Visit Sunny Chernobyl is the name of the blog, and so today we’re beginning the story, in many parts, of my adventures in the Exclusion Zone.
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Just as you might visit Los Angeles on your way to Disneyland, you get to Chernobyl via Kiev. How you get to Kiev is up to you. There are flights, but that didn’t sound very exciting to me; besides, I was planning on visiting a friend in Austria, and—unbothered by the geographical realities of central and eastern Europe—I thought Kiev was just a hop and a skip further east. So after flying to Vienna, I bought a round trip ticket on the Kiev Express.
It’s not really called that. In fact it’s not even an express train. But I still like calling it the Kiev Express. It sounds like the Orient Express. And the actual train, of Soviet vintage, did have a certain Agatha-Christie-meets-Leonid-Brezhnev feeling about it. Long oriental rugs ran the length of the corridor, and the compartments were outfitted with faux-wood paneling and dark red seats that folded up to make bunk beds.
I got to use the bunks twice on my way to Kiev, which is once more than I had expected. I had bought my ticket thinking it was a twelve hour trip, through the night, which sounded like fun. But I was off by an entire day, and found myself in for a thirty six hour ride. Ample time to get to know the faces of the other people on the train. In the next compartment, for example, there was a man who looked exactly like the Watcher from Kieslowski’s Decalogue films. These are a bunch of solemn morality tales, full of heartbreak and death, made in Poland in the 1980s. The Watcher is a recurring character that turns up from time to time in the different stories, never saying anything, just staring at the camera with a pained expression, a mute commentary on the mortal struggles that embroil the human race. Or something. But why was he on my train?
I spent my time reading. I had brought a pair of books about Chernobyl, one of them a collection of interviews with survivors of the accident, and the other an investigation of the accident’s effect on the environment. Of course when I say I was reading, I really mean that I was taking an epic series of naps that was occasionally interrupted by some reading—and by frequent dips into the bulging sacks of groceries I had bought at the Sudbahnhof station in Vienna.
It was important to make inroads into the groceries, of which I had an embarrassing tonnage. You see, I sometimes have pretty extreme levels of pre-travel anxiety, and—although I’m all man—this stress always seems to express itself in the form of shopping. Before moving to Colombia, for instance, I bought a new laptop. Before traveling to Afghanistan, I decked myself out with an entire new travel wardrobe. And in Vienna, before my big train trip to Kiev, I had gone through the grocery store like a survivalist with a sweet tooth, collecting breads, juices, water, salamis, chocolate crackers, and enough cheese to last the summer. Once on the train, I was able to see how compulsive I’d been in my provisioning, and I almost wished the ride would last forty eight or seventy two hours, so that I might have time to actually eat it all.
For help, I had a companion in my passenger compartment. He was called Max, a rotund, balding man in his early thirties. He spoke in a high, oddly formal voice, and was always smiling. He looked like a grown-up Charlie Brown, if Charlie Brown had grown up in the USSR. Originally from Kiev, Max now lived in Australia, where he worked as a computer programmer.
Max had an endearing way of volunteering explanations for things that needed none. I would wake up from a nap, my book sliding onto the floor, and look out the window to see that the train had stopped in a station, and Max would turn to me and say, “We have stopped.” Later, I would wake up from another nap to find the train moving, and Max would say, “We have left the station.”
We spent the first night passing through Slovakia. The weather was beautiful, and as dusk settled we had beautiful views of the country’s crumbling industrial infrastructure. Cracked smokestacks stared out over small, deserted factories. Warehouses sat empty, the glass in their windows long since smashed out.
In the morning we reached the border with Ukraine, and after a quick passport check we rolled into a cluttered rail yard, separating from the rest of the train and coming to rest between a set of oversize jacks taller than the passenger car itself. A team of crusty rail workers set themselves wrenching and hammering at the train’s wheel trucks, and placed the jack’s pads underneath the lower edges of the car. Slowly we rose into the air, leaving the trucks beneath us on the rails. They were changing the wheels on the train.
“They are changing the wheels on the train,” Max said.
Because railroad tracks are set at different widths in Europe and in the former Soviet Union, any train car that wants to pass from one region to the other must have its wheels changed. Never mind that we could have walked across the platform with our luggage, settled into a new train, and been miles down the track in the same time it took them to change our wheels. That’s the kind of thinking that will make you unhappy on a long train trip in eastern Europe. Besides, When was the last time you were in a train that got jacked up into the air?
A new set of wheels came rolling down the yard, giving off a satisfying pinging sound as they crashed into our old wheels and sent them coasting away in the other direction. A railman clambered onto the train, ejected Max and me from our seats, and pulled up the upholstered bench on which we had been sitting, produced a giant wrench, and tightened a set of large bolts that he found underneath. I’m not kidding.
By afternoon we were in the Carpathian mountains, a cheery alpine landscape in western Ukraine. We chugged by forested hills and undulating fields. Little barns and houses studded the wildflower-glazed meadows. I fully expected Julie Andrews to emerge spinning from a barn, arms thrown outward, singing The Sound of Music in Ukrainian.
Max had become curious about my plans. He hadn’t run into many Americans on the train before, especially not long-haired ones packing suspicious quantities of groceries. When I told him I was going to Chernobyl for vacation, his face lit up with appreciation, and he needed little prompting to share his own experiences of the accident. He had been eleven years old, living in Kiev, when word of the disaster got out, in May of 1986. Soon, people were trying to get their children out of the city. It was nearly impossible to get train tickets, but eventually some relatives managed to get Max onto a train bound southeast for the Crimea. Even though tickets had been so hard to come by, Max said, the train was nearly empty. He implied that the government had manufactured the ticket shortage to keep people from leaving the city.
“When we arrived,” Max went on, “the train was surrounded by soldiers. They tested everyone and their things with dosimeters for radiation, before allowing them to move on. They were trying to keep people from spreading contamination.”
He stayed away from Kiev the entire summer, only returning in mid-August. From his parents he heard stories about life in Kiev during that time: the streets were washed down every day; bakeries that had left their wares out in the open on shelves now wrapped them in plastic. He talked about the possibility that cancer rates in the area had increased because of Chernobyl, and told me that when his wife, also from Kiev, got her first checkup from their Australian doctor, they had found abnormalities in her thyroid, which Max attributed to radioactive exposure.
“It’s very lucky Kiev didn’t get more radiation, thanks to the winds,” he said. There was a quiet moment. Then he turned to me and in his very polite, clipped voice asked, “And what do you think about nuclear energy?”
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It was a restless night. I lay in my bunk and imagined—as only an American can—the post-Soviet gloom slipping by outside, the train shuddering as it pushed through the thick ether left behind by an empire. From the book of Chernobyl oral history, I was reading the account of a firefighter’s widow; her husband had been among the first responders to the explosion at Reactor Number Four. He left their apartment in the middle of the night and by morning was in the hospital, massively ill from radioactive exposure, swollen beyond recognition. “I don’t know what I should talk about,” she says as she opens her story. “About death or about love? Or are they the same?”
I fell asleep with the book on my face, rocking back and forth with the movement of the train as it pushed towards Kiev, dreaming of sickened roads covered with frothy white bubbles.
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Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster