future, an image of what will come in our wake. What is most strange
about wandering the streets and buildings of this discontinued city is
the recognition of the place as an artifact of our own time: It is a vast
complex of ruins, like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat, but the vision
is one of modernity in wretched decay. In wandering the crumbling
ruins of the present, you are encountering a world to come.
And this is why the images from my time in Pripyat that cling
most insistently to my mind are the fragmented shards of technolo-
gy, the rotted remnants of our own machine age. In what had once
been an electronics store, the soles of our sturdy shoes crunched
on the shattered glass of screens, and with our smartphones we
captured the disquieting sight of heaped and eviscerated old tele-
vision sets, of tubes and wires extruded from their gutted shells,
and of ancient circuit boards greened with algae. (And surely I
cannot have been the only one among us to imagine the smart-
phone I was holding undergoing its own afterlife of decay and
dissolution.) In what had once been a music store, we walked amid
a chaos of decomposing pianos, variously wrecked and capsized,
and here and there someone fi ngered the yellowed keys, and the
notes sounded strange and damp and discordant. All of this was
weighted with the sad intimation of the world’s inevitable decline,
the inbuilt obsolescence of our objects, our culture: the realization
that what will survive of us is garbage.ater, outside the entrance to one of Pripyat’s many schools, a small
wild dog approached us with disarming deference. Vika opened her
handbag and removed a squat pinkish tube, a snack from the lower
reaches of the pork-product market, and presented it to the dog,
who received it with patience and good grace.
There was a dark fl ash of movement on the periphery of my fi eld
of vision, a rustle of dry leaves. I turned and saw the business end
of a muscular black snake as it emerged from beneath a rusted slide
and plunged headlong for the undergrowth.
‘‘Viper,’’ Igor said, nodding in the direction of the fugitive snake.
He pronounced it ‘‘wiper.’’
The school was a large tile-fronted building, on one side of which
was a beautiful mosaic of an anthropomorphic sun gazing down at
a little girl. Dylan was rightly dubious as to the wisdom of entering
a building in such an advanced state of dilapidation. Turning to
Igor, he remarked that they must have been constructed hastily and
poorly in the fi rst place.
‘‘No,’’ Igor replied, briskly brushing an insect off the shoulder of
his camoufl age jacket. ‘‘This is future for all buildings.’’
The school’s foyer was carpeted with thousands of textbooks and
copybooks, a sprawling detritus of the written word. It felt somehow
obscene to walk on these pages,
but there was no way to avoid it
if you wanted to move forward.
Igor bent down to pick up a col-
orfully illustrated storybook from
the ground and fl ipped through its
desiccated pages.
‘‘Propaganda book,’’ he said,
with a moue of mild distaste,
and dropped it gently again at his
feet. ‘‘In Soviet Union, everything
was propaganda. All the time,
propaganda.’’I asked him what he himself remembered of the disaster, and he
answered that there was basically nothing to remember. Though
he was fi ve years older than me, he said that I would most likely
have a clearer memory of the accident and its aftermath, because in
Soviet Ukraine little information was made public about the scale
of the catastrophe. ‘‘In Europe? Panic. Huge disaster. In Ukraine?
No problem.’’
Climbing the staircase, whose railings had long since been
removed, I trailed a hand against a wall to steady myself and felt
the splintering paint work beneath my fi ngertips. I was 6 when the
disaster happened, young enough, I suppose, to have been protect-
ed by my parents from the news and its implications. What did I
recall of the time? Weird births, human bodies distorted beyond
nature, ballooned skulls, clawed and misshapen limbs: images
not of the disaster itself but of its long and desolate and uncanny
aftermath. I remembered a feeling of fascinated horror, which was
bound up in my mind with communism and democracy and the
quarrel I only understood as the struggle between good and evil,
and with the idea of nuclear war, and with other catastrophes of
the time, too, the sense of a miscarried future.
As I continued up the stairs, a memory came to me of a country
road late at night, of my mother helping me up onto the hood of our
orange Ford Fiesta, directing my attention toward a point of light
arcing swiftly across the clear night sky, and of her telling me that
it was an American space shuttle called Challenger, orbiting the
planet. That memory was linked in my mind with a later memory,
of watching television news footage of that same shuttle exploding
into pure white vapor over the ocean. The vision of the sudden
Y-shaped divergence of the contrails, spiraling again toward each
other as the exploded remains of the shuttle fell to the sea, a debris
of technology and death, striking against the deep blue sky. That
moment was for me what the moon landing was for my parents
and their generation: an image in which the future itself was fi xed.
We rounded the top of the stairs, and as I set off down a corridor
after Igor, I realized that those images of technological disaster, of
explosions, mutations, had haunted my childhood and that I had
arrived at the source of a catastrophe much larger than Chernobyl
itself or any of its vague immensity of eff ects. I remembered a
line from the French philosopher Paul Virilio — ‘‘The invention of
the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck’’ — that seemed
to me to encapsulate perfectly the extent to which technological
progress embedded within itself the prospect of catastrophe. And
it occurred to me that Pripyat was a graveyard of progress, the fi nal
resting place of the future.
In a large upstairs classroom, a dozen or so toddler-size chairs
were arranged in a circle, and on each was perched a rotting doll
or threadbare teddy bear. The visual eff ect was eerie enough, but
what was properly unsettling was the realization that this scene
had been carefully arranged by a visitor, probably quite recently,
precisely in order for it to be photographed. And this went to
the heart of what I found so profoundly creepy about the whole
enterprise of catastrophe tourism, an enterprise in which I myself
was just as implicated as anyone else who was standing here in this
former classroom, feeling the warm breeze stirring the air through
the empty window frames.
I wondered whether Igor and Vika held us in contempt, us
Western Europeans and Australians and North Americans who had
forked over a fee not much lower than Ukraine’s average monthly
wage for a two-day tour around this discontinued world, to feel the
transgressive thrill of our own daring in coming here. If it were I in
their position, I knew that contempt is exactly what I would haveL
40
I lay awake for
some time, trying to
attend to thesilence, hearing now
and then the faint
howling of wolves in
the lonely distance.
““
Photograph by Mark Neville for The New York TimesP. The Voyages Issue