felt. The fact was that I didn’t even need to leave my own position
in order to hold myself in contempt, or anyone else.
‘‘How often do you come here?’’ I asked Igor.
‘‘Seven days a week, usually,’’ he said. He had a strange way of
avoiding eye contact, of looking not directly at you but at a slight
angle, as though you were in fact beside yourself. ‘‘Seven days a
week, eight years.’’
‘‘How has that aff ected you?’’ I asked.
‘‘I have three children. No mutants.’’
‘‘I don’t mean the radiation so much as just the place. I mean,
all this must have an impact,’’ I said, gesturing vaguely toward my
own head, indicating matters broadly psychological.
‘‘I don’t see my wife. My family. I get up at 6:30 a.m., they are
asleep. I get home late night, already they are asleep again. I am a
slave, just like in Soviet Union time. But now,’’ he said, with an air
of inscrutable sarcasm, ‘‘I am a slave to money.’’
I followed Igor and Vika into another classroom, where we were
joined by the wild dog Vika had fed earlier. The dog did a quick
circuit of the room, sniff ed perfunctorily at a papier-mâché doll,
an upturned chair, some torn copybook pages, then settled himself
down beside Vika. Igor opened a cupboard and removed a stack of
paintings, spread them out on a table fl aked with aquamarine paint.
The pictures were beautifully childish things, heartbreakingly vivid
renderings of butterfl ies, grinning suns, fi sh, chickens, dinosaurs,
a piglet in a little blue dress. They were expressions of love toward
the world, toward nature, made with such obvious joy and care
that I felt myself getting emotional looking at them. I could all of
a sudden see the children at their desks, their tongues protruding
in concentration, their teachers bending over to off er encourage-
ment and praise, and I could smell the paper, the paint, the glue.
I picked up a painting of a dinosaur, and I was surprised by
sadness not at the unthinkable dimensions of the catastrophe itself
but at the thought that the child responsible for this picture was
never able to take it home to show his parents; how instead, he
had to leave it behind just as he had to leave behind his school, his
home, his city, his poisoned world. And I became conscious then
of the strangeness of my being here, the wrongness of myself as a
fi gure in this scene: a man from outside, from the postapocalyptic
future, holding this simple and beautiful picture in his hand and
looking at it as an artifact of a collapsed civilization. This, I now
understood, was the deeper contradiction of my presence in the
Zone: My discomfort in being here had less to do with the risk of
contamination than with the sense of myself as the contaminant.he tour company had put us up in the town of Chernobyl itself, in a
place called Hotel 10 — a name so blankly utilitarian that it sounded
chic. Hotel 10 was in reality no more chic than you would expect a
hotel in Chernobyl to be and arguably even less so. It looked like,
and essentially was, a gigantic two-story shipping container. ItsSofi a, one
of a handful
of samosely,
or “self-
settlers,”
people
who have
voluntarily
returned
to the Zone.
←41
T
P. The New York Times Magazine