exterior walls and roof were corrugated iron. Internally it seemed
to be constructed entirely from drywall, and it smelled faintly of
creosote throughout, and the long corridor sloped at a nauseating
angle on its fi nal descent toward the room Dylan and I were sharing
on the ground fl oor.
The Ukrainian government imposes a strict 8 p.m. curfew in the
Zone, and so after a dinner of borscht, bread and unspecifi ed meats,
there was nothing to do but drink, and so we drank. We drank an
absurdly overpriced local beer called Chernobyl — the hotel had
run out of everything else — that the label assured us was brewed
outside the Zone, using nonlocal wheat and water, specifi cally for
consumption inside the Zone itself, a business model that Dylan
rightly condemned as needlessly self-limiting.
We all turned in early that night. Even if we’d wanted to walk the
empty streets of the town after dark, we would have been breaking
the law in doing so and possibly jeopardizing the tour company’s
license to bring tourists to the Zone. Unable to sleep, I took out
the book I brought with me, an oral history of the disaster and its
aftermath called ‘‘Chernobyl Prayer,’’ by the Belarusian journalist
Svetlana Alexievich. As I reached the closing pages, after dozens of
monologues about the loss and displacement and terror endured
by the people of Chernobyl, I was unsettled to encounter an image
of myself. The book’s coda was a composite of 2005 newspaper
clippings about the news that a Kyiv travel agency was beginning
to off er people the chance to visit the Exclusion Zone.
‘‘You are certainly going to have something to tell your friends
about when you get back home,’’ I read. ‘‘Atomic tourism is in
great demand, especially among Westerners. People crave strong
new sensations, and these are in short supply in a world so much
explored and readily accessible. Life gets boring, and people want
a frisson of something eternal.’’
I lay awake for some time, trying to attend to the silence, hearing
now and then the faint howling of wolves in the lonely distance.
Had I myself, I wondered, come here in search of strong new sen-
sations? There was, I realized, a sense in which I was encountering
the Zone less as the site of a real catastrophe, a barely conceivable
tragedy of the very recent past, than as a vast diorama of an imag-
ined future, a world in which humans had ceased entirely to exist.
Among ruins, Pripyat is a special case. It’s Venice in reverse: a
fully interactive virtual rendering of a world to come. The place is
recognizably of our own time and yet entirely other. It was built
as an exemplary creation of Soviet planning and ingenuity, an
ideal place for a highly skilled work force. Broad avenues lined
with evergreen trees, sprawling city squares, modernist high-rise
apartment buildings, hotels, places for exercise and entertainment,
cultural centers, playgrounds. And all of it was powered by the
alchemy of nuclear energy. The people who designed and built Pri-
pyat believed themselves to be designing and building the future.
This was a historical paradox almost too painful to contemplate.
It wasn’t until after I returned home from Ukraine that I began
to imagine my own house a ruin, to picture as I walked through
its rooms the eff ect 30 years of dereliction might wreak on myVagn, a
tourist
from Denmark,
on a tour
of the Zone.
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Photograph by Mark Neville for The New York TimesP. The Voyages Issue