Approaching Chornobyl (04/23/00)

Approaching Chornobyl

by Irene Zabytko

On a crowded Air Ukraine flight to Kyiv in 1992, I sat next to a plump woman who kept her elbow planted firmly on my armchair handle. She was returning home to Ukraine after a prosperous summer cleaning American vacation homes outside New York City. As we began our descent, she insisted, "Look out the window."

It was a pristine blue summer day, cloudless and innocent. "Look to the right," she demanded. As the plane descended, I saw a tower with blinking red lights. I thought it must be an antenna for a television station.

"Chornobyl," she whispered, then placed a conspiratorial finger over her lips and winked, as though it were a family secret not told to strangers.

The tower, ominously marking the site of the 1986 nuclear "accident," stands only 60 miles from Kyiv, where my mission was twofold: to teach college students English and to experience firsthand the sights, sounds and textures of Ukraine for the novel I was writing about Chornobyl.

First, though, there was the matter of my assimilation into a post-Soviet Ukrainian lifestyle that includes daunting shortages of basic sundries an American is used to - sugar, spices, aspirin, vitamins, toilet paper - and the shortages a writer would be especially sensitive about - paper, pens and real whole-bean coffee.

All of my students' accounts of their Chornobyl experiences were similar: initial disbelief that anything serious had happened, followed by growing suspicion of a typical Soviet cover-up, and finally anguished panic as nearly everyone tried to leave Kyiv. Those left behind were told to combat the radiation by thoroughly washing their clothes and themselves - hard to do in a city where, in normal times, hot water is regularly shut off without warning.

Some of my students bravely offered to accompany me on a visit to Chornobyl. Public transportation in Ukraine is sporadic at best and always unreliable, so I hired a private car and driver. We had no official permission to enter the "dead zone," but I wasn't going to pay the $500 our driver demanded. We managed to coax him to take us for a more reasonable rate, which included my Swatch watch.

The trip, though brief, was tantalizing in what it suggested. Outside the Kyiv city limits, we drove in maddening circles, wasting expensive gasoline, before we reached the dense forests and, finally, tiny villages where abandoned homes and fallow lands formed the depressing landscape.

But, every now and then, in the hazy distance, I thought I saw a thin spiral of smoke floating from the chimney of a dilapidated house. There were a few souls alive here. Were they the old people I had read about, the displaced elderly who had returned to their contaminated homes because they had nowhere else to live?

That day, though, the only living creatures we saw were two waddling geese on a dirt road and the policeman who pulled us over. "You came all the way here to get cancer?" he growled. "Get out of here before you get sick."

In 1995 I returned to Kyiv to visit my students. It was mid-September - potato-harvesting time, when nearly everyone in the country goes out to help harvest the precious potatoes. My students informed me that even the lands abandoned by the Chornobyl evacuees were planted with potatoes and other vegetables. No matter how dangerous the soil, the people must take the chance.

Despite government claims to the contrary, Chornobyl's radiation remains a persistent blight. And because Ukraine's economic situation has worsened since its independence eight years ago, plans to shut Chornobyl down in 2000 may have to be canceled. The new government says it cannot yet break its dependence on nuclear energy without Western aid. Money is also urgently needed to fix the leaking makeshift structure meant to contain the remains of the exploded reactor.

It is now admitted that leukemia and other radiation-related diseases have increased dramatically. In fact, most people seem to be suffering from general bad health, a condition the Ukrainian media has nicknamed "Chornobyl AIDS" - a breakdown of the immune system that's believed to be a result of radiation, pollution, depression, poverty, stress, corruption and alcoholism. In a country where doctors demand bribes, medicines are sold on the black market, and the people never have enough food, heat or money, it's easy to understand the physical and spiritual exhaustion of the Ukrainian population.

I worried about how wan my students looked. "Don't worry," they tried to reassure me, the coddled American. "We're used to it. And anyway, it'll pass."

I am awed by their resiliency and saddened by their forced cheerfulness. I wonder what other tragedies Ukraine will face in its struggles to survive.

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