Nuclear haunting

Years later, Chernobyl, photo by Evilviking

When I was 19, I tried to convince Leon Kreel that Chernobyl was like a "red berry" eaten by one of Eugene Marais' more limber-minded chimpanzees, and I suggested to him that a planned economy with a head on its shoulders, unlike the soul-swallowing Yog Sothoth that is pre-sentient capitalism, should be capable of learning not to repeat the same poisonous mistake of building up a reliance on nuclear power.

He called me Kugel and then challenged me. "If you have Jewish in you, as you say you do, then tell me what a Kugel is?"

I said: "A cake."

"Not bad, not bad." he said, smiling.

But I think his offbeat response had less to do with my politics and views on nuclear power and much more to do with the way I continued to lust after his younger daughter, who was 17.

So Andy went to Chernobyl for a haunting.

He went to a place that felt like Tarkovsky's "Zone" in the film "Stalker". 25 years later Andy described how children's dolls lay still, in toy prams, and how pines and creepers from the black two-meter thick earth fisted their way through housees and climbed around brick, wood, tile and concrete, how his guide took Andy to what was once his room and from the window they looked out together over the pristine decay of fields and forest.

With his depiction of what he saw Andy quickly bridged the years for me, took me back to when I first studied and then later worked in Kiev, both times at the same government teaching university in what was then called Krasnoarmeiskaya street, not far from what was then known as Derzhinski square. Names to conjour with.

Some images

1991, My wife, pregnant cramming snow into her mouth for its cool mineral taste in Goloseivsky Lec, where the trees leech radiation from the subsoil

Teaching Tai Chi to a medical researcher ill with leukemia in front of his wife and children,

Coming home to see Tere happy after a warm shower, when a high ranking officer in the army has just told me the ice around Chernobyl's vents had just been bombed loose and that the radioactive silt was flowing into the water supply,

People were advising each other to use Geiger counters to buy vegetables, clothes and trinkets in the city markets because "entrepreneurial" Ukrainian and Azerbaijani spivs, soon to be fully fledged mafiosi, were harvesting these radioactive items from the Zone and selling them.

Andy was spooked by the emptiness of the land, he said, and the clear vision of a civilization destroyed The balding dolls, of course, representing the children that had died from radiation poisoning.

After paying his visit Andy got blind drunk on vodka, primed by his Ukrainian guides, who took pleasure in taking pictures of him passed out on the snow. Governments and even some ecologists tell us that nuclear power is the most viable option at present.

If they say this then they have learned nothing from Chernobyl, then they will have behaved like kugels, less intelligently than poisoned chimpanzees.

An if nuclear power is adopted, as a major alternative energy source, then will one day we too will also be able to experience alternative life in Tarkosky's waterlogged and irradiated landscape at first hand.