Springtime in Chernobyl by Emmanuel Lepage (translated by Edward Gauvin).
Title: Springtime in Chernobyl.
Author/Artist: Emmanuel Lepage (translated by Edward Gauvin).
Genre: Non-fiction, memoir, travel.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: 2012 (first, lesser version published in 2008).
Summary: A memoir of tragedy and death, people and land, and what comes after disaster. April 26, 1986. The reactor core of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl began to melt, setting into motion the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. At the time, the author was 19 years old. 22 years later, in April 2008, a group of nuclear energy-averse activists and artists visit Chernobyl to document the lives of survivors and their children. Sent to sketch brutal landscapes of disaster and the folly of man, the author is surprised at the unexpected beauty he encounters. Often wondering himself: What am I doing here?
My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:
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"It was a special hospital, for Radiology... They even measured the radiation of the walls where they had them."
"There were little lesions, and then they grew. It came off in layers—as white film..."
"I loved him!"
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"And here is the first photo broadcast on Soviet television. The roof of the building was destroyed by escaping steam."
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April, 1986. I'm 19. The clash of titans. The Cold War at its height. This much is certain: something terribly serious has happened over there, behind the Iron Curtain.
The Swedes detect the disaster when they observe abnormal levels of radiation within their borders. A cloud has already traveled thousands of miles without anyone knowing... or taking protective measures. An invisible, odorless cloud, swept along on the winds' whim, with its cargo of radioactive dust, plunging Europe into despair for a few weeks, and then the rest of the world. After Scandinavia, it drifts toward East Germany, Czechoslovakia...
Moscow can no longer deny its existence. So it asks Sweden for help. The Chernobyl disaster is the first nail in the coffin of the Soviet bloc.
This is my first memory of Chernobyl.
♥ France does nothing.
The radioactive cloud, we are told, with much recourse to satellite maps and interviews with scientific experts, did not pass over French territory.
Some political leaders, no doubt ill-informed, expend a great deal of passion and energy reassuring us.
"We have nothing to hide. There is no health risk and no need for concern. There are no safety issues in France."
Weeks go by before French authorities admit the cloud did in fact pass over France, covering a third of its territory with Cesium 137.
♥ In 1986, there were 16 nuclear plants in France (19 in 2012, or 58 reactors, making France the most nuclear-reliant country in the world, per capita). After WWII, France had made the political and industrial decision to ensure its energy independence, there was no questioning these policies. Nuclear power was the crown jewel of French technology. A source of national pride. The industry was represented as cheap, safe, and non-polluting. Unlike Soviet plants, which were regarded as antiquated, much like the declining regime to which they belonged.
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In Ukraine, Soviet authorities evacuated Pripyat, a city of 48,000 people, thirty-six hours after the explosion. It took 1200 buses and 200 trucks. The evacuation, meant to be temporary—a few days, said authorities—proved permanent. According to the World Health Organization, 350,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated area.
For days, the fire smoldered. The molten reactor core threatened to sink lower and reach the water table, potentially causing an explosion that could contaminate all of Europe.
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I remember those blurry images of men running along the roof of the plant, shoveling highly radioactive debris into the gaping hole in shifts of no more than two minutes, lest they suffer a lethal, dose of radiation.
They were called "liquidators."
They had no faces.
The Soviet Union mobilized thousands of people to evacuate and clean up The Zone. Soldiers, scientists, and members of the Communist Party. The figures are unclear. Between 500,000 and 800,000 liquidators took part in the task.
♥ According to the W.H.O., the radionuclides have now contaminated five million people. Three million children will require lifelong medical treatment, 270,000 people are living in "strictly controlled zones" (SCZ), and 4,000 died of radiation exposure. This last figure is highly contested by many NGOs, especially since suspicious ties between the W.H.O. and U.N.-affiliate the Intentional Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cast doubt on their validity. These NGOs report 25,000 to 100,000 deaths instead. Not counting cancer, which takes at least 500,000 lives in the years that follow.
Early 2010: the New York Academy of Sciences claims that lasting pollution from the accident caused the deaths of more than a million people worldwide between 1986 and 2004.
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At first, the area in a nineteen-mile radius around the plant was evacuated. 5% of Ukrainian and 24% of Belarussian territory were contaminated. But there, no evacuations took place. Millions of men and women continued to live and work on highly contaminated land. In Belarus, Lukashenko's dictatorship stifled all information and research into the health consequences of the disaster.
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Freefall.
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Gildas and I decided to take the train to Chernobyl, for a fuller grasp of the distance form here to there. Two whole days on the train, with a stop at Warsaw, birthplace of Marie Curie.
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Kiev. 83 miles to Chernobyl. My first time out East.
Our only welcome: fine rain, mixed with snow.
This is where they relocated most of the refugees from Chernobyl, after the disaster. New projects were built for them. They were grouped by town or village. The Soviet administration gave them apartments promised to others, who had been kept waiting for years. Which sometimes led to great animosity toward the refugees.
♥ "The plains of Ukraine... They've watced every invading army go by. Why, just the 20th century alone saw the communists, then the Nazis. The Ukrainians suffered through two famines because of Stalin. Millions of deaths, deportees, and then the Germans came. And this is the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster... How do you keep going?"
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"Dobriy nochi!"
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Vassia is a liquidator.
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I can't stop staring at Vassia. At last, I've put a face to Chernobyl... The tragedy takes place.
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"Come on, Viera! Sing us something!"
♥ "And you?"
"I think other things besides anti-nuclear sentiment have brought me here."
"Such as?"
"I don't really know. Maybe a need to confront the disaster personally, through drawing. I'm not sure I can put it into words..."
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April 30. The driver from the agency in Kiev met us in Ivankiv, a village on the edge of the Exclusion Zone a few miles from our house. He picked us up in a Toyota Combu. He makes the drive daily. It's always raining. The weather is bleak. Just the way I pictured in my head.
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The heart of darkness.
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What the hell am I doing here?
Passport, clearance. While I wait for them to check our papers, I draw.
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As we close in on Chernobyl, huge pipelines cross the road. "Oh, for the contaminated soil," we think at first. But no: they were there before the disaster. Hot water piping for the communal housing.
Chernobyl. This town, now synonymous with the 20th century's greatest nuclear disaster. 15,000 people once lived here. Today, 2,000 still do, working on the site with its four reactors.
♥ He lays out the facts we already know. The extent of the contaminated area, 100 square miles. The size of Luxembourg, three large cities, 86 villages, 200,000 evacuees. From 500,000 to 800,000 liquidators mobilized. To clear out and clean up the Zone, erect the sarcophagus around the gutted reactor.
To kill all the animals: cats, dogs, livestock, fowl, woodland creatures...
To cut down and bury an entire forest. After the disaster, the pines around the plant turned red.
Pripyat, founded in 1970, was purported to be the prettiest town in all Ukraine for its modernity, green spaces, and amenities. It had theatres, pools, conservatories, cinemas, children's playgrounds.
Thousands of vehicles could not be decontaminated, and were abandoned onsite, occasionally buried: trucks, cranes, tanks, tractors, buses, helicopters. A massive industrial graveyard.
22 years without human activity. Fauna developed. Wolves came and made their homes.
Species were introduced, like Prizewalski's horse. As if their hooves might trample the radiation into the ground.
People moved into villages where the mailman only comes once a month: usually old people, self-sufficient, without water or electricity. In Chernobyl, stands a 12th-century church. It's the cleanest place around. The soil was not contaminated. People fetch water there.
"A girl, Marika, was born in the Zone. She is now 9 years old. She is not contaminated.
"To many, she is a miracle. She is known as the "Mary of Chernobyl."
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Chernobyl. A strange, deserted city that is still kept up.
In front of the barracks, a monument in honor of firemen who died fighting the blaze.
Now and then, the rare rubbernecker. 2,000 people still work in the plant, in two-week shifts. Just one grocery store. At the edge of town, another no man's land, another checkpoint.
We drive along the buried forest.
I'm surprised by how modern the infrastructure is. Although run down, the irrigation canals, the highways, the streetlights look familiar, a lot like the landscape around our French plants.
We've been told so often Soviet plants were behind the times, that unconsciously, I'd begun picturing archaic caricatures in my head.
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Before us, on the far side of the canal, Reactors 5 and 6, under construction at the time of the accident. They were supposed to start operation in late 1986. Four other reactors were to follow, bringing Chernobyl's total up to 10, and making it one of the USSR's largest plants. The cranes are still there.
This vast and powerful radar array could detect any ballistic missiles that NATO may have launched. In the mid-'80s, star wars was raging. The radiation burned out all the circuits in that titanic erector set... Now useless.
..
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Tick tick klikk. Tick tick klikk.
Every pencil stroke feels like a step closer to the point of no return.
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Pripyat's Ferris Wheel was supposed to open on May 4, 1986.
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Engineers and plant workers lived in Pripyat with their families. The average age was under thirty. Many women were expecting children. They were the elite.
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Tick tick... Tick tick... The dosimeter's clicking follows us.
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Pripyat was meant to showcase Communism's human side. A happy, communal alternative to capitalist individualism.
We flee The Zone. Safe and sound? We have no idea.
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It's a while before anyone says a word. The only sound is me drawing. Weird, that doll, abandoned in the middle of nowhere. Why was it left there? Are you sure it wasn't staged, a photo op?
"The real question is, for whose benefit? That back there was a nuclear waste dump shaped like a city! Who'd bother with a radioactive doll?"
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Our Chernobyl tour is over.
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"Did you wash the car?"
"What? I don't understand."
"The car? Is it clean?"
"It's okay, it's okay! No problem!"
In France and the Ukraine alike, illusion is the name of the game. Is it from fear of looking reality in the eye? Khaki uniforms all over, fatigues, a semblance of authority, power... When in fact we humans control nothing. Not to reassure people would be like staring into a bottomless abyss. It might stare right back into you.
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The grocery's decor is kitschy, eclectic, and generous, a festival of colors.
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Viktor is Ludmilla's ex-husband. And a former liquidator.
He's fresh off work. Backj from The Zone in his truck. Viktor's a looter.
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♫ "The child who weeps, in the well deep..." ♫
What have I come here looking for that I don't already know?
♫ "We each have a well inside
So deep where a child kind and
Good lies dying. In the night
He weeps never understood." ♫
A muffled thumping in my heart. What if I'd come to see if reality was anything like what I was imagining...
...long before the disaster of 1986? When, as a teenager, everything around me was blowing up.
And, locked away in my own loneliness, I drew and drew... Creating apocalyptic worlds...
Nuclear wars...
Worlds of technological catastrophes, radioactive clouds, nature reclaiming the cities. I drew worlds without human beings. Worlds where humanity's carelessness and folly had led to its downfall.
♫ "The weeping child had sworn
To keep his heart young." ♫
That muffled thumping hits right when everything's falling apart again: my ability to draw, my place in this world, slipping away.
♫ "Oh, cover over its song forlorn
I don't want to hear it sung..." ♫
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May Day.
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Pascal's deep in creating a website: Radio Chernobyl.
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Morgan's set up a bath in one corner. Buckets, a tub, curtains... Just like the old days.
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Many of the houses in Volodarka are abandoned. Those who could leave, left.
Those who were deeply attached to the land, to their houses, and those with nowhere to go... stayed.
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A path from the edge of the road vanishes into the woods.
This was once a village.
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Bober is outside the Exclusion Zone, but was contaminated by wind and rain in a hotspot or "leopard-print" pattern.
"Clean" areas can exist inside the Exclusion Zone, just as contaminated spots can exist outside of it.
In one field, the soil can be dangerous, and in the next, not. So you can find a "clean" potato just a few yards away from an "unclean" potato...
...but they can both wind up at the market.
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I venture into the undergrowth to get closer to the houses and do more "dynamic" drawings.
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Looters have diligently emptied them out. Time has diligently destroyed their frames. These isbas are slowly collapsing. In a few years, there'll be nothing left. Even the brick structures are being dismantled but by bit. It's all up for grabs. In drawing these destroyed houses, I experience something like the 19th-century romantic fascination for painting ruins. But here in Chernobyl, guilt plays a part.
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But a nuclear disaster is also the collapse of a vast region's entire economy. Who'd drink milk from cows that pastured near the plant? Who'd use flour "made in Chernobyl"?
The state gave the land to agricultural workers. So farmers raise their own cattle there. Chernobyl kicked off the end of Soviet collectivism.
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My drawing of the nuclear plant fascinates them. I'd finished it after getting back from The Zone. The beast.
♥ "Aw, come with me and get a taste of radiation! Just five minutes! Come feel your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth! Leaving Chernobyl without tasting radioactivity is a crime!"
The Zone: an industrial version of Russian Roulette.
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"I used to live in The Zone. I was thirteen when it happened. That night, we'd gone camping with my cousins."
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"I got sick. Had I eaten too many? Or was I just scared? We stayed for two years. When I saw the job ad to be your interpreter in Chernobyl at the French Institute in Ukraine, I thought it was my duty to go. My friends were frightened for me. Were you scared the other day, in Pripyat? No more so than the people here. Maybe the Zone's lulled us all into thinking it's safe."
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Igor Kostine, the first photographer on the scene the day after the disaster, got a nasty surprise: he noticed almost all his photos had gone entirely dark. The radioactivity had fogged his film. The same thing happened to Marie Curie when she isolated radium.
"So my idea was to bury dental x-rays..."
We drive slowly down a narrow forest road.
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"So did you bring your passports? And the little note Anya wrote up for you, that provides clearance to be there? In case we run into the police."
"Is it somewhere off-limits?"
"No. There's work going on out in the woods, but you never know. It's a contaminated area."
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Or almost. Crap! Should I? I leave it.
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A shape in the undergrowth catches my eye.
A bus stop! A good thirty feet from the road, under the trees!
It hits me like lightning. Suddenly, I realize I'm not on some forest road: I'm sitting in the middle of a highway! What surrounds me is no lush and welcoming forest, but... the result of the accident.
Luminous foliage running from dark to spring green, young shoots a pretty cadmium yellow, the carmine of confider trunks, the indigo of birches, the white of windborne petals... The colors explode, incandescent. Everything around me exudes calm. This place is an invitation to luxuriate... Then again, this is Chernobyl.
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My drawing says nothing about reality. How strange it is to have to depict what I can neither see nor feel! My senses tell me the opposite of what the dosimeter says. Suddenly, I feel dizzy. Pripyat, that desolate place, is how I pictured disaster, what I imagined it would look like. But here, in The Zone? The subtle thrum of color covers up the horrifying reality hiding right before my eyes. Drawing is lifting a veil from the surface of the visible, and I feel powerless to do so. I'm fine with Pripyat and its empty gray streets, but blue woods like this? What, then? Beauty? But how can it be?
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Where are the monsters? The five-legged animals? The barren, violated earth? Nowhere to be found. Just unsettling surfaces.
Maybe this "mirrored image", the unintended transfer of blue trees onto the facing page can come close to capturing the phantasmal aspect of Chernobyl.
An atomic explosion seems to be eating away at those trees. Is that the kind of drawing I'm supposed to be bringing back?
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In a two-room farmhouse. There's a strong, greasy smell to it. An animal smell. The air is so close you can almost chew and swallow it. They own a tiny plot of land, and mostly live off others' charity. Though Chernobyl is the most subsidized region in Ukraine, alcohol and religion seem the only prospect for some people who were left to their fate.
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Gildas and I have set yup a little studio area in our bedroom. Outside the window, a pale spring light shines through the cherry blossoms.
Morgan's got Gwenael Kerleo's album on a loop. The Celtic harp takes us back to Brittany. Our house feels unreal, outside space and time.
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Could I ever have imagined life would be like this in Chernobyl, in the heart of the disaster whose horror I'd come to portray? I feel like I'm living life to the fullest, intensely... In the here and now.
I've lost track of time...
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Sunday.
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The river, in spate, has drowned the deserted fields.
A striking landscape, extending to infinity. A dull silence. Unruffled by the frogs' distant croaking. Everywhere, lilies of the valley, Mirabelle plums. On the bridge, couples and families come to picnic, enjoy the scenery, spend some quality time...
...right up against The Zone.
It would be so easy to step over the line.
What are they searching for, coming so close?
Do they long for a lost land, that's forever forbidden? Have they come on a pilgrimage? As one visits the dearly departed? As one commemorates a grave? Their presence here cannot be explained by the dazzling beauty of this spot alone.
"Dazzling beauty spot"?
Isn't the expression inappropriate, unseemly, even, indecent when speaking of Chernobyl? Dazzling beauty? But... I've been sent here by any organization to bear witness to disaster. Dazzling beauty? I thought to be braving death and danger...
And here, instead, is life.
Gildas, do you think we're allowed to say: "Chernobyl is beautiful"? I feel a sense of vague confusion at the juxtaposition of those words. And yet, that's what my drawing is telling me. Is this what death looks like? It doesn't add up. We weren't sent here so we could come back with this!
I came to Chernobyl to dive headfirst into reality. Break through the glass wall so often between me and the world. That my drawings be made flesh, and lent the weight of lived life, of experience. What if none of that were real? I'm dizzy.
Can reality not be real?
What am I really seeing? I glimpse something else here, something very different... drawing me relentlessly closer.
This morning, I got on a bike and left the house. Alone.
Like Pascal, with his x-rays planted in the ground, I was wondering about the truth of things. Deep in a dangerous world that cheated, lied, disguised itself... I wanted to find tangible signs that spoke of tragedy...
So I could use them... as proof.
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She talks! And talks, forgetting that I can't understand a word. And yet, what with smiles, laughter, looks, fond gestures... somehow I do. A conversation takes place without need for words. She speaks of her five children with pride. I tell her about my own.
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The bike, the mild spring air, my visit... I feel light. It's been so long!
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Look at this, Gildas! We were sent here to depict disaster and we're coming back with landscapes, portraits of children and animals! That's not what people are expecting out of this book. Its distributors are nuclear protesters!
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The "French farmhouse" has become a merry phalanstery.
♬ Every summer, any sunny day
Had he kept, the child who wept... ♬
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♬ The weeping child had sworn
To keep his heart young... ♬
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What if Chernobyl were a mirror...
...showing me a lost land? The land of childhood...
...of yesteryear...
...whose sensations and feelings I'm always rediscovering?
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Ivankiv.
Lenin, symbol of a bygone era that many people here seem to miss.
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I draw: sometimes standing, sometimes seated among the registers.
And soon, even strolling! The sketches pile up, quick little thumbnails on the fly. Often failures. But who cares? Yeah, who cares? Success or failure, what counts are my discoveries along the way. What does a drawing done to the rhythm of my footfalls reveal? What remains of a face glimpsed as I turn my head? I explore the infinite facets of found illustration.
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Alone with Alona and Vassili, I draw the kids who come every day to bring us flowers.
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Oh, a wolf! A wolf... in the village! Holy—!
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It's hard to cheat when drawing a child: no hard shadows to firm up features, no wrinkles to sketch in and hide your drawing's flaws. It's all about getting the proportions right. And also, children never sit still.
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"The heroes of Chernobyl will live forever in legend." These children are no longer taught to believe nuclear power is no deadlier than coal, as their parents were.
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"Down with war." "We stand for peace."
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May 11, 2008. During their previous excursion to the edge of The Zone, Morgan, Pascal, and Gildas ventured down a forest trail. They got lost... And then realized they were beyond the checkpoint! They'd just found a way through. We go back inside the Exclusion Zone. Totally trespassing this time. For a picnic. Alona's back at the house.
The road has gone to seed, and beside it sits a pond. A mirror...
The air is sweet, exquisite. The wind caresses the soft grass... an invitation.
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"Fuck!"
Carried away, suffused by spring warmth, we'd forgotten, completely forgotten! We let ourselves be taken in by appearances.
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The houses here don't look as dismembered as in Bober.
Philippe's brought his bandoneon along. We set up a chair.
He plays, improvises... Soaks up a sense of place... Records...
"Philippe is the first to "give" something to The Zone, rather than try to describe it. He's putting his music out there."
I keep trying and trying to portray the invisible, the unthinkable.
I'd like these buildings time and looters have mutilated to tell of a vanished world. From before...
That's probably why I'm so irresistibly drawn to them.
They invite the imagination, but say nothing of what once was.
The gentle breeze. Philippe's bandoneon. The birds. Time, suspended. We fall silent... For fear of breaking the spell...
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No one. But I sense a presence! Something like footsteps. In the distance, Philippe plays his bandoneon. Gildas is drawing on the blacktop, Morgan's napping, and Pascal's at the other end of town. Who's there? Tick tock... I start breathing hard. I panic.
What the hell just happened? What did I sense coming toward me?
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I rejoin the others. I feel empty, worn out... And reassured.
The Zone. I don't belong here. I was an intruder. The Zone is a land without people. It doesn't need them. A land bursting with spring beauty that sometimes even seems like a paradise... A land that shut people out, from which people shut themselves out... Exiled themselves.
They say man was banished from Eden. Humans banish themselves from Chernobyl.
Deep down, I am no different from Vassili, who wants to go to The Zone while shouting, "I'm not scared!" Whoi think that'll make a man of him?
Is that the kid who wakes now and then at the bottom of a well deep inside me and tries to defy death? Like in fairytales?
No. Death wasn't what I came here to touch... But rather, what scares me, what slips away before my very eyes. The unknown. The mysterious.
Instead, I was caught off-guard... by life.
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Paris. May 15, 2008.
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"How 'bout her? Is she dead? And him? Is he dead? And him?"
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