In the Danger Zone (16 page)

We circle the plant, a vast monolithic monstrosity that spreads across the land like a concrete rash, then Pripyat, which looks even more haunting and lifeless from overhead. Then over Anna's house and village (I wave but I can't spot her waving back) and back home via a ship graveyard – rotting steel ships and barges that were involved in the clean-up operation sit scuppered in a huge lake.

The pilot looks over at me. 'Enough?' We finally thump onto the landing spot with the elegance of an elephant ballerina, but it's a relief to get down in one piece, and I thank our pilot effusively.

Slavutych

At last I leave Chernobyl and head for Slavutych – the town that was hurriedly built to house the workers needed to keep Chernobyl going after the accident. I can't wait to go – I've felt weighed down by the tragedy of this place and the relentless symbols of loss and pain. Trouble is, the 20-minute route to the town cuts through Belarus, and they won't give us a visa, so we have to take the five-hour round journey via Kiev, still in the agonizingly stifling company of Denis.

The relief I feel when I arrive in Slavutych almost overwhelms me and to celebrate our escape from Denis, Marc and I go out to the nearest bar to ease our stress in a lake of cheap vodka.

Later I meet my new guide, llyena, who talks with a classic Bond-movie spy-villain Russian accent. She's fun, opinionated and eloquent – everything Denis wasn't. She takes me to the town market and although it's surprisingly small for a town of 25,000 people, it's lively. Most stallholders seem to be Anna-alikes: tiny, elderly babushkas with wizened faces and beautiful smiles, selling a few peppers, aubergines, lots of dill, parsley and basil, tomatoes and loads and loads of tiny sweet cucumbers for nibbling and pickling.

I get chatting to a woman who sells meat and wishes she could turn the clock back to Soviet times. She had been part of a collectivized state farm, and the collapse of communism had ruined agriculture and her lifestyle. I suggest that collectivized farming has been blamed for widespread misery and environmental damage, not to mention the death of millions under Stalin, but she angrily insists that she doesn't care about the others – her life was better before the fall of the USSR. I buy some of her pork to cheer her up a bit.

Because this market is so close to Chernobyl, every stall has to have its food checked at an on-site radiation-testing lab. I take my pork along to be checked – I'm done with the devil-may-care approach. J chat with the friendly lab supervisor who sports startlingly yellow hair and thickly applied make-up in the traditional Ukrainian style. Her nails are like a baroque masterpiece. She says that she rarely, if ever, sees high radioactivity levels from food in the market – perhaps only five instances in the last year and ten the year before.

That evening we meet up with some of Hyena's friends for a riverside barbecue. Amongst others, there's Anatoly, a lovely but slightly ear-bending ex-'liquidator' (the name given to the people who worked as part of the clearing-up operation after the accident); Denis, a wild-living 20-year-old; and Denis's friend, who has a fashion-busting ponytail-through-baseball-cap thing going on at the back of his head.

Everyone's a little wary at first, but after I reveal the stash of beer and vodka I've brought to oil the wheels of love, they quickly become my best friends.

Denis's mother Natasha has banned him from drinking vodka in front of us as a way of keeping him on the straight and narrow – vodka does seem to be an enormous problem for Ukrainians, especially among young men like Denis who've had to live through extreme social upheavals and have few job opportunities. I feel ashamed for bringing the booze along, but Natasha says, 'It's fine, he has to learn to deal with it.' His desperation for vodka is manic and obsessive, and his mum follows him everywhere shouting and chastising him for constantly trying to get his hands on it.

Oddly enough, there's lots of beer available for him to drink, and his mum doesn't mind him necking that, but he isn't interested. Ukrainians see beer as a soft drink.

'Do you worry about radioactivity in food?' I ask. None of them does. Hyena's elderly friend Nadia says that they appreciate the lifestyle in Slavutych – it's better than most towns in Ukraine because there's good healthcare and housing, and if the food is contaminated with a little radiation, it's a small price to pay.

This astounds me, but everyone agrees with her. Denis and his mate couldn't care less; it's as though he's never thought about it. 'Nothing's happened yet,' he says.

His mother explains, 'Why are we so tolerant? We have another reason. It feeds us. They built this town and we live here only because of the Chernobyl power plant.'

Nadia tells me about the day of the accident: she had to battle with the authorities to keep custody of her kids because a bus driver had gone off with their ID documents. She had gone to her
dacha
(a cross between a country cottage and an allotment shed that many Ukrainians own) with a friend but they suddenly started getting terrible headaches and raced home to Pripyat to see the tragedy unfolding. She cries as she remembers everything she lost.

Yuri – a wonderful, smiling bear of a man – cooks huge pork kebabs marinated in his top-secret recipe (which he readily reveals after a couple of vodkas: soak the pork in a mixture of vodka, dill, basil, parsley and onions). The pork's a little raw, but I reason that you can't grill away radiation-like germs, and anyway, it tastes great.

Anatoly talks about his experiences as a liquidator. He says that Ukraine has been vilified as a polluter of the world, but in fact, the Ukrainian people were the heroes who gave their lives to stop the disaster getting any worse and killing millions more.

Magic Mushrooms

The mayor of Slavutych has agreed to take me out for the day. Trouble is, all he's really interested in is getting the BBC to film his horse at a local stable, whilst all I want to do, given we're slap bang in the middle of the season, is go mushroom picking. Mushrooms are one of the foods that absorb radioactive particles most readily and foraging is hugely important to Ukrainians. I want to see if the land around Chernobyl really is as safe as the authorities claim, but the mayor isn't ready to play ball.

The mayor is a tall, imposing, balding fellow of 60 and he's been in charge for 15 years. He is relatively popular, although there are dark mutterings about him spending a lot of time shaking hands, and precious little improving the lot of the townsfolk. After watching his horse trotting around the stables for hours on end, I finally manage to drag him away to some nearby woods to search for mushrooms.

He turns out to be a dull, political animal, sticking to stock phrases about opportunities for entrepreneurs in his wonderful town and how it's a marvellous centre for technology (there's little evidence for this, but I nod sagely). He's deeply reluctant to talk about radioactivity, and although I force him to admit that food issues are of crucial importance, he won't elaborate. 'None of this land around here is dangerous,' he says. 'It's not a problem we have.'

I suggest that local people are remarkably accepting of such a terrifying idea as radioactive food, and ask him whether their attitude has been shaped by Stalin's enforced famines in the 1930s (Stalin took revenge on the rebellious Ukrainians by starving them in a shameful episode that killed 2.5-4.8 million people). He skips over the issue, saying, 'Actually, there is some debate about that.'

What? Is he really denying that the famines happened? But he waves the question away. Many Ukrainians see themselves as ethnic Russians and he doesn't want to be seen to take sides. Well, what're 4 million murders between friends?

I eventually give up and go looking for mushrooms, much to the mayor's relief. He's already carrying a large bag of mushrooms that he says he picked with his wife earlier that morning (I find out later that his stable girl actually picked them for him). In this endeavour we are more successful, finding masses of ceps and chanterelles. I'm overjoyed – I've never seen such an embarrassment of fungal riches, and it makes up for the disastrous interview.

After bidding the mayor goodbye, I take some of the mayor's mushrooms to be tested at the market lab, just in case something interesting crops up. I wander in and our lovely shocking blonde chops them up and drops them into her strange radiation contraption. We chat for a few minutes until the machine goes 'ding' and I notice her jaw drop. Suddenly there's a palpable tension in the air.

The lab technician is a very worried woman. She taps her calculator and shows it to us. It reads 2,300 becquerel (another unit of radio activity), and she points to her table of safe levels. My mushrooms are eight times too radioactive. 'Sorry? Say that again?'

Eight times the safe levels.

Is she surprised? 'Yes.'

'But it can't be true: I picked these with the mayor.'

'That's all very well – I'm glad you had a nice walk. But you'll have to throw the mushrooms away.'

This is the woman who, just yesterday, had told me that they had found only five cases of radioactive food in the last year, and ten the previous one.

I get straight on the phone to the mayor. 'We took the mushrooms to be tested and I have to warn you that they were eight times over the safe levels.'

'So it doesn't matter. So it cannot be that they are seriously high.'

'Are you still going to eat them?'

'No problem, I will.'

His cavalier approach astonishes me, but then he's a politician: I shouldn't be surprised at all. Did he really go and eat them? Who knows?

I'm flabbergasted – not by the mayor, but by finding mushrooms that weren't just radioactive, but extraordinarily radioactive. Everywhere we go people say, 'There's no problem, nothing around here is contaminated, you journalists just try to stir things up.' I had begun to believe them, although I did wonder if a desperately poor country would really keep expensive radiation labs in the town if it didn't need them.

I ask Hyena what she thinks about all this, and she's genuinely surprised that we've found such a high level of contamination. Is she worried about the mayor?

'Ah,' she sighs. 'He is a fatalist maybe. And he tries to transfer his belief to other people of his town. So we live with radiation and we know there are a lot of people eager to come to Slavutych to work. And we pay this price of not paying attention to radiation.'

Across the former Soviet Union, this is people's prime concern: a bit of money, housing and a functioning infrastructure. If that means they have to cope with a bit of radioactivity . . . well hey, they are willing to put their fingers in their ears and hum gently to avoid thinking about the potential horrors.

Is this a kind of blackmail, I wonder, seeing as the Chernobyl Power Plant and its shutdown still needs thousands of workers? She doesn't think so. People here are happier than everywhere else in Ukraine. I don't get it: why aren't people worried or angry? Is it something to do with the Ukrainian national character?

Ah,' Hyena's eyes light up. 'Yes, we are used to suffering, in taking burdens, shouldering disasters, absorbing pain and trudging on. Because no one's going to help you, and you have to keep on living.' She explains why no one smiles in the shops and restaurants: they see it as insincere – what is there to smile about? All these Americans who come over here are always smiling about nothing – what is wrong with them? There's nothing to smile about.

On our last day in Slavutych we are spotted in the bar and invited to a drinks party by the Slavutych English-speaking ex-pat community, lorded over by Mavis, a Little England curtain-twitcher from Sunderland. The weirdness of being at a Chernobyl nuclear drinks party is trumped only by my conversation with Paul, a US radiation expert whose job is to analyse the risks of people's contact with radiation in order to assess the likely financial fall-out in insurance terms – i.e. how much radioactivity can the staff endure before the resulting medical and legal bills make it financially unbearable for their company? It's a strange and shameful extrapolation of the financial from the human costs, and the conversation leaves me feeling grubby.

I've become increasingly confused about the moral/economic/ political/medical/radioactive web of misery that the Chernobyl disaster has thrown over this area of the world and it's hard to draw conclusions. Maybe I'm confusing the Chernobyl that is an event in time with the Chernobyl that is a place full of people and lives. These people have consumed radioactivity and sighed deeply, and got on with their lives. On one level it's extraordinary, and on another it's inevitable and unremarkable.

Ilyena tackles all of this in the way that Ukrainians know best: we retreat to a
dacha
and drink obscene, brain-numbing quantities of moonshine. Many Ukrainians genuinely believe that vodka flushes radiation out of their system. There's no medical evidence to support this . . . but that's not really the point.

• • • • •

Just before I leave Kiev for London I go for a final radiation check. I'm terrified. If I've picked up radionuclides, I might take radioactive contamination into my house, harming my kids and myself. I wonder if I've been reckless and stupid to eat food grown in the exclusion zone. A stern medic tells me to strip to my pants and enter a radiation chamber that looks like a turn-of-the-century relic from the Imperial War Museum. The door grinds shut, and a probe travels up and down a rickety track above me.

When I emerge, Marc looks a little worried. They did see something, he says, and my nervous smile fades. The woman tells me that I have raised levels of radioactivity in my stomach. Oh. Shit.

After letting me stew for a while she says that
luckily
it's within safe limits, the results aren't so bad and should return to normal in time. That's the last time I wear my immortal specs. What was I thinking?

There is possibly one last twist to this story, and it's called 'radiation hormesis'. It's a controversial theory that ionizing radiation can actually be
good
for you at low doses, activating genes that repair radiation damage, which then also reduce damage from other causes. It's a radical theory with many detractors, but it would be a glorious twist if there was some truth in it.