I’m writing these lines on the border of Kyiv, where fighting is now taking place between Ukrainian defenders and Putin’s invaders. I evacuated my wife last night. It took us a long time to get to the village where her friends were waiting, they only had one place left in the car. She’s gone.

I decided to return to Kyiv. My mom is here, she has three cats and no car. She has nowhere to run.

All morning, I walked to Kyiv along the highway. The road to Kyiv is empty, crammed with cars for tens of kilometers ahead, as if it were a movie about the zombie apocalypse. Someone leaves their pets right there on the road, telling them to “just go,” someone writes “children” on their car to avoid getting bombed, someone dramatically stalls and remains alone on the road. Someone tries to go around the side of the road, someone offers a ride to people with huge backpacks. Everything is as it always is, in all wars of conquest that cause mass migrations.

We don’t know what will happen to us in a couple of hours. But there is no fear. There is Ukrainian unity. Encapsulated in the phrase: “Russian ship go fuck yourself!” which the Ukrainian border guards yelled at the invaders on Zmiiny Island, when they threatened to kill them and shouted at them to surrender, saying, “This is a Russian warship so lay down your arms or you will be destroyed.” They were all killed, they did not give up. Let their cry of freedom live forever in history.

Some Ukrainians are dying, allowing the others to retreat. All my life I will remember their sacrifice on the altar of democracy. There is no doubt about what is happening here today. The last time this happened in Ukraine, in 1943, my grandfather, a private in the Soviet Army, defended Kyiv from the nazis. Today, the nazis are Putin’s troops.

A few days ago, Putin’s soldiers captured the Chornobyl nuclear power plant and Exclusion Zone. My father was a liquidator there and in 1987 he sacrificed his health to clean up the aftermath of the accident, or rather: the consequences of thoughtless Soviet nuclear policy. My father died in 2003. I have dedicated the last twelve years of my life to the exploration of the Exclusion Zone. Now I don’t have it anymore. The Russians took her yesterday.

But we had her once. There will be more beauty when the empire collapses, but it was good too. If you want to read about the beautiful Ukrainian Zone we have lost, I wrote this text under a peaceful sky over Kyiv. Today my words seem like an effort to replicate the past that we have lost. But it’s just for now. Temporarily.

The Silent Rhythms of Chornobyl

I wake up on the Chornobyl-2’s antenna.

A deafening orchestra of birds fills the air around me. I’m three hundred feet from the ground, and fifteen miles from the perimeter of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. I’m waiting for the guards to leave, who are supposed to arrest anyone who, like me, scales the barbed-wire fence, makes their way through the swamp, and climbs the antennas to spend the night closer to the sky.

Twelve years ago, when I started to explore the Zone, even the Ukrainians considered Chornobyl a valley of “mutants.” Few dared to walk off the popular tracks. The Zone is large, but just a decade ago the only well-known nuclear sites were the town of Prypyat, the Chornobyl power plant, and the city of Chornobyl. Connecting these places is a thin route dotted with several deserted villages, which runs through an ocean of forest surrounding an archipelago of even more villages. Dozens of miles of dense woods; almost a hundred villages—and not a single photo of them. Legal tours did not venture out there. Only three dozen people or so explored the Zone illegally, on foot. They didn’t go too deep, either.

I spent my youth amid these ruins, and I loved it. I drank myself blind in the Zone. My friends and I threw all-night acid parties at the abandoned churches to the songs of The Doors—still, the Zone was always sacrosanct. Today, a sea of tourists, inspired by Tarkovsky’s Stalker or the new HBO series Chernobyl, fill the main square in Prypyat, thousands of them wandering along the abandoned streets.

Chornobyl is the first word I remember—as a child, my father and other disaster liquidators talked about 1986 in our kitchen. My old man devoted his life to the atom. A physicist, engineer at the Nuclear Research Institute, and later a liquidator and operator of the neutron detection system, he went to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant to monitor the levels of radiation in the sub-reactor rooms, so the portal to hell wouldn’t get even wider. I was born the following year: 1988, two years after the disaster. My father died when I was fourteen, his thyroid gland damaged by exposure to radiation. I didn’t become a physicist, but the Chornobyl Zone caught up with me nonetheless. Since 2010, I’ve been exploring it on foot, illegally, avoiding the checkpoints.

When I first packed my backpack to go into the Zone, I thought I was doing it only once, to get the material for a book, but that material got me. It sucked me down into the swamp of a soul-searching trip, upstream toward the heart of darkness, to the border of the oecumene where dragons lived, geographical maps came to an end, and Eldorado began.

My Zone is a few days and nights completely alone; it’s blistered feet and a constellation of bug bites. Deadly exhaustion, poor sleep, a compensatory one-to-twenty-second micro-nap on the go, tired hallucinations, dehydration, and dew I collect greedily from pine needles. It means counting stars framed by the rough-edged wounds of cauliflower clouds through a hole broken in the ceiling. Standing in an abandoned house and wiping the table dusted with plaster to have dinner. Standing on a pontoon bridge over the river and drawing brown-colored water, promising myself never to drink it again. Shuffling along the abandoned railway track for hours; counting crossties under your feet that flash in the night with their concrete, zebra-like; crawling up to Prypyat at dawn, dead tired; crashing, fully clothed, onto a dusty sofa and watching the crossties flashing again, this time in dreams. Feeling happy to find a chair that survived intact. Carrying it carefully all the way to the roof of a sixteen-floor high-rise, humming Wanda Jackson and counting bullet holes in the thick green glass tiles. Climbing onto the roof, plopping down in the chair, which immediately breaks under your weight. Navigating the town, watching dozens of houses busted open by the police, and building your route mechanically in such a way as to steer clear of them. Watching for the manhole covers stolen by looters to reveal the dark abysses left in high grass that trap the first-timers—just in time. Saying hello to the bathtub that scrap hunters threw down from the fifth floor—it got stuck in a tree mid-flight and is now hanging there, heavy, pear-like. Blowing air into a crisp plastic bottle at the pier at night and putting it into the water so cold it gives you cramps. Going to sleep when there’s not a snowflake outside and waking up to find yourself snowed under.

My Zone is a forsaken borderland where all you can find are chimeras of the Soviet defense industry, the thunder of silence, and shards of sunlight pouring through a kicked-out door. A dense cocktail of calm, sadness, and oblivion where life gets synced with the Sun’s rhythms, and the biological clock adapts to the cruising speed of clouds. 

There are birds making nests in the forsaken lookout towers. On a frosty morning, you can see as far as the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant from those towers, but in the fog, you won’t see anything, not even the ground—only the milky air wrapping solitary wanderers into a dense November cocoon. The ranger stations have different names, but they all look the same. Even the deserted nests at the top of lookout towers are all in the same places.

My Zone is trembling islands of my own bliss. Time erodes them right before my eyes, so I return, again and again, to inhabit them one last time. To walk the remains of the villages where I keep searching for a place to crash. Sometimes, there are only a few houses in a village, one of them already lopsided, exposed to the tectonic activity of the swamp. Utter ruin teaches you to delight in the little things. I rejoice knowing that somewhere out there, in the labyrinths of rusted pontoon bridges and abandoned irrigation canals, I definitely missed something: a vivid detail not yet marked on my internal map.

My Zone is full of police ambushes and patrols. Sometimes, it’s full of encounters with people gathering radioactive antlers for sale. To carry as many of them as possible, they tie these antlers round themselves, and they stick out from behind their backs like demons’ wings in the twilight. It’s full of encounters with mushroom pickers, who have been picking porcini mushrooms from the radioactive soil for years, and with looters stealing radioactive scrap to trade for vodka.

In the Zone, some believe that radioactive artifacts from the eye of the storm symbolize status and courage. The closer to the epicenter of the explosion the piece of iron was, the more power it has—like meteoric iron or the Black Stone of the Kaaba. In 2016, I met scrap hunters at the Yaniv railway station. They’d been living there for months, collecting radioactive scrap for sale. The level of radiation in their trailer was fifty times higher than normal, but they didn’t care. They showed me a “turbine blade from the fourth bloc that got bent when the Chornobyl NPP exploded.” The piece of iron, highly radioactive, felt too heavy for its dimensions. The man who took me there tried to cut a trophy knife out of it with an autogenous cutter. He thought it was cool—like an amulet made of bear claws or shark teeth.

This looters’ trailer was less than half a mile from the Prypyat checkpoint, a gateway for thousands of tourists each year. None of the tourists or journalists know about Yaniv. During the tours, they don’t show you the dark side of the Zone. 

Yaniv station is only one of the many facets of destitution, one of the thousands of faces of our times, washed in the antiutopian gradations of a gray color. For decades, outcasts from the villages bordering on the Zone were getting money for booze by raiding the radioactive cemeteries of liquidators’ equipment: they would load heavy truck engines onto ripped-off car hoods, harness themselves to their cargo, and drag it on a rope through the snow like a sleigh laden with catch.  

One of the scrap hunters from Yaniv boasted, “I was the one to snatch the last fucking ZIL engine from the goddamn cemetery!” His words were full of the pride of belonging to an era that was already coming to an end. To the era of the Zone as a terra incognita, a Klondike for the have-nots, hobos, and petty criminals. The “good old Zone” you could plunder for decades! Not just lift “knock off brass faucets” in Prypyat but dig deep into the ground: search for old maps of hamlets vanished back during World War II and then raid them with metal detectors, stir up bones and cartridges, stir up death, dragging it by its hair out of the swamp in Polissya that preserves dead bodies so well. The last time I saw that man was five years ago, in the Podil neighborhood in Kyiv: he was sawing down an enormous rusty trawler with a group of metal workers, and he bragged about being ahead of schedule.

After the Soviet project collapsed, scrap theft became so widespread that manhole covers were cast with an inscribed warning: “Theft is punishable by law.” In Prypyat, they stole and scrapped central heating radiators, underground communication cables, elevator coils, faucets, and zinc-coated steel sheets. They even tore up a street to get water pipes out.  

That’s not to mention the bathtubs—the ones I saw hanging in the trees.

A decade ago, at night, I ran into a scrap hunter in Prypyat. He bummed a smoke off me and told me how he’d dismantle those tubs: his mate would throw them out the window onto the grass, and he would lug them away, piling them up. There was a guide nearby walking a “fancy Dutch tourist” around the town. He recalled the woman’s terrified look as she appeared from around a corner just as one of the tubs crashed onto the asphalt, shattering into a thousand pieces. He laughed about this clash of two worlds and bummed another cig, saying, “She asked for it! Caught a glimpse of the real Zone at least.”  

Five years later, I bumped into him for the second time in Yaniv. He told me how he’d run away from the police, having lugged his motorcycle, loaded with scrap, over the barbed wire with his last gasp. He boasted that he’d done a total of seven years in prison. Then he took my friends straight to the Chornobyl NPP fence, and while they were taking photos of the nuclear station, he started to pick up the remnants of cable or something.

Chornobyl is a miniature model of the world in which we all will live unless we act now. The future does not begin, like in movies, as a result of a single catastrophic event. It crawls up slowly, like a swamp; it flashes in sinister forecasts.

The Apocalypse is showing through here and there, breaking out in spots all over the Zone: it is visible in high-tech projects like the “New Secure Confinement Center” and “smart systems of nuclear objects monitoring and protection”; it ripples through the tsunami of tourists in expensive clothes; covered with an old sackcloth, it appears sometimes as a bathtub smashing at the tourist’s feet, like a raw code of life bursting forth in glitches through the screens of your smartphones. It manifests in prison tattoos, in the rust on a blue oxygen tank that you will have to cut into pieces—cut, in order to sell, to get drunk, to pass out, and to start all over again.

Although I know the Zone inside and out, I return there often—back to the railway tracks overgrown with shrubs, the endless swamp, the thousands of islets of dry land linked with the rotten planks of bridges and walkways—to peer into a trembling sapphire of sky reflected in the swamp while I jump from one islet to another. To wait by the checkpoint, watching the wind wave over blades of grass that ripple like chainmail. To listen to the guards boot out the tourists from the Zone late at night, freeing it up for me. Cars hum one after another; the humming layers and grows only to die away suddenly when the curfew comes down.

A post shared by Markiyan Kamysh (@markiyankamysh)

Sometimes, I still pass by the Antennas. I take my time to crawl up to the sky, rubbing my hands sore against the rust of the ancient ladders. The forest spreads out in front of me—boundless, dense, and majestic. Flocks of birds are crawling just above the horizon: tiny, moth-like dots.

Translated by Hanna Leliv.

Markiyan Kamysh is a Ukrainian writer who, since 2010, has illegally explored the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and represents it in literature. He is the son of a Chornobyl liquidator who died in 2003. His first book, Stalking the Atomic City was translated into multiple languages and will be published in English by Astra House in April 2022. Preorder his book here. You can also follow Markiyan on Instagram, here.

Hanna Leliv is a freelance literary translator based in Lviv, Ukraine. She was a Fulbright fellow at the Iowa Translation Workshop. Among her translations into Ukrainian are texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Hawking. Her translations of contemporary Ukrainian literature into English have appeared in Asymptote, Washington Square Review, The Adirondack Review, The Puritan, and Apofenie.

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