THE STAR ABSINTHE: NOTES ON A BITTER ANNIVERSARY

Prypiat is the only city in the world that has such an easily calculated age: 1970 (its founding)—1986 (its end). Besides that, of all the cities that have been ruined, it existed for the shortest time—only sixteen years. That is, it was no longer a child, but not yet a young man, sort of like a teenager who has the right to obtain a passport and to par­ticipate in an election for the first time. But, instead of a passport, he is issued a death certificate. And the reason listed for death: Acute Radiation Syndrome.

No other city has existed for such a short time. And it continues to be ruined—usually by human hands. It’s not just the forest that eats away at it.

An opportune digression: I wonder—how long did Sodom and Gomorrah exist? You can fantasize about this all you want, but it is impossible to imagine that they existed for less time than Prypiat did. Sixteen years could not have been long enough to bring God to such wrath. In a competition for brevity of existence, Sodom and Gommorah lag far behind Prypiat.

Moreover, with the example of Prypiat, we have a precise, final date: April 27, 1986. No, not the 26th but the 27th—the day of the evacuation, not of the accident. The existence of an exact, final date makes Prypiat comparable to Pompeii. The latter also has a precise date—August 24, 79.

The ghost of Pompeii climbed up out of nowhere into reality when we, stepping onto broken glass and rotten boards, lifting our feet like herons, entered the Prypiat Café—at one time, the coolest joint in town. The café was situated on a hill above the river docks. From there, you can observe the city’s beach and the arrival of the blindingly white Kyiv passenger liners with their underwater wings. The wall of the café across from the beach was made of stained glass. Our Guide took the opportunity to share with us the fact that, according to lore, the artist who had made this stained glass wall had, at one time, created another stained glass piece that tempted fate. What he had in mind was that, among other works by that stained glass artist, there was “The Last Day of Pompeii.” He did indeed curse this place. There’s no way a person like that should have been asked to create any stained glass in Prypiat. Our Guide chuckled while telling us this legend.

It’s doubtful that “The Last Day of Pompeii” could have become a monumental-decorative theme during, need I remind you, a time of Socialist Realism [1]—not even as a replica of Karl Briullov’s work. [2] What club, hall, or sanatorium could have had any use for its catastrophism? What executive committee could have ordered a far-from-the-most-op­timistic scene depicting volcanic lava and the scorn of the heavens?

One can perhaps understand a moment of the artist’s weakness that resulted in a work being given birth to out of wedlock. A stained glass work made for oneself? In order to materialize random apocalyp­tic visions? Art that does not belong to the people? Art for art’s sake? In any case, that latent decadent categorically should not have been invited to Prypiat. People such as him always drag their horrible karma around with them and meddle with otherwise happy streams of events.

Where can he be found today? How can he be made responsible for everything that came to be?

* * *

What’s on the stained glass?

For starters, it’s worth noting that almost half of it was ruined. That is, today, it’s no longer a stained glass work, but half of one; only pieces remain intact. The other half crackles underfoot when you carelessly come too close to it. By the way—upon entering the café, the radiation meter strapped to Our Guide’s shoulder began to flap madly, alerting us to a dangerous hot spot. We carefully circumvented it. You can’t walk barefoot here—you’ll be overexposed.

So then, getting back to the stained glass. Everything that has remained gives the sense of an accented splash of colors. If one were to describe the colors of the stained glass in terms of physics, you would need to use the prefixes “infra-” and “ultra-” as much as pos­sible. The stained glass is remarkably active. It emits. The verb “to emit” usually requires a complement in the accusative case. You can emit something, for example, happiness. Or radiation. The stained glass in the Prypiat Café on the shores of the Prypiat River in the city of Prypiat simply emits.

Its sun is multi-colored. Like the rest of the world, it’s striped. The stripes are dark-red, bright yellow, blue, azure, and green. This is summer in all its fury, at its zenith, in its surplus—the singing of forests, the silence of lakes, reeds, pines, the buzzing of bumble bees among the bushes of berries, becoming one with nature, the sweet swelling of the biosphere.

A bit later, when we were already in the bus, Our Guide played an agitprop film for us about Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) that was filmed the last summer before the catastrophe. “And what’s most important,” a choleric guy with the rank of an engineer, in a white lab coat and glasses, says in one scene, all choked up by his own enthrall­ment—“what’s most important: we live in such unity with nature here, we are the flesh of its flesh! Go swim in the river, enter the forest, walk among the pines, breathe, gather a whole frying-pan-full of mushrooms for dinner, if you want, it’s all here, right next to you, we are in it, we are part of it.”

About nine months later—and this fidgety, life-embracing person, with his quick manner of speech seemed cruel. But for now—the pro­paganda of success, the standard victorious context in which the words “man” and “nature” are now always written in uppercase letters, M and N, Man and Nature, NatureMan, a celebration of harmony, swim­ming in the river, gathering mushrooms, the peaceful atom, [3] the scent of pine, dialectic materialism.

The inhabitants of Prypiat exemplified the success of scientific communism, they embodied it: clean, naïve, and obtrusive.

Are you really sure that instead of “obtrusive” I should have writ­ten “cocky”?

* * *

Most unforgettable that day were, of course, the catfish in the canal near the Nuclear Power Plant. They were the size of dolphins, or sharks, and this is nature’s categorically harsh answer to man (now in a different context— one in which both of these words are always written in lowercase letters).

Gazing at fish in water is one of my favorite and constant activities. I’ve had very few opportunities to do this in my life. One, for example, came in Nuremberg, another—in Regensburg. I think it was in Nuremberg that I came to the conclusion that Europe is a land in which fish live well. I would not have come to this conclusion if I hadn’t been in Nuremberg precisely at that time, in the summer of 1995. If I hadn’t stood on those bridges time and again and I hadn’t gazed down deep into the river to see how fish slowly move just above its bottom. And I ended up in Nuremberg at that time just because Walter Mossmann [4] summoned us to come there.

And now I am recalling him not just casually, and not out of thanks, but because a few months earlier he too gazed at those very same catfish in the canal near the Nuclear Power Plant. In his report, he writes about “meter-long monstrosities with giant, flat skulls and wide jaws, and with long, waving outgrowths jutting from the left and the right of their jaws that recall the curled moustaches of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.” [5]

That’s a rather caustic joke, in case anyone missed it: catfish with Cossack mustaches in a sluggish radioactive canal nestled in slime, the cold blood of Ukraine, its adipose fish hearts.

* * *

Europe? A land in which fish live well?

It’s doubtful—in the case of those catfish.

First of all, I’m not sure if they really live all that well. But they definitely live long: no one catches them or kills them, in fear of the undeniable danger of radiation. How long is Silurus glanis, a normal (non-radioactive) wels catfish, supposed to live? According to several sources, up to one hundred years. This fish can live longer than any other fish found in our rivers and waters. Only moss-covered carp can live longer—but that’s only in Aldous Huxley’s novels.

On the other hand, abnormal (radioactivus emanatos) catfish—that is, the Prypiat catfish—live eternally. And as evidenced by their size in the twenty-fifth year of their eternal life after the catastrophe, they will continue to grow eternally. And someday they’ll grow into eternally living, monstrous leviathans. But will they really be living well then?

Second of all, I’m not sure if it’s really Europe. In our country, Europe occasionally appears and then disappears again. It’s phantas­mic, like communism in the early poetry of Marx-Engels. [6] You can’t touch it, it’s made of mist, misunderstandings and rumors.

In April 1986, Europe was not even a topic of discussion. There was the USSR and there was the West and also China. What Europe? Central? Eastern? If “Eastern,” then how can you call that Europe? Europe cannot be eastern. From our geography lessons we learned that there is only the European territory of Russia and a few adjacent repub­lics. The city of Prypiat was located somewhere there in that European territory. But certainly not in Europe.

And really—if it wasn’t for Sweden, if it hadn’t created such a ruckus about the accident, then how would this have continued on? There probably would not have been any continuation, just another cover up of yet another mega-crime. They nonetheless classified as secret the oncological illness statistics, regardless of all those Swedes. What, do you think the USSR was going to change all of a sudden?

And it’s good that there was a resistance to the system. It’s good that Sweden made a fuss and indicated that Poland was in danger. It’s good that Poland had stopped being a friend and was increasingly turning away, westward. This time it turned away from a radioactive cloud—holding its breath and fastidiously holding its nose. It’s good that Poland became frightened and took up Sweden’s appeal.

But France did not stop being a friend and denied everything. There is no danger, France said, there is nothing to see here. It’s a good thing the European Union didn’t exist then. Otherwise it would have, once again, come up with some kind of blushingly indecisive decision (please excuse the oxymoron) like the one they came up with during the war in Georgia: the most important thing is not to anger the Russians.

It’s good that Germany had had the experience of the 1970s, when hundreds of thousands and even millions of people protested against the Nuclear Power Plants, led by a few poets with guitars and fifes. It’s good that by May 17, 1986 the German Greens called an emergency meeting in Hannover. And it was on May 17 that I wrote these lines:

Blood will change. Blossoms will fall from the chestnut trees.

We rush to live, like after a plague.

Perhaps that is where salvation lies—to recognize this time,

as a final flowering. The Only. One.

No one understood what they were about. On the other hand, Walter Mossmann, who certainly would have understood, did not know about their existence. “And then I tried,” he writes about that day, “to imagine an infected landscape, forests, pools of water, fields, villages —everything is radiating. And I wasn’t able to. This is not something that can be seen in reality.”

I replied to him a dozen years later: “What were our initial reac­tions? To understand them is to understand what it is to fear the wind, the rain, the greenest of grass, to be afraid of light.” And later—con­cerning the presence of a different kind of death—one that you cannot sense or see, “death to grow into, [7] death so devoid of form (and, follow­ing Hegel—content), that any kind of resistance lost any sense.”

But the authorities demanded that resistance be applied. They, from the first days, shamelessly hurled full echelons of poor souls res­cuers into the Zone—the same way, as if in war time, they hurled, full speed ahead, masses of un-uniformed and unarmed men from the “recently liberated territories.” The authorities were in charge of the resistance and were bringing about their own end. But no one had real­ized it at that time. It seemed that the end of the world would come sooner than the end of such a wonderful epoch-empire.

The resistance consisted of de-activization. Zone X was ordered to be washed of its dirt. What couldn’t be washed was to be buried in the ground. [8] What could not be buried was to be left as it was.

But there was another resistance as well, which consisted of pillag­ing. It’s as if people decided to deal with the radioactivity of the materi­als through the act of dividing the loot, that is, through the acquisition of things that belong to others. It’s as if someone’s possessions, when taken out of their home, immediately lose their deathly glow.

That’s why Prypiat is a city not only abandoned but also a city robbed, a take-out city, a city taken apart, a city to go. And that is its particular attraction. No longer a city but a body, collectively raped by new gangs of rescuers-lovers each time.

* * *

In his notes on Prypiat, Walter Mossmann calls it “an installation beyond compare.” I also couldn’t shake the feeling sometimes that all this surrounding me was probably a fragment of an exposition that had been especially created and then methodically developed inside some kind of Contemporary Art-and-Ecology Zone—it’s just that the curators overdid it and now the dose-meter goes bonkers in some places. And not just they—that very same Walter Mossmann admits a bit later: “The entire city of Prypiat is an installation with such rich Bedeutungsebenen [9] that it creates buzzing in your skull.”

Picking up on his skull buzzing, I attempt to list at least the highest “levels of meaning”— as if trying to formulate a question about the semiotics of Prypiat. I’ve even come up with more than two levels. Here are just the first five:

Ecological

Political

Social

Lyrical

Mythological

In the case of the last one, it emerges—a friend of the people and an enemy of the gods, a superman and near-god himself, that is—a titan.

* * *

It was Prometheus, and not Sabaoth or Jehovah, who created man from clay. What word first comes to mind when we hear his name? Correct— “fire.” But it should be “clay,” one that is red, at least. The meaning behind the fire that was stolen from the gods for man can only be understood if the factor of clay is taken into consideration—that is, the condition that Prometheus needed to care for those that he had fashioned out of clay. By the way, I hear in the Ukrainian word for “burn” (o-pik) the root of the word for “to care for” (pik-luvatysia). Clay hardens and strengthens as a result of burning. There is no way to avoid fire here. If fire burns in a nuclear reactor, then all the more so.

Prometheus is a favorite of the Romantics, it is they who, one after another, as if according to plan, sang of his self-sacrificial protest against the static order of things. It is not strange that Shevchenko, in his “The Caucasus,” a poem that is first and foremost concretely political, launches it with him, bound to the top of a cliff for thirty thousand years (well that’s a long sentence!). And an eagle fits in here too—not necessarily a two-headed one but an autocratic devourer of a liver nonetheless.

Prometheus remained a favorite in the era of Socialist Realism as well, in the sphere of late Soviet electro-energy. He was sort of a patron of more and more electro-stations and of the residential areas tied to them. It is as if he came up with the slogan about the electrification of the whole country.

It’s understood that Prypiat could not help but be one of the cen­ters of this cult. Yet another blow from greedy and lascivious gods landed on the reactor.

* * *

Secondly, of course, a star or, more accurately, the Star called Wormwood. In the summer of 1986, that is, about a month after the catastrophe, we began to actively quote verses 10 and 11 from chapter 8 of St. John the Divine’s Revelation. Wormwood is a very strange, a completely ridiculous, name, if one really has a star in mind—and even if by star one has in mind a comet or an asteroid. Why should a cosmic body have the same name as a field plant? It only begins to make sense when taking into account the place where the catastrophe occurred.

In that manner, wormwood is a double “a”: apocalypse and absinthe. Both are extracts of sorts: the former, of a secret knowledge; the latter, of bitterness. If geographical names were to be translated, then discussions on an international level would not be about the ChNPP (the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) but about the ANPP (the Absinthe Nuclear Power Plant). They would be about a technogenic catastrophe not in Chornobyl but in Absinthe.

There is, of course, a third “a”—angel (yes, the third one, the one who sounded the trumpet). Isn’t that whom we see among other figures on the aforementioned stained glass in that café in what is yet another allusion to Pompeii made by the artist? The angel, although disguised as a flying girl (with breasts!), and although with invisible wings, is none­theless given a trumpet as its main and most important sign. Angels cannot have female sexual organs, moreover primary ones, because angels are sexless. But angels can pretend to be girls. Long hair and the absence of indicators of the male sex, even secondary ones, allow for this. That angel flying on that stained glass window, perhaps, is one like that. Its author didn’t really know but was trying to guess. And some­times a guess is much more impressive than actual knowledge.

* * *

We drove down Lenin Avenue to get to the City of the Electric Sun. We exited the bus on the main square in front of the Energy-Man Palace of Culture, where Lenin Avenue intersected Kurchatov [10] Street. Actually, the epithet “former” needs to be used everywhere in these sentences—at least six or seven times. “Former” is the primary and most important characteristic of Prypiat. It makes you kick in your memory, full on. Memory has to work for everything else because noth­ing else remains in Prypiat.

When I was a kid, I often dreamt about the Yucatan and about cities abandoned in jungles. And although to compare Prypiat with it seems too flattering, and thus dishonest, I do compare them. It’s about how nature, upon returning, takes back its own. It’s about weeds, sometimes impassible, in former courtyards, about trees on the roof and on stairs, about boars or deer, that suddenly cross Friendship of Peoples Avenue (formerly: now, today—Friendship of Animals). It’s about extraterrestrial and hypertrophic mushrooms filled to their caps with roentgens. Nature returned and took back a hundredfold, unnaturally. The indifferent-merciless revenge of nature against the system can attest to the unnatural quality of that system. To the notion that the place where Kurchatov and Lenin intersect goes beyond the boundaries of the order of things and is horribly dangerous.

The contamination was worst in the park. It was best not even to approach the Ferris wheel. According to Our Guide, the park missed its own opening by just four days. The opening was to take place on May 1. Everything stood, just about ready, all the carousels greased and ready to go, all that was left to do was wave a hand, signal the orchestra, cut the red ribbon and give the command. The inhabitants of Prypiat were methodically getting their kids ready: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five days until the opening!

That was approximately the amount of days left for the existence of communism. This was evidenced by prosperity, its growth, and by the Kyiv Cakes, [11] for which people from Kyiv would come to Prypiat. Stepping onto the broken glass and other screeching scraps, I could not help but notice the countless ranges and refrigerators in the “Rainbow” store. Well there it is, embodied in the consumer goods—this higher, this truly highest, as if in Moscow, category of supply!

The chief color for the city of Prypiat should have been the color of those ranges, refrigerators, and washing machines—an ideally white color, the sum total of the rainbow, an indicator of the inability to get dirty or stained, an index of absolute cleanliness and sterility, the color of lab coats, wings, orchards in late April and rapid passenger liners with underwater—also white—wings, that arrived at the city docks, one after the other.

And if we imagine the angels clothed, then it is also the color of their special clothing.

That’s why, when I walked around inside the former Energy-Worker Palace I could not help but think about the third myth and, simultaneously, the phantom, of this city. His name is Harmonious Man—an exemplary creation of Prometheus, Clay Creation No. 1, the tireless, conscientious worker, a dazzling dancer, the blessed-with-perfect-pitch-and-velvety-voiced champion of the world in chess and swimming and also in acrobatics, numismatics, and gym­nastics. On a heavily peeling panel in the foyer of the palace hall, the exemplary Workers, Engineers, and Scientists united in a new Trinity with the exemplary Villagers and embraced each other in a happy round dance. The concert hall continued to echo something from Leontiev, Antonov, maybe some Rotaru, her “Lavanda” [12] and other songs.

A bit later, in the workshop beside the palace, filled with portraits of members of the Politburo, I tried to recall their last names. In the army, we had to know them by heart in order to distinguish between their iden­tically kind, good faces. But how can you distinguish between Voronov and Kapitonov? Ustinov and Tikhonov? Gromyko and Kunaev? Or, even more difficult, how can you tell the difference between Vorotnikov and Solomentsev? How can you tell the difference between the ideal and the ideal? Between the positive and the positive? Between the perfect and the harmonious? Between the good and the even better?

The city of Prypiat died because of the inability to answer these questions. The Harmonious Man could not withstand his own progress and choked on happiness.

* * *

P.S. I also remember something else that Our Guide told us. In the days before the 1986 New Year’s holiday, the holiday tree in front of the Energy-Worker Palace fell down twice. Few of the city inhabitants paid any attention to such a telling sign.

March 2011

Notes

[1] The sole officially sanctioned style of art of the Soviet Union and its satellite coun­tries from 1932 until the USSR’s demise. Its required themes were the glorification of communism and the proletariat, and its dominance was enforced by government cultural policy.

[2] Russian painter Karl Briullov’s (1799-1852) best-known painting is entitled “The Last Day of Pompeii” (1830-1833). Briullov was instrumental in buying Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko’s freedom from serfdom in 1838.

[3] According to Our Guide, the roof of one of Prypiat´’s buildings had “Let the atom be a worker and not a soldier!” written on it in huge letters. (Author’s note)

[4] Walter Mossmann (1941-2015) was a German songwriter, journalist, and activist, one of the leading figures of the German student movement of 1968. He frequently visited Ukraine in the 1990s while developing several projects of cultural exchange between post-Soviet Ukraine and Germany.

[5] Zaporozhian Cossacks were a Ukrainian political and military force in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

[6] Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were the founders of Marxism.

[7] And why not “on a payment plan?” (Author’s note)

[8] The path to Prypiat’ goes through the former villages of Zalissia and Kopachi. The latter has, in fact, now been buried. In this manner a name crossed paths with its own destiny. (Author’s note) Kopaty means to dig in Ukrainian and a kopach is a person who digs.

[9] Levels of meaning (Ger.) (Author’s note)

[10] Igor Kurchatov (1903-1960) was a Soviet nuclear physicist and director of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

[11] A dessert baked in Kyiv that was very popular throughout the Soviet Union.

[12] Valery Leontiev (b. 1949), Yuri Antonov (b. 1945) and Sofiia Rotaru (b. 1947) were among the most well known pop singers in 1980s USSR. The latter’s song “Lavanda” (Lavender) was a popular 1985 duet with Estonian singer Jaak Joala.