The 90-mile stretch of the Belarusian-Ukrainian border that runs through the Chernobyl zone is one of the most radioactive parts of the planet, painted in the darkest shades of red on the contamination maps. A brown smudge of plutonium straddles the border just seven miles north of the nuclear station. But the border is not demarked in any way. There are no passport controls or customs inspections, and border troops refuse to patrol it without extra pay, which no one has ever offered them.

Two roads cross the border within the confines of the zone, which seem to make it easy to go from the Ukrainian portion to the Belarusian and back again. Actually, it isn’t. Although Belarusians and Ukrainians don’t need visas to visit each other’s countries, anyone, regardless of nationality, requires permission to be in either country’s exclusion zone. Visitors must also have an official escort. You can’t just wander around by yourself.

For an American like me, who needed not only visas for both countries but also stamps in my passport to prove legal entry and exit, crossing the radioactive border was even more complicated. The most logical way to do it—just driving my usual route from Kiev to the town of Chornobyl and then crossing the border—was illegal since there was no one to stamp my passport at the actual border inside the zone.

If I was caught in Belarus without the proper stamp, I could be detained for three days and then deported. What I had to do instead was to exit Ukraine and enter Belarus at a border crossing outside the zone and then cross the border again, semilegally, inside.

The closest border point was on a bridge over the Dnieper River near the Belarusian village of Komarin, six miles away from Paryshiv, the Ukrainian zone’s northeast checkpoint. The drive there took me only about half an hour out of my usual way, but the border took more than an hour because my car needed Belarusian insurance, whose acquisition required $20 and visiting sundry trailers parked on the river’s mosquito-infested marshes. Uninsured foreign cars get confiscated in Belarus.

Just two miles after crossing the border, I was inside the 30-kilometer zone, only now I was in the Belarusian section. In fact, about one-third of that original zone was in Belarus, but it was very different compared to Ukraine. For one thing, you can enter the zone near Komarin without passing through any checkpoint. The road, at least, is unrestricted, and on the radiation maps, the area is virtually clean. Such clean spots are in the Ukrainian zone as well. In the rush to establish an evacuation zone in 1986, it was impossible to map radioactivity levels in any detail. So, a rough circle was drawn around its perimeter even though some lands inside were quite clean, while patches outside were dirty. But access to even clean parts of Ukraine’s 30-kilometer zone was nevertheless restricted because the Sarcophagus, the nuclear plant, and hundreds of nuclear waste dumps inside posed continued security risks.

The barbed wire fence around the zone’s perimeter was incomplete and didn’t extend to the southernmost bit of Belarusian territory that seems to jut into northern Ukraine on maps. In fact, although it was within a 30-mile radius of the power plant, that part of Belarus was populated and not part of the exclusion zone. Instead, Belarus’s exclusion zone extended for a radius of 50 kilometers to the north because that’s approximately how far areas of high contamination—40 curies or more of cesium-137 for each square kilometer—extended from the nuclear station.

In still-Soviet 1988, 500 square miles of those lands were put aside in the Polissia State Radiological and Ecological Reserve (PSRER). More lands were added in 1993, expanding the PSRER to more than 830 square miles.

Ukraine, too, attached a ragged 200-square-mile tail of territory to the southwest part of the 30-kilometer zone, creating a single administrative unit called the Zone of Exclusion and the Zone of Unconditional (Mandatory) Resettlement. That unwieldy name is shortened to an even more unwieldy acronym that transliterates into English as ZEZU(M)R. The Cyrillic original——is used in so many documents and signage that it is worth a mention.

Together, the adjoining portions of Ukraine’s ZEZU(M)R and Belarus’s PSRER immediately around the reactor created a roughly oval-shaped no-man’s-land totaling 1,838 square miles. This is almost twice the land area of Rhode Island and about half the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Driving west across Belarus on the way to Chernobyl took just 15 minutes. There was only one road, and it ran along the border of the radiological reserve on the right. The reserve was not fenced. The roads and paths that led into it were marked by large rocks painted with trefoils and yellow signs hand-stenciled with red lettered warnings:

PSRER

Walking or Driving is

Forbidden!

Fine

up to 10

minimum

wages

Ten Belarusian minimum wages was about $80. This is a stiff fine for a poor country where the average annual wage in 2000 was $700. It was only $300 more in Ukraine.

Instead of heading in the direction of the reserve, I kept driving west towards the border because I wanted to drop off my car in Chornobyl—back in Ukraine—before going farther into Belarus.

It would have seemingly been more logical, legal, and easier for me to simply drive from the border to the administration of the radiological reserve in Khoiniki, a town of 19,000 about 40 miles north of the Chernobyl power plant. But I didn’t have a Belarusian map with

enough detail to get me through the rural, sparsely inhabited, and poorly marked corner of the country I needed to drive through.

Although I had cobbled my own map together from inexpensive Ukrainian topographical maps that showed much of the bordering regions of Belarus, a critical corner of 15 square kilometers was missing, and it was the very area that I presumed must contain the turns to Khoiniki.

I consider myself fairly intrepid. But I was not so adventurous (or foolish) as to drive around a radioactive zone without a map, especially without certain access to unleaded gas for my car. Though I was quite certain there was unleaded gas, I knew that I would have problems actually finding it in a remote rural region.

It was surely the center of the universe to anyone who lived there, but it was the middle of nowhere to me and I needed both a guide and a ride. Once in Belarus, I hoped that I’d be able to buy a detailed topographical map with the sections I was missing. In the meantime, I wanted my car in a safe and familiar place. (Yes, given enough time, even a radioactive town like Chornobyl can seem safe.)

Rimma Kyseltsia, who came along as my companion and fixer, had arranged with Petr Palytayev, the director of the reserve, to pick us up at the Paryshiv checkpoint. But he wouldn’t leave his office until he knew we had arrived in Chornobyl. It was an hour’s drive from Khoiniki to Paryshiv and since he didn’t have permission to enter the Ukrainian zone, he’d have to wait in his car outside the checkpoint where, to put it mildly, there is not much to do.

And that just about exhausted all the information we had about what awaited us in Belarus. We didn’t know where we’d be staying, what it would cost, or even what we’d be eating. Unlike Ukraine’s Chernobylinterinform, the Belarusian reserve’s administration didn’t seem to have a set price list for visitors. Palytayev had been quite cagey about all the details.

“We’ll figure all that out when you get here,” he had said when Rimma asked about prices. That could mean it would be free of charge, with a nominal gratuity to Palytayev. Or it could mean a shakedown. I have experienced both after being told variations of “oh, let’s not discuss tacky issues of money now” in this part of the world.

I had visited the Ukrainian zone so many times that I had a blasé been-there-done-that breeziness about it. I knew where the shops were, what I could buy there, and what I needed to bring. In Belarus, I knew nothing and so prepared for the worst.

I folded emergency hundred dollar bills into the demi-pad pockets of my bra, packed an insulated bag with enough food to last three days, and even lugged a five-liter bottle of water along for the trip. Since alcohol is often decent currency in such parts and I had no idea of whether I’d even be in the vicinity of a store to buy any, I also brought along vodka and brandy.

The fact that rain poured from gloomy skies for much of the drive didn’t alleviate my reservations. Belarus was a daunting, neo-Soviet dictatorship. While Ukraine was not exactly an exemplar of democracy, it had declassified hundreds of previously secret KGB documents about Chernobyl in 2001. Belarus’s Chernobyl files largely remained secret.

In any event, it was good that I brought the food—and the booze.

After driving about 15 minutes through Belarus, we passed the tiny village of Gden. Little of it was evident from the road except for some aged log cabins. But they were quite clearly occupied. Gden was about the same distance from the nuclear power plant as the town of Chornobyl. But it was successfully decontaminated and, therefore, never evacuated. In Soviet times, Gden was cited as a positive example in contrast to the Ukrainian republic, which didn’t decontaminate any villages in its portion of the 30-kilometer zone and simply evacuated them.

While Kiev did decontaminate the towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl, Belarus decontaminated the larger town of Bragin, just outside the northeast border of the radiological reserve, without ever evacuating the people (though all the children were sent away to summer camps).

Within minutes, we came upon the international border, which was marked only by a cluster of signs on either side of a candy cane post. Belarus displayed a small red sign that read: Border—Ukraine. The Ukrainian sign announced that we were entering the exclusion zone and warned us against picking mushrooms or berries. It was a low-key display compared to the border crossing at Komarin, where the signs scream and huge national flags whip in the wind.

About a minute later we were at the Paryshiv checkpoint on the zone’s northeast perimeter, just four miles from Chornobyl.

At that point, I was in Ukraine illegally because I had reentered the country without an entry stamp. But there were no border guards or immigration officials in the zone to notice or care. The only thing the guards at the Paryshiv checkpoint wanted to know was whether I had a

Chernobylinterinform program, which was my permission to be in the Ukrainian exclusion zone. They didn’t even ask to see my passport.

Once we arrived in Chornobyl, Rimma called Palytayev to start heading our way. After a lunch of sandwiches and fruit from my insulated bag, I parked my car in a garage, and a driver for the Chernobyl Ecological Center gave us a ride back to Paryshiv where Palytayev and his driver were waiting in a gray Volga sedan.

A minute later we were back in Belarus—where I was again somewhat illegal since I had recrossed the border without a stamp. But since no Belarus immigration officials would possibly find out (until and unless they read this book), the entry stamp I got in Komarin a few hours earlier was good enough to prove legal entry.

Rotund and mustached, Palytayev was a former Communist Party functionary who worked in local Belarusian government before taking over as director of the Polissia State Radiological Ecological Reserve a year earlier. He said that the reserve employed 700 people—firemen, checkpoint guards, forest rangers, security guards—nearly all of whom lived in Khoiniki and were bused to the reserve daily.

Though it is officially a radiological reserve, its workers still call it the zone in casual conversation. I also use “zone” to refer to the no-man’s-land surrounding the nuclear station as a unitary radioactive environment, though I use each country’s proper name for its respective portion of evacuated territory when necessary to distinguish them administratively or politically.

Seven hundred workers in the Belarus reserve amounted to far fewer than the 2,500 people who worked daily in the comparable, if slightly larger, Ukrainian exclusion zone. (And this doesn’t count the 4,000 who worked at the nuclear plant.) The reason for the difference is that Belarus’s reserve is a radioactive wilderness and nothing more. It requires little in the way of maintenance except fire prevention and security patrols.

Nearly 300,000 people passed through the zone, working short tours of duty, at the height of the cleanup in 1986 and 1987. By 1989 the total number of cleanup workers, known as “liquidators,” approached 900,000. But after that, when the main cleanup work was done, the numbers dropped radically. In 1991, when Ukraine took over its portion of the zone, about 11,000 people were working in the administration of the zone and the power plant. By the turn of the millennium, there were fewer than 8,000 and the number continued shrinking after the plant was shut down in 2000.

So, what do they all do? Aside from the nuclear power plant and Shelter Object, people work in managing radioactive wastes, water resources, and forestry. There are police and firemen, scientists, construction workers, and medics—plus the people who provide services for them, delivering and preparing clean produce from outside the zone, running Chornobyl’s three bars and its grocery stores. Despite the layoffs, it still takes quite a few people to run a no-man’s-land.

In the age of terrorism, security has also become a more driving concern. After all, Red Forest soil contains enough radioactive cesium, strontium, plutonium, and americium to make a “dirty bomb” in every sense of the word, to say nothing of the radioactive mess inside the Sarcophagus.

After driving in heavy rain for about half an hour, splashing through puddles past clusters of dark wooden cabins with bright blue or green window frames, we drove across the railroad tracks that shuttle between the nuclear station and Slavutich, the brand new town for the station’s workers built 30 miles to the east to replace contaminated Pripyat.

“Ukraine pays for maintaining this track,” said Palytayev. “After all, they’re the only ones that use it.”

Originally, the workers were housed in a hastily thrown up settlement called Zeleny Mys, just outside the zone’s southeastern borders. The ill-fated site was littered with World War II mines that had to be exploded before construction could begin. When it was completed, little—including central heating—actually worked.

Slavutich was built to replace it in 1988. Like a company town once the company has left, the town of 26,000 has been struggling to find a new purpose since the nuclear plant closed. It is a low-slung place of young trees, dowdy apartment buildings, and an incongruously gigantic plaza that seems empty no matter how many people are in it.

In Soviet times, the fact that the tracks went from Slavutich in the Ukrainian republic, through a portion of the Belarusian SSR, and back into the Ukrainian republic to the power plant made little difference since Soviet republics’ borders and budgets were mostly administrative fictions run by the Communist Party from Moscow. But since the borders became international and the budgets national (and full of holes), the Slavutich-Chernobyl shuttle had become a bigger headache, requiring various government agreements to smooth the Chernobyl workers twice-daily international crossings.

We were driving through the missing corner of my map when we

passed a sign showing the turn north for Khoiniki. But the driver turned south instead, passing feral fields of emptied villages.

Like Ukraine, Belarus (and Russia) mandated resettlement from regions of high contamination where radiocesium levels are more than 15 curies per square kilometer or where inhabitants will get an “extra” dose of more than one rem (10 millisieverts) a year. The annual dose most people get from natural background radiation is from 0.1 to 0.6 rem, depending on where they live and lifestyle factors. So, an additional rem is from about 2 to 10 times that.

That natural background dose of about a tenth of a rem is also the current public dose limit recommended by the International Committee on Radiological Protection (ICRP), though it uses the metric sievert units instead of rem. In the past, the maximum lifetime dose was not supposed to exceed 350 rem, which would mean limiting annual exposure to 5 rem. So, the new threshold is much stricter.

Nevertheless, nearly all decisions on resettlement and compensation are based on the density of contamination in a particular region rather than the dose received by a person who lives there. That’s because accurately measuring doses, especially low doses, is notoriously difficult.

For much of the 1990s, the highest priority had been resettling people from regions where cesium exceeded 40 curies and annual doses were more than 5 rem. Nearly all of these areas have been evacuated. Most, but not all, of these areas in Belarus were within the boundaries of the radiological reserve, which once contained 96 settlements and 22,000 people.

The second-highest priority has been resettling people in lands contaminated with 15 to 40 curies, but many people continue to live in these regions.

Palytayev gave me a pamphlet printed on the occasion of the reserve’s fifteenth anniversary in 2003. Displaying the reserve’s logo of a triangular trefoil sign against a backdrop of conical evergreens and oak leaves, the pamphlet was an informative primer for first-time visitors and one that the Ukrainian zone—which gets many more visitors than Belarus—would do well to emulate. But after more than 18 years, the

Ukrainian zone administration hadn’t even put together a fact sheet, much less the colorful little booklet I held.

“The reserve contains 70 percent of the strontium-90 that fell on Belarus and 97 percent of the plutonium isotopes,” I read aloud. “Exposure is as high as two milliroentgens an hour in places.”

I had routinely exceeded two milliroentgens during my hikes in the Red Forest, where readings of 10 milliroentgens an hour of gamma radiation in the air are not unusual, and levels can go as high as one roentgen.

But comparing maximum exposure levels in the two zones led me to think about the various claims made on behalf of the three most affected countries—Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine—as to which country suffered most from the disaster.

It is often said that Belarus holds the unfortunate first place in Chernobyl victimhood. Indeed, Belarus officially maintains that 70 percent of the fallout from Chernobyl fell on its country. So do charities for Belarus’s Chernobyl victims. For example, the web site of the New York-based Chernobyl Children’s Project International (CCPI), which was associated with the 2004 Oscar-winning short documentary Chernobyl Heart, makes that claim and says that the reason is because the prevailing winds were directed north to northwest at the time of the explosion.

But Russian and Ukrainian scientists vigorously dispute Belarus’s claims. They maintain that most of the radioactive release fell on the grounds of the power station and within the borders of the 10-kilometer zone in Ukraine. Although the 70 percent figure is repeated in all of Belarus’s official documents and speeches, it is never footnoted or referenced in any way and even Belarusian scientists confess that they have no idea what its source is. A Belarusian radioecologist told me that he even made a special effort to find out where the number came from but got nowhere.

Instead, one international study that also included Belarusian scientists concluded that 33 percent of Chernobyl’s cesium fell on Belarus, which is probably a good measure of the total amount of radionuclides that descended on the country.

One-third is nevertheless a large amount, but the explanation that so much fell on Belarus because of the prevailing winds is as unsatisfying as efforts to find the source of the 70 percent claims.

For one thing, the dirtiest territories were in the eastern part of Belarus, around the towns of Gomel—Belarus’s third-largest city—and Mogilev, 180 miles to the northeast. But at the time of the explosion on April 26, 1986, ground-level winds were blowing south towards Kiev, while atmospheric winds a thousand meters high—where the graphite fire’s smokestack effect lifted a good part of the radioactivity—went through western Belarus and arrived in northeastern Poland on April 27. From there the radioactive wind went on to Finland and Sweden, where it set off alarms at the Forsmark nuclear power plant north of Stockholm.

A light ground-level breeze shifted towards Gomel on the 27th, but the reactor’s release of radionuclides had dropped significantly by then, as had the force of their expulsion from the core. So it seems unlikely that either was sufficient to blow the contamination to Gomel. Atmospheric winds shifted in the city’s direction on the 28th, but by the time the release of radionuclides increased significantly on May 1, both ground-level and atmospheric winds were directed south. In short, wind direction does not explain the causes and extent of Belarus’s contamination.

Rain was a likelier culprit. Soviet newspapers traced Belarus’s contamination to heavy rains on April 28, which would have brought the radionuclides down when atmospheric winds were directed towards Gomel. Others maintain that the Soviet government seeded clouds to prevent rain from falling over the Chernobyl area. Still others claim that the clouds were seeded to bring radioactivity down on Belarus instead of letting it get to Moscow. Whatever the reason, a huge amount of radioactive rain fell on the country.

Judging which of the three most affected countries suffered the most is not straightforward and the figures are often confusing. For example, the disaster removed 1 million hectares of Ukrainian farmlands and forests from service compared to 464,000 hectares in Belarus By that criterion, Ukraine’s economic loss might seem greater. In fact, Belarus suffered the smallest total amount of contaminated land. Russia—which rarely rates as much attention as Belarus and Ukraine—suffered the most, largely in the Bryansk region neighboring Belarus and in the Kaluga-Tula-Orel region 300 miles northeast of the reactor.

Consider that all three countries define land as “contaminated” if cesium-137 levels on a square kilometer of land exceed one curie. But one curie is a relatively low amount of radioactivity when it is spread

over such a large area. Natural background radioactivity from radon gas is between one and five curies in many inhabited parts of the world. So some of the “contaminated lands” are, relatively speaking, not really very radioactive.

Nevertheless, this means that there are 43,500 contaminated square kilometers in Belarus, 59,300 in Russia, and 53,500 in Ukraine. Thus, using the one-curie criterion, Belarus suffered the least and Russia suffered the most. But what do such figures really mean given the vast differences in size and contamination levels between the three countries? Belarus’s contaminated lands amount to 23 percent of its total territory; Ukraine’s, 5 percent; and Russia’s, 1.5. Moreover, if 24 percent of all the cesium that Chernobyl released fell on Russia, 20 percent on Ukraine, and another 20 percent on Europe, then fully one-third—33 percent—blanketed Belarus. And because Belarus’s contamination was concentrated in a smaller area, radiation levels and exposures were higher.

Yet a different picture emerges when looked at in terms of human suffering. Altogether over the years, Ukraine evacuated and resettled 163,000 people—more than Belarus’s 135,000 and far more than Russia’s 52,000. This occurred because the parts of Ukraine contaminated with the 15 to 40 or more curies that mandate evacuation were more densely populated than similar regions in Belarus and Russia.

Of course, the flip side of not evacuating people is that they continue to live on contaminated territories. Leading in this category are 1.8 million people in Russia, followed by 1.5 million in Belarus and 1.1 million in Ukraine. There are more Chernobyl thyroid cancer cases in Belarus than in Ukraine and fewest in Russia. But Ukraine contributed the vast majority of the cleanup workers known as liquidators.

So, there really is no correct answer to the question of which country suffered most from Chernobyl. It all depends on what criterion you are using, as shown below. By nearly every measure, though, Belarus surely suffered greatly.

Although the PSRER was a sink for strontium and plutonium, little of which left its borders, this was not true of the light and gaseous cesium that vaporized in the explosion and fire. The reserve’s cesium contamination exceeds 1,350 curies in places, but this accounts for only about a third of the radiocesium that fell on Belarus. Much of the rest fell around Gomel and Mogilev, which are surrounded by patches of contamination that exceed 40 curies per square kilometer.

Where cesium density was between 5 and 15 curies, resettlement was voluntary and guaranteed, which meant that people who wanted to leave were supposed to be given free housing. Khoiniki and most of the villages surrounding the radiological reserve were “voluntary, guaranteed-resettlement” villages in which crumbling and empty ruins testify mutely to the people who left. Such incomplete evacuations were the least successful because infrastructure development slows when everyone expects a place to be resettled, adding to the sense of abandonment of those left behind. You’re unlikely to find a school in such villages, much less a library, a café, or the “culture buildings” of Soviet times.

The sole exceptions are in larger towns such as Khoiniki, where one can find a clinic (albeit an old, dark, and dank one), schools, a few cafés, and decently stocked shops. But with 5 to 15 curies per square kilometer, Khoiniki is sufficiently radioactive for its residents to have the right to voluntarily resettle. More than 40 percent have taken up the government’s offer. Many of those who left were young people—leaving the town with largely empty streets, an elderly population, and demographics skewed towards high morbidity and mortality.

A similar situation is true of Ivankiv, Khoiniki’s sister city in Ukraine. Like Khoiniki, Ivankiv is 30 miles from the nuclear reactor, except it is to the south rather than the north. It has a similar elderly population.

In places where contamination was less than five curies per kilometer, resettlement was also voluntary but not guaranteed, and people had to move at their own cost. This may not seem like much in the way

of government relief, but in Soviet times people needed government permission to legally change their residence and “voluntary resettlers” were entitled to get it. People who stayed in the one- to five-curie zones, also known as “zones of periodic radiation control,” were supposed to receive regular monitoring of contamination levels in the land, food, and water.

Despite the huge resettlements—totaling 350,000 people in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine by the year 2000—between 100,000 and 200,000 people continue to live on the 15- to 40-curie territories that are officially considered uninhabitable. A 2002 United Nations report maintained that most of them were not at risk from radioactive contamination, although the people would probably disagree.

In one study, people in contaminated Gomel considered themselves less healthy than those in a comparable but uncontaminated town in Russia. But these differences may have been due as much to psychosocial factors as to radiation-induced illnesses, since neither population was particularly healthy.

The greatest danger in the contaminated areas was from consuming homegrown milk and meat. But the people who lived there were less likely to believe that they could do anything about their own health. Fatalists especially tend to have relatively higher doses because they don’t even try to reduce them. One overweight woman in her late fifties who suffered from high blood pressure refused to diet or cut her dietary salt because she thought she “will die soon whatever I do.”

So, should they stay or should they go? At this point, those that wanted to leave have already done so and of those that haven’t, not many want to go. In 1996, Ukrainian sociologists found that 80 percent of the people living in affected areas of Ukraine wanted to leave. Six years later the number had dropped to 20 percent. As a rule, the rural poor who are at highest risk do not want to move.

While the evacuations and resettlements immediately following the accident probably significantly reduced radiation doses, the health benefits of moving people more than a decade after the disaster are not so clear. Some experts say that people received 90 percent of the total Chernobyl-related dose they will get over their lifetime between 1986 and 1995. Resettlement won’t change that. Besides, moving people also has costs in terms of both health—the stresses, car accidents, heart attacks—and finances, especially since the same money could do much to improve quality of life in the contaminated regions. Given economic

improvements, country people who currently have no choice but to grow and gather their own food could earn the money they need to buy clean produce.

The United Nations recommended that less severely affected areas should be put back into productive use as soon as practicable, and Belarus was evidently taking this advice by encouraging immigration to places that had been evacuated.

One of these places was Strelichevo, a partly evacuated, voluntary, guaranteed-resettlement village that we drove through just outside the northern border of the reserve. Ethnic Russians from former Soviet republics such as Tadzhikistan, Moldova, and Armenia have been settling in the homes of people who have moved away. Most of the new residents are atomically “fresh” and had not been exposed to radiation when it was most dangerous, before 1995.

Rimma asked if I wanted to stop there. The setting sun had finally peeked out from the clouds, reflecting off the wet streets and making the notion of leaving the car rather appealing. But I was unlikely to encounter candor in the presence of a bureaucrat like Palytayev and so declined. Besides, I was tired after traveling the whole day and wanted to see our destination. Expecting (actually hoping) that we were going to be taken to the reserve’s headquarters in Khoiniki and given accommodations similar to Chernobylinterinform’s hotel, I asked our host where he was taking us.

Flashing a mischievous smile as though he had a secret, Palytayev turned to look at us in the back seat. “I’m taking you deep into the woods and leaving you there,” he said, albeit without much real threat in his demeanor.

“Great! I love camping,” I said but wondered what he had in mind.

What he had in mind was the evacuated village of Babchyn. The Polissia State Radiological Ecological Reserve’s headquarters was in Khoiniki, but its base inside the reserve was in Babchyn, making it the functional equivalent of the town of Chornobyl in the Ukrainian zone.

Before we passed through the checkpoint guarding entry to the village, Palytayev handed me a temporary permit to enter the reserve. It was dark red cardboard, making it rather difficult to read, but it just had my name and the relevant dates on it. It was quite different from the Chernobylinterinform program, which was a sheet of paper listing

all the places you planned to visit, the people you planned to see, and the checkpoints you’d be crossing.

After we drove into Babchyn, our host explained that the dozen or so small houses of white brick bordering the road were built in the early 1980s, just a few years before the disaster. Now they housed the reserve’s scientific staff, laboratories, and administrative buildings. It was evening when we arrived and nearly everyone had gone home to Khoiniki except for the checkpoint guards, firemen, and some scientists.

It was a tiny village. Driving through it took less than five minutes. After the firehouse with its lookout tower in a feral meadow sprouting thick grasses and clumps of shrubs, we arrived at a single-story building surrounded by a profusion of well-tended flowers. Painted in pink, mauve, and brick—appropriately, the same colors symbolizing high contamination on the radiation maps—the sign on the building’s front lawn identified it as the Sanitary Processing and Dosimetric Control building.

Palytayev really hadn’t been kidding. He was about to leave us in the wild—or at least in a practically abandoned village surrounded by not much of anything. But it was peaceful and pretty outside. The rain had stopped and the air was heavy and green. The only sounds under the humid and hazy skies were bird songs and the buzz of an occasional mosquito. My dosimeter measured 60 microroentgens an hour—or about four times natural background—at the one place I tried measuring it in the field across the road. But the radioactive contamination was patchy all over the affected territories. Had I walked just a few feet away, I would have registered completely different levels.

Our host was gallantly helping us carry our things inside, so I followed him around the foot bath cemented inside the front vestibule for washing radioactive dust off shoes during Chernobyl’s early aftermath. He gave us a tour of the accommodations, which were just fine, if a bit run down. The locker-room-style showers, without walls or doors, were for the reserve’s workers coming back from highly contaminated areas. The hot water got shut off at 7:30 p.m., when the spectacled fellow in charge of the boiler and pumps caught the last shuttle bus to Khoiniki. There was also a refrigerator, but so much ice and snow had built up in the freezer from frequent power outages that it barely worked.

It was good that I had brought food. The refrigerator was empty but for a loaf of black bread and a jar of homemade pickles, and there were no stores in Babchyn where we could buy anything. A canteen served lunch, but the cooking staff had left at 4:30.

I unpacked quickly in what was designated as my bedroom, a spacious room of brown velour furniture, a pine writing table, and a closet. My dosimeter beeped a reading of 32 microroentgens an hour—almost three times as high as in the Chernobylinterinform hotel in Kiev. In fact, I was surprised at how high it was.

When I emerged, I found Rimma and Palytayev sitting at a long table in the building’s conference room. After consulting with me, she had invited Palytayev to join us for a modest meal of bread, cheese, peaches, and a bottle of Transcarpathian brandy that we consumed under the glassy eyes of a boar trophy shot in the reserve.

Although I decided to put my notebook away and relax, at one point Palytayev said something about the Chernobyl disaster that moved me to write in a less sober but still legible hand:

“They thought that it was a peaceful atom. But it was savage.”

Palytayev picked us up the next morning in a boxy purple jeep known as a UAZ, which were the initials of the once-Soviet automotive factory that built it. It had high clearance and a tight suspension that proved well suited for the narrow roads and trails cross-hatching the radiological reserve.

“The Chernobyl station is 60 kilometers due south,” he said after we piled in and started off in that direction on a paved road that was wide enough for just one car. This proved not to be a problem because we didn’t encounter even one other car that day.

Passing former hayfields blanketed with wildflowers under cloudy and cool skies, Palytayev explained that 60 percent of the reserve’s forests are deciduous. The rest are conifers. Opposite proportions were found in the Ukrainian zone, where most of the trees are pines, which grow well in the sandy local soils. But the Belarusian forestry service preferred to plant deciduous trees after concluding that pine forests were too dangerous because of their flammable carpets of dried needles. There were noticeably fewer pines than in the Ukrainian zone.

After four miles we came upon a checkpoint. Unlike Ukraine,

which controls its 30-kilometer zone’s perimeter, Belarus doesn’t have costly checkpoints on the reserve’s borders—only keep-out signs and trefoil-painted boulders that are too heavy and worthless for anyone to steal. But Palytayev explained that they do have 11 checkpoints inside the reserve at intersections and anywhere that there are more than two directions in which an intruder could drive.

Manned by camouflaged guards working 24-hour shifts, the checkpoint included a well-kept cottage surrounded by flowers. I had never seen anything resembling a garden at Ukrainian Chernobyl checkpoints, which are generally eyesores. Yet every single checkpoint we saw in the Belarusian zone had a nice little cottage and gardens. Beautification was clearly official policy.

All the checkpoints displayed boulders with warnings against hunting and painted with stylized moose, lynx, and roebucks. The paintings were so primitive as to approach naïve and I quite liked them. Palytayev explained that the reserve’s employees did them.

He barked some orders into the jeep’s radio and the guards ran out to open the gates as we approached so that we didn’t have to stop as we passed through. Driving with the boss had its benefits. Soon after the checkpoint, Palytayev made a right turn onto a dirt road and drove west. To our left was the barbed wire fence the Soviets put up in 1986 to mark the 30-kilometer zone. But it was incomplete and didn’t extend around the zone’s northeastern arc.

We were due north of the reactor. On radiation maps, the territory inside the barbed wire was painted in dark shades of red to indicate contamination levels from 100 to 1,000 curies. Three blotches of brown located less than 10 miles from the reactor marked extremely contaminated hot spots of cesium measuring more than 1,000 curies per square kilometer. They were traces from the original explosion and also contained much of the plutonium that had fallen on Belarus. One of them was right on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.

On our right was a canal that had once been used to drain the peat lands, called mires, that had dominated the Polissian landscape north of the Pripyat River until they were drained for farmland. My make-shift topographical map of the Belarusian zone was thick with canals.

I showed it to Palytayev and asked where I could buy a map that contained the 15 square kilometers of Belarus that I was missing.

He appeared to admire my handiwork but shrugged. “I have no idea.”

As Rimma told me later, never trust an ex-Communist functionary. In fact, the maps were available in larger towns like Gomel, but I only learned that several weeks and nearly $70 later. Too distressed by the hole in my map after returning from Belarus, I ended up buying the missing piece from the Minneapolis-based East View Cartographic company for $63—and that was with a 20 percent discount they gave me for plugging them in this book.

“There’s a black grouse!” Palytayev exclaimed and pointed over his shoulder at a plump bird that flew up out of a copse of birches. I turned to look but caught only a black flash as it flew away. This meant it was a male because the female is a speckled brown. Although I can, with the help of a handbook, often identify the more dramatically plumed male game birds—such as the black grouse with its red eyebrows—most of the speckled brown females fall into a catchall category of “field chicken” that I don’t even try to identify without the help of an expert birder.

Polissia is right on the southern border of the black grouse’s traditional European nesting grounds, which used to be all over Europe but are now mostly limited to the northern regions of Russia and Scandinavia. But the depopulated Chernobyl lands have created inviting environments for many birds that had never been found there since anyone started keeping track of such things. Unfortunately, the Chernobyl people don’t talk to the people who write the birding handbooks. There is, in general, very little literature about zone wildlife.

For example, two of my European birding manuals show great white egrets nesting only in parts of Crimea and southern Ukraine. In the Ukrainian birding manual, they nest nearly all over the country except Chernobyl lands and Polissia. In Belarus there were no great white egrets except for the occasional vagrant. But in 1997 the first great white egret egg was found. Since then the zone has become one of the birds’ primary nesting sites—especially in the wetlands north of the Pripyat River.

Aquatic birds such as cormorants began appearing in 1988. Twelve years later, there were thousands, nesting in giant colonies in trees that they eventually kill with their accumulated droppings. Stocky, croaking night herons were found breeding for the first time in 1999. Blue and white azure tits, rare just about everywhere in Europe, have begun nesting there, as have aquatic warblers—one of the world’s rarest birds. Endangered white-tailed eagles have also appeared and some even winter in the zone, stealing fish from minks that catch them in ice holes.

Short-eared owls build their nests in fen mires—peat marshes that have been drained into disappearance in most places in Europe. Kestrels nest in the abandoned flower boxes on Pripyat balconies, and young endangered eagle owls can be spotted near the Sarcophagus. Although the figures vary depending on what different birding experts consider a “sighting,” from 250 to 280 bird species—40 of them rare or endangered—have been spotted in the zone since the evacuation.

Moreover, the zone lies on a major migratory path. Twice a year, about half a million birds pass through it, consuming radioactive food and carrying radionuclides to their destination countries. Eight years after the disaster, song thrushes that wintered in Spain had detectable amounts of cesium-137 and strontium-90 in their muscle and bone. These weren’t dangerous levels, but the birds were from central and northern Europe, places that were far less contaminated than the zone.

Because it mimics calcium, radioactive strontium concentrates in eggshells, where it bombards vulnerable, growing embryos with beta particles. The eggshells of great tits nesting in the highly contaminated Red Forest contain as much as 40,000 becquerels per gram—an extraordinarily high density of radioactivity that is comparable to solid nuclear waste. While normal birds’ eggs are uniform for a given species, Red Forest great tits’ eggs vary greatly in their size and shape even within the same nest. In a 2003 study, many eggs were empty or contained dead embryos, and from the eggs that hatched, fewer birds ended up leaving the nest compared to control birds. In one-quarter of the nests, none of the nestlings survived, although the causes of death were not always clear. It could be that their parents were weakened by the effects of radiation and didn’t have the energy to feed their young. Great tits in the Red Forest display pathological changes in their blood.

Soviet-era research on nuclear spills in the military complex found that strontium-laced eggs also contained deformed embryos.

But the only avian mutants identified in Chernobyl lands have been barn swallows with partially albino faces instead of the species’ typically rust red chins. It’s possible that the birds had high radiation exposures in the early period after the disaster because they flew low over the fallout-coated fields, and the metabolism of carotenoids, the organic molecules responsible for their red plumage, is especially susceptible to radiation. Whatever the cause, the albino-speckled males are evidently not very attractive and fewer females choose them as mates.

Soon we drove into the village of Tulgovichi. It overlooked the Pripyat River at a place that appeared to be right outside the reserve on my map, about 30 miles northwest of the nuclear power plant. The map marked it as occupied, though this was hard to tell as we drove past rotting cottages with collapsed roofs, overgrown yards, and blank windows. Weeds and shrubs grew out of long abandoned white storks’ nests.

“We’ve tried attracting white storks by putting wagon wheels and other platforms on poles for them to build nests,” Palytayev explained as we trundled slowly through the village. “But they don’t come here. They like places where there are people cultivating fields.”

Tulgovichi had 12 families but none of them were doing much in the way of cultivation, and none of them were evident on the streets either. There were plenty of pigs, though. Aside from a sow and half a dozen piglets snorting about the roadside, several others were just wandering around at a crossroads where radiation levels on the grassy shoulder I measured at random were 65 microroentgens an hour. This was high—higher than nearly every inhabited place in the Ukrainian part of the zone.

We stopped in to visit Nikolai Shamenko, who lived in the first occupied house we came across. It was a filthy, unkempt place where 80-year-old Shamenko was sharing a smoke with his 45-year-old son, also named Nikolai, who lived across the street.

“We live well,” insisted the older Nikolai without prompting after the three of us crowded awkwardly into the front room of his traditional two-room cottage. One of things I dislike most about journalism was playing tourist in other people’s lives, especially when those lives were so difficult compared to mine that I felt stupid and intrusive even asking them questions.

Luckily, old Nikolai was voluble. “Actually, we live badly,” he admitted and explained that he had never been evacuated but that his son Nikolai had.

That prompted the younger Nikolai, who had been lying on a pile of rags and smoking, to join the conversation. His face was shiny and his grimy pants were belted with a length of twisted pink fabric.

“They gave me an apartment in Mozyr,” he said, referring to a town about 10 miles away on the Pripyat River. “But I gave it to my kids, left my wife, and moved back here with my new wife. We live across the road.”

Palytayev sat on a chair near old Nikolai, who grunted at him and asked: “Who are you?”

“I’m the director of the reserve,” Palytayev responded.

Old Nikolai squinted skeptically: “What reserve?”

“The radiological reserve where you’re living.”

Old Nikolai seemed even more skeptical and pointed at Palytayev’s paunch. “Our director is thin, and you’re fat!”

I barely stifled a laugh. Clearly, Palytayev—who had started his job only a year earlier—did not go visiting very much in the reserve. And he didn’t want to stay with the Shamenkos very long. This was fine with me.

After saying our good-byes, we piled back into the jeep and drove past the obviously occupied white brick cottage that was Nikolai-the-younger’s home. It was neat and surrounded by flowers. I didn’t want to make sexist assumptions that these were his wife’s handiwork. But Nikolai did not look as though he cared much about appearances, leading me to wonder about the woman who had agreed to set up housekeeping in a place as radioactive as Tulgovichi.

Palytayev drove off the paved road into a maze of dirt paths through the largely empty village before emerging onto a short strip of asphalt that ended on a cliff overlooking the Pripyat River.

“The hydrofoil between Kiev and Mozyr used to stop here every hour,” said Palytayev when we piled out of the jeep. “That’s why there’s asphalt here. It used to be a pier.”

All that remained of the pier were some concrete blocks that had collapsed at the bottom of the cliff.

“It was also a popular place for camping,” he said, gazing at the riverbanks that had once been crowded with tents. A pair of gray herons stood motionless in the water.

“And then, in one moment, it all ended.”

After a filling four-course lunch in Babchyn’s canteen, Palytayev drove us out to neighboring Vorotets, a village that had once boasted a swine farm of more than 20,000 pigs and now housed the reserve’s experimental farm. In contrast to the gradual destruction of human habitats that we saw on the way there—like the trees breaking through the rotting roofs of wooden cottages, darkened by time—the farm buildings were freshly whitewashed. But the paddocks and stockyards were empty.

Palytayev parked the car near a barn and we climbed out. The sun had come out and the weather suddenly turned humid and uncomfortably hot.

“Where are the mustangs?” he asked some men wearing coveralls and repairing a fence. He was kidding about the mustangs. The farm raised two breeds of Russian horses, a heavy draft as well as a lighter trotter, and had been doing so quite profitably for eight years. Each year, 30 horses were sold for about $500 each, mostly to private farmers. When we came to visit there were about 150 horses in the herd—only they were nowhere to be seen.

“People don’t eat horse meat, so the fact that the horses have internal contamination doesn’t matter much,” he said, explaining that in the summer the horses graze outdoors on radioactive grass while in the winter they are fed hay and oats, also grown in the zone and also radioactive. But Vorotets, like Babchyn, wasn’t highly contaminated and the horses weren’t either.

The farm had 250 pigs that produced piglets for sale. Sold for a nominal price (much more cheaply than the horses) to local rural folks who fattened them on uncontaminated feed, the pigs’ meat was supposed to be clean by the time they were slaughtered.

Aside from stockbreeding, the administration also had a lumberyard that made pine furniture. All of the checkpoint cottages were decorated with pine desks, hutches, and benches, as was an entire wall of Palytayev’s office, which was built to resemble the wall of a log cabin.

The Belarusian reserve’s businesses stood in marked contrast with Ukraine, which banned any kind of economic activity in its zone except that connected with cleanup activities and providing services to the zone administration and workers. I had once asked the folks at Chernobylinterinform why they didn’t sell tasteful T-shirts and coffee mugs to raise a little money for their black hole of a budget, only to learn that it was forbidden.

Or so they said. Maybe it was simply that no one there wanted to go to the trouble of organizing production.

Vorotets’s experimental farm also had 33 dairy cows that happened to come in from their pastures just when we arrived. Personally, I find cows to be among the scariest of domestic animals, and I stood frozen as they clattered around me on their way to one of the barns.

Soon afterwards, a young blond horseman cantered up to us on a sweaty gelding covered with swollen horsefly bites. All that remained

of the saddle were the frame and some patches of leather, while the bridle was homemade and made of braided hemp rope. But the tack evidently worked well enough for the rider to canter off at Palytayev’s command to find the horses.

When he returned with news on where they were grazing, Palytayev herded us back into the jeep and drove back to Babchyn, but on a different road that took us past fields that had been plowed to plant grassy pastures for the horses and the construction site for the reserve’s new canteen and administrative buildings.

Ukraine doesn’t allow any plowing or building in the zone because it raises radioactive dust. With the vast majority of radionuclides in the upper 10 centimeters of soil, plowing and building expose the most contaminated layers to the air.

Palytayev seemed unconcerned about the risk and more interested in the fact that all of the scientists and administrators would be under one roof—in a new building with its own boiler and generator.

The horses were in a large field just behind the site. Nearly all of them were a light chestnut color, but none resembled heavy Russian draft horses because someone let the draft horses mix with the trotters. It didn’t really matter, though. Belarus was too poor to support much of a sport horse or racing industry, so there was not much demand for purebred trotters. The mixed breeds were perfectly adequate plow and cart horses for private farmers with small plots of land. They were also used by the reserve’s fire and security patrols. The reserve was huge and the Belarusian budget was too poor to provide much money for gasoline—especially after world prices shot up in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In fact, after showing us the horses, Palytayev stopped by the Babchyn fire station where one of the firemen poured a canister of gasoline into the jeep. The gas-guzzling vehicle had used up a full tank during our travels that day, and he needed enough to get back to Khoiniki. Since we wouldn’t see him the next day and would instead get a ride back to Chornobyl from one of his deputies, it was also time to find out what, exactly, the visit would cost me.

At the equivalent of about $100—much of it for gasoline—it turned out to be much cheaper than I expected. After I gave him the money, Palytayev drove us to a laboratory housed in one of Babchyn’s brick cottages and put us in the care of Yuri Bondar, a radiochemist who was the reserve’s deputy science director.

The 4:30 bus had already left for Khoiniki and Babchyn was al-most empty.

“It’s so lonely here,” Rimma said, looking up and down the streets. “In Chornobyl, there are a lot of people working on a shift, even at night. Here, there’s nobody.”

The nightlife in Babchyn was strictly BYOB.

Lanky, balding, and deeply tanned, Yuri Bondar had just arrived that morning to begin his two-week tour of duty at the reserve. In contrast to Ukraine, where many zone employees worked tours of duty, in Belarus only highly qualified scientists did.

“That’s because there are no scientists in small towns like Khoiniki, so all of us come down from Minsk,” said Bondar, who had been working in the Belarusian nuclear energy institute in 1986 and remembered arriving at work to find all the radiation meters going inexplicably crazy as the radioactive cloud passed through Minsk, about 200 miles to the north.

Minsk’s distance from the reserve is one reason most outsiders perceive Chernobyl as a largely Ukrainian problem. Chernobyl is merely a two-hour drive from Kiev. But getting there from the Belarusian capital takes five hours and that’s on a good day. Moreover, because of the complicated border crossing, foreign journalists who want to see the Sarcophagus and the ghost city of Pripyat—and most do—usually opt to see the Ukrainian zone. That’s why descriptions of Chernobyl, such as its distance from large cities, usually have a Ukrainian context.

“We didn’t know anything about Chernobyl at the time,” Bondar continued. “But when I saw the radiation levels, I said that it was worse than an atom bomb, and unfortunately, I was right.”

The wind picked up as a dark and imposing storm cloud on the horizon headed our way to the accompaniment of alarming thunder and lightning. I generally enjoy thunderstorms if I am safely indoors, but there was something about Babchyn’s isolation that made me feel less than safe.

We had invited Bondar to join us for dinner and drinks back at the Sanitary Processing and Dosimetric Control building, but since none of us had umbrellas, we decided to wait out the storm in a dark laboratory crowded with computers and radiation meters.

The room was dark because the electricity had been turned off during the storm. Bondar explained that this was done in villages all

the time as a precaution against power surges, but it was a big headache for the radiological reserve’s staff in Babchyn. Although the lab’s computers and spectrometers had small generators that kicked in automatically when the power went off to prevent data losses, other zone services were more affected. For example, the boiler that heated the water in our building was unaffected by the power outage, but the pumps that got the water from the boiler to the shower were electric. So, if reserve employees came back from doing some radiologically dirty work during a storm, they wouldn’t be able to take showers.

The phones were also a problem. The Soviet-era village lines made it nearly impossible to get a good Internet connection. Bondar sometimes had to spend hours trying.

“The phone lines in Chornobyl are terrible, too,” said Rimma.

No wonder Palytayev was so happy about the new administrative building, even if its construction did raise some radioactive dust.

Luckily, the storm blew over quickly, with hardly any rain. The pavement was mostly dry when we walked the 10 minutes it took to get from the cottages to our building, where Rimma and I quickly set out a picnic on the stoop. Potato salad with sun-dried tomatoes and balsamic vinaigrette, lightly curried chicken with bacon.

Bondar did the honors of pouring the Transcarpathian brandy. Traditionally, only men were supposed to touch open bottles of alcohol.

I asked him about the rumors that Belarus was so highly contaminated because cloud seeding brought radioactive rain down on the republic to keep it from hitting Moscow. Judging by his expression, he had heard the rumor before.

“It’s entirely possible,” he said. “But if it did happen, it was done in secret and no one will ever admit it.”

Bondar seemed more open to talking about the subject than other Belarus scientists, who fell into uncomfortable silences when I raised it with them at Chernobyl seminars and conferences. Maybe it was the brandy.

But in fact, all major cities and towns in the region were relatively unscathed by the disaster, and rumors persisted that clouds had been seeded to prevent rain from falling on densely populated urban centers.

“Look at Gomel,” said Bondar. “It’s relatively clean, too.”

The regional capital of the most contaminated territories outside

the borders of the zone, Gomel was 80 miles from the nuclear plant. But although it was surrounded by dark colors on the radiation maps, signifying cesium contamination levels of 15 to 40 curies or more, Gomel itself was a moderate 1 to 5 curies per square kilometer. The same was true of Mogilev, 180 miles to the northeast in Belarus; Chernihiv, 40 miles to the east in Ukraine; and Kiev, 50 miles to the south. All of these cities were surrounded by moderate, if notable, radioactivity levels but were relatively clean themselves. Even Pripyat lay outside the lobes of lethal contamination from the initial explosion.

Bondar thought it might have to do with the effects of so-called urban heat islands, a phrase reflecting the fact that urban areas are warmer than their surrounding suburbs and rural areas. Buildings, roads, and other artificial surfaces retain heat; cars and air conditioners produce it, and the higher temperatures that result can, for example, increase summer rainfall levels downwind of cities. Maybe urban heat islands played a role in ensuring that the clouds didn’t rain radioactivity on urban centers.

But don’t tell that to the old babushkas in Chernihiv. They say that their city was saved because of the eleventh-century monastery that was built to mark the spot where a miraculous icon was found on the banks of the Desna River. It has, according to local lore, protected the city ever since.

The next morning Mikhail Rupashchenko showed up at the Sanitary Processing and Dosimetric Control building to collect Rimma and me in an old Soviet van. He was Palytayev’s deputy, a 30-something forestry professional responsible for the eastern quadrant of the radiological reserve, the part we’d be driving through to get back to the Paryshiv checkpoint in the Ukrainian zone.

“It’s an interesting job,” he said. “But it’s not like I have much choice.”

Although it was called the “Bragin Sector,” after the decontaminated district center 30 miles northeast of Chernobyl, Rupashchenko’s division was headquartered in Komarin, just a few miles from the Belarus-Ukrainian border crossing. It was the type of town where you were lucky to have any job, even working in a radioactive nature reserve.

“Komarin is 29 kilometers from the plant, which placed it inside the limits of the original 30-kilometer zone,” Rupashchenko explained, and when I examined my ersatz map, I was surprised to find this to be true. In Ukraine the barbed wire borders and checkpoints are such a significant part of the zone’s imagery that it was hard to accept that parts of Belarus’s 30-kilometer zone were inhabited and openly accessible without permits. On the maps of cesium contamination, Komarin was in the one- to five-curies range.

“Komarin provides better access to the reserve’s Bragin Sector than Bragin itself,” said Rupashchenko, who had blue eyes, a gold incisor, and a penchant for telling jokes that got increasingly off-color as the day progressed. Many had to do with the high sex drive of Belarusian women, a subject about which I knew nothing and so couldn’t tell how funny the jokes were. Rimma laughed, but I only smiled politely at what seemed to be the punch lines.

We were driving south from Babchyn, on the same road towards Chernobyl that Palytayev drove on the previous day. But instead of going west, Rupashchenko turned east onto a packed dirt trail that ran alongside a drainage canal, taking us past ghost villages gradually being consumed by the wild. The only fence in the reserve was the barbed wire perimeter of the 30-kilometer zone. We drove along it for a while, but then it ended.

“They just stopped building it in 1986,” said Rupashchenko, who didn’t know why.

Abandoned barns and silos were rotting away jigsaw patches of wood, paint, and metal, and the remains of cottages were barely visible through the thicket of vegetation.

“See that grass,” said Rupashchenko, sweeping his arm outside the van’s window.

It was hard not to see the grass. There was practically nothing to see but the grass.

“That’s at least two meters high,” he continued. “If you went in there, you’d disappear from sight. If a moose was in there, you might just see the tips of its antlers. A herd of boars could be in there and you wouldn’t see them at all.” Actually, Rupashchenko used the Slavic word los’ to refer to the large, roman-nosed deer called “moose” in America and “elk” in Europe. Confusingly, in North America, the word “elk” refers to red deer.

After lying fallow for 18 years, the drained swamps were blanketed

with tall grasses and about two feet of thatch that was like gunpowder. One match would spark huge radioactive brushfires.

After about half an hour, we were back on a paved road that took us past Savichi, an inhabited village like Tulgovichi that was right on the reserve’s borders. This took us outside the reserve for a few minutes, but the road passed back inside again, taking us through a checkpoint guarded by camouflaged men in yet another white brick cottage surrounded by flowers. I had hoped to use their outhouse, but it was flooded after the previous days of rain, so I ended up going in the woods where a horsefly bit me painfully, leaving a mark on my thigh for months.

Back on the road, Rupashchenko explained that we were on our way to a place called the Upper Swamps, where Belarus had started restoring, or at least rehabilitating, the drained peat lands around the villages of Kriuky and Kulazhyn. On the radiation maps, there are two big brown blotches between them, representing cesium-137 levels in excess of 1,000 curies per square kilometer.

In the very hot and dry summer of 2002, huge fires ignited in the peat lands around Moscow and in Belarus. The smog suffocated the Russian capital and drifted as far as Sweden. Kiev, too, was blanketed in a strange smoky haze from peat fires that ignited north of the capital, increasing the cesium levels in the air. Because the soil itself is literally aflame, peat fires can burn deep downwards and last for weeks. Luckily, the peat lands around Kriuky and Kulazhyn were not among them, but the prospect that they could catch fire and release their massive inventories of radiocesium into the air prompted the decision to flood them.

To flood the swamps, the reserve had simply dammed the ditches that had been used to drain them. It was a cheap and effective system that had been used to reflood 4,000 hectares, or about 15 square miles, over the course of two years. The dams required maintenance, though. If they broke, the swamps would drain again.

“Filling up the drainage ditches would be the best solution,” said Rupashchenko, whose sector contained most of the mires. “But that’s expensive. We’ve achieved what we wanted. There haven’t been any peat fires since 2002.”

Experts argue whether reflooding peat lands really counts as restoration, or merely their rehabilitation, since “restoration” implies recreating wetlands that are the same as they were before they were

drained. Over the short term, this is impossible to do, although it may happen over many years. In any case, Rupashchenko didn’t use either word but instead used the term “reflooding.”

It was not yet clear whether the reflooded peat land would become a bog or a mire. Although the dominant vegetation consisted of reeds, making it more like a fen, only two years had passed. Rupashchenko predicted that it would look entirely different in five or six years.

Whatever it was called, it had created a paradise for birds. As we approached the Upper Swamps, black storks glided about the car, their bright red bills piercing the air like daggers.

“Black storks are becoming so common, they are no longer endangered in the reserve,” Rupashchenko told us. “But white storks are getting much rarer.”

Although one reason was probably the lack of people and the absence of cultivated fields full of frogs and snakes, he thought it might also be because the number of raptors had grown markedly and baby storks exposed in their high and open nests were vulnerable to predation. The shier and rarer black storks conceal their nests in trees.

After spotting at least half a dozen black storks, I pleaded to stop the car for a closer look.

But Rupashchenko laughed and said: “This is nothing. There are many more of them up ahead.”

It was true. Gray herons, mute swans that took off at our arrival like commercials for KLM, and thousands of ducks that rose into the air in a tornado-like cloud shared the flooded peat lands with dozens and dozens and dozens of great white egrets. There were so many egrets that I could only begin to count them before our appearance made them take off deeper into the renewed wetlands, their flight seemingly silent at a distance that made them look like fleeing wraiths.

“All of the reflooded peat lands have become bird sanctuaries just like this one,” said Rupashchenko. “If you come here in the morning or evening, the birds make such a racket you wouldn’t be able to hear me talk.”

“It’s so beautiful,” I said, gazing through my binoculars.

“If only it wasn’t radioactive,” responded Rimma.

“If it wasn’t radioactive, it would be a farm—and there wouldn’t be any egrets,” I said. It was one of Chernobyl’s more profound ironies that never failed to affect me and drew me back again and again like a magnet.

When I placed my dosimeter on the thick grass by the roadside, it measured 250 microroentgens an hour. At waist level, it was 200. And this was 10 miles from the nuclear power plant. On the Ukrainian side of the border, there were no places with such high radiation levels so far away from the reactor. Although the Upper Swamps were mostly contaminated with cesium, and birds’ eggshells were not as packed with strontium as those in the Red Forest, it was nevertheless a very radioactive environment. But all indications were that the radiation was benefiting the birds because it had gotten rid of the people. Whatever the effects of cesium, strontium, and plutonium might be on individual egrets, they were not as bad for egret populations as human activities.

The downside of flooding the peat lands was that radionuclides are very mobile in bogs and fens and transfer much more easily into plants than they do in drained peat lands, although they can be very mobile in those as well. As with all things Chernobyl, it was a choice between lesser evils. The bitter wormwood waters and plants of the renewed mires were less dangerous than the risk of peat fires.

We were also about four miles from Kriuky and the brown patches of cesium on the map, where radiation exposure goes up to three milliroentgens an hour. Ours was a rose-colored patch.

Back in the van, Rupashchenko drove us a short distance into the forest to show us three rare black birch trees. Although they occur occasionally in Polissia, black birches don’t appear in handbooks of European trees, and botanists differ over whether they are a distinct species or merely variants of white birches.

But Rimma was more interested in the rich harvest of champagne-colored chanterelle mushrooms that sprouted in the birches’ shadow after the previous day’s rain. My dosimeter beeped a rapid 250 microroentgens an hour on the ground. It really was a hot patch, and the mushrooms were probably loaded with tens of thousands of becquerels if not more.

For obvious reasons, mushroom picking is forbidden in the zone, though that didn’t stop Rimma from bemoaning the waste of the lovely looking chanterelles. Mushroom hunting is a traditional pastime that has become a survival mechanism during the post-Soviet economic downturn. I didn’t even want to touch them.

A bull moose watched us from the other side of the road, standing motionless between some bushes about 50 yards away. His gray-brown pelage camouflaged him perfectly, and I wouldn’t have seen him at all

had Rupashchenko not spotted him first. His eight-point antlers were still covered in velvet, but he would fray it in time for the autumn rut, when the radioactive reserve would echo with the moose’s nasal, squeaking mating calls. After obligingly letting us watch him for 10 minutes, the moose trotted off with a clumsy, ambling gait until we could no longer see him through the thick vegetation.

I had never seen a moose in the wild, though they had always held a fascination for me after they began returning to the northern reaches of my native New York State in the 1980s. After a decade of living in Ukraine and spending time in a number of natural landscapes from Crimea to the Carpathians, I had never seen a wild animal larger than a rabbit. Although the moose was standing on Belarusian territory, the depopulated zone on both sides of the border had become an inviting habitat for wild animals—but not only because the newly feral landscape provides room for ranging and foraging: The rules that prohibit hunting for mushrooms also prohibit hunting for game.

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