Chapter 9

EXPLORING PRIPYAT

We’re approaching the hotel. I pass some harrowing graffiti: the black silhouettes of children playing, painted on the hotel’s restaurant walls. Near one group, someone has written, ‘Dead Kids Don’t Cry’. Overlooking the square, the hotel ‘Polesie’ commands one of the city’s best views, so we head straight to the roof, climbing past each tantalising floor without a second glance. You can see for miles up here. Chernobyl sits on the horizon behind abandoned homes, while the ferris wheel apex crests a carpet of trees 150 meters away. As the others busy themselves taking photos from the roof, I separate from them and head towards it. Walking outside on my own for the first time, I gaze across the overgrown square with its cracked concrete and recall decades-old photographs of sunny days, pristine rose bushes, parades and smiling faces. It’s so lonely here in the present. I’m a solitary sort of person, and have fantasised countless times about how extraordinary it would be to be the last person on Earth, to go anywhere and do anything I wanted with absolute freedom. Post-apocalypse stories, in particular, have always held sway over me. How ironic that, now I’m experiencing a sliver of that imagined existence, it unsettles me so. I stumble upon a circular building that looks like it was a sports facility of some kind - the splintered remains of a boxing ring dominate the centre. I take a photograph and climb back outside, before approaching what is probably the most iconic structure of the Chernobyl accident, other than the power station itself.

It’s a strange feeling when you first see something so familiar from photographs with your own eyes, like visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids, but familiarity does not preclude awe. You know all the major details, the colours and shapes, but there’s so much you never noticed before. There’s vital context too: you see everything around it, the geography, and distant things you hadn’t expected to see from that particular spot. Near the ferris wheel, which was never formally used, as it’d been due to open as part of the May 1st festivities, are the famous dodgems. A dozen plastic and rubber bumper cars sit idle inside the remains of their 10x20m bare steel enclosure; drapes intended to provide shelter from rain are long gone. The exposed metal base is one of the more radioactive parts of the city, but the cars themselves are in decent shape, all things considered. I saw a great photograph of them once and I try to compose my own, but find myself distracted by thoughts of disappointed evacuee children back on May Day, 1986. They had hoped to be where I am now - laughing and smiling as they barrelled into each other.

I suddenly realise I’ve been on my own for half an hour. I had expected Danny and the others to join me minutes after I left, but there’s neither sign nor sound of anyone. Maybe they weren’t heading in this direction until later? Did I actually tell anyone where I was going?

I set off back towards the hotel, glancing up at the roof I left them atop, but not seeing any familiar faces gazing over the edge. Perhaps they headed into the sports building from earlier. Down the corridor from the boxing ring, a filthy practice swimming pool lies bone dry. Did Liquidators drain the water, or has it evaporated over time? Regardless, there’s nobody here. I stop and listen for distant footsteps - the sound of boots on broken glass is particularly piercing and easy to hear - but nothing breaks the silence. Have they walked off and left me? A square canvas painting, my height, with a celebratory ‘CCCP 60’ emblazoned in bold white text against the traditional Soviet blood-red, sits propped against a pillar in the building’s large entranceway. It turns out that the sports building is the rear of Pripyat’s Palace of Culture, one of the city’s most recognisable and central landmarks. Palaces of Culture were large Soviet community centres, containing cinemas, theatres, dance halls, swimming pools, gymnasiums and other sports facilities, like the aforementioned boxing ring. By the end of the 1980s, there were well over 125,000 such buildings across the Union. I stride out through the front doors, past tattered chairs, and study the surrounding landscape. Nobody.

After snapping a few squint photos, I return inside. On my way in, not twenty feet from where I’d been standing mere seconds ago, I bump into Dawid photographing the red canvas. Where did he appear from? He smiles and says that Danny and Katie are upstairs somewhere, exploring the building. I bound up the wide staircase into the main exhibition/dance hall, where the entire left side (from my perspective - it’s actually the front of the building) is made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, right down the length of the hall. It goes without saying that the glass is long gone, but it must have been quite an impressive room in its day. On a balcony above me, I spot the others taking photos. I’m relieved to see all my companions again. To my right, the brightly-coloured paint of a 10-meter mural depicting a glorious celebration of communism still clings to the concrete; a losing battle.

We regroup and circle the building. At the eastern corner, I pass through a pair of triple-height doors into the back of what appears to be a theatre or concert hall (or both). Before I spoil myself with that, I investigate a cluttered room off to my right, which contains several square painted portraits of Soviet heads of government, each as large as the ‘CCCP 60’ example I saw earlier. Gorbachev is instantly recognisable, but I’m unfamiliar with the other men. I was expecting to see Lenin or Stalin, but they aren’t here - too tempting for looters. Lenin, at least, was here once, standing proud on a banner hanging from the front wall of the building. His depiction must have been stolen in the years since the accident. Photos taken, I eagerly return to backstage in the theatre hall.

The stage area roof is higher than everything else in the Palace of Culture, enabling light racks to hang high up out of view of the crowd. Those same lights are now slumped across the stage. Dozens of metal cables hanging all around me slice through shafts of light from holes in the masonry. I’m half-tempted to go climbing up into the rigging above for a more unusual vantage point, but, upon further consideration, I decide that I quite like my bones intact. All the chairs that were once here are long gone, save for a few discarded dirty and deflated cushions. Strangely, it looks like all of the wall panels have been stolen. Exposed bricks are visible everywhere, and there’s a makeshift, obviously hand-made set of rickety wooden scaffolding reaching up to the ceiling in one corner of the room. It must’ve been erected by someone who couldn’t bring in proper equipment. The only obvious explanation is that they used it to reach up to the tops of the walls to steal whatever was once on them. There’s nothing more here, and the others want to check out the ferris wheel, so we head back into the sun.

Having soaked in the atmosphere while my friends take their photographs, then posing for the inevitable group photo, we’re on the move once more. Our little ensemble makes a quick stop in a clinic, before conceding that nothing of interest remains - my most notable shot is of an open window, vibrant red leaves creeping past the frame. Next is one of our big targets of the day: a kindergarten named Golden Key, the biggest of 15 junior schools in the city. Photographs of this building litter the internet, and rightly so, it’s choc-a-bloc with unique and fascinating imagery. Situated near the centre of the city, not far from the square, Golden Key is surrounded on all sides by residential tower blocks, though I struggle to spot them through the trees. Beneath my feet, more and more toys lie discarded across the ground as we approach. Upon entering, the first thing to catch my eye is a reclining doll perched on an infant’s chair, in an otherwise empty classroom. She wears a faded red and white checkered shirt with black pants, but her face and most of her hair is obscured by an old Soviet child-sized rubber gas mask. Some previous photographer, keen to capture an artificially haunting image, has obviously staged the scene, but that takes nothing away from it. It is haunting, knowing what happened here.

There’s too much to take in. Everywhere I turn there are sights worthy of hours of study - it’s overwhelming. I wander without aim through the building, my camera hanging limp from my shoulder. When I force myself to take pictures, they’re impossible to compose - there’s just so much to see that I can’t decide what to focus on. Room after room packed with babies’ cots, children’s beds (for napping, or was this a boarding school?), tiny desks, chairs, books and gas masks. Toy animals; toy cars; toy dolls; toy bricks; toy instruments; toy cutlery; toy buildings. There are a few obvious highlights, worthy of careful examination. Gathered around a low, white wooden table, barely a foot off the floor, sit a plastic duck and two dolls: one boy, one girl. The vibrant colours of the bright yellow duck and navy blue-suited boy draw your eye, but it’s the comparatively drab girl who demands your attention. Her soft-touch silicone face has dried and cracked, then gradually faded to ash grey over 25 years of neglect. The lacy white dress wrapped around her has become dirty over time, and it, too, is now grey. Sepia hair, once tidy, is unkempt and sprinkled with delicate spider’s web and crumbled flecks of paint, fallen like snow from the ceiling above. The only real colour on the doll is the pale pink plastic body, exposed through tears in her dress, and her piercing sky-blue eyes.

I hate to leave the kindergarten, but time is of the essence and we need to maintain our momentum to complete the list. The city swimming pool, made famous to gamers everywhere in 2007 by appearing in the Pripyat level of Infinity Ward’s revolutionary Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is next on the agenda. I don’t remember when I first saw photographs of it, but it was long before the release of CoD4, and I’ve recognised images of it over the years since - even before I knew anything about the Chernobyl accident. There’s just something about seeing an empty swimming pool that unsettles me; it sticks in your head. Walking via our drop-off point, where the bus still patiently waits for the clock to reach 3pm, I’m glad Danny, Dawid and Katie seem to know where they’re going. If I had spent the day exploring Pripyat alone, I may not have found much of anything. One of the things I love about this city is that, because the trees and bushes are so thick, buildings pop out of nowhere, right in front of you. It’s happened several times throughout the day, and again upon our approach to the swimming pool. We enter through a single fire-door in a blank wall. Inside it’s almost pitch dark, we tread carefully as we inch along the length of the building, through torch-lit changing rooms. At the far corner, we scale a steep set of rusted metal stairs and emerge into the light. Once again, I’m speechless.

How do you document something without preparation that’s been photographed so many times, while keeping your own unique look to your image? The answer is you can’t, and my images of the pool are identical to everyone else’s. At the time of this trip in 2011 I almost exclusively shot everything wide-angle, to squeeze as much content and context into the frame as possible. I wish I could go back there today, because now I would do it in a completely different way, standing in different places, using different lenses at different angles with different camera settings. After crouching beside the pool for a few minutes, I turn around to find that Katie - ever the adventurer - has climbed up and stands atop the higher of the two diving boards, peering over the edge. Must be a better view up there.

I toss my bag and tripod up to the lower platform, and then pull myself up (the lower ladder is long gone) before scaling steps to the high board. The view is better. I’m not sure it’s quite Olympic size, but the pool is still big; 6 lanes across and a good 15 feet deep. Light pours into the surrounding space from enormous glassless windows. They stretch the entire length of the building, before reaching around the corner and wrapping along most of each end. I suspect some industrious soul has been doing a little cleaning here, as the ceiling panels - no longer hanging from their perch - are also not in the pool, with one or two exceptions. To what end, I wonder. Dawid appears up on the balcony, making me realise I’ve spent almost my entire time here photographing the pool itself. I need to see the rest of the building, so I dash to a side door, through another changing room, and discover a basketball court, of all things. The polished wooden floorboards have warped and been torn from the floor at one end, it’s very picturesque. We’re out of time yet again within minutes, it’s so incredibly frustrating.

I’m exhausted. Keeping up this pace for hours, plus not having eaten or drunk anything since breakfast, is beginning to take its toll. There’s no time for rest, another of Pripyat’s many schools awaits. Along the way, we pass through a beautiful natural corridor of trees, standing guard over fallen yellow leaves that stretch far off into the distance. Reminds me of the Yellow Brick Road in Oz.

Pacing through corridors of an artificial kind - concrete, barren, nondescript - we’re getting lost, but after a little backtracking we find what we’re looking for. Discarded here by looters in search of the tiny pieces of silver in each filter, the cafeteria’s entire floor is drowning in an ocean of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of dust-coated gas masks. The remains of a globe break the surface, its European side is shattered and buried.

Only one more building to go - another secondary school - but it’s destined to disappoint. We made our target list based on one of Danny’s photography books, but it’s years old and the school has been gutted in the intervening time, leaving most rooms bare. I photograph a couple of the more interesting ones, then decide to spend the final 20 minutes just soaking in the atmosphere of this amazing place. I head to the roof, joined by Katie, where we contemplate a silence that’ll last ten thousand years.