Stalking the Atomic City by Markiyan Kamysh

Author:Markiyan Kamysh
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

4.

Campari

AT LEAST WE SAW PRYPYAT. IT could’ve been worse. For example, I could’ve taken some wankers from Barcelona to the Zone. I’m often asked what that is like—taking foreigners to the Zone? Easy.

They always have some funny names, like Samuel or Adrian, for instance. They drag me to Concord, and, once we’re inside the restaurant, they grill me in broken Russian about the Maidan and Chornobyl and tell me how they went crazy in Donetsk during Euro 2012. They learned about the Zone from Chernobyl Diaries and they don’t believe in monsters on the other side of the barbed wire, but they’d love to stare at the dezertid chernobl ketestrofi with their own eyes. They’re just passing through Kyiv, of course, and listen, man, we got business in Warsaw, so let’s head out tomorrow. Text us what stuff we should get.

Sania rolls up—their buddy, our interpreter, and just a dude interested in this dump called Chornobyl. I give him fair warning that, in the winter, the Zone looks scarier than a nude photo shoot of the minister of culture of the Luhansk People’s Republic, but it doesn’t help.

I slowly get more and more drunk at their expense, but I quickly sober up when I realize that I’m in trouble. One of them, right there at the table, flashes the gun they plan to bring along for self-defense. I spend half an hour trying to convince them that it’s a foolish idea; for another half an hour, they try to prove to me that guns are fun, that we’ll make snowmen, shoot their heads off, and laugh. In the next half an hour, they get as wasted as scrap metal, and I make Sania promise: no guns.

I meet them downtown on a cold morning. Sania arrives in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Thick snowflakes are pouring down from the somber sky. These macho guys have no idea what kind of arctic shit show they’ve signed up for.

They would never have signed up for this had they heard the story about Yura and the chocolate bar. That day, we all were psyching ourselves up. Someone was making a list of their achievements; someone else was trying to remember the faces of all their lovers; another guy was getting drunk on the shuttle bus so that his first contact with the snow would not throw him for a loop. And Yura got stoned and was craving a chocolate bar.

He tumbled out of the bus, plodded for some three hundred feet, waist-deep through the snow, and fell into a swamp—and then he just sat down, only his head sticking out. He refused to move unless he got his chocolate bar. We were swimming in snow for six miles to get to our overnight stop. It was freezing cold outside, and Yura, still starving, just couldn’t pull his chocolate bar out of his backpack because the zippers had frozen shut. He had to make a fire to open his backpack.

We went inside the very first house

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