In Europe

schools, excellent facilities. Then, on 26 April, 1986, everything suddenly stopped. Hundreds of cars and buses were driven to the central square; all of the city's inhabitants had to leave within the hour and none of them moved back. Only very few among them have ever set foot here again.
    In the city we enter, the Soviet era is still in full bloom: the central square with its hammers and sickles, the square buildings, the mottos inscribed above the entrances: ‘Lenin's Party Leads us to the Triumph of Communism’. Between the blocks of flats it is deathly quiet, the snow on all the streets and squares lies untouched, as if in a remote forest. A little fancy fair, ready for the May Day celebrations, is still standing: a rusty Ferris wheel, weathered bumper cars, sheets of canvas on the ground. A little tree is growing out of the floor of the hall of the hotel.
    In the cupboards at the day-care centre, the little shoes still stand neatly in a row, the way they were left behind thirteen years ago. On the floor are two red canisters of toy cars, a box of building blocks, a toy shop, two dolls with plaster in their hair, a shelf of honour bearing the best clay figures of the week. The next room is full of baby beds, with half-decayed sheets and mattresses.
    ‘This must have been an excellent day-care centre,’ Dmytruk says as we walk through the abandoned rooms. ‘Look at all the things they had here. It's almost hard to believe: in those days, every child in this country still went to school, they got a warm meal every afternoon, later they could fall in love with whomever they pleased, Russian, Ukrainian, it didn't matter, we were all brothers and sisters.’ The snow has drifted into the corridors. On the wall is a drawing of the May Day celebration, half finished.
    Night is coming and the air is icy cold. We drive on, through Kopachi, a village buried beneath a layer of soil, past rows of long mounds, agraveyard of houses and barns. Then a medieval darkness falls, the sky is full of stars, here and there we see the blinking of a candle or a kerosene lantern.
    Dmytruk and my interpreter think I should meet old Nikolai Czikolovitch. Nikolai and his wife Anastasia Ivanovna live deep in the woods, in the middle of the restricted zone, in the lee of the plant. They are deeply attached to their smallholding, their chickens, pigs and cows, and after the catastrophe they stubbornly went on living there. Today they are among the 600 or so people who live illegally in the zone.
    Anastasia, wrinkled and bowed, climbs down hastily from the tile stove when we come in; she had already gone to bed. Amid the groves of Chernobyl, it appears, Philemon and Baucis still reside, no radiation seems to touch them, they live on and on like two trees sharing one trunk. They have been together for more than half a century; he was once a tractor driver, she worked all her life at the agricultural collective. After that they received their pension, which these days they use to buy a little soap and tobacco every month, then it's gone. In their poverty, they produce everything themselves. The fireplace is poked up, the cupboards are plundered, home-made vodka, eggs, sausage, pickles and jars of cherries appear on the table, all for the guests.
    We talk back and forth in sign language, take pictures of each other, laugh, sing a song, have another drink, Dmytruk from the ministry of emergency affairs, the interpreter, Nikolai, Anastasia and I, the ikons bless us all, day and night.



Chapter SIXTY-THREE
Bucharest
    ‘ DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY THIS COUNTRY IS SO MELANCHOLY? I'll tell you: the Rumanians have always seen history in terms of a single person. When you look at old Dutch paintings, usually you see groups: the city militia, people partying, street and village scenes. The Rumanians in their paintings are always quite alone, they are kings or dictators: Prince Michael, King Carol II, Nicolae Ceauşsescu. That dependence on a single person, it's deeply embedded in us. It also provides us with a sense of certainty, even if it's only the certainty of life close to the minimum.
    ‘For us, the academics at the University of Bucharest, the problems started in 1971, after Nicolae and Elena Ceauşsescu visited China. The two of them came back wildly enthusiastic: our country too needed a cultural revolution. Agriculture was to be fundamentally reorganised, old villages had to be torn down, flats had to be built for the farmers, the birth