When we decided to move here, we were only placing our bodies in the land we had truly inhabited for many years. For the first time in my life, my insides and my outsides seemed to match. We were excluded anyway, why not chose to be secluded as well? They call us samosely.
It really is quite beautiful here in the exclusion zone; involuntarily it has become a wildlife park. Most of all, I like to go fishing in the deep, cool lake by the pine forest and watch the beavers gathering small branches. There is a legend that on that fateful night another forest glowed red. They called it the Rudyi Lis and brought in the bulldozers to deal with it. I often pray when I am wandering. I brim with gratitude and thank God for all that has been left here. My home is in the Northern part of the second concentric circle. Like Dante’s hell there are four circles and as you go inwards, the radiation levels increase until at last, you reach the crumbling sarcophagus around the damaged reactor, rising like Prince Lucifer’s throne.
We know each other in the strange road-less network; my presence is unusual because I am young. My nearest neighbour is Svetlana. She cannot remember how old she is. When she laughs, her few remaining yellow teeth remind me of kernels in the near-finished corn cobs of her gums. She gives me apples and milk from her goat. Cesium or not, it tastes sweet and good. She always asks me and smiles with satisfaction as I nod and mumble ‘da’ through a mouthful of fruit.
She is perhaps the nearest thing I have to family. I left my vodka-violent parents in Minsk. Sometimes I catch myself praying for them to suffer because I hate them so much. Then I stop myself and hope that God will not punish me by making me leave this place. The house I took over has three large rooms; a kitchen, a bedroom and my studio. I am good with my hands and repaired and decorated the house well. I often do repairs on my neighbours' houses even though there are 30 km of our land and no transport. I brought an excellent set of tools with me from Belarus, it took me a year to save up for them. I had a good trade but my parents drank my money and repaid me with guilt and shame. Did I mention that I hate them? I am sorry that I had to bring this resentment with me into the zone of tranquility. That for me is the real contamination.
When I paint the hushed tones of my quiet world, I try not to include the painful memories. But sometimes I sweep a stroke of pink oils across my canvass and there I see my father leering over me. Then I remember sobbing myself to sleep. I sleep well now that I am here. There are wolves in the forest and I hear them howling at night but they have plenty of food and do not bother us. Knowing that the ecosystem has reached its own troubled conclusion brings a certain brand of calm that is unique to this hazy half forgotten place. When I lie in my room feeling the cool moonlight slip in like silk, past the wooden shutters and across my aged bedstead, there are no ghosts. This is all mine now. There is a new day just around the corner and every day is extraordinary.
