THERE is a legend than the village of Maryino is the birthplace of the mother of Jesus. The man in charge of burying villages, his gold teeth glinting in the weak spring sunshine, remembers hearing it from his mother. Mary would hardly spurn it as a homeland. Its timbered houses washed in the faded blues and greens of nature, the ornately carved windows, the wood piled high against the winter snows the vegetable plots at the back, the absence of noise and modern traffic . . .
Maryino, in its faded, peaceful beauty, should be a paradise. But the peace is unnatural. The vegetable plot produces only poisoned food; the paint is faded only because there is no one young enough left to maintain it. In this village of old people, the peace is born not of serenity, but of slow death and decay.
The young have all been evacuated to the cities, hundreds of miles - from Maryino's poisoned land. When these elderly few resisted the move, the authorities turned a blind eye. The handful who are younger remain only because they have a "mental want" in them, says an old woman. "We are all invalids here," she says brokenly, "waiting to die."
The man with the gold teeth has been busy. Still smouldering embers in the little farm village of Vylevo about 20 miles away are the only testimony to its recent existence. He takes no pleasure in his job; these were once the homes of neighbours. Just one small, blue house remains above ground, each of its timbers separately numbered for export and reconstruction as holiday homes on the Black Sea, say some. Not so, he says; evacuees are compensated according to the size of the house they have been forced to leave, measured by the number of timbers.
Inside, tattered remnants of another life are everywhere: old letters are scattered on the floor, sepia tinted photographs of clear eyed children, grave young newlyweds and stoic men in uniform still adorn the wall.
Once a thriving contributor to the "bread basket" of the Soviet Union, this long tilled and celebrated land, along with everything in it, has become a radioactive hell, unfit for human use or habitation. Agricultural areas in Belarus and Ukraine the size of England and Wales are so heavily contaminated that they cannot be worked until well into the 21st century.
But confusingly, this landscape looks nothing like the scorched waste lands visualised in apocalypse movies; its very "normality" serves only to deepen the eerie sense of travelling through a twilight zone.
As the spring thaw gets underway and the earth begins to stir again to its ancient rhythms, the wind sighs through the ancient graveyard, and only ghosts are free to wander through the tall birches and gather at the old water pump. To reach Vylevo now, to be allowed past the checkpoints with their warning signs "No trespassing. Radioactive contamination" you need written permission from the local authority.
But unlike hundreds of other villages, Vylevo's name at least will remain on the map of Belarus. For just over the brow of the hill, its startlingly beautiful 200 year old church is still standing to be preserved as a monument to those past generations.
Its elaborate blue and gold painted railings are weathered now, the blue painted timbers are in need of a fresh coat and the entrance is overgrown. But inside, the long sweep of polished floorboards is intact and the chandelier remains, a symbol of the sacrifice and devotion of a simple, rural people who held on to their faith through wars, revolutions, schisms and Stalinist terror.
An old copybook containing the baptism lists of 1974 - the parents' and babies' names beautifully inscribed on the cheap paper - still lies on a table, a record lost forever with so much else that is precious. Where are those children now?
In a few days, said the man with the gold teeth, the church would be boarded up, its beautiful old wrought iron gates barred, maybe for eternity, to all but the ghosts of Vylevo. Chernobyl has finally accomplished what mighty dictators failed to do.
UP five floors in Malinovka, the bleak, concrete jungle of high rise flats outside Minsk, Tonia has laid the dining table with a snow white tablecloth, delicious home made relishes, bread, cheese and biscuits for the Irish visitors. There is laughter and banter as the vodka glasses are charged and raised in heartfelt, emotional toasts.
Tonia's two daughters, aged eight and 12, have opted for their own perfectly laid little dining table in the bedroom, having thanked us for the gifts of chocolate while gravely laying them aside for later.
Tonia's shy smile falters only when someone asks about her children. They have both developed a mysterious bone condition in their legs and the 12 year old is also suffering from rapidly failing eyesight. Tonia herself is having eye problems and almost as an afterthought she confesses to having had thyroid cancer surgery only a few weeks before. In the ensuing stunned silence, she leaps up, desperate to recover the cheerful atmosphere, recharges the glasses, plies us with more home made biscuits, raises another toast.
A few years ago, Tonia and her family were evacuated too late - from Narovlya, a town which, on the map, is no more than a blighted place on the edge of Chernobyl's 30 kilo metre dead zone. But to Tonia, looking back, it meant everything: "It was comfort, peace, space, silence. A river runs through it and I liked to walk there. I could grow my own vegetables, I had a job and a lovely home. It was the motherland of myself and my husband".
Finally, lost for words, she takes a book from the shelf, full of colour photographs of a blessed land of river meadows, peatland and lakes, of 200 year old pine and oak forests and small, winding rivers full of fish. This book, writes the author, Victor Malinovski, is for all the babies fated to grow up far from their motherland, Narovlya, for the day when they grow big enough to ask why their parents had to abandon their homes, gardens and ancestors' graves, for when they ask: "Where are we from, brother? Where are our kin?"
For Tonia and her family, Narovlya was always another country; now, with their sick children and financial hardships, it is only a place of the mind. But Narovlya is not cut off from the living by a barbed wire fence. Not yet.
In other villages such as Babici, the gates with their warning signs are opened for evacuees only on Victory Day and on the Day of the Dead the only days when these distraught people of the land can walk the old familiar streets, look into their deserted gardens, embrace old neighbours, mourn their dead and the death of their own pre Chernobyl lives.
In Malinovka, the very stones seem to weep as young women talk of their mothers attempting to reconstruct village life outside these ugly apartment, blocks; of marriages breaking under the strain of chronic illness, unemployment, poverty and profound dislocation; of the stress of carrying the stigma of Chernobyl to a city already resentful of the "privileges" once accorded to evacuees. In Malinovka, a place of 11,000 evacuees, about half of whom are children, it is said that six out of every 10 marriages now end in divorce and that 95 per cent of the children are ill.
In Belarus alone, some 130,000 people have been displaced from contaminated areas and 1.8 million still live in regions with a contamination of more than five curies per square kilometre.
In Ukraine, where the effects have spread as far south as the Black Sea due to seepage into the water table from nuclear fuel still inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus, and from there into the Dnieper River, some three and a half million people are affected. In Russia another three million people still live in dangerously contaminated territories.
As the vast majority of these people will be continuing to produce food on contaminated ground for their own consumption and for the markets, it is not unrealistic to suggest that many of these eight million people may be dying slowly of radiation poisoning.
AT Minsk railway station, we meet a woman whose sight is nearly gone. Her only son is buried here in the city but this morning, she is setting out on the seven hour journey to Vetka, her motherland, and the burial place of her only daughter, who died a year after Chernobyl. She remembers well the beginning of the end of the world. It was "worse than anything in the war" and happened during the May Day parade in 1986, on a beautiful hot, sunny day.
It came in the form of a dust storm so dense and violent that it turned day into night, forced adults to their knees, threw children in the air like toys, lifted roofs off houses, uprooted trees. It took an hour to pass. In Ukraine, buses and cars were disappearing off the streets of Kiev to help evacuate residents of an arbitrarily created 30 kilometre zone around the crippled reactor. But in Vetka, 150 miles from Chernobyl, in another country, it would be three years before its citizens would find out for sure what they already suspected.
Unheralded, unchecked by borders, like a child flinging a handful of wet, sand, the blasted reactor had scattered, radiation unevenly across Ukraine, western Russia and Belarus. In a bitter twist of irony, nuclear free Belarus was by far the most seriously affected, with 23 per cent of its territory severely contaminated, and horrendous suffering visited upon the lives of 2.1 million people - more than a fifth of its population - including 400,000 children.
Ten years later, there is nothing, and no one in Belarus who has not been touched by Chernobyl's poison. This country that somehow survived the second World War, a period which saw the loss of one in four of its people and such mass destruction that only a handful of buildings was left standing on its capital's main thoroughfare, has finally been brought to its knees by an enemy it can neither see, nor hear, nor control.
In 1986, its population had managed the climb back to pre War levels of around 10 million. But since that year, birth and death rates have been moving steeply in opposing and disturbing directions. Births are now well outnumbered by deaths. Since 1986, the average life span has been shortened by four years.
Chernobyl, Belarusians believe, is poisoning the gene pool, producing new generations that are weaker than the ones before. Couples now think long and hard before starting a family, says 35 year old Lyuba, in a country where only a quarter of all babies are born in perfect health. Those that decide to risk it approach a baby's birth with a sense of fear instead of anticipation.
We are all witnesses, she says, to the death of a nation. Scientists have turned the stricken areas into a giant laboratory, producing reassuring figures for the nuclear industry on mortality and cancer rates, propounding certainties based on the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which in fact are not usefully comparable) and on a mere 10 year span since the world's greatest environmental disaster.
But disturbing new evidence about the long term effects of low dose radiation serves to support the World Health Organisation's view that only an exacting epidemiological study undertaken over several decades will hold scientific weight on the effects of Chernobyl on incidences of most types of cancer.
"By now," says an uncharacteristically emotional and strongly worded UN report, "the people in the three most affected countries . . . have been subjected to every variety of opinion, and none is as convincing as the reality of their own experience."
If, in western Europe, there were repeated instances of, say, a young mother and her two children contracting cancer, it would be the subject of endless expert analysis. In the Gomel region in south west Belarus, the local director of the Children in Danger fund takes out her closely typed list of 410 children with cancer, and points to several cases where the same family name recurs. Gomel is the area where a particularly aggressive type of childhood thyroid cancer has reached undreamt of levels, the place chiefly responsible for filling the dingy crowded wards of Minsk's No 1 Hospital.
A huge majority of the affected children were under four years of age in 1986. But in the eyes of some, these are only the tip of the iceberg. Dillwyn Williams, professor of histopathology at Cambridge, believes that as many as 40 per cent of the children exposed to the highest levels of fallout when they were under a year could go on to develop thyroid cancer as adults. "I have done some sums and the answers terrify me," he told New Scientist.
American children exposed to too many X rays in the 1930s developed thyroid cancer 40 years later. Ludmila Yadrentseva's "Belarusian necklace" - the livid ear to ear scar left after thyroid surgery - is only a few months old. After three similar operations, the prognosis for Oleg, her 11 year old son with the bright smile and floppy hair remains uncertain.
ANDREI, now 14, is one of those ailing children of Chernobyl, who for now probably appears nowhere in the statistics. A year after the explosion, he lost his hair. On a recuperative trip to Germany last year, to his great delight, it began to grow again but once back in Gomel, the growth stopped, leaving uneven patches of black growth across his head. Like many children in the area, he is pale and listless, suffers headaches, joint pains and respiratory problems. His condition appears to have worsened in recent months, his mother remarks fretfully. Later this year, the Children in Danger fund will pay for a trip to Italy where more sophisticated diagnostic equipment may tell its own grim story.
Meanwhile, the Blarusian economy is in tatters. Relatively low official unemployment figures conceal the real story; the "officially" employed include some who are laid off for 11 months in the year; many including doctors in hard pressed hospitals have not been paid for months on end; as inflation rages and prices climb towards Western standards, even those lucky enough to be earning the average wage of about 50 to 70 US dollars a month find the going unbearably tough.
As the dream of democracy dies along with the future of the people of Belarus, and despairing workers develop an idealised image of the USSR - "the days when we were one big happy family", according to one man the tentacles of Chernobyl have left nothing untouched. The burden of coping with the consequences of the disaster has extracted as much as a fifth of the national budget in some years. In 1994, 10 per cent was all the exchequer could manage.
Scientists may argue forever about whether or not the rising number of congenitally deformed babies is due to Chernobyl. In either event, money desperately needed to run the truly grim orphanages to which many of these tiny victims are being abandoned has been abruptly withdrawn. In one such orphanage outside Gomel, where at least 60 per cent of the babies are somehow disabled, its survival depends entirely on Western aid.
Meanwhile, only a few hundred kilometres away - but still further away from them than Ireland's east coast is from Sellafield the Chernobyl power station continues to operate, the sarcophagus on Reactor No 4 slowly falling apart. It now has holes big enough to drive a car through.