BETWEEN YOUR HEARTBEATS

in the summer of 2017, I was alone in Kiev with nothing to do for a day. I had just finished a 48-hour tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and had not yet fully recovered from the experience. As I walked through the lively cobbled streets of the Old Town, some part of me was still wandering the discontinued city of Pripyat, with its crumbling tower blocks and drained municipal swimming

pools and abandoned fairgrounds. A residue of that melancholy still clung to me as I strolled up a hill towards the golden domes of Kiev Pechersk Lavra, the large, walled Orthodox Christian monastery that presided over the sprawl beneath.

I walked the grounds of the monastery a while, the darkness of my mood dissipating with the feel of the sun on my face, the sound of chanting monks drifting across the courtyards. With its tiered white towers and gilded domes, the place felt at once peaceful and vibrant, and as such I was already experiencing it as an antidote to the poisoned desolation of the zone. I felt as though after the purgatory of the previous two days, I had stumbled across an unseen border into paradise. Then I saw a sign for something called the Mykola Syadristy Microminiatures Museum. I did not know who Mykola Syadristy was, or even what a microminiature was, but figuring I had nothing better to do I decided to take a look.

I followed the sign to the entrance of an ornately classical building, and then to a cavernous and windowless room on its ground floor. The only other person in this room was an older woman sitting near the door, who shot me a look of indifference as I walked through. Along either side of the room ran a series of strange display units — large, circular glass plates affixed to the wall, each of which had at its centre the eyepiece of a microscope. I approached the first of these, bent towards the eyepiece, and my mind was immediately and permanently blown.

What I was looking at seemed, strictly speaking, impossible. What I was seeing was a pin, an ordinary stainless steel pin, on the flat head of which was positioned a tiny chess board, on top of which in turn were two even tinier sets of chess pieces, gold and black and impossibly ornate. I knew what I was looking at, and at the same time had not the first notion what I was seeing. I made my way around the room, peering into the magnified displays, each of which contained a thing that was more extraordinary — less possible — than the last.

A preserved flea, all but invisible to the naked eye, on the end of whose dangling hind legs were affixed two unthinkably small golden shoes. An information card beside it provided a description of the exhibit which, for all the bluntness of its translation, somehow served only to deepen the mystery of what was going on: “The Shod Flea: a common flea is shod with golden shoes. This is the simplest early miniature of the author. 1969.” A golden needle whose eye contained an entire caravan of golden camels. An actual mosquito on whose spear-like proboscis perched a little girl holding a parasol above her head. A fully functioning clock inserted into the head of a deceased dragonfly. A little tray with a bottle of wine and some glasses on it, all set out on an actual grain of salt. The world’s smallest Bible, its pages bound together by strands of cobweb. The name of the artist himself carved, all capitals, into a planed section of human hair.

I immediately wanted to know as much as I could about this Mykola Syadristy character, and so I took out my phone and Googled him. What little I could find was imperfectly translated, and had about it the distinct whiff of self-hagiography. (“Syadristy is a fully endowed personality,” I read on one website. “He was the master of sports in the USSR, as well as the absolute champion of Ukraine in diving. Nikolai [sic] is a quite good poet.”)

What I was able to glean was that he was born Nikolai Syadristy in 1937, and that he is still alive, and that he had worked as an engineer in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

On a page about Syadristy on the website of something called the Prime Excursion Bureau, I read the following quote from Syadristy on the exacting difficulties of his craft: “You must have good command of your body, because the most subtle movements of the hand holding a tool must be made between your heartbeats.” I was struck by the beauty of that image, of its evocation of human and machine working in concert, of the artist waiting for the interval between his own heartbeats to make his exacting interventions.

I found myself thinking of one of my favourite scenes in one of my favourite books, The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. In this scene, O’Brien’s narrator — who has died unbeknown to himself and is languishing in the purgatorial exclusion zone of the Irish

Midlands — encounters a rural policeman who takes him into a back room of the police station and displays to him certain uncanny objects he has been crafting in his spare time, all variations on the theme of infinite regress. A series of nested chests that get incrementally smaller until the last few, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. A spear so unnaturally sharp that it disappears from view about half a foot before the actual tip, which is “so thin that maybe it does not exist at all and you could spend half an hour trying to think about it and you could put no thought around it in the end”.

At the same time the previous afternoon, I had been standing in front of the world’s largest movable structure: the vast steel arch which encloses the remains of Chernobyl’s Reactor No 4, and which minimises the leakage of radioactive material and prevents outside interference with the reactor. What had affected me most about Chernobyl — about the power plant itself, and about the uninhabited 30kmradius exclusion zone surrounding it — was the sense of vastness: the vastness of the spaces, the vastness of the damage, and the vastness of the time in which the place would remain poisoned.

On the grounds of the plant was a statue of Prometheus, arms aloft, wrestling fire down from the heavens. I left Chernobyl with a bleak view of science’s desire to crack the code of nature, with a sense that technology itself was a vector of human perversity. Of course, the division of the smallest thing in the world to call forth the most powerful force in the world would bring down punishment from the gods. Of course!

As I stood before Mykola Syadristy’s wonders, I realised that the source of my delight was their inversion of the Promethean impulse whose effects I had encountered in the zone. There was an atom-splitting logic to his work, and a clear technological genius at play, but it was in service not of power, but of joy — of joy for joy’s sake. I felt suddenly quite differently about human ingenuity, and about technology. I found the tininess of these objects, their impossible intricacy, not merely impressive but moving.

All of a sudden, I could think of nothing more beautiful than the insane ingenuity of human minds. I walked out into the sunlight, and heard the chanting of the monks, and smelled incense on the warm air, and the world felt redeemed.

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