Here, more than a year after the accident, the streetlights still came on at night, and operatic music sometimes crackled from the speakers mounted along Kurchatov Street. But the bright pennants that twitched in the breeze above the central square were sun-bleached and tattered, and the laundry on the apartment balconies had begun to rot. Yet still the authorities maintained the illusion that the city was not dead but only sleeping and one morning would be awoken by the footsteps of its returning population.
