Vika laughed, turning toward me, and I chuckled as though I, too, found this amusing, though I did not. I was unsure what to make of the tone of all this. Igor and Vika’s inscrutable jocularity sat oddly with the task they were charged with: to guide us around the site of the worst ecological catastrophe in history, a source of fathomless human suffering in our own lifetimes. And yet some measure of levity seemed to be required of us.
