Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  Then Solovyei disappeared without a trace. The Gramma Udgul immediately started investigating by talking to every administrative and police body she knew. She was told to wait for Solovyei himself to give some sign, implying that he had simply chosen to divorce her without going to the trouble of explaining himself. For two years, she pestered the departments. She made the most of the private sessions where she was asked to rewrite her autobiography and asked the officers if they had any news about her husband. The answers varied, sometimes unkind and sometimes sympathetic, but, in short, she never got the least bit of workable information. Solovyei had vanished. Solovyei had gone somewhere else. She knew nothing else about him for the next ninety-one years.

  And that’s why now, after so many decades where each of them had lived alone, she didn’t complain about what fate had given her. Like her, Solovyei had changed dramatically, physically and mentally, and he bore the burden of a century’s memories he hadn’t shared with her, but she didn’t consider reproaching him for having become a peculiar person. From the moment she had found him, she had decided to do everything she could to be happy with him, in this kolkhoz with its name already suggestive of subversion. She had found the man she had once loved, she had decided to love him again, and nothing else really mattered. Not even his transformation into a sort of authoritarian, unsavory, insane wizard. Now she didn’t care about the incongruities of everyday life in the village, which simply underscored its difference from proletarian normalcy. She knew that, no matter the point of view, she herself no longer belonged to the normal realm of the Orbise either. That, by resisting the gamma rays, she had long since joined the realm of monsters. It made perfect sense, then, that she would settle down in the Levanidovo, and that she would end up with one of its unlikely inhabitants, with the president of Radiant Terminus. With another monster.

  • From then on people went to the kolkhoz hangar if they were willing to meet the Gramma Udgul. She had made it her home and she rarely left. She had her own private corner, closed off by a heavy decontamination tarp that the tractor driver Morgovian had stripped of its lead to give it a bit of flexibility. She went back there to wash up, or when she felt various pressing needs that called for solitude, such as preparing for her discourse to the core, reading Leninist classics, or defecating. The rest of the time, she preferred to stay in the middle of the bric-a-brac that never diminished in size, because the kolkhozniks and several volunteer scrap merchants in the region kept adding to it, obeying her instructions so that the area would be cleared of all wreckage before the second half of the millennium.

  To determine which pieces of trash were the most dangerous, she had given up Geiger counters, which went haywire at the slightest thing or else had gone out of commission after the first days of the catastrophe. She sniffed the dust and followed her instincts. She no longer respected decontamination procedures. She handled these heaps, these mountains, she oversaw the opening and closing of the well, she threw objects into the abyss, she talked to the core. She told it about the passions of her past, the doubts that had assailed her fifty years earlier when the Party had advocated new economic or social policies, but she also confided her more immediate worries, Solovyei’s moments of madness, his immoderate love for his daughters, the physical deterioration of the last kolkhozniks, the water leaks that flooded her toilet. Such was the confident and confiding relationship she had with the core.

  Aside from managing the atomic detritus, Solovyei had entrusted her to take care of what he called his archives, which were actually several crates of handwritten notebooks containing accounts from the camps, proclamations read in prison, critical studies of the Party and its future, transcriptions of epic songs, black-magic recipes, war stories, and dream stories, to which were added a large number of wax cylinders on which he had recorded impenetrable, extremely strange, disturbing poems.

  Everything was piled up in a mess, close to the Gramma Udgul’s favorite armchair, and when she took a break from liquidating, she focused on preserving Solovyei’s memories. Sometimes particular writings had such an obnoxiously counterrevolutionary slant that she yelled out loud, her accent suddenly finicky and Bolshevik, and sometimes she felt carried away by the poetic violence of other sulfurous pages, and then she forgot the lessons she had learned in grade school, the rigid principles that had been instilled in her to make her appreciate or detest this or that narrative or ideological option. She forgot it all and sighed contentedly like a young reader immersed in a love story. Whatever it was, she felt a deep affection for Solovyei’s prose, and she dived into it at any moment, on the pretext of classification when in reality she never bothered to do that properly. She wanted to be completely united with Solovyei at the end of her life, completely complicit, and she wasn’t afraid of reading, rereading, or listening to these creations that seemed immoral and most often bereft of the least glimmer of Marxism-Leninism. At another point in her life, she would have hastened to bury them, these antirevolutionary creations, beneath anodyne paperwork, beneath irradiated volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, beneath literature reviews, veterinary manuals, the complete works of fellow travelers, farm novels. But here, today, she didn’t go to the effort. She knew that she was no longer at risk of any trouble from the authorities, the capital investigators, or the services. As for her own internal audit committee, it made itself heard less and less often.

  The engineer Barguzin, who helped the Gramma Udgul as best as he could in sorting and processing the radioactive trash, didn’t have access to the crates containing Solovyei’s archives, despite Solovyei being his father-in-law, as we will come to learn. He fixed anything that broke in the kolkhoz, he carried and piled up the things meant to be fed to the core, but he wasn’t allowed to go through Solovyei’s personal memorabilia, and, when he saw that the Gramma Udgul was busy moving them around stealthily, he went to smoke a cigarette outside the hangar.

  • That morning, the Gramma Udgul woke up abruptly and knew immediately that she would be in a bad mood.

  She had dreamed of waltzing with a red proletarian on Labor Day, but she didn’t remember what she’d done with him after the dance. To make matters worse, she couldn’t say whether she’d been present at the ball in the form of a young Bolshevik belle or in her present form as an old woman. This forgetfulness bothered her, because in the second case the next part of the dream couldn’t be what it would have been in the first case, and deep down she hoped she’d had a dream adventure with this heroic worker who had held her tenderly in his arms, who had twirled her to the accordion’s sounds until dizziness caught hold of her and forced her to leave the dance floor. She still remembered her dance partner’s laughing face, and, if she shut her eyes for a few seconds, she could happily keep it in her heart, but then it disappeared and was replaced by a conventional Komsomol face that didn’t resemble anything living. After the striking events of her dream had vanished, this bastardization of the man she had loved for a single night really upset her.

  She opened her eyes and growled a jumbled curse that tore the Marxist classics a new hole.

  Getting up from the armchair she’d spent the night in, still grumbling, she decided to go lock herself in the bathroom until something happened. In fact, what mostly happened there was meditation, considering that episodes of fecal or urinary evacuation were rather uncommon. Most of the time these past thirty or forty years, the Gramma Udgul had simply snacked on a spoonful of toasted flour here, a cookie there; she drank little and never ate a full meal, which had rendered null and void the terminal parts of her digestive system, which by now were shriveled up.

  The sun had risen outside. Its rays slanted through the air vents just beneath the roof. Above a heap of farming machines, a harrow with perfect blades gleamed. It had been included in a recent bequest of new equipment, and had never been used. The Gramma Udgul wasn’t in a rush to throw it into the pit because the radiation it emitted consistently grilled the flies buzzing around it. The murders happened wit
h a quick crackle. Flies had always bothered the Gramma Udgul and she felt a small satisfaction when she heard one of them being reduced to ash.

  It had to be eight in the morning.

  As she raised her head to admire the reflections of sunlight beneath the cement, the Gramma Udgul stumbled over a milk bucket. The bucket was empty and it scraped noisily against the ground and fell over. The Gramma Udgul let out an annoyed exclamation.

  —What’s that piece of junk doing by my feet? she asked. It wasn’t here yesterday. Did the engineer bring it in, just to put it in my way? Jerk!

  She squinted into the labyrinth of piles to see if the engineer was nearby, but the hangar was silent and nobody was working there right then.

  —Barguzin! she yelled. Hey, Barguzin!

  Nobody answered, so she relented. Yelling had calmed her down.

  —Idiot. Of course he’s not here, she whispered. He’s never here when I have to yell at him. Dawdling outside, probably.

  She kicked the bucket a few meters, then threw it on a hill of trash. The bucket found a resting spot between a television set, two pillows, and a quilt.

  She stopped to look at the pillows. There were rings of sweat on it. She didn’t remember exactly where they’d come from—a Red Star dormitory, an isolated izba in the forest, a cupboard in one of the Radiant Terminus farms? She rummaged through her memories for five or six seconds, but nothing came. Who knew what sleeper had sweated there, she thought. Then she went back to Barguzin and his laziness.

  —Or maybe he’s sucked up too many becquerels and died, she said.

  She was there, in the middle of the path between two mounds of radioactive scrap metal, grumbling once again.

  —Wouldn’t be the first time, she grumbled. He’s from the new generation, they just die off whenever they can.

  • Barguzin actually was often a victim of what conventional wisdom would term death. He no longer breathed, his body had started to adopt a cadaverous pose, and in particular his heart and his brain refused to work. Beneath his eyelids, his gaze was lifeless, his pupils didn’t respond to anything. His skin was becoming unappetizingly waxy. The Gramma Udgul had to shake him over and over, put him in the sunlight when there was sun or in moonlight when the moon shone, and she rubbed his forehead with heavy-heavy water, then with deathly-deathly water, then she poured lively-lively water between his eyes, as in the tales the bards had sung. Barguzin responded to this treatment and regained normal color. He got back up, thanked her, and went back to work in the kolkhoz repair shop. He, too, had a body that had gone wrong in a useful way when it came to radiation; he, too, turned out to be resistant to radionuclides, but his resistance wasn’t the same sort as that which allowed the Gramma Udgul and Solovyei to stand at the doors of immortality. Barguzin remained fragile and always close to death. Without the Gramma Udgul and her urgent care, he would long since have been turned into mere residue fit for throwing into the well, along with other toxic matter and agricultural objects.

  • After a bit of toilet, the Gramma Udgul went back to sitting down in her favorite armchair. She had a collection of newspapers beside her that had been put together by Solovyei, to try to make sense of what had happened in terms of the world revolution during his time in the work camps. Because that was where he had ended up after leaving Akaban, for forty-five years straight starting, after a disorganized life, with periods of conditional freedom, of banishment to inhospitable regions, which alternated with new arrests, new transfers to special zones, not to mention gallivanting across the taiga with bands of mystic thieves, shamans, escaped convicts, and highwaymen. He made no effort to settle down and regularly ended up back behind bars and even in front of the execution squad, whether for serious disagreements with the powers that be or for various trifles connected to his shady character, such as brawling with a superior or inappropriately mugging bureaucrats.

  She took the gazette at the top of the pile and fumbled through the headlines. The newspaper was from the previous century, but the news was encouraging.

  The revolution made headway on all fronts and the number of battles increased. At that point, the Second Soviet Union covered most of the globe. There were still several distant continents with pockets of aggressive capitalists, and there was no denying that the domestic nuclear disasters had made the survival of the world population rather problematic, but the situation had improved, at least under the military plan.

  —Good, she said. As planned, we’re headed toward total victory, just have to be a bit patient. Just a matter of time.

  Satisfied, she gave up the headlines and dipped into the pages inside. She looked for the weather report to compare the printed information with the reality of the sky above Radiant Terminus, and came once again to the conclusion that the press was full of nonsense.

  • Solovyei came into the hangar by a side door and weaved between the mounds of trash that impeded all movement in a straight line. Without being a maze, the place gave the impression of having been put together to prevent direct access to the well that constituted its center. Solovyei let his eyes wander over the various piles, noticed several milking machines, dairy vats, industrial churners, old manual churners, cheese racks, zinc mixers. Everything seemed to be in good shape. Everything was clean and in good shape, but showering the immediate vicinity with a storm of deadly particles.

  He thought of the cows that had flourished in the region and which were now an extinct species, and of the kolkhozniks who had spent a major part of their life standing alongside these enormous ruminants, their cowpats and flies, their mooing and swollen udders, and who had now gone extinct as well. He wondered if the cows had had an existence worthy of consideration and if the men and women who had taken care of them had died heroes or not. He wondered this without any sarcasm, but without any emotion, because this question really didn’t trouble him in the least. He had built his own existence around values beside heroism and, since he was president of the kolkhoz, he gave priority to black magic, to incursions into the world of dreams and parallel universes filled with zombies, wonderful daughters, animals, and fires. Heroism and cows barely had any place there.

  Then he kept on walking. Not far from the decontamination tarp that hid the toilet, the Gramma Udgul was sitting in her favorite armchair and smoking a pipe while reading under her breath a newspaper describing the news eighty years ago. Solovyei had a heavy tread that couldn’t go unnoticed, the surroundings shook around him like he was a knight from the Middle Ages, but the Gramma Udgul acted as if she didn’t hear him.

  She didn’t even raise an eye when he walked up to her.

  —What are you doing, reading that newspaper? the kolkhoz director asked in mock indignation. I thought you’d started organizing my complete works. Have you already gotten discouraged?

  The Gramma Udgul’s collarbone shook as she sighed, and then she set the newspaper on the pile. The paper disintegrated as soon as it was touched. Specks of pulp dusted her black dress. She brushed them off before talking.

  —Your texts are too hard for me, she said as she looked down. No clue how to get started. They’re ravings. They don’t even have dates on them. I can’t organize that muck.

  —Well, reading old gazettes won’t help move things along, Solovyei said.

  —Guess not, the Gramma Udgul said.

  Solovyei came closer and tenderly stroked the base of her neck, as he might with a person he had shared his daily life with for years, in a time of elation and courage, and then lost for nearly a hundred years.

  She looked up and smiled. Her gray eyes were covered with leukomas that had grown opaque over the iris, but in their center, they sparkled.

  —Maybe if you started with the cylinders, Solovyei suggested. They’re spoken words. Can’t put a strain on your eyes. They’re spoken words from my trances, when I walked into the fire or after I went through the doors of reality or death. I recorded them in the hereafter. Not so hard to organize.

  —I’ve been listen
ing to those old cylinders for a while, the Gramma Udgul shot back. They’re unbelievable rantings uttered by a madman. I don’t like them. They should all be thrown away. If the Party stumbled upon them, they’d put you right back in the camps or some place for schizophrenics.

  —Yes, that’s exactly right, Solovyei said.

  —When I’ve heard them all, I’ll put them with everything that has to get thrown into the core, the Gramma Udgul replied.

  —Don’t destroy those, Solovyei said. I spoke those words during my trances. It’s never been translated into any earthly language. They’re valuable accounts. Could be useful later.

  —Who would they be useful for? the Gramma Udgul said.

  —That depends on who’s still on earth, Solovyei said.

  —We didn’t start a revolution to listen to these insane words, the Gramma Udgul said. Nobody’s going to understand that. It’s ideological sabotage and so on. I’ll number them, your cylinders, but then they’re going into the pit. The core can make whatever it wants of it.