Kronauer shrugged. This girl was disturbed. If he had realized it earlier, he would have tried to get to the Levanidovo on his own without calling on her as a guide. So far, she hadn’t been any help and, instead, she’d only made his trek harder and slower. What if I abandoned her? he thought to himself. Then he caught himself. Too late, Kronauer, like it or not you’re responsible for this girl now. She’s not all right in her head, but you’ve taken some responsibility for her, so stick with it. You haven’t lost your morals entirely yet. And if you get up and leave without turning around to see if she follows you or not, how will you explain to the kolkhozniks that you left behind the daughter of their president lying on the ground?
—Tell me about your father, Kronauer said.
—I have nothing to tell you about my father, Samiya Schmidt shot back. The less you see of him, the better off you’ll be.
The conversation ended on that note.
After having rested for about an hour, they set off again.
Kronauer felt like he had gained a bit of energy. He suggested that she climb once more onto his back and she accepted without saying a word.
• The old forest.
Now the scene is darker.
Not a bit of sky above their heads. Only black branches. Dark layers of black branches. A thick fabric, heavy and unmoving.
Kronauer carrying Samiya Schmidt on his back.
Strong smells.
Resin, rotting peat mosses, decomposing trees, marsh gas. Stinking wafts from deep layers of the earth. Scents of bark, viscosities stagnating beneath the bark, mustiness of larvae. Mushrooms. Moist stumps. Monstrous accumulations of polypores, oxtongues, giant clavarias, branchy hedgehogs. Fetid tears on the edge of conks.
An intense silence that nothing shatters.
The irregular noise of Kronauer’s footsteps, and that silence that immediately becomes unbroken.
Twigs snapping under his boots. Sometimes, under the grass and the ferns, the suctioning noise of mud. Then, once again, the silence that nothing disturbs.
Samiya Schmidt’s breath on Kronauer’s neck, behind his ear. Samiya Schmidt’s panting in Kronauer’s hair that reeks from his wanderings, the grease, the dust.
The bottles knocking, the bags, which every so often bang against Samiya Schmidt’s calves, Kronauer’s elbows.
The tangled, slanted trunks, most often arrayed in long cascades like witch grass. Mysterious blockades covered in mosses. Obstacles best skirted around, sometimes with a hundred meters’ walk, rather than sinking to one’s ankles in puddles of dark water, in clayey troughs.
The color of these mosses, an unvarying, nearly-black green. The disagreeable texture of this witch grass that has to be pushed aside with faces and shoulders.
At every moment, this cool and damp caress on your face.
At every moment, the feeling of something malevolent feeling its way toward you.
No bird, no small animal.
Here and there, giant anthills, without any apparent bustle but perhaps inhabited by black and teeming colonies.
Samiya Schmidt and Kronauer no longer speak.
The crossing is harder and harder.
The scene is darker and darker.
• The old forest isn’t an earthly place like the others. Nothing comparable exists in other forest of similar size, nor in the taiga, which is boundless and where people die. Unless they take a horribly long and uncertain path, you can’t reach the Levanidovo and its Radiant Terminus kolkhoz without crossing it. But crossing it also means wandering under its menacing trees, advancing without any landmarks, blindly, means walking with difficulty among its strange traps, beyond all duration, means going both straight ahead and in circles, as if poisoned, as if drugged, breathing with difficulty, as in a nightmare where you can hear your own snoring and moaning but where wakefulness never comes, means oppression without the least idea of where your fear comes from, means dreading noise every bit as much as silence, means losing reason and, finally, understanding neither noise nor silence. Being in the heart of the old forest also means sometimes no longer feeling exhaustion, floating between life and death, hanging between breathlessness and exhalation, between sleepiness and wakefulness, also means understanding that you are a strange inhabitant of your own body, not really at home, like a particularly unwelcome guest who has overstayed and who is accepted because expulsion is not possible, who is accepted until there comes a way to separate painfully, who is accepted while waiting for the opportunity to hunt or kill you.
The old forest is a place that belongs to Solovyei.
It is the entrance to Solovyei’s worlds.
When you walk through the old forest, when you crush under your boots the twigs fallen from the trees, the centenarian pines, the black larches, when your face is stroked or slapped by dripping mosses, you end up in a transitional world, in something where everything exists intensely, where nothing is illusory, but, at the same time, you have the disturbing feeling of being imprisoned within an image, and moving around within someone else’s dream, in a Bardo where you are a foreigner yourself, where you are an unwanted intruder, neither living nor dead, in an unending and endless dream.
Whether you realize it or not, you are in a realm where Solovyei is the absolute master. You may move in the shadows of the plants, you may try to move and to think in order to escape, but, in the old forest, you are first and foremost dreamed up by Solovyei.
And in there, quite simply, you cannot be anything other than a creature of Solovyei’s.
• As confirmation: in the last kilometer, Kronauer entered some sort of hypnotic numbness. He stopped thinking. This mental abdication came with physical relief. He didn’t feel his exhaustion. On his back, Samiya Schmidt didn’t weigh more than a feather. He trod without stumbling over the marshy ground, he crossed the obstacles of rotten, tangled branches, he climbed over the barricades of old mossy trunks, and he came back down without losing his balance. He breathed in the gas that wafted from the standing water without fainting. With one hand, he pushed away the wet undergrowth that threatened to smack him. He didn’t disturb the anthills taller than himself, he swerved past them without touching anything or angering or scaring their inhabitants. Besides, he didn’t know whether beneath their crust of earth and needles numerous insects twisted and turned, or whether these constructions were vestiges of a lost civilization, because not a single creature was visible in the area. He advanced as if within a dream, without any real awareness of his body or that of Samiya Schmidt. He advanced in this way, and around him the morning stretched out, hardly bright and as if devoid of any future.
Suddenly, as they emerged into a clearing filled with ferns, a strong whistling began in front of them, from the place where the trees resumed, as if from the black tufts where the lowest branches hung. A sound that at first mainly resembled the cawing of a bird of prey, and which immediately transformed into a shrill, increasingly piercing note. This note did not tolerate any modulation. It only mounted in violence. It bore into Kronauer’s eardrums.
He slid Samiya Schmidt onto the ground, or rather, he set her down as quickly as possible to cover his ears with his hands. He grimaced. He said or screamed something that was stolen away.
On every surface of the clearing the ferns trembled, as if they too were trying to struggle against a sound assaulting them. The sky was now just a leaden gray blanket stifling the earth. It only gave a dim light. Several dozen meters away from Kronauer, on the other side of the clearing, the forest had taken on the appearance of a gigantic mass, dark green, compactly alive and hostile. The trees shifted, their tops came together and back apart above the space. High or low, the branches had started to move in a frenzy. No wind, no storm was shaking them, but they shook. They swept the air around them. They seemed to have cast off their vegetal nature, to have become animalistic, to be obeying chaos and fury. Some of them began to whistle in turn.
Kronauer was certain the trees were watching him.
&nb
sp; —What is that? he yelled as he turned toward Samiya Schmidt. What is that over there?
Samiya Schmidt had drawn back to the edge of the clearing. She leaned against a trunk before answering. She had a sullen expression on her face. Her eyes were obstinately focused on the tips of her boots, as if she didn’t want to watch what was happening.
—It’s nothing, she finally said. We’re in one of Solovyei’s dreams. He’s not happy that you’re with me.
Kronauer walked up to Samiya Schmidt and looked at her, aghast. He kept his ears covered and he found it necessary to talk loudly to make himself heard.
—He’s not happy that I’m with you? he shouted.
Samiya Schmidt shrugged helplessly.
—That’s my father. He doesn’t want you to hurt me, she said.
Solovyei’s unbearable whistling stretched out.
Kronauer crouched down, got back up. The pain ran from his head to his tailbone, along his spinal cord. The sharp note wreaked havoc in his skull. He tried to ease the pain by squatting, then, because that didn’t change anything, he got back up. He looked like a demented gymnast in rags.
—It’s nothing, Samiya Schmidt said. He’ll stop.
—It’s really horrible, Kronauer moaned.
—Yes, it’s horrible, but he’ll stop, Samiya Schmidt promised.
• They sat side by side on the warm ground, on some roots. They waited for the screaming to stop. Samiya Schmidt didn’t cover her ears. She seemed irritated, but not overly inconvenienced. She was still one of Solovyei’s daughters, she must have a particular internal resistance, something borne through his genes. A sort of immunity against her father’s aggressions, acoustic or oneiric or otherwise.
Ten minutes went by like this, then the whistling diminished, the trees stopped shaking and fidgeting with frightening aggressiveness, they stopped screaming, they stopped acting like a collective animal of unlikely dimensions. Kronauer had already uncovered his ears. In his head, in his backbone, the pain had gone immediately. But he still had the feeling that the branches were watching him menacingly, and soon the whistling was replaced by a voice that came from nowhere.
Then he took the mask in which his face lived, his face of a beggar-bird beneath the storm, of a tattered bird thirsty for thunder, declaimed someone with authoritative, cruel solemnity.
It was a voice that seemed transformed by wax, fire, sputtering, and which also carried echoes, as if before coming into daylight it had to go through tunnels or black pipes. It was shivering hideously and still hideously distinct, and in reality it neglected the obstacle of the eardrum to strike more deeply, in the barely protected layers of the brain, beneath memories, there where unease, animal fury, and ancestral fears hid, still unformulated.
—And that, what is that? Kronauer asked again.
—Those are my father’s poems, Samiya Schmidt said, barely disguising her annoyance. He’ll declaim one or two, and then he’ll . . .
She paused. The verb she was about to use had sexual connotations, which deeply revolted her.
—He’ll what? Kronauer asked.
—He’ll pull out, Samiya Schmidt finished tonelessly. Then it’ll be over. He’ll pull out from us and it’ll be over.
• He put on the hardened skin of this mask that stank of black oil and the remains of the fire and, as the flashes fell slowly on the turf and the ashes around him, he began to beg for thunder, and, as no noise went to the trouble of rattling the space, he bent down in a pose of feigned humility and he rummaged for an hour or two among the leaves and the earth wet with brackish water and wine from casks, he stirred the humus with its sprouts scorched by the violent electricity, and, when he had rummaged the deep earth and its mucus like carcasses for a long while, he got back up and opened his eyes again, at least the ones he had shut to suggest non-impudence. Nothing had changed, except perhaps the walls of the space had closed in. As before, the darkness was stricken by lightning, but this sort illuminated the countryside less and less. He kept on begging in the silence. He moved around, counting his steps by fours or thousand-and-thirty-fives depending on his mood, which was foul. What he saw only aroused useless anger, which he hid as best as he could or which he managed to soften by imagining that he had been split in two and his double was walking somewhere else, with his daughters or his occasional wives, his war wives, or his taiga lovers. Sometimes he beat his wings, but the shadows were too deep for anyone to notice, and, besides, he had reached a chasm where his loneliness no longer had any witnesses. At one moment, he began to think more about his daughters. He called to them instead of speaking to the thunder. Neither his daughters nor the thunder answered him. In the end he stretched out in the mire, sighed horrible curses through the holes of his mask, and disappeared.
• As brutally as it had invaded Kronauer’s soul and the clearing, the voice stopped resonating. Suddenly the forest regained its banal character. Despite its perennial darkness and thickness, it no longer seemed fantastical in any way, magical in any way, terrifying in any way. The trees were no longer capable of sight or sound. Solovyei had left the scene.
Kronauer let out a sigh. Even if this declamation hadn’t been accompanied with pain, he had received it like a vile incursion. The fundamentally hermetic content of his discourse hadn’t touched or unnerved him, even though he had sensed, beneath the sentences, ahead of them, a malevolent thought, a selfish and lawless cruelty. But the way of conveying this discourse had repulsed him. He had clearly felt someone creeping inside him, settling in and sauntering around his cranial vault without the least respect for his privacy. It was both psychical and physical. He was talking to him and violating him. He who was speaking the poem had raped him and then pulled out. Kronauer hadn’t known how to defend himself against this outrage, how to stop this aggression, and now he felt wretched. His passiveness had upset him terribly, and somehow he felt both guilty and dirty.
—There, said Samiya Schmidt. It’s over. For now, it’s over.
She was now leaning at the base of a larch, and there, her head thrown back, she shut her eyes to talk in a fading voice.
Kronauer made sure she wasn’t watching him through her eyelashes and he turned away. He would rather that she didn’t see his shame. He still felt like he had endured an assault.
—Does he do that often? he asked.
—Do what? Samiya Schmidt whispered.
Kronauer shrugged.
They both remained silent, as if trying to just be quiet and forget.
—He does that when he feels like it, Samiya Schmidt finally said. He comes and goes when he feels like it.
They mulled over the thought for several minutes, still not moving, and then Kronauer helped Samiya Schmidt get back up and they began to walk, leaning against each other. Samiya Schmidt said that she could make the last two kilometers on her own. She had to stop often. She leaned on a tree for support, caught her breath, waited until her heart started up again or regained a normal rhythm. Kronauer stopped, went over to her, stood ready to help if she fainted. He used these stops to restore some of his energy, as well.
Then the forest brightened. Behind the trees there was sky. They walked five hundred more meters to the east. The trees were airy, the ground springy and neat. Kronauer noticed the clumps of dwarf rowans, raspberry bushes, Siberian foxgloves, and then they came out of the forest and went down the tar path toward the Levanidovo and the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz.
A man was busy a bit farther down in a ditch. Samiya Schmidt stammered something along the lines of how that was her father, and then she was quiet.
4
• Two hundred meters from the first house of the village, the president of the kolkhoz was hunkered down in a ditch, gathering mushrooms. He had cut the lower part of a nicely sized penny cap and, without turning toward the two shadows that had left the forest and were drawing near, he examined the cap which was a beautiful gleaming brown and he inhaled the scent, his eyes half-closed, tilting his head approvingly. The sc
ent ought to be wonderful, as all the produce saturated with radionuclides was, but his contented sigh was overdone and rang false. He actually didn’t care about his harvest, and indeed only cared about one thing: watching his daughter Samiya Schmidt’s reappearance. She had been gone for forty-eight hours, and here she was, back and in the arms of a stranger, a soldier in a military jacket that was far too warm for the weather, its pockets torn and dangling, and with bottles jangling from his hips and, on his shoulder, two army bags filthy with dirt and blood. A deserter.
As Kronauer and Samiya Schmidt drew near, Solovyei stuffed the mushroom into a plastic bag and got up. He kept his countryman’s knife in his hand and, rather than sheathe it, he pointed it vaguely in Kronauer’s direction.
He was a tall man, bearded, scrubby, with an irascible, heroic face. His hair and his beard were still black, as if he were still in his forties or fifties, but he was about the same age as the Gramma Udgul. He towered a full head over Kronauer and, in size, the two men weren’t comparable. With his fairground wrestler’s chest and shoulders, his torso with bulging abs, the kolkhoz president gave an impression of invincibility. His irises, which were tawny and coppery, impinged upon the space reserved for the white of the eye—an oddity often seen among predators and equally often among thaumaturgists. It wasn’t possible to meet such a gaze without straining not to drown in it, and it was easier to look away, but the result was a feeling of smallness and defeat. This Solovyei was clad in a white collarless shirt, cinched at the waist by a leather belt on which he had slung an ax. His thick canvas pants puffed where they were tucked into massive black leather boots. In short, he seemed to have come out of a Tolstoy novella describing a scene between muzhiks and kulaks in a prehistoric era, before the earliest collective farms.
• The road descended behind Solovyei and, after half a kilometer, it became the main thoroughfare of the village of the Levanidovo. The kolkhoz buildings and the farms were interconnected by dirt roads and, although they were spread out over a considerable space, there was a center of sorts, with houses facing each other in rows. It was easy to tell at a glance which ones were falling apart and which ones still harbored living villagers, or at least villagers able to sweep in front of their door once a week. There were several sorts of buildings there, one or two small apartments with one or two stories, wood houses surrounded by fences, wobbly shacks, and, right in the center of the Levanidovo, an impressive structure with a façade weighed down with four concrete columns, all of them Ionic and absurd. It had once housed the Soviet. On the pediment was mounted a flagstaff that held bits and pieces of the red flag. The main road continued toward a hill overlooked by a vast hangar. Surrounded by foliage, fields, and forests, the Levanidovo had every appearance of a tranquil and self-sufficient hamlet, isolated from the capital’s directives, from imperialistic offensives, and from the revivals of civil war.
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