Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  —Good, said Ilyushenko. And then?

  —Then he left me alone and I began to walk, Schulhoff said. I was no longer an inert statue. It was morning in a deserted region, a grassy plain with mountains far off, and, in the middle, the gray-blue reflection of a little lake. I went toward the lake at random. I’d regained the use of my body, of my eyes. I didn’t suffer from these inscriptions that he’d engraved in my skin. They had left no trace. I tried to remember what had happened, and what I had lived through during the preceding days. My head was empty. Nothing came back to me. For six or eight months, I was wholly amnesic, then I regained a little memory. Then a little more. I reconstructed it, bit by bit, over the course of years. And finally everything came back to me, except for the name of the woman I married in the Levanidovo. Without her name, I can’t revive my memories. I no longer have a precise image of her. The look she had when we were close to one another, her gaze both yellow and black, I don’t even know if I’m confusing it with her father’s horrible gaze. Without her name, without her image, it’s impossible for me to really remember her.

  Schulhoff sighed deeply.

  —I’ve lost her, he said. I’ll wander like this for twenty-four and a half centuries and more without her name, without her image, and always looking for it.

  —Uh-uh, philosophized one of the detainees with his hands held up to the fire, it’ll pass. When you lose someone, it passes.

  —No, Schulhoff said, shaking his head sadly. Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can’t escape it. I can’t die. I’m stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I’m actually inside one of his dreams. It won’t pass and I can’t escape.

  —And after the twenty-four and a half centuries and more? Hadzoböl Münzberg asked.

  —After, the same thing, Schulhoff said.

  —The urge to be done, Matthias Boyol commented. It’s true that it’s something that doesn’t diminish.

  —Yes, a detainee said. Whether you’re living or dead, it doesn’t diminish.

  • When the night was over, Ilyushenko gave the order to the engineer to start the engine again. They tamped down the last embers of the campfire and went to settle back in the cars. The sentries made one last round around the convoy and reported to the captain that there was nothing to report, except that the sky burials had begun at dawn when the crows pecked at a few of the cadavers’ hands, then had stopped, doubtless because the birds preferred to do their work without any witnesses. The crows had flown off to the north and had momentarily made way for rats and necrophagous insects. Ilyushenko went past the pines to say good-bye to Pedron Dardaf, Babour Malone, and Douglas Flanagan. The three men were lying on the grass. In spite of their shut eyes and several pallid abrasions on the backs of their hands and their foreheads, they didn’t seem to be any more dead or alive than most of their convoy comrades, which is to say we others.

  Ilyushenko stayed and didn’t move for a minute in their company, then he turned back, aware that he wasn’t alone. Seven or eight steps off, Schulhoff was stationed, waiting, on a molehill. When he saw that Ilyushenko was watching him, he shifted his shoulders within his stinking rags.

  —Now you can order me shot, he said.

  —I have no reason to have you shot, Ilyushenko said.

  —I was on the tracks, Schulhoff pleaded. I forced the train to stop. That’s like a sabotage or an act of war. People have been slaughtered for less than that.

  —Forget it, Ilyushenko said.

  —On the other hand, Schulhoff said, I told you bullshit instead of responding honestly to your questions. I took advantage of the goodwill of the investigators. I just tricked everyone with my inventions.

  —So those were lies? Ilyushenko asked.

  —Yes, lied Schulhoff.

  Over there, on the tracks, the diesel engine whined.

  We never fill it up with fuel, Ilyushenko suddenly thought. We never stock up. We go on as if we were outside reality. The locomotive could keep going like this for years. Why not twenty-four and a half centuries and then some. We, too, we’re part of one of Solovyei’s dreams.

  —And besides, Schulhoff continued accusing himself, I have in my possession, engraved on myself, entire collections of counterrevolutionary poems. It’s ideological deviation. That’s punishable by death.

  —Forget it, Ilyushenko said again, hesitating over the right decision to make.

  —You know, Schulhoff insisted. You just have to give the order. And besides, it would help me. It would cut short my suffering.

  —You’re not a dog, Ilyushenko remarked. If you were a beast, we’d take pity on you. But no, you’re not a dog. We can’t end you like that.

  —No, Schulhoff lamented.

  15

  • He or I, doesn’t matter. Him or me, same thing. He’s there, by the pines, nothing special at first glance. He looks like all the male crows in this area of the world. A little plump, with a gaze perhaps unusually deep, but he resembles every one of them. He’s approached the corpses and examines them, taking his time. He hops around and bounces between the bodies, he thinks. He pecks the cold hand of Pedron Dardaf, as if to test out his reaction. And suddenly, as if disturbed by a noise or by a hunch of a hostile presence, he extends his wings and shakes them powerfully and abandons the support of the plants and the earth. For two seconds he rises up at an angle; he seems to be floating effortlessly just a short distance from the ground, then he strikes the air and pushes upward and presses onward again, he beats the transparent space, the fluid space, and he hears his wings flapping and that gives him inexpressible satisfaction, I listen happily to my wings flapping, which tell me unambiguously that I’m there, solid and black, as if fully alive, and he crows twice, a cry of pure contentment, not joy but contentment, the first time out of nothing but instinct, and the second time with some awareness of its cause. It’s a self-affirmation, but it’s also a call. It’s not directed at anyone in particular, not at the fellow creatures that in any case only admit his existence passively. It’s more a call aimed at the forces surrounding and carrying him, not a prayer and even less a supplication, more a salute, more a display of affection, which he sends toward the gray First Heaven, and toward the gray Third Heaven, toward Madame Crude Death, toward Our Lady of Very-Hot Vibrations, toward the First Lady of Very-Cold Vibrations, a sonic caress for the Seven Strange Floods, for the Five Snouts, for the Flames of Strange Silence and for the Flames of Nuclear Silence, for the Immense Labyrinths, for the Gramma Udgul, who has always been and will stay alive in his heart, and I’m not forgetting in the list the Second Soviet Union and the Immortal Poets of the Orbise. Still rising up he lands on the peak of a pine, the highest one in the little group of pines at the foot of which these poor morons have set out three of their own for their sky burials.

  • From the top of the tree, everything can be seen, and just by making a little effort, almost everything can be seen.

  • He tilts his deep-black crow’s head, once to the left and once to the right. He cracks open the slightly rough and gray eyelids, behind which was his glassy nictitating membrane, and, beyond that, the indescribably amber-yellow gaze that explains the ostracism of his fellow creatures. His golden gaze, his fiery gaze that isn’t warm. Whether his eyelids are closed or not, he sees everything; whether he sleeps or doesn’t sleep or doesn’t dream, he sees everything. His head pulled back, he runs the bottom of his beak over one of his most important flight feathers. He inhales the smell of his plumage, the nauseating scent of clouds at the end of the night, the scent of trees moored in darkness, the scent of grasses in which steppe mice have urinated, in wh
ich dampness has hastened rot, the smell of the icy earth on which these idiots have decided to lay down their dead. He stretches out his left wing and folds it back in, he makes as if to move his right wing, then shifts his head into its most usual position, facing the wind when there’s wind. All his joints are in order, nothing hurts in spite of the unfortunate encounters while crossing the long tunnels of black space, the furtive but aggressive birds, with wings that cut like sabers, and horrible, odorless winds loaded with atomic plague and radiation. He lets a minute go by, and, as so often happens when he is wearing feathers, he repeats “He or I, doesn’t matter.” And indeed I’m not very sensitive to the use of one pronoun rather than another, because it’s all still me, and he opens his eyes, and with this yellow brightness added to the world’s, the landscape is altered imperceptibly, the landscape becomes an image in which the idiots come as if they were in a net, unable to escape even in dreams, and his eyes follow the double line of the railroad tracks across the gloomy steppes, here barely rising and falling, farther off the convoy trying to disappear on the horizon as if disappearance were possible, he didn’t fail to notice the convoy of these idiots still wandering in infinite repetition. And I crow.

  • The train lurches slowly on its path. The passengers are slumped in the half-dark cars. They aren’t all dead, but claiming that they’re alive would be a bit much. The conductor and the second conductor are the only ones to still have some semblance of consciousness, however often they disappear into tortuous periods of sleepiness. They, too, like the captain, are working this job in rotation and, even if they have the basic principles of mechanics, even if they do their best, they don’t have much prowess aside from staying more or less awake while the others sleep. In any case, they don’t have much to trouble themselves over if they want everything to keep working. The locomotive keeps purring as it goes along, as if its engine obeyed something other than a miracle I’m bringing about, although the oil and diesel fuel tanks have been empty for years. The convoy advances. Clack clack, clack-clack, clack clack. Night falls, darkness spreads over everything. One of the conductors, say Hadzoböl Münzberg, turns on the headlights but sometimes forgets to and the train crosses the night without the tracks in front lit up, in any case, there aren’t any traps and it’s empty. No other convoy over thousands of kilometers. Dawn breaks, followed by a sunny but chilly day, then night falls, the sky becomes starry. In the morning, a shower. The clouds really move in, then the evening thickens, becomes inky black. The night is punctuated by volleys of unending rain. In the morning, the rain grows heavy with melted snow. For several hours, the day brightens. Then comes a night of frost. Noumak Ashariyev, who is the second conductor here, does his best to trigger the cabin’s heater, but the wiring has been ruined since the previous winter. It keeps the ice from accumulating on the controls, but that’s it, there isn’t any more that it can do. Hadzoböl Münzberg and Noumak Ashariyev go numb. Every so often they think that the Saturday stop is coming, and the idea of pemmican distribution and a night around the fire revives them for a few seconds, but the rest of the time they jostle around and doze. After night comes day. The steppes have taken on their winter colors. Clack clack, clack-clack, clack clack. At the end of half a week the snow sputters against the locomotive’s windows. It wakes up the two men. And as the morning is, despite everything, underway and bright enough, through the moving curtains of the snowflakes I know they will suddenly see a camp, the camp, and I anticipate their surprise, and I let out a caw that they don’t hear.

  • Hadzoböl Münzberg woke up first and, with a nudge, put an end to Noumak Ashariyev’s protracted drowsiness. Now the two conductors were hunched over the dashboard, worried, trying to interpret the forms that loomed in view, or those that grayed beyond the snowflakes. The snow seemed dirty and ocher. It fell flat on the window in irregular spots. The windshield wipers scrubbed them away, but sometimes the mechanism struggled and got stuck, only moving again after two difficult seconds and with a grinding noise. The conductors got so close to the window that their foreheads were nearly touching it. They didn’t say anything, but whispered curses and promises of ill will toward the elements, to the windshield wiper blades and their screwiness and recklessness. Chilly whistles snaked through the cabin. It shuddered under the engine’s purring. The strip right in front of the locomotive kept cutting through the snowdrifts that had accumulated between the rails. The notches in the snow set off roars and sprays. In these conditions, it was much harder to make out the clack-clack of the wheels.

  Noumak Ashariyev had his face very close to the windshield. He seemed to dislike this transparent protection and, by the looks of him, he wanted to face head-on the masses of snow hurtling against the window. He stayed like that for several minutes, and suddenly he uttered an excited sentence. He claimed to be able to make out a watchtower to starboard and a barbed-wire fence three meters high, and almost immediately two other watchtowers and a long barrier rose up through the swarms of snow.

  —A camp! he roared, without hiding his hoarse enthusiasm.

  I crowed at the same moment he did.

  Hadzoböl Münzberg immediately lowered the brake lever and, when the train had come to a stop, he opened a side window and poked his head out. Noumak Ashariyev was hunched over the control panel. The windshield wipers continued going back and forth and everything could be seen more clearly than when they had been moving. The snow fell in dense and peaceful cascades. It flattened the entire landscape, which was flat and devoid of trees up to a distant and dark line of larches, the border of the taiga. To the right of the tracks, the emptiness came up against another obstacle, this one less natural, made up of high, barbed fences behind which were wooden abutments, watchtowers, and a second wall. It was a sentry walk. Behind that, deep within, were rows of barracks, houses of wood.

  —All that time, Noumak Ashariyev said.

  Hadzoböl Münzberg pulled his head back into the cabin. His cap was powdered with snowflakes, the snow had accumulated in his wrinkles, on his nearly nonexistent eyebrows.

  —It’s worth all the effort we made, he said.

  —Yes, said Noumak Ashariyev. There were moments when I had my doubts.

  —Me, too. I wondered what use there was in going on.

  —Of course, but we kept on going. We went to the end.

  —It really was worth the effort, Hadzoböl Münzberg repeated.

  • The camp was a hundred and fifty meters from the rails. A secondary track went from the main track to the entrance. It was covered in fresh snow, but its outlines were clearly visible. The junction began several meters past the place where the locomotive had stopped.

  —I’m going to clear off the switch, Hadzoböl Münzberg announced.

  He was already in the back of the cabin taking down a long sheepskin jacket. It was torn and greasy. A long while ago, during a stop in a radioactive small town, it had been pulled off a lifeless body. He put it on and got ready to go out.

  —Have to wait for the captain’s orders, Noumak Ashariyev objected.

  —Why? It’ll be forever before he wakes up . . .

  —All right, the conductor said. When you’ve made sure that the ice isn’t covering the mechanism, raise your hand. I’ll go slowly.

  Hadzoböl Münzberg opened the door and went down the steps.

  —I can hardly believe it, he said.

  —Well, we’re here, Noumak Ashariyev said. It’s unbelievable.

  The morning was barely bright. Hadzoböl Münzberg was immediately surprised by the cold and, when he set his foot on the ground, he pulled the fur collar of his jacket around his neck.

  Behind him the snow-smudged train now seemed to only contain goods and nothing living. Nobody had reacted yet to the convoy stopping. The captain hadn’t summoned up enough strength yet to stick his nose out and learn the reason for this abrupt and unplanned stop. The sliding doors stayed shut. Hadzoböl Münzberg walked past the locomotive, which was still puffing a bit, as if dreaming,
as if contemplating after the effort of the journey. The snow fell.

  Hadzoböl Münzberg followed the rails to the fork without looking back at his comrade, who was observing him from the top of the machine. The ground creaked. With the toes of his shoes, he clumsily cleared the rails to the spot where the wheels would shift onto the auxiliary track. The boards were in good shape, and even if the pulling cable was completely coated in ice, no piles of compacted snow posed a threat to the mechanism. As if to test the path the convoy would soon take, he now went slowly down the start of the curve. The switch stand was fifteen meters from the actual switch. He walked that distance looking up ahead rather than immediately in front of him. He looked at the camp. The auxiliary rails past the curve turned through a right angle toward the entrance of the exterior wall. An unloading platform could be seen through the snow beyond the door of the inner wall; the rails disappeared between the buildings and the view, at that point already indistinct, could no longer be deciphered.

  The camp didn’t seem to indicate any activity, in any case this part of the camp, perhaps because it was already an hour of the day when detainees, administrators, and soldiers had left for a mission somewhere else, or everyone was confined to barracks because of the poor atmospheric conditions, or this area of buildings was shut down, or all the personnel had suffered devastating atomic blasts to the marrow of their bones and hadn’t found ways or reason to defy and survive them. Muffled and silenced by the continual snowfall, the camp didn’t leave any doubt as to its status as a camp. The doors were reinforced with metal plates, the barbed fences and the watchtowers had not been worn down by time.