• There were three cylinders that night. They were broadcast one after the other, but, when the third one ended, after a brief sizzling transition, the first one started again, and once again Solovyei’s inscrutable sentences boomed in the night, at full strength through the internal broadcasting circuit of the village, along the streets, the main road as well as the side streets, once again Solovyei’s three opaque poems unfurled over the entire valley, from the edge of the trees to the opposing edge of the forest, from the road leading to the old forest to the warehouse run by the Gramma Udgul; once again they had to hear it in its entirety. Kronauer was now sitting on the ground, on the parquet exuding its smell of pine, dust, and liquid soap, he was leaning against the metallic carcass of his bed and he shook his head, as if hypnotized, as if he was a man or a corpse stripped of all desire to go further in existence.
• And, having walked a hundred and sixty-three steps over the orange path, he walked another thirty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty-four, then once again a hundred and sixty-three, then he went back twenty-two steps and took a break to get his bearings, because everything around him was undulating and howling, and nothing seemed stable beyond the flames, and, drawing back a haze of burning hail pounding on his face and the front of his stomach, he began to call, pronouncing at first inarticulate words, as if to clear his voice, then chanting his daughters’ names and chanting his own name, affirming in this way his presence in the middle of the fire and wind, then, as the flames didn’t stop and, on the contrary, redoubled, he resumed his heavy walking, from that point without putting any stop to his mouth’s murmurs and his tongue’s noise and his lungs’ ironworks, going straight even when he had to sink into the embers up to his knees, going straight no matter the often terrible temperatures of the obstacles, refusing to cough when his throat stung and refusing to stumble more than once every fourteen steps and refusing to believe in the sizzling of his eyes or even less attaching any significance to it and refusing to waste any breath and refusing to lie down or curl up on the ground when he fell and refusing to construct out of his saliva words of distress or disarray, always going steadfastly in the direction that he knew deep within his heart to be the only one and therefore the best, a direction that was neither night nor day nor twilight, then he went thirty-eight steps without moving his feet or legs, then he went thirteen hundred and seven additional steps awkwardly, leaning forward as if a thunderstorm was bending him low, then he expressed an intent to sing odes, then he loudly declared that he was very comfortable in the fire and so well integrated into the fire’s texture that soon he would fly great distances while staying rooted to the same spot, and that soon the paradoxes within his mouth would cancel themselves out, and suddenly, as the space around him shrieked and whirled in yellow plumes, he put on a mask of soot and he enveloped himself completely in soot, and he said to nobody in particular that he was coming, that he would come, but the words sounded more like a threat than a declaration.
• From time to time Kronauer looked out the window. The wall of Hannko Vogulian’s house was covered with gleams as if, somewhere in the village, far from the center, far from the Soviet, a farm was burning. What are you doing in this kolkhoz, Kronauer repeated to himself, what’s keeping you here, Kronauer? You don’t get anything about these people, you don’t understand what’s happening, if you stay stuck here you’ll end up in a bad way, this Solovyei is imprisoning you and enchanting you with his magic whistling, there’s only one thing to do, Kronauer, leave with one of the daughters, save one of the daughters and flee with her, and then let the pieces fall where they may! Save Samiya Schmidt or Hannko Vogulian or even Myriam Umarik, one or the other, doesn’t matter, take flight, cross the forest with her, hide yourselves, put tens or hundreds of kilometers between Radiant Terminus and yourself, don’t look back ever again, run as fast as you can while there’s still time!
However, his resolutions didn’t result in anything. He stayed prone on the floor, almost like a corpse, shaken every so often by a rumble or shudder, and he kept listening to the three cylinders playing on loop, without ever recognizing anything familiar even as he received the words for the fifth, the seventh, the eleventh time. He kept listening to them, and, like a dying person given advice for which he has no use, he shuddered and grumbled.
• He cleared his throat and, because of the absolute black obscuring their perception of things, the rare spectators who had watched him had the impression that he had performed this throat-clearing by using a poker, like a sword-swallower, and several, who considered this sleight of hand insulting, inappropriate, and hideous, were upset. However, he went down the burning debris and the powder, indifferent to the violence of the lightless flames cruelly licking what remained of his skin, and he heard neither the recriminations that arose behind him nor the sharp words from the observers. He suddenly warned them that the worst was yet to come and he told them that they could, if they wished, turn back and rejoin or at least try to rejoin the outside world. That was untrue. One of his followers, named Kronauer—in reality an idiotic soldier—discovered it almost immediately at his expense. Hardly had he begun to retrace his steps when he felt encumbered by a heavy feebleness; barely had he counted four steps backward when a bitterness surged within him, and his skin crackled all over his body, over his legs as much as over the dream of his hands and face that he had been dreaming since the beginning of the fire. His bones whistled, his cartilage was already just ash and smoke. He was a paltry soldier, a good communist but without any magical value, like those picked up by the shovel load in the camps’ mass graves. He would have liked to call his comrades for help, but his voice didn’t carry and his thoughts, which he tried to express, didn’t succeed in crystallizing in words. Then he sat, somehow, in the embers, sobbing, his lungs wracked with awful sobs, trying again to shed the weight of asphalt darkness covering him. A few meters away, but still permanently separated from him, the others took a break and ignored him. “The worst has spared us thus far,” our helmsman, who had let the iron rod fall to his feet, said in a low voice. “But now it’s different. Those who turn back will endanger the whole group.” His vowels were squeaky, his consonants cracked at the least contact with reality or with fumes. “Those,” he continued, “we’ll have to kill before they do us harm.” At that moment, his discourse fell apart, his words collapsed. However, Kronauer’s name was pronounced, and they heard it. But he was already beyond reach, burning alone, and nobody tried to go bring him back from the darkness to slay him before the worst.
• It was a nightmarish night. But not just for Kronauer.
17
• Around ten in the evening, close to the time when, in the prison, Kronauer set his book on the ground, turned off the light, and got ready to sleep, Samiya Schmidt heard Morgovian getting ready and putting on clothes. That didn’t match up to his hours or habits. She was intrigued and decided to go see what was happening.
She had gone to sleep early, in this room where she had lived practically as a recluse for several weeks, as she always did after one of her bouts. The last bout had coincided with her encounter with Kronauer in the forest and his arrival in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, and she had barely gone out into the village since, avoided talking to her sisters, the kolkhozniks, and her father, and only met Kronauer at the Pioneers’ House library, where she only spoke to him in monosyllables.
The hot, peaceful light of the bedside lamp left most of the room in shadow and lit up the corner of the bed where Samiya Schmidt was snugly settled, occasionally turning the pages of Baree, Son of Kazan, the only book by James Oliver Curwood within the cabinets of books in Pioneers’ House to escape the liquidators. Kronauer had mentioned this novel about the Great North earlier in the day and she wanted to read it before telling him that she had finally found a forgotten copy in a box of damaged books. She enjoyed delving into it. This generous prose, filled with the breath of nature, was a change from the imprecations of Maria Kwoll, Rosa Wolff, and Tat
iana Damianopoulos, who replaced the phrase “make love” with “do sex” or “do rut” and who always, no matter the subject of their story, managed to express uncompromising opinions about bodies, their unacceptable physiological mechanisms, sexual impulses, and the cock’s language prowling throughout men’s thoughts. It had been years since Samiya Schmidt had read anything other than romånces and incantexts inspired by these considerations. Baree, Son of Kazan, was a breath of fresh air for her.
Although she was sorry to have to stop reading, she pushed aside the sheets and got up. The mirror sent back an image of her rumpled pajamas and her completely bald head. She reflexively passed her right hand over the smooth skin, trying in vain to find traces of regrowth. Then she set her wig in place, thick and shiny black hair with adolescent braids knotted at the ends with red cloth. She hid her breasts, which she considered too large, under a thick, white unisex shirt, put on khaki pants and a quilted vest she could wear on the street in any temperature, especially chilly autumn nights. Once again she looked like a young, well-read girl sent to be reeducated in the country after inciting anarchy in the cities. She accentuated the resemblance by putting on a military cap with a star-shaped badge.
Then she opened the door of her room.
• Since her marriage to Morgovian, Samiya Schmidt had lived in a house with a large portion reserved exclusively for her. Morgovian feared her as a wife and even more as a daughter of Solovyei. Nothing in the world could have convinced him to cross the invisible threshold beyond which she remained shut away. For him she remained a theoretical spouse, a false spouse for whom he felt neither tenderness nor absence of tenderness, in contrast to Samiya Schmidt’s unembarrassed ease in visibly snubbing or disdaining him. She didn’t share anything with him and stayed obstinately in her world, daydreaming over feminist rantings or losing herself in ideological or agricultural brochures, or listening intently to the abstract noise of radios that no longer emitted music or discourses, but which sometimes sent mysterious crackling into the ether, at the heart of which she always hoped, like a little girl, to distinctly hear her name. Nobody, really, ever came into her private space, except, to her great regret, Solovyei, who did not respect any boundaries and who, whenever he wanted to and without ever asking her what she thought, broke through all her defenses, crept into her no matter how hard she resisted, and came and went within her like it was his own terrain, observing her internal dreams and possessing her completely, towering over everything, showing no difference between the physical and the mental, taking hold of everything. Then, without warning or discussion, having gotten what he wanted, he left.
• The house smelled of paint heating on the cast-iron radiators; she smelled the dust from before winter, she smelled the liquid soap on the newly scrubbed floors and the heather bath-soap that Morgovian had just used in his shower. Samiya Schmidt went past the bathroom and the bedroom where Morgovian lived in his disastrous conjugal solitude. She peeked in but didn’t enter. Pinned on the walls were Model Tractor Driver diplomas and posters recovered from the irradiated farms, advocating foot-and-mouth vaccinations for sheep and enlisting in the Volunteer Red Army. The furniture was rustic but not really spartan. It comprised a chest of drawers where Samiya Schmidt knew Morgovian kept a collection of pornographic images that had been commandeered from a salesman’s corpse during an expedition in the forest. Because these expeditions weren’t mythical. They gave Kronauer, who hadn’t been integrated into Radiant Terminus, the least specific answers they could about them, but those accursed expeditions certainly did happen. They regularly took place, perhaps once or twice a year, in the springtime. The merchants dated back to the Middle Ages with their cargo of supplies, they searched for a shortcut through the metaphysical traps that Solovyei set on their path, and, unfortunately for them, they got lost in the old forest where the president of the kolkhoz and several kolkhozniks armed with grapple hooks, ropes, and axes were waiting. The obscene photographs, thus, which properly speaking weren’t part of the spoils, had been entrusted by Solovyei to Morgovian, with the order not to distribute them in the population. They had agreed that they would be used for illustrating a conference on immorality in merchant societies, but the conference didn’t happen and the illustrations, which were indeed immoral, and certainly very lewd, ended up locked in a drawer where, lost beneath an innocent pile of bolts, spikes, and threaded rods, they waited for nights of animalistic misery to resurface.
The kitchen and the living room were empty. The hallway light-bulb illuminated the steps that went down to the basement. Morgovian had already left the house. He’d gone out that way and not through the front door.
Long ago, a network of tunnels had been dug to allow people to move through the kolkhoz even when the snow, the wind filled with driving needles, and wintery temperatures prevented anyone from going out into the open. The network followed the path of the hot-water pipes and, in specific parts of the route, the underground passages weren’t sinister at all, benefiting from satisfactory light and not having been invaded by vermin or dampness. The work dated back to the beginning of the Second Soviet Union and had been carried out by engineers, firefighters, and soldiers who simply wanted to leave behind a perfectly constructed work that would garner a medal or a reduced sentence, and which would resist time, the eventual atomic wars, and the predictable slackness of future generations.
• Samiya Schmidt went down the stairs and reached the tunnel that led to the Soviet. At most, she had to walk seventy meters underground. She walked them all and ended up at the immense former municipal wash-house, in which, as has already been said, the technicians who survived the first weeks of liquidation had time to dream up an alternative nuclear installation, furnish it with fuel rods taken from the pool bubbling in the Red Star sovkhoz, and put them to use before their skeletons scattered inside and outside their carbonized bodies. Thus for several decades the former wash-house had been the source of energy feeding the Levanidovo: its water heaters, its boilers, its lights, and its various communal and individual buildings, its robust washing machines, its meat coolers, its electric churners, its flour roasters, its stoves, its radio antennas that had been mute in the absence of transmitters, and its chattering loudspeakers.
It was also a vast confusion of unruly pipes, copper, lead, firebricks, and electrical panels. At first glance, someone would think that they had infiltrated a dump for industrial materials or the basement of a factory post-cataclysm. But soon enough they had to acknowledge that the elements, despite their incongruity, were interconnected and followed an overarching plan, which lent an overall unity to at least some portions of this whole. They could imagine that they were in an art gallery, unintentional visitors to a retrospective of particularly aggressive or complex sculptures aligned with destructionist art or other avantgarde aberrations. The depths, their chaos, and the stacks multiplied, but in reality no artist had popped up here intending to construct something beautiful or conceptually torturous. This metal mess was due to extreme emergency, the carnage among the engineers, and also the hallucinations of workers unceasingly deluged by neutrons. The technicians succeeded without any time to evacuate their colleagues’ corpses or to organize and streamline their assemblages. Some, despite their death, continued to carry out their duties around the vessels, the pumps, and the turbines, no longer complaining about terrible burns, but disrupting the efforts of the living. The construction continued without a preliminary plan, by improvisation and groaning, and, while several intrepid liquidators piled up in a corner the fuel rods they had carried on their backs and manipulated with their bare hands, the valorous handymen tried to remember why the preceding team of workers had laid pipes and cables there, welded a cast-iron plate here, built a room without any opening there. Their questions went unanswered. While fighting against fear, horrible headaches, the liquefaction of their livers, and a rapid loss of sight and sense of balance, they put together new bypasses, new junctions. Which is why many essential components had
been doubled, multiplied, or oddly hung in places that made them superfluous, even monstrous.
When Barguzin was assigned to the construction, the auxiliary station had started to function and promised to do so for several more centuries, even with its leaks and serious security breaches. In the presence of this chaos of cables, tubes, and compressors, he had given up on establishing any semblance of order. He had simply undone those circuits that could only cause damage, and, with the help of several deceased who were still somewhat able-bodied, he tried to seal the central compartment of the reactor. Morgovian, Abazayev, and the daughters of the kolkhoz president all helped out; nobody balked despite the danger and the scope of the task, but, for lack of specific information about what happened in the boiler, construction couldn’t be completed, and, all around, it stayed that way. Solovyei regularly went into the boiler, but he claimed to go in for personal and not technical reasons, and he’d come back out without a word, sizzling and blackened, weighed down with radiation and opaque poems. When Solovyei’s routine had ended up taking hold of Radiant Terminus, the kolkhozniks put an end to their visits to the former wash-house, and the only two who still went were Barguzin, who dealt with the maintenance, and Solovyei, who engaged in his thaumaturgic activities.
Radiant Terminus Page 26