20
• Solovyei’s voice reverberated in the warehouse, along the metal framework and between the mountains of trash. Things vibrated at the tops of the piles every so often, as if sensitive to the stridency of certain vowels. Rolls of iron wire, sheet pans, bits of grills, harnesses.
Kronauer didn’t make a sound. The psychic tension had flowed into his muscles. His body weighed hundreds of kilograms, his brain had gone on hold. Fugs of thought moved in slow motion behind his forehead. It can’t be her. But it is her. No, impossible. They couldn’t have hidden her all this time without my seeing. Solovyei couldn’t have been working on her body all this time. Somebody would have found out. Weeks. Solovyei’s daughters couldn’t have kept this secret. Myriam Umarik is too talkative. Samiya Schmidt couldn’t have that kind of cynicism. Hannko Vogulian has moral uprightness. Or maybe they didn’t know, either. Vassilissa Marachvili in the village for all this time, weeks, without anybody knowing. Vassia. No.
I can’t believe that, he thought.
He shuddered. He didn’t even realize it. He repeated bits of elementary thoughts. From a long way off, the name of Irina Echenguyen sometimes was added to that of Vassilissa Marachvili. Two loved women he had lost, each time in abominable circumstances. Women he hadn’t loved in the same way, but whom he hadn’t known how to defend. Their falling into the hands of murderers. Irina Echenguyen. The dog-headed enemies. Vassilissa Marachvili. This Solovyei with his peasant magician’s head.
The phonograph still put out its insanity. In front of Hannko Vogulian, Kronauer’s shoulders shook. He cried without any tears. His eyes rested on the corpse of Vassilissa Marachvili and he didn’t make an effort not to see her. His ears heard nothing. Of Solovyei’s vicious speech he heard and retained nothing.
Then the roll ended. The needle screeched a dirty silence for five seconds, then the Gramma Udgul stopped the mechanism and everything went quiet. Nothing vibrated in the warehouse anymore.
Kronauer moved. He came out of his numbness. He had stopped shuddering.
He got down, lifted the felt cloth, then he carefully covered Vassilissa Marachvili’s face once more. Vassia, little sister, he thought. It’s over for you. It’s finally over. The rest depends on me.
Once again the young corpse became alien to its onlookers. Beneath its dark gray envelope, it had already merged into the infinite mass of the dead, already closer to the tractor driver Morgovian, lying next to her, than to Kronauer, who was the only person present to still have any memories of her. Then Kronauer didn’t wait to say good-bye to the outstretched bodies and was already walking away. Hannko Vogulian stood before him, in the middle of the path. He sidestepped her. She tried in vain to look him in the eye, maybe to silently tell him that she hadn’t been involved at all in her father’s vileness. He pushed past her without turning his head toward her, went past her without slowing down in the least, and began walking between two embankments of debris, through a hallway lined with truck wheels, hurriedly folded canvas sheets, crates, pipes thrown haphazardly, saucepans and frying pans that still exuded the scent of meat, of mushrooms.
He took a detour through smaller alleys, which were rarely used. He wanted to get to the exit without having to go past the kolkhozniks who were waiting by the container, as well as the Gramma Udgul. He couldn’t bear any contact with these people anymore and he wondered how he had been able to stand alongside them day after day and give in to their needs, and, as shamefully as them, as passively, borne the magical, dark, and incestuous practices that were commonplace in the Levanidovo.
He glanced at the junk while walking. He looked for a weapon. Something he could bury or drive into Solovyei’s flesh, something evil, pointed and cutting. Close to the entrance he saw a construction stake and he took it out of the pile of scrap iron surrounding it. It was a solid shaft with a sharp point, and the object was nicely balanced in his hand, slightly rusted, as dangerous as a javelin. He hefted it for about ten seconds. Then he sent it flying into the bric-a-brac.
No, that doesn’t work, he thought. In a pinch, it’s good for fending off a wolf or a bear. But I can’t see myself using that against Solovyei.
And besides, he thought, I wonder if there’s any weapon for that.
• Now he was on the threshold of the hangar, at the boundary between the warmth inside and the icy air outside. The warehouse kept producing heat, and as the Gramma Udgul wasn’t complaining today about the air flow, nobody had worried about closing the door. The snow had resumed, it fell violently in huge, gray, very fluffy flakes. The low light announced the proximity of the darkness. With this twilight and the curtains of snow it was hard to make out the first houses of the kolkhoz at the bottom of the slope. There wasn’t any smoke or movement. The main road was lost in the white. What could be seen was blank of every trace.
Kronauer hesitated as he looked at this dead village. Without warm clothes, he couldn’t leave the warehouse. His coat was hanging close to the well and he especially did not want to retrace his steps and come close once again to the Gramma Udgul’s lair, with her little kitchen, her armchair, her piles of newspapers, her phonograph, and her old woman’s organized mess. Nor did he want to see one of the others again, the kolkhozniks, Solovyei’s zombies, Solovyei’s daughters.
As if his leave-taking hadn’t aroused any feeling, hustle and bustle had resumed in the warehouse. He heard soles squeaking on the ground, some banging against the sides of the well. Those who still had strength had stopped resting. They’re liquidating the remnants the Gramma Udgul’s picked out, Kronauer thought. Some forgotten things, and, of course, the bodies of Morgovian and Vassilissa Marachvili. They’re throwing all that into the core without asking any questions. He raged at them all. He wouldn’t go so far as to accuse them of direct complicity in Vassilissa Marachvili’s death, but he suspected them of having been aware that her cadaver was there, fully aware, unaware only of Solovyei’s working on her day and night with all his revolting habits. They had plotted it all out together. And him, during these autumn months, just an idiot. Drunk on the nearness of Solovyei’s daughters, all his morals gone. Waiting stupidly for his cock’s dreams to come true. Having no dignity or future. While Vassia. While they’d used magic to grope Vassia.
He stood there, momentarily protected from the cold by the radioactive waves, half a meter from the tracks on which the door slid. He saw the snow thickening two meters in front of him, and in the quiet moments amid the various noises the liquidators were making by the well, he could make out the monotonous twinkling of the icy stars crashing against or landing on their sisters already on the earth. He felt overwhelmed, unable to take any initiative. Despite being confused, almost dazed, he knew that in light clothes he couldn’t confront the atmospheric conditions outside.
After a moment, and while he rocked back and forth by the door rails like he was mentally ill, he sensed a presence behind him.
A presence. He sensed it without any idea of how to react.
A few seconds. Then, gently, someone set a fur coat on his shoulders. He turned. It was Hannko Vogulian.
• He looked into the beautiful and strange double gaze of Hannko Vogulian and, immediately, the unexpected occurred. A reversal, a radical inversion of his feelings. Just a short while before, in front of Vassilissa Marachvili’s cadaver, he had almost leaped onto this woman to strike her to death. The two of them had been alone and, at the moment he’d wanted to kill, there had been no other representative from Radiant Terminus there. He had almost done it. But in a fraction of a second this urge to murder had disappeared, giving way to tenderness. The effect of this beautiful and strange gaze. Once again, as through the entire autumn, Hannko Vogulian attracted him. Over the last weeks, he had often wanted to lose himself in her eyes, and, hoping that she wasn’t aware of the trouble she gave him, he swam magnetically toward her. Sometimes he even had the impression that she expected that of him, that he would gently draw near to her. And here, although the circumstances hadn�
��t conspired in this way, everything came back to this physical need for meeting and fusion, for this urge. So what if I fell into her arms, he thought. What if I cried on her shoulder?
His lips trembled, but he didn’t know how to express what had arisen in him. It was a luminous second, but it faded away and everything, once again, became muddled. The idea of crossing the short distance separating them, opening his arms, and giving in to her seemed less and less obvious. Less obvious, less defensible was this amorous urge, assuming that was what this was. Hannko Vogulian, however, showed no emotion. She stood very close to him, she bestowed her extraordinary gaze on him, but she didn’t invite anything of him.
He caught the coat before it slipped and he put it on, taking his time, without continuing to contemplate this daughter’s eyes. You idiot, Kronauer, he scolded himself, you just said good-bye to Vassilissa Marachvili, and all it takes is for this daughter of Solovyei to appear for you to dream of pressing up against her? As if you didn’t know that these impulses have nothing to do with feelings . . . It’s just an urge to rut!
Hannko Vogulian handed him a big, brown fur shapka that she had taken, like the coat, from a pile of irradiated clothes, and he accepted it slowly, almost regretting the peaceful normalcy of his gesture. She took half a step backward. She stood upright, rigidly, in her work uniform filthy with filings, soot, and dust, with grease stains on her face and on her scalp as smooth as an egg, because she hadn’t put on her Chukchi or Yakut princess’s wig. Her eyes didn’t blink. Kronauer met them for a fraction of a second and immediately looked away. Her monstrously different, beautiful, and strange eyes. They didn’t blink.
—Are you going to Solovyei’s house? she asked.
He nodded furtively, then he put on the shapka, finished buttoning his coat, and went back to the doorway. A downy layer several centimeters deep was freezing in the door’s track. He looked up at the twilit wall coverings that covered a good part of the countryside. Now he could confront the cold. Now he would go down to the village and fight the president of the kolkhoz. He had a moment of weakness when he’d put Vassilissa Marachvili in second place to fantasize about Hannko Vogulian, but this moment was passing. He was already filled with the idea of the action to come.
Still, at the moment he went into the snow, he hesitated briefly. One second, two seconds. He considered the overcast landscape and he didn’t take the decisive step. He waited.
Three seconds.
Hannko Vogulian had just whispered something behind him.
The fur earflaps were folded over his cheeks, they kept him from understanding what she had said. He concentrated, he tried to reconstruct the syllables that the obstacle had deformed or erased.
—Do you hear me, Kronauer? Hannko Vogulian asked, this time a little louder. I’m with you.
She reached out and touched his shoulder. He felt it but didn’t react, didn’t turn toward her.
—Remember that later, that I’m with you, she said as he stepped over the threshold. Later and always.
21
• He took one step into the snow, then a second, then he went down the hill, leaving behind the Gramma Udgul’s awful warehouse, her awful junk, and her various awful creatures. The snowflakes stuck to his face. He frequently had to bat his eyelashes or blow to keep them off his lips. They were delicate. They didn’t melt. Under his soles, the snow groaned. During the daytime lull, the wind had crystallized a crust that now hid several centimeters deep, and every so often something fragile gave way under the weight of his body. When the slope increased, the ice resisted, and then he slipped. As he didn’t have gloves, he kept his hands in his pockets, and instead of using his arms to balance, he slowed down so as not to fall over. The light became increasingly gray. A lone crow came out of nowhere several meters from him, cawed, and swiftly disappeared off to his left, doubtless to take shelter in the forest that was already invisible, drowned in the falling night and the snow.
The afternoon was at its end. He was in a rush to get to the village. The main road stretched out, covered in a uniform layer, very white and perfectly blank. Nobody had trampled it for hours. To the left and the right, the first structures of the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz were slowly taking on rounded and softened shapes, lacking all angles. The rest of the Levanidovo was phantasmagorical. The forest encircling the village was no longer discernible.
What’s your plan, Kronauer, you sham soldier? he suddenly wondered. What were you planning to do, you crummy fighter, actually kill Solovyei? And how would you do it, and why? And what are you going to do if you don’t succeed? . . . And who will you leave with, if you don’t fail? . . . For where? With Myriam Umarik and Barguzin, the model couple, a nymphomaniac and a dying man? With Samiya Schmidt and her anti-male books, if she’s still alive? With that ice princess Hannko Vogulian? . . . Where would you go? What would you do? . . . Did you think about that? . . .
• Just when he came to the Pioneers’ House, a gust of wind lifted the snow off the road and blinded him. He covered his face with the crook of his arm. Without any gloves, his hands were covered in frost. He stopped walking. Until that moment, the snow had fallen mostly vertically and silently. Well, that’s the final straw, when the wind’s mixed in, he thought. The snow beat against his coat, crackled against his elbow, on top of his head. An icy crust grew between the brim of his shapka and his eyebrows. Several crystals melted on his tongue, unleashing the flavors of winter.
The snow whistled.
The day ended, the road was already dark.
He hunched forward and kept walking. He had put his hands back in his coat pockets and squinted against the pins and needles that the aggressive snowflakes, the half-snowflakes, the miniscule needles inflicted upon his face. His eyelids were nearly shut and he went about fifty meters without seeing anything, then, just as he was about to bump into the fire hydrant in front of Myriam Umarik’s house, he swerved and turned toward the Soviet. Forty paces still separated him from the columns and front steps. He crossed the distance thinking about nothing except the cold against his cheeks and the gusts of wind attacking him treacherously, sometimes head-on, sometimes sidelong, trying to knock him off balance or make him change direction. Forty paces, then twelve or fifteen. Without stopping, he went up the steps that disappeared beneath an immaculate layer and pushed open the front door.
The hall was lit only by the poor light coming from the street. Kronauer didn’t give any thought to the illumination and right away he stamped and scrubbed his boots against the wall so as not to keep the slippery mass stuck beneath his soles. He couldn’t let himself slip on the tiles if the battle against Solovyei took place here and now. Once he was sure he couldn’t slip and fall easily, he shut the door behind him. The door banged, the whistling stopped. After the noise of the wind, the sudden silence enveloped him.
He had only been inside once, to inscribe his name in the kolkhoz registers as a temporary resident. Although he knew nothing about the rest of Solovyei’s actual residence—the part of the building where he of course had never set foot—he was familiar, more or less, with what seemed to be the administrative section. Outside a side hallway that led to Solovyei’s place, there were two padded doors opening onto offices, and the entrance to a storeroom where the liquidators had once set aside smaller irradiated materials, and where even now they kept sensitive objects that had to be categorized before being added to the Gramma Udgul’s disgusting piles. Kronauer crossed the hall and, just on the off chance, he tried opening the storeroom door. It wasn’t locked.
He went in.
His fingers reached the switch and turned on the ceiling light.
• As if fate had decided to make everything very simple for him right now, at the end of the room stood a gun rack that was missing its lock; it contained two hunting guns and three weapons of war. He took out a Simonov rifle from the First Soviet Union, and an SKS with a scratched handle, but which didn’t look too outdated. The cartridges and clips lay in a jumbled pile next
to the rack. Without wasting any time he took out a clip and loaded it into the rifle, and then a second one that he put in a pocket. Then he told himself that perhaps he could take a third one and he was about to rummage again in the box of munitions when he heard a noise in the hall. Someone was coming, quite slowly. Trained in the military, Kronauer loaded a preliminary cartridge into the chamber and aimed the rifle barrel at the door. At that moment, an imposing form planted itself on the threshold of the room. The form had a head covered with a travel bag. It didn’t seem perturbed by the threat aimed at it and its first act was to turn off the ceiling light, as if following a memo about conserving energy, or as if it preferred the dialogue or confrontation to take place in a thick darkness.
Radiant Terminus Page 32