Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  part four

  TAIGA

  narracts

  23

  • I woke up later. Much later. I smelled terrible, like waste oil, rotting flesh, urine, world-weariness. Terrible oil, terrible flesh, shooter or shootee’s urine, truly terrible weariness. A horrifying smell. I budged a little and the stench intensified. It’ll only get worse, I thought. So don’t move.

  All my joints ached. At the bottom of my rib cage, the pains were fiery. Every heartbeat sent a migrainous wave up my skull. It hit the back of my brain and scattered all over, through my jaw. It broke apart, it dispersed, but, before it had completely gone away, it was replaced by the next one.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes. Get used to the pain and the smell first, I thought. Accept that banging in your head first. It’s flowing past your eye sockets, going from the greasy layer of your eyeballs to the upper half of the vitreous humor, reaching the top of your cheekbones, find a way to bear that. Then you’ll open your eyes or vomit or both.

  Five minutes had gone by. I hadn’t moved a millimeter. I was stretched out by a wall. I could feel unfinished floorboards along my back and beneath me, covered with filth and dried mud. They exuded a smell of earth and wood, which I’d always appreciated even if those were also the smells of coffins. The stench isn’t coming from the ground, I thought. It’s coming from you.

  My eyes were sealed shut by the detritus of tears and blood, and, as I had trouble scrubbing them clean, I gave up. So I must have been crying without realizing it, I thought.

  I kept feeling horrible breakers in my skull and I took my time before adding to this backwash the inevitably bewildering images of the place I was in. Of course, I repeated. I must have been crying. Who knows if it was pain or sadness.

  Several seconds fell away.

  Or shame, I thought.

  • So what happened? Before? This night, the days before? Before I slept?

  The memories pounded behind my eyes in the same rhythm as the waves of the migraine. Shreds of spumy images. Appeared, disappeared.

  I don’t remember anything, I thought.

  This observation was an exaggeration. But, for the moment, that was where I was.

  • The temperature wasn’t icy, but I didn’t mind that I was wrapped in a coat. Between my body and this mantle there were only indescribable, gray, formless rags like the ones on corpses in mass graves. My body reeked, these cloths gave off whiffs of grime, but the coat was what stank most. The fur had been soaked in grease, despair, and blood, the hairs were stickily clumped together. There were better things to protect against the cold.

  I took several deep breaths even if, quite honestly, I had realized that I didn’t need or want much air. The mustiness was overwhelming, but the images were gone. Some streaks of memories were replacing them. They flashed haphazardly. A night of hunts, of murders. These facts came in bits and pieces. I had left the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse. I went down to the village in the snow. Wind, sharp needles of ice, harsh fall of night. Then and abruptly a sort of funereal dance full of violence and strange opacity. A sort of funereal dance, I thought. At some point you were carrying a gun, I thought. At some point you were talking with Solovyei. But about what, and what did you do with the rifle, no idea, I thought.

  • The cell wasn’t anything special in and of itself. A narrow wooden bunk held by two chains, and a hole for pissing that had to lead to a drainpipe outside. Instead of a window, air and light came through a small grille in the door, as well as from the hole for pissing.

  So I’ve been transferred again, I thought.

  It would be good if I could open my eyes, I thought. But they’re already open, I thought, trying to reason with myself. Otherwise I wouldn’t know about the grille, the chains holding these boards, the hole.

  Try to open them anyway, I insisted.

  For a minute or two, my head had been hurting less. I was still lying on the ground, I was barely moving, I didn’t feel like I was breathing, but who knew. New smells were still coming, horrible smells dirtying my nostrils, winding from my coat, from the air outside or from the caves and poorly shut openings of my flesh, including my liver, stomach, spleen, and marrow, the despicable nuances of these inner and outer stenches. It would be better if you opened your eyes now, I thought. Why better? I cut in. Because, lying like this among deleterious gases, you’ll end up understanding nothing anymore, fainting again, or depressing yourself. There’s nothing special to understand, I objected. I’ve been transferred. It’s already happened to me and it happens to everyone. Well, I thought. It’s true that it already happened to you and that it will happen to you one thousand and forty-seven more times, and even ten thousand one hundred and eleven times.

  I shrugged. One thousand forty-seven and even ten thousand one hundred and eleven times were numbers that didn’t normally come out of my mouth and which more likely belonged to Solovyei’s language, to his curses and his threats. All the more reason to open your eyes, I thought, for no reason.

  I opened my eyes. I had practically no headache anymore. Around me the darkness was complete. The grille, the hole for pissing, and the boards might have been nearby, but whether my eyelids were raised or I’d let them rest, the darkness was complete. It was complete, heavy, and oily.

  So I’m in black oil, I thought. In heavy oil, in heavy-heavy oil, in heavy black oil.

  • Shit, I swore in Russian, Tyvan, and camp German, I’m here deep in black oil and it looks like I’ll be here for one thousand forty-seven years, or even for ten thousand four hundred and one full years!

  24

  • His bloodthirsty frenzy had barely ended when I had one of my henchmen, Münzberg, knock him out, then, once he was already soaked with the black and horrible oils of death, I carried him to the heart of the flames and set him there, making sure he dried out high against the fuel rods and slipping between his bones the magic words necessary for his eternal unhappiness, for the punishment I’d warned him about, and, therefore, to maintain both the mental and physical activity he would have exerted in the real and imaginary worlds where the constant backwash of incantations would push him, would give him some semblance of activity and crush him. After eight hours or so he began to moan again, then thirteen years went by. I had things to do and I barely worried about him, and, although every so often I came to rummage in his soul so as to keep pain and confusion in his memories, I was happier to let him wander endlessly from image to image without his being able to grab onto anything tangible. Most of the time, I left him to Münzberg and my henchmen, as well as of course the cruel spirals of black space. I know that he often complained about little things, neglecting the crux of the matter, unwilling to ponder what the future had in store for him, plunging those he’d known into the same yellowing backwater of idiocy, refusing obstinately to consider the low level of inexistence he’d come to, refusing to see that from now on he would be eternally dead and subject to the whims of nothingness and chance. His lucidity came poorly, in fits and starts. His animalistic stupidity was evident. From a militaristic, ideological, and sexual point of view, he was composed of more or less carbonized scraps and rags that combined haphazardly over his years of sleeplessness and unraveled terribly during his years of sleep. The very mediocre fate of this Kronauer had bothered me from our first meeting, but mostly it was his person I hated. From his appearance in the region he had begun to tiptoe around my wives. Wives or daughters, doesn’t matter. Quickly enough, when he was at my mercy, I wrapped him in hides and furs and I increased the stench of the black reactor I had stuck him in. Then, whether I interceded or not, he would have nightmares for at least one thousand forty-seven centuries or lunar half-years. The lights weakened within his skull. Everything in him became muddled. I enjoyed it for a minute, then four hundred and four years went by. The heat didn’t diminish, I stayed stuck to the brick all that time, singing and whispering sometimes in one dream, sometimes in another. Münzberg and the others had long since been forgotten be
neath the ashes. I stayed for several more decades in complete immobility, then I began whistling so that new henchmen would materialize, and daughters, wives, and marvels would resurge again from the soft pits, the tarry steppes, and the fiery forests. The tunnels around me roared then went quiet. Insects floated between me and the wall like moving embers. I hadn’t stopped whistling and fluttering around. Sometimes my feathers caught fire, sometimes not. I stayed by the brick and I was elsewhere, far away. The soldier began to groan again between the fuel rods. Once again I shook him and worked him with a poker. This necessary routine didn’t bore me. However, after having watched the hell in his head glow red, I spread my wings and left the place.

  25

  • Then, like it or not, a hole of seven centuries.

  • The railroad hadn’t been in use for seven hundred years and, over the kilometers, the rails had sunk into the earth. Or they had disappeared among the grasses. The wooden crossties had rotted, the ones the workers and the prisoners had made with cement had disintegrated. Occasionally an intact portion of the tracks survived in an unexpected place, at the bottom of a valley or between two ramparts of larches. The metal crumbled once someone stepped on it. The tracks no longer existed and were so fragmented that they could no longer serve as landmarks for potential vagrants, whether in the steppes or in the forest, each of them ever encroaching upon the other. The fact was that nobody was crossing the region or even the continent anymore, and so useful signposts for travelers no longer concerned many people.

  The population had diminished dramatically. The cripples and the dead were barely enlivened by the spirit of adventure or the needs of exile. The conditions of life had changed. Those who were still able to lead a whit of existence generally preferred not to go far from their individual territories, from the refuges they had somehow secured while waiting for extinction—a hut with a vegetable garden and a few hens, a former kolkhoz, the ruins of a work camp, a grain silo, an abandoned nuclear power plant.

  • Hannko Vogulian had chosen to reside in a clearing within the taiga, several kilometers from a long ditch where the remains of the railroad could be seen. A logging village had doubtless been built there, in an already-hard-to-imagine era of the Second Soviet Union, but there was no longer any trace of the houses and the roads from that time. The village had been self-sufficient when it came to energy sources and Hannko Vogulian’s cottage was built on the residue of the small nuclear core. Nobody knew who had built it, perhaps a team of fickle engineers who planned to stay there until the atoms’ rage subsided, or the liquidators intent on making themselves useful one last time before their muscles stank like something was burning. The solid logs defied the passage of time. The building had taken on a slight slant, but for hundreds of years it had continued to perfectly fulfill its function: to protect Hannko Vogulian from bad weather—in the winter from gusts of snow, in the summer from swarms of flies which were themselves indeed on the brink of extinction, and in all seasons from attacks by wandering soldiers, psychotics, and wolves. The structure of this small-windowed izba wasn’t particularly special, aside from having been constructed above and around a well, as once had been the Gramma Udgul’s hangar. Hannko Vogulian, who wasn’t nostalgic for the Levanidovo, nonetheless appreciated settling into a place with familiar characteristics, since it adjoined a pit out of which an invisible mist of radionuclides flowed. The well wasn’t as impressively proportioned as the one the Gramma Udgul had presided over, and the bubbling magma hadn’t descended to such breathtaking depths. The core had also lost a large degree of its radioactivity rather quickly, which didn’t keep it from giving off an agreeable warmth, enough to make the months of blizzards and ice less difficult. Besides this advantage, Hannko Vogulian found a certain sort of companion in the pit, a mute interlocutor, and even if for several decades she had avoided doing so—disgusted at the idea of repeating the Gramma Udgul’s witchy actions—now every so often she leaned over the edge and told the core about her day-to-day life, or stories from her past that came to mind, and, when her voice gave out in exhaustion, she stayed for a long while in the same place, sitting still, as if trying to make out precisely which stage the corium’s fusion had reached, or as if waiting for a response.

  • Hannko Vogulian was old now, very old, and she lived as a recluse. At the beginning, Solovyei had kept on visiting her, using her dreams to enter her and invade her, completely taking over her and her space to walk in her house and snoop around the well, looking for a memory of the Gramma Udgul. He had harassed her that way for something like three centuries or so, but then he had stopped appearing, without any apparent reason and without any farewell.

  She lived in total autarky. Once she finished with her housekeeping, once she had walked past her rabbit traps, and once she had buried a vagrant she had killed because he had bothered her, which happened once or twice every twelve or fifteen years, she went back to her place, checked her rifles, and barricaded herself. Then, so as not to spend her evenings moping around gloomily, she wrote.

  From the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse she had saved unused school supplies and ink. This allowed her to keep a diary that she sometimes forgot for several years, only to take it back up suddenly on a whim and without worrying about explanations. She inscribed the paper with harmless remarks about her days. However, the priority was for her to do what she called “reviving prose.” She was determined to reproduce in her little notebooks the memories of her readings long ago, in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz. She had read far fewer books than her sister Samiya Schmidt, but now that she no longer had access to any library of any size she was sorry not to have any works to break the monotony of her nights, to brave everything’s remoteness and the knowledge of being one of the only survivors. So she tried to reproduce, on the yellowing grade-school paper, what remained within her of the literature that was dead and gone.

  But she had never been an attentive reader, a model reader, never a good reader, and the contents of the novels she once had sped through had now vanished, not to mention their form, which for her had always been a wholly unimportant element. Outside the titles, which in any case she had difficulty remembering exactly, the texts gave her trouble. Under her pen, the post-exotic fictions or the socialist realist sagas, broad at first, became a welter of a few dark pages, even more disappointing than their ancient originals. Most often she was disgusted by the result and, when she had finished a volume, she filed it in a corner of the izba without reading it again. She was most proud of herself when she tackled what remained of her memories, the collections of lyrical poetry, and the brochures focusing on agricultural techniques, pigpen hygiene, the maintenance of dairy materials (churns, creamers, and sterilizers), bookkeeping for farms, security for power plants. On all these subjects the detailed information came back to her and, little by little, she managed to reconstruct the basics of these pamphlets, with their diagrams for illiterate peasants and even with their most distinctive illustrations.

  But it was the anti-male pamphlets by Maria Kwoll, Rosa Wolff, Sonia Velasquez, or Luna Galiani that emerged most powerfully from the point of her pen. They had been engraved even more brilliantly than all the rest in her memory. The substance of these little books had always answered her questions, her anxieties as a young woman, which hadn’t been possible with the Marxist classics or the social-skills manuals sent by the Orbise. She lit the lamp, she began to write, and she felt as if Sonia Velazquez or Rosa Wolff were holding her hand and guiding it, generously allowing her to speak and rant against the violence all females had suffered since the middle of the Paleozoic era and, closer to us, during the previous twenty thousand years of human history. She had already reproduced in this way, almost without mistake and without reproach, a good fifteen or so incendiary feminist productions of the Second Soviet Union.

  • However, her resuscitation of texts also involved a portion unconnected to general literature, but focused exclusively on the cultural life of the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz. A sect
ion that didn’t have its sources in books, properly speaking, because they came from Solovyei’s cylinders as they’d marked moments of crisis, everyday life, nights of crime and incest in the Levanidovo, days of work among the junk stored at the Gramma Udgul’s. Frozen on the acoustic cylinders, Solovyei’s voice resonated from the loudspeakers along the main road, but it also echoed in his daughters’ dreams, including those of Hannko Vogulian, where the kolkhoz president entered forcefully to attend to his lustful or impenetrable affairs.