—You went into your own dreams to hurt her, Solovyei said.
—That accusation doesn’t hold up, Kronauer said.
—I saw your dreams from start to finish. I went into them. You hurt them every night.
—I don’t remember my dreams, Kronauer said, raising his voice to talk above the noise of the cascade around him.
—But I remember them. I was there. You came and went like a lecherous dog. You mixed up the woman you knew with the woman you wanted to know. Your cock trembled like a stone-age monster.
—But, Kronauer protested in despair.
—You were often accompanied by the dying, Solovyei thundered in a triumphant voice, as if hammering home an unshakable argument. Your wife Irina Echenguyen. Your wife Vassilissa Marachvili.
—She was never my wife, Kronauer cried. She was the wife of one of my comrades, Ilyushenko. We were together in the steppes after the fall of the Orbise. We were irradiated together in the forbidden lands. We were all dying and more.
—Of course, and she, Vassilissa Marachvili, was dying, Solovyei said. You have always been accompanied by women neither alive nor dead. You wanted my daughters to be like them. You hurt them in your dreams. And in reality you shot at them with an SKS Type 56.
—I didn’t shoot at anyone in the village, Kronauer insisted. Those are absurd accusations.
• He withdrew into natural sensations. The noise of the shower. The flow over his stomach, his legs. His head no longer bothered him. He didn’t look at the corpses lying at the judges’ feet, or the judges themselves. And he didn’t look at Samiya Schmidt either, but, in the background of his thoughts, he couldn’t contradict the sludge rising and falling in himself and thoroughly dirtying what little reason he still had. He didn’t remember having had a rifle, he didn’t remember having assassinated the kolkhoz daughters, but Solovyei’s accusations had lodged deep in him and he now wondered if something scandalous hadn’t obsessed him, recently or not, connected or not to his stay in the Levanidovo. And what came from the depths had no relationship to reproachable military activities, or to his rejection of Marxist-Leninist morality; in contrast, it had more to do with the images of copulation embedded within himself over millions of years, with immemorial fantasies, urges to rape, animal tremors, and groping or dominating vulvas. With the language of the cock.
Amid these noises of water, these drops and trickles, he unwillingly came back to Samiya Schmidt sitting on her stool, and every so often he undressed her and considered her in a dreamy way, without any particular desire, her soft woolly crotch.
—I didn’t shoot anyone, he finally said once again.
—If you’re going to just say shit like that, the Gramma Udgul suddenly said angrily, you should shut up, Kronauer.
• The soapy water scattered in grayish glimmers beneath the drain and then gave way to limpid water.
Now Kronauer wasn’t thinking of anything, wasn’t listening to his judges, and wasn’t trying to recall any memories. He stammered a childish argument, more for himself than for his listeners, and, like a mentally handicapped person, he slapped the palm of his hand against the floor next to his left thigh to make squirts and bubbles.
29
• After years of seclusion in a nauseating darkness, one morning Kronauer noticed that the door of his dungeon was open. He went through it.
As he hadn’t walked for a very long time, he crossed the hallway with difficulty. He tottered. He had to stop several times. The cells he went past seemed empty, and besides, he had never heard noises from them, or rather noises that could be attributed to human sources. He had concluded that he was the sole prisoner locked in this building. When he came to the corridor that led outside, he paused. If a watchman saw me, he thought, he wouldn’t think twice before shooting me. Then he pushed the heavy door. The lock wasn’t bolted.
The abrupt contact with natural light blinded him. It took him several minutes to become accustomed to day again. The sun wasn’t even shining; it was overcast, filled entirely with slate-gray clouds. A fall day, Kronauer thought.
A very gloomy fall day, he thought.
He went straight ahead, minimizing his movements, his arms away from his body, as if, having just learned to stand upright, he still had a long way to go. He blinked away his tears. It’s because of the cold, he thought. He hadn’t taken his coat and, although the air’s chill bothered him, he refused to go back. Too bad, he thought. I’ll cover myself later. I’ll find something along the way. A cover, a soldier’s coat, a wolf’s hide.
• The camp was extraordinarily vast but empty. No fence delineated any limits. Dilapidated or in ruins, the barracks were arrayed monotonously. They went on for two kilometers, then they became sparser, giving way to paths that were less and less clearly marked out, to black pools of mud, to potholes and clumps of pines massive crows were perched on. The birds watched Kronauer. They shook their wings and beaks every so often and hopped from branch to branch without cawing. They tilted their heads and, even if they pretended not to be interested in him, they examined him.
The buildings had endured the attacks of hundreds of seasons, and most of them were nothing more than squalid piles of boards. As the wind sharpened, Kronauer stepped over the remnants of a doorstep, pushed aside the remnants of a door, and began to rummage through the remnants of a windowless dormitory. He told himself that maybe he’d dig up something to protect him against the cold, or some sort of pittance for the days to come. The dormitory didn’t have anything useful. The bed frames had caved in with the vicissitudes of old age. The floor wasn’t strong anywhere, it seemed about to collapse, he had to follow the joists so as not to fall through. The floor and the walls had broken in several spots, which let through light but also a stream of sharply whistling air. The building ended with a room that might have been a storage room or a medical annex. An infirmary, he thought.
Inside were an infirmary cot and a rotting, empty armoire. Nonetheless, in a corner was a crate the previous inhabitants had forgotten in the confusion of being evacuated, or for some other inexplicable reason. It was black with dust, but solid. Kronauer spent half an hour prying it open. He had lost his dexterity, his youth, and his fighter’s rage, and he also didn’t have any tools at hand. It was dark. The crate had been nailed shut and wrapped with a metal strip that hadn’t rusted enough to submit to Kronauer’s obstinate but powerless twisting.
After resisting for a long time, the crate finally opened. Kronauer took out first a white liquidator’s uniform, with gloves, a filter mask, and insulated boots. It was odd material that he knew he would never use, but which had the benefit of protecting everything that was stored inside it—clean clothes, quilted jackets, army boots, and the fur hats worn by prisoners. Kronauer immediately stripped off his rags and put on a brand-new zek’s uniform. He didn’t really want to admit it, but he knew, deep down, that he looked sharp.
When he left the infirmary, a gray wind was blowing from the forest. He felt warm in his new clothes and he happily inhaled the strong resinous smell sweeping the camp. I don’t know if I’m escaping or not, he thought, but in any case I should get to the forest by nightfall. I should leave the camp for good and reach the forest by nightfall.
• Sometimes ditches at the bottom of which black oil stagnated.
Once or twice, crows flying north.
Sometimes heaps of iron that once had been trucks, jeeps, electric generators.
Again, aromatic winds from the taiga, accompanied by sharp gusts hinting at sleet or snow.
Sometimes a slanting watchtower about to fall, sometimes a perfectly upright watchtower missing the ladder that would have let people up to the platform.
No fence. No sentry walk. No barriers. The same world throughout.
Well, maybe the fences had been useless at some point, Kronauer thought. Maybe nobody else saw any difference between the carceral interior and the concentrational exterior.
Gusts of wind, whistles, then silence.
> Here and there pines, thickets of birches.
The trees growing everywhere in the remnants of the camp.
The soil hard, as if icy.
Tar patches.
The grass in short clumps, very yellow, sometimes dark brown.
I don’t even know the names of these grasses, Kronauer suddenly realized. These are new species. These are new species, but they’re dead.
• Crows were perched on high branches. Three, four. They were pecking at lice and nonchalantly surveyed the comings and goings or semblances thereof. Kronauer made his way through the barracks of the abandoned camp. They watched him.
Them or me, doesn’t matter.
Sometimes I cawed as I spread my wings and I acted as if I was only interested in myself, but I actually wasn’t.
• I’ll never ever get to the forest at this pace, Kronauer thought.
As he turned around to see how far he had walked, he noticed a human form walking in the same direction as him. A broken-down building hid whoever it was, then trees kept Kronauer from following with his eyes, then the figure reappeared. They were now separated by about two hundred meters and Kronauer still couldn’t make out the features of his or her face. No rifle on the shoulder, no hint of a pistol on the belt, a generally gray appearance. A prisoner, Kronauer thought.
The other person was physically diminished and, despite the fluffy clothes that made him or her look bigger, looked more like a teenager than an adult.
Kronauer stayed between two pines and waited.
That couldn’t possibly be Samiya Schmidt, he thought.
It was.
She drew near and, when she was four steps away from him, she froze. She was out of breath and, beneath the shapka covering her head, her face was muddy. Exhaustion had swollen her eyelids. Her revolutionary-Chinese-doll physiognomy had diminished to the point that it was hard to connect her now with the juvenile enthusiasm of struggle against the Four Olds. Only her sulkiness remained, only a sort of withheld feminist rage that Kronauer, as a male, risked bearing the consequences of. Up close, it was clear that she was dressed in clothes too large for her and in poor shape. It was also clear that she had put her full effort into catching up to Kronauer as quickly as possible, and that she was now at the point of exhaustion.
They eyed each other for a long minute without saying anything.
In an unexpectedly coquettish movement, Samiya Schmidt brought up her hand, rummaged beneath her shapka, and pulled out the two braids that had been hidden there. The braids now framed her head, ending at vermillion knots that weren’t too wrinkled and generally happy, restoring a little joyful youth to her appearance.
—Do you recognize me? Samiya Schmidt finally stammered in a trembling voice.
—Of course, Kronauer said, unsure what else to say. We worked in the same kolkhoz.
• Sometimes I cawed as I spread my wings and I acted as if I was only interested in myself, but I actually wasn’t.
The grasses, for example. The dead grasses. If I had been asked, I could have named some of them.
Allwoods, torfelian, curse-grass, solfabouts, garveviandre, twirlvains, ulbe-bayan, grandoiselles, ourphonge, ever-fools, ditchcroaks, white Tatars.
30
• Dawn lasted for half an hour, giving way to a persistent grayness that already presaged the darkness of evening. Hannko Vogulian checked that her rifle was loaded and went out. The snow in front of the house was intact. Farther off she saw wolf tracks and, around the carcass of the man she had killed a week earlier, an impressive number of symbols inscribed by birds of prey. They had touched down, pecked, followed, and bickered with each other, hopped away to tear up the bit of flesh they had gotten, and, after digesting they had defecated left and right. The carcass had been moved several dozen meters, as if the animals had wanted to make him disappear in the forest. The wolves had torn off a good part and the birds had attacked the face. Hannko didn’t lean over to do a medical or butcher’s appraisal. She was unable to identify the person she’d shot. She simply knew, instinctively, that she had never met him. She also knew that there would be nothing left at winter’s end because the big and small scavengers could continue cleaning up. And if in the first days of thaw she still found human residue and shreds, she’d scatter them beneath the shrubs, as she had done since time immemorial, for eight hundred eighty-nine years or more. There were already several places like that in the area. Not a huge number, since the visitors were far and few in between, but still several.
• Farther off, Hannko Vogulian came across the remains of an encampment. She had expected this discovery. A week earlier, she had smelled some wood burning, so unexpected in the middle of her winter and her solitude that she had immediately prepared for an enemy attack. The encampment had been set up in a gully about a kilometer from the house, in what had once been a bear’s den. The man had draped a cloth on poles to guard against gusts of wind and snow. On a flat spot nearby, he had made a fire out of needles, pinecones, and twigs. He had hung up his pans, a sort of kettle, several indescribable cloths, and a bag where the animals couldn’t reach them. So he had intended to come back, doubtless after having explored the area and after having put together a plan of action to capture Hannko’s house by eliminating its occupant, moving in, or by unloading his weapons and supplies.
Hannko Vogulian untied the strings and cords and took them with her. She never had enough at hand. The cooking utensils were revolting and she barely glanced at them, left them in the snow where they fell. The bag’s contents, however, brought a satisfied smile to her lips. There was reindeer jerky, berries for making tea, scissors, material for carving up game, balls of tarred thread, hinges for traps. Looking through an inner pouch, she laid hands on a trapper’s lighter like the ones Red Army scouts used to have, heavy and inexhaustible, and she also took out wads of sheets from a disintegrating book, clearly meant to kindle a fire rather than to instill poetic emotions within their reader. She collected her loot and went through the woods back to her solitary residence.
—That was a close call, she whispered as she skirted the frost-covered bushes. That one seemed like a clever little shit.
She liked hearing people give advice. For centuries she had been talking all alone and she considered this a dialogue.
—If I’d opened the door to him, he’d have given me a hard time, she continued.
—Of course, she said.
When she came to the clearing, she made a detour and at first she avoided looking at what remained of the man’s corpse; then she changed her mind, went up and stopped by the scraps of his blood-soaked jacket. Despite the cold, the smell of mangled flesh, excrement, and grime were overpowering. Visible beneath the fabric was a broken ribcage, hardly cleared of the organs it contained. The bustle of the predators wore on for several nights.
Without looking at the man’s head too closely, she spoke to him.
—Well, my boy, she said firmly, as if persuaded that this way the sentence would, after traversing the icy air and then the black space of the Bardo, reach him. Well, my boy, what a state you’ve been left in by these assassins!
• At night, she took out her diary, which she hadn’t looked at for a month, and she began to write. The dates were all made up. She wrote them at random, only certain that there were still fifteen or sixteen more weeks before the thaw, and using this estimation as a basis for giving her calendar some degree of credibility.
• Friday, November 2. Identified, from the east, a human smell. Barricaded myself in the house and stood ready. Smelled like a wandering soldier and campfire. At night didn’t light the lamp. Was in shooting position all night.
Saturday, November 3. At daybreak, saw the prowler hiding behind the trees to examine the house. The wind had covered my footsteps and he had to be wondering if the house was inhabited or not. The wind had changed direction and didn’t bring me his smells. This prowler had a hunter’s patience. He didn’t come into the open and barely moved. Used binoculars to
examine his face. A survivor or a dead man. Bearded and dirty. Verified that it wasn’t Aldolay Schulhoff. Knew this somewhat, but verified. At the end of the afternoon the prowler decided to leave the thicket and, as I had him in my line of sight, I attacked him. I aimed at the middle of his stomach. He fell down and didn’t move anymore. As I didn’t want to have any doubts about his state or any further worries, and as night was about to fall, I took aim at him even more carefully than the first time and I shot a second bullet. Right where the neck meets the shoulder. Decided to stay shut up for the next few days. The corpse would attract animals. Decided to stay shut up for the next few days, away from the animals.
Thursday, November 8. Went out. Twilight and cold. The prowler had been torn apart by wolves. Pecked at by crows. Will deal with what’s left in the spring. Can barely see it from the window, no need to clear the scene. Went to find the place where the man had set off toward the house. Found his encampment and requisitioned whatever I might need. An army lighter. Baits for traps, cords. Also half a book. No cover, no title. Post-exotic narracts. Read two or three. Total garbage. Good for starting a fire.
31
• At the moment the flames stopped roaring, and perhaps a little later, several years later, because now and for a long while you haven’t been calculating time the way you used to, for a long while you haven’t cared about clocks and calendars, so at this second you entered a place that had to be a black lake of tar and naphtha, and for the first while you stayed there without any preconceived ideas and even any ideas at all, busy leaning and loafing and waiting lazily for what would come next, the time that outside would see two or three successive generations go by, satisfying yourself with the thick silence surrounding you, liking this thickness akin to nothing else, sometimes attacked by the miniscule din of a bubble slowly rising from deep down below, and then you heard this noise that was honestly barely perceptible and you made it the basis of a long piece of music, with a rather unvarying melody that didn’t charm you but in which you inserted some dancing modulations and overtone sounds from your glottal cavities and your various diaphragms or what passed for them, also taking pleasure in the spare time you had available, which allowed you to watch films of your previous existences slowly or on loop, to stop as needed on the most powerful images and meditate on the interconnected dreams that had crystallized in your memory without worrying any longer about any difference from your memories of reality and, because you were staying there and barely moving, you took some of the exploits that had piece by piece comprised your life and its countless variations, you took them to speak them and in so doing relive them, yet not neglecting these heroic moments or these oneiric evils or the numerous intersections of difficulty and confusion, because, deep down, your existence, although nicely organized by an iron ideology constantly soaked in the wellspring of black magic, which in and of itself multiplied the realms visited and embellished them with items incomprehensible to dead human bodies, to living human bodies, and to dogs or the like, male or female or dead or the like, so your existence, despite being rich in clear and easily situated events was also disastrously muddled, to the point that you ended, or rather you started, by confusing daughters, wives, and mistresses, simple crimes and massacres, proletarian morals and vile reveries, tyrants and prisoners, birth and death, and, for some time, you justified this difficult wayward trend by leaning on the Bardic yet nebulous theory of canceling out opposites, of dissolving contradictions in an indeterminate and, certainly, a sometimes nightmarish, sometimes not, oneiric mass, and, as you wanted in spite of everything to preserve in history these never-ending trips of wandering and nothingness, and not to limit your words to a hagiographic tale in which you would have been the leader, you refused the method that would have forced you to separate the narrative grain from the baroque chaff and you began declaiming, first, as an introductory prayer, calling forth your secret henchmen, then creating by your mouth the shadows of those who had crossed your path or wandered by accident on the same fate you did, then, the prayer spoken and the shadows formed, you put on the rags of one of your characters who wasn’t the most glorious one, you reincarnated yourself in the unkind figure of Solovyei, and, for several empty and moonless years, because in the tar and the naphtha you were bathing in there was no longer any sky or idea of a sky, during these heavy and dark years you were entirely in your narrative, then the accumulation of anecdotes exhausted you, you felt full and thought of being quiet. Your secret henchmen didn’t respond to your call, or so quiet and small were they that you didn’t notice them. The blackness of your solitude tended to make you fall asleep. You bellowed several more names, you summoned other henchmen. Altoufan Dzoyïek, Döröm Börök, Elli Kronauer, Toghtaga Özbeg the Old, Maria Kwoll, and several hundred others who had played a role in some of your most recent adventures, then you listed your daughters, your wives, and your mistresses. The days went by, none appeared, and as the sound of your voice horrified you, you closed your lips. What stood in for your grimace expressed discontent. The length of your sulking barely matters to us. Your sulking or ours, doesn’t matter. Then the flames returned.
Radiant Terminus Page 38