37
• Kronauer had started a small campfire. Nearby, less than fifteen paces away, wolves sniffed and, every so often, raised their heads to howl. There were three of them. Kronauer had noticed the smell of their scruffy pelts wafting around him. Dirty fur, scraggly and dirty bodies, the breaths of starving wildlings. They had noticed the fire. Thanks to their animal intuition, to their sixth sense able to detect the supernatural and anomalies in the universe, they knew that a neither-dead-nor-living creature was moving near them, but they couldn’t see anything specific. That unnerved them. They asked the snow and darkness in vain, clattered their teeth, and howled.
It had been night for hours. Kronauer continually added pieces of wood to the flames. The ice had melted around the hearth, but the heat didn’t reach beyond the first branches and no snow masses had fallen to dust the form sitting right below. Kronauer barely moved. He imagined, rightly, that to the wolves he was just a strange shadow, and that not even his fire was reflected in their retinas. After wondering for a minute how to react, he had finally relaxed. He wasn’t in danger. He hated these huge winter carnivores prowling behind the bushes, he hated their breaths, their growls, their urinous mustiness. He didn’t like meeting their beautiful murderous gazes. But he had nothing to fear and, deep down, he missed it, because if he had belonged to a normal world the wolves could have shortened his nightmare by attacking him and eating him. Don’t think you’ll get out of death like that, Kronauer, he thought. Don’t think that you’ll end up right in their jaws. Whether Solovyei’s still interested in you or has forgotten you, you’ll keep waiting. One thousand or two thousand years, doesn’t matter. It’ll go on. Don’t count on something else.
He felt extremely tired. His mind went blank every so often. Now the wolves were gone. He must have dozed off. He added a log to the fire and began to grumble disorganizedly.
• I miss you, he grumbled.
Our best comrades, he grumbled.
Workers, peasants, soldiers, he pondered.
Prisoners. Singers. Captains, monks.
He listed several names in a trembling, heavy voice, with pauses that lasted several minutes or several weeks, that sort of gap. His memory and his inventive faculties were getting worse and worse.
• Mikitia Yerushalim, he grumbled with difficulty. Bölögdar Mourmanski, Gansur Yagakorian, Anaïs Apfelstein, Noria Izmayilbekov. Jean Petitjean. Dondör Zek. Sirène Mavrani. Molnia Krahn. Werner Örgöldaï.
• He had dozed off again. His chest too close to the flames. The right arm of his jacket had caught fire. Small silent flames, accompanied with a nauseating black smoke. Then the rags that surrounded the central zipper of his clothes, then one of his shapka’s earflaps. The burnt smell hadn’t woken him up.
• It’ll pass, I say to keep going. He’s been through worse before.
Our best marionettes, I say. Him or me, doesn’t matter. When he’s stuck I keep going. Zombies, deep shadows, devoted servants. The dead stuck forever in the Bardo. Dead come from the dead. Wives come from unknown mothers. Henchmen. Best puppets and best dolls.
—Samiya Schmidt, I began to recite in a calm but forceful voice. Irina Echenguyen. Elli Kronauer. Vassilissa Marachvili. Barguzin. Hannko Vogulian. Ilyushenko. Myriam Umarik . . .
There was a gust of wind. The day had broken, the fire had gone out. The wolves howled. The branches shook violently. The ashes spun around, scattered on the snow mixed with silt and debris. Several crows watched the scene and, every so often, they opened their wings and beaks halfway and cawed. I had no reason to continue reciting my list. The noise was too deafening around me.
Our best marionettes, I said again in a muffled voice.
The list wasn’t complete.
Then I was quiet.
38
• At the same moment, or perhaps a little earlier, let’s say for example thirteen hundred forty-two lunar months earlier, Myriam Umarik heard a noise in the distance and woke up. She had been dreaming that her father was visiting her in her house in the Levanidovo, that he had briefly seduced her, then broken all the furniture and all the windows and raped her. She had opened her eyes right at the worst of it, and at first she had trouble leaving behind her fear, overcoming her urge to vomit, and understanding that she was beyond Solovyei’s reach, in a reality less painful than that of her nightmare.
She stood up. She had fallen asleep sitting on the little bench that was an extension of the gatekeeper’s shed she had made her residence. She had moved there sixty-seven years earlier with her husband, the engineer Barguzin. The night was stifling and she went out to doze in the open air, in light clothes, not caring about the mosquitoes just as plentiful outside the shed as inside.
The sun had risen and sprinkled gold on the peaks of the birches. It was already warm. This was the end of July, in the middle of a heat wave.
She banged on the wooden partition just behind her, so Barguzin would know something was happening outside. Just out of sheer respect for propriety. In reality, over the years, Barguzin had been lying on the bed, inert and mute, and, as the Gramma Udgul wasn’t there anymore to rub his face with heavy-heavy water, then with deathly-deathly water, and then to revive him by pouring lively-lively water between his eyes, his state hadn’t changed.
—Hey Barguzin! she said in a raspy voice that couldn’t be heard by interlopers. I think somebody’s coming!
• They had both fled the Levanidovo. Radiant Terminus had become unlivable. Shortly after the massacre, the provisional nuclear power plant had exploded in the Soviet’s basement, the accident had ended the energy and hot-water supply in the kolkhoz. A burning wave had set fire to the majority of the kolkhoz’s houses through the underground network. Most of the inhabitants no longer showed any signs of life. Solovyei wandered in the main road, inhaling the smoke and silent fumes, walking on the piles of burned debris, whispering or declaiming poems. He walked heavily and proudly as if nothing had happened, and he only calmed down at night, when he went to join the Gramma Udgul in her hangar, which had suffered less than the rest of the village.
Numb with cold and fear, still drawn to the old dream of collaborating with the Organs, Myriam Umarik and Barguzin had left Radiant Terminus a week before the thaw, without saying good-bye to anyone. They had stocked up on several pemmican loaves, enough to last them until spring and through all the winters to come. In a laminated envelope, able to resist decades of rain and snow, they had enclosed a letter addressed to the Regional Commission for Recruitment into the Organs, where they offered their services for all inspections, surveillance missions, or even executions of people’s enemies the Organs deemed necessary.
For lack of a post office, the letter hadn’t been sent, and even so Myriam Umarik and Barguzin both knew deep down that there was no longer a Regional Commission of the Organs, or any Organs, or even a population to monitor, that there was nothing of the sort for thousands of kilometers, but they felt that they had done something crucial, something that marked their separation from the kolkhoz and its demonic president, and that above all signified their return to general society, which was composed of the living, or at least the dead. And once they had found this gatekeeper’s hut after months of wandering, they had settled in with the idea that they would start a new existence there. They would make themselves useful by rigorously recording the passing trains and vagrants headed from the taiga to nowhere. They’d had enough basic Marxist-Leninist training to put themselves completely into policing power.
The line was closed down and no traveler got lost in the area. But they took their work seriously and always stayed on the lookout, certain that their responsibility was to monitor all movements in the region, both military and civil, and, in this spirit, every month they prepared exhaustive reports on the subject—orally because they didn’t have any paper to write them on.
• Myriam Umarik got off the bench and looked in the direction of the noise that had woken her up. As there were trees and undergrowth all arou
nd, she could barely make out anything specific.
In front of the cottage, the rails had been immersed in grasses and, forty meters off, the tracks joined a grove of birches and disappeared. A thirty-year-old pine had taken root between two crossties and seemed to be positioning itself as the triumphant vanguard of further vegetation. In the other direction, the rails went on for three hundred meters, then sank into a burial mound. There were trees everywhere, with mingled scents, as was often the case on the edge of the taiga. Another time, the steppes had dominated the area, and the forest was now invading it little by little.
Beyond a little curtain of pines, Myriam Umarik saw movement, some colors that weren’t those of the forest, then it was hidden by a crease in the terrain, then it reappeared. Branches were audibly cracking and echoing under the mature trees.
Myriam Umarik’s heart pounded. She hadn’t seen anyone in years and she was afraid she no longer knew how to handle meeting a traveler. Suddenly, she realized she was half naked. She hurried into the hut to put on a skirt and wrap her shoulders in a shawl. She shook Barguzin, who didn’t react, and then she quickly went back out to the doorstep. Now she was standing next to the bench and she waited for the visitors to come.
It was a small caravan of peddlers like the ones who had gone from village to village even before the dawn of industrial capitalism. It was composed of three men, one a teenager, and two overburdened animals who seemed to have mutant bovines as their ancestors, and who more than anything looked like obstinate and mute masses, with hair that swept the ground and prevented her from determining the exact number of their feet. All gave off stifling fragrances of grease, which preceded them horribly for a good twenty meters and made Myriam Umarik want to vomit.
The men were wearing lambskin coats, they had colored shirts on, merchants’ hats, but their clothes were in such disrepair that the rags had no elegance at all. They had faces darkened by filth, and their beards were thick, which displeased Myriam Umarik, as she had lost all her hair in the Levanidovo while in contact with plutonium, and she had to be satisfied with wigs.
• She let them approach as she stood stock-solid several meters from the hut, then she saluted them in the manner of the Altaic Mongols, which seemed most appropriate, welcomed them, and offered to slake their thirst. All three of them made faces and she went to find a pan filled with water that they would share greedily.
Two were fortysomething men, robust and extremely noisome, and the third was a young adult even dirtier than his elders. Myriam Umarik had trouble hiding her disgust, but she smiled at them and swayed from one foot to the other, which made her look like someone who urgently needed to urinate.
A conversation began. They were salvagers as well as peddlers. They scoured ruins and were looking for a refugee camp or a work camp to unload treasures and products. They asked Myriam Umarik about concentration structures in the area and about any paths that might lead to those.
—There’s nothing of the sort here, Myriam Umarik replied.
These individuals didn’t please her at all, their activities were clearly associated with those of the people’s enemies, and their fetid odors nauseated her.
Then they asked her what she was doing, in the forest, in this hut so far away from everything.
—I’m from the Second Soviet Union, Myriam Umarik declared nervously, while throwing back her head arrogantly. With my husband, here, we watch for trouble. Even in the most distant corners, the supreme law of the proletarian revolution reigns. Here we warn people not to stand on the tracks, to cross them carefully, not to ruin the common good. We alert the authorities to hooligans, suspects, and partisans of capitalism.
The three men laughed through their beards.
Then they tied her up. One of them went inside the hut to see whether the husband she had mentioned could pose a problem, then he came back to say that he was harmless. Then, in turns, they raped her.
39
• Hannko Vogulian set her pen aside and counted the pages she had just written. Four. In a week, she had inked twenty-two. She had a small gleeful smile. Her work was progressing.
Everything was calm in the house and in the environs. There had been a cold snap and the snow had hardened. The slightest noise in the forest reverberated for kilometers. Nothing alarming had happened outside since night’s fall. She didn’t even need to go to the window to scan the clearing and its outskirts. It was enough for her to listen. She could also analyze the air that had entered through the cracks. Smells of snow, of larches hibernating. She took several deep breaths to find out more. Outside, a fox had kept watch for a minute before darkness. It had left its acrid stench in the cranberry patch. Farther off a second fox, maybe a vixen, had unearthed a magpie carcass and carried it away. As far as recent traces went, that was all.
Hannko Vogulian adjusted the lamplight, which had fallen a bit, and picked up her pen. She wrote slowly and without crossing anything out. She was trying to rewrite, sentence by sentence, the original text of Dogs in the Taiga, a little novel by Maria Kwoll she had read hundreds of years earlier in the kolkhoz library. She transcribed as best as she could what her memory dictated, but often she was sure she was inventing and, besides, she was knowingly replacing forgotten sections with summaries and abridgements of her own, or aphorisms she felt were appropriate. From a strictly literary point of view, what she was doing was an aberration, but she didn’t care. I could say as much, as far as I’m concerned. Her or me, doesn’t matter. What did make a difference, ultimately, was that she darkened her notebook with prose.
• Here, a rape scene, Hannko Vogulian wrote in her role as copyist, but she didn’t really know if she was speaking on behalf of Maria Kwoll or her own self.
Here a new rape scene. Another one. I’ve systematically avoided describing them in detail. Alluding to them is enough. For victims, it’s unbearable. For witnesses, it’s equally unbearable. We’re confronted with the filthiness of the cock’s language, at one moment or another we have to go along with the exhalations of the cock’s language, we have the impression of sharing something with the rapists. Into every description of rape comes an element of complicity. I’ve always avoided that and it’s not because I know Myriam Umarik that I’m going to watch this scene objectively, as a witness, or that I’m going to plunge back into the horror subjectively, incarnating myself within her.
Three merchants wreathed in a fetid aura, men who came from the forest after weeks of traveling without ever cleaning off their excrement or dust, three brutes stinking of sweat from effort and solitude, stinking of emanations from their glands, three harsh males greedy for money, junk sellers and rapists.
I have no desire to make them appear in my writing, Hannko Vogulian wrote, except to kill them, to help Myriam Umarik take revenge, to bleed them messily and kill them.
• Hannko Vogulian sighed. She had changed the name of the unfortunate heroine in Dogs in the Taiga and bestowed upon her the name of her sister.
She was reluctant to continue the story where she had left off. In Dogs in the Taiga, the heroine’s revenge had eventually come about, but the heroine took at least thirty pages to find the right moment, and Hannko Vogulian was torn between her confused, incomplete memories of Maria Kwoll’s text and her wish to see Myriam Umarik assassinate her torturers as quickly as possible.
She put the rest of the novel off until the next day. As she still had several hours before nodding off, she decided to insert several of Maria Kwoll’s aphorisms and reflections instead of rewriting the descriptions of landscapes the author always inserted when she didn’t have the courage to continue her narrative. All these images of nature, of trees or grasses that she used to pull out of the hells she had sent her characters to.
• The swamp of their bodies, Hannko Vogulian wrote, the cock’s fog of their bodies, the cock’s and blood’s language, an ideology forged in the Mesozoic era, the pitiful hormonal urges of their sexual organs, their ancestral culture of rape, their sexual educatio
n entirely organized around some of them penetrating the others, predatory behaviors that nothing had changed, lewd normalcy, expecting rut, female complacency established by incessant and domineering conditioning, female submission to the cock’s language, their permanent apprenticeship to disaster and rape, their ancestral female culture of rape, the feelings of shame, abnormality, or ridicule imposed upon females if they rejected penetration. Expecting moans, trembling, excretions. This deep sexual catastrophe all fell into without a struggle, living and dead alike, comrades and enemies alike, commingled in the same sludge, egalitarian prigs as well as partisans of capitalism and slavery, without a struggle, into this same hideous mire.
• Then she shut her notebook and set it on the shelf.
—Well, I’ll come back to that later, she said.
She turned off the lamp. She went to get a white she-wolf pelt and wrapped it around her legs before sitting in an armchair facing the window. Next to the armchair, right by her hand, she had propped up a loaded rifle.
Now—which is to say for several centuries—she was like the Gramma Udgul had once been, never really sleeping. She just dozed in darkness, while murmuring dreams rather than projecting them unconsciously on her inner screens.
And she waited.
40
• A bird beneath the clouds. Very gray, the clouds, very black, the bird, and when it clicks its wings to regain altitude, it’s also noticeable that it’s rather large, let’s say the size of a human or thereabouts, or a corpse. It clicks its wings forcefully in the wind, at the edge of the haze, but nobody hears it or sees it. It’s above the taiga, there aren’t many people either on the ground or in the air. The bird stays in the same place, follows a current, glides, comes back. Below, successions of small hills as far as eyes can see, some gullies, millions of trees, no paths, occasional bare patches filled by lakes of dark water or stretches of oil. The sky can’t be seen from the earth, the branches get in the way, but it, the bird, notices the smallest detail through the leaves, the needles, as if the earth was naked and deserted. It has this gift. It has this kind of gaze. It clicks its wings to play with the wind, it soars, it drifts, it hides as a floating, unmoving object. It or I, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t dive, it stays up high, but, no matter the variety of trees it overlooks, no matter how thick and dense the treetops, to its eyes it’s as if everything was transparent. It sees everything. But not everything interests it. What it watches is the caravan that advances, with its two overburdened animals, its three heinous merchants, and their captive.
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