• Now they were both together around a wood fire. As usual, they were quiet. The night went by, then a day, then another night. The difference between night and day had been imperceptible.
—It may not seem like it, but I was once in love, Aldolay Schulhoff mumbled abruptly.
—Yes, that happened to me too, Kronauer said.
—Oh, Aldolay Schulhoff said. You, too.
The logs crackled. Every so often, a vesicle beneath the bark burst, and for one or two seconds the beauty of a spray of golden sparkles bloomed. They settled into contemplating the fire until it threatened to die. Kronauer added a heavy piece of wood.
—I don’t remember the girl’s name anymore, Aldolay Schulhoff said. It was in a kolkhoz. He screwed up my memory.
—He? Who was he? Kronauer asked.
—I don’t know anymore, Aldolay Schulhoff said. For a long while, I knew, but now I don’t know anymore.
When the piece of wood was done, Kronauer added a second one.
—Me too, briefly, I was in a kolkhoz, he said.
They were quiet until dawn. The fire died. The day flowed, twilit, then the evening came, half-dark. They both moved in silence to take off a newly finished log. Fall had come, frost was imminent; it was best to start a good fire or its equivalent. When the wood was sizzling, when the branches were smoking again and blazing, they relaxed and prepared to spend the night by the magical braids, sleeping amiably and chattering. The flames, at their wildest, were reflected against the door of the nearby train car. All around, the forest showed no movement. An ideal background for a conversation about intimacy or lesser things.
—I loved my wife most, Kronauer said. But I met others.
—Other what? Aldolay Schulhoff asked.
—I remember some of their names, Kronauer said.
—Go on, Aldolay Schulhoff said.
Now the fire purred. They enjoyed listening to it. When the music diminished, Aldolay Schulhoff added a branch to the blaze. The branch took its time before agreeing to burn like the others. Then it conceded. It gave off several indecisively-colored flames, and then its lower half discharged overly bright orange flames, overly twisted, before hunching down again, as if sulking. It seemed not to know exactly what it was expected to do. It had plenty more to learn before turning to ashes.
—Say the names of these girls, since you’ve got them in your head, Aldolay Schulhoff said.
Kronauer collected his memories, his thoughts, his breath.
—Vassilissa Marachvili, Samiya Schmidt, he recited. Myriam Umarik, Hannko Vogulian.
—Never heard of them, Aldolay Schulhoff said.
—Right, why would you have? Kronauer asked.
—Right, why would I have known them, Aldolay Schulhoff said.
• —That was in Solovyei’s time, Kronauer said.
—Never heard of that one either, Aldolay Schulhoff said.
—The kolkhoz’s president, Kronauer said.
—What kolkhoz? Aldolay Schulhoff asked indistinctly.
They were quiet for one or two days. And as happened from time to time, a solitary crow came and perched on a pine branch, practically on top of them, and settled in as if to listen to their conversation and their silence. It was a powerful animal, of monstrous proportions, with a black beak as hard as steel, with shining feathers like dewy, moist tar. From where they were, the two companions couldn’t meet its gaze, but, if they’d had the ability to imagine something of this sort, they would have bet on its yellow eyes, an unbearable golden intensity. The bird appeared comfortable on the branch and barely moved. It barely broke into their dialogue. Sometimes it accompanied it, this meager dialogue, with a ringing caw, or by clicking its wings, and it also sometimes defecated without worrying about which of the two it would hit. But, more than anything, it barely intervened.
• —And your wife’s name? Aldolay Schulhoff suddenly asked.
—What, my wife’s name? Kronauer was panicked.
—You didn’t say it, Schulhoff said.
—No, I didn’t, Kronauer said.
In the darkness, he could be heard moving. Suddenly he breathed more loudly. The air whistled in his nostrils or in his mouth, or in what passed for them.
—You told me you loved her, Schulhoff said. Say a name, that’ll help you to remember.
—Sure, Kronauer said.
The crow clicked its wings harshly above his head and cawed once, twice. In the suddenly-stolen sylvan silence, this scream seemed to stretch forever. When the echoes had completely faded away, Kronauer pitifully wiped away a dropping that had fallen on one of his cheeks, as if it was a teardrop.
—I don’t remember her name anymore, he said. I loved her, yes, that’s for sure. But I don’t remember her name anymore.
43
• There were days when Aldolay Schulhoff had nagging memories of having been in love and trying to find his beloved again, and there were gulfs spanning years or decades during which he suffered inwardly without knowing why. His memory was an open wound, a window onto a universe he knew keenly but which was denied him. He couldn’t pin any names on the silhouettes he could make out, the images of the past didn’t correspond to anything he could actually keep or cherish. His memories were palpably close, but to no avail. Their inaccessibility tortured him.
But sometimes he remembered that he had been a wandering musician and, although in rags, still had several moments of music in his mind. And he wanted to make them resound once more outside, these rags, these moments. It was like the mechanical wish for a last breath. The long tales had lost their coherence, the cycles of byliny had diminished to snatches of disparate fictions. Nothing much had resisted the vast leaching of the centuries. Still, some years bits of songs welled up on the surface of his consciousness, and he was nostalgic for the musical evenings when everybody, himself and his audience, rode on poems and traveled by magic over the immense steppes, through the infinite forests, or into the Second Soviet Union at the peak of its splendor, or toward camps.
And there, at the end of spring, scraps rose to his lips. He told Kronauer about them. He was nearby and half inert, but the idea of another lyrical and poetic evening woke him up and, in the days that followed, he began to move again.
• Scraps of songs. They welled up. Like the black oil leaving the buried villages to form puddles and pools on the earth’s surface. Drop by drop, they came back out, and suddenly, once again, they were songs.
• They took up their roles again. Schulhoff was in charge of the main part of the narrative. As he declaimed, Kronauer played a continuous low note, picking up as best as he could several phrases and, when he lost his breath, tapping rhythmically on the train car’s door with a stick or a dead branch.
Once the roles had been divided up, they set off to go lean against the train’s skeleton. Moving took them some time but they had sworn to give the concert no matter what and the distance didn’t frighten them. With this sort of slow frenzy that the heavily burned militiamen have when they climb out of a shell hole, they progressed toward the peak of the ditch. Then they came to the car and leaned against it.
In front of them, several meters of a grassy slope stretched out, past which the first trees stood. At the base of the pines that they had left, there were traces of a campfire, their campfire, and several items they hadn’t brought with them, half of a dusty soldier’s cover, two sacks that were nearly empty, several logs for later. After some twenty meters of underbrush, the darkness was completely black. In short, only the small space where they were about to give the concert benefited from a little light.
They stopped and faced that. They felt exhausted by the climb, the crawl. For several seasons, they had barely exercised, and they needed to regain their strength at the top of the ditch.
Time went by, as if the performers wanted to see the audience grow before dedicating themselves entirely to epic songs. In reality, the audience was wholly and solely a crow perched on a low branch and which, once or t
wice a day and two or three times a night, swayed as if alive.
—The bird, Kronauer said.
—What, the bird? Aldolay Schulhoff whispered.
Although they were ready to sing, they were both still very out of breath.
—The same one? Kronauer continued after a minute.
—The same as what? Schulhoff whispered.
—Nothing, Kronauer said.
• They stayed for several more hours, then some weeks prostrate against the train car’s door. The twilight in front of them didn’t change. Every so often the humidity increased, as if they had come to the end of a night and the dawn was approaching, then the dew evaporated and, in a way, the day surrounded them. But ultimately neither the brightness nor the ambiance changed. Time stagnated and, in any case, it wasn’t very robust. That allowed them both to rest, Schulhoff to bring back several supplementary passages of the epic to mind, Kronauer to think lazily about his present and the few things he would lose one day as he met extinction.
Smudges of black oil broke through the grasses and slowly grew. Some merged together.
—What if we sang? Kronauer asked.
—Eh, Schulhoff sighed in a tone that indicated his despondence.
He didn’t seem so determined anymore.
—Maybe later, he said.
—It would be better to start before the snow, Kronauer said.
He took the branch he had brought for banging against the car and he struck it awkwardly against the wooden wall behind his head. He was hardly positioned to perform his role as percussionist. Bits of bark and dust darkened his shoulders.
In front of them, perched above their belongings, their empty bags and the logs, the crow shrieked while shaking its wings.
—The audience is waiting, Kronauer said.
He struck the branch against the train car again.
As if affronted in his singer’s honor, Aldolay Schulhoff drew up several centimeters and suddenly his low voice could be heard, quickly followed by a sharp overtone song that was inimitable and very beautiful.
—Ah, Kronauer sighed approvingly in comfort.
He hit the car behind him again.
—The Attack on the Camp, Aldolay Schulhoff announced once he had finished the introduction.
—Ah, yes, Kronauer said approvingly once again.
Silence settled. The forest was black. If there were still birds and beasts nearby, or corpses in a state to hear poetry, they were unnoticeable, because everything was silent.
Then Kronauer began to play the continuous low note, and Schulhoff sang.
• Schulhoff’s tale was confused and spoken poorly, stripped of the vocabulary and style of traditional epics, and on top of that he was singing with a voice that hadn’t been used for far too long and was now rusty and unimproved, but in this terminal landscape—half-unearthed train car, larches and pines waning in a twilight without beginning or end, pools of black oil in the depths of the ditch—and in the presence of an equally sparse audience—two vagrants in extinction, if they counted themselves, and a massive and bad-tempered bird that sometimes disappeared, sometimes reincarnated on a low branch—there was something miraculous.
Schulhoff’s tale. His song. With a musical accompaniment by Kronauer. In the terminal forest. After such long and confused wandering. After so much time. Outside time. In the silent forest. Something miraculous.
• With several interruptions due to declines in energy, nearly-fatal apneas, or gaps in memory, Aldolay Schulhoff continued in his musical narration and, when he didn’t continue, Kronauer took over by delivering the only two things he still somehow had in his head, first a list of wild grasses and grains that a thousand years earlier he had helped Irina Echenguyen to make, and second the list of our best comrades, those who were scrubbed away by fate, shot after a misinterpretation of the Marxist-Leninist classics, reduced to ashes by the enemy, or fallen in unequal battle against the plutonium effluvia that had swept civilization and then the planet.
Aldolay Schulhoff told of the attack on the camp he had been part of. He added spectacular backgrounds and heroic characters, but after several episodes it was clear that he had switched the roles and had set himself in the camp, not outside it. The double fence of barbed wire remained, surrounding the concentration buildings as far as the eye could see, but in the poem, Schulhoff and his companions fought the intruders who wanted to break into the camp to reap its benefits. Guns had been distributed among them all and Schulhoff used them as soon as he had a target in the line of fire. Snow flew in every direction, making the battle doubtful. They had trouble aiming at the convoy two hundred meters from the main doorway, where the shots had been fired from. The arrivals were furious at the welcome their negotiators had been given, and now that they were lying dead in the snow, the camp suffered heavy fire. The delegation had made insane speeches in front of the door, and, when they had been told that there were no more free spots in the barracks, they had grown angry and raised their voices. They’d had to hunt these unwanted spokespeople and, as they seemed intent on staying through the night and maybe even until the spring, the order had been given to slaughter them all. At that point, the situation deteriorated. Hidden in the cars or in the diesel locomotive that had brought them there, the detainees, soldiers, and snipers had peppered the watchtowers and the camp entrance with bullets. Aldolay Schulhoff had heard the bullets’ whistling around him. Some had lodged in his torso, inviting him to lie on his back, his mouth open to the sky, as if eager to receive snowflakes on his tongue and as if he was completely indifferent to the sequence of events.
• He stopped.
—Your turn, he whispered to Kronauer.
It seemed like no more words would cross his lips. His head was slumped on his chest. The song had reached a point beyond which nothing was perceptible.
Kronauer tried his best to make a connection. His eyes had been shut for several hours, and he opened them. The note on which Schulhoff had broken off his declamation wasn’t too low, which allowed him to take it up without the audience realizing what had happened.
He banged the branch on the wall of the train car.
—Now everybody was lying on their backs, their mouths open to the sky, as if eager to receive snowflakes on their tongues and like me, like Schulhoff, completely indifferent to the sequence of events.
A new strike.
—These are our best comrades, he continued.
He listed about thirty, then he was quiet.
44
• Like every other morning for the last few thousand seasons, the Gramma Udgul turned the knob on the radio stand next to her armchair. She wanted to know whether civilization had reestablished itself overnight, or at least whether humanity had survived organic degeneration, cancer resulting from generalized radiation, sterility, and the urge to engage in capitalism.
The apparatus emitted a slight crackle and then was silent.
—Maybe there’s still a pocket of resistance somewhere, she groused. Our little ones can’t just accept total defeat.
She twisted the knob the other way, until the click that marked a break with all possible supply, reception, and hope.
—Doubtless they have something else to worry about than getting the propaganda machines back in order, she mumbled.
No noise rose from the gray ruins around her. Dawn had barely broken.
—Brave little ones, she kept mumbling. Our Komsomols. They’re doing what they can.
• She heard herself talking, because she had some hearing left, but she barely understood what her mouth was proclaiming.
Despite being condemned to immortality from her first interactions with nuclear reactor cores, she had finally registered symptoms of aging, and, especially over the last seventy-nine decades, her physical state had degraded. Mentally, she was still alert, but, body-wise, things weren’t holding up fantastic, to borrow one of her expressions.
Her mouth, for example. Her teeth had fallen out one by one and none
had grown back. Her lips had become deformed and, reduced to two strips of hardened leather, they had partly detached from her cheeks and hung over her chin like sheatfish whiskers. Her tongue, in turn, had lost its elasticity. With such a phonatory apparatus, what vibrated outside barely resembled language. She herself was astonished by the mumbling and clicking she produced and gave up trying to interpret them.
• It was no longer the height of Radiant Terminus’s splendor and the Gramma Udgul’s hangar had suffered irreparable damage. For a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, it had survived the disintegration that had blighted all the village buildings and the taiga’s inexorable advance. But one day the fuel for the small power plant beneath the Soviet had awoken, had suddenly become manic and started working, and from that point on the kolkhoz, although already devastated, already abandoned and left for dead, had gone through another phase of unrest. A series of bizarre nuclear accidents had accelerated the area’s decline. The fuel rods had united. They tried to rejoin the core that had taken up residence at the bottom of the well the Gramma Udgul guarded like a dragon over its treasure. The slope’s foothills had crumbled, the entire hill had slipped and lost its height, so much that the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse building, which was already fragile, had shattered. The warehouse had taken on the look of the iron scrap and girder heaps that had once been shown to schoolchildren in photographs warning them against atomic wars, fires lit by enemies, and apocalypse in general.
Once the racket and dust of the collapse had died down, the Gramma Udgul had looked around her. Her private corner had been destroyed, the pyramids of junk had been scattered, the well’s cover had flown off. She had brought her armchair to the well’s edge, and, without too much effort, she had reconstructed a lair in the center of the ruins. She had recovered her radio, her kettle for tea, several utensils, the remnants of Solovyei’s phonograph, and even seven or eight cylinders that hadn’t been crushed during the disaster.
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