The darkness is thick. Upon carefully examining the nearly perfect circle that the tree’s edge sketches, she notices that she is in the line of sight of two rifles. With her black agate eye, the color of naphthalene death, she has identified Myriam Umarik far off, whose grimy and messy turban is undone, baring a shriveled face, more like a mushroom than a face, with vague hints of flesh and the remnants of an expression both idiotic and cruel. Then she turns her copper-yellow eye, the color of amber, to the left and immediately recognizes the deformations of space and shrillnesses indicative of Samiya Schmidt’s presence. She examines the image. She finally sees a shadow a little more opaque than the vegetal shadows. She has the impression that an intellect is observing her. At that moment, they both exchange the equivalent of a look, she and Samiya Schmidt. Over there, the branches shake, several bushes twist. The two sisters stand at a distance for a few seconds. A horrible whistle tears the air and then abruptly breaks off.
• Oddly, while Hannko Vogulian is drawing several fragments of information concerning her sisters from the depths of her memory, in order to shoot them down at the right moment, she first dredges up a vision that has nothing to do with what she’s looking for. A parasite vision.
She is standing in the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse, next to the soldier Kronauer who has just discovered the carbonized carcass of Vassilissa Marachvili and who is sputtering over her, paralyzed by horror and pity. She would like to show him a little sympathy, but he is closed off in his uncommunicative mania. Soon he will go on a rampage in the village.
She remembers this scene, the smell of socks and metal in the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse, the smell of Kronauer’s sweat, her own smell of perspiration. They have spent the day throwing junk into the well to feed the core. Her wig has slipped and, in front of this man she barely respects, she doesn’t care.
Then the image trembles, then it is gone.
Once again, Hannko Vogulian is lying at the entrance to the clearing, in a darkness that doesn’t bode well, with her two sisters who have aimed their aggression or their arms at her, and she is exhausted.
• At that exact moment, a small crow lands by her, then another on her right sleeve, then another on her neck. All three of them are extremely black. A fourth settles on the hand rubbing the trigger guard. It is icy. She doesn’t brush it away, but waits to see if it will melt. It doesn’t melt. Others already dot the grasses all around, the almourol bushes she is hiding behind. She shakes her hand, then sets her bony finger back on the trigger. The crows are descending from the sky, ever more numerous and black. They turn slowly, sometimes carried askew by imperceptible gusts that cannot be heard. They go or come at low heights. Most of them fall straight down, not as quickly, as drops of water but with the same blind determination. A very light chirping can be heard over the entire surface of the clearing.
Aside from this regular chirping, there is no noise.
The last residual lights are dying.
It becomes more and more densely black.
• The crows fall.
They are small, silent, and odorless.
These are the innumerable links of a black sheet unfolding over the clearing.
An impression of black lightness in the air and, on the ground, an increasingly compact layer, which will stay, which will cover everything, and which will not melt.
The three sisters are now frozen, their rifles pointed at each other. They watch each other from afar with hostility and without trying to make any contact. They know that they have reached the end of their path and they refuse to dirty the hours that remain by bringing back the monstrosities they had suffered for a thousand years, by reviving Solovyei, this cursed father who had transmitted the curse of his own immortality to them. Above all, not to remember Solovyei; this is what all three of them are collectively thinking. They would prefer to focus on insignificant images, they mentally find themselves in the company of this unimportant Kronauer, whom none of them had loved and who had come unheeded into their minds.
And, as the layer of feathers thickens, papering shadows over the last dying grasses of this world, they prepare for the immediate future.
Immediate or distant. The future. Where, whatever happens, there would be nothing.
49
• Aldolay Schulhoff finished singing and, for a time hard to define in the absence of breaths and in the absence of light, Kronauer held the final note, and when he was unable to continue, he continued moving his arms a little, knocking several times on the wall of the train car by banging the back of his head.
Already neither of them remembered what they had said and, in particular, whether they had put themselves in their tales, for lack of any available heroes, or whether they had mixed in their own pasts, or, on the contrary, invented characters and events, or whether they had reused the epic subjects of Siberian or post-exotic or Mongolian traditions, or whether they had included poems and narratives in the gest of the Orbise, and whether they had or hadn’t drifted toward disaster humor or camp humor or the fantastic, in order not to overdo their intimate despair, or whether they’d ventured into parallel universes or tunnels or imaginations, which in principle escaped them and forced them to present versions of reality and totally random dreams and where their characters and their voices were nothing. They were now leaning against the raised remains of the convoy, surrounded by the thick shadow of the taiga. The song had exhausted them.
The lack of an audience, in a way, hadn’t bothered them, and in this moment when their performance had concluded, it saved them from having to get up to bow, which would have required an effort of them that they weren’t able to make anymore. They preferred to stay there, in an exaggeratedly prostrate position, legs splayed and necks bent forward, without having anything else to say or do.
• While they lounged in numbness and in the decline of nearly all their bodily and mental functions, supposedly to collect themselves again after the performance and regain their strength, but in reality because sleeping didn’t concern them, the crow that had listened to them up until then clicked its wings and its beak and landed at the top of the ditch, right next to Aldolay Schulhoff, and he had the vague impression that it was scratching at something right under his forehead.
Several hours fell away, then the crow took flight and disappeared.
Now Aldolay Schulhoff and Kronauer waited for evening, or winter. Neither evening nor winter came.
—It pecked out your eye, Kronauer said.
—Who did?
—The crow, Kronauer said.
—Oh, was it him? Schulhoff said. I thought it was you.
—No, Kronauer said.
His voice was uncertain. He didn’t know. He mumbled another denial.
—Him or you, doesn’t matter, Schulhoff said. As far as it goes.
—It would hurt me if you believed it was me, Kronauer said.
—I don’t believe in anything, Schulhoff said. I’m waiting for the end.
Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French writer who has published twenty books under this name, several of which are available in English translation, including Bardo or Not Bardo (also available from Open Letter) and Minor Angels. He also publishes under the names Lutz Bassmann (We Monks & Soldiers) and Manuela Draeger (In the Time of the Blue Ball). Most of his works take place in a post-apocalyptic world where members of the “post-exoticism” writing movement have all been arrested as subversive elements. Together, these works constitute one of the most inventive, ambitious projects of contemporary writing. In 2014, Radiant Terminus was awarded the Prix Médicis.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is digital editor of Music & Literature. His writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, 3:AM Magazine, Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Brian Evenson has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and has won the International Horror Guild Award and the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror
Novel. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson is a professor at CalArts.
Inga Ābele (Latvia)
High Tide
Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark)
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Esther Allen et al. (ed.) (World)
The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life in Translation
Bae Suah (South Korea)
A Greater Music
Svetislav Basara (Serbia)
The Cyclist Conspiracy
Can Xue (China)
Frontier
Vertical Motion
Lúcio Cardoso (Brazil)
Chronicle of the Murdered House
Sergio Chejfec (Argentina)
The Dark
My Two Worlds
The Planets
Eduardo Chirinos (Peru)
The Smoke of Distant Fires
Marguerite Duras (France)
Abahn Sabana David
L’Amour
The Sailor from Gibraltar
Mathias Énard (France)
Street of Thieves
Zone
Macedonio Fernández (Argentina)
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel
Rubem Fonseca (Brazil)
The Taker & Other Stories
Juan Gelman (Argentina)
Dark Times Filled with Light
Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria)
The Physics of Sorrow
Arnon Grunberg (Netherlands)
Tirza
Hubert Haddad (France)
Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters
Gail Hareven (Israel)
Lies, First Person
Angel Igov (Bulgaria)
A Short Tale of Shame
Ilya Ilf & Evgeny Petrov (Russia)
The Golden Calf
Zachary Karabashliev (Bulgaria)
18% Gray
Jan Kjærstad (Norway)
The Conqueror
The Discoverer
Josefine Klougart (Denmark)
One of Us Is Sleeping
Carlos Labbé (Chile)
Loquela
Navidad & Matanza
Jakov Lind (Austria)
Ergo
Landscape in Concrete
Andreas Maier (Germany)
Klausen
Lucio Mariani (Italy)
Traces of Time
Amanda Michalopoulou (Greece)
Why I Killed My Best Friend
Valerie Miles (World)
A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction
Iben Mondrup (Denmark)
Justine
Quim Monzó (Catalonia)
Gasoline
Guadalajara
A Thousand Morons
Elsa Morante (Italy)
Aracoeli
Giulio Mozzi (Italy)
This Is the Garden
Andrés Neuman (Spain)
The Things We Don’t Do
Henrik Nordbrandt (Denmark)
When We Leave Each Other
Bragi Ólafsson (Iceland)
The Ambassador
The Pets
Kristín Ómarsdóttir (Iceland)
Children in Reindeer Woods
Diego Trelles Paz (ed.) (World)
The Future Is Not Ours
Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (Netherlands)
Rupert: A Confession
Jerzy Pilch (Poland)
The Mighty Angel
My First Suicide
A Thousand Peaceful Cities
Rein Raud (Estonia)
The Brother
Mercè Rodoreda (Catalonia)
Death in Spring
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda
War, So Much War
Milen Ruskov (Bulgaria)
Thrown into Nature
Guillermo Saccomanno (Argentina)
Gesell Dome
Juan José Saer (Argentina)
The Clouds
La Grande
The One Before
Scars
The Sixty-Five Years of Washington
Olga Sedakova (Russia)
In Praise of Poetry
Mikhail Shishkin (Russia)
Maidenhair
Sölvi Björn Sigurðsson (Iceland)
The Last Days of My Mother
Andrzej Sosnowski (Poland)
Lodgings
Albena Stambolova (Bulgaria)
Everything Happens as It Does
Benjamin Stein (Germany)
The Canvas
Georgi Tenev (Bulgaria)
Party Headquarters
Dubravka Ugresic (Europe)
Europe in Sepia
Karaoke Culture
Nobody’s Home
Ludvík Vaculík (Czech Republic)
The Guinea Pigs
Jorge Volpi (Mexico)
Season of Ash
Antoine Volodine (France)
Bardo or Not Bardo
Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven
Radiant Terminus
Eliot Weinberger (ed.) (World)
Elsewhere
Ingrid Winterbach (South Africa)
The Book of Happenstance
The Elusive Moth
To Hell with Cronjé
Ror Wolf (Germany)
Two or Three Years Later
Words Without Borders (ed.) (World)
The Wall in My Head
Alejandro Zambra (Chile)
The Private Lives of Trees
WWW.OPENLETTERBOOKS.ORG
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Contents
Part One: Kolkhoz
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two: Ode to the Camps
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three: Amok
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Four: Taiga
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
About the Author
About the Translator
Radiant Terminus Page 46