Radiant Terminus Read online

  It was Hannko Vogulian, not the people who had gone, who had summed up the story of the fruitless Red Star trip for him. When they had come back to the village, Kronauer was still unconscious, and then, as soon as he’d woken up, Hannko Vogulian had rushed to tell him everything, in hopes that he would stop worrying about his lost comrades. He didn’t show his grief or his shock, and he indicated without wasting any words that he had come to terms with this act of fate and now wanted to become part of this kolkhoz by fulfilling the tasks entrusted to him. However, in hopes of getting more details, he sometimes asked for a few more particulars. Myriam Umarik was happy to talk with him, but she didn’t have anything useful to add. Morgovian, who had gone on the expedition, barely said three sentences on the subject. He repeated that they had, Solovyei and he, combed through the grasses, combed through the environs, that they had seen traces of ashes, the remnants of a bivouac, but nothing else. Kronauer’s insistence put him in a bad mood. As for the president of the kolkhoz, Kronauer rarely saw him on his way, and always off in the distance. They passed without waving, and it would have, of course, been out of place to stop him to ask what he had seen at the Red Star. The idea of initiating a conversation with Solovyei didn’t even occur to him, since he, even more than the Gramma Udgul, seemed dark and hostile.

  • In short, he had passed out, he had woken up, and now he belonged to the small cohort of the Levanidovo’s inhabitants, more or less dead or living, with a status he had trouble appreciating, because he never knew what he was in the kolkhoz—a prisoner on parole, an unwanted guest, a refugee begrudgingly accepted more out of duty than compassion, or already a full member of the Levanidovo’s community. President Solovyei’s watchfulness weighed down on him, the forest surrounding the village dissuaded him from going elsewhere, into the uninhabitable zone where he knew he would only last a few days. Physically, he hadn’t regained the energy he’d had as a soldier in the Orbise, he felt like he was in bad health, fragile, much like Barguzin who fainted often and who, without the Gramma Udgul’s attentive care, would have long since been carried in his terminal form to the edge of the well, to meet the warm and welcoming heart of the nuclear core two kilometers down. And, on a psychological level, he suffered from confusion, his mind troubled by hazy memories, long-winded dreams, and the constant certainty that he’d already lived what he was now living once or several times. These problems didn’t bother him much on a day-to-day basis, but they cast a gloom over him, because he didn’t know if the excessive radiation was causing him to suffer a serious degenerative illness, or if Solovyei had possessed him just to mess with him, playing with him like a puppet before sending him back to the steppes, brainless and stupid, or to the bowels of the earth.

  • For weeks now, he had gotten dressed with clothes taken from the dead or from the surviving cripples in the kolkhoz, from nonexistent husbands, from disappeared sovkhozniks of similar height. He felt perfectly comfortable in them. The things he had brought upon his arrival had long since been cleaned and dried, brought to his room, put in a box that he had shut and never opened again. His coat, however, had been hard to wash. The lining came away in shreds. He had spent time stitching it back together and clumsily patching the pockets, the right side, the collar. He did the same for the rest of his rags. He mended them and reinforced them as best as he could. He wanted to be able to reuse his original outfit if he was ever asked to return the clothes lent by the kolkhoz. But, deep down, he knew that they would never ask. Radiant Terminus functioned on ideological principles that didn’t match up to the collectivist norms of the Orbise, but, as far as the allocation of goods went, the end result was the same. Disdain for property was, as had been the case throughout the Second Soviet Union, commonplace in the Levanidovo. It was a place where the Party had been extinguished, where the Party no longer existed, but where the idea of reestablishing capitalism and the bourgeoisie hadn’t occurred to anyone, and besides it had to be asked just what this thing called capitalism would have looked like at Radiant Terminus, and what bourgeoisie could be called upon to oppress the working class. In any case, if by some miracle the enemy had braved the radiation to come implement its barbaric program in the Levanidovo, they would have met opposition so radical that its programmers and hit men would have swiftly been sent to the pit, along with other dangerous trash.

  • While the sunlight caressed him, Kronauer thought about the kolkhoz, about his provisional stay in the kolkhoz, about the provisional that threatened to become permanent, and about everything that seemed strange, misunderstood, or incomprehensible. He had just kneeled down once more by the fire hydrant by Myriam Umarik’s house. The leak showed ill will and Kronauer’s repairs had only held for a few days, after which the seals had loosened and everything needed to be reset. Barguzin hadn’t been interested in the problem and, even though the puddle in front of his house had been growing larger, he was counting on Kronauer to put things right again.

  Kronauer was now listening to the water hissing under the hydrant’s hood and, rather than dealing with the problem, he stayed idle, unmoving, and almost drowsy.

  A heavy door banging startled him. Hannko Vogulian, Solovyei’s oldest daughter, had just left the Soviet, which was also where her father lived.

  She came toward him.

  Her princess-like face shone under the sun, more Yakut than ever before and more magical than ever before. Her hairstyle had changed, her hair was now in two long black braids that were no longer tied around her forehead in a crown. Over the weeks, Kronauer had learned to look directly at her. He was no longer bothered by the disparate colors of her two eyes, as he had been at the beginning of his stay, and now he actually tried to immerse himself in those eyes, because he found them both wonderful and touching. Although he was deeply troubled by reading Maria Kwoll, he didn’t hold back from imagining Hannko Vogulian stretched out beside him, tilting her body mellowed by the exhaustion of love and displaying one of her precious-stone eyes, sometimes the black onyx one, and sometimes the tiger’s-eye one with flaming depths. He imagined it or he remembered it. She whispered magical and perfectly indecipherable syllables, maybe affectionate and maybe spiteful, in the shadows. It was one of those scenes that he wasn’t sure had happened in reality, in a dream, or in one of the false memories that he suspected Solovyei of having cleverly implanted beneath his consciousness, while he was sleeping or passed out. He would have liked to know, but he would have never dared to ask Hannko Vogulian just to have a clear conscience. Sometimes he scrutinized her with the idea of finding some hint of complicity, he interrogated her mutely while considering the dampness of her eyes, the movement of her hands, her way of walking toward him. But he did this haltingly and he never got any answer. Whether among her sisters or on the Levanidovo’s empty main road, Hannko Vogulian remained aloof and never deviated from her unfriendly stiffness.

  She stopped three paces away from him.

  —You’re going to be transferred, she said.

  —But I’ve just gotten used to my cell, he joked.

  —There’s no heat where you’re sleeping, Hannko Vogulian said. The cold’s coming. We’re going to put you in another room. There’s a radiator that heats properly. It’s the same boiler as the one for the showers.

  —All right, Kronauer said.

  He looked at her tiger’s eye. He dove in and lived another life in there.

  • He bent down and walked his fingers behind the pipes to see where they came out. From time to time, when he touched something hard, the finger that had been pricked by the phonograph needle came back to mind, and, for half a second, he felt like the needle was sinking into his finger again and burning it. The wound hadn’t even left a scar, but at moments like these a quick pain shot through his entire hand, like an electrical shock. His fingers snagged along a metal bas-relief and he shuddered quickly. He caught himself, he didn’t want to explain once again in front of Hannko Vogulian what had happened with Solovyei’s phonograph. But she noticed the movem
ent of his shoulders.

  —What’s wrong? she asked.

  —Nothing, he said. I thought a bug had bitten me. An ant or a spider.

  —There aren’t any spiders left, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —That’s not something I’m very sad about, Kronauer said as he kept following the pipe.

  The water beaded between his fingers. I can’t do anything about that, he thought. It’s not even the seal. It’s the clamp that’s deformed. I’d have to take it all apart and take it to a fitter, or find something equivalent in the Gramma Udgul’s bric-a-brac. A spare fire hydrant. No idea whether she’d have one. And it’s too much work for me.

  Hannko Vogulian was wreathed in light and, even though he knew she was still looking him disdainfully, he looked at her with a happy smile. He had long since realized that she was even prettier than Myriam Umarik and, because he now knew how to look at her two eyes, he didn’t hesitate to look at her directly.

  They talked for a minute about spiders, the steppes, the big steppe spiders called mizguirs or mazguirs which had been completely eradicated by radiation in just a few months, before inexplicably reappearing on the expedition Solovyei and Morgovian had taken the day after Kronauer had come to the Levanidovo.

  Once again, Hannko Vogulian recited what sounded like an official version of the events, a coherent whole that Kronauer had already heard from various sources, and which barely varied in its terms. Having arrived by the railroad, Solovyei and Morgovian had surveyed the hill overlooking the Red Star sovkhoz. They had shouted, combed through the grasses, examined the grasses and what they revealed of man’s passage. Nobody was there. Aside from the traces of the soldiers having bivouacked several meters away from the rails, there were no clues. They had explored the environs for a long while, in case Kronauer’s comrades had been abandoned after being violated or executed. They had searched through the sovkhoz’s ruins, including the farthest-away buildings and in the place where the nuclear generator was still buzzing, surrounded by burning blocks that had burst from its core. But nothing. No corpses, not even crumpled ryegrass stalks that would have given them reason to suspect that there had been a crime.

  —Maybe the soldiers offered to let them get in the convoy. If they accepted, they’d be far away by now.

  —I can’t believe that, Kronauer replied.

  It was a phrase he usually uttered at this point in the conversation.

  —They would have left a message, he continued.

  —They didn’t leave anything, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —A message for me, Kronauer mused. In writing or some other way. They were waiting for me. They knew I was coming back.

  They stood there for a minute, thinking. Upright and facing each other in the center of the Levanidovo.

  —Vassilissa Marachvili was dying, Kronauer continued. She couldn’t be moved. She wouldn’t have gone far.

  —Solovyei said that was your fate, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —What was? Kronauer asked.

  —To have dying women nearby.

  Kronauer shrugged.

  —What does he know, he whispered. What does he know about my life.

  —I don’t know, Hannko Vogulian said after a short while. Maybe he saw it in the flames.

  He tried to find a hint of sympathy in Hannko Vogulian’s tawny eye, he admired it once again just then, the nonpareil color, but his search was fruitless and he quickly turned away.

  —What flames, he finally grumbled, unconvinced and hardly expecting an answer.

  • As he didn’t dare to meet her astonishing eyes, presuming that she would see some insolence in his own, he turned toward the countryside that he now knew by heart. The village’s main road turned into a path that led to the forest and stopped by the first pines. At that point, it became an impassable forest trail, which Kronauer had taken to get out of the old forest and which he would never cross in the other direction, toward the marshes, the dark silence, the furious trees, and the giant anthills. The Levanidovo was an enclosed area and Kronauer no longer knew exactly which direction he should look to imagine the exact location of the Red Star sovkhoz, the railroad, and the steppes. As for the rest, the other directions, Morgovian had suggested that there was nothing beyond the trees, that the stretches of larches had no limits and if anyone should go there by mistake, they’d go in any direction, and only go deeper, tragically, into the taiga.

  Kronauer didn’t linger on the dark line encircling the kolkhoz and he briefly contemplated the completely yellow meadows, the distant farms in ruin, and then he noticed Abazayev’s apiary and he saw Abazayev himself walking between two rows of beehives toward the valley. The Levanidovo still functioned somewhat normally, despite losing its inhabitants, its dogs, and its cattle.

  —This Vassilissa Marachvili, did you know her well? Hannko Vogulian cut in. Were you lovers?

  —We fought together, Kronauer said. We fled together.

  —And slept? Did you sleep with her? Hannko Vogulian asked.

  —Hmm, I don’t remember, Kronauer said with a blush. Maybe once or twice. Or maybe not at all.

  —If you slept together, then she was your wife, Hannko Vogulian decided. But if you didn’t, then who was she?

  —I don’t know, Kronauer said.

  They didn’t talk for a few seconds. They thought about themselves, about marriage, about copulations such as the ones Maria Kwoll and her disciplines had described and such as the ones they had experienced in reality, about Vassilissa Marachvili, about Irina Echenguyen, who had indeed been Kronauer’s wife, about Schulhoff who had indeed been Hannko Vogulian’s spouse, however briefly.

  —She was in very bad shape when I left, Kronauer said.

  He wanted to call up Vassilissa Marachvili’s image again, as she had been when he had abandoned her, which he had carried with him while fighting his hardest against all appearance of emotion and grief, the last image of Vassilissa Marachvili.

  —You see, that’s exactly what Solovyei’s saying. That your specialty is being accompanied by a dying woman, Hannko Vogulian remarked. You’ve always got a girl in bad shape beside you. Dead or dying.

  —No, Kronauer said.

  —He says that all your women will die close to you, one after the other. Already there’s been Vassilissa Marachvili on the steppe. Samiya Schmidt in the forest, during her bout. Irina Echenguyen in the Orbise. And certainly there have been and will be many others.

  —Why are you talking about Samiya Schmidt? Kronauer asked angrily. She was never my wife. And besides, she’s not dead.

  —What do we know? Hannko Vogulian said.

  —What? Kronauer asked. She was unconscious in the middle of the forest. I brought her back to the village on my back. Nothing else happened between us. She came back home sane and safe.

  —That’s not what Solovyei says, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —Instead of listening to Solovyei, you could just ask her.

  —We asked her, actually.

  —And? What did she say?

  —She didn’t say anything. She barely talks at all anymore. She barely talks at all ever since she came back from the forest with you.

  • —Listen, Kronauer. You came here by accident and not by choice, Hannko Vogulian said. You’re our guest. We’re not asking your opinion. And if you want mine, my opinion, you’d do best to turn your tongue in your mouth seven times before talking about Solovyei.

  —Why? Kronauer asked. Because he’s watching me? . . . Is he listening to us? Right now, is he listening to us?

  —Maybe, yes. In any case, he hears us.

  —I don’t believe that. And even if he did hear us, I don’t care at all.

  —He doesn’t like you, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —Well? Kronauer said back.

  —No, really, he doesn’t like you at all, Hannko Vogulian insisted.

  part two

  ODE TO THE CAMPS

  9

  • Vassilissa Marachvili had closed her eyes the minute
Kronauer set off. She opened them fifteen minutes later without saying anything, and then, because for her it was the end, she did not open them ever again.

  Ilyushenko had to fight against his drowsiness. If he didn’t let himself go completely, it was more out of solidarity with Kronauer, who at that moment was walking toward the forest, toward prospective help, and less because he was nervous about losing sight of the soldiers farther down the slope. He went back to Vassilissa Marachvili and watched her breathe. He had to stay on his knees, in a painful position, so as to resist the temptation to lie down next to her and not think about anything until there was nothing left. At that moment, she seemed peaceful, but death’s approach clouded her face. A gray dew broke through her grimy skin, amid the hardened flecks dirtying her cheeks. The blood had withdrawn from her dried lips. She had vomited when they had come to the Red Star. Her ragged battle-dress stank.

  Half an hour passed.

  Half an hour had passed.

  The sky was less bright. The gusts of wind diminished. The grasses exhaled their scents of stalks threatened by rot and they remained unmoving in their yellowing green. Kronauer had disappeared toward the forest.

  —He’s on the way, he’ll come back, Ilyushenko murmured, as if he was answering Vassilissa Marachvili.

  She didn’t react. Ilyushenko sighed. I hope he’ll come back, he thought.