Radiant Terminus Read online

  —Swamps, she said. Anthills as tall as houses. Fallen trees everywhere. Hanging moss. No trails.

  Her eyes had just opened partway. Kronauer met her gaze: two brown stones, intelligent, mistrustful. Her eyelids were a bit slanted. In this face that exhaustion had turned ugly with bits of earth, framed by dirty hair, her eyes were where beauty was distilled.

  She could sense Kronauer’s interest in her, and, because she didn’t want any special bond between the two of them, she quickly focused on a point behind him. An abrasion on a trunk.

  —If you don’t know the way, you’ll get lost, she said.

  —What about you? Do you know the way? Kronauer asked.

  —Yes, she said quickly. I live there. My husband is a tractor driver in the kolkhoz.

  —If you’re going back to the village, we can go together, Kronauer said. That way I wouldn’t get lost.

  —I can’t walk, she said. I’m not able to. I had a bout.

  —A bout of what? Kronauer asked.

  The woman didn’t reply for a minute. Then she took a heavy breath.

  —What about you? Who are you? she asked.

  —I’m Kronauer. I was in the Red Army.

  —From the Orbise?

  —Yes. It collapsed. The fascists won. We tried to fight for as long as we could, but it’s over.

  —The Orbise fell?

  —It did. Everybody knows about that. They had been closing in on us for years. We were the last holdouts. Now there’s nothing left. It was a complete slaughter. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear about that here.

  —We’re isolated. There’s no radio because of the radiation. We’re cut off from the rest of the world.

  —Still, said Kronauer. The end of the Orbise. The massacres. The end of our own. How is it you didn’t hear about that?

  —We live in another world, said the woman. The Levanidovo is another world.

  • There was silence. The water Kronauer had swallowed gurgled in his stomach and, in the quietness that prevailed around them, he felt ashamed. He made himself talk to cover up the noise.

  —You could be my guide, he said hurriedly.

  The woman didn’t reply. Kronauer had the feeling that his body would make more rumbling noises. To cover up the obscene hymn of his entrails, he spouted off several useless sentences.

  —I don’t want to get lost. You said there are swamps and no trails. I don’t want to find myself all alone in there. With you, it won’t be like that.

  He said that with a great effort, and the woman quickly realized that he was hiding something. His words rang false. He was putting up a front. She was starting to be afraid of him again, as a male, as a rough-hewn soldier guided by bad intentions, who might be violent, who might have sordid sexual needs, who might murder sordidly.

  —I can’t walk, anyway, she reminded him.

  —I could carry you on my back, Kronauer suggested.

  —Don’t try to hurt me, she warned. I’m the daughter of Solovyei, the president of the kolkhoz. If you hurt me, he will follow you. He will come into your dreams, behind your dreams, and into your death. Even when you’re dead you won’t escape him.

  —Why would I hurt you? Kronauer protested.

  —He has that power, the woman insisted. He has great powers. It will be horrible for you, and it will last for one thousand or two thousand years if he wants, or even longer. You will never, ever see the end.

  Once again, Kronauer plunged quickly into her gaze. Her eyes showed indignation, anguished indignation. He shook his head, shocked that she might be afraid of him.

  —Don’t hurt me, she repeated sharply.

  —I’m going to carry you on my back, that’s all, Kronauer said. You’ll show me the way and I’ll carry you to the Levanidovo. That’s all. There’s no ill will here.

  They stayed frozen for a minute, both of them, unsure what movement to make to begin the next episode.

  —You wonder why you’d hurt me? Solovyei’s daughter said. Well, there’s really no point asking. All men try to hurt women. That’s their specialty.

  —Not mine, Kronauer said defensively.

  —That’s their reason for being on earth, said Solovyei’s daughter philosophically. Whether they want to or not, that’s what they do. They say it’s natural. They can’t restrain themselves. What’s more, they call that love.

  • Samiya Schmidt was the third daughter of Solovyei. She was born to an unknown mother.

  Like her two older sisters, also born in the Levanidovo to unknown mothers, she had lived in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz nearly her entire life. She had gone to primary school in the Levanidovo, where a Red Star sovkhoz cowherd whose cancerous masses hadn’t yet become malignant had taken on the role of educator. Over the years, this woman had devoted the last of her strength to transmitting all that she knew to these three girls of the village: reading, arithmetic, the basics of Marxism-Leninism, historical materialism explained for simple souls, as well as useful principles of veterinary practice and animal hygiene, then, as had been fated but postponed due to physiological incongruities, she was turned into an uncommunicative sooty doll. Solovyei then called on his own magical powers to find someone who could replace her for the next school year.

  By a pitch-black moonless night, he called up the fires of the nuclear heart of the small kolkhoz reactor, and he entered death through the fire, as he often did during his self-imposed exile at Radiant Terminus. Once he had gone beyond the fire, he had gone looking for a teacher. His needs were twofold: first, the teacher in question had to agree to work in the Levanidovo without any question about salary or risk premiums, and second, he had to teach the class without lecherously ogling the three students, nearly all of whom were already nubile. Rummaging through the ashes of dreams, he unearthed a former political captain who had become a cooperative worker, and then been shot for corruption. All too happy to leave the shadows where he had moped around, the man—named Julius Togböd—accepted the job and started working in the Levanidovo school, and he brought his students up to a reasonable educational level. But, after three semesters, he started to lecherously ogle Hannko, the oldest of the three girls, and Solovyei had to intervene.

  Solovyei, as father of the students and as president of the kolkhoz, reproached him, then knocked him unconscious with a shovel, and then dragged him into the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse to the well. Even though it wasn’t a workday, the Gramma Udgul had no problem letting him unscrew the heavy cover. The schoolteacher ended his journey two kilometers deep and whether he lecherously ogled the nuclear core or not could only be guessed at. The Gramma Udgul didn’t broach the topic in her conversations with the core, rightly considering it a private matter.

  Following this disagreeable experience, the school still existed, but Solovyei’s daughters were asked to work as autodidacts. They went there in the morning and studied together lazily and disorganizedly. They read heavily, because the House of the People library was well-furnished with agitprop pamphlets and the classics of economics and literature. All the important male and female novelists of the Orbise were there: Ellen Dawkes, Erdogan Mayayo, Maria Kwoll, Verena Nordstrand, and a full spread of others. The girls read those authors in preference to technical works. Their father, however, warned them against the nihilistic nonsense of the poets and the tragic uselessness of their fictions. In spite of such admonishments, they steeped themselves in the post-exotic masterpieces. They understood that Solovyei, who prided himself on writing, was expressing an opinion that an author’s allure could overpower critical impartiality.

  From time to time, an adult came to round out their incomplete education. He would tell them a story or share his experiences with them. The adults were rarely skilled at transmitting their knowledge; they had never learned how to teach, and they had never considered the question of adapting a curriculum for their small audience, but they took their job to heart. They did their best to explain how the world they had experienced worked. Some days, the Gramma U
dgul taught the girls how to use the kolkhoz rifles and explained how to put together a firing squad, and other days, she described the liquidation campaigns she’d gone on, how the liquidators had died, her ongoing difficulties with the Party and her clashes with the medical commissions that had examined her in public to study the mechanisms of her immortality. The engineer Barguzin talked about electrical and nuclear installations, short circuits and angry atoms, and he also discussed his blackouts and his passages through death, as well as his reawakenings after being treated with heavy-heavy water, deathly-deathly water, and lively-lively water. He tried his hardest never to look his students in the face, out of fear that he might be accused of inappropriate conduct by Solovyei and end up prematurely at the bottom of the liquidation well. The one-armed man Abazayev came to gesticulate in front of the blackboard and recount once again the convoluted circumstances that had resulted in the loss of his right arm, a misfortune connected to his enlistment in the army that he sometimes wanted to link to a heroic act, sometimes to a surprise attack by capitalist henchmen, sometimes to hand-to-hand combat with a property manager, but according to Solovyei he had simply suffered from meningitis and poor medical care. When Abazayev was sufficiently enmeshed in discussing the reasons for his amputation, he changed the topic and gave directions for how to clean drainage canals, transport irradiated materials in carts, and smoke moles out of their burrows, three specialties he excelled at in the Levanidovo. The tractor driver Morgovian stepped in, as well. He didn’t talk often, but he came in. As there were no longer any working tractors in the village, he focused on the kolkhoz beehives and henhouses. He sketched out diagrams of hives on the blackboard and copied in chalk the list of symptoms for avian flu. He also abstained from looking at the three students who, over the years, looked more and more like beautiful young women well worth courting or marrying.

  Other improvised teachers sometimes showed up in front of the students. They were usually former members of the Gramma Udgul’s liquidation team who hadn’t survived the radiation, or kolkhozniks who had died in the forest or in the open fields, angry at being left unburied. They came into the classroom, knocked over chairs, and tried to talk, but the girls drove them out.

  Solovyei personally never opened the schoolroom door to round out his daughters’ education. He preferred to go into their dreams. Whether he chose to go through fire, to enter body and soul into this black space, or to fly forcefully through the shamanic skies, some nights, he ended up deep in their sleep and walked around without knocking. He had edifying conversations with them where he declaimed his own poems in a hissing voice, but mostly he took advantage of his visit to explore the nooks and crannies of their consciousness, their fantasies, their secret desires. He was obsessed by the ills men could inflict upon them and he watched them, feeling that they were too young to know how to defend themselves against their lovers’ vileness. The girls respected Solovyei and did not deny him their love, but from the day they had their first periods, they began to hate this sort of intrusion, this imperious and unnatural penetration, and in the morning, silently or openly, they remembered that he had appeared within them, that he had disturbed their privacy, and that he had forced himself on them to explore the hidden secrets of their unconscious and their body in general. They remembered the trips he had wantonly taken within themselves. It was a memory that disgusted them and that they refused to consider trivial or furtive, that they were not willing to relegate to the numerous dream-sensations that waking cleared away. They could not forgive him for that. The next morning, if they saw their father on the way to school, they barely said hello to him, and they made it clear that they were sulking.

  • Samiya Schmidt was now thirty-one years old. She had stopped going to school twelve years earlier. She hadn’t left with a solid university education, but she had practical knowledge in nearly every realm of agricultural mechanics as well as theoretical knowledge about economics, the history of the camps, and occupational medicine, because, aside from Maria Kwoll’s fictions, she had, for lack of anything better, devoured the popularized booklets from the House of the People library one after another. The kolkhoz president had awarded her a diploma with honors at the end of her studies, in case she needed one on the outside, but she stayed in the Levanidovo and married the tractor driver Morgovian.

  Her marriage to Morgovian hadn’t been a catastrophe, but nobody would say that it had made her happy. Morgovian was afraid of her and he behaved himself as a result. She struck an animalistic fear into him. Partly because she was the daughter of the kolkhoz president and also because she was an authoritarian sort with intellectual and emotional needs he couldn’t understand. And finally, he was terrified by the bouts of insanity she sometimes had, during which she would run as fast as possible through their house and through the main road of the kolkhoz, scarcely touching down on the ground and whispering extraordinarily violent and strange curses. She came and went like this and then disappeared into the forest for days on end. Hardly had their short month on honeymoon gone by when the first of these bouts happened. Morgovian was paralyzed with horror and sadness. From then on he began to avoid her, spending as much time as possible collecting dead animals at the forest’s edge or fixing the henhouse netting—or he claimed he needed to fight the Asian hornets so as to spend entire weeks camping by the hives.

  Their union’s disintegration pleased Solovyei, who had had trouble accepting it in principle, and who moreover played a major role in the mental disturbances Samiya Schmidt was subject to. Indeed, he kept paying her his nocturnal visits and walking supreme throughout her dreams, which caused serious disruptions and, in particular, the feeling of being possessed day and night by an outside will. Solovyei didn’t worry about the damage that might result from his intrusive magical acts. On the contrary, he pressured her to start the process of getting divorced. He offered to simplify the formalities she would have to bring before the kolkhoz soviet. But she refused. Morgovian, despite it all, suited her. She appreciated his silence, and also his self-effacement as a man, his terrified lack of appetite around her. She had him as her husband, and she knew she would never have a better one. Besides, after reading Maria Kwoll and Sonia Velazquez, she was inclined to hate men, but this one didn’t trouble her.

  • Now, perched on Kronauer’s back, held against him, Samiya Schmidt let herself be carried back to the village. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and her legs were folded around his hips. Kronauer somehow kept her upright. Sometimes he grabbed her ankles, sometimes he crossed his arms to hold her calves. Samiya Schmidt had been reticent at first about being in such close contact with this unknown man; she didn’t want to be pressed up against him, intertwined with him at all. At the trip’s start, she had stood up while refusing his help and, when they started walking, she tried to stay all the way upright. The first several hundred meters were an ordeal. She staggered and, so as not to fall, kept holding onto Kronauer. Then she fell down and he convinced her to drag herself behind him, on him.

  For Kronauer, even though she was a small woman who barely weighed more than a child, she was a difficult burden to carry. Every step diminished somewhat the restorative effects of the fresh water, and fasting had weakened his body. He hadn’t eaten for days. After a painful half-kilometer he lost his rhythm and began to stumble under the weight. He exhaled heavily. Drops of sweat ran down his forehead and from his armpits.

  —Stop, Samiya Schmidt growled suddenly. We’re not going far like this. We’ll never get to the Levanidovo.

  —You told me it wasn’t far, Kronauer said stubbornly.

  —We’ll have to cross the old forest, Samiya Schmidt said.

  He set her down on the ground. She shakily stood up by him, then she was overcome by nausea and went to lean against a larch to vomit. Kronauer watched her heave. He felt the sweat on his face building up and then falling in huge drops. He noticed a rocky outcrop and walked the five or six steps to sit on it.

  I won’t be able to
get back up, he thought. I don’t have any strength left. We’re both going to die in the trees, this half-dead girl and me.

  Samiya Schmidt spent a minute bent in half, then she pulled herself back up and went over, swaying, to Kronauer. She sat on the other end of the outcrop. They both had trouble catching their breath.

  —It’ll be easier later on, she said, clearly talking about herself. Have to wait for it to go away.

  —What is it? Kronauer asked.

  —It’ll go away, she insisted with effort. But have to wait.

  She was sitting three meters away from him. She turned toward him and looked furtively in his eyes. Within Kronauer’s gray-blue irises, there was no trace of dishonor. He had touched her legs, her body had been thrashed around while her breasts had rubbed and pushed against his shoulder blades, he had panted while holding her against his body. But now he looked at her calmly, with brotherhood and sadness more than anything. He didn’t seem like one of these men torn by sexual frenzy, ready to grunt, attack, and spray sperm over everything feminine within reach, like those men Maria Kwoll had described in her feminist writings. She had never met these sorts of men in the village, where all the inhabitants, except for Solovyei, constantly teetered between comas and inexpressible mental and physical exhaustion, but she knew that they existed and that they might appear time and time again, and not just in Maria Kwoll or Sonia Velazquez’s incendiary writings. She knew all about the dirty tricks they were capable of. Maria Kwoll was graphic enough to describe them unflinchingly in her numerous ranting texts. This soldier seemed in no way to be a male in rut, but who knew.

  The image of rape overwhelmed her.

  —Don’t you think for one second about hurting me, she said before she could help herself. The president of the kolkhoz isn’t the sort to forgive that. I’m his daughter, remember that. He’s not a little president of a nowhere kolkhoz. He’ll be dogging you for at least a thousand eight hundred and thirteen lunar years and then some. I’d rather warn you before you think up anything nasty.