Waist-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep in a verdurous ocean, he pressed ahead rather than save his strength. His body hurt but he refused to accept it. He hadn’t let himself stop during the first two kilometers, assuming that he needed to evade the watchman’s potential gunfire, and after that, he hadn’t let himself stop for more than the ten or twelve seconds needed to catch his breath. He was wholly focused on his goal. He wanted to reach the forest’s edge before nightfall, so he could cross it the next morning at daybreak and go straight through the trees until he emerged and saw a village. It was a simple goal. A clear and simple action. Vassilissa Marachvili’s life depended on his accomplishing it.
From time to time he’d trample through marshes. Then he’d stop to see if there wasn’t a spring or a pool nearby for him to drink and refill his bottle and the one he’d taken from Vassilissa Marachvili’s belt. The ground was wet and sometimes had a muddy consistency, but he never found water in a salvageable form. He’d keep looking one or two minutes, rummaging through argamanche shrubs or bushes of gourgouledes-pauvres, which usually cropped up near water sources. He spread apart the pulpy stalks of lancelottes and grumes-ameres in vain. Then, muttering a quick rosary of curses, he went back on his way.
Plants that obstruct his calves, his knees, his thighs. Plants that rarely snap, except for dame-exquises, regrignelle, deadchive plumes, or folle-en-jouisse. Hard, elastic, violent plants. Plants that give way at the slightest touch, like twistsprouts, fine-brousse, majdahar, souffe-magnifique, caped mudbeaks, or mere-du-lépreux. Plants that feet could never crush. Plants that give off strong and disagreeable scents, such as torchpotils or pugnaise-des-errants, and even pestilential scents, especially the dangue-à-clochettes. Plants that look like thick hedges. Plants that exhale their perfumes with evening’s arrival. Plants with acrid sap. Plants with heady sap, like diaze-lights or dive-diazes. Dark green, emerald green, yellowish green, silvery green like huckster terbabary, bronze green like ravine terbabary. Seeds, dull green, shiny green, ears. No flowers. Plants that don’t resemble anything, besides drabness and absence. Soft, weak plants. Large stretches with fewer insects than in the summer months, but still buzzing with grasshoppers and flies.
The noise of this progress. Its screeching violence. A man pushing at full speed through vegetation that doesn’t welcome him at all. A man crossing the steppes instead of sleeping on the ground. A man breaking the plants’ silence.
The occasional crow high above. Five or six of them, often fewer, flying toward the forest. Always toward the northeast or the east, as if there was only one possible direction. The occasional shrill cry under the sky. As if, out of what little solidarity with other animals remained, or out of respect for a fairy-tale tradition, they were trying to give the lost man a useful direction or a warning. Kronauer didn’t slow down even to watch them go by. He looked up, but he didn’t slow down.
• Kronauer went, his body fixated on the effort, while his thoughts wandered. Several planes of consciousness merged within him, just like when he was falling asleep, and, without any conflict, intermingled. He grew obsessed with the idea of getting to the village at all costs and he saw himself in a rather cinematic sequence, in which the villagers around him heard his pleas and rushed to the Red Star sovkhoz with water and supplies. All the while he kept envisioning Vassilissa Marachvili and Ilyushenko in distress on the hill, doomed to lie in the grasses and keep quiet so as not to be noticed by the soldiers who had bivouacked by the rails. But other images merged with these: moments of loving friendship that had developed among the three over the last weeks, around campfires, along deserted paths, amid ghost towns, after interminable hours of walking in the open steppes. The particulars of this long walk. Their farewell to rifles and cartridges, which they had decided were no longer of any help to them and which they hid in a bakery oven in a dead city.
Cold raindrops breaking up a star-studded night.
Two wild cows visible in the distance.
Vassilissa Marachvili not turning around to undress, before going to wash herself in a brown lake. The smell of Vassilissa Marachvili’s body still shivering on the lakeshore, her sweat replaced by the stink of mud.
The “forbidden” and “danger” signs that rust had eaten away. Over a skull framed in red and black, snails that, before dying, had left heavy trails of slime.
Ilyushenko looking for one last cookie in his rucksack and not finding it.
Vassilissa Marachvili’s teeth, which he had, many times at their trip’s start, imagined sliding his tongue across.
Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili whispering.
The skin a grass snake had shed in the middle of the road.
The idea that they had been irradiated, that they were baking, and were already dead, in the process of breaking apart at the base of a reactor.
A railway track disappearing beneath stinging nettles.
Villages far off, lifeless and repulsive.
A stop close to a wrecked nuclear power plant, in a place open to the winds but stinking of grease, and the discussion they’d had to decide if it was grease from sheep or from bears.
But we were the ones who smelled bad, he suddenly realized.
He stopped walking, saw the sky brighter behind him than over the forest. The steppes stretched out endlessly, wavy, velvety, hued yellow and green with white smudges indicating tufts of Jeanne-of-the-Communists, spotted doroglosses.
He caught his breath. He breathed in the vastness deeply.
You’re on the steppes, Kronauer, he thought. There’s no shame in being here for the end. It’s beautiful. Appreciate it. Not everyone gets to die on the steppes.
• The steppes. He had spent his childhood in the city, in an orphanage that rarely took trips to the countryside; what passed for trips were days dedicated to the communal potato harvest. Urban settings were practically everything he knew. His universe of references was circumscribed by wide avenues, inner courtyards, gray buildings, and exhaust fumes. Still, the movies and books the school had deluged him with had allowed him to roam, meander, and travel among the grassy spaces flattened under the blue sky, alongside the Scythians, the Avars, the Pechenegs, the Tatars, the Red Cavalry, and, of course, in the company of the mythic Russian heroes of Kiev every single child in the Orbise knew: Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovitch, and all their partners, rivals, and comrades. The steppes eventually became as familiar and essential to him as the capital’s streets. And later, when he was no longer a child, he fell in love with Irina Echenguyen—and, in this theater of epic horseback rides beloved by the Orbise’s orphans and communards alike, this unforgettable woman had fostered his love for botany.
Irina Echenguyen, like the rest of us, also loved those Russian byliny and the scenes of endless prairies intertwined with millennia of history, from the Scythian Empire to the Second Soviet Union, by way of Genghis Kahn’s thunderous horses and Chapayev’s crackling machine guns. But, above all, she was a member of a scientific team that worked on naming uncultivated grasses and wild plants in general. Kronauer didn’t have the expert knowledge she did, and he remained wholly unable to help her in her complicated classifications, but he had learned to see the grasses as something other than an undifferentiated mass of plants. He had hundreds of names in his head, lists he had watched her patiently put together when he lived with her, had reread with her, had recited together with her as if they were post-exotic litanies.
They were married for ten years. Irina Echenguyen died after a long illness, during a counter-revolutionary attack. She was put on a drip in a clinic. The counter-revolutionaries burst into the common room where she had been resting with a dozen other female cancer patients, tore out tubes and needles, broke all the medical equipment, and then raped the women, even the ones who already looked like corpses. It was a group of dog-headed enemies, zealots for exploiting men for the sake of men. Then they deserted the place, but before they left, they killed Irina Echenguyen.
• Molle-guillotes, malvein
és, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.
• A pair of crows, very low, did not caw as they passed right over his head. The sky was far less blinding than it had been earlier. Dusk was coming. The temperature had dropped and every now and then harsh gusts of wind blew. The black line of the forest, now much nearer, had ceased to be an abstract image. It was already resolving into trees and branches, with perceptibly different heights and thicknesses. He still had two kilometers to go before reaching it.
That’s good, he thought. I’ll have time to get there before night falls.
He had already stumbled several times and he took another break. One minute, he thought. Just one minute.
The smoke that had just a minute ago suggested the possibility of a village was now faded away. Now there weren’t any points of reference left. Only, in front of him, the dark mass of the first larches.
He closed his eyes so his dizziness and exhaustion would dissipate. A gray and erratic layer of clouds spun behind his eyelids, but it was mainly the darkness of the forest he was thinking about.
Damn it, Kronauer, he reproached himself, don’t tell me you’ve got the willies! Your parents died in the taiga, so what? You’re still far from the taiga, it’s just a slightly dark wood, it won’t be more than a few kilometers deep. Two or three hours of walking, and you’ll end up in fields with a village and countrymen. Get a hold of yourself! Don’t give up that fast! Your little troubles are nothing compared to the apocalypse that hit the Orbise!
• He was thirty-nine years old. He was born in the Orbise. All his schooling had been focused on the future of Communes for workers and countrymen.
His view of the world was illuminated by proletarian morality: self-sacrifice, altruism, and confrontation. And like all of us, of course, he had suffered the world revolution’s setbacks and collapses. We didn’t understand how the rich and their mafias had managed to win the trust of the laboring classes. And before our rage, first had been our stupefaction when we realized that these masters of unhappiness were triumphing around the globe and were on the brink of annihilating the last of us. We had no explanation when we interrogated ourselves about humanity’s bad choices. Marxist optimism prevented us from seeing the proof of serious defects in the genetic heritage of our species, an idiotic affinity for self-destruction, a masochist apathy in the face of predators, and perhaps even above all a fundamental inability when it came to collectivism. We thought this deep down, but, as the official theory relayed these hypotheses with a shrug of the shoulders, we didn’t broach the topic, even among comrades. Even in joking among comrades.
Kronauer’s intellectual education after high school had been wrecked and there were huge holes in his knowledge, like so many other young people in the Orbise when their studies were interrupted by chaos and defeats. If the worldwide situation hadn’t been so unfavorable to egalitarianism, perhaps he would have turned toward a quiet career with an apprenticeship that wasn’t too long, a career nothing like a soldier’s. He wasn’t very interested in abstract things. He did like books and happily borrowed novels from the local libraries, but a list of what he’d borrowed, aside from political classics, would show that his preferences veered toward inoffensive adventure stories and the most traditional post-exotic bluettes. Deep down, even if he wasn’t loath to sit down for hours reading in silence, he didn’t feel comfortable when he was confronted with the complex structures of the soul, and he much preferred action. One example had actually disrupted his existence. When the Komsomol had suggested it, he had refused to join a school for Party officials, and asked to be assigned to an operating unit. After his first year of training, he would have been assigned a political instructor’s minor responsibilities, but the propaganda work didn’t appeal to him. He wanted direct confrontation with enemies or traitors. The Orbise was in danger. Military violence seemed more natural to him than meetings where he would have to call for military violence. Therefore the start of civil war hadn’t troubled him in the least. He’d immediately joined the standing army, and he’d been sent to work with one of the clandestine organizations that found unconventional ways to heckle the enemy. Then he had been assigned to a Special Intelligence Center. Aside, of course, from periods of peace when he went back to civil life as a worker without much qualification, sometimes in construction and sometimes in the food industry, he had been fighting here and there for fifteen years now. He had never been wounded. He was in the prime of life. That said, he had seen too many corpses, witnessed too many defeats, and he had lost most of the hope he’d still had.
• He started walking again. He couldn’t keep a steady pace. The two kilometers that still separated him from the forest’s edge seemed to stretch out interminably. Keep going, Kronauer, keep going and don’t think, don’t look, don’t count the meters you’ve walked, don’t count what’s left, don’t count anything! . . . Don’t listen to anything but your footsteps, don’t look at the sky, keep going like you’re in good shape!
The landscape was already taking on the gray and purple hues of twilight.
He veered away to avoid a barely visible burial mound; there had been thousands of them on the steppes since the Bronze Age, a kurgan that had been built on his path, tamped down and nondescript, a symbol of existences wasted and millennia gone for nothing, just to witness the collapse of egalitarianism and a wave of derelicts just like the very first nomads eons earlier. Now he staggered by a field of hare-rye, a mutant variety that had appeared in the countryside thirty years earlier, and then was cultivated close to the capital to make flour that tasted like cardboard. He stepped into the withered, unappealingly brown ears, then he went through. He drifted as if drunk. And suddenly his legs. They gave way beneath him. He hobbled ten more meters, and then he kneeled on the ground and slumped down.
Well, he thought, trying to get back up. It’s nothing. A wave of tiredness.
He couldn’t get himself back upright. His muscles wouldn’t respond. There were cramps in his neck, all his joints were on fire. He breathed loudly.
You think you’re still alive, a voice suddenly said in him, inside his head, but unfamiliar.
—What! he grumbled. What’s going . . .
He waved his hand like he was trying to swat away flies or wasps. He was on his knees, exhausted. And this voice.
You think you’re still alive, but it’s over. You’re just a relic. Your corpse is already rotting somewhere on the moist earth and you don’t get that it’s over. It’s just after-death mumbo-jumbo bouncing around in your head. Don’t keep trying. Just lie down where you fell and wait for the crows to take care of your burial.
Then, just as quickly as it had come, the voice left. It left him entirely, without a trace in his memory, as if it had never spoken in him. Once again he found himself alone, with his breath short and hoarse, with his bodily pains, his exhaustion.
Just a moment of tiredness, he thought, a big one. Nothing serious. Night won’t fall for another half an hour, three-quarters of an hour. I’m going to lie down. Just not enough food, dehydration. I’m going to lie down until it passes. As it is, my legs won’t get me anywhere.
He lay down. Above his head, when he opened his eyes, the sky had started to whirl again. He shut his eyes against his nausea. Shaken once more by the wind, the plants brushed against him. He listened.
False ryegrass, he thought. Racines-rieuses, lovushkas, solivaines. This too will pass. Even if I black out for a minute, this will pass. Then I’ll get back up, and if it’s not too dark I’ll go sleep under the trees, at the edge by the first trees, and I’ll wait for dawn before going into the forest. Hang in there, Kronauer! Tomorrow you’ll be in the village, and then it’ll be okay. Everything’s spinning right now, but this will pass.
Tomorrow. In the village. It’ll be okay.
• Chiennelaines, doroglosses. Lovushkas-du-savatier, rogue solivaines, aromatic solivaine
s.
2
• Inside the warehouse, the temperature wasn’t dropping. It never dropped. The sheet-metal walls were always warm, even in the winter when it was freezing, and they emitted a soft and constant light, rendering all heating and lighting equipment unnecessary.
After the nuclear reactor that powered the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz caught fire, the hangar had been used to store the irradiated material the liquidators had collected in the area. It was an enormous, ugly building, intended to hold massive quantities of garbage, and it had been constructed right above the burning ruins of the little power plant. The liquidators had found it best to use preexisting structures to store the stock of dangerous trash and bury it all in the same place. A well sat in the center of the building. In it went everything that people wanted to get rid of forever.
The well had been dug by the nuclear core itself when, after vaporizing everything in range, it had gone mad and begun to sink into the earth. The engineer Barguzin, the only surviving member of the team that had designed the hangar, claimed that the hole was regular and vertical and about two kilometers deep. According to him, at the bottom of the hole, the core had stopped moving. It would stay there, always mad but no longer moving, no longer trying to reach the innermost depths of earth proper. It would simply feed on what it received from on high.
• Every month, indeed, the core was fed. The heavy cover for the well was opened, and some of the bric-a-brac collected over the last season or two was knocked over the edge; just to show that people weren’t panicking and weren’t afraid of pathetic radionuclides. Tables and chairs, television sets, the tarry carcasses of cows and cowherds, tractor motors, charred schoolteachers who had been forgotten in their classrooms during the critical period, computers, remains of phosphorescent crows, moles, does, wolves, squirrels, clothes that looked perfect but had only to be shaken to set off a haze of sparks, inflated toothpaste tubes filled with constantly simmering toothpaste, albino dogs and cats, clusters of iron that continued to rumble with an inner fire, new combine harvesters that hadn’t yet been broken in and which gleamed at midnight as if they were lying in full sunlight, garden forks, hoes, axes, debarkers, accordions that spat out more gamma rays than folkloric melodies, pinewood planks that looked like ebony planks, Stakhanovites in their Sunday best with their hands mummified around their diplomas, forgotten when the event halls were evacuated. The ledgers with their pages turning day and night. Cash-register money, the copper coins clinking and shifting without anyone nearby. These were the sorts of things thrown into the void.
Radiant Terminus Page 3
