The Gramma Udgul was the one to handle the maneuver. She arbitrarily decided on the days to open the well and told the improvised liquidators which things should feed the core. The Gramma Udgul was also the only person who had the idea to stoop down by the chasm and talk to the core to make it happy.
When she hunched, the undetectable wind from the depths hit her in the face. This caress didn’t bother her and she went on with her monologue. Nothing could be heard, not even the crush of objects or bodies that had arrived at their destination after falling two thousand meters. The Gramma Udgul’s voice sank into the well’s dark mystery without an echo. The kolkhozniks helping the old woman waited nearby until she had finished her sorcerous, vehement screams. They looked like a group of zombies in the last stages of their existence. Aside from some occasional reserve soldiers, these uncommunicative men were the core of the male population still alive at Radiant Terminus, and they could be counted on the fingers of one hand: the engineer Barguzin; the demobilized, one-armed Abazayev; and the tractor driver Morgovian.
• A few words about the Gramma Udgul. About her hardiness which science cannot explain. About her beliefs, about her path to glory and darkness. And about her eighty-year-old, in-shape body, doomed to eternity.
One hundred years earlier, she had begun her long career as a liquidator. She was thirty-two years old then; she was a nurse’s aide and, as the Second Soviet Union experienced its first serious collapses, she dreamed of sacrificing herself for communism-bound humanity. And so she had joined the kamikaze corps that was sent close to the nuclear power plants, which were all breaking down or exploding at the time. I recall that thousands of them had been built in order to make each production plant, each city neighborhood, each kolkhoz self-sufficient. But, despite all the precautions and security measures, the accidents multiplied and the habitable areas diminished. Of course all those who invented these seemingly clean and robust generator models had been executed, but that hadn’t solved any problems. Massive regions had to be evacuated and left to ruin. The triumphant march toward communism, already hampered by outside attacks, found its pace slowed down even further. When the Gramma Udgul volunteered, the liquidators had become a pillar on which society teetered. The candidates for this noble task, however, weren’t rushing to the recruitment offices. Only heroes were signing up. Only young idealistic fanatics, or the same old militants who hid their fear by gritting their indomitable Bolshevik teeth.
The Gramma Udgul worked selflessly on the first building site, and then on those that followed. She knew that she was immolating herself, that she was offering up her health and her life for the collective’s future well-being, for the radiant future of her children and grandchildren, or rather everyone else’s, because she had been warned that the radiation would render her sterile. She helped evacuate the population, she piled up the trucks with the evacuees’ goods, she soothed those who were hysterical, she went on to arrest the thieves and lent a hand when they had to be immediately executed, she was involved in building the shields and concrete layers around the unapproachable cisterns, close to the cores that did whatever they wanted to. It was demanding, dangerous work. However, in contrast to the other heroic men and women who had quickly succumbed, she kept on living.
Her body had responded positively to this repeated exposure to fissile matter. The ionizing rays had destroyed all the sick and potentially cancerous cells her flesh might harbor. Radioactivity had certainly made her slightly iridescent in the darkness, but above all it had stopped the process of aging in her flesh, and according to what the Gramma Udgul thoroughly suspected, it had been stopped forever. These phenomena also had inconveniences and, particularly, they had caught the attention of the authorities who asked her several times, not without some irritation, why she wasn’t dying. The Party had trouble accepting that she refused to go with her comrades in liquidation to the grave. A proposed official reprimand was discussed and, even if it was closed for being judged absurd and even odious, it nonetheless remained in her folder, a stain. From then on, her troubles never ended. They kept on singing her praises in the press and depicting her as a Soviet woman of extraordinary devotion and courage, but they managed not to mention, moreover, that she was fit as a fiddle.
• At first, the Gramma Udgul submitted without complaint to the psychological exams that were ordered regularly, but after five or six years she had had enough, and she didn’t seem very willing when she was asked to donate her body to science as quickly as possible. She only responded to convocation notices intermittently. She had clearly been singled out without any explanation, both in the realms of medicine and normal civilian life. She knew that she was being watched as an unreliable individual, and she understood that she had been deemed unworthy of promotion to the Party’s honorary body, as had more or less automatically been the case for every cosmonaut, author of epics, and television celebrity. She didn’t complain about her iridescence or her immortality, and she didn’t make a single comment about the political injustice she was suffering. She wrote self-criticisms when asked, she kept taking part in community meetings, and, when the opportunity presented itself again, she left for the liquidation sites, always willingly. She had a sense of discipline and she didn’t claim to be clever enough to contradict the Party.
Decades went by. The authorities changed, co-opted themselves, grew old, were rejuvenated, but never reviewed their evaluation of her, and, generation after generation, they considered her immortality, intentional or not, an insult to the toiling masses. They kept an eye on her organic deviationism. However, that eye had an unclear view. Her extraordinary abilities in battling the atoms’ unforeseen wrath were undeniable. She was frequently called upon for her irreplaceable experience, and behind closed doors she was frequently awarded the titles and medals she had earned: Valiant Combatant of the Atom, Red Heroine, Glorious Liquidator, Intrepid Red Doyenne, Veteran, Red Big Sister. She pinned the certificates above her bed, but she rarely mentioned them, rarely or not at all. In her building, she was just a small anonymous person. She wasn’t the sort to show an invalid’s card at stores in hopes of skipping the line.
In this way, a century went by. A century of setting out again and again for nuclear ovens on the brink of meltdown, mixing fuel rods with gloves ill-suited to the task, crossing the countryside, laughing yet bleak, going into ghost towns, digging communal graves, and shooting down thieves. She worked hard with teams as their members collapsed one after another and decayed in weeks. She helped with hurried funerals in places filled with silence and strewn with ossified birds, then, upon her return to the capital, she was paraded on solemn occasions, during which she was decorated with awards normally given to the dead. Then she went back to normal life. She settled back in her job at a local clinic. Her frequent requests for time off to go fight enemy matter had hampered her upward trajectory, and she remained a nurse’s aide—a first-class one, but still just a nurse’s aide. And, once she was at work, she was again forced to deal with the Party and the suspicions of its teams, undergo humiliating procedures, rewrite her autobiography for the thousandth time, do her self-criticisms over again, and, on top of all that, she had to appear at the Medical Academy’s meetings, justify her natural and ideological state in front of embryologists, in front of xenologists, in front of special works councils that didn’t hesitate to accuse her of petit-bourgeois individualism in the face of death, and even of witchcraft.
She put an end to this endless cycle.
One day, she acted in a fit of pique.
She applied for a disaster site far away from everything, having made a firm decision there and then never to come back. She simply had to go to a closed-off province, already quarantined for a half-century after uncontrollable setbacks in the military facilities. Some minimal human activity persisted there, with a few agricultural enterprises and several camps, but the urban areas, even the small ones, had been evacuated. And, conveniently enough, the Red Star sovkhoz had just indicated that
there was a situation of utmost urgency at its nuclear power site, and, in the same distress call, had spoken of a neighboring kolkhoz, Radiant Terminus, also in trouble. The region had been kept under military confidentiality since its annexation to the Second Soviet Union, and nobody could quite pinpoint it on a map. The Red Star was indicated by a question mark, close to a large forest and a place called the Levanidovo, but there was no hint anywhere of a Radiant Terminus.
• They had brought the Gramma Udgul and her squadron on a bus that had stopped at the edge of the province, then they had given everybody sidecars to get themselves to the accident site. The road continued, but no person or thing could be seen on it and, out of fear of radiation, the drivers decided to turn around two hundred kilometers sooner than expected.
The Gramma Udgul’s companions had unanimously picked her to head the squad. They were proud to work under such a popular figure of the Orbise because, even if the Party kept having trouble publicly recognizing her merits, the Orbise’s masses happily paid homage to her and weren’t irritated that she wasn’t dead. She had the astonishing ability to constitute a liquidation brigade out of any workforce found nearby. She was accompanied by some thirty scientists, firefighters, and engineers ready to wade through boiling-hot cooling ponds and breached cores in sovkhoz and kolkhoz alike. They had all sworn to do their best until their spinal cords had become nothing more than blackened mallows.
Their sidecars trundled down the empty roads, then, when the sidecars ran out of gas, they crossed the forest on foot to the Levanidovo, where they split up in two teams.
The Gramma Udgul came to the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz and was surprised and overjoyed to discover that the president was a certain Solovyei, her first husband, a comrade whom she had loved very much and whom she had been taken away from ninety years earlier. This Solovyei wasn’t a citizen as respectful of the official proletarian obligations as she was and, despite believing in egalitarianism, he had his own views, on which he had imposed moral arrangements that nobody was allowed to judge. In short, he had long since turned his back on the Party. After an eternity of imprisonment and vagrancy, he had finally settled into this hidden corner as a member of an independent commune that maintained very weak links with the institutions and authorities of the Orbise.
As she gave herself over to the pleasure of finding Solovyei again and reminiscing about their lost youth, the Gramma Udgul let the scientists carry out preliminary measures, assess the damage for millennia to come, and then explain the situation during a general assembly of the Red Star and Radiant Terminus survivors. The teams then began to work at full force. Using shortcuts that he alone knew, Solovyei guided them through the forest to get from one site to another quickly. The two agricultural complexes were effectively separated by a strip of taiga that foolhardy people could easily get lost in.
The Red Star sovkhoz had been abandoned after three days. Since the innards of its plant was burning outside the reactor vessel, but not presenting any major performance issues, the firefighters had suggested leaving the building as it was, and coming back several years later to remove the most problematic waste. The barns and pigsties were opened, the livestock and poultry encouraged to go die on the open steppes, and all the surviving sovkhozniks and liquidators withdrew to the Radiant Terminus area, where the core was already sinking into the earth’s bowels. The Gramma Udgul had approved the plans for the hangar, requisitioned sturdy men and women to begin construction, and outlined the framework for decontamination, which in her opinion would take four or five centuries, taking into account the few hands available. Then she did her best to care for her team members as they died. The scientists went first, closely followed by the engineers. The firefighters held out for a week longer, and in turn, they went out in shreds, torn apart by deadly cancers and burns. Aside from the engineer Barguzin, who also seemed to be immune to radiation, the whole squadron had died in enthusiastic but atrocious suffering.
For three months, she sent a report to the Party every two weeks in which she copied down the readings from the few thermometers and measurement instruments still in working order, and described the liquidation’s progress, as well as her short-term and medium-term prognoses. On schematic maps, drawn according to Solovyei’s directions, she delineated the large perimeter where from that point on it would be ill-advised to venture without having taken iodine pills and put on hazmat suits. At the end of the message she gave an exhaustive list of countrymen, specialists, and non-specialists who had died and whose corpses had been thrown into the well, because this well’s liquidating function had been activated, albeit in a strictly experimental manner. In a postscript, she sometimes wondered about the tactics used to reestablish the ideological norms of Radiant Terminus in a kolkhoz where class warfare had never happened in an orthodox fashion, although on the whole without straying from the egalitarian mentality dear to our hearts. She never received a reply. Then the mailman had thyroid problems in the middle of the forest and lay down for a long while under the larches, putting an end to mail delivery to and from the Levanidovo.
So the Gramma Udgul began living her life without deferring to the Party at every moment. This break with the hierarchy and supreme guides had induced stress, and for several months she suffered nightmares and even some mental confusion. She tended to see the worst everywhere. Then, thanks to Solovyei’s affectionate presence, she succeeded in overcoming her doubts and stressful thoughts.
In reality, when the correspondence had broken off, the Party had concluded that she had been killed in turn by the heavy bombardment of murderous particles. Due to the numerous proofs of ideological steadfastness she had furnished in the past, nobody suspected that she had defected or taken advantage of her immortality to go down deviationist paths in this region.
Her name was added to the list of proletariat martyrs who had fought against matter’s insanities, and she was given one of the few medals she hadn’t yet received: the posthumous distinction of Foremother of the Proletarian Pantheon. Then they ran barbed wire around the last points of entry into the province and decreed the region unsuitable for human life.
• The Radiant Terminus kolkhoz bore closer resemblance to a den of thieves than an agricultural establishment, and from an ideological point of view, there was a pure and simple aberration here, which was a striking contrast to what the Gramma Udgul had imagined for her exile. However, her adolescent urges asked only to be reawakened, with their radicalism, their ferocity, this dissatisfied gaze the young had for the real world. Deep down, more than any wish to be part of the world revolution’s triumph, she still had the childish desire to live out her destiny like an adventure film. And Solovyei certainly emblematized this: defiance of all laws, astonishment, love, a descent into the forbidden, into the hereafter, into the unexplored spaces of dreams, into sorcerous realms. He bent down and looked her in the eyes, he offered her his support, his complicity, his lucidity, his anarchist nonconformity. He helped her distance herself from the Party without apostasy or pain. It took months for her to find peace. But from the first day he had welcomed her as if she were the missing piece of the magical edifice that was the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, a formerly lost piece he had waited his whole life for, and which he was extraordinarily happy to find at long last.
Solovyei was the only man who had mattered in her life. She had met him at a liquidation site, at Kungurtug, when she was a beautiful woman in the bloom of her thirty-sixth year, already noticed by the authorities for her miraculous resistance to radiation. The place was completely isolated, in the middle of the mountains, close to a small lake that, after the accident, held water more closely resembling lukewarm mercury. All the liquidators, except for the two of them, had died in the following weeks. Like the Gramma Udgul, Solovyei had a body unaffected by delirious neutrons, which he happily explained by claiming that he had descended from a line of Bolshevik shamans and magicians who had continually evolved on the border between life, death, and sleep. These provocat
ive explanations didn’t please the authorities at all, especially when he accompanied his words with mocking laughter and insults at the bureaucracy and its managers. She fell for him after a nighttime walk along the glimmering banks of Tere-Khol, the nearby lake, and although he was already too anarchist to join the Komsomol, she loved him exactly as he was, without any attempt to make him change his mind about the five-year plan or his telluric view of communism. They parted ways after Kungurtug, but they stayed in touch, and finally she went to be with him in Abakan, the little city in the province where he lived.
They lived in harmony together in Abakan, hardly bothered by their political differences of opinion or the fact that she couldn’t have children. Although they never registered with the Soviet authorities, they considered themselves husband and wife. They both worked at a school for deaf-mutes, she as a caregiver and he as group leader. When needed, they left for sites where nuclear accidents required their presence. They were two irreproachable citizens at the forefront of the fight against misfortune. However, their good health had marked them out for surveillance, and naturally not just by the medical research services. The Gramma Udgul’s autobiographies, written several times during special sessions, cleared her of any wrongdoing, but Solovyei’s only made things worse for him. Solovyei took pride in being not only a revolutionary, but also a poet, and so he felt that he had the right to say anything that went through his head loud and clear. The prospect of having to write lies to save his skin infuriated him. He sabotaged his self-criticisms by inserting esoteric narracts, considerations of the apocalypse, and politically incorrect discourses on sexuality and dreams. On the official deposition papers, he expounded on his hope that there would come a time when only shamans, sorcery experts, mages, and oneiromancy disciples would be in charge of the battle between classes and they would wander like nomads through the cities and the countryside. Solovyei’s relations with the authorities grew acrimonious. After four years of life together, the Party encouraged the Gramma Udgul to leave her comrade, which she refused to do.
Radiant Terminus Page 4
