Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

—It might like them, Solovyei laughed. They were also composed for readers like it.

  The Gramma Udgul angrily muttered something indiscernible. He takes everything as a joke, except for his daughters. I’ll have to talk to the core about that one of these days.

  —Well, I’ll say this, if a committee stumbled upon this, you’d be good for fifteen or twenty more years of rigorous imprisonment. At least.

  —You think? Solovyei said. Even with you as president, with all your medals and a team of easily swayed good little Komsomols?

  —If I were president, you wouldn’t escape a firing squad, the Gramma Udgul laughed lightly.

  Then she began humming as he caressed the back of her head.

  Their tenderness was palpable.

  • They lay together in the hangar for several minutes. Barguzin hadn’t appeared, they knew they were alone, and they weren’t embarrassed to coo at each other.

  The Gramma Udgul was in a good mood again. Under Solovyei’s affectionate hand, she daydreamed once more about the joy of the waltz, the accordion, and the ideal worker who had turned her head at sunrise. Solovyei relaxed. The morning was just starting, the day was bright, the warehouse thrummed agreeably under the combined effect of the radiation and the sun’s heat, and so Solovyei slipped into an almost unmoving dance with his old friend. The dance was magical, like all dances of love, but it didn’t carry any real sexual freight, and he didn’t feel any frustration in the least. He let himself fall little by little into romanticism and he went into an image instead of unleashing his body. Even though he had plenty of other experiences and even though he felt that he was in the prime of his years and far from the end of his hardy masculine life, he accepted this barely sexual relationship. He accepted it because it was actually very deep and very beautiful.

  —What if we listened to one? he asked suddenly.

  The Gramma Udgul came out of her reverie.

  —One what? One cylinder?

  —Well, what if we listened to one, just to see?

  He was no longer hugging her and he went to open the cupboard where the Gramma Udgul had put away the phonograph.

  The device had a spring mechanism. Solovyei set it on the pile of newspapers and cranked the handle until it stopped, and then he took a cylinder at random from one of the archive crates.

  —Which one did you pick? the Gramma Udgul asked.

  —I didn’t look, Solovyei said, setting the black cylinder in the notches. I didn’t pick. None of them have names or dates on them. Just a voice bursting out in black space. It’s as much in the present as the past. Or even the future. Listen to it with your gut, not your ears.

  Then he pulled the arm and needle over the wax.

  —Listen to yourself, the Gramma Udgul said. You’re saying that it’s both present and not present. How do you expect me to organize that?

  The needle hissed for two seconds, then the voice was around them: bizarre, deformed, like it was actually from an intermediary world, barely comprehensible and unmoored.

  • Then he became a shadow with the knife he had been hiding in front of his face, there was now just a shadow with the knife, a single shadow that was sometimes black, sometimes dark, and as his face glimmered subtly with the embers’ every movement, he gathered together his throaty voices and imagined devotees around him and, focusing on the slim edge of the blade remnants of bravery, and thundering his sighs in his most haughtily low registers, in his ample but extraordinary registers, exhaling his terminal curse in deep waves, rolling off his tongue notes still far less audible than extinguished stars, and also thinking of his scattered daughters, and thinking of his daughters turned away from him, and thinking of his noble daughters lost, forever away from him and lost, and inventing haphazardly new ways of whispering that avenge, inventing whispers made with murderous words, with murderous phrases, and wrapping himself in the memory of his short existence and his short laughs and his dead and his daughters, and thinking about the futures his daughters had promised he would experience, and focusing on the point a remnant of a useless lie, because he never had the chance to speak articulately to his daughters at a distance nor to communicate intelligently with them at a distance, focusing that on the sharp iron, and trying not to be brought down by a sudden insolent greed for the horizon nor by stupor, and thinking of his beloved daughters he never had the chance to pamper or protect or even quickly perceive, between two railings or two wars, between two black absences, and raising his head again to accompany the slow dance of his cutlass and the slow dance of its point, noiselessly raising his shadowy head, hiding once more the extinguished shadow, and thinking again of the catastrophic fate of his daughters he never was able to save from misfortune, and who, if they ever knew happiness, never shared a single crumb of it with him, and thinking of his daughters whose happiness he wasn’t able to apprehend even by proxy, and groaning speeches of painful ignorance, dead waves of already-dead words, groaning calmly endless discussions already long since dulled, he searched haphazardly for an artery and he said: “Come!” Then, already in absolute tatters, he turned toward the image no less in tears that followed him, itself hidden behind sharp iron, and they exchanged glances, and as he wanted to pretend not to feel anything ominous and pretend not to know what to stammer now and how to end, he said again, but nobody nearby heard his indistinct wheeze: “Tomorrow or yesterday, no dying for any reason!” Then he spoke again a little of his daughters and expired.

  • The needle moved onto the unrecorded wax and sputtered disagreeably before Solovyei stopped the mechanism. The Gramma Udgul pouted, but the kolkhoz director bore a triumphant look.

  —Did you like that? he asked.

  —It’s too far from socialist realism for me, she sighed. It’s just poetic, slightly perverse nonsense, petit-bourgeois fantasy. It’s like a threatening riddle. None of it makes sense.

  —There’s nothing to understand, Solovyei replied.

  The Gramma Udgul’s face clouded over.

  —There’s no clear class line, she continued. The proletariat would hate that.

  Solovyei was putting the cylinder back in its crate.

  —Shall we listen to a little more? he suggested.

  —Hmm, the Gramma Udgul said.

  —Before you throw them to the core.

  —Don’t think I’m doing it because I want to, the Gramma Udgul said.

  Their eyes drew level. Solovyei smiled while furrowing his eyebrows comically. He kept on making faces for a few seconds, until the Gramma Udgul relaxed.

  —I’m just doing my work, she said.

  —Go on, I’m playing another one, Solovyei said. Then I’m going back to the kolkhoz.

  —Whatever you like, the Gramma Udgul sighed.

  • He was masked in leather and copper, as often, and then he took off his terrible bird’s head and, once the smoke subsided, he peeled away from the brick where the fire had forced him to stay for nearly a thousand years. Some mercury flowed noisily along his arms. He hunched toward those who were facing the reflections and, without clearing his voice, he spoke to the scribe who had died. “Go,” he said. “Write what nobody else has told you over the centuries.” As it fell, the mercury made a greater din than his own breath. The scribe didn’t move. For a year or two, he had the impression that this writer at his service was a woman, then the impression went away. Then, he threatened the scribe with bits of burning wall and he continued, but, this time, while hurling words in encrypted language: “Go! Hadeff Kakain! Hoddîm!” And, as the scribe didn’t write anything, he crushed the head under his heel and squatted by the remnants.

  3

  • The day had started. Kronauer regained consciousness and got to his feet. The rough fabric of his coat was stained with moist earth and bits of grass. Blades of lovuskhas, solivaines. A crushed budardian ear. Ants wandered over the fibrous scraps. Seven or eight.

  The night had not given him back much strength and he lost his balance trying to clear the ants away. The emp
ty bottles he carried over his shoulder bothered him. They clinked against each other. He stumbled for two meters before regaining some stability. He had trouble catching his breath.

  In his skull were audibly stabbing pains.

  The clouds tinged Prussian blue.

  He was three hundred meters from the first trees, among the bluish budardians trembling gently against his legs.

  Everything was blue, everything swayed.

  His body needed food, water, more than anything. Despite moving his tongue and swallowing, there was little saliva behind his dried-out lips. He coughed. The cough aggravated the constricting and tearing sensations at the bottom of his throat.

  He went a hundred more paces toward the nearby forest. Dizziness forced him to slow down. He stopped. He swore in Russian and Mongolian. Then German, for good measure.

  —Hell’s teeth, Kronauer, you sniveling wimp, what are you doing, staggering like a drunkard? . . . Walk toward the trees. Cross the forest and look for the village that was smoking yesterday afternoon. This isn’t anything impossible. Get to this village. Beg for a bit of gruel and food from the rednecks. Fill your bottles. Then go back to the railroad. This isn’t even a feat to accomplish.

  A small morning breeze blew, a bit acrid, bearing the smell of herbs preparing for the end of summer and for death.

  Barely risen, the sun had disappeared behind a barrier of clouds. The temperature in the air was autumnal. Birds chirruped somewhere in the stretches of degenerate buckwheat still separating Kronauer from the edge of the forest. A family of steppe songbirds that had survived, belonging no doubt to a species that was already nearly extinct. Kronauer listened to them for a minute, then they fell silent. They had detected a presence, they hid in the middle of the grasses, and they went quiet.

  Five minutes later, he had crossed a ditch and entered the forest.

  • The undergrowth wasn’t bushy, there were barely any obstacles between the trees. Here and there a fallen larch, a stretch of black mud, but, overall, practically nothing. He quickly disappeared among the trunks. The light diminished; it took on brown and red hues on account of the dead needles covering the ground. He remembered the spot on the horizon where the smoke had been visible the previous day, and that was the direction he went in, toward this hypothetical village. Nothing else was in his head.

  In the forest a heavy silence prevailed. Kronauer’s footsteps. A muffled noise, crunches that did not echo. A few mushrooms. Chanterelles, puffballs, clouded agarics, cortinars.

  As he steeled himself for hours and hours of humdrum walking, he saw, about a kilometer off to his left, a structure vaguely resembling an entrance to an underground tomb, and he approached. It was a fountain fed by a natural spring. The basin was protected by a stone arch. The water was scarce, just a few cupfuls at the bottom of a hollowed-out lava stream. It had scarcely any moss and looked clear. At the bottom of the basin, an emerald-green fern had taken root and spread out its wavy fronds: unnerving, splendid.

  On the other side of the structure, sitting on the ground, was a young girl who seemed to be dead.

  Kronauer hunched over the water and at first he lapped it up, like an animal. The water was cold. He held back from taking too much and stood up again, then he succumbed to temptation and went back to drinking.

  Then he tried to fill the two bottles he had carried the whole distance on a string hanging from his neck. He couldn’t submerge them in the too-shallow basin. Nothing got through the bottle’s neck. He struggled for three minutes, moving the bottles every which way, but to no avail. The water flowed in through a small crevice under which there was no way to position a receptacle. The water did spill out of the stone basin when it overflowed and subsequently made its way back, naturally, down into the earth, but right now the flow was too meager and the shallow basin was half empty. He hung the bottles back around his neck and drank once more by cupping the water in his palms.

  • The tinkling song of drops falling in the basin.

  The taste of the water. A faint scent of peat, of slightly peppery silica. An impression of transparency, of infinity. The feeling of being able to experience that, of not being dead yet.

  The silence of the forest.

  The hammering of a woodpecker determinedly pecking at bark, a few hundred meters from the fountain.

  Then, once again, silence.

  • Kronauer turned toward the girl leaning against the fountain and looked at her. She was short, with a head barely bigger than a child’s and, indeed, she seemed to be barely out of adolescence. Judging by her unmoving eyelids, as well as her slightly disjointed pose, she had already left this world. Her clothes were tattered, with smudges of clay and tears. She was wearing pants and army boots, a military shirt that was unbuttoned at the top. Her chest was visible, as well as her left breast down to the nipple. Pearl-white skin, a dark areola that was nearly brown. It was a breast slightly larger than would have been suspected given her body’s slim proportions. Kronauer reached out. He grabbed the collar and pulled the fabric a bit to hide this flesh that had unintentionally come into view. He felt a breath on his wrist. The girl was breathing. He had thought she was just a corpse, but she was breathing.

  Her physiognomy betrayed a Siberian ancestry, the memory of forebears come from nowhere to wander as nomads through the gaps of the taiga, back to the midst of nowhere, but overall, and because of both her clothes and her pale complexion, she looked like a Chinese woman who had traveled through the twentieth century to take part in a new campaign against the right-wings. Jet-black braids framed her face, accentuating her adolescent age. They were half undone and dirty. As usual for this sort of face, it seemed to be both very ordinary and very beautiful. Her left cheek was streaked with dirt and mud. The girl had fallen or gone to sleep on the ground before leaning against the fountain and passing out. Whatever had happened before she had lost consciousness, she had kept, beyond exhaustion and pain, a sharp and sullen expression. Her jaw was still clenched, her eyebrows were still furrowed. She had to be a sturdy sort. She had wanted to fight to the end against internal collapse, against night.

  She opened her eyes and, seeing a man facing her who looked in every way like a lawless escapee from the camps, brought her hand to her shirt collar, as if the first measure to take upon waking had to be to protect her neck from a stranger’s gaze. Her fingers gripped the collar, slowly pulled tight her clothes, and then she lowered her arms in order to lie down on the earth. She folded up her legs and now she tried to stand up again. She didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t get up from the ground. A groan escaped her lips.

  —Why are you looking at me? she asked, her voice cracking.

  She was afraid. She was unable to stand upright, and, in this deserted place, a man towered over her without saying anything. How long had he been there? Dread shook her eyelashes and her lips.

  —I come from the Red Star sovkhoz, Kronauer said.

  He hadn’t spoken since the previous day and the words came out with difficulty. He wanted to explain his own weariness as quickly as possible. So she would understand that she had nothing to fear from him.

  —I have comrades there. A man and a woman. The woman is dying. They have nothing to drink. I tried to fill some bottles, but I can’t. Is there a village a bit farther off?

  The girl nodded confusedly and shut her eyes. She had dark brown eyes, a small mouth, which was very pale on her pale face. She held back another moan. She had to hurt somewhere, behind her forehead, in her body, and, in any case, she was very, very tired.

  It wasn’t clear what this movement of her head meant, assuming that it was some sort of reply.

  • —I have to get to this village, Kronauer said again. It’s a matter of life or death for my comrades.

  —I don’t believe you, said the girl.

  She didn’t open her eyes to talk. It seemed like she was talking while in sleep or in her death throes.

  —Red Star is abandoned, she went on. It doesn’t
exist anymore. Everything’s irradiated. Nobody lives there.

  —Hang on, I didn’t say I lived in the sovkhoz, Kronauer said. I didn’t say that. We got there, all three of us, by following the railroad. We don’t have anything to do with the sovkhoz.

  He stopped to take a breath. He was standing over this exhausted woman, but he himself felt ill as well. Every now and then, the trees swayed, split, the verticals waved. He felt like he was going to fall into some kind of coma, like the night before right on the edge of the forest.

  He closed his eyes for three, four seconds.

  • A man. A woman. An accidental couple. Two vagrant figures, him in particular, with his bags hoisted over his shoulder, his bottles. A stone basin under a gray tile canopy. The dampness of the place. Its coolness. Drops that chimed from time to time while falling into the basin. The red ground. The trees nearby, the nearly black bark. The bare trunks, covered with long streaks of greenish slime on their northern sides. The subdued, slightly hazy light. A man who closes his eyes, his feet planted squarely but still shaky, fighting against dizziness. A woman who closes her eyes, leaning against the foot of the fountain. Two people breathing, the only perceptible sound for several seconds. During these several seconds, there is nothing else. The forest is silent. The breaths are noisy. Then the woodpecker from before resumes his interrogation. The hammering and its echoes fill the space around the fountain.

  • Kronauer opened his eyes again. The larches kept tilting, but he forced himself not to pay attention.

  —So there’s a village past the trees? he asked.

  —What? the young woman said, her eyes still shut.

  —A village, past the trees. Is there one?

  —Yes. A kolkhoz. The Levanidovo.

  —Is it far? Kronauer asked.

  The woman made a vague gesture. Her hand didn’t indicate direction or distance.

  —I need to go there, Kronauer said.

  —It’s not far, only you have to go through the old forest, the woman warned.

  She paused, and then went on: