• She tilted her head to indicate the papers and boxes of cylinders.
—See all that, she said. Solovyei calls that his complete works. He’s joking, but I know he’s attached to them. And sometimes he says it’s a treasure, the only example in the world of post-shamanic poetry. It certainly isn’t like anything, and politically it’s nauseating and subversive more than anything else. They weren’t made for any specific audience. These are complete works for no audience.
Kronauer nodded in feigned interest. Everything having to do with Solovyei usually tended to bother him, these incessant mentions, full of vagaries and threats, as if the land and the inhabitants of the kolkhoz had magically submitted to their president. Besides, he didn’t believe that the Gramma Udgul would really establish a rapport with him at the expense of Solovyei’s literary ambitions. There was no reason for this complicity to arise just then. The Gramma Udgul wasn’t stupid and, if this was the direction she’d steered the conversation, it had to be so he’d say something bad about Solovyei. This had to be a trap the old woman had set, and he had no intention of falling into it. As for Solovyei’s poetic achievements, he remembered experiencing an unbearable example in the forest, before he had come to the Levanidovo, completely unbearable and humiliating, and he didn’t plan on sharing his memory of this experience with the Gramma Udgul.
—Well, maybe someone will find it all charming one day, he said sardonically.
—Nobody with a proper head on his shoulders would, the Gramma Udgul said. They’re vile mutterings. A little like the post-exotic writers, back in the day, during their mystical period. But worse. Mutterings recorded when he’s gallivanting through the atomic flames, through death or black space.
—Ah, Kronauer said.
The Gramma Udgul began to take her smoking materials out of an apron pocket, and she made herself comfortable while packing bits of tobacco into her pipe. Silence had settled between the two of them and throughout the whole warehouse. Kronauer was more or less at attention in front of her, and every so often he ran his hand over his shaved head, more for something to do than to straighten the half-millimeter of hair that dotted his skin and which would, by all appearances, fall out and not grow back until his death.
As the silence stretched out, Kronauer went to look at the phonograph more closely.
It was a device like the ones they had started making again, based on the old models, when they had believed that the enemy had weapons able to remotely destroy the mechanisms of electronic devices. This unfounded rumor had set off a panic in the industry and in the population, and it had kick-started a pilot plant for reinventing engines that ran on springs or other forces that didn’t require power. The rumor was quickly stamped out, but the first non-electronic models had already come off the production lines, demonstrating the ability of our engineers to adapt and the superiority of our technology, let us say our survival technology, in the race to the bottom we’ve had with imperialism. These prototypes weren’t produced in large numbers, but they were distributed through the network of cooperatives so that the working-class population would stay in touch with our culture and enrich it with local contributions. And so here and there working phonographs could be found, as well as blank cylinders without which these objects would have lost nearly all their significance. Kronauer handled the copper horn, caressed the diaphragm’s membrane, examined the needle; then he looked at the box full of cylinders and took out one to look more closely.
He could feel the Gramma Udgul’s hostility on his back and he turned toward her. She took the pipe out of her mouth.
—Didn’t you see what’s written on the cylinder? she asked icily.
Kronauer rotated the cylinder, which at first glance seemed not to have any information on it; then he saw an inscription in gray letters on the end. He had to hold it up to the light to read it. Like traces of graphite on slate.
—Well, there are a few letters, he said. F T T L T T D A T T D.
—It’s an abbreviation, the Gramma Udgul said unhelpfully.
—I don’t know how to decode that.
The Gramma Udgul blew a cloud of smoke at Kronauer. Her face was frowning and unfriendly.
—You really aren’t smart, soldier, she said.
—No.
—It means “Forbidden to the Living, to the Dead, and to the Dogs.”
She spoke these words with an ominous aggression, as if he was undeniably guilty of something, but refused to admit it. Kronauer decided to be as straightforward as possible.
—I’m not any of those, he said.
—Sure, you say that, the Gramma Udgul grumbled.
They watched each other without talking for several seconds.
—Ow! Kronauer suddenly yelled.
—What happened? the Gramma Udgul jumped up.
—Nothing, Kronauer said. I just pricked myself on the diaphragm needle. I wanted to put the cylinder in the spindle to see how it worked, and I pricked myself.
• Kronauer has pricked his finger on the phonograph needle.
A small drop of blood grows on the end of his index finger.
A sting, and then everything changes.
Sleeping Beauty pricked herself on her spindle and that cost her a hundred years of sleep and immobility.
Kronauer doesn’t fall down, doesn’t fall asleep. He doesn’t dream for a second of making any comparison between this fairy-tale princess and himself, between the old spinster and the Gramma Udgul, between the spindle’s point and the phonograph’s needle. He has nothing in his head resembling children’s stories, and he simply looks at the drop of blood swelling on his finger. He looks at it, then he brings it to his lips and he licks it.
The taste of blood on his tongue. And there, as in the shower, an aftertaste of cesium and iodide.
Kronauer has drawn blood on an object belonging to Solovyei, which is an integral part of Solovyei’s memories, which is used to broadcast Solovyei’s voice, a magic machine that speaks Solovyei’s poems out loud, his memories, Solovyei’s emphatic howls, Solovyei’s terrible admonitions and dreams.
A miniscule wound, and then everything changes.
Kronauer feels a light numbness in the pad of his finger, a barely noticeable pain. A new droplet of blood appears on his fingertip, he lets it tremble before licking it up, but already everything has changed.
Kronauer doesn’t know about this change, he is silent as he faces the Gramma Udgul, who watches him unkindly, herself also silent.
He thinks of the living, of the dogs, and of the dead, and, oddly, he wonders which category he belongs to, and no less oddly, he is unable to answer.
In any case, he has to say, this warning on the cylinder doesn’t affect me at all.
He is wrong. Even in admitting he isn’t living, or dead, or dog, he has bled on Solovyei’s phonograph and fallen into the world of Solovyei’s dreams.
A prick was enough, a few microliters of blood have become the gateway from one world to the other. Here everything is the same, and Kronauer doesn’t notice.
Everything is the same, but he has changed.
• He has just entered a parallel reality, a bardic reality, a magical and stammering death, a stutter of reality, of magic malevolence, a tumor of the present, a trap by Solovyei, an inordinately elongated terminal phase, a fragment of sub-reality that threatens to last at least a thousand seven hundred and nine years or thereabouts, if not twice that, he has entered an unspeakable theater, a vivid coma, an endless end, the false continuation of his existence, an artificial reality, an unlikely death, a swampy reality, the ashes of his own memories, the ashes of his own present, an insane loop, resounding images where he cannot be actor or audience, a luminous nightmare, a shadowy nightmare, lands forbidden to the dogs, to the living, and to the dead. His walk has begun and now, no matter what, it will not end.
6
• A moment of silence.
The Gramma Udgul sucks on her pipe, then blows some smoke out. The curls disappear
. She watches them turn into thin clouds, turn back to nothingness. Then she spits out another thick puff. The tobacco the Gramma Udgul is smoking leaves a vapor trail of resin, mossy stones, and low-quality hashish around her. The curls are beautiful and call for silent admiration.
Kronauer sets the forbidden cylinder next to the phonograph, as if waiting for the Gramma Udgul to order him to insert it into the mechanism. The cylinder waits, Kronauer too waits, impassive in front of the old woman. He no longer holds up his finger to lick away the blood. It has coagulated, and he is simply waiting for the Gramma Udgul’s initiative to move forward. In this way Kronauer is inactive, due to a physical and mental numbness not unconnected to the pricking. Also due to the respect the Gramma Udgul has instilled in him.
Kronauer does feel inclined to keep a militarily proper attitude in front of the Gramma Udgul. He doesn’t stand at attention, but he might as well. This heroic liquidator impresses him. Just a bit earlier, when Hannko Vogulian was walking him over to the warehouse, she had said a couple of words about the Gramma Udgul and he realized that the name wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Suddenly it was clear that the old woman he was going to see was one of the most valiant figures of the Second Soviet Union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories. He thought she had been dead for more than a century, since she had been presented in the media as a phenomenon of the past, since she had been discussed so much in the past tense. And then he was being told that he would meet one of the most honorable egalitarian deities of the Orbise. Which is why, although this deity had welcomed him as quickly and as easily as if they were equals, he couldn’t imagine addressing her in anything other than the most respectful terms. And that, too, is why he stands in front of her now like a good boy in front of an adult.
The curls of smoke come together and come apart.
High above, a fly that had ventured into the teeth of an irradiated harrow is stricken dead, after a noise much like an electrical discharge.
When the Gramma Udgul’s tobacco smoke dissipates, the warehouse smells of metal, burnt cloth, and an old woman’s sweat.
A second fly wanders around the harrow’s teeth. Once again an electrical discharge can be heard. In the silence, the noise of the insect’s instantaneous carbonization is so loud that Kronauer looks up to see where it had come from.
—It’s the flies, the Gramma Udgul says. The spiders didn’t survive, but the flies did. All the so-called experts were wrong about that.
Kronauer nods.
—I respected those scholars back in my childhood, but after living so long I learned that they often just spouted bullshit, she adds.
• The conversation regains some semblance of energy, and the Gramma Udgul resumes the biographical interrogation she had been putting Kronauer through when they met. She asks him about daily life in the capital just before the fall of the Orbise. Then she makes him talk about his marriage to Irina Echenguyen. He has trouble talking about her. The suffering he experienced when he learned that the dog-headed fascists had seized her in the clinic where she was dying, raped and assassinated her—this suffering is still unbearable. It is now buried under several layers, but it is still there, deep and undying. It only takes one cruel or awkward question for it to come back to the fore. The Gramma Udgul excavates this pain a bit, then she turns her attention to the grasses Irina Echenguyen had been cataloging. She asks Kronauer to recite the names of several wild grasses, to compare to what she knows of the steppe’s grasses. Kronauer lists two or three, then he stops. He has the irrational impression of betraying Irina Echenguyen’s memory. Irrational and especially disagreeable. As if he was describing something pure in front of a malevolent and impure judge.
—I can’t remember any others off the top of my head, he lies.
—Oh, come on, the Gramma Udgul protests.
Her wrinkled face screws up in irritation and displeasure. With the hand holding her pipe, she waves exasperatedly for him to keep going.
—You’re not being honest, Kronauer, she says. If you were in front of a people’s court, you’d have provoked the crowd.
—What crowd? . . . What are you talking about?
—Make sure you always tell the truth in front of the proletariat, the Gramma Udgul says.
Her voice is solemn and threatening.
Sensing danger and feeling exhausted, Kronauer nods. He remembers that he is being watched by Solovyei, and now this representative of Soviet heroism has started to calmly threaten him with a quick trip to the people’s court. She is casually and sloppily interrogating him, but during their interview, she has been trying to give him trouble, as if she is investigating him and as if he has something to be ashamed of, which he might end up confessing when he becomes upset enough.
—Ringed valdelame, garluv, Chinese keys, crizèle-du-marchand, talmazin, oncroies, he says.
He stands at attention. On the pad of his finger, the pain has started up again.
The Gramma Udgul hides behind the smoke of her pipe. Her mouth moves for several long seconds, as if after hearing this brief list she physically tastes its effects on her tongue, between her sagging centenarian cheeks.
—Good, she says. You see, soldier. You said you didn’t have anything else in your head.
—I have my highs and my lows, Kronauer explains miserably. The walk through the steppes took its toll.
—You didn’t just walk through the steppes, I thought. You also walked through the forest.
—Not for very long, Kronauer says.
—In the forest you had plenty of time to hurt Samiya Schmidt, the Gramma Udgul suddenly says.
—I didn’t hurt Samiya Schmidt, Kronauer says defensively. I carried her on my back. She couldn’t walk any farther.
—That’s not what Solovyei said, the old woman says inquisitively.
Kronauer waits several seconds. This accusation has been twisting in his head like a thick, black shadow ever since he came into the kolkhoz.
—I don’t know why he would say that, he finally says.
—So, you actually went through the old forest, you and Samiya Schmidt both?
—Yes, says Kronauer.
—In the old forest, he saw you hurting Samiya Schmidt.
—He wasn’t even there, Kronauer says weakly.
He immediately realizes that Solovyei’s words aren’t what he should attack, but the silliness of the accusation. Whether Solovyei had been present in the old forest or not doesn’t matter. Besides, his whistling voice certainly was there at one moment, whistling and harsh, magical, hurtful. What he has to say, forcefully, what he has to repeat, is the truth. He has to keep denying and denying without worrying about Solovyei’s flights of fancy, or Samiya Schmidt’s silence. Samiya Schmidt could have just said what actually happened. And what didn’t. That would have simplified things.
So he prepares to finish what he was about to say, but the Gramma Udgul doesn’t let him.
—Oh yes, he was there, she says triumphantly. He’s always in many places at the same time. Whether he’s actually in dreams or reality, he’s always half in the taiga. And he saw you there.
The Gramma Udgul laughs mildly, a satisfied old woman’s laugh, and then her lips chew on a thought that she finally says out loud.
—You wouldn’t understand, she says.
Kronauer pauses. He watches this legendary heroine, sitting in an old armchair as if it were a throne, this tireless old woman surrounded by newspapers, crates of memorabilia, black cylinders, and papers that she considers subversive. She closes her mouth without making any sound other than the mottled slurp of saliva. And suddenly he realizes that things have changed, that he has gone to the other side, the side of this old woman and unpredictable worlds where she feels like a fish in water, with the president of the kolkhoz and this unstable Samiya Schmidt setting off the rumor that he hurt her in the forest.
In front of this old woman who takes Solovyei’s lies as truth, he has no evi
dence he can summon up. He suspects her total complicity with Solovyei, her physical and mental alliance with Solovyei. No point in trying to defend himself with common sense. He can only expect unfairness, poisonous attacks, a complete lack of compassion.
So he looks down, his thoughts follow the path of the blood pulsing beneath the prick of his finger, and he doesn’t talk.
The Gramma Udgul opens her mouth but does not say anything.
Kronauer waits for her to make the accusation she is withholding, or change the topic to something heretofore undiscussed, or tell him he can leave. He waits a long minute, and when this long minute persists, he lets two slightly shorter ones go by. Then, without a word, he goes to the warehouse door.
• Then the Gramma Udgul leans over the device next to her armchair and inserts the cylinder that Kronauer picked up a bit earlier. Clearly, she cares about Kronauer hearing the post-shamanic stammer before leaving. About him being slapped in the face with a post-shamanic poem forbidden to the dogs, to the living, and to the dead. She hasn’t said good-bye to Kronauer, but this is her way of accompanying him to the warehouse door, her way of telling him that she has the same negative, very negative appraisal, the same opinion as the kolkhoz’s president. After just a short little interrogation about mere trifles, this pathetic soldier has revealed who he is: an unsuitable kind of person who let his wife be violated by the fanatics of capitalism, who shot the last-ditch officer without trial, who abandoned his comrades on the vast steppes, and who, in the forest, hurt Samiya Schmidt.
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