Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  This was the end of their vagrancy as a trio. After wandering, after bivouacking in the ghost towns, close to the abandoned cores, hunger, thirst, silent bombardments of gamma rays, Vassilissa Marachvili’s shared love. They had ceased to be a small inseparable group. Kronauer had left, he would soon disappear into the taiga, he was at risk of starving to death beneath the trees. As for the two who had stayed back, Vassilissa Marachvili and Ilyushenko, it was clear that they were no longer an active group. Exhaustion had been slowly breaking them apart. They barely communicated anymore. Hidden in the open, forced to wait and stay immobile until the soldiers left, until some kind of help came, they were no longer able to comfort each other.

  If Vassilissa Marachvili passed on, the very idea of helping one another would founder, the idea that had kept them together thus far.

  • Farther down, the soldiers barely moved, and when they did it was slowly, as if radiation or illness had drained them of all energy. Standing upright without support overwhelmed them. Every moment they stopped moving, they put a hand on a freight car or a comrade so as not to fall, and, for two or three minutes, they looked like they were about to faint, catching their breath hunched over like old men. Some, betrayed by their trembling legs, had fallen down and, scattered in the grasses, they seemed dead. Others, affected by some huge weakness or a no less huge inertia, hadn’t gotten out of the cars. Those soldiers simply stayed sitting on the floorboards, their legs hanging and their faces turned toward the sky, their eyes closed in the sunlight. The most valiant ones seemed hyperactive in contrast. They had formed a small detachment that ended up collecting wood splinters and boards to make a bonfire on the ballast. It looked like none of them were talking to each other, either because words were deemed unnecessary for accomplishing basic material tasks, or because each of them preferred to be locked up in harsh or tragic or simply unbreakable solitude within themselves.

  Afraid that a reflection off his binoculars would draw a shooter’s attention, Ilyushenko watched them with his naked eyes through the grasses’ unruly ribs. The uniforms were in tatters, stripped of any distinctive insignia, more worthy of prisoners of war than of soldiers in the field. He couldn’t figure out which corps they’d originally come from. And why exactly they were being stationed near the Red Star sovkhoz was a complete mystery. They were barely out of the train and none of them had gone off to explore the ruins. Although they were far from any theater of operations, they had stacked rifles outside the freight cars and, essentially, they followed a certain military logic. Two men had positioned themselves at each end of the train, one between the rails, the other leaning against the locomotive, and, even though they were dozing off pretty quickly, they were there to keep watch. Every so often, one of them woke up and immediately checked something in the countryside, then in his rifle, then went back to sleep.

  Several possibilities. Ilyushenko couldn’t stop going over them. These people’s identities. Their raison d’être. Their origins. A group of partisans doing what they’d done in the Orbise again in empty lands, hunting traitors? . . . Or a Freikorps that had broken away from the Orbise? . . . Or were they deserters who, like us, had abandoned the army in despair? . . . Mutineers who had no other place to go? . . . Or who wanted to join the enemy? . . . Partisans returning to capitalism? Or bandits? . . . A group of irradiated suicides, having decided that they no longer had anything to lose, tempted to commit thefts and crimes to while away their last weeks of life, having tossed aside the Orbise’s ideals of honesty and brotherhood? . . . Dangerous? Not dangerous?

  They had hesitated the whole time, with all these unanswered questions turning in their heads—to go meet the soldiers? Stay hidden? . . . As he had thought about it, Kronauer certainly must have relived the hell that Irina Echenguyen had crossed, the hospital besieged by a violent troop of thugs with dogs’ heads. That nightmare. He had talked about it once, one evening by the fire, furtively and choosing his words so as not to seem tormented by pain. He had managed not to dwell on horrible details, but Vassilissa Marachvili had become increasingly sad. She must have identified with Irina Echenguyen and, when Kronauer stopped talking, she hadn’t said anything further. Ilyushenko, though, despite not having experienced such barbarity up close, knew enough about collective behavior to be wary of this zombie brigade setting up camp by the Red Star. They seemed calm, but any horde of males could suddenly lose reason and become aggressive. This also went for these slow-moving soldiers. And now the Orbise’s shining beacon no longer cast light on the world or on the little area where its last partisans had been. So all the savagery would come back. All that we hadn’t been able to eradicate during our all-too-brief centuries of power. The moralities of killers and rapists would supplant our own. Ancestral cruelties would no longer be taboo and, once again, as in the hideous period preceding the establishment of the Second Soviet Union, humanity would regress to its earlier stage as cavemen. Its ideologists would rally around those who had once advocated inequality and injustice. Its mercenary poets would sing the culture of masters. Ragtag soldiers would no longer be kept on a leash. The old dance of idiocy and blood would play out again.

  • The last gleams of the setting sun had dissolved beyond the horizon. The evening began to blue the space. Ilyushenko spent the last minutes of the day repeatedly scrutinizing the soldiers who, at the bottom of the hill, had settled down around the fire. In vain he examined their half-alive half-dead, expressionless and gray faces. Now he used his binoculars. At this hour he was no longer in danger of being betrayed by a reflection of light on their glass. He nervously scanned these heads covered with dirty hair, these bodies clothed in army rags. He didn’t try to read the words on their lips because, most of the time, they didn’t talk. Then, as his inspection hadn’t turned up anything useful, he lay back down behind the curtain of high grasses and let the useless optical instrument dangle from his neck.

  • Night fell.

  Vassilissa Marachvili groaned quietly, with such weakness that her voice didn’t travel more than a meter.

  Then, both of them, she and Ilyushenko, slept. Ilyushenko dozed off and woke up suddenly. The sky was dark, with clouds going past and no moon. The all-too-scarce stars sparkled behind a veil and illuminated nothing. Night dampened the steppes. The grasses and the earth let their autumnal scents bloom, full of putrefaction and insects that had died in the early frost. Around him, Ilyushenko heard vague squeaking, here perhaps the final screeching of grasshoppers and there perhaps the deep roots hardening for the winter, rhizomes. He really was concerned about only one thing: hearing Vassilissa Marachvili’s breath. At the bottom of the hill, the soldiers weren’t moving. The fire by the rails was no longer red. Ilyushenko tried to keep watch for as long as he could, and then, his eyes shut, he did his best to make sense of the night’s distant sounds. Then he abandoned the effort and went to sleep.

  In this way the night went by. Then came the morning accompanied with a light fog, and then the fog dissipated.

  • The sky was gray-blue and sunless. It stayed that way the whole day.

  Vassilissa Marachvili was stationary. She didn’t ask for anything, she didn’t complain, she seemed not to be suffering, she breathed regularly and almost noiselessly. Ilyushenko lay unmoving on his side and let the hours go by. He gently touched her wrist, or his hand lingered on the veins of her neck, to make sure her blood was still pulsing, or on her forehead, to wipe away the moisture. Later, in the early afternoon, he paid attention again to the men camping at the foot of the hill. In the light of the dawn he had confirmed that they were still there, then he had lain back down by Vassilissa Marachvili, as if total indifference had crushed him. Now, his face was hidden, his skin irritated by contact with the spiky plants, the chilly stems, the prickly leaves, and he went back to his job as a watchman.

  The sentries had resumed their positions. Other men had replaced them, unarmed, which made Ilyushenko think that maybe the convoy had brought two sorts of travelers, one being militar
y, and the other being civil, the two indistinguishable, clothed in the same interchangeable rags from the lost war. Then this idea floated away. It didn’t lead to anything. Either could be hostile. Just like the previous night, he couldn’t figure out what these men were waiting for. They were prostrate in the grass, around the extinguished campfire, and, despite the daylight that should have invigorated them, most of them were still lazing around or sleeping. Some had headed toward the area of the sovkhoz and they walked there with extreme indolence. Sometimes they went inside ruined buildings to bring out something that seemed salvageable, or a piece of wood, a splintered plank, and then they sat down, exhausted, and didn’t move for an hour or two before getting back up and going at a cautious pace toward a new goal.

  • The day went by in this way, in slowness, without any collective initiative, without any describable activity. Late in the afternoon, Ilyushenko became dizzy. He stopped watching what was happening by the tracks or in the sovkhoz and stretched out by Vassilissa Marachvili. Above them the clouds drifted, high up and heavy with dark shadows rather than rain. The hours flowed by, one after the other, in silence, in the grasses’ trembling, in a few echoes of the sparse conversations that started up by the cars or the locomotive. Then the sunset came.

  Vassilissa Marachvili hadn’t regained consciousness. Ilyushenko gently caressed her face, the top of her neck, her hands, but he had stopped wiping away the bits of muddy dust, furrowed by trickles of sweat, which etched the patterns of death into her features. As the sunset deepened, drops of blood beaded around the corners of her eyes, beneath her nostrils, at the edges of her lips. She was no longer breathing calmly. She made no sound aside from irregular and hoarse breaths. Whether unconscious or still able to take in comprehensible fragments of the world, she gripped Ilyushenko’s hand, and he didn’t let go. For the first part of the night, her misery didn’t change measurably. His heart breaking, Ilyushenko stayed right against her, he leaned over her, and in the darkness he watched as she traversed the last moments of her life.

  • In the darkness, beneath a handful of stars scattered among the clouds, on the ground that had swiftly lost the day’s warmth, in the middle of what might have once been farmed land but now, after the nuclear catastrophe, had merged with the indistinct sea of now-unnamed grasses, in earshot of the soldiers and their strange convoy, at a short distance from the abandoned Red Star sovkhoz, from its ruins and its small uncontrollable reactor, Ilyushenko watched as Vassilissa Marachvili traversed the last minutes of her life. Her dying lingered, as if imposed by a sadistic fate that loved emotion and suffering. Finally, well before dawn, Vassilissa Marachvili let out her last sigh. She tensed, and then relaxed; Ilyushenko let go of the fingers he had intertwined with his own, moved her arms into a natural and tranquil position along her body. Then he stayed flat on the ground for an hour, closed off to grief, open only to elementary sensations, to the dampness of the night and the grasses, to the occasional and miniscule ruptures in the shadows, to the terrible smells that came from his body and that of Vassilissa Marachvili.

  • The sky didn’t show any indication of brightening soon. The air was getting colder. Cramps settled into Ilyushenko’s legs. He got back up and moved his limbs. His joints hurt. He warmed them with movements calling to mind the exercises of octogenarians. On the horizon a half moon had just emerged, bestowing only some pathetic light on the steppes. He said to himself that, despite everything, if the sentries hadn’t fallen asleep, they now had a golden opportunity to spot him, because aside from him everything for kilometers around was completely petrified. He waited for the sound of a gun being cocked, a gunshot, but nothing came, and the moon disappeared. Then, without even wondering whether it was a good or bad idea, he hefted Vassilissa Marachvili’s body and began to drag her toward the railroad.

  After the day’s end, the soldiers had lit a fire and some of them had stayed there for the night. The fire was now out, but throughout the last hours Ilyushenko had examined it so many times from the top of the hill that he knew exactly where it was, and now he oriented himself by a small red smudge that still breathed among the embers. He went down the slope without taking the least precaution not to be seen. He was wholly focused on not falling and not handling Vassilissa Marachvili’s remains disrespectfully.

  Once he was fifteen meters from the embers, one of the soldiers who had been sleeping haphazardly by the fire came out of his lethargy, turned on a flashlight, and pointed the beam at Ilyushenko. He froze in the light, mesmerized, filthy, silent, a strange vagrant from the steppes with his only baggage being a woman’s corpse. The soldier turned off the flashlight without asking him what he wanted, what he was, without welcoming him or inviting him to come join the sleepers.

  The night had not yet come to its end and it was cold. Ilyushenko stayed for half a minute without taking a step, enough time for his retinas, rendered temporarily useless by the light’s beam, to regain their ability to distinguish black from white. None of the soldiers around the fire said a word and, as they didn’t snore in their sleep, it occurred to Ilyushenko that they too, like Vassilissa Marachvili, hadn’t survived. He set her morose weight on the ground, taking care that the corpse wouldn’t bounce disgustingly against the earth, and then he went to the fire pit and sat by the kindling to stir the embers with some splintered wood. A flame crackled on one of the planks, red and gold, but the fire didn’t catch and, after several pointless attempts, Ilyushenko gave up. He hadn’t even been able to warm his hands.

  The soldier with the flashlight was talking now. The last of the flames reflected off his shoulder, in his feverish and exhausted eyes, against his leathery physiognomy, then the light diminished again and only his voice was left.

  —We don’t eat human flesh, he said.

  —Oh, Ilyushenko said.

  His throat and tongue were dry. The vowel had been hard to get out, it had grown from a wheezing sound, and then he coughed. The soldier held out a flask. Ilyushenko let the water soak into his mucus before he swallowed. It had a vinegary taste. He gargled carefully so as not to choke or set off spasms that would paralyze his stomach.

  —Marxism-Leninism forbids it, the soldier replied as he took back the flask.

  —Forbids what? Ilyushenko asked.

  —Eating human flesh.

  —Yes, I know that, said Ilyushenko.

  —So why did you bring us that? asked the soldier.

  Ilyushenko finally realized the misunderstanding, but he was too tired to be annoyed.

  —You can help me take care of her. I don’t want the crows and ravens devouring her on the open steppes.

  Another bout of coughing shook him. His listener, who couldn’t possibly know how dehydrated he was, didn’t offer to quench his thirst again.

  —We haven’t eaten anything for weeks, but we’d never eat human flesh, he continued.

  Ilyushenko’s body forced him to lie down by the ashes. His eyelids closed heavily, his heart beat as if he was in a deep sleep. The bodies stretched out around him encouraged him not to fight it. Even the pain of Vassilissa Marachvili’s loss had gone hazy. Suddenly, he was no longer thinking of anything, but the smell of carbonized planks and the absence of warmth and light.

  • When day broke, the stiffened soldiers sprawled out and yawned. With immense laziness they got up and began to walk. Some went off to take care of their paltry urges, others went back into the cars to stretch properly. A few were still lying on the ground, breathing slowly and waiting for the sun to appear and warm them up.

  They offered Ilyushenko water and shared bits of pemmican with him. He had to wait until sunup before hearing the sound of their voices at last. They talked a little about one thing or another, about the end of the Orbise, about egalitarianism, about the officers who had committed suicide or who they’d had to shoot, about their hopes of having finished their interminable travels. They had gone in and out of irradiated zones for a month without finding anything even vaguely resembling an oasis. They
felt like they were going around in circles. The destination they dreamed of finding was a work camp that wasn’t marked on the railroad maps, but which they had heard about. They had crossed the entire network together searching for what they considered a happy end to their wandering. In a camp, one of them said, they would be taken care of and finally be free. They glanced around and talked like they were insane. They also talked about Vassilissa Marachvili. The one who’d had a flashlight, and who the soldiers had elected captain for a week, suggested keeping her where the nuclear generator was, so that she would be safe from predators. They had been eliminated by radiation, the captain said, and would continue to be eliminated for eternity’s entirety. Several soldiers nodded. He’s right, one of them said.

  Ilyushenko was easily convinced. He had absolutely no desire to bury Vassilissa Marachvili. Leaving her alone near the core was a form of slow incineration, and in any case far preferable to rotting slowly underground, among the beasts, the earthworms, the centipedes, and the larvae.

  10

  • Five foot soldiers volunteered to help transport Vassilissa Marachvili to the defective reactor. They positioned themselves to carry her in an almost brotherly, certainly attentive way, and, having bypassed the locomotive and crossed the tracks, they went shakily through the tall grasses and undergrowth toward the small sovkhoz’s nuclear building. They went past collapsed administrative buildings, a former pigsty that still smelled of manure, two collective residences that didn’t emit any human odors, and, after taking a road that had once been asphalt, they came to the entrance of the generator. The soldiers set Vassilissa Marachvili on the doorstep and, feeling that they had done their job, they left Ilyushenko with the corpse and went back toward the Red Star’s entrance and the railroad.

  • The building’s door was shut, but not locked. Ilyushenko cleared away the dirt that had built up at the foot of the door, pushed on the latch to pull the panel open, and went in. It was a technical control room, with pipes of different sizes, monitors, knobs, meters. They had all burned and been completely ruined when the concrete surrounding the adjacent tank had burst, and violent streams of fusion wastewater had flowed in its wake. But then the eruption had calmed, and finally, after several decades, the space looked like a room full of broken machines that had burned a long time ago and were now waiting for total overhaul. By some miracle, two lamps still worked in the middle of the soot-black ceiling. This miracle was due to the heroic liquidators who had managed, right after the explosion, to reestablish a provisional electric supply in order to carry out emergency operations on the tank, and who had died forgetting to turn off the lights.