Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  Under the lights, there were two stools, and on the stools, two men sitting.

  The first one was an impressively sized man, a hairy fiftysomething giant Ilyushenko decided had to have come from a Russian bylina, or maybe one of Tolstoy’s short stories describing countrymen whose appearance and style hadn’t changed for a thousand years. This man had a sheepskin cloak wrapped around his shoulders, and was dressed in a deep blue muzhik’s shirt that was perfect, silky, and unwrinkled, with billowing gray serge pants tucked into waxed boots, and, if he hadn’t had a rifle by his shoulder and a robber’s ax in his massive black belt, he could have come right out of a tranquil story of an unchanging Russian or Siberian village, living from day to day and having escaped the course of the centuries and their jolts, having ignored the Mongolian invasion, serfdom, collectivization. But there were these weapons, and his magnetic, yellow gaze, which Ilyushenko couldn’t hold for more than a second, an outpouring of golden fire that opened out to the hereafter, adding an extremely unnerving dimension to his person. It was Solovyei. He had come to the Red Star sovkhoz as soon as Myriam Umarik and Hannko Vogulian had taken charge of the unconscious Kronauer, and he had arrived at the reactor building early in the morning.

  On his left Solovyei had Morgovian, a man who Ilyushenko immediately thought looked sickly, terrified of his companion, and generally insignificant.

  Ilyushenko wasn’t prepared for this encounter and he blinked rapidly without saying anything, wondering if his brain, exhausted, wasn’t somehow playing tricks on him, and if he hadn’t begun to hallucinate as a result of the heavy bombardment of rays from the tank.

  Maybe I’m dreaming or dying, he thought.

  He turned toward the door. Vassilissa Marachvili lay on the doorstep. The soldiers who had brought her there had gone back.

  Or maybe I’m already dead, he thought.

  • —Oh, good, the enormous muzhik said in a deep voice. You came with your daughter.

  —She’s not my daughter, Ilyushenko said. She’s Vassilissa Marachvili.

  —Is she your wife? the enormous muzhik said.

  Ilyushenko didn’t know how to answer. This interrogation seemed uncalled for.

  —She’s dead, he said.

  The enormous muzhik nodded with a tilt of his chin. Unable to meet his gaze, Ilyushenko looked at his mouth, lost amid the black beard. The hair wasn’t fake. If he lived in the area, this man must have made some sort of pact with the radiation, which turned everyone completely bald before killing them.

  —For me, wife or daughter, it doesn’t matter, Solovyei said, oddly proud. Bring her here, so we can see if she’s really dead.

  Ilyushenko balked. He had never willingly obeyed orders.

  —What about you, who are you? he asked.

  The other man smiled like a wily muzhik, raised the hands that he’d set on his massive thighs, and gestured vaguely behind him.

  —There’s a kolkhoz back there. We’re self-sufficient. I’m the president. And your name is Ilyushenko, am I right?

  Ilyushenko nodded.

  —Did you talk to Kronauer? he asked.

  The enormous muzhik frowned. As if he wanted advice on what to say, he turned to the worn-out kolkhoznik watching the conversation, his head slumped, quiet and frightened.

  —This bastard Kronauer will get what’s coming to him, he grumbled.

  —What did he do? Ilyushenko asked.

  —He took his sweet time with my daughter, the enormous muzhik said angrily.

  Despite his exhaustion, Ilyushenko couldn’t bring himself to believe something so unlikely.

  —What daughter? he asked.

  —Morgovian’s wife, said the muzhik, pointing to his companion with barely veiled displeasure.

  Now that they’d noticed him, Morgovian sat up and muttered two or three disjointed words. He took off his hat and fiddled with it to look busy. Now his head, bare of all hair and covered with numerous scars, was visible. He had the head of a zek with only fifteen years left before freedom.

  —I don’t believe that, Ilyushenko said.

  —Did you say her name was Vassilissa Marachvili? the enormous muzhik asked, changing the subject.

  Ilyushenko nodded with disdain.

  —Bring her here, I told you, the enormous muzhik said. Ilyushenko went out of the building and dragged Vassilissa Marachvili inside. He set her down in front of the two seated men. He felt like he was presenting a game bird to some hunters and this so disgusted and upset him that he couldn’t stay upright; instead, he sat by Vassilissa Marachvili, touching her arms, her torso, her face, without any further thought as to the men there, since he was trying to be one with her body. He took in her smells of the steppes and earth, of dirty clothes and dead flesh, and, out of friendship and empathy, and also out of hostility toward the two kolkhozniks ordering him around, he refused to think of her as a corpse.

  Vassia, he thought.

  • Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili had met several times at cell group meetings before the fall of the Orbise, and there was already a friendly bond between the two of them when they joined one of the partisan units hoping to defend the Orbise one last time for the sake of honor without any prospect of victory, however small, even in the smallest battles. The group they belonged to had been wiped out in a matter of hours. One evening, with their front broken through and the self-assured enemy sitting quiet until the next day’s offensive, they had gone into a bombed-out house, lain down on an undamaged bed, and made love, awkwardly and fearfully, telling themselves that in any case they only had a few hours to live and whatever happened to their bodies didn’t matter. The next morning, they both went into a rearguard formation, an unpromising brigade made up of survivors intent on hampering the enemy before disappearing. That was how they met Kronauer. And Vassilissa Marachvili did fall a bit in love with him, but then the three of them had gotten caught up in the whirlwind of civil war, and they no longer had the time to figure out the state of their sentimental relationship triangle. Their commander wanted to send them on ridiculous kamikaze missions, and ally with communist creatures from other solar systems that he was claiming to talk to telepathically. They had to separate from him by shooting him, as has already been described elsewhere. Then they decided to flee by going along the taiga, through the steppes dotted with cities, small towns, and industrial and agricultural centers, nearly all of which had had their nuclear cores breached at the same time, rendering uninhabitable an immense region the size of a continent and now abandoned. Behind them the enemy was reestablishing capitalism and undertaking massive bloodbaths in order to start afresh, but in these areas unsuitable for human life there was nothing left to fear. Now they just had to go forward, toward death, helping one another. Vassilissa Marachvili hadn’t really weakened until the last week of their trek. Kronauer, who was most resistant to the exhaustion from hunger and radiation, had often carried her on his back, but Ilyushenko had often taken turns as well. They kept heading toward their communal end. For both of them, Kronauer and Ilyushenko, Vassilissa Marachvili was not a merely circumstantial companion, but more like a special sister. A small and very special comrade.

  And suddenly Ilyushenko realized that he was going to leave her here, this woman he’d loved, respected, and considered special, in this room where a nuclear disaster had occurred and where, over the course of centuries and even more, a silent and devastating and inexorable eruption would continue. He had certainly thought about this before, but suddenly he was completely aware of it. Here, in this ruined technical building, with carbonized walls, Vassilissa Marachvili’s immense solitude would begin.

  Vassilissa Marachvili’s immense solitude.

  But the presence of these two unlikely kolkhozniks kept Ilyushenko from communing with her, kept him from saying at her bedside, internally or out loud, his good-byes or words of comfort. He would have liked to talk to her some more, to speak his pain. And now everything was unraveling between them. He needed peace and quiet to
make sure that the few washed-out images still connecting them were firmly fixed in his mind and that they wouldn’t fade away too quickly. He needed time and absence, emptiness. Solovyei and Morgovian had no reason to be present in this moment of grief. They were totally external to his mourning. He needed to ask them to leave the place. He would ask them to go, to have the decency not to be present here. He would explain that this was a private funeral, that only concerned the dead woman and himself, and that they were of course excluded. Yes, that’s it. He would get up and firmly ask them to go and wait outside. And then, if needed, they could resume their conversation.

  • Without any concern as to what Ilyushenko was thinking, Solovyei rummaged through a bag that he carried on a strap. He took out a bit of dark brown pemmican, wrapped in oilpaper. Reaching over Vassilissa Marachvili’s body, he handed the packet to Ilyushenko.

  —You can last weeks in the open steppes with that, he said. Go southwest with the soldiers. Go along the tracks. You’ll end up settling down somewhere. The distances are vast, but you’ll still get somewhere and make a place for yourself there.

  Ilyushenko got up and, without a word, caught off guard, accepted the gift the enormous muzhik had given him. The amount of pemmican was impressive. There were at least three kilos of it.

  —What about Vassilissa Marachvili? he asked.

  —I’ll examine her. I’ll take care of her. She’s at the end of her rope. She won’t go far.

  —No, you won’t. She’s dead.

  —She’s neither dead nor alive. That’s what will save her. At that point, we’ll work on her.

  Morgovian, who up until that moment had been nervous but hadn’t opened his mouth, inexplicably broke in.

  —We can fix her, he stuttered.

  Ilyushenko had a large empty pocket in his dirty deserter’s coat. He was stuffing the block of pemmican in it. He stopped doing so and looked up at the kolkhoznik who had just spoken. He met his furtive, small-statured zek’s eyes, somehow able to compromise with watchmen and barracks wardens, seeking out consensus rather than conflict and physical threats. But more than anything he saw in those eyes a vicious tone, a lazy and self-assured lust. Now he had the impression that he had brought Vassilissa Marachvili not to villagers impervious to radiation, but to two necrophiliac degenerates practically proud of it.

  —I’m not letting you touch this woman, he said.

  Solovyei held his arm in front of Morgovian to keep him from saying other nonsense.

  —Morgovian is right, he said. We can fix her. But it’s a great deal of work.

  —I’m staying right by her, Ilyushenko said. I have no reason to leave her with you. I don’t have any faith in you. I have no idea who you are. I don’t know what the story is with this kolkhoz.

  Solovyei pulled himself off the stool he had been sitting on and stood up straight. Making sure all the while to keep his cloak on his shoulders, he stepped over Vassilissa Marachvili’s body and drew close to Ilyushenko, in a stance that wasn’t aggressive in and of itself, but which could hardly be seen as neutral. His hands certainly didn’t caress the head of his ax and instead dangled along his colossal hips, open and innocent, but his entire body was a dangerous mass. He left no doubt that if there was a fight he’d be on top in less than three seconds. He was gigantic and, as one of the powerful lamps in the room backlit his head, it created a halo that made him seem like a fantastical creature. Ilyushenko looked up at him, not wanting to seem intimidated, and immediately beheld a vision of his hairy face, carnivorous and taunting, a face that persisted in formidable flames, that did not even twist, that was both woolly and blinding. Then Ilyushenko met Solovyei’s tiger-yellow eye, his hypnotic iris bereft of warmth, and the two came face to face.

  This kolkhoz president doesn’t scare me, he thought unconvincingly. He’s just a kulak from Tolstoy’s time. An uncollectivized country bumpkin turned crazy and depraved by the gamma rays. Maybe there isn’t even a kolkhoz where he lives. He’s the sort to live in his hallucinations.

  Ilyushenko endured Solovyei’s gaze for two seconds, then the duel shifted against him. The other man didn’t blink and Ilyushenko felt a wave of bad light entering him, invading him to the marrow and depriving him of all willpower. A vertiginous nausea began to overpower him, and he was already wondering if he would faint or vomit, but, more than anything, he was aware that deep down he was losing his mind and that he had lost his mind as well as the struggle. The comparison was worth what it was worth, but it was perhaps the sort of reflection that occurs to a fly when, after having been caught in some slime, it realizes that it’s just been whelmed by gastric acid that will turn it into food.

  —The story of the kolkhoz is my story, Solovyei finally said in a strong and whistling voice. It’s my business. The kolkhoz is my dream, and it will last for all the time I want it to. It will last as long as I exist, and, in it, I’m accountable to nobody. As for your daughter, I’ll take her under my wing. You want her to stay here, getting blacker and blacker and deader and deader? Is that what you want? For her to be under the rays, more and more alone and ghastly?

  Ilyushenko didn’t know how to respond. He struggled mentally to figure out whether the golden liquid paralyzing him was outside him or not. Disorganized under-thoughts babbled in the subterranean corridors of his memory, formulated in a magical language of which he did not understand a syllable. More generally, the world as a whole escaped him. He barely heard Solovyei’s question, and Solovyei answered it for him.

  —Of course not, you don’t want that. You’d rather that she keep on living, but you don’t know what it takes for that to happen. Well, instead of entrusting her to this crazy reactor, you’re going to entrust her to me. I’ll fix her and I’ll take her to the kolkhoz. To Radiant Terminus. The name of the kolkhoz. That’s what has to be done. Nothing better for her.

  At that moment, Ilyushenko slowly moved his right arm over his eyes, as if to protect them against a blinding light, and, without a word, he staggered and lost consciousness. He stayed upright, as if turned to stone, he didn’t fall to Solovyei’s feet, but he barely had any consciousness left.

  —Of course not, Morgovian said. Nothing would be better for her. That’s what we’ll have to do.

  —Of course, Solovyei confirmed. That’s what we’ll do.

  • The space was lined with ruined pipes and meters dangling at the end of cables like carbonized foxtails, the control screens showed more cooled bits of lava than electronics, the ceiling was thick with sooty dust, the walls had undergone a terrible cleaning by fire, the concrete barrier separating the room from the tank was furrowed with several large cracks, and the ground was cluttered with blackish concretions, ashy fragments that didn’t crumble under footsteps. It was a repugnant background. Still, the harsh and violent electrical light bathed the scene with a sort of theatrical normalcy, as if it had been painstakingly put together by a stage electrician for an unspecified post-exotic performance, an unspecified little tragic sketch like the ones that had been popular after the end of the First Soviet Union, without special effects, with comedians who stood almost unmoving next to each other, in this unnerving mental nudity characteristic of the work of Leonor Ostiategui, Maria Sauerbaum, Maria Henkel, or other dramatists of the time.

  A theater scene showing what happened after the end.

  And here there were four characters: first a woman in rags mimicking cadaverous rigidity at the others’ feet; then a seemingly self-effacing kolkhoznik who hadn’t gotten off his stool since the first lines; then a paralyzed deserter, wearing an extremely dirty soldier’s coat, with a bag on his shoulder and a pair of binoculars taken from a corpse and, on his neck, a spider web that was intended to mark his affiliation with the worker’s and countryman’s camp; and finally a gigantic muzhik in his Sunday best, with a beard and a wreath of hair sticking out here and there as if run through by an electrical current, with a magician’s yellow eyes that were wholly unbearable. Four actors who couldn’t have ha
d much to say to one another, so different were they from each other. And, indeed, the dialogue among them had finished. Now, only one performer had everyone’s attention.

  Only Solovyei spoke.

  Only Solovyei currently had a non-mute role. He performed a play comprising a monologue, a talkative block aimed at the listeners who made him stand out all the more. Essentially, he steered and spoke a dream, as the dead did after their dying, as all the dead tried to do in the hope that their last conscious jaunt still had a bit of flesh, still contained some non-solitude and adventure. As most of the dead tried to do in vain. But Solovyei had succeeded, he had succeeded in constructing this solidly and, if not for eternity, at least forever. And now he was managing his dream without worrying about decency or plausibility. The image had solidified, the scene in progress no longer required any of the actors to move, and only he spoke. The time for talking was reserved entirely for him. The light didn’t particularly flatter him, although he was in the center of the theatrical space, but all the sound was his. He towered over Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili, and without caring about the nightmarish length of his discourse, he unfurled it.

  • —It’s not my intention to teach you a lesson, soldier, but it’s stupid on your part to talk about faith. Faith has nothing to do with it . . . It’s a completely different question . . . I’m going to tell you, Ilyushenko. You can consider yourself already dead. I suppose you already know it, more or less. So, in these conditions, what good does it do you to make trouble for this girl? If you’re already dead or something like it, close to toppling or walking through death, what good does it do you to fight so that nothing happens to your daughter? She’s here in the radiation chamber, and because of that, but mainly with my help, she can regain a bit of existence. I’m not promising the world, I’m not saying she’ll come back entirely, but that she can regain at least a bit of existence, yes . . . Oh, yes . . . that I can do . . . You, however, can’t stay busy with her. You’ve done everything you can, but now it’s done. You’ve done what you could, which is to say nothing . . . Soon, you’ll leave with the soldiers, for you there’s no other direction, and, if you want my advice, you’ve got nothing to lose there. They, too, are already dead or something like it. Close to toppling, but far from extinct. Thanks to me, in a certain way, far from extinct . . . You’ll all get back on this train and leave. What for, in what direction, you ask. This is my answer . . . We all have dreams. Even in the middle of the black space, we keep on functioning that way, in hope and in dreams . . . It’s our fate as conscious creatures . . . Whether we like it or not . . . Before life, and especially after, whether we want to or not, we advance that way, in dreams . . . And moreover, often we’re inhabited by dreams of dreams . . . You, along with the others, the prisoners and soldiers in the convoy, you have something inhabiting you. That’ll become more and more clear to you, over time . . . You all have the dream of settling into a place where you’ll finally be at peace. Whether you’re already dead or in the throes of dying or becoming dead, or still soldiers, or already prisoners, or already transformed forever into the living dead, or disguised as alive or as dead puppets without any idea of who you are. These are distinctions that don’t matter to you, and even less to the others who don’t know about any of you and don’t care . . . You dream of finally making a home in a place where you’re not forced to be anything other than what you are, you dream of going into a camp and never leaving again. Finally, a reward for your efforts . . . for your persistence . . . finally imprisonment in a camp where you’ll be protected from the horrors of the outside . . . This dream we’ve all had at one point or another. Well, I’m telling you, Ilyushenko, as I stand here speaking to you, I’ve seen everything, it’s no worse to dream it, even if it seems a bit strange to the living, to the dead, and to the dogs. It’s no worse. And in any case you’ll leave with them and, once you’ve been carted around in a cattle car for a while, you’ll be one hundred percent like them. They’re no longer of this world, and neither are you . . . Nor am I, nor your daughter Vassilissa Marachvili . . . but now we’re not talking about the same worlds, you wouldn’t understand . . . No matter, the two of us will be separated soon and never brought together again . . . well, yes and no . . . when I want to I can see who I want to in the black space or in the flames. Don’t try to understand that. We’re no longer similar or comparable creatures . . . You’re a brave soldier of the Orbise, you’re used to generosity and the Orbise’s brotherhood, and I . . . I too was once used to that, but I quickly learned to cross black space and the flames, and that . . . those things change everything. When you know how to come and go through the flames and when you know how to sleep and wake up in black nothingness, existence is nothing like in the Orbise . . . you live your life like a thousand plays, a thousand comedies and a thousand tragedies that never end, and not like a crummy short walk in the Second Soviet Union or I don’t know what’s even worse . . . You can’t understand and I don’t expect you to understand. So why am I telling you this, and what do I expect of you? . . . I don’t expect anything special, soldier, I don’t expect anything from you. Just for you to go back to the convoy, for you to leave everything behind you and let me take care of your daughter. This Vassilissa Marachvili, she’s already out of your life. Whether you still think of her or not doesn’t matter now. She’s no longer for you. I don’t know her very well yet, but I can tell you she’s a pretty girl and a good girl, brave and ideologically healthy. She couldn’t handle the exhaustion of the irradiated steppes, that’s not something you can hold against her. She has so much radiation in her body that she’s already made of something other than real flesh, and that’s exactly why we’ll be able to bring her back . . . Because of the radiation we can fix her. If you have the expertise and you don’t balk at the work . . . It’s magic as much as science, but fundamentally it’s science more than anything. I don’t say art because I don’t have that ambition. In any case, I assure you that we can fix her . . . and all right, she won’t be like before, she won’t have any of her own memories from her existence before, and once she’s woken back up she’ll be a little soft and stupid, but at least we’ll have given her back the minimum for living. She won’t know that she’s alive and she won’t have much of a brain, but it’s a hell of a lot more than plain and simple death. She won’t be living or dead, nor a dog, and once again she’ll be a pretty and good girl, brave and ideologically healthy . . . Good. You wonder what will happen next. I won’t hide that once she’s revived I’ll give her to Morgovian . . . Morgovian, you know, this tractor driver here with me right now . . . Morgovian’s a good sort, he’ll know how to take care of her. He knows how to take care of tractors, he doesn’t talk too much, he’s able to be faithful and tender. He made a mistake marrying one of my daughters. That upset me. He married Samiya Schmidt. She’s the one who asked, and, in the end, it wasn’t his fault, but it was still a mistake, a big mistake. It was done, there’s no crying over spilled milk, but it upset me very much . . . Morgovian’s a good sort, I just said it and I’m not going to say otherwise. But I don’t want him spending his life with what remains of my daughter Samiya Schmidt. She’s not for him. I know that he didn’t hurt her very much, she’s against intercourse . . . and him, he’s a bit impotent . . . that’s how he is, and the radiation didn’t help . . . But in any case this union wasn’t meant to last forever . . . We’ll sort the whole thing out once Vassilissa Marachvili’s back in shape. Samiya Schmidt will be unmarried again and that’s the best thing that could happen to her. She’s not doing well, and her marriage has only made her shakier. When she gets worse, if she gets worse, I’ll be there. I can go into her dreams, she’ll never be all alone, there’s nothing to worry about for her. I can go in and leave as I wish into her reality and her dreams. Whether it bothers her or not I can go in. It’s a safeguard for her. I have my way of taking care of her. It concerns the two of us, her and me, and it’s not your problem, Ilyushenko . . . It’s nobody’s business . . .
It’s not Morgovian’s business, either. As for Vassilissa Marachvili, I’ll put her in the Soviet away from everything, to start with. In the basement . . . Your comrade Kronauer won’t know anything about her. Morgovian won’t visit her at first. Nobody will come to bother me while I work on her . . . How long? Is that what’s bothering you? How long will I be working before she comes back? . . . Well, I don’t know at all . . . What I know is that once she’s come back into existence she won’t have needs or much of anything in her head. But we’ll take care of her in the Levanidovo then. You won’t worry about her, Ilyushenko. Instead of her broiling slowly in this awful reactor, we’ll care for her at Radiant Terminus, we’ll save her, and we’ll extend her as if she was born in immortality . . . She’ll last a long while, you can be sure of that. She’ll endure. Everybody’s a bit like that in the Levanidovo, you know how the song goes . . . Only there’s this Kronauer. I hope he won’t get in our way. I’m watching him, but he’s unpredictable and our goals aren’t the same ones. He ended up in the Levanidovo even though he shouldn’t have been there. Maybe I should have broken his skull instead of putting him in the prison. I don’t like him. He’s not really part of any stinking category, politically he’s not too dirty, but I don’t like him. Samiya Schmidt was in the forest with him and ever since she hasn’t said a word. He’s got some sort of infectious unhappiness in him. If he ever hurts my daughters it would be hell for him, and that . . . that I would make sure to last a long while . . . Look, can you imagine a thousand six hundred and nineteen years of confusion and fear, two thousand four hundred and one years of suffering, or even more? That’s what he can expect if he ever hurts one of my daughters . . . Same thing if he tries to find Vassilissa Marachvili and visit her and hurt her in the Soviet’s basement. For me this man will always be accompanied by a woman dying or dead. I saw it in his dreams and his memories. Right there on the surface, barely any digging needed to find that . . . The women he’s known have always ended up with him, dying or dead. And that’s also why I don’t want him to hang around my daughters. First of all because they’re my daughters and second because I don’t want them to end up dying or dead by him . . . In any case, not right now . . . He’s got a filthy fate and that’ll last until the black space, it’s not worth hoping otherwise for him . . . It’ll last forever . . . It’s not his fault, have to see how he was before he was born, whom he got his misfortune from, but, right there, I don’t like it at all that he’s talking to my daughters . . . I’ll have to go into him to keep him from going too far. I’d have liked for him not to come to the kolkhoz, but he came and, for me, the damage has been done. It’s not the same for you, Ilyushenko . . . you I’m sending back with the soldiers, you’ll travel by train and they’ll be the ones you set up your new life with . . . if you can call it that . . . something like that . . . You’ll go with them toward a camp . . . it’ll take however long it takes . . . five hundred years, two thousand years . . . and even if you find one, a camp, no saying that they’ll accept you . . . But well, that’ll be your life from now on, Ilyushenko . . . Whatever happens, you’ll be too far away from the Levanidovo and my daughters for it to bother me . . . And so far away from Vassilissa Marachvili . . . Because I’ll tell you, Ilyushenko . . .