Solovyei kept talking and talking, fiercely but droning on, or sometimes with an inappropriate intonation that suggested that behind his words were magical forces he could barely control. He wove a cocoon of words around Ilyushenko, likely to permanently take hold of Ilyushenko’s body and spirit, and his fate as well. Every so often, he readjusted his cloak, which tended to slip off his shoulders, over the shining cloth of his countryman’s shirt, or he set his hand on the head of the ax resting by his belly. He clearly took pride in playing a terrifying character and, despite his diminished audience, he overdid it a bit.
• Ilyushenko was frozen, facing him only a pace away, a muddled look on his face. He didn’t seem irritated or disapproving. He stood sheepishly, his arms at his sides, as if he had given up all free will, and he listened patiently and even deferentially to the explanations he was given. Clearly, he didn’t have any kind of answer to provide, and soon enough, like an onlooker who didn’t have to say good-bye to anybody, he would leave the technical room to begin his new life as a wanderer searching for a camp.
Morgovian sat and watched indifferently; he had his usual appearance of a farm worker weighed down by the harshness of country work and by the uncontrollable complexity of human relationships. He was the only one of the four sitting down. When he heard his name spoken, he barely looked up, and certainly not at Solovyei, and as he blinked he listened to how Solovyei had decided his life and his domestic future, then he shrank down even further on his stool.
Vassilissa Marachvili herself played an even muter role than Ilyushenko and Morgovian had. She didn’t express anything audible, visible, or legible. She remained stretched out in front of the stools, on the hard ground sprinkled with dark crumbs and compact remnants resembling excrement sculpted in ebony. She was evidently not in a state to understand the words of the president of Radiant Terminus, but Solovyei’s voice must have magically entered her marrow or what remained of it. She perceived these very, very vague echoes, and she waited for what would happen next.
11
• Ilyushenko left the reactor without looking back. He stumbled over the steps, nearly falling, and immediately stopped moving for a minute, swaying because he had trouble regaining his balance. He stubbornly turned his back to the building that was momentarily holding Vassilissa Marachvili’s body and the two kolkhozniks who had promised to give her some sort of rebirth. Ilyushenko himself would go his own way and abandon them, this body with its unlikely fate, its hypothetical future, and it was heartbreaking, but all the same there was a chance that something good could happen to her, something that, for Vassilissa Marachvili, would ultimately be less dismal than death—assuming such an eventuality existed. The idea of a posthumous life had never really occurred to Ilyushenko. He was not inclined toward mysticism, and like us all he preferred to explain the world’s oddities through dialectical materialism, evil plots hatched by enemies of the people, or the unexpected detours of five-year plans. However, oddity or not, for Vassilissa Marachvili there couldn’t be a better prospect for the days to come. This president of the kolkhoz really seemed to know what he was saying about reviving those dead from radiation, and in any case he couldn’t do anything worse than the worms, bacteria, and scavengers that would have attacked her body if it was put in the earth.
Now he was walking through the ruins of the sovkhoz and, as he got farther away from the nuclear structures, he asked himself several novice questions about the existence that might continue after death. About the length of this phenomenon, about what would happen during and after. The questions were formulated in such a muddled way that he didn’t even dream of an answer. Lurching beneath the gray-blue sky, in the knee-high and waist-high grasses, he had trouble fighting the mental void Solovyei had dug in him. Along with the narcotic torrent of Solovyei’s monologue and the effect of his golden gaze was the dizziness due to his half-hour stay by the fuel rods. The images floated disjointedly in his immediate memory and he was barely able to keep Vassilissa Marachvili’s memory at the forefront of his thoughts.
He muddled together the arguments for why he was saying goodbye to Vassilissa Marachvili and, more specifically, giving her body to a Tolstoyan kulak and a stupid countryside proletarian. He postponed the possible remorse, and especially sorrow, caused by her death. His knowledge was hazy, his steps were uncertain, and he shifted directions, rhythms, stopped. His face was an impassive but tortured mask, as if he had come out of an electroshock session.
He stayed groggy like that for fifteen minutes walking around in circles, aimlessly and slowly around the ruins of a pigsty, and then his dizzy spell lifted.
And now he went toward the railroad tracks with a steadier gait. He went up the Red Star sovkhoz paths that had once been asphalt. Under his feet, the grasses crackled. A good number of them had already dried out for the fall. He crushed them, leaving in his wake a powder redolent of hay. Sometimes he had to go onto a trail through the bush-covered areas. The convoy was close now. He went past the dark rectangles of homes darkened by time, the windows behind which foliage had burst through furniture, floors, and windowpanes, then he left through the sovkhoz entrance. Above him, the red tin star hadn’t completely lost its original colors. Maybe because he wanted to be moved by something that wasn’t himself or his grief, he thought intensely about what this decrepit star represented, and he was glad it had stayed in place. It would remain for a long while up there, on this solemn frontispiece, for several decades, protected from vandalism by nuclear silence, indifferent to the vileness and defeats overwhelming the metropolises and continents filthy with capitalism and blood. It will keep shining on us, he hypothesized, it will shine on and on over the places where we are, in the lands and in the dreams forbidden to the living, the dead, and the dogs. This is what he repeated to himself while walking—partly personal thoughts, still weighed down by bits of Solovyei’s monologue, part of which had been transmitted directly to his consciousness with its sorcerous components forgotten.
• Unhurriedly the soldiers came and went around the wagons. The engineer had lifted one of the metal panels covering the diesel engine. One of his comrades, who hadn’t gone up on the bridge with him, was giving him one-word suggestions every so often. The engineer was busy with an oil pump, rubbing something with a rag, and then he went up to the front of the motor, as if to smell it. The two men were in work uniforms, and looked more like convicts than soldiers. The technical problem didn’t seem to be seriously worrying them, or interesting the five or six spectators nearby who were also wearing mixed-up rags, from both the military and the prison. Once the engineer had closed the hood, his technical adviser waited until he had gotten back to ground level and offered him a cigarette. They sat next to each other on the ballast. Other soldiers loaded up bits of wood in one of the cars. The captain, the one who had pointed his lamp at Ilyushenko that night, was going around the groups and giving orders here and there in a conversational tone. Evidently the convoy was getting ready to leave.
Ilyushenko went up to see the captain and asked if he could join their group and set off with their company toward adventures, or at least toward whatever direction they had decided on. They had kept talking about the existence of a camp where they hoped to be welcomed and to end their days, and Ilyushenko said that this goal suited him and that he wasn’t even looking for something else from existence. He took out of his pocket the massive piece of pemmican Solovyei had given him.
The commander wasn’t a talkative sort, but when he saw the pemmican he couldn’t hold back a surprised and slightly greedy face.
—I’m not going to enjoy it all by myself, Ilyushenko said. We’re sharing it as comrades in arms. If we leave together, we can last a hell of a long time with this.
The commander asked Ilyushenko his name and interrogated him about his service status, his relationship to egalitarian ideology, his military abilities, but also the camps, general human happiness, the assassination of those responsible for general unhappiness, his con
nection to animality, to brotherhood, to Bolshevism, and to shamanism in general. The interrogation finished, he told Ilyushenko that he still hesitated to attribute the status of soldier or prisoner to him, but that he didn’t see any reason to refuse his presence in the convoy.
Radiant Terminus Page 16
