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Radiant Terminus

Page 19

by Antoine Volodine


  • The next Saturday, the train stopped near a group of five shacks. They were positioned near the tracks, in a bare landscape, evidently without agricultural ambitions. And at first their presence seemed somewhat mysterious, then Pedron Dardaf offered an explanation—the countrymen living there used to be responsible for providing bread and water for the prisoners on their way to the camps. This confirmation that they were indeed on a path leading to concentration structures overjoyed the men and also reflected on their mood. Once Ilyushenko had finished distributing pemmican, Pedron Dardaf began the transfer of power that he had promised. The operation took place without the least solemnity and without any difficulty. It wasn’t even necessary to call for a show of hands. Ilyushenko waited for several seconds without saying a word, sighed, and ordered that they demolish a shack and transport the pieces in the second car, in order to increase their stockpile of wood to burn in the coming week and later on. The soldiers stacked their rifles or leaned them against the cars, and then mingled with the detainees, and they all began to work with motions from beyond the grave, as usual.

  Ultimately, there was nothing new on the trip. Only unimportant details. For example, in one room Umrug Batyushin found a book that he brought to Ilyushenko for him to decree its immediate future—bonfire or library. The cover had been torn off thirty years earlier. It was an anthology of short texts by Maria Kwoll, an author easily identified for explicitly laying out her hatred of sexual relations, at every moment and on every page. Ilyushenko ran through three paragraphs, which brought back every manifestation of desire and as well as loving tenderness to the original brutality of the animal night, to the urgent darknesses born in the Paleozoic era, forcing living creatures to tear each other apart, to rape each other in order to gruesomely perpetuate their species. Maria Kwoll saw in the vertiginous moments of orgasm a portal that led directly back four or five hundred million years. Ilyushenko said to Umrug Batyushin that he didn’t really know what to do with this book and that, for now, he would keep it. Umrug Batyushin waited patiently for his decision in the position that corresponded to standing at attention for dead soldiers. In reality, Ilyushenko felt shame at throwing a book into the fire, which was more often done by the dog-headed enemies, but, at the same time, he couldn’t bear and had never borne Maria Kwoll’s rants. And, ultimately, when the sun set over the steppe and the fire needed small twigs and paper to take hold, he tore out the pages and put them right on top of the sparks. It was the beginning of the evening, nobody asked any painful questions about our genetic heritage, and for him personally, this attack on post-exotic literature gave him no remorse.

  Those present around the fire were less numerous than at the last festive evening. Several were resting in the cars, unable to move or express interest. One of them, according to the news related around noon to the captain, had fled. It was Idfuk Sobibian, the harmonica player. The captain hadn’t ordered anybody to search for him. This man was lost, no matter what. He had condemned himself to the most awful solitude. And there was no point spending hours tracking him down just to bring him back to the convoy and shoot him for deserting.

  • When the fire had taken on beautiful tints of orange-yellow, golden-yellow, coppery-red, with occasional threads of pure gold that dissolved in the night with a hiss, Ilyushenko got up. Around him, a good twenty bodies were outstretched, mostly listless, and five or six were sitting upright. They all had their eyes turned toward the flames. Their eyes all reflected in the same way the powerful color of the fire, the inhuman yellows, the rapacious and devouring and hypnotic yellows that Ilyushenko had only seen in a gaze one other time, not long before, in the Red Star sovkhoz.

  Solovyei, he thought bitterly. Him again. I’d forgotten about him. This necromancer of the steppes. He’s come back here. This awful kolkhoz matchmaker, this reviver of cadavers, this horrible shadow, this giant impervious to radiation, this shamanic authority from nowhere, this president of nothing, this vampire in the form of a kulak, this strange man sitting on a stool, this abuser, this dominating man, this sleazy man, this unsettling man, this nuclear-reactor creature, this godless and lordless hypnotizer, this manipulator, this monster belonging to who knows what stinking category. He’s there again. He’s made himself scarce for days, but he’s come back up from the depths. He watches me through the flames. He watches us all and he directs us from the flames.

  It was a reflection meant to be fleeting, but Ilyushenko took several seconds to come out of it. Well now, he thought, there’s no basis for that, it’s the effect of having been rocked and shaken around for days. It’s obsessive thought in a stewing brain. Mental flatulence, nothing more.

  Several soldiers had turned their heads toward him and, as he had taken up an oratorical pose, they indicated that they were listening. This made it easier for him to escape Solovyei’s pull. He was now the captain, he had much more important responsibilities than mentally going over his irrational fears and troubles. He had to talk to his men. He cleared his throat and did so. His voice came out painfully and he had hoped it would ring with more authority, but he didn’t stop to reinforce it. Even if his exclamations were pronounced with a hoarse breath that had nothing warlike about it, he went on.

  —Comrade soldiers, comrade detainees! . . . We are engaged in an expedition that seems fruitless . . . However, necessarily, we are approaching our goal! . . . Our objectives will be achieved soon . . . we will finally see standing in front of us the fences and barbed wire beyond which we can lie down, beyond which our survival will become meaningful . . . Let us stay united, as we have been until tonight! . . . Let us never break this unity! . . . Together, we form a brotherly corps that nothing can break . . . not our feelings of ultimate defeat . . . not the political aberrations now everywhere on the planet . . . not the radiations silently broiling us . . . not the tricks of the enemies of the people . . . not the terminal nastiness of our fate . . .

  He no longer knew quite what to say, and, for half a minute, he struggled for words.

  The sparking of a plank catching fire.

  The twilit sky turning black.

  All around the endless, slightly rolling steppes, exhaling their last scents of not-rotting flowers, its shades of hay also not yet rotting.

  Much closer, the mustiness that accompanied the convoy, rusted iron, diesel fuel, dust, grease, excrements, and grime.

  The living fire.

  The men in a circle not far from the flames, inwardly in a good mood, but outwardly tattered and depressed.

  Their eyes often lowered, but open enough to show both sclera and iris reflecting the flames, merging into a single coppery yellow thing.

  —Let’s stay united in our happy brotherly hardship, Ilyushenko finally said before sitting back down like a heap. Now some music! . . . Start celebrating! . . .

  • Matthias Boyol got up and Schliffko Armanadji followed suit. They prepared for the traditional Saturday evening performance. Now that Idfuk Sobibian and his harmonica had defected, their group was musically impoverished, which was why Matthias Boyol had decided to break up his text by alternating medium-ranged recitatives with parts he sang. Schliffko Armanadji would bring in throat songs and harmonics during the recitatives. A detainee named Julius Togböd offered to accompany the singers on the Jew’s harp. He had found the little instrument lying among the debris of the second shack and he confessed that he didn’t really know how to use it.

  —Doesn’t matter, Schliffko Armanadji said encouragingly. If you lose the thread of the melody, we’ll find a way to help you.

  —The important thing is that you don’t leave them all alone, Ilyushenko remarked.

  —We’re going to perform a burlesque glorificact.

  For no reason, since it had no importance, the former captain Pedron Dardaf came out of his apparent torpor, raised his hand like a kid questioning his schoolteacher, and asked:

  —Tell us, Boyol, is there a difference between a burlesque glorificact and a tragicomic threnody, like th
e one you recited for us last week?

  Matthias Boyol looked disconcerted for several seconds, because he was already absorbed in the performance, which had started silently within himself, but he answered gracefully:

  —No, Pedron Dardaf. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s exactly the same poetic bullshit.

  Then the musical declamation began.

  • —Every man in love with liberty, Schliffko Armanadji sang as a prologue, and every woman equally in love, he continued, must have in their minds the incomparable ideal of the camp, its absolute splendor, and never stop at what is actually revolting in the camp, the organized squalor, the deplorable sanitary conditions, the terrible promiscuity night and day, the arbitrariness of the camp managers, the guards’ primitive savagery, the violence between detainees, the dogs’ lessons constantly broadcast on the dogs’ loudspeakers.

  Julius Togböd’s Jew’s harp began to produce an arid melody. It was too soon. Matthias Boyol let Julius Togböd do his best, with two notes, for two long minutes. Then, once the uncertain musician lost heart, he waved approvingly.

  —In some cases, he said in a storytelling voice, the train stopped in the open country, such as when a switch presented the conductor with a logistical problem, but also due to a global disinterest for the trip, shared equally by the detainees, their escorts in uniform, and the technicians caring for the machine. Everybody ended up outside. If this pause came after sunset, we relived, after getting off the train, particular moods of railroad displacement that refused to degrade in our memory, whether we had had the chance to experience them elsewhere in our own existence or in an earlier existence, much earlier, on the lines to impenetrable prospects, centuries earlier, such as Cusco–Puno, or Irun–Lisboa, or Vladivostok–Khabarovsk, or Irkutsk–Ulaanbaatar, or Kimchaek–Hongwon, whether we had received them and integrated them into our fundamental emotions during movie screenings, had already experienced them upon contact with wonderful black-and-white films that were silent or punctuated by the noise of vapor escaping, often with the image of ourselves or others like us, dressed as wretches or adventurers, an image that overwhelmed us, an overwhelming image that paralyzed us with grief, because it was associated for us with an imminent slide for the characters toward nothingness, it signified failure and ending, it warned us of separation, of terminal decline, and the end, and for us who no longer differentiated between characters and spectators, this was no longer fiction but another disastrous page in our reality, already written, already darkened by the indelible ink of our future to be placed randomly in our past or in our future.

  Matthias Boyol paused gently. He was breathless and needed a few seconds before breathing normally. Next to him, Schliffko Armanadji had swelled his lungs and, after a sound that resembled a sigh, he sent up to the sky an ascending lamentation, entirely in unearthly dos and mis.

  —I’m thinking here, Matthias Boyol concluded, of particular films by Yuri MacMakarov that affected our entire generation, Before the Defeat, The First She-Wolf, or Myriam’s Voyage being the most representative of his oeuvre and these themes.

  A moment of silence that was broken only by Schliffko Armanadji’s throat whispers.

  The fire crackling, sometimes accompanied by a shower of sparks.

  The reflection of the flames in the eyes of everyone present, as if detainees and soldiers were dead beggars imagined by Solovyei.

  The night with scents of grasses and railroads.

  Fleeting memories of images from Yuri MacMakarov’s films.

  Matthias Boyol had already returned to his declamation. After half a minute, his voice built up toward a song.

  —And so we went out into the nocturnal emptiness, orienting our chests and shoulders to avoid the full brunt of the icy wind, we imagined ourselves on a deserted platform, suddenly enveloped in a jet of vapor, as if we had just said good-bye to a female lover and already no longer saw her; a soldier offered us a cigarette, we took a puff before passing it on to someone else, then we moved away to squat and pretend to empty our bowels and intestines which hadn’t held anything for weeks. It was a ritual like any other, a way of showing that we hadn’t broken with existence and that we still had bodies and elementary bodily functions. Then, having restored order within our underwear or in what served for it, we resumed more vertical activity. We slowly went around the train. We came back up the convoy toward the locomotive. We listened to the earth’s noises, the shrieking grasses, the frost crystals beneath our feet.

  • —The stop lasted half an hour, Matthias Boyol sang, sometimes much longer, and then it was followed by a long hour of rounding everyone up, warnings on loudspeakers, whistle blasts, and horns. The roll call was done in confusion but not in violence. The soldiers responsible read their lists with difficulty, stumbling over last names and first names and, it has to be said, without caring. We hauled ourselves once more into the cars, in any case, as many of us as we were, hardly willing to stay alone in the open steppes, to have no food and no help forever, a thousand leagues from any inhabited land and cut off from civilization by the insurmountable fences of the horizon. When someone went missing, we notified the soldiers. They first lost themselves going through lists, trying to find the missing person in their papers, then they declared him or her never registered and therefore nonexistent, then, as we insisted, they started the roll call all over again. That gave any latecomers or half-deserters the time to discreetly return to his or her original group and allowed accompanying staff to once again question the veracity of our words. But sometimes the absence was confirmed, and then the soldiers looked to and fro more than usual around the convoy. A soldier climbed up the middle car in order to shine the spotlight. After one or two minutes we called “warming up,” the spotlight worked, and a large and blinding brush hollowed out a formidable tunnel through the night, ending very far, on vague natural obstacles that for a second took on monstrous shapes over the hills with their burned grasses burned further by frost. We suddenly made out an oblong portion of the prairie, punctuated or spotted with stains that were geological wounds or patches of rotten peat or patches of ice. The stains were never silvery, never agreeable to look at, they were always gray-black or dark brown. Sometimes the incredibly powerful lamp surprised in its beam a quadruped mammal animal far off, which we tended to describe as a long-haired cow but which the Mongols and Tibetans in our company, having more knowledge than we others, refused to call yaks.

  At that moment, Julius Togböd woke up and held the Jew’s harp between his lips again, and, as the sounds that he achieved were suddenly completely perfect, the two others fell silent. They stood immobile, surrounded by shadows and moving reflections, their eyes closed, and listened, while rocking gently back and forth, to Julius Togböd’s solo.

  Julius Togböd’s solo.

  A little wind carrying the perfume of unknown grasses.

  The heat from the fire.

  The earth increasingly damp as the night advanced.

  The end of Julius Togböd’s solo.

  • —The spotlight was hard to move or reorient, Matthias Boyol continued, immediately accompanied by Schliffko Armanadji’s throat singing. We heard the soldier on the roof cursing some kind of handle system or some kind of rack and pinion that wasn’t responding to his entreaties and pushes, his expectations. So the spotlight sometimes stayed locked in a single direction, the one where the long-haired cow had been surprised and continued to tilt its nose toward this bizarre sun that was bothering it during its restorative sleep and ruining its long night. But what usually happened was that the beam managed to reach a neighboring hill, and, halfway up its slope, a second cow or an old demolished shepherd’s hut, and it would stop there, unresponsive to insults or kicks from the soldier’s clumpy shoes, until an officer ordered the apparatus shut off. There were also times when the spotlight fell and lit up the sky violently, thereby becoming once more what it had been before its fatal agglomeration with the rack and pinion, an element of defense against airplane
s. The entire convoy, soldiers and prisoners alike, stayed there with mouths wide open beneath this immense luminous column, dreaming of unlikely enemy bombers who had come from amid the clouds or ether, and then, too, a non-commissioned officer or somebody like him had to come to put an end to the oddity, and, only then, after further imprecations and a string of stinging blasphemies, the light went out.

  • Julius Togböd’s lips were bleeding. He had been playing the Jew’s harp while holding it wrong between his teeth and he had cut himself. Still, after his recent solo, he had become convinced that he was indispensable, that without him this concert would lose all its symphonic appeal, and he had enough sense of duty to play his part despite the pain tormenting his lips. Once again he held the metallic body between his incisors and began to pluck the reed. Now he drew out a fuller range of sounds than at the beginning of the performance. He knew it and felt a certain pride, which was enough to keep ignoring his burning lips.

 

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