Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  —You’re reading that? Myriam Umarik asked.

  —Yes, Kronauer replied. I borrowed it yesterday from the Pioneers’ House. Samiya Schmidt recommended it.

  —It’s not for men. Myriam Umarik simpered.

  Kronauer pouted and shrugged.

  —It’s not for girls either, he grumbled.

  They faced each other for several seconds without saying anything. Myriam Umarik saw that Kronauer was in a bad mood and she changed the subject.

  —You’re to be transferred, she said.

  —I know, Kronauer said. A heating problem.

  • He obediently transported his things into the new room that Myriam Umarik had shown him. She had bragged about the room’s qualities, and then left him alone. The room was closer to the showers and much warmer than the first, but, as it didn’t look out onto the main road, it didn’t have as much light. The window was double-hung, too, which guaranteed good protection against winter’s soon-to-be-icy temperatures, and covered with a grille that wouldn’t necessarily have prevented an escape, but certainly would have hampered it. Outside, a half-dozen meters away over a murky, bushy terrain covered with dried plants—cramoisines, ditchcroaks, solfeboutes, gaviants—was a wall. It was the house where Hannko Vogulian lived. There were practically no openings on it, except for a dormer window close to the roof and a service entrance that seemed to be blocked off.

  The room was clean, smaller than the previous one, furnished with a desk and a narrow bed, as well as a radiator working too hard given the weather. Everything was painted gray. The metal box spring and the rolled-up, rather thin mattress didn’t look comfortable. The sheets, however, were linen and smelled good. My new cell, Kronauer thought as he unfolded them and tucked one of them beneath the quilt. Maybe they used it at some point to interrogate kolkhozniks suspected of deviationism, agronomists who had trouble understanding the orders for proletarian morality, beekeepers tempted by anarchy, cowherds applying the fundamental principles of free union too assiduously, sympathizers of the Organs working suspiciously, those who hadn’t worked with them, those who had worked overzealously.

  He walked away from the window and, as dusk was coming, he turned on the lamp. He pressed the switch, the bulb clicked, reddened for two or three breaths, and then did its job. For no reason, maybe to compensate for the frustration he’d just felt about his inadequacies as a plumber, he meditated for several minutes on the village’s electrical current. During the first liquidation, almost immediately after the catastrophe, the engineers had cobbled together a small alternative power plant in the Soviet, underground, using the fuel rods recovered from the Red Star sovkhoz’s vessel. This makeshift contraption had radioactive leaks as well, but, according to Barguzin, it could power the Levanidovo for at least a hundred years, after which it would become uncontrollable and turn the village to ashes, and then sink into the earth. Which left enough time to find some kind of alternative, Barguzin remarked. Find some alternative and grow old. Or something else. Something else like what, Kronauer had asked. Ahh, the engineer had said evasively. You know. Then he turned curmudgeonly and put an end to the conversation.

  Just as Kronauer was remembering Barguzin’s annoyed look, Myriam Umarik knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for his reply. Under the lamp, she was radiant once again, tanned orange, with her perpetually open smile that was easy, mocking, generous, and her slanting eyes, deep black, her eyebrows drawn out, her movements unctuous.

  —I forgot to bring you this, she said.

  They both stood by the window and began chatting without paying attention to the day slipping over the walls of Hannko Vogulian’s house.

  Myriam Umarik had brought a basket with clean clothes, Barguzin’s shirts, underclothes picked up from the Gramma Udgul’s reserves. Clearly, she was trying to make him forget that just half an hour earlier she’d been caught rummaging through his room without permission. Actually, the reason for her hunt hadn’t been to find evidence of Kronauer’s connection to a spy network, but rather to make sure that he hadn’t exchanged love letters with one of her sisters. That afternoon, once she reflected on Kronauer’s relative indifference to her, she’d suddenly had the heartrending realization that a love affair might have secretly started up between him and Hannko Vogulian or even Samiya Schmidt. She had carefully explored every possible hiding place in Kronauer’s room, and it was just bad luck that he had come in right when she was inspecting the books, which she had saved for last.

  For a minute, they talked about the Levanidovo’s radioactivity. The levels had hit their peak during the core meltdown disaster, and then, contrary to scientific studies, they hadn’t gone down. All the inhabitants had died at first, as had the heroic rescue workers and liquidators a little later. The local clinic had turned into a morgue, the sick people admitted there had gone and lain right in the refrigerated lockers, and, when there were sheets, they had covered themselves up completely, including the head, and they began to go quiet. The weakest kolkhozniks didn’t last for more than a week. Pretty quickly, by the time they had finished building the warehouse that would serve as a symbolic cover for the well the core had dug, there wasn’t a single living being left in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz.

  • —Well, what about you, living your whole life here? Kronauer responds. And the other kolkhoz inhabitants, your sisters, your husband?

  —No, we’re hardened. It’s not the same.

  —And me? Logically, I’d be liquefying right now.

  —You’re hardened, too, Myriam Umarik confirms.

  Then she bursts out laughing. Her teeth show between her fleshy lips. A lecherous man might, at that moment, imagine sliding his tongue over that white enamel, that he might pull this shining mouth up to him. If one believes Maria Kwoll, no man can resist the constant impulse toward lechery. According to Maria Kwoll, men’s thoughts are entirely dominated by and steeped in what she calls the cock’s language. No matter what they say or even believe, whether they are conscious of it or not, men can never even momentarily escape the cock’s language.

  Kronauer doesn’t linger over this sight of the seductive mouth. He looks away.

  Ten or twelve seconds go by in silence. They think about radiation, about dead kolkhozniks, about liquidators, about lecherous men. Maybe, yes, they both think at least a little about lecherous men. In any case, the idea, and its attendant images, occurs to Myriam Umarik.

  —You know, she says, suddenly very serious. If you hurt any of us in the slightest, if you come up to any of us to kiss or penetrate us, Solovyei will know and he will punish you horribly.

  —And your husband? he ends up asking.

  —What, my husband? Myriam Umarik asks.

  —Barguzin.

  —What about Barguzin?

  —He doesn’t have any say in this, if you’re affected?

  —Affected by what?

  —If I hurt you.

  —Are you joking, Kronauer? Myriam Umarik asks.

  —No, I’m asking you a question.

  —Hurt how? Myriam Umarik squirms.

  —Well, for example, if I came up to kiss or penetrate you.

  —That’s none of Barguzin’s business, what you’re planning to do to me, Myriam Umarik says. It’s only my father’s business and mine.

  —Remember, I never said that it was my intention to do that to you, Kronauer says defensively. It was just a hypothesis put out there, just for the sake of talking.

  But he swallows, his gaze shakes, his eyebrows quiver, and Myriam Umarik notices. She smiles teasingly. She doesn’t say anything, but her hips sway unexpectedly, and, indeed, her whole body opens up with that teasing smile.

  Outside, crows are cawing. They’re perched on the prison roof and they comment on the advancing dusk.

  • Or, to take another example, at almost exactly the same time, Ilyushenko in front of the camp’s door.

  —Captain Ilyushenko asks for the admission of a convoy of deportees he captains! Ilyushenko bell
owed once again.

  The absence of any response weighed on the silence, on the downy decor, on the barbed and glacial decor. Ilyushenko and Matthias Boyol sank in the snow halfway up their calves. They stamped their boots every so often to keep their feet from freezing. They keep their hands in the air as if they had been ordered to do so.

  —We came thousands of kilometers, Matthias Boyol suddenly said quietly, as if to himself, but loudly enough to be heard on the other side of the door. In our heads we had a happy image of our arrival to the camp, our enrollment among the ranks of the camp, our allocation to a warehouse or cleaning team, the recognition of our status as political and social rejects, our inscription in the register of those worth shooting. We wandered in hopes of this moment that would crown our existence. We staked everything on our entrance to this camp, we are at the doors of the camp, at the doors of death, at the doors of hell. We ask to be admitted.

  Then he began to scream with an actor’s ease:

  —The detainee Matthias Boyol is at the doors of the camp, at the doors of death, at the doors of hell! He asks for his admission and that of his comrades!

  Then there was an invisible commotion behind the watchtower from which the recent, fatal shot had come. An amplifier had just been plugged in. A crude noncommissioned officer’s voice moved through the electrical circuits and burst loudly, like vomit, over the camp’s threshold, the door, and the fresh snow in which our captain and Matthias Boyol waited.

  —Go back where you came from! . . . We’re full! . . . Get out of here before we kill you all! . . .

  —The captain Ilyushenko cannot believe that! Ilyushenko immediately bellowed.

  As he looked for words to argue, Matthias Boyol broke in. They had agreed to act in this way. Matthias Boyol had been selected among the others for his glibness and Ilyushenko had encouraged him to speak, independently of all hierarchical rank, whenever he saw a pause in the authorities’ dialogue.

  —The captain Ilyushenko will insist, he yelled with more elegance than Ilyushenko. He proposes the integration of detainees and soldiers in good health, workers resolved to pursue with abnegation behind this fence the construction of an egalitarian and fraternal society!

  The loudspeaker let several seconds pass. Matthias Boyol, who assumed that they had heard him, took the opportunity to repeat word for word a paragraph of one of his burlesque glorificacts, or a brief excerpt of one of his tragicomic threnodies.

  —Nobody can deny, he declaimed, that the camp is the highest grade of dignity and organization that a society of free men and women can aspire to, or, at least, already sufficiently unfettered from their animal condition to endeavor to construct freedom, moral progress, and history. No matter what we say or assay, nothing will ever equal the camp, no collective architecture of the human species or its like will ever achieve the degree of coherence and perfection and tranquility compared to the prospect that the camp offers to those who live there and die there.

  The snow fell. From the other side of the door, the noncommissioned officer crackled through the loudspeaker with the stupefied silence of a drunk man. Matthias Boyol’s discourse went several meters before being swiftly absorbed by the continuous cascade of snowflakes.

  —That’s why, he continued, we ask the camp’s authorities to respond favorably to our request.

  —We’ve got enough hobos here! . . . the loudspeaker spat out. Go die somewhere else! . . . This isn’t a charity! . . . Last warning before we open fire! . . .

  • Once the conversation had reached that point, looking bad but still undecided, an incident ruined everything.

  Aldolay Schulhoff, who was more or less part of the convoy, but who—more or less because of this—hadn’t been given a rifle, left the fourth car. He had been moping around in the presence of the dead being transported as well as the military bric-a-brac, the reserves of covers, munitions, and winter coats that everyone was saving for later, when they were absolutely needed. He had been put in a corner without any thought given to his movements, or the stench of grease and animal piss that his tattered rags, his flesh, and even his insane thoughts exuded. The soldiers hadn’t received any instructions concerning him and they mostly kept busy watching the snowy plain, and behind the uninterrupted fall of gray flakes, the heroic silhouettes of their two comrades negotiating with the camp authorities. They cocked their ears, but couldn’t make out anything, and had positioned the ends of their rifles in the cracks in the wood that served as arrow slits. When the situation no longer seemed critical, they withdrew their weapons and set them back on the ground, apparently becoming apathetic once more even though they weren’t.

  Without any awareness of the tactical requirements of patience and immobility imposed upon the train’s occupants, Aldolay Schulhoff decided to jump out of his car. He fell in the snow and immediately got up, then he went along the convoy toward the locomotive. The interim captain, Shamno Driff, saw him go by, but he had bigger fish to fry than to worry about a ragged madman. It was only when he approached the switch that he regretted not having knocked him down when he was still benign, because now he realized that Aldolay Schulhoff’s appearance in the middle of these discussions could compromise them.

  Aldolay Schulhoff walked past Hadzoböl Münzberg’s corpse and, instead of following the auxiliary track to end up by Matthias Boyol and Ilyushenko, who right then didn’t see him coming, he began to meander in the field of snow without any particular direction. He sank considerably in the snow, he walked with difficulty, and his revolting shamanic rags gave him the appearance of an imaginary beast, characterized by a hesitant walk and long dirty scales. For a minute he went on like this in silence, watched in consternation by Shamno Driff, who aimed at him but did not dare shoot—then he began to moan incomprehensible rebukes and the two envoys noticed his presence, turned, saw him thirty meters away, and didn’t know what to do.

  Aldolay Schulhoff was up to his knees in snow. It wasn’t really clear whether he wanted to get rid of the snow keeping him from moving forward, or if he was happy there, immobilized by a white manifestation of nature, and if he was ready or not to add his two cents to the conversation that his appearance had interrupted.

  —The tortured Aldolay Schulhoff recognized you! he suddenly screamed. The tortured Aldolay Schulhoff begs for you to put an end to his torture!

  There was a silence. The interloper gesticulated, churning up snow around him and throwing it childishly toward the far-off barbed wires that he hadn’t been able to reach. The strips that clothed him fluttered for a few seconds, giving the impression that he was massive and took up a great deal of space. When the cloth settled back down he once more became what he had been at first, an exhausted and sickly creature whose destiny was to brush past death for one thousand years or more without ever being able to lie down.

  —The captain Ilyushenko informs the camp authorities that the tormented Aldolay Schulhoff does not have the status of either soldier or detainee! Ilyushenko declared, suspecting that the upper hand in negotiations had been lost.

  Behind the door, at the top of the watchtowers, the answer was still yet to come. The loudspeaker crackled, then it no longer emitted anything, not even the nerve-wracking static that replaced the lack of words.

  —I recognized you! Aldolay Schulhoff yelled again.

  • The snow falling in big flakes, in vertical lines, without a breath of wind.

  Not silence, but an astounding crustiness that can sometimes be heard, sometimes not, depending on the importance accorded to it.

  The light subdued by millions of plumed lines.

  Three men at the camp’s entrance, immobile after having yelled at the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the door, and time flows.

  Seventeen seconds, maybe eighteen.

  The loudspeaker falls silent, as if on the other side, at the source of the noise and electric fury, the noncommissioned officer or his representative on earth or elsewhere is too dazed in the face of Aldolay Schulhoff’s audaci
ty to envision an immediate reply. Then contact is reestablished. The amplifier reawakens. The loudspeaker belches and begins to whistle hideously. The sound is so piercing that Ilyushenko lowers his arms and puts the palms of his icy hands over his icy ears. Matthias Boyol does the same.

  The whistle increases in intensity. The watchtowers on both sides of the door bend like trees shaken by the wind. The barriers tremble. Everything trembles, except for the snow, which falls calmly, implacably, as if belonging to another level of reality. Far off, from such places as the arrow slits in the train’s sides, it is hard to see what is happening. Everybody covers their ears, but cannot see anything special, anything new. The interim captain has the impression that the camp authorities have set off a sort of siren alert and he doesn’t know how to interpret this, whether it signifies a happy conclusion to the negotiations or a point-blank refusal.

  Nineteen seconds. Twenty.

  Two things then happen at the same time.

  On the one hand, several rounds of gunfire are loosed from the watchtowers, although none of the shooters can be seen. The two negotiators, Ilyushenko and Matthias Boyol, each take three bullets and stagger, then sink into the snow without a struggle. Ilyushenko falls back, Matthias Boyol falls onto his stomach, headfirst. They are no longer covering their ears. They are no longer moving. As for Aldolay Schulhoff, who only participated in the negotiations in a very secondary and unorthodox way, he puffs up many shreds of tissue that seem to belong to his clothes as much as to his body. The projectiles seem to have given him a surplus of energy and, in the time needed for several breaths, he doesn’t fall and turns around slowly, as if hoping, by way of life, to realize the figures of a dreamy dance. He has been shot through and he suffers from his wounds, but he doesn’t attain immediate unconsciousness. He screams something in the direction of the camp, but it’s in a language that nobody on the train speaks, perhaps Old American or Ölöt, and in any case his voice is softened by anger and blood. He screams loudly enough, his voice carries past the barbed wire and past the tracks, but in his sentence there are more bubbles than consonants.