And on the other hand.
• On the other hand, I am happy to see that someone is busy bringing some strange relief to this banal scene. A little bit of supplementary oneiric panache. Someone or me, doesn’t matter. I keep from crowing and I let things happen. The loudspeaker provisionally stops its whistling and a needle can be heard settling onto the wax of a cylinder, the squeaking and crackling before the word can be heard. The scraping before the poem.
Suddenly Aldolay Schulhoff pulls himself together and screams several Russian camp phrases—finally in an intelligible idiom.
—We’re in one of your dreams! he bellows. The tortured Aldolay Schulhoff speaks on behalf of everyone! . . . We cannot die! . . . The bullets kill us but we cannot die! . . .
A new salvo silences him.
The loudspeaker now projects words over the snowy plain. Whether ears are cupped or not, the word dominates the landscape. Nobody can remove themselves from it. Even the corpses already covered in a white layer distinctly hear it. In a particular way, they too feel the torment of ubiquity. They find themselves both in front of the camp, in the floating world that follows death, and in one of Solovyei’s dreams, and, whether they focus or not on what the loudspeaker broadcasts, they have no way of escaping the acoustic layer that envelops them. Farther off, in the train, the nervous or terrorized men are in the same situation. They don’t exactly have the same status as the corpses fallen in front of the door, but slim is the edge separating the ones from the others, and, to put it crassly, they can just be lumped together. The poem, as incomprehensible as it seems to them, imposes itself upon them. It burrows deep into them, and very soon it no longer comes from outside, it no longer passes through their eardrums; on the contrary, it gushes in them and invades their marrow and hidden, secret sub-marrow that has been waiting for this magic moment to reveal itself, that has been waiting for this moment since their birth. Soldiers and detainees wobble, suddenly unsure whether they’re exhausted, enchanted, or ill, or already passed away. They examine the field of snow, waiting for the order to shoot and terrified by this voice that comes from outside and arises or rearises deep within them. They clench their icy hands around the silent rifles. Their necks stiffen. Their lips tremble, their eyelids twitch. Despite their hardened faces, they all look as if they’re about to cry. Some shiver, out of disgust and despondency more than cold. A voice summons up within them images so dark and fundamentally foreign that they hear nothing sensible and see no image.
The images. They are about to cry. They don’t see any of them.
• So, thinking that his henchmen and his daughters were about to escape him, to betray him, and even to bruise him, he immerses himself to the bones in the vibrating heart of the flames and he invents others, other accomplices, other girls, other wives, other flames, and first he counted to twenty-seven, and, when the blackness became total, he walked off, there counting to twenty-seven or maybe twenty-seven thousand seven hundred eighty-three, then, wearing out the legs he still had left, he went from marrow to marrow without sparing any trouble, adding rooms and tunnels here and there, adding crackling to crackling, humid bursts to humid bursts, heavens to the Seven Heavens, then he curled up, on pretext of a sudden fit of fever, and whistled some of his odes, repeating several times “Hadeff, derek! Hadeff, dzwek! Hadeff Kakayin!” and, without waiting for the echoes of his screams, without waiting for the impossible soots and the impossible curtains to send back these echoes, he quickly mated with the spouses and the female creatures that rolled next to him toward the pit, and, as some of them complained and resisted his oneiric ramming, he rejected the prospect of descent and went with great footsteps and great noise toward a dream where the protests of his fleeting partners weren’t audible anymore, saying, with great wizardly vigor, “This is a forest, this is a village, this is a work camp abandoned eleven hundred thirteen years ago or so, this is an irradiated land where the last beggars perish, this is a travel bag where I put my head so that eternity still has surprises for me,” then he made a wrong turn and ended up between six brick walls with no opening, within an oven that had neither a door nor a chimney and, once inside, he yelled out various calls for his henchmen and, convinced that they would not delay, he made himself a chair with the naphthalene oil that he hardened by licking it, then he sat calmly for a minute. The bricks that imprisoned him were sometimes burning at melting temperatures, sometimes icy, close to the temperatures of deep space, of black space and empty space separating galaxies. Neither living nor dead, his henchmen surrounded him; they swayed like puppets hung from nails and even bumped against one another, shaken by nuclear disintegration and silence; time had stopped. He used it to think again about his daughters and their mothers, about his mistresses, about his spouses and offspring, which he easily confused in his memories and fantasies. Then, after a long stretch of lechery and crime, he came back to himself. The henchmen waited in the shadows, in beggar-worker or beggar-soldier clothes. He ordered them to take their names, to deepen the darkness around him and to dance in accordance to the outlines of stories and sketches that he imagined and told them. And so a blind theater was born of which he was the sole listener. He beat the rhythm for different characters’ entrances and exits, and in that way he entertained himself, pushing away his immense pain and the immense worries that came with his fate of living and not dying. The darkness was thick as tar and for a long while he chose to stay there, reducing all flow of time to the drumbeats of his hands against his legs. In solitude he spoke the beginnings and endings of novels, saying with a voice that was sometimes whistling, sometimes gravelly, sometimes velvety, and occasionally interspersed with sniggers, “This is snow, this is death, this is a day and a night, this one is my daughter, this one will be sent into his own hell for two thousand thirty-three years and then some.” Then he crowed for a long while in the tar, enumerating the decades by twenty-sevens or hundred-and-twelves and some, then, weariness coming, he went quiet.
• When the incomprehensible deluge of words ended, the interim captain, Shamno Driff, gave the order to open fire on the watchtowers in order to bring down the tension that had built up a notch in the men’s souls, then, after a minute of shooting at will, he told them to stop. The fusillade made no sense. The camp didn’t return fire and didn’t suffer any losses. From a strictly military point of view, there had been no situation and certainly no developments. In the cars, among the gas, smoke, and smell of powder, the fighters began to collect the cartridges without saying anything. The captain went to consult Noumak Ashariyev. He asked him whether the switch had been moved all the way.
—Did Hadzoböl Münzberg have time to push it or not?
—I don’t know, Noumak Ashariyev said. I saw him fall under the sniper’s fire. I don’t remember anything else.
—You’re going to go back into the locomotive and you’re going to take us at a snail’s pace to the junction, Shamno Driff said. If we veer toward the camp, put on the gas and accelerate. We’ll break through the door at full speed. I’d be amazed if it held firm. As we go through, we’ll shoot in all directions. Once the barriers have been breached, don’t slow down. Go until there are no more rails. Maybe that way we’ll get into the heart of the camp. They’ll be forced to accept us. So what if they punish us for causing damage on our way in.
—And if we don’t turn toward the camp? Noumak Ashariyev countered. What if the switch doesn’t do anything and we head down the main tracks?
—Then we’ll go on, the captain said with a gesture of helplessness. We’ll just go farther, until we find a camp with authorities less stubborn than these ones.
There was a silence.
—What about our dead? someone cut in.
There was a new silence.
—Do you have a suggestion? the captain finally asked.
• The car was plunged into the twilight. Outside, the evening deepened. The smell of hot metal, of grease and powder continued to snake past the men. The sliding door was half op
en, but the smells of combat hadn’t dispersed. It was the end of the afternoon, the gray snow falling and the white snow papering the world to the black wall of larches. As there wasn’t a breath of wind, the cold was bearable, and in any case the excitement of war had diminished that chill to one of the many impressions to which they simply attached no importance. In the neighboring cars, detainees and soldiers argued quietly about cigarettes, about eliminating social parasites, and the best tactics for taking the camp by attack and evading gunshots from the watchtowers. We had set our rifles by our feet and we were awaiting orders.
—And our dead? someone asked. Are we going to leave them down there?
—Do you have a suggestion to propose? the captain asked.
—If we leave, who will take care of them? I asked.
—After a while, the camp authorities will collect them, someone speculated.
—If the train disappears, they won’t stay like that in the snow, someone babbled. They’ll get back up and they’ll follow the rails by foot. They can count on Aldolay Schulhoff. That one knows the place like the back of his hand. They won’t get lost. You’ll see, we’ll end up meeting them again on our way.
—I doubt it, said Noumak Ashariyev.
—It’s winter, said a detainee. They won’t stay here for long. The wolves will come out of the forest. They’ll take care of them here or they’ll drag them to the shelter of the trees.
—What do you know about what’s going to happen? the captain asked philosophically.
—Eh, someone else said. That doesn’t depend on them or us.
—Not at all, someone concluded.
part three
AMOK
16
• Meanwhile, in the Levanidovo, night had fallen. The main road was empty and, although not a flake was fluttering in the air yet, it smelled of black ice and winter. Myriam Umarik had forecast snowfall for the next day, and Samiya Schmidt, in the library, had drily noted to Kronauer that neither her sister’s prophecies nor her swaying hips were needed to verify the meteorological evidence. She had abruptly turned her back to Kronauer when he told her that he would rather borrow an adventure book than a new lesson on the repugnant sexuality of males. “By James Oliver Curwood or Jack London,” he suggested while looking at Samiya Schmidt’s black braids, and her back shook with indignation at the idea of his trying to escape Maria Kwoll and the wholesome theories of her disciples. Small, serious, with this strict hairstyle, she had never lost her unusual resemblance to a Chinese woman from the cultural revolution. “Stories about trappers in the forest,” Kronauer insisted. “We don’t have those,” Samiya Schmidt finally declared without looking at her index cards. “We don’t have them anymore. They were too contaminated with particles, they ended up in the well.”
The night was like all the others.
At mealtime, Kronauer left his new room and went to the canteen. He only had to walk thirty meters from the prison.
At the canteen he roasted four spoonfuls of flour diluted in water and butter—still astonished as always that the butter hadn’t run out, and noticing that the stock of flour seemed inexhaustible—then he poured himself a bowl of the broth gently simmering on the stove. He was alone. The meals rarely varied but the ingredients never disappeared, which he knew because it was regularly his turn to cook. One day, when he asked one-armed Abazayev for an explanation as to this relative abundance of edible foodstuffs in the Levanidovo since the kolkhoz hadn’t been in production for decades, Abazayev had looked behind him to make sure that nobody was listening, and whispered that it was stolen goods. “Stolen from who?” Kronauer asked, whispering as well. “From merchants,” Abazayev claimed, “from merchant caravans lost in the old forest.” Kronauer retorted that no merchant caravan had crossed the taiga for several centuries, and Abazayev was irritated. He considered Kronauer’s incredulity rude, but he was especially afraid of having said far too much, and from then on he was wholly incommunicative on the topic. “Is the president organizing the looting?” Kronauer asked, to keep the conversation going. “Is it Solovyei? Is he acting alone?” But Abazayev didn’t say anything else and seemed to be mentally incapacitated. “What about the merchants?” Kronauer kept interrogating in vain. “What becomes of them? What happens to them when they are robbed? Does Solovyei kill them?”
• Kronauer finished his meal, washed the dish, and left. The street was lit, he saw Hannko Vogulian going back into her house like a shadow come from nowhere; then he noticed Morgovian, Barguzin, and Myriam Umarik coming out of the Soviet and talking amiably. They stopped in front of the building to finish what must have been a funny conversation because they all burst out laughing at the same time. Then they started walking again. Behind them, the streetlamps shone for three hundred meters all the way to where the houses were spaced farther apart, and then to the black road leading to the even blacker forest. Aside from the echoes of these joyous voices, the village was silent. Kronauer shivered. The daughter and Solovyei’s two sons-in-law were now headed toward the canteen. They had stopped laughing. Kronauer waved to them, far off, and without waiting for them to get nearer he opened the door to the prison and went back to his cell.
He read several pages from The Pokrovsk Beggar, and became riveted by the intricate plot, but as soon as Maria Kwoll began to hold forth with acidic eloquence on men and their cock’s language, their cock’s thoughts and their cock’s world, he set the book back on the floor next to the creaking bed, turned out the light, and went to sleep.
• A little after midnight, he awoke with a start. He had been dreaming of Vassilissa Marachvili. She was coming out of a hospital, a building that had been spared by the dog-headed men, while all the rest had been vandalized and burned. She was safe. She was very weak, but she was better. He hugged her with an immense feeling of happiness. They clung to each other at the bus stop that would take them back home. Right before waking up, he realized that he had confused her with Irina Echenguyen.
The room had a slight smell of smoke. He propped himself up on an elbow and sniffed the dark air around him. Maybe it came from the radiator burning dust, he thought. There’s no reason why someone in the village would be lighting a wood fire. Nobody does that here.
Now that he had been transferred, his view outside had changed. The road could no longer be seen. In the frame of the double window he couldn’t see anything except for the wall of Hannko Vogulian’s house. On this dull, poorly lit screen, he projected once more what remained of his dream—mainly the dual face of Vassilissa Marachvili and Irina Echenguyen, but he especially tried to keep in his body the emotion of having found his companion once again after a long ordeal, the silent complicity that united them, this drunken embrace in the street, in front of the hospital’s ruins. Images and impressions both faded away quickly, but the affectionate languor remained. He didn’t move for one or two minutes, trying not to let this warm languor disperse, but it, too, simply became the trace of a memory, something unattainable and sad, practically drained of flavor.
Then he heard a murmur growing somewhere in or above the village, distant cries. As he got up to go to the window, the main road’s loudspeakers came into view, squealing several times with feedback, and suddenly they began to broadcast horrible strident clamors, so unbearable that Kronauer froze, then fell back moaning. He began to pace like a panicked animal back and forth in his room. Clenched over his ears, his hands did nothing against the acoustic aggression. He tried to find a place where the sound might be dampened. At every spot, by the window or far away, the whistling pierced and devastated his eardrums just as powerfully. It came from several places at once, seemingly relayed within his own skull. He went out into the shadowy corridor, got to the toilets, opened the iron door to the communal showers. It was worse. The whistling had invaded the night and managed to amplify in empty space, creating sound boxes within the prison, vibrating tubes, and pipes of all sorts. Kronauer went back into the room and sat on the bed, then, once again, he dashed lef
t and right across the room. Then he got dressed. He thought something serious was happening in the Levanidovo, a fire, a new nuclear alert, an attack from who knew what natural or supernatural enemy, and maybe he had to leave the building right away. The air still smelled of logs blazing, the darkness hummed, the stridency persisted, with variations and increases in rhythm that suggested, behind the earsplitting pain that was being inflicted on the listener, a language: warnings, maybe, or calls.
Suddenly, the whistling stopped. For a minute, there was electrical silence and crackling on the loudspeakers. Then Solovyei’s recorded voice enveloped the village, thunderous and emphatic, transformed, deformed by the membranes and the needle’s jumps, by the Bakelite’s imperfections, by the copper, by the stricken silence of the kolkhoz, by the night.
• At first they didn’t recognize his silhouette, because the fire was strong and it was hard to see beyond the flames, and also he was crouching in a brick recess, adopting an extremely animalistic and unearthly pose, a pose that barely corresponded to the original structure of his skeleton and that violated all the rules of vertebral aesthetics and underscored just how loose the ties between his skin and his bones had become, and, when they recognized him, a murmur spread, doubtless because they didn’t like to witness miracles, whatever they might be, and also because they felt a deep revulsion to the idea that this one who now publicly resorted to magical trances would be one of their own, dead or alive as they described themselves when allowed to speak, an individual they had heretofore considered rather ordinary and even inferior to them and who they had disregarded indulgently, as they disregarded their kind or their own waste, and who ultimately turned out to be deeply unnatural and deeply strange, and, in this growing murmur, frustration, fear, and disgust could be heard, and he, aware of this wave that would crash against him from outside the oven and from a time and space outside the fire, curled up even more against the wall, and, hardly willing to offer those present the spectacle of his combustion, he bent his head further inward, darkening his mouth and his tongue and focusing on intimate whispers more than thundering admonitions, and, now only speaking to his own increasingly black and indecipherable self, he began to give himself instructions for the trip into the heart of the fire and to give advice for the journey among the embers, and he decided not to listen to anything but his own breaths, and, for a minute, he only puffed and panted the orders intended for his least submissive organs, which often disobeyed him despite the emergency, because he had allowed the anarchist principles, that his mouth had never ceased to proclaim all through his existence to prosper in his own depths, then he contracted again and let cryptic images whistle from his lips, and then the audience, annoyed to only receive foul echoes and smoke from him, began to grumble and disperse, and, as he continued to murmur in a cryptic language, refusing to proclaim harangues that they could have appreciated and even fervently repeated, they intensified his withdrawal and left the place, and that’s why nobody witnessed the slow dance that he then performed for several hours and at least several centuries, a magnificent dance in silence in the middle of crackles and red clouds.
Radiant Terminus Page 25
