Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  • The kolkhoz president liked this place enough to develop most of his sorceries there, as well as stay there for short periods of drowsiness that, for him, replaced sleep. He left the Soviet’s upper floors, he stepped over the pipes and the pumps that murmured on the warm ground, and he snuck into the compartment that held the reactor core. He had set down a mattress in one corner. He brushed the excess plumes running along the wall with an iron rod or his own hands, or he chased them down by huffing and puffing. Then he lay down in the middle of the regular, soothing rumbling. The mattress was fireproof, but had to be replaced often because despite being treated against fire it eventually turned hard and stank of bister and cadmium. When Solovyei wasn’t able to relax and had nothing special to do, he leaned against the cement and hummed in tune with the quivering he felt on his spine from the vessel and fuel rods’ excitement. It was one of his favorite dens in the Levanidovo, and, even when he was going to a great deal of trouble and working hard, whether in the forest, in the steppes, or within the souls of those he possessed or haunted, he used his powers of ubiquity to stay there again and again. Often it was from there that he launched himself into parallel universes, into strange flames, into empty spaces and dreams where he was sometimes a horribly resentful and invincible shaman, sometimes a magnificent lover, sometimes a traveler to dark worlds, sometimes a necromancer specializing in punishment and camps, sometimes an unforgettable, cryptic poet whose words were nonpareil, forbidden to the dead, to the living, and to the dogs.

  • That night Morgovian had put on a peasant’s funeral or wedding clothes, and, with his city shoes and his jacket with too-long sleeves, he was simultaneously ridiculous, sweet, and humble. He went around an electronic monitoring block where no light had been turned on, stepped over a large water pipe, and went toward what he knew was both the entrance to the reactor and the threshold of one of Solovyei’s sacred domains.

  The man in the shadows fidgeted.

  —I told you to wait until I called you, he said.

  —I wanted to at least see her, Morgovian said humbly. Just a quick peek.

  —Today won’t be when you marry her, Solovyei said. She’s only regressed since she came. I haven’t been able to fix her.

  —But is it on its way? Morgovian asked stupidly.

  —Oh, on its way, Solovyei ground his teeth. I haven’t been able to fix her, that’s where we are.

  —So it’s not going well, then? Morgovian sighed.

  —That’s right, Solovyei confirmed.

  Morgovian said something under his breath. He tugged at the bottom of his jacket.

  —Well? Solovyei asked.

  —Maybe I could see her? Morgovian stammered.

  —That’s not a good idea, said the kolkhoz president. She hasn’t progressed in the right way.

  At that moment, Samiya Schmidt came in.

  —What are you talking about? she asked.

  • For Solovyei, the Vassilissa Marachvili operation wasn’t terribly tricky and simply had to happen in several stages. The first stage was transporting Vassilissa Marachvili to the Levanidovo and placing her discreetly in the Soviet’s basement, close to the emergency reactor. As Solovyei and Morgovian had come back from their expedition to the Red Star sovkhoz at three in the morning, this first phase had been a resounding success. Nobody had seen the young woman’s nocturnal arrival. The second stage consisted of leaning magically over Vassilissa Marachvili, with the sole goal of bringing her back to existence in the form of a creature neither alive nor dead. The third, after Vassilissa Marachvili’s awakening, had to lead to her union with Morgovian, to shepherding the new couple toward their honeymoon on one of the abandoned village farms, and to the immediate divorce proceedings between Morgovian and Samiya Schmidt. In that way, which he considered relatively gentle and implacable, Solovyei intended to liberate his daughter from a failed marriage and make her independent once again, and more available to him. He hadn’t foreseen Samiya Schmidt’s sudden entrance right in the middle of the second phase, at a moment when his attempts to reanimate Vassilissa Marachvili weren’t producing the desired result.

  • For several seconds, the only noise came from the surroundings. Occasional murmurs in the confused mass of cables. Bubbles of oil bursting in the oil chambers. Flames crackling along the walls, along the mains and pipes with illogical branches. Machines constantly humming. Fuel rods regularly sizzling as they tried to get several degrees hotter. Burning vapors and water whispering as they flowed inside the channels and pumps. Several drops falling and echoing in several puddles in the shadow or in full light. The radioactivity at its peak puffing almost silently.

  Solovyei stood in the darkness of his nook, at the entrance to the reactor, with the corpse of Vassilissa Marachvili at his feet. The young girl was lying on the somewhat tarry mattress and, dressed in disgusting rags, she waited in vain for the results of the treatment that had been recommended for her. She wasn’t in a worse state than at the time when the kolkhoz president had begun to expose her to radiation and his magical tricks. But all the same, at first glance, her state was catastrophic. The penumbra was occasionally interspersed with layers of dwarf flames. They slowly grew over Vassilissa Marachvili and then disappeared.

  In his absurd outfit as a kolkhoznik dressed in his best, Morgovian knew he had been caught red-handed. He shivered despondently without looking up at Samiya Schmidt. He focused on the ground and his already-dissipating soapy smell. The room smelled of plutonium, bubbling water, overheated metal, but around the tractor driver were the noticeable and acrid smells of total dismay and fear.

  Samiya Schmidt began to metamorphose in a fury. She drew herself together, her muscles taut, her eyes wide open. A stupefied red guard facing two enemies of the people. A small creature of the cultural revolution, confronted by the dark doings of the people’s enemies, contemplating incredulously the victim of their crime, contemplating this disgrace she did not completely understand, but which she knew they could not deny in its disgusting horror. Very small, already very angry, and on the brink of crisis.

  Suddenly out of control.

  Suddenly truly out of control.

  • The president of the kolkhoz raised his arms and then let them fall back along his flanks as if to say that the situation was difficult, but at the same time there was nothing to do but accept it. He rummaged through his thoughts for an immediate truth or lie. His beard was electrified and, as his hair was as well, his head was encircled by bristles and black tendrils that looked like they wanted to fly in all directions, a face haloed in dark rays. His golden eyes sparkled over the mattress that a new wave of plumes had just lit up, as well as its unfortunate occupant.

  —Who is that? What is she doing here? Samiya Schmidt yelled, pointing at Vassilissa Marachvili’s body covered with caramelized rags, at the face that death had rendered indifferent to everything, in contrast to the sooty ends of her shoulders, of the flesh that seemed twisted by the effects of sorcery and radiation.

  Although he usually held back, most reluctant to speak in front of Solovyei, whom he sensed was contemptuous, Morgovian, who had just had a terrible idea, decided to answer right back.

  —We’re trying to fix her, he said.

  —But why? Samiya Schmidt exclaimed.

  She moved forward. She shoved Morgovian and stood a meter away from Solovyei.

  —What are you doing with this girl? she asked.

  Once again, Solovyei raised his arms and let them drop again heavily.

  —She was Kronauer’s wife, he sighed. Vassilissa Marachvili. She’s gone into a dark tunnel. She’s neither dead nor alive. We can still bring her out of the darkness, but it’s still difficult.

  Samiya Schmidt was deformed by a spasm. She felt rising within herself the first swell of an impending bout, and she knew that delirium and agitation would soon swallow her up. She began to hear her skin physically changing and scales screeching as they breached her surface.

  She hit her hand agains
t one of the compressors. The noise echoed far more than if it had just been a slap. Already her skin had hardened. She hit a pipe angled toward Solovyei, then she turned toward Morgovian and violently pushed him backward.

  —You want to hurt this girl, she screamed.

  —Of course not, Solovyei tried to explain.

  He went toward her, arms outstretched and hands open to grab her by the shoulder. He wanted to keep her from attacking the building.

  —You’re just monsters, she yelled, banging the pipe again. You want to do rut with her!

  • The night is long. Very turbulent, very strange, and very long. In several minutes, Samiya Schmidt takes on her furious form. Then she escapes all standards. Neither Solovyei with his very considerable powers nor, obviously, Morgovian is able to calm her down.

  She is covered in very hard scales.

  She lands terrible blows.

  She moves at an incredible speed.

  She transforms her scream into energy.

  She no longer has blood, or rather she no longer has either blood or the absence of blood.

  She is neither dead nor alive, nor in dreams nor in reality, nor in space nor in the absence of space. She makes theater.

  She allies with the fuel.

  She starts fires of cold flames.

  She allies with the void, with the controlled fuel, with the suspect fuel, with the demented and uncontrollable fuel.

  She comes and goes at full speed between the two cores, between the well the Gramma Udgul watches and the emergency reactor cobbled together beneath the Soviet.

  She pronounces curses, prayers to forces, to the forces she knows, to the forces she has heard of, and to the forces that don’t exist.

  She runs in the darkness faster than a bullet. She runs in the night forest. She goes beneath the larches to the old forest and then she comes back. Several times she goes around the Levanidovo, running along the border of black trees.

  She comes back to the nuclear crackles, she draws circles around the nuclear cores until the oil in the pumps catches fire, she traces circles until the icy flames thunder and twirl around the fuel rods.

  She enumerates the crimes of her father and she orders the supernatural forces to bring her father back to the region of the camps, to force him to stay within a nest of barbed wires, in a harsh regime’s confines.

  She doesn’t meet anyone, or rather she refuses to look at those in her way, whether they do or don’t belong to the horde of the living, to the cohort of dogs, or to the infinite herd of the dead.

  She covers herself in hard and rustling scales.

  She covers herself in black droplets.

  She covers herself in sparks.

  Her hair briefly grows back and grows down to her ankles, then once again her scalp is bald.

  She makes wind, she makes theater, she makes black sky, she makes four black heavens.

  She calls the forces when she is against the forest, she calls the forces when she sees around her the earth of the tunnels, she calls the forces once she is close to the fuel rods.

  She goes to the beginning of time and she blows with a yell, then she reaches the end of time and she blows.

  She appeals to the former leaders of the world revolution, she appeals to the great figures, the anonymous masses, the disappeared peoples.

  In reciting compact lists, reduced to a short piercing babble, she appeals to the heroes of the First and the Second Soviet Union, those she knows and those she just invented, the major and minor scholars, the inflexible proletarians, the engineers, the veterinarians, the archivists who have already left their contribution to the spinning worlds, the sacrificial liquidators who gave their lives to the molten-down nuclear sites, the heroic detainees and soldiers, the heroic musicians, the cosmonauts.

  When she comes back to the boiler room, facing Solovyei, she knocks him over and pummels him, she asks him why he isn’t dead, and, when he defends himself, she slaps him with her hands harder than iron and she asks him to stop going into her like an object without thoughts, and she pummels him furiously.

  She also asks him to stop going into her sisters like lands of inert flesh, without thoughts or sensitivity to heat and cold.

  She makes the cold flames and warm flames burst from Solovyei’s body when she touches him.

  She beats him, she asks him to stop his worthless immortality and to no longer inflict such worthless immortality on those surrounding him.

  In order to humiliate her father she prevents him from replying to the hailstorm of blows she lands.

  She crosses the Levanidovo in every direction, she goes through walls unharmed, like neutrinos passing through the earth without destroying the earth or themselves.

  She forces Solovyei to run behind her to keep her from setting fire to the village and to put out the blazes she lights, she hears him panting behind her and sometimes she makes a sudden volte-face to bang into him, knock him over, and curse him.

  She covers herself in a soot that neither fades away nor crackles, and suddenly she is radiantly beautiful, then again she looks like a free-running and dark creature.

  She goes from the Soviet boiler room to the Gramma Udgul’s workshop, she slips down the well to the core’s heart in the shadowy depths, she goes back up after having touched the heart, she runs again at high speed to the center of the village, she goes past her house, past her room, she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she goes down the stairs, she comes back to the boiler room, she hits the pipes, the pumps, the doors illogically distributed throughout the jumble of burning pipes, she goes to Solovyei’s nest and, when he’s in her way, she pummels him.

  She goes and flies under the ground as well as above it and sometimes she speeds so quickly she is neither here nor there.

  She never touches Vassilissa Marachvili’s remains.

  She never contemplates or examines Vassilissa Marachvili’s body.

  She crosses the curtains of flames shuddering on the wall of the reactor, she moves over Vassilissa Marachvili’s cadaver, but she doesn’t contemplate her or examine her in passing.

  She doesn’t consider any of the Gramma Udgul’s complaints as she exhorts her to calm down and accept her fate, accept the mutations that have seized hold of her, but guarantee her endless existence within the Levanidovo, which encourage her again and again to accept the deathless life granted by her father, to accept her father’s monstrosities, to accept her father as he is.

  She covers herself with specks of cutting ice.

  She covers herself with night.

  She makes blinding night, she makes immobile tempests, she makes theater, she makes breaths, she makes sky, she makes twelve black heavens.

  She summons exceptional tribunals to judge Solovyei.

  She covers herself in a dull plumage.

  She covers herself in a black, urticant down.

  She makes ink black, she makes theater, she makes blizzard, she makes tar-black, she makes the thousandth stinking category.

  When Solovyei transmits through the loudspeakers his dreadful digressionary poems in order to cover the clamors coming out of his daughter’s mouth, she traces spirals around the loudspeakers while reciting extracts from epic literature that she knows by heart, or fundamental accusations against her father.

  She assembles a popular tribunal, she forms a jury of incorruptible Chekists, Red Army soldiers, Second Soviet Union avengers, exemplary zeks, model detainees.

  She accuses her father of the manipulation and sorcery of deceased humans and being proud of it.

  She accuses him of vileness and incestuous relations with imaginary daughters, with real, dead, or imaginary spouses, she accuses him of debauchery committed against willing victims, of fornicating with the Gramma Udgul, she also accuses him of having done rut with his own daughters, with a list of girls whose names she says one by one, all without any end to her coming and going down the village’s streets and tunnels, with the girls whose names she says at random into the
darkness, with unknown women whose names she invents, with girls like Solayane Mercurin, Imiriya Good, Nadiyane Beck, Keti Birobidjan, Maria Djibil, Maria Dongfang, Lulli Grünewald, Barbara Rock, with kolkhozniks lost to memory, with poetesses whose names and faces and poems weren’t left to posterity, with the female communist prisoners locked up with him in camps, with counterrevolutionary women and representatives of the first, the second, and the third stinking category, and, to end the list, she accuses him once more of having had ignominious relations with his own daughters.

  She accuses him of genetic crimes.

  She crosses the Levanidovo while spreading insane rumors and painful childhood memories.

  She claims that she isn’t even born to an unknown mother, she says that she wasn’t born, she covers herself in a tarry mist.

  She covers herself in shining dust, she covers herself in shimmering points.

  She covers herself in animal-hide straps, she covers herself in frost, she keeps crossing the roads and the tunnels of the Levanidovo with such a speed that nobody witnesses her passage.