She makes poison, she makes hurricane, she makes theater.
Suddenly she is vertiginously radiant, suddenly she sparkles, and almost immediately she is a handful of magical flesh that runs and runs in the countryside and slams into tree trunks, walls of farms where all the animals are dead, Morgovian when he stupidly appears in her path.
She tears Morgovian, she tears his old peasant-husband’s clothes, she slashes Morgovian, she destroys his backward body, kept deceptively alive by Solovyei’s powers, she takes those spells out of his body, she tries to kill Morgovian when he comes between her and the soviet reactor, every time she tries to kill him.
She bangs the pipes until the metal sings.
She covers herself in the fur of a white she-wolf, and at that moment once again she looks like a lost young girl from the cultural revolution, fragile in her unisex military uniform, her only vanity a red ribbon at the end of her braids and a red badge on her shapeless green cap, and then she resumes her frantic race through the night’s flames.
She hits the fuel rods, she wields them, she shakes the vessel water, she can’t keep going out of despair, she hurls herself against the silent walls, and on them she leaves traces of soot and despair, she beats the vessel water, she bounces back and forth from channel to conduit, she bounces with fleshy noises against the walls, with clanking noises, with avalanching noises.
She makes revenge, she makes depth, she makes darkness, she makes theater.
She reads a long-winded accusation, she accuses Solovyei of counter-revolutionary immortality, she reproaches him for his habit of illegally penetrating the dreams of his daughters and penetrating his daughters in order to transmit an excess of immortality that they don’t care about.
She beats her father, she hits his memory, she dirties his memory as he dirtied the memory of all those he penetrated in order to keep them in a false state, between life and death, she accuses her father of orchestrating the Levanidovo like a revolting dream, of orchestrating the forest, of orchestrating the steppes, and of the concentrational hereafter of the camps, she accuses him for imprisoning within himself all the living and the dead of the Levanidovo and his hereafter.
In front of the popular tribunal, she denounces Solovyei’s suspected ubiquity, his affiliations with several stinking categories at the same time, his poor management of the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, his criminal ways of sourcing provisions, she accuses him of assassinating merchants in the forest, she accuses him of pillaging the caravans, she denounces Solovyei’s terrifying stature, his appearance of a triumphant kulak, his magic axes, his lust.
She makes theater, she makes opera, she makes cantopera.
She causes serious damage in the places she passes through and over the bodies she pummels.
Compacting the flood of words as much as possible, she recites in their entirety the Marxist-Leninist brochures talking about the world revolution, the end of history and the joys awaiting the generations to come, the user’s guides for fuel cells, hygiene manuals for kolkhozniks, the post-exotic romånces of her childhood, the feminist manifestos for women neither living nor dead, the treatises on practical oncology, the booklets for pig breeders, yak farmers, beekeepers, teachers put in extreme pedagogical conditions, adventure novels set in the Great North.
She hangs from the pipes in which pressurized vapor hisses, she breaks doors, she throws planks behind her, wood shavings, she throws iron plates over her shoulder, locks still surrounded within the meat of doors, she speeds through the night and through walls, vessels, boiling circuits, then she comes back toward Morgovian and she beats him, she heads toward Solovyei once again and she pummels him.
She feeds her impotent rage only images and speed.
She covers herself in strips of flesh, metallic excrescences, organic vapors, and a second later she’s already dressed anew in armor of unbelievably hard and rustling scales.
She keeps racing back and forth across the Levanidovo, along its surface and underground.
She makes lightning, she makes bolts, she runs, she imagines that she is dressed entirely in fire and blood.
Then suddenly nobody knows where she is.
She makes silence.
She makes theater in the sudden silence.
She makes absence.
She has disappeared and she is silent.
18
• At almost the same moment, give or take a few hours, the night declined, declined and transformed into an ugly day. It began to snow over the Levanidovo from the first glimmers of dawn. For Kronauer, the morning followed a night of fiery reflections, hypnotic whistling, curses broadcast over the loudspeaker, fiery sparks within his brain tissue, blackouts, sideration, catatonia. He was lying on the floor of his new room and had the greatest difficulty believing that he had come out of his nightmare. Passively he saw through the double window the drab wall of Hannko Vogulian’s house, and, above, a piece of sky transformed into a flat gray anthill. From this discouraging backdrop fell and flew snowflakes that seemed gray as well; dirty and gray. No noise came from outside. After having broadcast Solovyei’s verbal diarrhea in a loop, the loudspeakers hadn’t made the slightest peep. Quietness was now, in the entire village, absolute. Nobody walked in the main street. The prison was silent. Kronauer felt dazed, as cottony as the snow. Solovyei’s discourse continued to turn within him. His spirit was streaked with thick mud and nausea and, from the night’s events, he remembered more than anything his own contortions, his despair when, after a minute’s respite, the loudspeakers began once more to broadcast shrill signals within his skull, sentences that mutilated reality and poisoned it. He spent hours close to the window, and when he couldn’t bear Solovyei’s whistling and poetic chasms any longer, he tried to take refuge in the bed, but he doubled over beside it without ever managing to reach it, without being able to plug his ears or hide under the quilt, and then he lost all sensation of time and even space.
He shifted position and then there was Myriam Umarik lying next to him and watching him. She watched him with an attention that could have been as predatory as it was affectionate. Up close, Kronauer could distinguish in her sensual black eyes small shining specks of silver and gold. She was lying on the floor at such a close distance that he suddenly felt her breath: hot, slightly charged, perhaps with hints of roasted flour that he had cooked the previous evening in the communal kitchen. And first he thought that he was dreaming, that he was attempting to heal from the night by consoling himself with an erotic dream. But this wasn’t the case. Everything was real. Reality distressed him for a second, then his distress turned to terror. How long has she been here? he wondered. What does she want? What did we do together tonight? . . . Kronauer, you animal with the cock’s language, I hope at least you didn’t hurt her, otherwise you’re done! . . . Kronauer, I hope you didn’t kiss or penetrate her! . . . If you’ve done rut, you’ll never escape Solovyei ever again! . . . He’ll put you through a thousand years of hell! . . . Your count is good, a thousand years or three thousand, at some point it doesn’t matter anymore! . . .
He remembered absolutely nothing that might have happened with this woman. As an animal with the cock’s language as well as the cock’s thoughts, but not just that, as an animal pure and simple, he realized that Myriam Umarik’s proximity had an effect. Between his legs his unfortunate cock swelled and moved and be began to intensely desire this body almost curled up against his, but at the same time he had the impression that he hadn’t satisfied this desire either at dawn or before. There was no odor of copulation in the room and besides, he and Myriam Umarik were dressed in a way that didn’t indicate recent sexual disarray.
As he hesitated over what he would ask her, she spoke first.
—Don’t move, Kronauer, she said. Don’t say anything.
This double prohibition only bothered him even more. Of Solovyei’s three daughters, Myriam Umarik was the only one who had ever seemed interested in men and who had hardly cared about Maria Kwoll’s theories
on the ignominy of men—the only of the three he considered capable of slipping into his bed one day without asking him first, at the risk of accusing him of taking advantage or even simply raping. She constantly played the seductress, but she was also the one he’d most distrusted from the very beginning, keeping up a chilly exterior he hoped was discouraging. He had always had the impression that she wanted to lure him into a trap and that, behind her appearance as a vamp, sometimes a heavily exaggerated one, was a vicious desire to see Solovyei cut in and put down his foot. He had even wondered if she wasn’t plotting with her father, devising at his expense a cruel snare that they had secretly planned down to the last detail, for the pleasure of watching his downfall and his punishment, at the beginning of his thousand-year-long punishment, to break up the boredom of everyday village life, to honor a five-year repression quota for Radiant Terminus, or simply and stupidly because his presence as a defeated soldier had immediately displeased the kolkhoz’s director.
—Nobody has to know I’m here, she finished. Things happened last night. Nobody has to know I hid at your place.
—What things? Kronauer asked worriedly.
—Don’t talk, Myriam Umarik said. Play dead.
• In a few hushed sentences, Myriam Umarik clarified the results of the previous night. Samiya Schmidt had experienced a bout, the strongest one to ever hit her. She had run thousands of kilometers at full speed all over the Levanidovo. She had destroyed several buildings and started fires here and there throughout the kolkhoz, in the Soviet’s basements, at the edge of the forest. She had opened the well in the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse, she had leaned over the pit and she had yelled such insanities and extraordinarily violent accusations against Solovyei that, two thousand meters farther down, the nuclear core had come out of its lethargy, become outraged, and vomited lava. The Gramma Udgul had to go and hunch in turn over the edge and talk to the core to calm it down. Samiya Schmidt had shoved her aside, shut the cover of the well, and, once she was back in the municipal boiler room, she had attacked Morgovian and reduced him to a nauseating pulp that was hard to contemplate without gagging. She had attacked Solovyei and she had jammed an iron pipe into his right eye, which came out of his left ear. She had lost control, and now she had disappeared.
—I have trouble believing all that, Kronauer remarked.
—It’s because you’re new to the kolkhoz, Myriam Umarik whispered. It looks like a normal place, but it’s not.
—I never thought it was a normal place, Kronauer replied.
• Myriam Umarik told Kronauer to be quiet again. She who usually exuded a sort of carnal radiance, she who smiled so easily, who wheedled and cajoled, was now reserved, frightened, and contagious. Her prone position next to Kronauer implied no lascivious abandon whatsoever, no amorous complicity, or any expectation of a caress. All that could be read into it was embarrassment, distress, and anxiety increasing by the second. Her face was frozen in a sharp grimace, her eyes darted. Her forehead was higher than usual, and Kronauer suddenly realized that her beautiful hair was a wig, and that, in the night’s confusion, it had slipped back. Her scalp was as smooth as an eggshell. He immediately felt repulsed, as if she had suddenly transformed into a hag, and right then he caught himself. What’s happened to you, Kronauer, you’re reacting like a livestock salesman who’s just found a hidden defect in the cow he’s inspecting, did you want to buy her? . . . You thought you could have her but she’d fooled you? . . . This woman isn’t something to be bought at a fair, what makes you think you can pass judgment on her, on her body, as if you were one of the male-chauvinist shits Maria Kwoll described? . . .
But he had been deceived, and, a bit rudely, he disobeyed her instructions to be silent.
—Why did you come into my room? he asked. What are you doing here?
Myriam Umarik looked at him, lost, and suddenly she curled up against him and rubbed against him, and then, immediately, perhaps realizing his feelings for her or their feelings for each other, having realized in either case that he had a tremendous erection, she pulled back and pushed him away, as if the initiative had been his and had shocked her. They hadn’t kissed.
—Don’t think in the cock’s language, she shot back.
Kronauer shrugged. He would have had trouble arguing that, after this furtive embrace, he wasn’t thinking in the cock’s language. He was wary of Myriam Umarik and of the desire he felt for her, he dreaded becoming a pawn in her father’s diabolic machinations, and, more broadly, Maria Kwoll or not, feminism or not, he had been schooled to scorn sensuality. But there was no denying that he had started to think in the cock’s language.
—I’m not made of stone, he said.
Myriam Umarik’s stomach seemed to rise with a wavelet, then stayed calm.
—Of course not. She suddenly smiled, which she hadn’t done until then. You’re hard as iron.
Her smile was an open one, not even flirtatious. Friendly, in a certain way. Then this moment of gentleness disappeared. Myriam Umarik’s mouth became serious again.
Kronauer got up on his buttocks, leaned against the box spring, and turned toward the window.
Behind the windows, the snow was flying. The sky couldn’t be seen.
• They stayed like that for a minute, him absorbed in contemplating snow, her oddly lying right by him, unmoving and mute. In a photograph, they could have been the perfect illustration of a quarrel between lovers.
—You have to help us, she finally said.
—Who’s us?
—Barguzin and me. You have to help us. We’ve had enough of living in the Levanidovo. We want to flee. This isn’t a life, or a death. We want to say good-bye to all that.
—Ah, Kronauer said.
—We want to start over, Myriam Umarik said.
—But why are you rubbing against me? Kronauer asked, without looking at her, still starting out the window. Aren’t you ashamed for Barguzin?
—Yes, I’m ashamed. But I don’t know what to do to convince you.
—Convince me to do what?
—To help us.
Kronauer got up and went to the window. The snow blurred everything; even in good weather the panorama was an empty dead-end, immediately limited by the wall of Hannko Vogulian’s house. A dark surface, two steps, a black door that evidently had never been opened. There was no view and he would have had to look down to see the entrance on the main road. The snow stuck to the ground. It was already almost half a dozen centimeters thick. No prints of any kind marred the perfection of this mantle. For a second, Kronauer was sorry not to see the trace Hannko Vogulian would have left between the two buildings if she had headed toward the prison at night. He preferred the always slightly hostile sobriety of the older sister to Myriam Umarik’s seemingly insincere exuberance. Hannko Vogulian, Hannko Vogulian, he thought furtively in the cock’s language. He would have been more comfortable finding himself lying next to her rather than the voluptuous Myriam Umarik. He would have been more certain of understanding what she wanted.
—I don’t understand what you want, he said.
He kept his back turned to his visitor.
She got up. He heard her sit on the bed, then readjust her hair on her bald skull, smooth out her skirt.
—Don’t talk so loudly, she whispered. He doesn’t need to know I’m here and he doesn’t need to hear us.
—Who are you talking about? Barguzin?
—Of course not, Kronauer, are you stupid, or what? I’m talking about Solovyei.
—You just told me that Samiya Schmidt stabbed his eye and ear with a pipe. When you get your brain run through by a piece of iron, you’re not usually busy listening in on other people’s conversations. He may already be dead.
—Don’t talk so loud, Myriam Umarik begged.
She really did seem afraid. He went up to her and talked more quietly.
—He’s had his brain wrecked, he said. He won’t recover.
Now they were sitting on the edge of the bed, side by s
ide. He could sense her shuddering anguish. He wanted to put his arms around her shoulders and wait for her head to rest on his cheek, but he held back. He couldn’t be brotherly with this girl. Desire had overtaken him, all the cock’s associations and thoughts of rutting. The image of consolatory gestures was overlaid with wanton images and sensations of skin, of flesh, of pawing, of masculine gropes, of possibly shared breaths, of tumbles on the bed, and urgent penetrations. The physical nostalgia of coupling, handed down over two hundred million animal years. He suppressed all this as best as he could, this surge of salacious filth. But, in his consciousness and beyond it, the filth overflowed.
—He’ll recover just fine, she mumbled. It’s not the first time something like this has happened. He always recovers. He hasn’t been dead or alive since he was born. The radiation doesn’t do anything to him. Iron through his skull won’t do anything either.
—Still, his head skewered by a pipe, Kronauer objected in a low voice.
—It’s just theatrics, Myriam Umarik said. It’s just a dream. His head skewered or not, doesn’t matter. We’re all neither dead nor living in Radiant Terminus. We’re all bits of Solovyei’s dreams. We’re all ends and pieces of dreams or poems in his head. What we do to him doesn’t matter to him. What Samiya Schmidt did to him that night is like a scene from a book. It doesn’t count for anything. It’s nothing. It’ll pass. Then everything will start over again like before. He likes to go around in circles here, in the Levanidovo, even if he seems to have adventures in other worlds. He enters the flames and he goes elsewhere, on an adventure. But here, in the Levanidovo, he has his ways of amusing himself, and we’re his toys. Sometimes he gets rid of us, sometimes he brings us back. He just plays the same scenarios over and over again. He plays us the same cylinders on his phonographs and his loudspeakers. He’s the one who decides everything. Sometimes he introduces inventions into his theater, junk that’s dangerous for him or unexpected, like you. But at the end of the day, he’s always the one who wins.
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