She was out of breath and stopped mumbling. Her eyes looked up at the drab gray rectangle of the window. The snow fell, thicker and thicker.
—We can’t do it anymore, she said.
—I’m not junk, Kronauer clarified. I don’t feel like I was an invention of that sort.
—Who knows what you are, Myriam Umarik whispered.
They didn’t talk for a handful of seconds. Outside, the silence was total.
—I don’t see what I can do to help you, Kronauer said.
—Because you do want to help us, right? she asked.
—Of course, but I don’t see how.
—You want to help us without me having to do rut with you?
Kronauer mumbled reflectively. After all this effort he had made to prevent the cock’s thoughts and language, he found Myriam Umarik’s question particularly inappropriate and stupid.
• Contrary to what might have been assumed at a first glance, Myriam Umarik liked the engineer Barguzin and she had never had the slightest inclination to be unfaithful to him and to do rut with someone else. Certainly, for several weeks she had wriggled provocatively in Kronauer’s presence, and every so often she had sent him winks and ambiguous remarks, but this soldier from the capital left her indifferent. The idea of doing sex with him, doing rut or moist hanky-panky didn’t appeal to her at all, and, even if she didn’t shy away from joking about it, she would have been horrified if it really was a matter of something real and suddenly having to accept that he might pull her against him, knead her, penetrate her, and overwhelm her with his grease and sticky ejaculate.
Kronauer was nothing to her. What she had understood was that, after having crossed the old forest in Samiya Schmidt’s company, he ended up in Solovyei’s control, but with an intermediary organic status, different from this state of neither life nor death that had reigned over the Levanidovo for decades. Like every other person to travel more than a few days in forbidden lands, in the steppes rustling with mutant grasshoppers and plutonium, Kronauer had certainly reached the hereafter of death, a point of no return in the Bardo of death. Solovyei had seen him approach the Levanidovo in Samiya Schmidt’s company, he had put him through a bout of whistling in the old forest, and, instead of annihilating him like an intruder or a wild dog, he had preferred to welcome him to the village without taking away his death, without stripping him of his life as a dead person walking in the Bardo, without completely subjecting him any further to his worlds of dream and flames. Out of idleness or out of negligence, he hadn’t made a puppet out of his completely disarticulated intelligence. Contrary to the Levanidovo’s other current inhabitants, contrary to Solovyei’s three daughters, Kronauer still had independent means within himself. So he could very easily, Myriam Umarik thought, go behind Solovyei’s back, which in the eyes of the kolkhozniks and herself was a practically invincible power.
—Did you tell Barguzin you were coming to my place? Kronauer asked.
—I took advantage of the confusion in the night, Myriam Umarik whispered without directly answering. When my father had his eye and brain stabbed by Samiya Schmidt, he lost his means. It was temporary, but he certainly lost them. He came to our place and asked Barguzin to take him to the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse. If there’s someone who can care for him at moments like this, it’s the Gramma Udgul. Barguzin helped him up the slope to the warehouse. And I got dressed and came to your room. It was still deep in the night. You were lying on the ground. I shook you, shook you. I knew that you weren’t dead for good, but you weren’t moving anymore.
—Well, Kronauer said. At some point last night I went dizzy. I had the impression I was living in a nightmare where I didn’t understand anything.
—It’s as if you stopped surviving for good, Myriam Umarik said. I lay down next to you. I thought I’d have to wait. I didn’t see what else I could do.
—Well, you see, Kronauer replied.
They didn’t talk for half a minute, then Myriam Umarik spoke.
—You’re the only one who can kill Solovyei, she said.
• Kronauer conceded that, of those in the village, he might be in a better position than the others to murder Solovyei, and he admitted that, as a soldier, inflicting death upon an enemy of the people was his line of work, adding that he personally hated this shamanic brute who kept the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz under his magical thumb, but pointing out that he didn’t have an objective reason to carry out the act. He preferred that the sanction be decided by an extraordinary commission rather than imposed by an isolated individual, who could later be reproached for having acted upon private motives unworthy of a proletarian revolutionary. Which was why he recommended putting together a popular tribunal in which the daughters and the sons-in-law of Solovyei would sit as judges, with the Gramma Udgul playing the role of lawyer or accomplice to the accused, and, for example, with one-armed Abazayev in the role of the poor and indignant masses. Moreover, he noted that Solovyei wasn’t a being with a fragile constitution, that he certainly had hidden physical resources, not to mention his sorcerous powers, and that his execution risked deteriorating into horrible conditions and even failing.
—It’ll be more a battle than a killing, he said. I won’t have a lot of luck, even if I catch him off guard.
A shadow passed over Myriam Umarik’s physiognomy.
—You have to know what you want, she said with an atypical sharpness. Nothing is ever played in advance.
• Myriam Umarik was now in front of the room’s window, half a pace away from Kronauer, and watched the snow falling. Without turning toward her, Kronauer made out in the grayness her attractive curves, frequently shaken by barely perceptible waves. She had set her wig back in place and, dark and full, shining, silky, her hair flowed once again to her waist with delightful naturalness. Kronauer’s hands imagined touching them, the movements they would make in this gently rustling mass, its playful scattering, while they rubbed just past the hair, this rubbing that would result in possessing the skin, the flesh, the body of this woman, the male achievement of what the cock’s language dictated, what the cock’s language had ordered since time immemorial. He meandered on this subject for seven or eight seconds, and then he put an end to his reverie, at least he forced himself to block, to suppress, and to repress the animalistic suggestions that invaded his head and, beyond his head, the muscle fibers and nerve endings that anticipated his touching, his squeezing, his rubbing.
—I’m going to leave, Myriam Umarik said without turning around. I’m going to cross the street. If someone sees me or sees my footprints, too bad. I’ll say that I came to the prison to give you clean towels.
—Ah, nobody’s going to ask you questions, Kronauer said reassuringly.
Myriam Umarik wavered.
—Maybe not ask me, but rummage within me, she said.
She lingered in front of the window, as if she expected a burning impetus, mischievous or lewd gestures that never happened. Outside silence reigned. The cottony whiteness thickened. It seemed like there was no activity in the kolkhoz.
—Nobody’s really going around in the village, Kronauer said, forcing himself to think out loud about something other than copulating with Myriam Umarik.
—Oh, I assure you, people will go around, Myriam Umarik promised. And not just a little. Today is one of the days when the Gramma Udgul opens the well and throws the trash she’s picked down to the core. It’s been scheduled for weeks. There’s no reason that’ll be canceled. We’re all helping her to do it. And you too, you’ll go to the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse.
—Nobody told me anything about that, Kronauer protested. I haven’t been kept in the loop. I haven’t been asked.
—Well, now you have, said Myriam Umarik.
19
• Once Myriam Umarik left his room, Kronauer nibbled on a biscuit with pemmican, lying fully dressed on his bed and trying to find good reasons to keep living in Radiant Terminus, and, unable to find them, he reconstructed all the moments of his morn
ing conversation with Solovyei’s daughter. There were too many parts that had escaped him. He would do better, doubtless, to act as if the dialogue hadn’t happened. They had separated without making promises of any sort, and for example Kronauer hadn’t committed to attempting to assassinate the president of the kolkhoz. The idea was there, but it hadn’t been fully fleshed out into a plan of action. Kronauer momentarily imagined his fight against Solovyei, his almost immediate and wholly inevitable defeat, and he shrugged his shoulders. Fundamentally, he had no reason to throw himself into such a clearly half-baked undertaking. If there was something he had to do in the next day or so, it was to leave the Levanidovo, leave them all in the dirty and crazy hands of their president and progenitor, and look elsewhere for a refuge to die, pretend to die, pretend to live, or practice a humdrum variation on survival, sousvival, or surmorial. The time for reflection having passed, he slept a little to recover from the exhaustion of that night. At the morning’s end, he left the prison.
The sky was black, the chill smelled of wolves. Right then, the snow was only falling in occasional crystals that the wind had transformed into spinning, resplendent stars. The traces of the road were barely distinguishable beneath the twenty- or thirty-centimeter snowdrifts that covered it and, once past the Veterans’ Hall, which hadn’t welcomed anyone for half a century and which was the last building looking out onto the main road, the path leading to the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse was indistinguishable from the ditches. Kronauer oriented himself by the footprints of the villagers who had converged toward the hill and he followed them. Equipped with fur-lined boots, a fox-fur shapka, and a winter coat, he enjoyed the moment. It was the philosophy he had chosen to adopt as a way to avoid thinking about what had accumulated within himself over the past few weeks, his heavy thoughts of dissatisfaction, incomprehension, and unease, all the arguments that pushed him to leave the Levanidovo’s camp and go back to wandering through the steppes. He took pleasure in hearing his soles crush the fresh snow. In just a little time I will be in the warm walls of the warehouse, he thought, in the middle of that irradiated pigsty. He had never watched the well being opened and he wondered what kind of impression he would have, once the opening was pulled back, as he received the warm breath wafting from the core. The idea didn’t frighten him and on the contrary gently added to the sensations of walking, of the squeaking music, of the taste of snowflakes as they fluttered around his lips and he caught them with a flick of his tongue. One or two hours of sleep had gotten him back on his feet. He went into the snow like a gruff bear, but he was in a good mood.
• Once he came into the warehouse, he saw that those inside had been waiting for him and were annoyed at his lateness. Everybody watched in silence as he came down the way to the well. The unhooping and unscrewing of the cover hadn’t started in his absence. He headed to the center of the warehouse and took off his coat and his shapka to set them on a pile of metal scraps adjoining the Gramma Udgul’s private space. The air was warm in contrast to the atmosphere outside. The noise of his steps accompanied the small buzzing in the mass of trash, and one or two quick hisses from flies being brutally freeze-dried after incautiously venturing between the electric teeth of a harrow or a pitchfork. It’s winter, and there are still flies, Kronauer thought. He wiped that thought from his mind, the image of instantaneously carbonized flies, the mutant appearance of the insects right before their transition into full flames.
Three or four meters from the edge, sitting on a milking machine engine doubtless condemned to an impending fall in the pit, the Gramma Udgul smoked her pipe disagreeably. She took it out of her mouth and pointed its stem at Kronauer.
—Well, tell me, soldier, she said without moving her lips or what few teeth she still had in her mouth.
—What? Kronauer asked.
—I wasn’t of the understanding that you were in the kolkhoz to coast along, she grumbled. We’ve been waiting an hour for you.
—I wasn’t given a specific time, Kronauer retorted.
The Gramma Udgul spluttered two disappointed syllables and slipped the pipe between her lips again. She reclined on the central part of the milking machine. The suction hoses surrounding it looked rather like tentacles sprouting from her haunches.
—Get to work with the others, she murmured. We’re not at your disposal.
—This isn’t worth yelling at me over, Kronauer said irritatedly. I don’t see why you’re talking down to me like I’m a slacker.
Around the well were the tractor driver Morgovian, the engineer Barguzin, Myriam Umarik, Hannko Vogulian, one-armed Abazayev, and three kolkhozniks Kronauer had never seen before. They had empty gazes, slow movements, and an evident lack of energy, and, despite wearing liquidator uniforms, they looked more like detainees sent on a suicide mission than agricultural workers. Kronauer immediately suspected them of not being full members of Radiant Terminus, and, although he wasn’t able to tell who they were exactly, he thought that they certainly had to have belonged to a reserve of former workers, zombified by Solovyei decades earlier—corpses that he took back out and reactivated according to his needs, after having put them away somewhere in the oneiric universes only he had access to, or in vaults.
Abazayev was smoking. Kronauer went up to him and asked who these men were. The question was direct and the other man couldn’t dodge it, but clearly he had no interest in responding.
—You want to know their names? he whispered.
—Sure, yes.
—Pedron Dardaf, Idfuk Sobibian, Hadzoböl Münzberg. Abazayev rattled them off.
—Never heard of them, Kronauer remarked. I didn’t know they lived here.
—You don’t know much, my poor Kronauer, cut in Hannko Vogulian, who was standing next to Abazayev.
Kronauer barely had time to meet her double and troubling eyes, the one tiger’s-eye, the other black onyx, when the Gramma Udgul broke in.
—Are you chitchatting or are you going to go and open the cover? she yelled in the tone of a site foreman.
There was no immediate groveling, but the conversation immediately stopped and everybody went to a work station. Abazayev crushed his cigarette beneath his heel and began pushing slightly, with one hand, on one of the wheels keeping the well hermetically sealed. Kronauer also hunched over a wheel and turned it. The cover’s seal wasn’t very thick and gusts of radiation passed over everyone’s faces, hot and caressing despite their noxiousness. Every so often, Barguzin coughed. He had caught a cold somewhere, maybe that night accompanying Solovyei to the hangar.
• If a post-exotic writer had been present at the scene, he would have certainly described it according to the techniques of magical socialist realism, with flights of lyricism, drops of sweat, and the proletarian exaltation that were part of the genre. It would have been a propagandist epic with reflections on the individual’s endurance in service to the collective. As background noise, perhaps a march by Georgy Sviridov or Kaanto Djylas, rhythmic and full of an infectious and ideologically irreproachable euphoria. But nobody beneath the Gramma Udgul’s hangar had the least literary pretensions, not to mention a musical pretension that could be considered radically bizarre. The president of Radiant Terminus, who prided himself on being a poet, was not present that morning himself and, in any case, he had a horror of magical socialist realism, as did many sorcerers who had spent a good part of their existence behind bars. So the scene happened without positive heroes and without the cinematic participation of the smiling faces of miners or anonymous detachments of steelworkers in helmets, without the flag of the working classes waving proudly above the kolkhozniks, without calls for supplementary sacrifices, and without the inevitable final discourses of Party cadets come back from the front with a medal and one less leg. We apologize in advance.
The first thing was to open the well. The metal lid was screwed to an iron base that had been cemented to the rim. Just being able to move the cover meant removing the lead tiles covering it, and, so as not to be hemmed in when br
inging the junk to the pit, the tiles had to be set aside and put in a pile. Everything was heavy. The place where the tiles were supposed to be stacked was just past the private corner where the Gramma Udgul lived; for a quarter of an hour everybody came and went, without saying a word, their arms filled with heavy and colorless rectangles, which at the moment they touched or took their place in the pile made no sound at all. A sort of greasy soot covered the surface of these plaques. On his third trip, Kronauer rubbed his hand on his face and immediately his skin was streaked with black smears. Others had done something similar, had inadvertently wiped a drop of sweat from their cheeks, foreheads, and now found themselves with the features of miners. Hannko Vogulian, who took care of her braided wig, had taken it off and set it in a corner, on the winter fur coat she had worn on her way over. She unashamedly displayed her skull, totally bare of down. Myriam Umarik hadn’t taken off her wig, but her shirt and her dress were already dirty and, unusually for her, she suddenly looked like a clumsy and strange slob. Nobody talked, there weren’t any discussions or reflections or glances. Once the lead was set aside, four men including Kronauer finished by unblocking the cover and sliding it over the earth, which everybody then bent over to move to a place among the bric-a-brac that Pedron Dardaf, Idfuk Sobibian, and Hadzoböl Münzberg, the only three dressed like liquidators, had spent the beginning of the morning clearing.
The team took a short break. Barguzin tottered. He went to lean on a container that had once been a garbage dumpster and which now held clothes, household objects, books, and shoes. Abazayev joined him and they shared a cigarette. The Gramma Udgul came down from the milking machine; she had gone back to her private area and had put together a kettle and mismatched glasses to serve tea to those who wanted some. Hannko Vogulian had lit a little camp stove to heat the water. Myriam Umarik had just taken off her own hair. The two sisters, although their bare heads gave them an extraordinary appearance, were still beautiful, perhaps because their eyebrows hadn’t been effaced and continued to underline the marvel of their looks. There wasn’t any difference between the color of the skin on their faces and that on their scalps. Myriam Umarik had an orange-bronze tint, while Hannko Vogulian seemed to be sculpted out of bright ivory. Both had smeared their cheeks while working, but they didn’t clean their faces. They didn’t put any value on their appearance.
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