Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  Pedron Dardaf and Hadzoböl Münzberg were sitting in the walkway, arms around their knees, eyes expressionless, breath short. Kronauer walked past them and went to lean by Idfuk Sobibian, who was leaning over the edge of the well to look down into its bottom.

  They both stayed incommunicative in this position conducive to conversation. The wind purred in the shadowy depths. At the level of the rim, the wind was very light. Near the ledge and even by Kronauer’s elbows, a sort of lichen gently glittered; when he put his hand down on it, it was crushed and disappeared with a ripping noise, and took a good twelve seconds to grow back.

  —Two thousand meters, and then it’s hell, Kronauer said to break the silence.

  —Not really, said Idfuk Sobibian.

  Kronauer looked at him curiously.

  —Hell is on the surface, it’s here, said Idfuk Sobibian. No need to dive into the core.

  • Before enlisting in the Third Army and leaving to defend the Orbise as a simple soldier, Idfuk Sobibian had lived a rather unstable existence. He was born into a family of dog breeders and, as he was separated from them at eighteen months old, he had never really known what sorts of dogs they were, fighting dogs, sled dogs, or dogs whose hair were sold at markets to the Koreans and the Chinese, despite their prohibitions—nor had he ever known if his parents were affectionate to him or if out of sheer malice they had fed and kept him with the animals. He dreamed every so often that he was lying in darkness and that he was gnawing at a bitch’s teat, but he preferred to imagine that this wasn’t a childhood memory, and when he woke up with the acrid taste of husky milk in his mouth, he sighed exasperatedly and tried to go back to sleep without dwelling on the subject.

  Constant twists and turns of fate marked his first years. The breeders had given or sold him to nomads who had almost immediately given him to one of their old women. The old woman, named Malka Mohonne, didn’t travel with her tribe and lived in a tent city erected in the suburb of Buirkott, which at the time was an agglomeration of promising developments. She spent her time smoking fish and talking with Idfuk Sobibian in an idiolect chiefly composed of obscenities and groans that could be equally anti-leftist or counterrevolutionary. She liked Idfuk Sobibian and she protected him from happenchance, hunger, and illness by wrapping him in grigris and jinglebells. The little boy, whose linguistic baggage included at the most twelve Chekist imprecations, had barely learned to stand when the old lady died in a tent fire. A neighbor, older but not as foulmouthed, took in Idfuk Sobibian and, for two years, devotedly and compassionately took care of him. She was named Mona Heifetz and unflaggingly assumed her role as grandmother, fed the child as best as she could with whatever edible foodstuffs were available in the suburb, and taught him the rudiments of language, hygiene in extreme conditions, and, in the evenings, read him the faits divers and the communiqués from the People’s Commissariat for Public Health, which alerted populations close to the power plants to the measures that had to be taken in case of a major incident. And appropriately so, because she was in the middle of describing to Idfuk Sobibian the order and calm that should characterize a massive evacuation when the sirens of the Buirkott atomic complex tore through the darkness and the exodus began, but in such confusion that Idfuk Sobibian quickly found himself alone on the road, surrounded by distraught beggars, some of whom, having come too close to the reactor in fusion, claimed to already smell the odor of carbon coming out of their entrails as they grew over with tumors. The tension and aggressions increased over the hours. Nobody paid attention to him. People reeking of smoke and blood went past him shouting programmes of reprisal against those politically responsible and against several ethnic minorities the little boy had never heard mentioned, although he was part of them. The only adults who noticed his presence looked at him insistently and strangely, as if he were a dog ready to be skinned and roasted. Dawn broke and Idfuk Sobibian became scared. He strayed away from the moving crowd and, although he was terrified, he went alone through a forest path and walked beneath the trees for a long and frightening half-day. It had been a good idea. The path led to a practically deserted road on which Red Aid buses were circulating. Invited to get into one of them, Idfuk Sobibian went about one thousand eight hundred kilometers without eating or drinking, over roads full of potholes made dangerous by the occasional remnants of ice. Then they sent him out, asked him for his identity, wrapped him in a blanket, and asked him to wait. He was standing in the dark courtyard of an orphanage in Urduriya. He was five years old. Now in the care of a governmental institution, he had every chance of living a normal life, or at least of staying clean and safe until his death. And it’s true that he benefited for half a dozen years from all the advantages his foster home provided: a lack of material problems, supervision by fortysomethings, collective education, brotherhood exercises, elementary knowledge training, particularly in the careers of furniture carpentry and guidance for the blind or the heavily irradiated, which were very popular careers at that time when visions of the future began to be tinged with reality. Unfortunately, the orphanage was situated in a risk area, perennially hit by imperialist military incursions and sabotages, and the successive explosions of the reactors, which had provided the region’s electricity, put a sudden end to the tranquility the orphans had enjoyed, as well, of course, as to their apprenticeship. Instructed by his memories of the hysterical first evacuation that he had lived through near Buirkott, Idfuk Sobibian didn’t follow the tormented flood and, when the educators raced through the hallways to confirm that they weren’t leaving behind any stragglers, he hid.

  Idfuk Sobibian’s independent existence began at Urduriya. It was April, the springtime was early and agreeable. The little boy was part of a band of kids living in autarky, thriving on the inexhaustible reserves left behind by the evacuees, and who fought together against other bands, against the militiamen responsible for preventing theft, against the groups of authentic thieves, and against the horror that was often inspired by the funereal silence in the city. Out of laziness, in the first months they had given a helping hand to the liquidators who worked near the center, but then the liquidators had given up and disappeared, preceded in their disappearance by the militiamen and the final medical-branch doctors and nurses. Despite avoiding incursions close to the reactors, most of the inhabitants who stayed at Urduriya, young and old, suffered a pathetic, swift end. Idfuk Sobibian was one of those rare individuals whom nature had given a body resistant to radiation. Soon he was alone, coming and going in the streets aimlessly and talking out loud without anybody listening, like a madman. Wild dogs, which he had planned on feeding in case he was ever tormented by a desire for meat, were no longer visible anywhere. The stench of a charnel-house reigned in most of the neighborhoods. Every night, the power plant sirens went off. The young boy was smart enough to realize that he wouldn’t have the strength to grow up in this morose place, to resist loneliness, to confront winter. He would fade if he didn’t leave. It was summer. He put food, soap, thick clothes, shoes, and spare tires in a bicycle basket, and he left Urduriya pedaling with excessive speed, like a hiker.

  The roads were empty. They were straight, impractical for biking and meandering. The countryside and the forest were empty. They say that in irradiated zones the animals freed of human presences regain possession of their natural territories and appear at every moment: birds, reindeer, bears and wolves, but he didn’t see, anywhere and everywhere, any animal except a single dying fox. She was lying in an indentation in the ground and he stopped to examine her. Without turning her head, she bit into a fox-cub corpse right in front of her snout, then shut her glassy eyes, then bit her dead offspring once more. This was the only evidence of fauna during his entire trip. It took him four days before he passed a truck, and five days to end up in a refugee camp.

  Until he enlisted in the Third Army, he lived in several camps: Gargang, Bürlük, Chamoldjin, Badarambaza, and Thochodor, where he spent his adolescence. He was made completely literate and, when it wa
s suggested that he join the Komsomol, he accepted. In the camps he participated in political meetings, progressed in his knowledge of the international situation, listened to conferences of poets of the Party, trained for middle-distance races, and, every week, he went to the barracks to complete his basic instruction for handling arms. At eighteen years old he presented himself at a recruitment office and, after his classes, he was sent to the capital, where he stayed for five months in a self-defense company. Then, as the noose tightened around the Orbise, he asked to leave for the Third Army. He was sent to the southeast front, close to Goldanovka. He was assigned to a decontamination unit. With about forty comrades, he spent a month undressing and showering soldiers who had gone into dangerous zones. The enemy didn’t appear. It was a wonderful time, the nights were short, the sun shone. A new summer had started. Once they got away from the decontamination ponds and buildings, once they had left the camps, the air filled with fragrances, sent from the taiga by a warm wind. During a vesperal walk beyond Goldanovka’s suburbs, Idfuk Sobibian was caught under machine-gun fire that was both unforeseeable and unerring. Against his cheek the earth, despite the ambient warmth, was icy. He had time to notice this, then he sighed a final breath and curled around his death. As the attacks around Goldanovka resumed, nobody came to recover his remains.

  Over the forty-nine days that followed, he went by himself down the path between Goldanovka and Djindo, a morose and abandoned small town. He stayed there for a while to think and to pull himself together. He felt numb, in a state much like hibernation. His memories were difficult to gather together. After several weeks, he wondered if he wasn’t floating in an oneiric or Bardic variant of his solitary stay in the city of Urduriya. Then something inscrutably pushed him to get going and so he headed northward, then eastward. He walked with a heavy step without taking into account obstacles. The region was covered with forest, rocky outcrops, valleys after mountains. There were no urban agglomerations and, if he had found one along his path, he would have gone out of his way to avoid it, because he knew that he would be tempted to stop there—and he wanted to get as far away as possible. He felt a violent need for solitude, as well as a deep mistrust toward the living, humans, beasts, and dead alike. Before the first cold weather he came to Kunaley and, deciding that he had walked long enough anyway, or at least that he couldn’t go any farther, he went in. It was a small-sized city. He looked for shelter to spend the winter. He first found the house of a widow who welcomed him effusively, as if she was reuniting with an old lost lover—then she began to insult him, after several days, to insult him and beat him. The old woman stank of eau de cologne, which she thought would hide her scent of plutonium and rotting bones. Idfuk Sobibian only stayed with her for two weeks, but when he left, snow was falling. So, seeking his fortune, he crossed the train station that had been bombed or burned five years earlier, saw a convoy that was composed of cars for merchandise and horses or soldiers, and got in, without thinking that the train might start and take him elsewhere. But that’s what happened. Barely twenty-four hours had gone by when the detainees got on board, slumped next to him, and fell asleep in exhaustion. A little while after, the locomotive whistled, and the convoy set off, quickly leaving Kunaley for an unknown destination.

  The train began to move slowly. Every so often the constantly wheezing diesel motor gave a sharp whistle, like those from steam locomotives, or a two-tone warning with a funereal key that brought to mind for each of them memories of night and distress. The doors were shut, they didn’t see what was outside. Several planks near Idfuk Sobibian had come apart and he could put his eye to a crack to examine the landscape, but he didn’t have any desire to. Neither he nor his travel companions went to this effort. There were eight of them in the car and they sprawled on the boards or sat somehow, leaning against the walls and protecting themselves against air currents with covers or straw. Nobody talked, or rather the conversations were limited to interjections, but also sometimes plaintive monologues, filled with self-mockery and fatalism. When someone finished his story, silence prevailed again for several days, the time needed to collectively digest the information and the tarry humor. The train never stopped. Someone remarked that between two jolts it was sometimes three seconds, sometimes three hours, sometimes three weeks. And why not three seasons? asked one of the detainees, named Matthias Boyol. In this way small conversations developed and, little by little, the car’s inhabitants learned to get to know each other. Detainees and soldiers shared, by and large, the same fate, the same loyalty to the egalitarian ideologies of the Second Soviet Union and the Orbise. They hadn’t always made the same choices, and some of them belonged to the stinking categories, but, in short, they were all comrades in arms and, once they got into the train, the differences between them had only diminished.

  The train finally braked and stopped, and the exhausted carcass of passengers took some time to forget the swaying that had continually shaken them for days or months, or perhaps even more. A man who acted as captain unlocked the doors and Idfuk Sobibian stepped out onto the ballast. The convoy had stopped at the top of a ruined sovkhoz, the Red Star. It wasn’t snowing. On the contrary, he had the impression of having reached a peaceful, summery place, in the middle of a green, silvery, golden steppe, barely rolling, stretching from one side of the sovkhoz endlessly and, from the other, seemingly closed off by the dark line of the forest.

  The captain spent the afternoon taking roll call, preparing for what he called the shift change, which meant electing a soldier or a detainee who in turn would be responsible for giving order and ensuring the convoy’s safety. He had promised them all a pemmican distribution that evening around the fire. Several cigarettes were lit. Idfuk Sobibian had found several packets in a bag that had hung over his head during the trip and which he hadn’t touched, out of superstition and out of lack of initiative. He didn’t have any desire to inhale smoke or crumbs of food, but he joined the others and, when they were all assembled around a campfire, he didn’t miss the opportunity to eat what had been put in the hollow of his hand, several grams of this energetic mixture that the nomads and the dead consumed when they hoped to last to the end of their personal adventure. And during the evening, listening to chitchat, he learned more about the function and goals of this strange group. He was one of the new guys, those who had been recruited along the way. Most of his companions were old-timers, and had already stopped in front of the Red Star sovkhoz more than once.

  —We’re turning around, explained Julius Togböd, the captain who had been co-opted at the end of the afternoon. It takes forever, but we’re turning around. We’re not going to get to where we want.

  —It’s just unbearable repetition, remarked Noumak Ashariyev, one of the members of the team that took turns day and night driving and maintaining the diesel engine. It’s unending and it’s endless.

  —Oh, it’s not that unbearable, said Hadzoböl Münzberg, another engineer.

  —It’s just repetition, Noumak Ashariyev insisted. It’s hell.

  —It’s not just hell, Matthias Boyol corrected. It’s more that we’re within a dream that we can’t understand the mechanisms of. We’re inside, and we don’t have any way of getting out.

  —Nobody’s keeping you from escaping during one of the stops, a detainee suggested.

  —Man, you know anybody who’s escaped? someone asked.

  —I’ll have no pity for those who try to escape, Julius Togböd said. We’ll catch them and we’ll shoot them for deserting. We’ve always done that and it’s not because we’ve changed captains that laxity is poking its nose here. We have firing squads and bullets. For fighting enemies and also for carrying out justice.

  —Well, Matthias Boyol said. We shoot them or we let them disappear without ever grabbing them by their collars. And then, at one point or another, we see that they’ve reappeared in the convoy.

  —Same thing for those who have died in the cars and those who we’ve left on the tracks, said a soldier.
>
  —Yes, we’re always more or less at the same number, said Matthias Boyol.

  —It’s just unbearable repetition, Noumak Ashariyev repeated.

  —We’re in a dream, Matthias Boyol concluded. He does to us whatever he wants.

  —Who’s he? Idfuk Sobibian asked.

  —We don’t know, said Noumak Ashariyev. But we do know that he does with us whatever he wants. We’re in his hell. We were put in there and we have no way of getting out.

  • Idfuk Sobibian was just about to ask Kronauer if he had a cigarette when the Gramma Udgul’s stern voice ended the break. Solovyei’s daughters had finished their tea. They were already headed back to the well, Hannko Vogulian with an assured, almost military step, and Myriam Umarik swaying her hips in a way that Kronauer felt was forced, even pitiful. Abazayev and Barguzin, who were leaning against the container of junk that the Gramma Udgul had selected for immediate liquidation, pulled away and began unlocking the movable wall. They banged on the lever. Pedron Dardaf and Hadzoböl Münzberg, as coolies, had just gotten out of their hunched poses. They got up and they waited, panting, for their orders.

  When Abazayev and Barguzin opened the container, some of what had been stored there flowed out with the short roar of an avalanche.

  Kronauer and Idfuk Sobibian were still leaning on the edge. The Gramma Udgul ran toward them and sent them off while grumbling some vague reproach, then she leaned toward the pit and talked to the core. As he saw a nearly religious stillness overcome the scene, Kronauer imagined this was a preliminary ritual, necessary for the liquidation to go well, and he, too, froze, his eyes on the old woman. Of all the participants, she was the only one with any hair on her head. Disheveled and sparse, but natural. The others, women and men, were completely shaven or balding, if not completely bareheaded.