Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  The Gramma Udgul told the core that it would soon get the food it had been waiting for, that it had waited weeks for, and she asked it to receive the food not as an offering, but as proof that the Second Soviet Union still faced up to its responsibilities and continued to rally heroes, new generations of enthusiastic and disinterested liquidators. She beseeched the pile to play its role in this spectacular process of cleaning and to continue collaborating with those who stayed at ground level. Thanks to this unflagging alliance, the Gramma Udgul explained, one day the ground would be again clean, again ready to resume building a more just society and collectively reindustrializing the city and the country. This time they would do their best not to let nuclear rubble accumulate, the Gramma Udgul promised, and especially to restrain the scientists who had disfigured civilization, doubtless because they’d been too indulgent in their margins of error and with their tendency to enjoy the enemy’s propagandistic twaddle, the enemy’s non-Marxist theories, and the enemy’s dollars. Then she emphatically and even shamelessly praised the core. She thanked it for having withdrawn deeply enough for the Levanidovo’s existence to continue in tranquility, so that its deadly plumes and its unforeseeable mood swings were not too near. She assured it of the love and respect of every person in the kolkhoz, including those who had already fallen in the line of duty. The Gramma Udgul’s voice, which she intended to be energetic, quavered a little, and Kronauer wondered if it really would reach whatever remained down there, formless and liquefied, and maybe hard of hearing, because, although the discourse was amplified by the echoes the uppermost meters of the abyss sent back, it was pushed back to the ceiling of the warehouse by the wind blowing from the burning entrails of the well.

  Once her short speech was concluded by a call to the working masses of the Levanidovo and its adjacent regions, the Gramma Udgul got back up. Through her sparse, gray locks of hair she passed an equally gray mummy’s hand and looked proudly, one by one, at all those present. Then she ordered Kronauer and Idfuk Sobibian to carry out the first actual act of liquidation of that day: throwing into the void the milking machine she had been sitting on a bit earlier. Kronauer grabbed hold of the machine’s body and rolled it to the edge, then over it. Idfuk Sobibian had in the meantime more or less collected the tubes and teat cups. The machine was indescribable, but it seemed a bit like a giant squid and, when it slipped into the void, the tubes dropped by Idfuk Sobibian whipped the air. For three or four tenths of a second, the image of a giant mollusk became increasingly indisputable, then the undersea beast disappeared. It bounced noisily against the well’s walls for the first hundred meters of its fall, and then it was quiet. Its descent must have continued, but the echo of its bumps no longer came to the surface.

  Immediately everybody went to work. The main task consisted of emptying the container. The liquidators took armfuls of things, which they carried about twenty meters and threw mechanically, but sometimes violently and with pleasure, into the darkness of the well. They went past each other on the paths, occasionally trading thoughts on the work schedule and the lack of a break. The comings and goings were endless, but there weren’t enough people to warrant comparison to indefatigable ants, in terms of incoming and outgoing lines. The trash was varied but generally of a small size. Chairs, pickaxes, straw bales, pitchforks and cutlery, household linens, microwaves, computers, fur coats, hardened blocks of meat, sticky masses of unknown provenance, mattresses, detainee pajamas, freezer motors, cupboard doors, hutch sections, encyclopedias republished on paper after the end of the Internet, children’s books, tin cans, tools, remnants of bats, anti-radiation suits taken off the corpses of firefighters, remnants of dogs, party dishes, portraits of leaders. When something was too large to be carried without assistance, Kronauer called to the closest liquidator. He avoided Abazayev whose lone arm resulted in his having poor balance and wavering. Often he teamed up with Hannko Vogulian. They both panted, their hips down, backs bent, and they looked at each other without saying a word, or while uttering brief instructions to get their charge to the right place, meaning the abyss. Kronauer admired Hannko Vogulian’s eyes and, on pretext of the job currently under way, which required synchronizing their movements and efforts, he plunged into them.

  • The Gramma Udgul set on the edge a box full of cylinders that belonged to Solovyei and she wavered, then she brought them back beside her armchair. She was out of breath.

  —I can’t throw these away, she murmured. I can’t really throw these away.

  As the liquidators’ ballet went on monotonously, and several of them showed signs of exhaustion, the Gramma Udgul leaned over the phonograph and put a cylinder between the grips, then she cranked the handle and set the needle on the black surface. A stimulating melody spread beneath the vaulted hangar, and the atmosphere, which had been morose, changed. It was a First Soviet Union march, from the times of civil war. It called the red soldiers to crush the people’s executioners and to put an end to the old world’s curses. There was a minimum programme within which everyone could still hear each other. All who were present took in the music with a shiver of optimism, and the pace picked up. The Gramma Udgul kept the rhythm with her feet and hands and, when the cylinder ended, she put the needle back at the beginning.

  For an hour, nothing notable happened. The core’s food flew into the depths. The radioactive dust burnished everyone’s skin. The march played on loop within the warehouse. The container gradually grew empty. Pedron Dardaf and Hadzoböl Münzberg struggled, less and less able to carry things, even light ones. Idfuk Sobibian dawdled in the pathways like a machine winding down. Although they hadn’t completely lost their sparkle, the two daughters resembled dirty and bald wanderers. Abazayev hurt his arm on a piece of metal and, when he carried something to the edge, drops of blood fell from his one hand and fluttered everywhere, then down to the core. Barguzin sleepwalked between the container and the well, sometimes overshooting his target without realizing it and then taking half a minute to retrace his path. Kronauer tried to choose cumbersome things, in order to team up sometimes with Hannko Vogulian, whose strange gaze he took in greedily, and sometimes with Idfuk Sobibian, whose calm moroseness he appreciated. By carefully moving around in a seemingly haphazard way, he managed not to ever work directly with Myriam Umarik.

  • Around three in the afternoon, the container was finally empty. Everybody, the Gramma Udgul included, had tired of the call for the red soldiers to flush out czars and exploitative vermin, and now silence prevailed, filled with heavy breaths, groans of exhaustion, and also the light atomic roar from the entrails of the earth. The light had dimmed, because the snow had started falling again outside. Several of us were sitting on the piles of debris and slowly massaged our calves or shut our eyes, as if feigning sleep helped the body to regain a bit of strength.

  The Gramma Udgul suggested some tea. Kronauer was the only one to get up to drink some.

  —It’s not over yet, said the Gramma Udgul. There are still carcasses and bodies.

  —Where? Kronauer asked.

  The Gramma Udgul pointed at a corner of the warehouse.

  —Not much, she said. It’ll be done in five minutes. Then we’ll shut the lid.

  —All right, said Kronauer.

  He drank his tea and rinsed the cup in a bucket. The cold water just waiting for this beside the table. It splashed and then calmed down.

  Kronauer went back to Hannko Vogulian. She was leaning against one of the pillars supporting the warehouse roof. She wasn’t slumped down and, on the contrary, she gave the impression of having stretched her spinal column to be more upright and serious than usual.

  —There are still carcasses and bodies to throw into the well, Kronauer said.

  Hannko Vogulian lowered her left eyelid, completely and without any effect on the other eyelid, as nocturnal birds could. She was now looking at Kronauer, showing him only the obsidian that replaced her right eye. Kronauer was breathtaken. The shining beauty of this gaze gave him vertigo. />
  Solovyei’s daughter tilted her head slightly.

  —Are you helping me? Kronauer asked.

  —Eh, said Hannko Vogulian. You won’t be happy.

  —It’s not a question of being happy or unhappy, Kronauer said. That’s left to do, and then we’ll be done.

  —All right, said Hannko Vogulian in a weary voice, and she followed him.

  • A space had been cleared behind a heap that was essentially a dismantled combine harvester. During the night, someone had lined up two corpses covered with felt rectangles, as well as two lupine cadavers. The wild animals must have wandered into the Levanidovo’s territories and immediately felt the effects of radiation in the marrow of their bones. The animals lay on the ground without a shroud. Kronauer took one by the paws and dragged it to the well. Hannko did the same thing with the second. They both pushed their burdens at the same time into the vertical darknesses and then they returned to the combine. The other liquidators watched them from where they were sitting as passive onlookers, unable to get up to give them a helping hand. Barguzin was slumped on a pile of newspapers, his head angled upward. He was no longer moving. He seemed to have once again crossed the boundary separating his sort of life and his sort of death, and for him to come back to existence, before night fell the Gramma Udgul would have to apply her three-water treatment—scouring with heavy-heavy water and deathly-deathly water, completed by an anointment of lively-lively water.

  Now Kronauer and Hannko Vogulian spent some time in contemplation. They towered over the wrapped bodies. The corpses beneath the covers.

  —We could carry them together, Hannko Vogulian suggested.

  —Who’s this one? Kronauer asked.

  Hannko Vogulian didn’t reply. Kronauer bent down to pull away the cover hiding the first cadaver.

  —If I were you, I wouldn’t do that, Hannko Vogulian said.

  —Why? Kronauer asked, pausing mid-action.

  —I’d rather not know, Hannko Vogulian said. It’s always better when you don’t know.

  Kronauer hesitated, then he decided to ignore Hannko Vogulian’s advice. His arm was outstretched and, carefully, he uncovered the face of the one lying at his feet. Half the head was damaged and, from the bottom of the neck, it was clear that the body had been horribly ruined. It exuded a smell of bad meat, a filthy odor.

  —Morgovian, Kronauer whispered.

  He put the cover back in place. For seven or eight seconds, he thought about Morgovian. He remembered their laborious discussions, his embarrassed responses about the merchant caravans that allowed the kolkhoz to be supplied with edible foodstuffs and the like. He glanced once again at his hung-up tractor-driver appearance, darkened by intimate secrets, by the knowledge of his overt submission to Solovyei, by his powerlessness, by his failed marriage with Samiya Schmidt. And then he considered the other corpse. Beneath the cloth he could make out an unimposing body. Despite everything, as if he needed to hear something from Hannko Vogulian before proceeding to identify it, he waited another moment indecisively.

  —And is that Solovyei? he asked.

  —Solovyei? Hannko Vogulian asked in shock. What’s wrong with you, soldier?

  Kronauer crouched and grabbed a corner of the shroud. Barely had he lifted it when his hand went weak and he let go. Then he grabbed it more firmly and did it again. He couldn’t believe what he saw. It was shocking, but more than anything absurd. In pulling away the cloth he had cast light on the face of Vassilissa Marachvili. The decrepit and damaged, but recognizable, face of Vassilissa Marachvili.

  At first, he was gripped. Eight, nine seconds. He felt an immense exhaustion. He didn’t examine the dead body’s face. He looked at it without understanding. Without trying to think that maybe it was another woman, a woman who looked like Vassilissa Marachvili, or maybe that he was in a waking dream and soon the hallucination would dissipate. He stood over her without reacting. He couldn’t get out of his stupor. This cadaver wasn’t talking to him, refused to talk to him, its features, after so many weeks of separation, no longer aroused the memories that could have harked to a living physiognomy. He couldn’t yet associate that which was lying at his feet with the brave woman he had left, in very bad shape, dying, on the hill that overlooked the railroad tracks and the Red Star sovkhoz. He hadn’t forgotten Vassilissa Marachvili, their flight after the defeat, the ordeals, the endless walk through the irradiated steppes, he remembered the light touches that had united them, the weight of her weakened body when, those last days, he and Ilyushenko had taken turns carrying her on their backs. But he was unable to make a connection between the living woman in his memory and the dead woman lying in the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse.

  Then something else clicked inside him and the link was formed.

  And, immediately, a torrent carried him away.

  He reattached the felt to Vassilissa Marachvili’s shoulders, leaving her head exposed. She hadn’t lost her hair. Her mouth showed some exhaustion, the shadow of what might have once been a smile, but it was a vague, fatigued smile, and as for the rest of her body, nothing remained of the joyful, touching beauty that had been an integral part of her and which she had tried to sustain for as long as possible. For her two comrades in disaster, all the way to the very end of their pilgrimage.

  Hannko Vogulian decided to break the silence.

  —Solovyei brought her from the Red Star, she said. He tried to bring her back to life. He really wanted to bring her back, but he couldn’t.

  Kronauer turned toward her. He couldn’t take it anymore: the Levanidovo, its inhabitants, the horrors and oneiric aberrations that had come to pass. He’d had enough of Solovyei’s doings, of this permanent presence in the background of space and of the mind. A monumental fury grew at full speed beneath his consciousness. The accumulation of frustrations, unsaid thoughts, and lies from when he’d arrived at the Levanidovo, from when he’d grazed a finger against a phonograph needle, everything that was part of this waking nightmare swelled and roiled beneath his thoughts, threatening to surge outright and destroy everything outside. He didn’t look specifically at Hannko Vogulian, or her body, or even her shape, or her gaze. But he shuddered and he didn’t even think of hiding that he was about to explode in rage. Almost nothing kept him from falling on her and killing her, and besides, he was only vaguely putting a name to her and this name meant nothing to him, or very little, really very little, not a known woman, in any case. His memory and his eyes only saw an unlit night, his conscious thoughts were stuck on the image of Vassilissa Marachvili’s mangled cadaver. As for his hands, they only moved for one thing. To strangle the first person to get in their way, and if that wasn’t enough to calm them, to strangle anyone, strangle one by one each of Solovyei’s creations living in the Levanidovo, whether they were accomplices, willing victims, or strange living dead. To strangle them, hurt them, undo them, and then, in one way or another, do away with Solovyei and with Radiant Terminus. This was what Kronauer had become in a few seconds: a man gripped, filled completely with loathing, with the hope of criminal retaliation, with night.

  • With that, the Gramma Udgul inserted a cylinder between the claws of the phonograph she had just set up. For reasons known only to her, but which didn’t have the effect of clearing the air, she didn’t ask the liquidators to listen once again to a red soldiers’ march. She had just rummaged in the box that she had decided not to throw into the abyss, and she had pulled out a cylinder at random. She shut the hooks of the machine and set the needle on the wax. Solovyei’s voice rose in the warehouse. Aside from these incomprehensible divagations, nothing else buzzed around Kronauer and Hannko Vogulian.

  • Suddenly he summoned up his strength to express words, and, having set his back on the mirror, he lit eleven candles in a row by bringing them to his mouth. Barely moving, he acted as if someone was standing right behind him and listening between two dreams. The reflection indeed obeyed him and conformed in every way to his desires, and supported his idea that everything wa
s going well as far as his audience, which persisted in turning its back on him without, however, pouring out vile remarks. He coughed, testing this presence—the reflection’s pulmonary sacs shook, but it didn’t express any discomfort. Then he was already thinking strictly about his next words, he was preparing a speech and some music. The memory that put ideas behind his tongue was wounded and painful; the source of the pain was a knowledge that he had acquired some time ago, when, having consulted fowl entrails and having cross-checked the information obtained therein against the forms of the flames howling around him in the room, he had suspected that his daughter was in danger somewhere in the universe, one of his numerous unique daughters and unique wives, born from unknown mothers and submitting to him. He set himself thus in front of the dark silvering and he waited, and, although the wounds beneath his skull didn’t close and he felt almost like he was in his terminal stage, he increased the flux of forces within himself and he projected himself into an image where he appeared under the auspices of a demiurge whose every word disrupted the evil labyrinths of the world. Far off, his daughter Hannko was dying or already lay dead, or was in the process of being born or reborn, and he said: “I just have to shuck the bad minutes, I will shuck the time backward, the wrong way, minute by minute I’ll destroy the image of your death until we’ve undone your death and until your enemies have one by one been brought down, I’ll bruise them backward and they’ll go quiet, brought down and mute.” This he said as he actually was feeling his way: the candles illuminated nothing, they shone in their molten suet sludge and went out and, even when he lit them again close to his mouth, they spread his smell rather than their own, a strong stench of grilled pork rind and darkness. In the room, only one person blazed and entarred himself, and it was him. He asked the mirror its advice on things, on the immediate future of worldly things and on their inverse. The reflection was silent as well, like a hostile, felled, and mute monster. He wiped it away angrily. He wanted to share the image with someone, but the image didn’t materialize and nobody responded. Among the thousands of possible daughters, Hannko didn’t come forward. The others wandered beside her, like her, destroyed, themselves also hostile, felled, and mute. He saw snow, camps, a frightening solitude, centuries in the forest that succeeded in an undisentanglable mass, but Hannko didn’t come directly to him or back on the path he had drawn for her. He saw her from far off, but in the middle of others he didn’t even know if that was his little sister or his mistress or an animal, or an ancestral mother of his blood, but harboring an avid resentment at his gaze. He would have been unable to affirm the sort of relationship that each of them had. Squinting in front of the mirror that at every moment became enshadowed, he examined Hannko in the distance, like an enigmatic stranger whom dizziness forced him to seduce or massacre unhesitatingly. At times she lay unconscious in the taiga, surrounded by she-wolves that protected or ate her; at times she spun around a core in fusion, refusing to admit that her father existed and that he could bring her back, if only she gave herself to him; sometimes she was silent and impenetrable, surrounded by hundred-year-old trees and books that, with time, she had learned to read and write. And he suddenly grew angry and yelled: “Hannko, little sister, daughter Hannko, come here! Wife Hannko, forget your hates, forget everything! I’m shucking the bad minutes! Come! Today or in one thousand six hundred ninety-nine years or more, it doesn’t matter!”