Something twisted in Kronauer’s gut. Dread, uncertainty. The darkness had come too quickly. He hadn’t had the time to convince himself that this apparition was indeed Solovyei. His adversary’s head was hidden beneath some sort of semi-rigid cover, large and invertebrate enough to suggest more a suitcase than a grotesque carnival mask. Two eye-holes had been punched in this vaguely rectangular, tanned-leather case, but in the weak light from the street Kronauer wasn’t able to make out its eyes, and certainly not the wild-animal blaze characteristic of Solovyei. Maybe the kolkhoz president had chosen this absurd getup to hide the wound that Samiya Schmidt had inflicted upon him the previous night? A metal bar had passed through his skull from the right eye to the left ear. Maybe the mask served to protect a massive bandage or a hideous wound? What if, behind the leather, was a face that bore no relationship to Solovyei’s, an unknown face? The one standing on the storeroom threshold didn’t have a definite height, because the shapeless bag made him taller. As for his size, it couldn’t really be assessed, because he was wrapped in a heavy dog-fur coat, a mantle Kronauer hadn’t ever noticed on anybody in the Levanidovo. Beneath this mass of pelt, practically anybody in the village could have appeared as imposing as Solovyei.
A heavy silence remained after the noise of the switch being flipped. The two protagonists didn’t challenge each other; they seemed to be waiting. The dog-fur coat filled a sizable part of the doorframe and didn’t shrink beneath Kronauer’s threat. Kronauer had pointed his rifle at it and didn’t lower his weapon.
In the street there were audible gusts of wind sprinkling snow on the windows of the hall.
The empty hall.
The shadows of the evening and the storm had annulled all color, reducing the confrontation to a black-and-white image.
A form frozen in front of the door, half-human, half-animal, topped with a travel bag that gave him a wild and unnerving look as if it had come out of a collection of surrealist collages.
The Simonov rifle in Kronauer’s hands. A China-made SKS, maybe specifically the model the Chinese also called Type 56, or maybe not.
The silence between the gusts of wind.
The mild scent of industrial grease coming off the rifle.
The scents of staleness, of cardboard, and radioactive Bakelite floating in the storeroom.
At that point, the mysterious form sighed, a powerful beast’s breath. Then, under cover of the leather, a mouth began to produce a whispered hum that had something religious in its basic musicality. The hall’s emptiness amplified it enough for the words to be distinct. For two seconds, maybe three, Kronauer thought it was a curse from a deranged spirit, and then . . .
Kronauer no longer had any hair, but, if he still had any, it would have stood up on end. Beneath the cotton lining of his shapka, the skin of his scalp contracted.
—What’s your plan, Kronauer, you sham soldier? the masked form whispered.
Word for word what he had thought at the start of the main road, right when he had hesitated beneath the gusting wind.
—What were you planning to do, you crummy fighter, actually kill Solovyei? And how would you do it, and why? And what are you going to do if you don’t succeed? . . . And who will you leave with, if you don’t fail? . . . For where? With Myriam Umarik and Barguzin, the model couple, a nymphomaniac and a dying man? With Samiya Schmidt and her anti-male books, if she’s still alive? With that ice princess Hannko Vogulian? . . . Where would you go? What would you do? . . . Did you think about that? . . .
The voice was deformed by the thick leather membrane it had to pass through, and it reproduced perfectly the questions Kronauer had formulated on the street. It sounds like my voice, he thought despondently. Not completely, but it sounds like it. But no, he thought, I’m not the one talking.
The masked creature modulated and interrupted his speech, as if it was remembering the rough outlines of a song rather than anxious reflections, and certainly as if it didn’t attach any importance to the text it was speaking. When it had finished its recitation, it repeated it completely, but this time raising its tone and scattering whining or mocking notes throughout the sentences. The result was atrocious. Then it was quiet.
This could only have been a sleight of hand by this dirty magician, Kronauer thought. It’s his way of doing things. A recording through a membrane and, when it ends, he goes over it again. And even if it’s not him hiding beneath this disguise, it’s clearly one of his creatures.
He held his rifle steadily and his index finger was ready to pull the trigger, but, as he still had his doubts about the target, he waited a little longer.
He knew that, if the gun went off, the bullet would go right into the other’s torso.
There’s no point in holding off, he thought.
Do it, he thought. Either way I’m screwed.
And he fired.
• The other form took the shot and slumped forward as if he had just been hit in the stomach with a sandbag rather than a bullet, then he stepped back and crept to the left and only then did he begin to emit squeaks that didn’t resemble screams of pain, but rather grotesque groans like angry clowns in circus performances. The moans echoed in the hall and Kronauer, galvanized by an adrenaline rush, sped toward the door, intent on seeing the wounded thing’s status and, if needed, to finish it off. The floor of the storeroom was covered, it was dark, and he lost time stumbling over boxes containing television or computer screens. His heart beat a fast rhythm, his temples were swollen and pulsating. When he came out into the hall, the wounded thing was making its way outside. It had swiftly crossed the hall, opened the door, and was already disappearing outside.
There wasn’t any trace of blood on the tile floor.
I got him, Kronauer thought. But the bleeding hasn’t gone on long enough to soak his clothes. Soon it’ll make its way down his stomach and his legs.
He was a little annoyed to see that his victim was stable enough to escape the building.
But that was a deadly blow, he thought. It went right through his stomach. He’ll die in the street.
He crossed the hall as well, almost running as the murderous excitement of the hunt caught hold of him, and he wanted more than anything to be sure that he hadn’t missed his mark. He wanted to see his prey lying in the snow, its coat open on a gaping wound, he wanted to walk up to it, lean over it, hear its death-rattles, and pull off its filthy head cover.
• In the main road, day was nothing more than a memory. The last gleams of light reflected off the ground. Kronauer’s gaze swept the area and saw nothing. The snow kept falling with the same intensity as before. The wind blew intermittently, without any fixed direction, in violent gusts followed by unforeseen calm.
Where’d it go? Kronauer wondered.
On the steps, he only saw the footprints he had left right before going into the Soviet building. Nobody had gone down the steps recently. If the wounded thing wasn’t a ghost, it still had to be on the threshold.
Tense, ready to fire a second time, Kronauer inspected the esplanade, looked behind the columns decorating the façade. There was no possible hiding place and the snow was unbroken.
Once again, Kronauer felt the skin on his scalp contracting in fear beneath his shapka. He crouched down and carefully scrutinized the traces on the ground. Nobody, aside from himself, had trod on the steps. The adrenaline that had propelled him outside, which had driven him forward like a predator sure of his deed, was already so diluted that it no longer had any effect. He felt his legs shaking nervously.
Solovyei, he thought. Don’t think I’m impressed by your wizardry. Your appearances, your disappearances—don’t imagine for one second that it has an effect on me. It’s just smoke and mirrors. I’m not fooled.
But the backs of his legs and his calves showed clear signs of weakness and he leaned against one of the columns. He had goose bumps.
The wind, which had relented, now increased and whirled around him. The snowflakes hurtled onto his eyelids, agglo
merations of stars. He also felt them pounding on his hands. He didn’t have icy fingers yet, but he knew that in a few moments he would no longer be able to count on them to pull the trigger at the right moment. He hoisted his rifle over his shoulder and dug his hands into his pockets.
It was night. The Levanidovo’s streetlamps didn’t light up, whether because Samiya Schmidt had destroyed the public lighting the previous night, or because Solovyei had deliberately turned them off in order to have an advantage in the darkness. The village seemed dead. Nobody had come down the hill after the work day at the warehouse. The kolkhozniks, the back-up workers recruited from the hereafter, and Solovyei’s daughters stayed up there, in the warmth, with ionizing rays and the Gramma Udgul. Maybe they had considered it wise not to venture just then into the snowstorm, or rather, predicting the bouts of violence in the village, they had decided to wait until calm was restored. They must be up there, getting ready to spend a night by the well, Kronauer thought.
He had the impression of being all alone in the heart of the Levanidovo, for a duel with Solovyei and its first round finished just now in an unintelligible way. Unintelligible and unnerving.
He scanned the street, which the natural brightness of the snow allowed him to see. Shades in the shadows. Dark masses. Incessantly moving ridges, whirling or vertical. Clear spaces that sheer habit forced him to say were white.
Not a window was lit.
The village disappeared.
The snow whistled in gusts that whipped across his face.
When the wind increased, the flakes hit the Soviet’s columns with a flurry of sharp, almost metallic noises.
Nothing living appeared.
I’m going to wait here one moment, he thought. Watch what happens and think about what I should do.
The snow beat against his eyelids, his mouth. He shook the cotton strip that covered his ears and wiped the belt holding his rifle on his shoulder. He quickly put his icy hand back in his coat.
Not worth it if I end up with joints frozen solid, he thought.
• He pulled away from the column he’d been leaning against, and he went down the stairs, then began to walk against the wind for about twenty meters. The street was dark, but there were enough landmarks for him to walk straight. The snow and the wind kept pushing him around. He went to Hannko Vogulian’s house and he tried to open the door. Contrary to what had practically been a rule in the village, it was locked. He leaned against it and aimed his weapon at the Soviet. If someone had come out at that moment, he would have shot regardless of the target or its resemblance or lack thereof to the president of the kolkhoz. He stayed there for a minute, plagued by freezing gusts, with the ice crystals clinking on his fur coat, his shapka, his shapka’s earflaps. He held his rifle for a steady, intuitive shot, enough to hit any creature that might appear on the steps of the Soviet. But nobody came out. Without hoisting his rifle back over his shoulder, he dusted its upper side, wiped his hands of the layer of snow covering them, and slipped them once more into his pockets to warm them back up.
The snow that had gotten into his pockets melted reluctantly.
He hadn’t been able to focus on a specific plan of action.
What if I left for good right now? he thought. What if I went to the forest? There’s a hut near the first rows of trees, I can spend the night there, and then . . . Then, good-bye, Radiant Terminus . . .
Of course not, he corrected himself. I have to avenge Vassilissa Marachvili first. I have to finish off this monster. And besides, I’d have trouble finding that old hut, in the darkness and the wind.
Then he thought of Vassilissa Marachvili again. He forced himself to dredge up images of his short time with her. The images were poor, repetitive, and lifeless. A smiling, timeless face, always turned toward him at the same angle. Her body outstretched in the grasses at the moment he’d left her. A kiss at twilight, behind Ilyushenko’s back, her lips pressed against his, hands wrapped around his back, but, ultimately, they were anonymous sensations, as those he’d experienced with other girls. He had to admit that the attachment he felt for her was now more abstract than actual. Really, only Irina Echenguyen was permanently etched in his memory, and behind the shock he’d felt when he’d discovered Vassilissa Marachvili’s body, a body that had been soiled magically, worked over magically by Solovyei to restore life or quasi-life, beyond the disgust and rage this discovery had provoked in him, he realized that his desire to kill the president of the kolkhoz had murkier roots.
Not worth nitpicking, Kronauer, he said soundlessly, half-opening his lips to blow on the flakes that had settled there, you also want to gun down Solovyei the alpha male, because it’s the elder who’s dominating the Radiant Terminus pack. That’s a reason from the Mesozoic or Cenozoic eras. That’s from the night of time and for you it’s not honorable.
His mouth barely moved. He chewed as many flakes as words and, at the end of each clause, he sighed.
There’s some cock’s language behind all this, he kept thinking silently. You can’t bear that the kolkhozniks circle around their president like planets around their sun, you really blame those three girls for having been accomplices to their father while you came and went in the Levanidovo like an idiot. You want to punish Solovyei for the abominations that Vassilissa Marachvili had to suffer. You have a gun and you want to shoot anything that moves. But, beneath all that, beneath the awful sludge of murder and vengeance, there’s your spasms of a frustrated male machine, there are hundreds of millions of years of the animal cock that order your actions and cock’s gestures and your cock’s thoughts. And more than anything, that’s what there is.
• At that moment in his speech it seemed that someone was coming down the main street, down the middle, up by the Pioneers’ House.
It was a quiet spot between the gusts, and the snow fell straight down. It was dense and black, in less and less airy snowflakes, covering every sight in a thick and very, very dark gray curtain.
The form Kronauer had imagined seeing walking from the Pioneers’ House disappeared in the darkness and then reappeared, still moving, but without having truly progressed. In reality, despite shaking its arms and wriggling its waist, it was buried in the snow to its knees and was at a standstill. It appeared to be moving. It appeared to be theatrically and grotesquely moving. The massive black coat that protected it prevented any clear determination of whether it was male or female. Its face was hidden beneath a scarf and on its head was a gigantic hat, a sort of incredibly thick Turkmen astrakhan hat with unreasonably long fur, almost as voluminous as the travel bag used as a mask for Solovyei’s first creature. It called to mind a blazing sphere that didn’t blaze, a burned-out sun flinging in every direction not rays, but its long frozen tentacles.
Kronauer took aim. The black coat was fifty or sixty meters away. He didn’t know his rifle well and it wasn’t a sniper weapon, but he felt that the bullet would fly toward its goal and hit hard, right in the torso.
What if it was one of Solovyei’s daughters? he suddenly thought. What if it was Myriam Umarik?
The other’s wriggling certainly did remind him of the voluptuous undulations that often shook Myriam Umarik’s belly and rear. But the coat erased all bodily shape, the snow blurred the image, the night prevented all certainty. At this distance and in the darkness, Kronauer was ready to shoot at someone whose identity and intentions he couldn’t be sure of.
I can’t do that, he told himself. That doesn’t make any sense.
The black coat in his line of sight had stopped moving. It was now a black stack topped with a sort of black, burned-out star. It was stuck in the snow, between the Pioneers’ House and the communist cooperative. Its immobility made a shot aimed at it even more absurd.
On Petrification Considered as a System of Defense, he remembered. A post-exotic work that had been republished at the time he’d met Irina Echenguyen, and which had provoked controversy and several arrests. On pretext of being humorous, the book flirted with several
counterrevolutionary positions. Irina Echenguyen hadn’t finished it and had criticized it harshly.
He thought furtively of Irina Echenguyen, trying not to remember her unhappy end, then, his finger curled around the trigger, he went back to scrutinizing the petrified form. He stayed there for half a minute, still certain that the tiny movement of his finger on the trigger could send a warhead toward his target and it would land dead-center. The wind hadn’t picked up. The snow hailed down on the collar of his coat, on his arms, on the Simonov’s breech. At the other end of the bullet’s possible trajectory, the black coat was in the middle of the road and, powdered bit by bit with ice, it began to whiten in the darkness.
Kronauer lowered his weapon. He had the idea of shooting at several meters in front of the immobile form, in order to see its reaction and make a decision on the fate that awaited it, but when he started moving and shifting his line of sight, his index finger pressed impatiently on the trigger and the shot went off. The explosion deafened him, he shut his eyes. He opened them immediately, but at that exact moment he saw a light at the edge of his field of vision. A burst of light on his left. Without having taken the time to see if the black fur coat had been hit or not, he turned his head toward the Soviet.
Someone had just appeared on the doorstep, aiming the weak beam of a flashlight at the steps as if to examine Kronauer’s footsteps engraved in the snow. Thousands of snowflakes could be seen speeding by in the faint yellow cone that the light projected. The person holding the flashlight was dressed in a dog-fur or wolf-fur coat, and on its shoulders, enveloping and hiding its head, it bore a sort of extravagantly proportioned leather handbag.
Radiant Terminus Page 33
