Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  Maybe it’s a woman, Kronauer thought.

  Sure, maybe a woman, but, whoever this is, it’s one of Solovyei’s creations, he finished.

  He aimed the rifle toward the hallway and fired. A first bullet doubtless too high and, immediately, a second bullet that hit home.

  Man or woman or something else, the silhouette jumped back and, once out of sight, it began to let out glum and inarticulate, sharp screams of pain, despair, or fury.

  Kronauer was glad not to have missed his mark. The screams astonished him and tore his heart, but the stupid delight of a hunter prevailed, this physical satisfaction that predators felt when killing. There it is, he thought without elaborating.

  He looked up for several more seconds. His hands were shaking.

  His amok killer’s hands, insane hands inflicting death upon every person he met. They shook.

  The screams suddenly stopped. He was standing on the last step of the stairs and he felt himself deep inside the frenetic shudder of having killed.

  The light up above went out.

  Of course it went out, he thought, without any further explanation.

  • He went down the last step and he was in the boiler room and, immediately, some of his energy came back. Now he was very close to Solovyei’s nest. Now he was making his way into a territory he knew nothing about and where any attack against him might be fatal. It would be hard to protect himself, he thought. The place was illuminated and, despite the maze of tubes, cables, pipes, and machines, it seemed to provide few hiding places. Kronauer gritted his teeth, took several steps, and stood behind a cistern set on cinder blocks. At least this way he would avoid a shot to his face, and it was also a good vantage point for familiarizing himself with the space where the battle might now take place.

  Beyond the installations that stretched out exuberantly over every surface of the basement, there were entrances to tunnels. Kronauer saw them and didn’t have any intention of venturing into them. You have no idea at all what’s in these tunnels, he thought. Don’t get in there, it’ll be the end of you at the first curve. He had never been warned of such a subterranean network which, as was known, allowed the villagers to circulate when too-low temperatures and walls of snow otherwise prevented it. They never told me about anything like this, he thought. Just like with Vassilissa Marachvili, they kept me out of the loop. They didn’t share any details about anything. Rage filled him again. He swore under his breath against the Levanidovo’s inhabitants, against Solovyei, curses in Russian and in camp Mongolian, in mass-grave German. They pricked me with their dirty phonograph needles, he moaned, they numbed my intelligence to the bone, they always set things up so I wouldn’t think hard or even very much, wouldn’t understand their little schemes!

  He caught himself. The rifle was shaking again in his hands, this time more out of anxiety than out of murderous excitement. He leaned against the wall. You have to focus, Kronauer, this is war. Don’t waste your energy complaining. The enemy may have already aimed their own weapons at you, this isn’t the moment to flinch. He whispered several more Mongolian swear words to take heart once again. In a few moments, his trembling had subsided. He had managed to find at least some of the calm needed to attack and to try to kill.

  In front of him, for dozens of meters, the complex, disorganized, and absurd conglomeration that the dying engineers had conceived to guarantee the Levanidovo’s electrical permanence stretched out. While figuring out the configuration of the place, Kronauer had a thought for these heroes and heroines, these unparalleled technicians sent by the capital to do the impossible and save the population, or at least assure the survivors a minimum of comfort. Our own, he thought. These courageous men and women who didn’t hesitate at the moment of sacrifice, who had said good-bye to rest and sleep, with the self-abnegation that had always characterized the partisans, the unrepentant, and the egalitarians pure and simple. In less than three weeks, while their intestines and their cerebellums turned into ashen rags, they had started on the circuits needed for the turbines to turn and the current to improve. Then they had finally separated from their painful bodies, from their nauseating flesh.

  Kronauer put an end to this fraternal homage and for the next minute he was completely occupied with military scouting. To get close to the core he would have to breach a complicated lattice of tubes and pipes, go past pumps, cisterns, oil furnaces turned into steam boilers, containers repurposed as maintenance pools, as well as tar-coated doors that opened onto nothing, which were perhaps intended to be confinement spaces but hadn’t been finished in time. This compact universe was bogged down with swaths of cables and a multitude of junction boxes that hung and snaked in every direction. The damage Samiya Schmidt had wrought the previous night had added steam leaks or oil and hot-water runoffs along the walls. The cement Kronauer was preparing to walk along was filthy with black streaks. Who knows if this is heavy water, lively water, and deathly water, or tar, he thought. He noticed the surface, which seemed to shine, several bubbles that occasionally increased in size then burst. Who knows, he thought.

  • He began to make his way to the core. He didn’t know many of the kolkhoz’s secrets, but, thanks to the indiscretions of people here and there, he knew that Solovyei had the habit of sleeping or resting in the Soviet’s boiler, close to the nuclear core. He had learned that and, a week earlier, he had dreamed that he himself had come into a small nuclear plant, right behind Solovyei and intending to spy on him. Then he had seen Solovyei go into a compartment where tubes filled with rumbling matter reddened, shaking his peasant’s lambskin coat and delivering in front of the flames and for the flames an insane, incestuous poem. This dream-image had startled him when he had awoken, but he had forgotten it, and now it came back in full force, blending without much distortion into the real world. Once again he was in a small nuclear plant, on a path that led both to Solovyei and toward a space of radioactive embers, of shadows and magic. If there was a place where the president of the kolkhoz could be hiding, waiting for the wound that Samiya Schmidt had inflicted upon him to heal, it was certainly there.

  • The whole basement was bathed in warmth. Behind the mocking shields, the fissile material radiated. The pipes were burning. Some were covered with glints that looked like lines of insects, and, after sizzling for several seconds, disappeared. Glimmers appeared, dimmed by the electrical light, but white, blue, sometimes a shiny jet-black. The concrete walls emitting the oven’s vibrations were barely approachable. At the entrance to one of the tunnels, the evacuation tubes aspirated the clouds expelled by turbines and drained them out by the forest, but the gigantic joints just a bit upwind were already exuding steam. The continuous jets of vapor didn’t help the temperatures. Beneath his heavy fur coat, Kronauer was now smothered. Sweat rolled down his entire body. On his forehead, he could feel that the levee formed by his shapka’s soaked brim was about to break. Drops were already streaming down his temples, oozing toward his eyelids, stinging his eyes. In the spots where he was holding it, his rifle was wet. He wiped his right hand on his coat. Its fur had imprisoned the molten snow. He set his hand back under the trigger guard. It was even damper than before.

  • I shot how many times? he asked himself abruptly. How many bullets now?

  He tried to count the shots he had taken in the building and on the street, but he lost count and he left the question unanswered. He had come too close to Solovyei’s nest to uncock his gun and look at the magazine, or resume his memorization exercises. Nor was this the moment to remove his right hand and rummage in his pocket for the clip he had commandeered from the storeroom. He wasn’t very sure that a cartridge was left in his weapon’s breech. He hoped there was, but he wasn’t completely sure.

  Now he went, centimeter by centimeter, along the wall of a concrete cube where the nuclear core the engineers and the heroes had cobbled together was humming. He had reached Solovyei’s nest. The wall smelled of carbonized meat, of actinides. Pipes zigzagged over the ground, crossed at ev
ery moment with waves of glimmers that went out and then almost immediately came back, like shivers, like a light feather raised by the wind, like a phenomenon connected to life, to living, or some sort of similar death. The glimmers were gray, sometimes orange. When Kronauer set his foot on one of these tubes, the groaning stopped, but he felt like they were going through his body by his bones, and, a second later, the SKS’s barrel in turn bristled with small plumes. On the ground were oily puddles, shaken by ripples, unusually shiny. Kronauer avoided them, but when he couldn’t do otherwise, he stepped in them with disgust.

  Then he made his way toward the entrance to the concrete cube he had just circumvented. He couldn’t get to the actual entrance without crossing a partial barricade of tarry cables and burning pipes. So he was facing a hardened mattress, filthy or powdered with soot, which was surrounded with naphtheous water and shadow. An overwhelming smell of Bakelite in fusion meandered through the black space. As Kronauer had both predicted and dreaded, Solovyei was in his nest. He was sitting on the mattress, his legs crossed, his boots thrown thoughtlessly on his bed, making the place just a little dirtier.

  For no reason, this insignificant detail shocked Kronauer. Look at that, this brute, he thought suddenly, this animal, he puts his boots where he lies down to sleep.

  • The president of the kolkhoz had a horrible head wound. Already on the path to recovery, certainly, thanks to the unguents and lively water that the Gramma Udgul had applied at the end of the previous night, and because Solovyei belonged to a category of creatures who reconstituted themselves quickly no matter the extent of physical damage suffered, but it was still absolutely hideous, this wound. The iron pipe that Samiya Schmidt had buried in his eye was still there. Solovyei had doubtless asked someone to pull it out, or maybe he himself was in charge of doing that, but the pain had hampered the operation and the pipe was sticking more than ever out of his left ear, streaked with lumpy brain matter and bits of bone. On that side, Solovyei’s mess of hair was sticky, as if coated in sludge. The space from where the iron pipe had entered to the left ear was nothing more than a pocket of blood-soaked pulp. The kolkhoz president’s face had lost its leonine presence and it took effort to see something other than mutilation and suffering. His working eye was shut. He opened it halfway and for a fraction of a second Kronauer felt all the contemptuous malice Solovyei was capable of, all his baleful mocking, and his rage.

  On the mattress, there were untied bandages, compresses soaked with brownish liquids, clothes filthy with lumps like cowpats. And a semi-rigid leather bag, which had been reused and cut out to be used as a massive mask.

  He took off his mask, Kronauer thought. Then, under the blow of the gaze that Solovyei had shot him just then, he wasn’t able to finish whatever it was. I was at war, he thought. Broken faces, I’ve seen them. It always has an effect.

  Yes, he thought sadly. It always has a hell of an effect.

  He stood upright in a lake of black liquid.

  • Kronauer’s rifle pointed right at the upper part of Solovyei’s stomach, right where his neck began.

  The discreet whirring of turbines.

  A disgusting odor of molten Bakelite.

  Other odors, of hot metal, of livid plutonium.

  Solovyei sitting on a dirty mattress, a homeless person caught in a cave.

  Around the mattress, the ground covered with blistering water, thick like ink.

  Solovyei’s mutilated head.

  His right eye suddenly wide open, cruel, golden.

  The pipes crossing anarchically in the middle distance of the image, in front, behind, on the sides, forming miniature labyrinths, following the blueprints drawn by schizophrenic plumbers.

  A dry sauna heat.

  Sometimes short intense glimmers in the boiler room, like magnesium flames.

  Flights of sparkles from the soldered joints, from the mattress, from Kronauer’s coat and rifle, from Solovyei’s wounds.

  A door coated in a velvet of small unmoving flames.

  Sometimes the lapping of black-black water, getting angry all on its own.

  The nuclear hell behind the door.

  Kronauer soaked in sweat, blinded by sweat, smelling all around him the scent of his fear.

  Every so often, sniffling from Solovyei, then nothing.

  Darkness.

  Waiting.

  • Solovyei didn’t move, he just fixed his hypnotic eye on the man threatening him.

  Kronauer, positioned to say several words before firing on the other one, thought for several seconds as to what he might say. Nothing came to him, no vengeful declaration, no argument justifying the execution to come. But there has to be something, he thought. No image blazed in front of him, no depiction of the crimes he could have accused the kolkhoz president of. Only with great confusion did he remember the reason he was there, in this basement, with a weapon of war aimed at a silent, wounded man. A woman appeared in his consciousness, but he didn’t recognize her, or did, but so poorly that she was merely a conventional shadow. He had forgotten what Vassilissa Marachvili had looked like before, during, and after the manipulations Solovyei had forced her to undergo. He saw Irina Echenguyen in his arms again, happy and young, then dying in the hospital, then dead, massacred. He remembered that someone had recently said to him “I’m with you,” certainly a woman, but he wondered if the phrase had been uttered in reality or in a dream. As for remembering the name of this woman who had assured him of her sympathy, and what sort of relationship he’d had with her, he was unable to remember. Maybe it was Irina Echenguyen again, or Vassilissa Marachvili, or one of Solovyei’s daughters, the youngest one, who had the guts to pummel Solovyei and bury an iron pipe in his brain. He didn’t even try to bring forth the name or the face of this daughter. He was exhausted. The bout of amok violence was reaching its end, and, like a seizure, it began its ebb by replacing his consciousness with a cloudy dough, full of incomplete images and tears. He felt tired, extremely tired. Not worth the trouble to say sentences, he thought. Not worth the trouble to dig through all the mud of your memory, Kronauer, he thought. A horrible fatigue fell upon him. His brain only focused on trifles: his smell of sweat, the dirty mattress, the fate of Marxism-Leninism.

  He held onto his weapon. Well, I have nothing to say, he thought. I only have to finish the job.

  With that, he pulled the trigger. The firing pin clicked in the void.

  —Ah, I thought you were a good soldier, Solovyei remarked in a cheeky voice, distorted by his swollen mouth.

  —I used up my clip, Kronauer explained.

  He stood sheepishly, dazed, sweaty and hot, his hands numb.

  Three seconds went by.

  —Look at that, this brute, Solovyei said cruelly. This animal, he puts his boots where he lies down to die.

  —What, what are you . . . Kronauer stammered.

  He lowered his eyes, and then his head. The soles of his boots were plunged in a lake of black water. Beneath, something burning was trembling. Irradiated cement, or maybe already the indescribable matter one walks on during the forty-nine days after death, when at least one has courage or luck.

  —So what, it’s just black water, he said.

  It was black water, indeed, or oil, and as it had the properties of a mirror, he saw in it his own reflection. He saw, aside from a fur hat, a bestial killer’s physiognomy, his lightless gaze, and, almost immediately, a shovel or a spade coming down upon him. Someone had approached him from behind and, without warning, put him where he couldn’t hurt anyone.

  So there it is, he thought, someone smashed in my skull.

  Then he slumped down and lay there where Solovyei had predicted, in the black water.

  22

  • While the bullets flew he shifted his powerfully shadowy path and, all the while hopping from ember to ember, he threw lures behind him that resembled him, gave them life and movement thanks to the memories that he drew both from his enemies’ memory and from his own black matrices. The lures
caught in his stead the arrows and iron projectiles meant for him, and sometimes he gave them a voice to feign pain and anger, sometimes he arranged for them, once hit, to melt or disappear in a great silence that was like an abdication in the face of reality. We watched this from our hiding places, wordlessly we were there like in a bad dream or a bad book. We hadn’t been given any sense of subtlety, we were rough-hewn in terms of intelligence. We understood little and our fear didn’t diminish. It never ceased to grow, on the contrary, and it spread within us nauseatingly, scraping and mistreating our secret ducts and our oneiric glands. The soldiers, too, were afraid and shot indiscriminately, perhaps aware that they were floundering in foreign spaces they would never leave, or, in a pinch, they would leave, but not alive or dead, without having won. He, on the contrary and as always, took pleasure in this manhunt for himself, which he knew was doomed to fail, and he had fun with it, intervening in the soldiers’ souls and constructing episodes of murder where he was the apparent victim, repeating to our disgust, but with delectation, the scenes where he had appreciated the strange sequence of events, driving the soldiers to the edge of the abyss of their stupidity and his nightmare. The heat was intense. He leaned against the burning wall and, suddenly uninterested in the events under way, he sang old prison songs he had learned in his youth and, after a moment, he felt nostalgia for his previous existence, comparing it to the inescapable eternity he had enjoyed ever since his entrance into black space, into our reality, and into many other intermediary spaces he jealously kept the keys to. The fire buzzed alongside him in the form of a basso continuo. He let thirteen more centuries go by, then he began whispering the names of his wives and the countless daughters he had had with them, and who had all helped him not to die of boredom or not to wilt away in his dreams, and then he began to list the names of the numerous camps where he had dragged his rags and his bones, then he went on to chant the identities of the enemies he had decided to punish when the occasion presented itself, in whatever universe they had taken refuge in so as to escape his vengeance. He kept inventing these golem-crows that he sent for observation in the minor worlds of the taiga. Time dripped around him in little drops, making him think of wax or liquid basalt. When the heat was too tremendous, he put on once more his gloves and mask, which was also dripping with lava, then he crouched down as he often did, showing to those who were curious that he wanted more than anything to go back to the ashes. Around him weeks flowed by, then years, then he shook off his muteness, stood back up, and abruptly started, not without sniggering, dictating several long poems. The soldiers were now far away and they were dust. We ourselves had renounced his company and the manna of his speeches, and, dispersed or wandering elsewhere among the dead, we were no longer able to hear him.