While Solovyei had carried out these nocturnal visits, Hannko Vogulian hadn’t dreamed of setting down these hailstorms of sentences that she had always considered as repugnant and detestable as the intrusion they accompanied. But then Solovyei had stopped appearing within her and, after a century or two, she began to feel nostalgic, not for her father, whose monstrosity she continued to hate, but for his ranting creations. Solovyei’s sad poetries had found a refuge in the inmost parts of her memory, she had buried them as far as possible beneath her consciousness, and yet, now that she was calling them up, she was exhuming them willingly and without any apparent deterioration. Once again they were well-articulated, imprecatory, and bombastic; once again barely comprehensible and unnerving. Hannko Vogulian copied them down quickly, as if being dictated. She omitted practically no figure of speech and sometimes was sad not to be able to express in her writing the needle’s crackle on the wax and the tonal variations her father loved, because they hypnotized or frightened their listeners.
• When she was captivated in this way by her task as a copyist, she sometimes intoned or hummed the strings of words that hung in front of her, and it occurred to her, confusedly or quickly, that her proximity to Solovyei hadn’t really ended, that no separation had taken place, and that she was still, or at least she had clearly become once again, a creature imagined, possessed, and brought to life by Solovyei. A daughter of Solovyei, a daughter for Solovyei.
A female annex in Solovyei’s life: nothing more than that.
26
• He got up, pushing against the boards. The chains groaned. He went to the hole for pissing and expelled the few drops he had in his bladder, then he got dressed. Horrid smells came from his body and his clothes at the slightest movement he made. They swirled around him and upset him.
So, Kronauer, he said. The next time you decide to stay in jail, make sure to take a bath first, otherwise I won’t come with you!
He walked away from the hole and, as the cell was narrow, after four steps he touched the door. From the grille he could make out the thick shadow of a hallway. He brought his nose to the small mesh. In that spot the air was a little less nauseating than in the cell.
His headache came and went. Behind his forehead, in his eyes, the pain thrummed, sometimes slackened, sometimes swelled in forceful waves.
Well, he thought. It’s still better than lying outside, pecked by crows and vultures.
The smell of the metal grille mixed with that of his sniffing and breathing. Others before him had been there, hoping to see in the hallway a slight change in the atmosphere, an indication of the time, the day, the nearness or farness of death.
Other smells.
The smell of muddy snow carried on the detainees’ boots.
The smell of muddy snow, penal blood, muscle fatigue, penal cold, and filth.
The smell of holes in other cells, and the smell that he himself left against the grille, of a hairy, famished, muddy, and dead animal.
He walked away from the opening and went back to the boards.
Now he was sitting on the wood, head hung, his forehead in his hands. He was slowly trying to figure out what had happened before. He could barely reconstruct the passage of days and nights that had preceded his incarceration. The fragments appeared amid chaos and didn’t coalesce into a story or a life.
At some point he took off his coat and set it in a pile next to him, feeling as if he had accomplished something difficult.
His mind was full of massive holes.
He stayed that way and for two or three hours didn’t move. Without his coat he was just in rags. Occasionally he saw an image of himself in his mind, and he felt that he looked just like an ordinary detainee, chiefly male, in a torn uniform like a convict’s, a beggar’s, a soldier’s, or that of someone buried in a shallow grave.
• Around eleven in the morning, a watchman came to open the door. The lock let out several lazy hiccups, then the iron plate squeaked on its hinges and Kronauer stood by the partition, standing mechanically at attention as if he had learned in the night of time the disciplined behavior of basic egalitarianism in concentration milieus.
The watchman was named Hadzoböl Münzberg. Kronauer recognized him easily. The day of feeding the core, they’d both taken a box with several puppets and video games out of the container. Hadzoböl Münzberg had a glassy stare then, a slow and weary pace, and Kronauer had figured out that he was one of Solovyei’s zombies. He had also thought of the children who had once played with these things and who must not have survived the radiation. When he and Hadzoböl Münzberg had tipped the box over the void, the dolls had slipped nonchalantly toward the abyss. Disarticulated puppets, damsels in plastic. “Dust to dust,” Hadzoböl Münzberg had remarked with a sigh.
And now Hadzoböl Münzberg was gesturing for Kronauer to leave his cell.
Kronauer showed him his coat and asked if he’d have to put it on.
—I’m taking you to the showers, Münzberg said.
—Good, said Kronauer as he followed his footsteps.
—You don’t have a headache, do you, sometimes? Münzberg suddenly asked.
—I do, Kronauer said. Horrible ones.
They went down the corridor. There were several doors with grilles, but, behind them, Kronauer couldn’t make out any breaths or signs of life.
—I’m the one who knocked you out, Münzberg clarified as they came to the shower room.
—Why? Kronauer asked.
—Had to, Münzberg explained.
—But, Kronauer protested.
—I did.
—So you knocked me out, just like that?
—Yes, said Hadzoböl Münzberg. With a shovel. I had to. You had become uncontrollable.
27
• The shower room had an icy draft flowing through it. Kronauer took off his coat and shivered. But I thought I didn’t put it on when I left the cell, he suddenly thought. No, I didn’t take it, this stinking coat, he thought. I left it by the partition when Münzberg told me we were going to the showers. So why do I have it with me? he wondered.
Right before, he had been walking in the hallway. Did I or didn’t I have it on me? He thought about this for one or two seconds. He couldn’t decide on an answer. Not that it matters, he thought.
Still, Kronauer, he thought. If you can’t even remember what happened three minutes ago, I wouldn’t count on your head for much. Who knows what’s in there, what sort of mush. Maybe you’re already dead. Or crazy. Or you’re spinning around in a dream without any hope of getting out.
He got undressed. His old clothes were so vile that he set them on the floor, under the bench in the changing room. Maybe the prison administration will give me a clean uniform after I’m cleaned up, he thought.
A naked light bulb lit the changing room. Aside from the air vents and the entrance Hadzoböl Münzberg had slipped through after giving him a bar of soap, there was no opening. The place, despite the bulb, didn’t have enough lighting. Everything was wood: the floor, the walls, the ceiling, with logs, boards, grates over the drain holes. It’s suffocating, he thought. The mustiness of damp, of wet pine and dirty clothes. Beyond the changing room was the actual shower room. Not very big. About fifteen meters long. Oddly, he had to go all the way to the back to find a water inlet, a single hanging showerhead.
• You want me to say it, Kronauer? he thought as he walked barefoot over the grates on the black, slightly viscous surface. A single shower, in a communal bathroom, that’s impossible. That just doesn’t happen.
You’re not in reality, there you have it, he thought.
• However, he felt the mossy, slippery slats beneath him, and, beyond his own stench, he could smell around him the violent odors of soaked larch, steeped in bad soap, sordid water, with an aftersmell of excrement, urine, and blood. It was real and didn’t belong to a dream world. Unable to more clearly make out the status of the world he was maneuvering through, he turned the knob in front of him and squatted b
eneath the shower head. After several liters of cold water, the stream became pleasant, very hot, but not burning.
He surrendered to the water without moving. The rain bombarded his head and he realized that since Hadzoböl Münzberg had left him, he had forgotten his headache. All the more reason not to completely believe what happens, he thought. It’s disappeared, I won’t complain. But it’s not natural. The drops hit his smooth scalp. He shut his eyes. He had quickly come to a minute of calm passivity.
Dripping liquid at a delightful temperature.
A nearly fetal position.
Half-darkness.
Solitude.
He hadn’t even started to wash himself yet, blissfully unmoving, when he heard someone opening the door to the room. All right, he thought without opening his eyes. Münzberg has come with clean clothes. A gust of sharp air hit his calves. He huddled even tighter beneath the water.
It couldn’t be better, he thought. I couldn’t be better.
Then he made the mistake of opening his eyes.
There were several people in the changing room. Hadzoböl Münzberg was there, indeed, holding an enormous mass that didn’t look like clean clothes. He was accompanied by the Gramma Udgul, Samiya Schmidt, and Solovyei.
Kronauer immediately shut his eyes.
Well, apparently not, he thought. It couldn’t be worse.
• Münzberg came and went. He went into the hallway to find several masses wrapped in waxed canvas, sheets, or various rags. He dragged them and set them between the changing room and the space for showers, for the shower. Sometimes he could see exactly what sort of packet it was. Sometimes an arm hung out, covered in a sleeve of a winter jacket, a foot with shoes to brave the snow. Hadzoböl Münzberg was carrying corpses. He set down his loads without any apparent emotion, as if he was indifferent to his lazy character, then he went back into the hallway to get another one.
When Münzberg was done, Solovyei pushed the bench to sit right behind the barricade of outstretched bodies. The Gramma Udgul sat next to him. They resembled a peasant couple in a rural train station waiting room and both seemed to be in a bad mood. Samiya Schmidt disappeared for a minute then came back with a stool. She sat far off, close to the revolting pile of Kronauer’s rags. In what looked like a tribunal, she could have been a third judge, a representative of the masses, or a witness for the prosecution. She hung her head, sullen and stricken.
Then Münzberg shut the door and stood on watch. At the other end of the room, Kronauer had covered his crotch and stayed under the hot water, in a frightened nudist’s pose. He waited under the flowing water. He didn’t know what to do.
• Solovyei’s two yellow eyes glinted. If he had once been wounded, there was no sign on his face. His dead eye had regained its evil power and its gleam. The hole in his head had been soldered shut.
—Let me get dressed, Kronauer begged.
—I’m the one giving orders here, the president of the kolkhoz said.
The wood in the room meant the acoustics would be good and his voice rolled powerfully toward Kronauer.
The Gramma Udgul packed some tobacco into the bowl of her pipe. Solovyei set his massive hands on his massive thighs and seemed to be trying to remember the broad outlines of the affair he would be judging. His long, natural hair haloed around his large, hostile muzhik’s head. It shone with oily reflections beneath the lamp. The iron bar that had skewered him from eye to ear now belonged to mere memory.
The kolkhoz president looked up at Kronauer, his golden eyes without any visible white, his wild animal eyes that didn’t bring to mind a peasant but an unknown creature, bearing a relationship of pure convenience with peasantry and even with the human species.
—So can I come out of the shower? Kronauer asked.
—Be quiet, the Gramma Udgul said.
• Solovyei jumped from subject to subject in order to discombobulate the accused man and make it impossible for him to defend himself. Every so often, he summed up the main charges, and then he gave equal weight to blood crimes and miserable ordinary details of life in Radiant Terminus. According to him, Kronauer had intentionally half-fixed the fire hydrant in front of Myriam Umarik’s house, which had turned a large part of the main road to mud. He had unfairly taken Barguzin’s shirts. When his turn had come to work in the kitchens, he had prepared a porridge of toasted barley with flour and rancid butter without paying attention to the amounts, thereby repeatedly creating disgusting meals. He had hurt Samiya Schmidt when he had brought her back from the forest the day of his arrival. Then he had tiptoed around all the women in the kolkhoz, with the clear intention of sleeping with them and hurting them, the only exception being the Gramma Udgul, whom he had evidently spared, but doubtless because she had brought to light his role in assassinating an officer in the Red Army, and because she had unmasked him as a deserter. Among his Casanovan actions, he had persuaded Samiya Schmidt to read and reread unhealthy pamphlets written by Maria Kwoll and her group of Amazonians, to the point that Samiya Schmidt had lost her spirit and had gone crazy against her father. He had spent his time in the kolkhoz without respecting a single ideological principle, breezing through events like he was an enemy of the Orbise or an idiot. In the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse, he had tried to break one of the rare phonographs that had survived the Second Soviet Union’s disasters, a machine with great historical and sentimental value. Moreover, the night of the blizzard, he had fired shots at innocent kolkhozniks, hitting his targets perfectly nearly every time, and causing a considerable hemorrhage in Radiant Terminus’s numbers.
• —I never fired a shot at anyone, Kronauer exclaimed.
—A semiautomatic war rifle, Solovyei said. An SKS Type 56.
—I didn’t shoot anyone, Kronauer repeated.
—Is that nobody? Solovyei asked.
At his order, Hadzoböl Münzberg came out of the doorway he had been leaning in and went to start unwrapping the cadavers lying at the judges’ feet.
Although the water was blinding him, Kronauer successively recognized the one-armed Abazayev, the tractor driver Morgovian, Hannko Vogulian, and Myriam Umarik. He couldn’t see any blood or wounds on their faces, but, lower down, on the torso, the stomach, all were bloodied.
As Hadzoböl Münzberg paused, the president of the kolkhoz gestured for him to take away the cloths covering the last two bodies. With a zombie’s gentle and slow movements, Münzberg did so. In this way appeared the partly smashed heads of the Gramma Udgul and Samiya Schmidt. Sitting nearby, one on the judges’ bench, the other on a small stool, those two concerned seemed not to express any emotions. They didn’t react. Münzberg withdrew to lean once again in the doorway. There was a brief pause.
The drops spluttering on Kronauer’s skin, on the grating around him.
The mist.
The slightly gray water close to his left ankle, in the spot where he had set his bit of soap. The bar continued to dissolve, leaving small shimmering ripples on the drain occasionally interrupted by bubbles that quickly burst.
The shadow around Kronauer.
The harsh light of the bulb in the changing room.
The shame of being naked like an animal in front of the judges, in front of the corpses, in front of Samiya Schmidt on her stool and in front of Samiya Schmidt lying on the floor, her head exploded.
—And why would I be the one to have killed them? Kronauer asked defensively.
—Kill is a big word, Solovyei acknowledged. But you spent a night shooting at them with a war weapon. They weren’t in good shape when we collected them. Whenever someone tried to get close and calm you, you shot them down. This went on the whole night until you were knocked out.
—I don’t remember any of that, Kronauer said. Are they dead?
—You’re one to ask, soldier, Solovyei said angrily. What do you think you are?
28
• Samiya Schmidt seemed to be drugged or exhausted. She watched the debate inattentively and, when her name was mentioned during So
lovyei’s accusations, when the president of the kolkhoz pronounced it in a peeved voice, she didn’t jump. She had set her hands flat on her legs and she didn’t move, or only when she raised an arm to twist one of her braids.
In one of his expositions and almost incidentally, almost cruelly indicating that it wasn’t the least bit important to him, Solovyei indicated that Samiya Schmidt, after the trial, would be expelled from the reassuring world of Radiant Terminus and would have to walk blindly for one thousand six hundred and eight or two thousand three hundred and two years or more, without help of any kind, a punishment coupled with the impossibility of any rest, whether in the world of the living or that of the dead. The facts motivating such a punishment were chiefly parricidal attacks, incestuous intrigues both oneiric and concrete, the feminist ramblings contrary to ideals of proletarian egalitarianism, conflagrations and destruction of public buildings, refusing collective morality, divulging secrets to the enemy, sabotage.
But then Solovyei pontificated again, cruelly, with Kronauer as the target. Then the interrogation resumed.
—You hurt my daughters, he claimed. There wasn’t a single day you didn’t hurt them or try to do so. In the village you were a lecherous dog. You were obsessed with your cock. You hurt Myriam Umarik, Hannko Vogulian, and Samiya Schmidt.
—I didn’t hurt anyone, Kronauer protested.
Every so often he looked past the judges toward Samiya Schmidt, who didn’t meet his gaze. He blinked to get rid of the droplets pouring down his cheeks from the shower and he scrutinized Samiya Schmidt. He had heard Solovyei’s threats for her and he wondered what would happen to her and whether, during this long and painful path awaiting them both, during those endless centuries, they would be separate or together, or simply crossing paths at random, when one of their watchmen made a mistake. And suddenly he realized that he was thinking of her in the cock’s language and he couldn’t help imagining, certainly furtively, but still, her sad crotch, as paramilitary as her clothes. But still.
Radiant Terminus Page 37
