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• No moon for a thousand years. We get used to it. Yes, that’s what’s best to do, get used to it. No more moonlight, no more romantic walks outside the yurt, no more penal insomnia punctuated by strange nightmares. We don’t look up anymore at the velvety firmament, at the blue gaps underscoring the clouds, at their fanciful flight, at the stars, we don’t get stirred up as we face the gray immensities of the steppes. All that doesn’t exist anymore. Only the deep black darkness and the walk. They call that the amber in their illegible poems. A thousand years in amber, and then nichevo. They or I, doesn’t matter. They proclaim it in a hoarse or despondent voice, and then they rant on incomprehensible topics. Not amber. Not the least light, it’s more black space, an absolute solitude and a black silence that nothing breaks, except sometimes infinitesimal avalanches, infinitesimal squeaks, as if beneath our feet we were crushing something, such as hideous soot or cinders reduced to powder, yes, this might well be black space. Only, the length of the trip doesn’t correspond to what we once had in mind, when we were dead or dying or alive, this sort of state, and when we listened to the monks’ speeches on that subject. Here the length of the trip stretches out unbearably. Forty-nine days pass, then three hundred forty-three, then we have to count in groups of years, then in centuries. Under our feet the ashes make few sounds, except for when we lose consciousness and when we enter nightmares. We rarely lose consciousness, if you must know, we rarely dream, it’s always the walk that keeps you going. Previously, while imprisoned for armed attacks or dissidence, time stretched out similarly, monotonous and exhausting, but at least the prospect of dying at the end of the stay assuaged our anxieties. Deliverance wasn’t an empty promise. Besides, we always had a fellow inmate who was Buddhist and who described what happened next, a forty-nine-daylong transition and, almost immediately, entering a new skin. While here, all prospects have been extinguished, like the light and like the moon. We also get used to the absence of prospects, whether with bitter resignation or natural passivity, we get used to it. A thousand years. It’s more approximation than any verifiable number. We’re counting fairly approximately, of course, we’re no longer counting in days or years, and very quickly we’re just at the nearest century. A thousand years in amber, meandering in the deep black darkness, walking endlessly and rarely dreaming, and then nichevo. Sometimes we end up at an unforeseen fork, we’re pummeled by Solovyei or unknown zeks or henchmen and Solovyei’s daughters. Sometimes we come out into the open air, into a concentration paradise or a convoy of dying people, but that doesn’t last forever, almost immediately the black comes back, and for the next two hundred and three years we no longer hear talk of anything, we no longer hear any voice nearby and we have to curl up mentally so as not to scream in fear. We also get used to these episodes, and, ultimately, we consider them purely delirious or oneiric surges. In all cases, the moon is absent. Sometimes we also come to a cul-desac, we bang on walls on all sides that, for lack of imagination or out of exhaustion, we claim are made of bricks like those of ovens, we imagine that we have gone into an oven as the walls are burning. We turn around and grope around, trying to recognize the space, which is full of silent vibrations and heat. Suddenly there’s no longer any way out. Everywhere are bars that have reached the maximum temperature of matter, there are hermetic walls that are painful to approach, and we are submerged in the waves of a black inferno, within the devouring and oily black flames. Then we scream in fear, we moan or we crow poems, unlikely biographies, torn bits of lives or memories. Then, when we have gotten used to our umpteenth prison, we act as if nothing existed, we make the best of a bad situation, we do our best not to be dead or alive and, after another few centuries, we fall silent.
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• Having written in her clumsy handwriting “we make the best of a bad situation, we do our best not to be dead or alive and, after another few centuries, we fall silent,” Hannko Vogulian added a correction in the margin: “our best not to be dead or alive, even as daughters, wives, or widows.” Then she shut her notebook and set it on a shelf and, at the same moment, she had the physical, violent feeling that someone was watching her.
—Don’t tell me you’re back, she grumbled like an animal, tensing up to avoid or endure an attack.
She turned. She moved like a wolf.
Aside from the yellow cone of light traced by the lamp, the house was sunk in a comfortable darkness. The well’s cover was ajar, the corium buried farther down gave off a pleasant warmth, gentle radiation nullified by the walls and the low temperatures outside. All around, a ranger’s furniture, pelts, utensils for the bathroom and for the kitchen, a sink in which the water from the well was cooling down. And on the planks that served as shelves, blank notebooks, already-filled notebooks. And two rifles hanging next to a bear skin.
She didn’t notice anything unusual.
Her certainty that she was being watched only increased.
Long ago, back when Solovyei went into her world and into parallel worlds as he liked, and when he went into everybody’s dreams, this horrible sensation most often preceded one of her father’s intrusions. This was an alarm, an alarm that warned her of a danger she couldn’t do anything against. Deep inside, physically and mentally, her dread intensified. This lasted, redoubled, for half a day, half a night. Then Solovyei entered her and walked inside her without any consideration, inside her dreams, inside her private memories, like it was conquered territory, sometimes indeed considering her a companion worthy of attention, even tenderness, but most often paying no attention to her happinesses and unhappinesses, coming and going erratically, building refuges she had no access to within her, soliloquizing opaque poems. Then everything ended, but she woke back up devastated, humiliated, and horribly sad.
And this horrible impression had just arisen again in her, without warning, and with a force intensified by its unexpectedness.
• She went to reinforce the lock on the door with an iron bar, then she took down a rifle and turned off the lamp.
Behind the windows, the snow gleamed weakly.
—Maybe it’s not Solovyei coming, she whispered. Maybe it’s just a prowler who saw the house and wants to hurt me.
Now she went from one small window to the other to examine the landscape. She sniffed the odors the wind carried, the grease and hints of grease, but she couldn’t discern any particular presence. She tried not to expose herself to bullets from a potential shooter. With her dark agate eye, she tried to make out the miniscule changes in temperature where the first arboreal barriers stood, it swept across the heaps of snow and the underbrush between the trunks, with her dark agate eye she looked for traces of life. She resorted to her yellow tiger eye to analyze the cracks in the nothingness and the night, in order to focus on something dead. She couldn’t distinguish anything at all. The clearing was illuminated by the residual light imprisoned in the snowdrift, and all the rest was darkness. Stars and moon belonged to another universe.
Then, very distinctly, she saw a shape on its knees in a sniper’s position, hidden behind a bush at the foot of a larch. The form had taken aim at her. A tenth of a second later, she saw the spark of the cartridge that had just been hit; then another tenth of a second passed, and, right by her head—which she’d barely had foretime and forethought enough to move—the glass exploded.
She immediately crouched down.
Moving like a crab, treading on the shards of glass that had flown far along the izba’s floors, she got into a shooting position that she knew was undetectable from the outside, a murderer perched between logs. She had regained the calm she’d lost after having put her notebook away. Now, as the confrontation neared, she was much more self-assured. Hannko Vogulian was a warrior. She would set her rifle barrel in the small groove dug into the wall. She was sure she could easily aim from there, in complete safety, and fire a fatal shot. After centuries and before the species had deteriorated, she had cocked her gun from this invisible slit at wolves, reindeer, bears
, and various vagrants.
She was in position. Her opponent had just moved and, deep in the night, she recognized beyond a doubt the sly and sullen figure of Samiya Schmidt. The girl had grown old, time and weather had articulated her features, but she continued to wear the silly teenage braids that framed her face. Hannko Vogulian saw all the years spent in Radiant Terminus flash before her eyes, and she remembered how Samiya Schmidt had always managed to get out of communal tasks. Between bouts, she consistently found a way to do nothing, or to claim that organizing and maintaining the library in the People’s House was exhausting enough. Hannko Vogulian had always hated her and, contrary to Myriam Umarik, for whom she had sometimes had a deep affection, she barely considered Samiya Schmidt a sister.
She aimed carefully. Even though she was hidden behind branches and a thick haze of darkness, Samiya Schmidt didn’t stand a chance. For no clear reason, Hannko Vogulian decided to wait a bit before pulling the trigger. The other one wasn’t in any more a rush to fire her shot.
• For several long minutes, the two women watched each other silently, unmoving, in the shadows. And suddenly Samiya Schmidt’s sharp voice tore the night:
—Hannko Vogulian! she yelled. Queen of the whores! You slept with Solovyei! Every night you slept with your father!
What is this idiocy, Hannko Vogulian thought. What does she want, this little shithead? She’s the one who’s been letting Solovyei into her bed while that idiot Morgovian was shaking with fear!
—You liked it when he hurt you, Samiya Schmidt continued.
Her voice screeched so loudly that it seemed like a gigantic bird was bellowing.
She isn’t human at all anymore, Hannko Vogulian thought. She’s never really been, but now she really isn’t anymore. Who knows if she’s already grown wings on her back!
—You schemed with Solovyei to make Aldolay Schulhoff disappear! Samiya Schmidt declared.
Hannko Vogulian had her line of sight right above Samiya Schmidt’s collarbone. She tilted the rifle barrel down imperceptibly and fired.
The commotion in the thicket was frightening. Samiya Schmidt had instantaneously turned into an ear-splitting, furious monstrosity. Her soldier’s clothes had transformed into thousands of whistling strips and plumes flying in every direction and filling an immense space, and didn’t quite correspond to anything living or dead. It was seamless, it went off in the undergrowth, and, at the same time, it stayed in the same place, like a sort of whirlwind of droplets and heavy, black crumbs. Hannko Vogulian fired a second bullet.
—Go back where you came from, shithead, she whispered. Go back to Solovyei’s cowpats. You never should have left.
• Much later, everything had calmed down. There was no longer a single fragment of glass on the ground. The shattered window was intact again. Hannko got back up. She set her rifle on the log wall, lit the lamp, went to find the notebook she’d been using for her diary.
She was tired, but she sat at the table, leaned over the paper, and wrote:
Saturday, December 9. Dreamed about my little sister Samiya Schmidt. Almost unchanged. Like herself, still had her little braids, looking like a reeducated Chinawoman. Didn’t have time to talk to her much. Nostalgic for the time when we were all together at the kolkhoz. Centuries have gone by. Seven or eight, maybe more. Nobody left to remember Radiant Terminus or the Second Soviet Union. Nostalgic for all that.
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• Having left the last watchtowers behind, Kronauer and Samiya Schmidt disappeared into the forest. They were about a hundred meters apart and sometimes a little more, but they were careful not to lose sight of each other for too long. When Samiya Schmidt lagged too far behind, Kronauer slowed down. They both walked with some effort. After the first kilometer the underbrush thinned out. They had to cross scrubby spots, or shuffle through beds of small prickly bushes, which had grown heavy over the summer with berries but now were reduced to dead, spiky branches. They also often had to avoid spots where their feet would slowly be sucked in by mud. They were afraid to wander into marshy traps that they might not escape. Sometimes, beneath the humus, muddy water or black oil or a disagreeable mix of the two gurgled. The oil came from overgrown former cities or former military bases. The taiga had ultimately prevailed over these ruins, after only a few centuries, but industrial pollution was still omnipresent, no matter how ghostly, and by all indications it would take several millennia to disappear. Samiya Schmidt and Kronauer went more and more slowly, and at the end of the day, when the shadows had grown thick, the distance between the two of them diminished and they finally found themselves side by side, out of breath and trembling.
They hadn’t exchanged a single word.
Since they had left the camp. They still hadn’t spoken to each other.
• Samiya Schmidt went and leaned against a trunk. Kronauer followed suit. For a little warmth, they hugged each other, and once they were sitting at the foot of the tree they stayed shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Their legs were pulled close to their chests, their hands were in their pockets. Now the darkness was complete.
The forest rustled, ferns scraped, barks crackled, practically nothing. There weren’t any animals nearby. The temperature dropped a little more, then it leveled off just above freezing.
Kronauer inhaled the scents from the earth and the trees. Bears had come by several days earlier, evidently to gorge on berries before hibernating. The strong odor of their urine had soaked the mosses, the dead needles. What are you talking about, Kronauer, he thought. What do you know about bears. Who knows if they’ve actually disappeared all this time. You don’t know anything about them. You only know about camps and black oil.
You’re just thinking up bullshit, he thought.
And suddenly he jolted. What about Solovyei? That was a horrible man, he promised you an eternity of suffering. What if you’re still one of Solovyei’s puppets, neither alive nor dead, within one of Solovyei’s dreams?
An unbearable thought. He pushed it away as he wrinkled his nose, he smelled once again what wafted around him. Aside from the traces the bears had left, he could smell Samiya Schmidt’s odors rising to his nose, everything that her body and the rags of her quilted clothes exuded, eight hundred and twelve years and some of painful memories, the filth of the prisons, the sludge of nights spent in makeshift shelters along the railroad tracks, or otherwise beneath the larches. Like Kronauer, she hadn’t taken a bath for one or two generations, and perhaps even more. She smells just like I do, he thought.
Radiant Terminus Page 39
