Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  • After several hours of night, a reedy, tinkling sound rose. Drops fell in the distance on a surface already filled with water.

  —You hear that? Samiya Schmidt asked.

  Kronauer nodded indistinctly. It was the first time Samiya Schmidt had broken her silence. And yes, he heard it.

  —So here we are, Samiya Schmidt said. When we first saw each other, it was in the forest by a spring.

  She was whispering. After this total absence of communication, two or three sentences that had come in quick succession seemed like logorrhea.

  —That was a long time ago, Kronauer broke in. You were dying.

  He, too, was talking with strange fluency, as if he was alive or at least had died fairly recently.

  —I carried you on my back, he continued.

  —Yes, I remember, she said. Thank you.

  They listened to the distant noise of the spring for several minutes. Kronauer was surprised not to have noticed it earlier. Maybe the water’s influx was weak and intermittent.

  —You’re barely doing much better today, Kronauer said.

  —That’s because I’ve been hit in all the worst spots, Samiya Schmidt said.

  Then she pushed her hair back and opened her clothes to show a hole at the base of her throat and another just north-west of her right breast.

  —But who shot you there? Kronauer asked.

  —Hannko Vogulian, that whore, Samiya Schmidt whispered.

  She let Kronauer digest that information. She herself needed some silence. She remembered the confrontation, or tried to.

  —She has her father’s magical eyes, she finally said.

  The disgust in her voice was evident.

  —That’s all right, Kronauer said consolingly.

  He distinctly remembered Hannko Vogulian’s strange gaze, that admirable and strange gaze that he had eventually come to appreciate, back in the time of the kolkhoz, in the time of the Levanidovo, centuries ago.

  —She hits the spots she wants down to the millimeter, even in the darkness. She’s a bitch. A perfect copy of her father. He lives in her.

  —Oh, really, Kronauer said to keep the conversation going.

  —He visits her. When he’s in her, there’s no difference between him and her.

  With that, Samiya Schmidt’s secrets ended. Long minutes went by, then half the night. Neither of them nodded off.

  For no particular reason, Kronauer thought it was a good idea, at the darkest, coldest, dreariest point, to continue their conversation.

  —And you? he asked awkwardly.

  —What, me? Samiya Schmidt immediately replied.

  She got up abruptly. Although she had seemed despondent and unable to move at all, Kronauer heard her move away from him, walk through the trees, hit the trunks and bushes, whisper and yelp. She ran and leaped at a manic speed. She had discovered the spring and, every so often, she slapped the calm puddle nearby. She moved around until dawn, then she came back to sit by Kronauer and, in the next days, she didn’t speak a word to him.

  35

  • Going aimlessly through the taiga was a perpetual ordeal for Kronauer. He didn’t necessarily show it, but fear twisted his stomach far more often than hunger did. Getting lost didn’t mean anything, now he was always wandering and lost, but, such as when he had been dozing for a minute and regained consciousness, the first feeling he had upon waking was interconnected with a primitive fear of the forest. For hours afterward he would remember this painful awakening, the nauseated feeling of having to confront once again silence and noise, shadows, the smells of plants that were rotting or doomed to do so, the odors beasts had left behind, the lack of sky, solitude, the gaps quickly closed, the confusion between the path already followed and the one he would have to keep following incessantly.

  • Of the four seasons, only fall was agreeable. The ground hardened, which made walking easier, the wild grasses and summer scrub diminished, fell back to the ground, the flying insects became rarer and rarer. There was less suffering than in winter, when surviving in the snow meant behaving like a Paleolithic man, or in the spring, when he had to deal with the mud, the racket of the birds, and the annoyance of carnivores intent on getting fat again. The summer months were nice, but they were short and squandered by the nightmarish presence of the last fleas, midges, and mosquitoes.

  • There were years when Samiya Schmidt disappeared completely. One morning, she wasn’t there anymore, for example, without any clear explanation, and her absence might last a month, but also three or four years, or even fifty-six or more. This defection was fine by Kronauer. He was used to her, but he couldn’t help thinking of her as one of Solovyei’s creatures, and therefore as someone who played a role in the thousand-year-long punishment Solovyei was meting out. His relations with Samiya Schmidt were somewhat fraternal and underscored, on her end and despite a long coexistence that ought to have allayed all tensions, an irrational distrust, bouts of sulkiness, angry gestures. They barely talked, each one shut up in his or her own lonely meditation, sometimes going for several weeks without exchanging a word. They didn’t touch each other, even though physical contact wasn’t a problem. They could grab each other without any revulsion in emergencies, when one of them was in a bad situation, a leg stuck in a pool of asphalt, or fainting in exhaustion by an anthill. When she had used up her last strength, he carried her on his back to a shelter and, when they were really too cold, they hugged each other. But, for the most part, they behaved as if they were two people who had no reason to feel each other, to caress each other, to palpate each other, or even to hold each other’s hands and stroke each other. The only thing they did together in any way was walk among the trees from dawn to dusk, from autumn to autumn, one decade after another.

  Also, during the periods when Samiya Schmidt no longer accompanied him, Kronauer didn’t feel any sensation of emptiness. His daily routine wasn’t affected and he didn’t feel any nostalgia for their silent, halting, useless partnership. After a variable amount of time, often an immoderate amount, Samiya Schmidt would eventually reappear at the foot of a tree, and they would resume, without any particular explanation, without her being willing to talk about her absence, their communal progress.

  To summarize: the years without Samiya Schmidt neither unnerved nor unsettled Kronauer.

  • When he was all alone in the taiga, Kronauer sometimes stopped, lit a fire of branches, and launched into a monologue both internal and expressed in halting, completely spoken, or moaned words. He spoke of the Second Soviet Union, the Orbise, and his comrades who had died in battle, killed by enemies or radiation from the lands or the poisoned villages. He recited several extracts from Marxist-Leninist education manuals that he still remembered, then, when night fell, he spoke to the one love of his life, Irina Echenguyen, and he told her of his pain when he had pain, his small adventures in the heart of the forest, his dreams when he had dreamed, and, if he had the time before sleepiness overcame him, he tried to put a number to the temporal enormities that now separated him from Irina Echenguyen. Eight hundred and thirty years, he grumbled, as a horrible headache blinded him. Nine hundred and forty years and five months. One thousand nine hundred seventy-seven years or so.

  • I am nothing anymore and I miss you.

  • In a labyrinth of the taiga I walk in the company of a girl, Samiya Schmidt. I miss you. For the last two hundred years I’ve been thinking about you more often than before. Samiya Schmidt is unpredictable, she has her father’s criminal violence inside herself, she is still haunted by her father even though he hasn’t appeared for half a millennium. She’s inherited bad dreams of her father. Often she loses all control over herself. She breaks those ties that connected her to a human form. She once resembled a soldier from the cultural revolution, and, when I found her upon leaving the camp, and even if she had grown much older, she still looked a bit odd, but now, during her crises, she doesn’t look like anything. She sprawls out, she expands, she inflates, and in a few seconds, wh
ere there was an exhausted or nervous girl is now just a moving mass, an indescribable mass made of black feathers, blackish whirlwinds, and harsh whistling. The trees shake, the darkness pulses, time’s passage increases violently or slows down. It’s a horrible scene. It’s impossible to watch without being deeply unsettled. I can’t help but feel petrified, feel like I’m inside a strange image, lost in a hostile mental territory, like I’ve fallen into the atrocious fears of childhood, been watched by unknown adults, or become dough to be shaped in the hands of a malevolent magician. Samiya Schmidt stretches out, she no longer has any limits, over hundreds of meters she screams and lets her anger, her rage flow, she shakes the trees, night and forest shriek deafeningly over hundreds of meters, the shrieks are interspersed with sobbing or solemn lines and curses. I try to take refuge in memories, I curl up at the foot of a shaking larch, on the snow that rises in oppressive spirals. The darkness thickens, the sky crows, there is the crackling of flames, but no fire anywhere. I take refuge in the distant past, in the traces that remain of our life together and our love. I miss you.

  • The dog-headed enemies. After your murder in the clinic, I killed a few. Seven, maybe eight. In ambushes, of course, with the help of our best comrades. We identified them, we fixed our eyes on them. One after another, over fifteen days, we killed them. I won’t tell you how, once or twice, it was very dirty. The eighth, we didn’t have time to make sure, we had to pull back, others were coming. The guys we killed had dog heads, but, underneath, there was no physical difference between them and us. We had so much difficulty understanding, but they could have believed the enemy’s sordid theories to the point of taking up arms against the Orbise and becoming a group of monsters with sadistic, monstrous practices. In any case, they massacred and raped. I don’t know if the ones we killed were the ones who attacked the hospital. We didn’t interrogate them. We killed them without wasting any time talking. Even among us we didn’t say anything. We killed them and we separated. I forgot the names of our best comrades. For a long time, they persisted in a corner of my memory, but I had been instructed never to reveal the list to anyone. Over the years I did everything so that they wouldn’t come back. We’ve acted as on our own and we agreed that our actions would stay secret forever. The civil war flared, the abuses and reprisals followed one another, the Orbise broke apart, but, as for this precise sequence of executions, our lips were sealed. Out of friendship and out of respect, in your memory, I don’t know. It wasn’t a heroic feat. We were silent as the grave. And now that I try to retrieve these names, they don’t come. I’d like to speak them in your direction, so that you know which men were thinking of you when they killed these dog-headed brutes, so that you speak to them affectionately if you meet them, but their names have vanished. I’ll make up a few here. Dobronia Izaayel, Rouda Bielougone, Yair Kroms, Solaf Onéguine, Anastasia Vivaldian. They’re beautiful names, but they’re not the right ones.

  • When I came to the clinic, nothing in the wing they destroyed had been washed or cleaned, nothing had been put back in place, but the bodies had been taken away. The guards let me go into the main room where the butchery had happened. The IV bags had been thrown on the ground, some still hung from the stands that hadn’t been knocked over. The serums had mixed with pools of blood. The militiamen responsible for carrying the bodies had tried not to set their feet on the spilled liquids, but they hadn’t been successful and there were so many footprints and dirty streaks that it was impossible to go into the room. I didn’t walk on the dirty tiles. I took four or five steps and I stopped. The room smelled like sickness, pharmaceutical products, and bestial rotting. There were few bullet holes in the wall. The dog-headed men had attacked their victims without finishing them off with their pistols. I didn’t have any desire to visualize the horrifying details, the way it played out. I stayed there unwillingly and powerlessly. On a nightstand next to the bed where you usually were when you hadn’t been brought into the treatment room, I saw a book that a visitor had recently offered you, a book you had told me you didn’t enjoy, but which you told me you still hoped to finish reading before dying, a romånce by Maria Kwoll that denounced once again the savage nature, the grotesquely hideous nature of all sexuality. I don’t know if you had the time to finish this romånce before being martyred. I myself decided never to read it before my death, and then, when I was in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, I looked for it in the library, but Samiya Schmidt didn’t have it. I stayed there for a minute without moving. I stayed for two, maybe three minutes, but not more. My mind was empty. I hadn’t made any promise. I thought of you without seeing you. I barely looked at the crime scene. My eyes were riveted to the cover of this book. For hundreds of years I have been trying to remember its title, but I’ve forgotten it.

  36

  • Curtains of blood, curtains of flames, absolute darkness, absolute oblivion, absolute knowledge, no more place or time, and you pull back the threads that extend your fingers, you pull back the feathers that extend your wings, you pull back the wandering souls, the drum beats in you is not a heart is a drum, is not a drum is the horrible pestle of the world and of hells, nothing exists anymore, absolute absence, and you wring your hands while screaming, you shake your wings while whistling, no more place but you are in the heart of the walls dripping with plutonium, you are in the middle of the trees, you are standing among the clouds, above the steppes, no more place but you are at the center of the kolkhoz ruins and around you is only a silent rumbling of burning death, the drum beats and resounds, the hundred-year-old trees are your henchmen, the drum beats is not a drum is the slow spurt of sap in the arteries and veins of the larches, the drum beats with notes so low they’re inaudible but shaking the earth and grasses, shaking the flames, taking all stability from the flames and upsetting them, is your voice, is not a drum is your voice, your growls when you shake while whistling, your cawing, is not your voice is your magic thoughts in the middle of nowhere, curtains of blood around you you are neither born nor to be born, curtains of flames envelop you you are not dead or to be reborn, you beat your massive wings you are motionless like a dead dog, you whistle horribly, the trees bend wildly and stand back up, nothing dances, nothing dances or moves, no shaking, no waves, you open your wings as if to fly away but you don’t fly, you pull back the crows that have flown in your stead, not a single crow disobeys you, you pull and you clutch the threads that link you to the human marionettes that have survived, neither dead nor living they have survived, sometimes you name them while cawing or crowing, you name them in coded languages that nobody has learned or unlearned, sometimes you call them one after the other for hours on end, but most often you only grant them pathetic anonymity and you throw them nowhere, you force them to wander without your help on pretext of respecting their individuality, wandering without your help in the unknown, or maybe you carve them up, or, if these are your daughters or your wives, you marry them, the drum beat is not a drum is the breeze in the depths, is the backwash in the depths, the drum beats the larches run in all directions then lie down then stand back up, lie down then stand back up, there is neither darkness nor light, is not a drum is your iron will and your fiery rage exerted upon what is absent and what has never existed, is your heartless and insane word violently shaping emptiness and nothingness, you send flying to the heavens feathers and needles as if you were a tempest, but heaven is absent and has never existed, only your mentally crippled and mutistic marionettes, only your senseless marionettes are witnesses to the storms that you create, you pull back the strings connecting you to them, only they are hearers of your word, for the rest there is nobody among the dead and nobody among the living, humanity has been swept away, humanity has dissolved into nothingness, excitedly it has wended down the path of abysses and it hasn’t left salvageable organic crumbs, total forgetting, total absence, total darkness after the curtains of blood and the curtains of flames and after the black oil, and you sway and you rock while making the remnants of eternity, you dance o
n the tips of wings while using actors’ and actresses’ remains for your theater, you are neither here nor elsewhere, you cross the taiga while chirring the remnants of songs and fragments of theater, if you were living you would be an immense black bird, you would fill immense sections of the old forest, you would live hidden in your nest or in a kolkhoz invented for you alone, patiently awaiting crazy beggars or travelers, awaiting for twenty years beneath the trees the arrival of a survivor, one hundred and forty-nine years, eleven centuries awaiting the presence of an exhausted or already-dead survivor, twelve thousand full lunar years, patiently awaiting the resurrection of at least one living or at least one dead, awaiting that in vain, the drum beats an endless death knell, the drum beats it recites total dissolution, the endless flow of the end, if you were dead you would be an endless animal, you would have for yourself alone the forest to the oceans, the forest with all its animals that would obey you, its grouchy, greedy, lusty, and stinking animals, and to relieve your boredom, to leave the forest and this bestial promiscuity you would dig in the nothingness of the tunnels opening onto new universes, but there is no longer place or time, only the drum that does not stop striking and striking, is not your wings that strike the ground is the drum, is not the wing beats of those who survived and obey you, or the footsteps of dancers you animate by pulling back magic and silken ropes, and black feathers that tremble, there is nobody at the end of your strings, when there are male dancers you eliminate them out of jealousy and when there are female dancers you marry them, then you reject them, then you forget them, then you reinvent them with their remains, the drum does not stop striking, absolute and definitive forgetfulness, absolute obscurity, neither hope nor despair, outpouring of forgetfulness and nothingness, and you soar into the middle of nowhere, you do not make a movement in the middle of the flames and the blood, you like the rhythm of the drum, you accompany it while whistling the name of your disaster marionettes, you are at the end of your black theater, even the marionettes are absent, even these miserable marionettes, the drum beats, there are no marionettes, only their misery, only their confusion and their misery.