Radiant Terminus

by Antoine Volodine

  • She took her time writing, and, as she didn’t have anything concrete on which to engrave her flights of fancy, she pronounced her text in a firm voice, enunciating her syllables, and she accompanied her diction with knocks on the wood to indicate the breaks and changes in paragraphs or atmosphere. When she had finished a narract or a chapter, she stopped for a minute, then she started again from the beginning, singing in order to inscribe it indelibly in her memory.

  • Her works were in principle distinct and she gave them titles after finishing them, but, although they had their particularities and didn’t reuse the same characters, they could have also been grouped in a single undifferentiated volume. In effect, they depicted the same twilit suffering of everyone, a magical but hopeless ordinariness, organic and political deterioration, infinite yet unwished-for resistance to death, perennial uncertainty about reality, or a penal progression of thought, penal, wounded, and insane. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that Hannko Vogulian’s obsessions as an author reinforced the similarities of her novelistic plots which had been so different initially.

  • Of post-exoticism, which she knew little about, Hannko Vogulian had mainly remembered their formalist constraints, and that’s why she persisted in dividing her books into forty-nine chapters or even three hundred forty-three parts, and, every so often, she tallied up what she had produced, with the idea that it might be good to number her works in order to arrive, after several centuries, at a harmonious whole, a multiple of seven or made up of identical numbers, like one hundred and eleven or one thousand one hundred and eleven.

  • Certainly difficult to establish calendars after everyone’s death, after the death of our best male and female comrades. But let’s say that, several thousand seasons after the fall of the Orbise and the end of the Second Soviet Union, the shack Hannko Vogulian had taken refuge in had deteriorated visibly. The logs that made up the walls had rotted, they suddenly broke apart very quickly, the walls and the floor disintegrated, and, in almost no time, the house became uninhabitable. At the center of the ruins, the well persisted for two or three years, then sank into the ground and disappeared. Everything crumbled, turned into humus and magma of humid sawdust. The notebooks Hannko Vogulian had filled didn’t last, except for the yellowish agglomerations that the stump mushrooms had shown a predilection for. At that moment, when she no longer had any writing material and was forced to abandon her shelter, Hannko Vogulian threw herself fully into novelistic creation.

  • She banged on the remains of her house or on a larch trunk, she spoke prose out loud like she was insane and she repeated what she had just composed by singing and giving her text a new rhythm with her blows. It was easier to understand why her characters occasionally felt attracted to the idea of epic declamations and songs, and why they then hoped for musical accompaniment, or at least a tenor bell or percussions in the background, whether they were improvised or not.

  • When she reflected on a story, she examined the world thoroughly with her black eye the color of deep black onyx, the color of a crow’s wing, the color of ebonite, the color of black agate, the color of black tourmaline, the color of obsidian, the color of naphthalene death. Then she looked at her novel with her golden eye, the color of tiger’s eye, the color of sulfur crystals, the color of yellow amber, the color of coppery lightning. Then she closed her eyes. Then she began to expel air and words and she began to write.

  • Although over the centuries Hannko Vogulian had become both an experienced writer and the last living being to have any poetic activity or something of the sort, she wasn’t aware of her stylistic mistakes or her poor narrative decisions, she never engaged in a critical evaluation of her work and she never went back over a text once it had been sung and memorized. There was no doubt that if someone had stood in front of her to recite a lesson on the principles of the novelistic tradition, and scolded her for not having respected them, she would have welcomed these principles coldly, and certainly, after having taken aim at him or her, she would have pulled the trigger of the last rifle she had been able to save from corrosion, a China-made SKS, perhaps specifically the model otherwise called Type 56 by the Chinese, or maybe not: a most loyal friend.

  • Hannko Vogulian’s novels are numerous today and in an excellent state of conservation within Hannko Vogulian’s memory, but consulting them requires entering Hannko Vogulian, and that, this abominable breaking and entering, she has not allowed anyone for a long time now.

  • She hasn’t been able to avoid authorial mannerisms. She or I, doesn’t matter. She hasn’t been able to avoid coming back, if not regularly, at least with some consistency, to fundamental scenes and situations, to images in which she finds again the heroes and heroines she had lost, often our best comrades male and female alike, images of wandering in black space or in the fire, images of weary conversations at the feet of trees or at the edge of stretches of water or tar, images of eternal lovers never to be reunited, images of waiting in front of the abyss, images of massive steppes and massive skies.

  • We were alone with her and none of us ever regretted it, just as none of us men or women ever questioned her attachment to the Orbise and the Second Soviet Union, whatever her position had been vis-à-vis the camps—inside or outside.

  • Hannko Vogulian’s novels and romånces include pages that could be called normal and others that seem hallucinatory, and, among those, some depict the death of Hannko and her sisters. All were born from unknown mothers and the idea of sisterhood existed in a greater sense, perhaps because most of these feminine figures, whether satisfied or unfortunate, had, over the course of the book, relationships of supernatural violence or companionship with a masculine father-figure or husband who was sometimes a magician come from the Bardo, sometimes a bird, sometimes a prince of thieves, sometimes a tyrannical shaman. The sisters find each other again after adventures that had separated them for their entire existence and they die together, or they prepare to die together. Out of this premise comes an oneiric image that clearly belongs to the novel’s last breaths. The image is frequently filled with a violent anguish, but despite being terminal it’s not always cataclysmic, and, on the contrary, it consists chiefly of shadows and waiting. The sky darkens, it transforms into monstrous organic matter that Hannko Vogulian rarely attempts to describe. This collective death, beneath an inconceivable sky, is also one of Hannko Vogulian’s authorial mannerisms.

  • Sometimes, like many of us elsewhere, our best male and female comrades, she confused empty space with empty hope.

  48

  • Myriam Umarik is the first to reach the clearing. She goes past the thickets that are extensions of the forest and she breathes. It has been a long time since she’s put her lungs to work, several years, perhaps. The fresh air whistles along her lungs and it’s so unexpected that she feels like she hears rasping and shrillness, but in reality age has made her completely deaf, whether the sounds come from inside or outside her body. Things are usually hazy for her, she goes through silence as if along the bottom of a body of thick water. In any case, whistling or not, this sudden influx of oxygen perks her up. Her blood begins to circulate again, something wakes up in her head, whereas, up until that time, she had kept going numbly and unthinkingly. And then an image comes to the fore.

  It’s a memory of the Levanidovo. It’s like the smudges of irradiated oil that rise from the buried cities, it appears out of nowhere, after an underground progression that lasted centuries. It’s a memory that belongs to another existence and, like the puddles of black oil in the underbrush, Myriam Umarik skirts it, but, for a minute, she looks at it.

  She sees herself walking on the main road of the kolkhoz, smiling, her flesh radiant, upon meeting the soldier Kronauer, a man who, after seeming to be a red hero, had quickly turned out to be insane and criminal. She goes toward this man, who at the moment is busy loosening lug nuts in a fire hydrant. The pipes leak, the water forms a lake of muddy water in front of her house. Everything sparkles
. The kolkhoz’s houses, the bits of frost on the water’s edge, Myriam Umarik’s eyes, her red-copper Kazakh earrings, the gold embroidery on her blouse, her belt. She knows that she is very feminine, sumptuous. She draws near to joke with the soldier Kronauer and instead of laughing with her he shows his bleeding hand, he claims to have been pricked by a needle in the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse, he accuses the president of the kolkhoz of having cast spells on him.

  Then the image wavers. Then it goes dark.

  • Now Myriam Umarik tramples unknown grasses growing in the clearing, amid the roots of red cranberries, Siberian redcurrants, and blueberries. She breaks branches, but, because she is deaf, she doesn’t notice and she doesn’t care.

  The light is very low, as if night was about to fall, but it’s lighter than beneath the trees.

  The clearing stretches a long way off, its radius several hundred meters. The ground is lumpy, with moss-covered ridges that might well be the last remnants of a city, a camp, or a village. Here and there are stretches of black oil. They’re the same color as the sky.

  • Careful not to be too conspicuous, my dear, an inner voice advises.

  She crouches down on the ground.

  In the chest pack she’s lying on, she takes out two cartridges, the last ones. The first immediately crumbles between her fingers, giving off a smell of mold rather than powder. The second shows fewer signs of deterioration. She inserts it into the barrel of the rifle that has accompanied her faithfully, although it’s been a long time since she’s had the opportunity to make use of it.

  Around her she smells the trembling twigs, the grasses, the powerful scents of the taiga, intensely vegetal now that the mammals and most of the birds have disappeared. She suspects that she will not get back up. She is lying down, the landscape is deserted, she hasn’t noticed anything special, but an inner voice has advised her to lie as low as possible. Something terminal will happen. That doesn’t bother her too much. But she breathes forcefully, as if it was a matter of bringing together several last lights before total darkness.

  One of the bandages surrounding her head is hanging off a prickly branch of white Tatar. The cloth, as mummified as her own flesh, tears. She directs some vague mumbles to her clothes, to her body, to her rifle, to the increasingly black sky. Her head is wrapped in dirty rags and scarves, against the cold, but also because, out of sheer vanity, she wanted to give some volume to what rises up between her shoulders and has shrunk uglily over the centuries, hardly deserving the name of skull.

  She speaks in a language she invented in solitude and which resembles half-animalistic babbling. She doesn’t hear or listen to herself, but she knows what she’s speaking. Reproaches and basic calls. She also talks a little to her scarves, the icy earth, the roots, and the faintly hostile krijovnik stalks. Then she seals her lips and is completely immobile.

  • The rifle she carries is a Schultz 73, a weapon made in the Second Soviet Union’s armories. For several quarter-centuries she’s greased it carefully, without any trouble because black oil abounds in the forest. She found it in an abandoned camp outpost, on the corpse of a watchman who had used it to commit suicide. The outpost was actually the top of a watchtower that hadn’t yet sunk completely into the earth. She requisitioned ammunition that hadn’t suffered too much from dampness, but, over the years, she used them up, and now she only has one bullet left.

  • Samiya Schmidt is the second sister to appear. Like her father Solovyei in the old days, when he walked magically through dark space, she is indescribable. She finds a place at the edge of the forest, she shakes trunks and branches when she whistles. Over several dozen meters the space is disrupted by her presence, the bushes seem to be crushed, the grasses bend, the air grows heavy with opaque comings and goings. She can make out something, but it’s not clear what exactly. Sometimes it seems like a broken and gigantic bird. Or a young Chinese red guard. Also sometimes, and now growing, is a feeling of atavistic fear, of all-consuming fear in the face of the unknown, in the face of a magical presence that is there but cannot even be conceived of, and which is impossible to know how to confront or appease, should it ever run riot.

  • Samiya Schmidt sees Myriam Umarik’s outstretched form at the other end of the clearing, she notices her rifle half hidden by the grasses, and instead of remembering their shared childhood and adolescence in the Levanidovo, or scenes from their calm life in the kolkhoz, she remembers a dream image, a moment so distant that it belongs to the dusty remains of the previous millennium.

  She remembers Kronauer’s humiliated face, naked under the shower in a strange communal shower room, Kronauer uselessly hiding his crotch from the eyes of the judges and the eyes of the kolkhozniks that he had shot dead, and who have been piled in front of him to make him ashamed. Kronauer is constantly drenched in hot water, he denies, he is powerless when confronted with the fate he does not understand, every so often he looks up at her, Samiya Schmidt, or he looks down at the corpses of her sisters and yet other victims. He tries to answer the Gramma Udgul and Solovyei’s questions. He stammers nonsense. He doesn’t have his wits, he doesn’t have his aptness, he’s a lower-ranking soldier, incapable of anything other than shooting his superiors, deserting, and, once he’s settled into a welcoming village after his death, massacring the villagers on a useless pretext. She had formerly felt some sexual stirrings during this investigation when he was naked, wet, and ridiculous. She no longer remembers whether what she felt had been rooted in ancestral animality or in the hormones she’d still had at the time. Or whether the emotion was due to the hate she felt for Solovyei, the kolkhoz president who had led the investigation and associated her hideously with Kronauer, as if they had been a pair of murderous fornicators. In his indictment, Solovyei had maliciously and brutally linked her to this obscene and streaming man, to this male she barely knew at the time and who, much later, she had briefly met in the taiga, without feeling any particular attraction or sympathy for him.

  She could bring back images where she rubbed shoulders with her sister Myriam Umarik, or even other images of Kronauer, with whom she had still wandered in the Bardo of the forest for one or two centuries, but she only clearly remembers this memory which is a nightmare, Kronauer’s interrogation under the shower, in the presence of the kolkhoz’s corpses. She ponders it unhappily. She stands just in front of the curtain of trees, she leans her indescribable body against their trunks, she mixes her body with the first branches, the berry bushes, the blueberries, the violet kryjovniks, the thin layer of damp earth, the sunlight’s reflections on the puddles of black oil, and she is immobile.

  She is immobile, she is thinking, and she is waiting.

  • The sky moves over the taiga, the sky keeps darkening, it fills with strange clouds, stranger still than the absence of day and the absence of night.

  The sky moves, from the northeast comes a black stain, a crow, then a group, then a substantial flock, several dozen birds, then the number grows, grows, multiplies incessantly, hundreds, thousands, then the quantity of birds goes beyond numbers. Their flights are superimposed, their wings touch, mix, their dark chests press on their dark backs, their feathers rub against their feathers. Outside these screeches, silence reigns. No crowing, no cawing. Although their wings beat in harmony, they look like dead birds, rooks of all sizes, extremely black crows, these various corvines, all dead. The layers are superimposed, mix, soon the thickness of the black is inconceivable, three hundred thirteen meters, five hundred forty-two meters of compacted height. The sky closes off little by little from the northeast. The sky is nothing but a vast sea of crows unfurling from the northeast to extinguish all light. Already the taiga is plunged into darkness. Already only the residual glints allow the clearing to be seen.

  • Then a preliminary bird detaches from the mass that now fills the entire heavenly vault. It hovers aimlessly for a minute, then it flies gently toward the ground. It turns around, it slowly takes the path that separates it from the earth. It descends fl
uffily upon the peak of a pine where it rests, curled up. It’s the first one. Others will follow.

  • At the same moment, Hannko Vogulian comes into the clearing from the southeast. She is exhausted by the walk and by the decades of unbroken fasting. She comes out from the cover of the trees and she wavers. It has been several years since her movements have had any steadiness. Deep in the taiga she can only move in zigzags, from one larch to the next, with long breaks with her back against the bark to regain her breath before the next step.

  She leaves the final tree on her left and she collapses in the grasses, first because she has nothing to lean against nearby, but mainly because she immediately notices something hostile hiding in the landscape. The clearing is five or six hundred meters long, dotted with low bushes and, beneath the inky sky, it is very dark. Nothing unusual, in short. And yet Hannko Vogulian is certain that the calm in this gap is only external. She lowers her head, then she lies down so as not to be noticeable. After several minutes, with minimum movement, she pulls out the weapon she has carried on her shoulder ever since leaving the ruins of her hut, long ago, and which she counts on to survive and keep on surviving forever.