Radiant Terminus. Antoine Volodine
had lived alone, she didn’t complain about what fate had given her. Like her, Solovyei had changed dramatically, physically and mentally, and he bore the burden of a century’s memories he hadn’t shared with her, but she didn’t consider reproaching him for having become a peculiar person. From the moment she had found him, she had decided to do everything she could to be happy with him, in this kolkhoz with its name already suggestive of subversion. She had found the man she had once loved, she had decided to love him again, and nothing else really mattered. Not even his transformation into a sort of authoritarian, unsavory, insane wizard. Now she didn’t care about the incongruities of everyday life in the village, which simply underscored its difference from proletarian normalcy. She knew that, no matter the point of view, she herself no longer belonged to the normal realm of the Orbise either. That, by resisting the gamma rays, she had long since joined the realm of monsters. It made perfect sense, then, that she would settle down in the Levanidovo, and that she would end up with one of its unlikely inhabitants, with the president of Radiant Terminus. With another monster.
• From then on people went to the kolkhoz hangar if they were willing to meet the Gramma Udgul. She had made it her home and she rarely left. She had her own private corner, closed off by a heavy decontamination tarp that the tractor driver Morgovian had stripped of its lead to give it a bit of flexibility. She went back there to wash up, or when she felt various pressing needs that called for solitude, such as preparing for her discourse to the core, reading Leninist classics, or defecating. The rest of the time, she preferred to stay in the middle of the bric-a-brac that never diminished in size, because the kolkhozniks and several volunteer scrap merchants in the region kept adding to it, obeying her instructions so that the area would be cleared of all wreckage before the second half of the millennium.
To determine which pieces of trash were the most dangerous, she had given up Geiger counters, which went haywire at the slightest thing or else had gone out of commission after the first days of the catastrophe. She sniffed the dust and followed her instincts. She no longer respected decontamination procedures. She handled these heaps, these mountains, she oversaw the opening and closing of the well, she threw objects into the abyss, she talked to the core. She told it about the passions of her past, the doubts that had assailed her fifty years earlier when the Party had advocated new economic or social policies, but she also confided her more immediate worries, Solovyei’s moments of madness, his immoderate love for his daughters, the physical deterioration of the last kolkhozniks, the water leaks that flooded her toilet. Such was the confident and confiding relationship she had with the core.
Aside from managing the atomic detritus, Solovyei had entrusted her to take care of what he called his archives, which were actually several crates of handwritten notebooks containing accounts from the camps, proclamations read in prison, critical studies of the Party and its future, transcriptions of epic songs, black-magic recipes, war stories, and dream stories, to which were added a large number of wax cylinders on which he had recorded impenetrable, extremely strange, disturbing poems.
Everything was piled up in a mess, close to the Gramma Udgul’s favorite armchair, and when she took a break from liquidating, she focused on preserving Solovyei’s memories. Sometimes particular writings had such an obnoxiously counterrevolutionary slant that she yelled out loud, her accent suddenly finicky and Bolshevik, and sometimes she felt carried away by the poetic violence of other sulfurous pages, and then she forgot the lessons she had learned in grade school, the rigid principles that had been instilled in her to make her appreciate or detest this or that narrative or ideological option. She forgot it all and sighed contentedly like a young reader immersed in a love story. Whatever it was, she felt a deep affection for Solovyei’s prose, and she dived into it at any moment, on the pretext of classification when in reality she never bothered to do that properly. She wanted to be completely united with Solovyei at the end of her life, completely complicit, and she wasn’t afraid of reading, rereading, or listening to these creations that seemed immoral and most often bereft of the least glimmer of Marxism-Leninism. At another point in her life, she would have hastened to bury them, these antirevolutionary creations, beneath anodyne paperwork, beneath irradiated volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, beneath literature reviews, veterinary manuals, the complete works of fellow travelers, farm novels. But here, today, she didn’t go to the effort. She knew that she was no longer at risk of any trouble from the authorities, the capital investigators, or the services. As for her own internal audit committee, it made itself heard less and less often.
The engineer Barguzin, who helped the Gramma Udgul as best as he could in sorting and processing the radioactive trash, didn’t have access to the crates containing Solovyei’s archives, despite Solovyei being his father-in-law, as we will come to learn. He fixed anything that broke in the kolkhoz, he carried and piled up the things meant to be fed to the core, but he wasn’t allowed to go through Solovyei’s personal memorabilia, and, when he saw that the Gramma Udgul was busy moving them around stealthily, he went to smoke a cigarette outside the hangar.
• That morning, the Gramma Udgul woke up abruptly and knew immediately that she would be in a bad mood.
She had dreamed of waltzing with a red proletarian on Labor Day, but she didn’t remember what she’d done with him after the dance. To make matters worse, she couldn’t say whether she’d been present at the ball in the form of a young Bolshevik belle or in her present form as an old woman. This forgetfulness bothered her, because in the second case the next part of the dream couldn’t be what it would have been in the first case, and deep down she hoped she’d had a dream adventure with this heroic worker who had held her tenderly in his arms, who had twirled her to the accordion’s sounds until dizziness caught hold of her and forced her to leave the dance floor. She still remembered her dance partner’s laughing face, and, if she shut her eyes for a few seconds, she could happily keep it in her heart, but then it disappeared and was replaced by a conventional Komsomol face that didn’t resemble anything living. After the striking events of her dream had vanished, this bastardization of the man she had loved for a single night really upset her.
She opened her eyes and growled a jumbled curse that tore the Marxist classics a new hole.
Getting up from the armchair she’d spent the night in, still grumbling, she decided to go lock herself in the bathroom until something happened. In fact, what mostly happened there was meditation, considering that episodes of fecal or urinary evacuation were rather uncommon. Most of the time these past thirty or forty years, the Gramma Udgul had simply snacked on a spoonful of toasted flour here, a cookie there; she drank little and never ate a full meal, which had rendered null and void the terminal parts of her digestive system, which by now were shriveled up.
The sun had risen outside. Its rays slanted through the air vents just beneath the roof. Above a heap of farming machines, a harrow with perfect blades gleamed. It had been included in a recent bequest of new equipment, and had never been used. The Gramma Udgul wasn’t in a rush to throw it into the pit because the radiation it emitted consistently grilled the flies buzzing around it. The murders happened with a quick crackle. Flies had always bothered the Gramma Udgul and she felt a small satisfaction when she heard one of them being reduced to ash.
It had to be eight in the morning.
As she raised her head to admire the reflections of sunlight beneath the cement, the Gramma Udgul stumbled over a milk bucket. The bucket was empty and it scraped noisily against the ground and fell over. The Gramma Udgul let out an annoyed exclamation.
—What’s that piece of junk doing by my feet? she asked. It wasn’t here yesterday. Did the engineer bring it in, just to put it in my way? Jerk!
She squinted into the labyrinth of piles to see if the engineer was nearby, but the hangar was silent and nobody was working there right then.
—Barguzin! she yelled. Hey, Barguzin!
Nobody answered, so she relented. Yelling had calmed her down.
—Idiot. Of course he’s not here, she whispered. He’s never here when I have to yell at him. Dawdling outside, probably.
She kicked the bucket a few meters, then threw it on a hill of trash. The bucket found a resting spot between a television set, two pillows, and a quilt.
She