Radiant Terminus. Antoine Volodine
He was standing over this exhausted woman, but he himself felt ill as well. Every now and then, the trees swayed, split, the verticals waved. He felt like he was going to fall into some kind of coma, like the night before right on the edge of the forest.
He closed his eyes for three, four seconds.
• A man. A woman. An accidental couple. Two vagrant figures, him in particular, with his bags hoisted over his shoulder, his bottles. A stone basin under a gray tile canopy. The dampness of the place. Its coolness. Drops that chimed from time to time while falling into the basin. The red ground. The trees nearby, the nearly black bark. The bare trunks, covered with long streaks of greenish slime on their northern sides. The subdued, slightly hazy light. A man who closes his eyes, his feet planted squarely but still shaky, fighting against dizziness. A woman who closes her eyes, leaning against the foot of the fountain. Two people breathing, the only perceptible sound for several seconds. During these several seconds, there is nothing else. The forest is silent. The breaths are noisy. Then the woodpecker from before resumes his interrogation. The hammering and its echoes fill the space around the fountain.
• Kronauer opened his eyes again. The larches kept tilting, but he forced himself not to pay attention.
—So there’s a village past the trees? he asked.
—What? the young woman said, her eyes still shut.
—A village, past the trees. Is there one?
—Yes. A kolkhoz. The Levanidovo.
—Is it far? Kronauer asked.
The woman made a vague gesture. Her hand didn’t indicate direction or distance.
—I need to go there, Kronauer said.
—It’s not far, only you have to go through the old forest, the woman warned.
She paused, and then went on:
—Swamps, she said. Anthills as tall as houses. Fallen trees everywhere. Hanging moss. No trails.
Her eyes had just opened partway. Kronauer met her gaze: two brown stones, intelligent, mistrustful. Her eyelids were a bit slanted. In this face that exhaustion had turned ugly with bits of earth, framed by dirty hair, her eyes were where beauty was distilled.
She could sense Kronauer’s interest in her, and, because she didn’t want any special bond between the two of them, she quickly focused on a point behind him. An abrasion on a trunk.
—If you don’t know the way, you’ll get lost, she said.
—What about you? Do you know the way? Kronauer asked.
—Yes, she said quickly. I live there. My husband is a tractor driver in the kolkhoz.
—If you’re going back to the village, we can go together, Kronauer said. That way I wouldn’t get lost.
—I can’t walk, she said. I’m not able to. I had a bout.
—A bout of what? Kronauer asked.
The woman didn’t reply for a minute. Then she took a heavy breath.
—What about you? Who are you? she asked.
—I’m Kronauer. I was in the Red Army.
—From the Orbise?
—Yes. It collapsed. The fascists won. We tried to fight for as long as we could, but it’s over.
—The Orbise fell?
—It did. Everybody knows about that. They had been closing in on us for years. We were the last holdouts. Now there’s nothing left. It was a complete slaughter. Don’t tell me you didn’t hear about that here.
—We’re isolated. There’s no radio because of the radiation. We’re cut off from the rest of the world.
—Still, said Kronauer. The end of the Orbise. The massacres. The end of our own. How is it you didn’t hear about that?
—We live in another world, said the woman. The Levanidovo is another world.
• There was silence. The water Kronauer had swallowed gurgled in his stomach and, in the quietness that prevailed around them, he felt ashamed. He made himself talk to cover up the noise.
—You could be my guide, he said hurriedly.
The woman didn’t reply. Kronauer had the feeling that his body would make more rumbling noises. To cover up the obscene hymn of his entrails, he spouted off several useless sentences.
—I don’t want to get lost. You said there are swamps and no trails. I don’t want to find myself all alone in there. With you, it won’t be like that.
He said that with a great effort, and the woman quickly realized that he was hiding something. His words rang false. He was putting up a front. She was starting to be afraid of him again, as a male, as a rough-hewn soldier guided by bad intentions, who might be violent, who might have sordid sexual needs, who might murder sordidly.
—I can’t walk, anyway, she reminded him.
—I could carry you on my back, Kronauer suggested.
—Don’t try to hurt me, she warned. I’m the daughter of Solovyei, the president of the kolkhoz. If you hurt me, he will follow you. He will come into your dreams, behind your dreams, and into your death. Even when you’re dead you won’t escape him.
—Why would I hurt you? Kronauer protested.
—He has that power, the woman insisted. He has great powers. It will be horrible for you, and it will last for one thousand or two thousand years if he wants, or even longer. You will never, ever see the end.
Once again, Kronauer plunged quickly into her gaze. Her eyes showed indignation, anguished indignation. He shook his head, shocked that she might be afraid of him.
—Don’t hurt me, she repeated sharply.
—I’m going to carry you on my back, that’s all, Kronauer said. You’ll show me the way and I’ll carry you to the Levanidovo. That’s all. There’s no ill will here.
They stayed frozen for a minute, both of them, unsure what movement to make to begin the next episode.
—You wonder why you’d hurt me? Solovyei’s daughter said. Well, there’s really no point asking. All men try to hurt women. That’s their specialty.
—Not mine, Kronauer said defensively.
—That’s their reason for being on earth, said Solovyei’s daughter philosophically. Whether they want to or not, that’s what they do. They say it’s natural. They can’t restrain themselves. What’s more, they call that love.
• Samiya Schmidt was the third daughter of Solovyei. She was born to an unknown mother.
Like her two older sisters, also born in the Levanidovo to unknown mothers, she had lived in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz nearly her entire life. She had gone to primary school in the Levanidovo, where a Red Star sovkhoz cowherd whose cancerous masses hadn’t yet become malignant had taken on the role of educator. Over the years, this woman had devoted the last of her strength to transmitting all that she knew to these three girls of the village: reading, arithmetic, the basics of Marxism-Leninism, historical materialism explained for simple souls, as well as useful principles of veterinary practice and animal hygiene, then, as had been fated but postponed due to physiological incongruities, she was turned into an uncommunicative sooty doll. Solovyei then called on his own magical powers to find someone who could replace her for the next school year.
By a pitch-black moonless night, he called up the fires of the nuclear heart of the small kolkhoz reactor, and he entered death through the fire, as he often did during his self-imposed exile at Radiant Terminus. Once he had gone beyond the fire, he had gone looking for a teacher. His needs were twofold: first, the teacher in question had to agree to work in the Levanidovo without any question about salary or risk premiums, and second, he had to teach the class without lecherously