Читать книгу Radiant Terminus - Antoine Volodine - Страница 12

3

• The day had started. Kronauer regained consciousness and got to his feet. The rough fabric of his coat was stained with moist earth and bits of grass. Blades of lovuskhas, solivaines. A crushed budardian ear. Ants wandered over the fibrous scraps. Seven or eight.

The night had not given him back much strength and he lost his balance trying to clear the ants away. The empty bottles he carried over his shoulder bothered him. They clinked against each other. He stumbled for two meters before regaining some stability. He had trouble catching his breath.

In his skull were audibly stabbing pains.

The clouds tinged Prussian blue.

He was three hundred meters from the first trees, among the bluish budardians trembling gently against his legs.

Everything was blue, everything swayed.

His body needed food, water, more than anything. Despite moving his tongue and swallowing, there was little saliva behind his dried-out lips. He coughed. The cough aggravated the constricting and tearing sensations at the bottom of his throat.

He went a hundred more paces toward the nearby forest. Dizziness forced him to slow down. He stopped. He swore in Russian and Mongolian. Then German, for good measure.

—Hell’s teeth, Kronauer, you sniveling wimp, what are you doing, staggering like a drunkard? . . . Walk toward the trees. Cross the forest and look for the village that was smoking yesterday afternoon. This isn’t anything impossible. Get to this village. Beg for a bit of gruel and food from the rednecks. Fill your bottles. Then go back to the railroad. This isn’t even a feat to accomplish.

A small morning breeze blew, a bit acrid, bearing the smell of herbs preparing for the end of summer and for death.

Barely risen, the sun had disappeared behind a barrier of clouds. The temperature in the air was autumnal. Birds chirruped somewhere in the stretches of degenerate buckwheat still separating Kronauer from the edge of the forest. A family of steppe songbirds that had survived, belonging no doubt to a species that was already nearly extinct. Kronauer listened to them for a minute, then they fell silent. They had detected a presence, they hid in the middle of the grasses, and they went quiet.

Five minutes later, he had crossed a ditch and entered the forest.

• The undergrowth wasn’t bushy, there were barely any obstacles between the trees. Here and there a fallen larch, a stretch of black mud, but, overall, practically nothing. He quickly disappeared among the trunks. The light diminished; it took on brown and red hues on account of the dead needles covering the ground. He remembered the spot on the horizon where the smoke had been visible the previous day, and that was the direction he went in, toward this hypothetical village. Nothing else was in his head.

In the forest a heavy silence prevailed. Kronauer’s footsteps. A muffled noise, crunches that did not echo. A few mushrooms. Chanterelles, puffballs, clouded agarics, cortinars.

As he steeled himself for hours and hours of humdrum walking, he saw, about a kilometer off to his left, a structure vaguely resembling an entrance to an underground tomb, and he approached. It was a fountain fed by a natural spring. The basin was protected by a stone arch. The water was scarce, just a few cupfuls at the bottom of a hollowed-out lava stream. It had scarcely any moss and looked clear. At the bottom of the basin, an emerald-green fern had taken root and spread out its wavy fronds: unnerving, splendid.

On the other side of the structure, sitting on the ground, was a young girl who seemed to be dead.

Kronauer hunched over the water and at first he lapped it up, like an animal. The water was cold. He held back from taking too much and stood up again, then he succumbed to temptation and went back to drinking.

Then he tried to fill the two bottles he had carried the whole distance on a string hanging from his neck. He couldn’t submerge them in the too-shallow basin. Nothing got through the bottle’s neck. He struggled for three minutes, moving the bottles every which way, but to no avail. The water flowed in through a small crevice under which there was no way to position a receptacle. The water did spill out of the stone basin when it overflowed and subsequently made its way back, naturally, down into the earth, but right now the flow was too meager and the shallow basin was half empty. He hung the bottles back around his neck and drank once more by cupping the water in his palms.

• The tinkling song of drops falling in the basin.

The taste of the water. A faint scent of peat, of slightly peppery silica. An impression of transparency, of infinity. The feeling of being able to experience that, of not being dead yet.

The silence of the forest.

The hammering of a woodpecker determinedly pecking at bark, a few hundred meters from the fountain.

Then, once again, silence.

• Kronauer turned toward the girl leaning against the fountain and looked at her. She was short, with a head barely bigger than a child’s and, indeed, she seemed to be barely out of adolescence. Judging by her unmoving eyelids, as well as her slightly disjointed pose, she had already left this world. Her clothes were tattered, with smudges of clay and tears. She was wearing pants and army boots, a military shirt that was unbuttoned at the top. Her chest was visible, as well as her left breast down to the nipple. Pearl-white skin, a dark areola that was nearly brown. It was a breast slightly larger than would have been suspected given her body’s slim proportions. Kronauer reached out. He grabbed the collar and pulled the fabric a bit to hide this flesh that had unintentionally come into view. He felt a breath on his wrist. The girl was breathing. He had thought she was just a corpse, but she was breathing.

Her physiognomy betrayed a Siberian ancestry, the memory of forebears come from nowhere to wander as nomads through the gaps of the taiga, back to the midst of nowhere, but overall, and because of both her clothes and her pale complexion, she looked like a Chinese woman who had traveled through the twentieth century to take part in a new campaign against the right-wings. Jet-black braids framed her face, accentuating her adolescent age. They were half undone and dirty. As usual for this sort of face, it seemed to be both very ordinary and very beautiful. Her left cheek was streaked with dirt and mud. The girl had fallen or gone to sleep on the ground before leaning against the fountain and passing out. Whatever had happened before she had lost consciousness, she had kept, beyond exhaustion and pain, a sharp and sullen expression. Her jaw was still clenched, her eyebrows were still furrowed. She had to be a sturdy sort. She had wanted to fight to the end against internal collapse, against night.

She opened her eyes and, seeing a man facing her who looked in every way like a lawless escapee from the camps, brought her hand to her shirt collar, as if the first measure to take upon waking had to be to protect her neck from a stranger’s gaze. Her fingers gripped the collar, slowly pulled tight her clothes, and then she lowered her arms in order to lie down on the earth. She folded up her legs and now she tried to stand up again. She didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t get up from the ground. A groan escaped her lips.

—Why are you looking at me? she asked, her voice cracking.

She was afraid. She was unable to stand upright, and, in this deserted place, a man towered over her without saying anything. How long had he been there? Dread shook her eyelashes and her lips.

—I come from the Red Star sovkhoz, Kronauer said.

He hadn’t spoken since the previous day and the words came out with difficulty. He wanted to explain his own weariness as quickly as possible. So she would understand that she had nothing to fear from him.

—I have comrades there. A man and a woman. The woman is dying. They have nothing to drink. I tried to fill some bottles, but I can’t. Is there a village a bit farther off?

The girl nodded confusedly and shut her eyes. She had dark brown eyes, a small mouth, which was very pale on her pale face. She held back another moan. She had to hurt somewhere, behind her forehead, in her body, and, in any case, she was very, very tired.

It wasn’t clear what this movement of her head meant, assuming that it was some sort of reply.

• —I have to get to this village, Kronauer said again. It’s a matter of life or death for my comrades.

—I don’t believe you, said the girl.

She didn’t open her eyes to talk. It seemed like she was talking while in sleep or in her death throes.

—Red Star is abandoned, she went on. It doesn’t exist anymore. Everything’s irradiated. Nobody lives there.

—Hang on, I didn’t say I lived in the sovkhoz, Kronauer said. I didn’t say that. We got there, all three of us, by following the railroad. We don’t have anything to do with the sovkhoz.

He stopped to take a breath. 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 ogling the three students, nearly all of whom were already nubile. Rummaging through the ashes of dreams, he unearthed a former political captain who had become a cooperative worker, and then been shot for corruption. All too happy to leave the shadows where he had moped around, the man—named Julius Togböd—accepted the job and started working in the Levanidovo school, and he brought his students up to a reasonable educational level. But, after three semesters, he started to lecherously ogle Hannko, the oldest of the three girls, and Solovyei had to intervene.

Solovyei, as father of the students and as president of the kolkhoz, reproached him, then knocked him unconscious with a shovel, and then dragged him into the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse to the well. Even though it wasn’t a workday, the Gramma Udgul had no problem letting him unscrew the heavy cover. The schoolteacher ended his journey two kilometers deep and whether he lecherously ogled the nuclear core or not could only be guessed at. The Gramma Udgul didn’t broach the topic in her conversations with the core, rightly considering it a private matter.

Following this disagreeable experience, the school still existed, but Solovyei’s daughters were asked to work as autodidacts. They went there in the morning and studied together lazily and disorganizedly. They read heavily, because the House of the People library was well-furnished with agitprop pamphlets and the classics of economics and literature. All the important male and female novelists of the Orbise were there: Ellen Dawkes, Erdogan Mayayo, Maria Kwoll, Verena Nordstrand, and a full spread of others. The girls read those authors in preference to technical works. Their father, however, warned them against the nihilistic nonsense of the poets and the tragic uselessness of their fictions. In spite of such admonishments, they steeped themselves in the post-exotic masterpieces. They understood that Solovyei, who prided himself on writing, was expressing an opinion that an author’s allure could overpower critical impartiality.

From time to time, an adult came to round out their incomplete education. He would tell them a story or share his experiences with them. The adults were rarely skilled at transmitting their knowledge; they had never learned how to teach, and they had never considered the question of adapting a curriculum for their small audience, but they took their job to heart. They did their best to explain how the world they had experienced worked. Some days, the Gramma Udgul taught the girls how to use the kolkhoz rifles and explained how to put together a firing squad, and other days, she described the liquidation campaigns she’d gone on, how the liquidators had died, her ongoing difficulties with the Party and her clashes with the medical commissions that had examined her in public to study the mechanisms of her immortality. The engineer Barguzin talked about electrical and nuclear installations, short circuits and angry atoms, and he also discussed his blackouts and his passages through death, as well as his reawakenings after being treated with heavy-heavy water, deathly-deathly water, and lively-lively water. He tried his hardest never to look his students in the face, out of fear that he might be accused of inappropriate conduct by Solovyei and end up prematurely at the bottom of the liquidation well. The one-armed man Abazayev came to gesticulate in front of the blackboard and recount once again the convoluted circumstances that had resulted in the loss of his right arm, a misfortune connected to his enlistment in the army that he sometimes wanted to link to a heroic act, sometimes to a surprise attack by capitalist henchmen, sometimes to hand-to-hand combat with a property manager, but according to Solovyei he had simply suffered from meningitis and poor medical care. When Abazayev was sufficiently enmeshed in discussing the reasons for his amputation, he changed the topic and gave directions for how to clean drainage canals, transport irradiated materials in carts, and smoke moles out of their burrows, three specialties he excelled at in the Levanidovo. The tractor driver Morgovian stepped in, as well. He didn’t talk often, but he came in. As there were no longer any working tractors in the village, he focused on the kolkhoz beehives and henhouses. He sketched out diagrams of hives on the blackboard and copied in chalk the list of symptoms for avian flu. He also abstained from looking at the three students who, over the years, looked more and more like beautiful young women well worth courting or marrying.

Other improvised teachers sometimes showed up in front of the students. They were usually former members of the Gramma Udgul’s liquidation team who hadn’t survived the radiation, or kolkhozniks who had died in the forest or in the open fields, angry at being left unburied. They came into the classroom, knocked over chairs, and tried to talk, but the girls drove them out.

Solovyei personally never opened the schoolroom door to round out his daughters’ education. He preferred to go into their dreams. Whether he chose to go through fire, to enter body and soul into this black space, or to fly forcefully through the shamanic skies, some nights, he ended up deep in their sleep and walked around without knocking. He had edifying conversations with them where he declaimed his own poems in a hissing voice, but mostly he took advantage of his visit to explore the nooks and crannies of their consciousness, their fantasies, their secret desires. He was obsessed by the ills men could inflict upon them and he watched them, feeling that they were too young to know how to defend themselves against their lovers’ vileness. The girls respected Solovyei and did not deny him their love, but from the day they had their first periods, they began to hate this sort of intrusion, this imperious and unnatural penetration, and in the morning, silently or openly, they remembered that he had appeared within them, that he had disturbed their privacy, and that he had forced himself on them to explore the hidden secrets of their unconscious and their body in general. They remembered the trips he had wantonly taken within themselves. It was a memory that disgusted them and that they refused to consider trivial or furtive, that they were not willing to relegate to the numerous dream-sensations that waking cleared away. They could not forgive him for that. The next morning, if they saw their father on the way to school, they barely said hello to him, and they made it clear that they were sulking.

• Samiya Schmidt was now thirty-one years old. She had stopped going to school twelve years earlier. She hadn’t left with a solid university education, but she had practical knowledge in nearly every realm of agricultural mechanics as well as theoretical knowledge about economics, the history of the camps, and occupational medicine, because, aside from Maria Kwoll’s fictions, she had, for lack of anything better, devoured the popularized booklets from the House of the People library one after another. The kolkhoz president had awarded her a diploma with honors at the end of her studies, in case she needed one on the outside, but she stayed in the Levanidovo and married the tractor driver Morgovian.

Her marriage to Morgovian hadn’t been a catastrophe, but nobody would say that it had made her happy. Morgovian was afraid of her and he behaved himself as a result. She struck an animalistic fear into him. Partly because she was the daughter of the kolkhoz president and also because she was an authoritarian sort with intellectual and emotional needs he couldn’t understand. And finally, he was terrified by the bouts of insanity she sometimes had, during which she would run as fast as possible through their house and through the main road of the kolkhoz, scarcely touching down on the ground and whispering extraordinarily violent and strange curses. She came and went like this and then disappeared into the forest for days on end. Hardly had their short month on honeymoon gone by when the first of these bouts happened. Morgovian was paralyzed with horror and sadness. From then on he began to avoid her, spending as much time as possible collecting dead animals at the forest’s edge or fixing the henhouse netting—or he claimed he needed to fight the Asian hornets so as to spend entire weeks camping by the hives.

Their union’s disintegration pleased Solovyei, who had had trouble accepting it in principle, and who moreover played a major role in the mental disturbances Samiya Schmidt was subject to. Indeed, he kept paying her his nocturnal visits and walking supreme throughout her dreams, which caused serious disruptions and, in particular, the feeling of being possessed day and night by an outside will. Solovyei didn’t worry about the damage that might result from his intrusive magical acts. On the contrary, he pressured her to start the process of getting divorced. He offered to simplify the formalities she would have to bring before the kolkhoz soviet. But she refused. Morgovian, despite it all, suited her. She appreciated his silence, and also his self-effacement as a man, his terrified lack of appetite around her. She had him as her husband, and she knew she would never have a better one. Besides, after reading Maria Kwoll and Sonia Velazquez, she was inclined to hate men, but this one didn’t trouble her.

• Now, perched on Kronauer’s back, held against him, Samiya Schmidt let herself be carried back to the village. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and her legs were folded around his hips. Kronauer somehow kept her upright. Sometimes he grabbed her ankles, sometimes he crossed his arms to hold her calves. Samiya Schmidt had been reticent at first about being in such close contact with this unknown man; she didn’t want to be pressed up against him, intertwined with him at all. At the trip’s start, she had stood up while refusing his help and, when they started walking, she tried to stay all the way upright. The first several hundred meters were an ordeal. She staggered and, so as not to fall, kept holding onto Kronauer. Then she fell down and he convinced her to drag herself behind him, on him.

For Kronauer, even though she was a small woman who barely weighed more than a child, she was a difficult burden to carry. Every step diminished somewhat the restorative effects of the fresh water, and fasting had weakened his body. He hadn’t eaten for days. After a painful half-kilometer he lost his rhythm and began to stumble under the weight. He exhaled heavily. Drops of sweat ran down his forehead and from his armpits.

—Stop, Samiya Schmidt growled suddenly. We’re not going far like this. We’ll never get to the Levanidovo.

—You told me it wasn’t far, Kronauer said stubbornly.

—We’ll have to cross the old forest, Samiya Schmidt said.

He set her down on the ground. She shakily stood up by him, then she was overcome by nausea and went to lean against a larch to vomit. Kronauer watched her heave. He felt the sweat on his face building up and then falling in huge drops. He noticed a rocky outcrop and walked the five or six steps to sit on it.

I won’t be able to get back up, he thought. I don’t have any strength left. We’re both going to die in the trees, this half-dead girl and me.

Samiya Schmidt spent a minute bent in half, then she pulled herself back up and went over, swaying, to Kronauer. She sat on the other end of the outcrop. They both had trouble catching their breath.

—It’ll be easier later on, she said, clearly talking about herself. Have to wait for it to go away.

—What is it? Kronauer asked.

—It’ll go away, she insisted with effort. But have to wait.

She was sitting three meters away from him. She turned toward him and looked furtively in his eyes. Within Kronauer’s gray-blue irises, there was no trace of dishonor. He had touched her legs, her body had been thrashed around while her breasts had rubbed and pushed against his shoulder blades, he had panted while holding her against his body. But now he looked at her calmly, with brotherhood and sadness more than anything. He didn’t seem like one of these men torn by sexual frenzy, ready to grunt, attack, and spray sperm over everything feminine within reach, like those men Maria Kwoll had described in her feminist writings. She had never met these sorts of men in the village, where all the inhabitants, except for Solovyei, constantly teetered between comas and inexpressible mental and physical exhaustion, but she knew that they existed and that they might appear time and time again, and not just in Maria Kwoll or Sonia Velazquez’s incendiary writings. She knew all about the dirty tricks they were capable of. Maria Kwoll was graphic enough to describe them unflinchingly in her numerous ranting texts. This soldier seemed in no way to be a male in rut, but who knew.

The image of rape overwhelmed her.

—Don’t you think for one second about hurting me, she said before she could help herself. The president of the kolkhoz isn’t the sort to forgive that. I’m his daughter, remember that. He’s not a little president of a nowhere kolkhoz. He’ll be dogging you for at least a thousand eight hundred and thirteen lunar years and then some. I’d rather warn you before you think up anything nasty.

Kronauer shrugged. This girl was disturbed. If he had realized it earlier, he would have tried to get to the Levanidovo on his own without calling on her as a guide. So far, she hadn’t been any help and, instead, she’d only made his trek harder and slower. What if I abandoned her? he thought to himself. Then he caught himself. Too late, Kronauer, like it or not you’re responsible for this girl now. She’s not all right in her head, but you’ve taken some responsibility for her, so stick with it. You haven’t lost your morals entirely yet. And if you get up and leave without turning around to see if she follows you or not, how will you explain to the kolkhozniks that you left behind the daughter of their president lying on the ground?

—Tell me about your father, Kronauer said.

—I have nothing to tell you about my father, Samiya Schmidt shot back. The less you see of him, the better off you’ll be.

The conversation ended on that note.

After having rested for about an hour, they set off again.

Kronauer felt like he had gained a bit of energy. He suggested that she climb once more onto his back and she accepted without saying a word.

• The old forest.

Now the scene is darker.

Not a bit of sky above their heads. Only black branches. Dark layers of black branches. A thick fabric, heavy and unmoving.

Kronauer carrying Samiya Schmidt on his back.

Strong smells.

Resin, rotting peat mosses, decomposing trees, marsh gas. Stinking wafts from deep layers of the earth. Scents of bark, viscosities stagnating beneath the bark, mustiness of larvae. Mushrooms. Moist stumps. Monstrous accumulations of polypores, oxtongues, giant clavarias, branchy hedgehogs. Fetid tears on the edge of conks.

An intense silence that nothing shatters.

The irregular noise of Kronauer’s footsteps, and that silence that immediately becomes unbroken.

Twigs snapping under his boots. Sometimes, under the grass and the ferns, the suctioning noise of mud. Then, once again, the silence that nothing disturbs.

Samiya Schmidt’s breath on Kronauer’s neck, behind his ear. Samiya Schmidt’s panting in Kronauer’s hair that reeks from his wanderings, the grease, the dust.

The bottles knocking, the bags, which every so often bang against Samiya Schmidt’s calves, Kronauer’s elbows.

The tangled, slanted trunks, most often arrayed in long cascades like witch grass. Mysterious blockades covered in mosses. Obstacles best skirted around, sometimes with a hundred meters’ walk, rather than sinking to one’s ankles in puddles of dark water, in clayey troughs.

The color of these mosses, an unvarying, nearly-black green. The disagreeable texture of this witch grass that has to be pushed aside with faces and shoulders.

At every moment, this cool and damp caress on your face.

At every moment, the feeling of something malevolent feeling its way toward you.

No bird, no small animal.

Here and there, giant anthills, without any apparent bustle but perhaps inhabited by black and teeming colonies.

Samiya Schmidt and Kronauer no longer speak.

The crossing is harder and harder.

The scene is darker and darker.

• The old forest isn’t an earthly place like the others. Nothing comparable exists in other forest of similar size, nor in the taiga, which is boundless and where people die. Unless they take a horribly long and uncertain path, you can’t reach the Levanidovo and its Radiant Terminus kolkhoz without crossing it. But crossing it also means wandering under its menacing trees, advancing without any landmarks, blindly, means walking with difficulty among its strange traps, beyond all duration, means going both straight ahead and in circles, as if poisoned, as if drugged, breathing with difficulty, as in a nightmare where you can hear your own snoring and moaning but where wakefulness never comes, means oppression without the least idea of where your fear comes from, means dreading noise every bit as much as silence, means losing reason and, finally, understanding neither noise nor silence. Being in the heart of the old forest also means sometimes no longer feeling exhaustion, floating between life and death, hanging between breathlessness and exhalation, between sleepiness and wakefulness, also means understanding that you are a strange inhabitant of your own body, not really at home, like a particularly unwelcome guest who has overstayed and who is accepted because expulsion is not possible, who is accepted until there comes a way to separate painfully, who is accepted while waiting for the opportunity to hunt or kill you.

The old forest is a place that belongs to Solovyei.

It is the entrance to Solovyei’s worlds.

When you walk through the old forest, when you crush under your boots the twigs fallen from the trees, the centenarian pines, the black larches, when your face is stroked or slapped by dripping mosses, you end up in a transitional world, in something where everything exists intensely, where nothing is illusory, but, at the same time, you have the disturbing feeling of being imprisoned within an image, and moving around within someone else’s dream, in a Bardo where you are a foreigner yourself, where you are an unwanted intruder, neither living nor dead, in an unending and endless dream.

Whether you realize it or not, you are in a realm where Solovyei is the absolute master. You may move in the shadows of the plants, you may try to move and to think in order to escape, but, in the old forest, you are first and foremost dreamed up by Solovyei.

And in there, quite simply, you cannot be anything other than a creature of Solovyei’s.

• As confirmation: in the last kilometer, Kronauer entered some sort of hypnotic numbness. He stopped thinking. This mental abdication came with physical relief. He didn’t feel his exhaustion. On his back, Samiya Schmidt didn’t weigh more than a feather. He trod without stumbling over the marshy ground, he crossed the obstacles of rotten, tangled branches, he climbed over the barricades of old mossy trunks, and he came back down without losing his balance. He breathed in the gas that wafted from the standing water without fainting. With one hand, he pushed away the wet undergrowth that threatened to smack him. He didn’t disturb the anthills taller than himself, he swerved past them without touching anything or angering or scaring their inhabitants. Besides, he didn’t know whether beneath their crust of earth and needles numerous insects twisted and turned, or whether these constructions were vestiges of a lost civilization, because not a single creature was visible in the area. He advanced as if within a dream, without any real awareness of his body or that of Samiya Schmidt. He advanced in this way, and around him the morning stretched out, hardly bright and as if devoid of any future.

Suddenly, as they emerged into a clearing filled with ferns, a strong whistling began in front of them, from the place where the trees resumed, as if from the black tufts where the lowest branches hung. A sound that at first mainly resembled the cawing of a bird of prey, and which immediately transformed into a shrill, increasingly piercing note. This note did not tolerate any modulation. It only mounted in violence. It bore into Kronauer’s eardrums.

He slid Samiya Schmidt onto the ground, or rather, he set her down as quickly as possible to cover his ears with his hands. He grimaced. He said or screamed something that was stolen away.

On every surface of the clearing the ferns trembled, as if they too were trying to struggle against a sound assaulting them. The sky was now just a leaden gray blanket stifling the earth. It only gave a dim light. Several dozen meters away from Kronauer, on the other side of the clearing, the forest had taken on the appearance of a gigantic mass, dark green, compactly alive and hostile. The trees shifted, their tops came together and back apart above the space. High or low, the branches had started to move in a frenzy. No wind, no storm was shaking them, but they shook. They swept the air around them. They seemed to have cast off their vegetal nature, to have become animalistic, to be obeying chaos and fury. Some of them began to whistle in turn.

Kronauer was certain the trees were watching him.

—What is that? he yelled as he turned toward Samiya Schmidt. What is that over there?

Samiya Schmidt had drawn back to the edge of the clearing. She leaned against a trunk before answering. She had a sullen expression on her face. Her eyes were obstinately focused on the tips of her boots, as if she didn’t want to watch what was happening.

—It’s nothing, she finally said. We’re in one of Solovyei’s dreams. He’s not happy that you’re with me.

Kronauer walked up to Samiya Schmidt and looked at her, aghast. He kept his ears covered and he found it necessary to talk loudly to make himself heard.

—He’s not happy that I’m with you? he shouted.

Samiya Schmidt shrugged helplessly.

—That’s my father. He doesn’t want you to hurt me, she said.

Solovyei’s unbearable whistling stretched out.

Kronauer crouched down, got back up. The pain ran from his head to his tailbone, along his spinal cord. The sharp note wreaked havoc in his skull. He tried to ease the pain by squatting, then, because that didn’t change anything, he got back up. He looked like a demented gymnast in rags.

—It’s nothing, Samiya Schmidt said. He’ll stop.

—It’s really horrible, Kronauer moaned.

—Yes, it’s horrible, but he’ll stop, Samiya Schmidt promised.

• They sat side by side on the warm ground, on some roots. They waited for the screaming to stop. Samiya Schmidt didn’t cover her ears. She seemed irritated, but not overly inconvenienced. She was still one of Solovyei’s daughters, she must have a particular internal resistance, something borne through his genes. A sort of immunity against her father’s aggressions, acoustic or oneiric or otherwise.

Ten minutes went by like this, then the whistling diminished, the trees stopped shaking and fidgeting with frightening aggressiveness, they stopped screaming, they stopped acting like a collective animal of unlikely dimensions. Kronauer had already uncovered his ears. In his head, in his backbone, the pain had gone immediately. But he still had the feeling that the branches were watching him menacingly, and soon the whistling was replaced by a voice that came from nowhere.

Then he took the mask in which his face lived, his face of a beggar-bird beneath the storm, of a tattered bird thirsty for thunder, declaimed someone with authoritative, cruel solemnity.

It was a voice that seemed transformed by wax, fire, sputtering, and which also carried echoes, as if before coming into daylight it had to go through tunnels or black pipes. It was shivering hideously and still hideously distinct, and in reality it neglected the obstacle of the eardrum to strike more deeply, in the barely protected layers of the brain, beneath memories, there where unease, animal fury, and ancestral fears hid, still unformulated.

—And that, what is that? Kronauer asked again.

—Those are my father’s poems, Samiya Schmidt said, barely disguising her annoyance. He’ll declaim one or two, and then he’ll . . .

She paused. The verb she was about to use had sexual connotations, which deeply revolted her.

—He’ll what? Kronauer asked.

—He’ll pull out, Samiya Schmidt finished tonelessly. Then it’ll be over. He’ll pull out from us and it’ll be over.

• He put on the hardened skin of this mask that stank of black oil and the remains of the fire and, as the flashes fell slowly on the turf and the ashes around him, he began to beg for thunder, and, as no noise went to the trouble of rattling the space, he bent down in a pose of feigned humility and he rummaged for an hour or two among the leaves and the earth wet with brackish water and wine from casks, he stirred the humus with its sprouts scorched by the violent electricity, and, when he had rummaged the deep earth and its mucus like carcasses for a long while, he got back up and opened his eyes again, at least the ones he had shut to suggest non-impudence. Nothing had changed, except perhaps the walls of the space had closed in. As before, the darkness was stricken by lightning, but this sort illuminated the countryside less and less. He kept on begging in the silence. He moved around, counting his steps by fours or thousand-and-thirty-fives depending on his mood, which was foul. What he saw only aroused useless anger, which he hid as best as he could or which he managed to soften by imagining that he had been split in two and his double was walking somewhere else, with his daughters or his occasional wives, his war wives, or his taiga lovers. Sometimes he beat his wings, but the shadows were too deep for anyone to notice, and, besides, he had reached a chasm where his loneliness no longer had any witnesses. At one moment, he began to think more about his daughters. He called to them instead of speaking to the thunder. Neither his daughters nor the thunder answered him. In the end he stretched out in the mire, sighed horrible curses through the holes of his mask, and disappeared.

• As brutally as it had invaded Kronauer’s soul and the clearing, the voice stopped resonating. Suddenly the forest regained its banal character. Despite its perennial darkness and thickness, it no longer seemed fantastical in any way, magical in any way, terrifying in any way. The trees were no longer capable of sight or sound. Solovyei had left the scene.

Kronauer let out a sigh. Even if this declamation hadn’t been accompanied with pain, he had received it like a vile incursion. The fundamentally hermetic content of his discourse hadn’t touched or unnerved him, even though he had sensed, beneath the sentences, ahead of them, a malevolent thought, a selfish and lawless cruelty. But the way of conveying this discourse had repulsed him. He had clearly felt someone creeping inside him, settling in and sauntering around his cranial vault without the least respect for his privacy. It was both psychical and physical. He was talking to him and violating him. He who was speaking the poem had raped him and then pulled out. Kronauer hadn’t known how to defend himself against this outrage, how to stop this aggression, and now he felt wretched. His passiveness had upset him terribly, and somehow he felt both guilty and dirty.

—There, said Samiya Schmidt. It’s over. For now, it’s over.

She was now leaning at the base of a larch, and there, her head thrown back, she shut her eyes to talk in a fading voice.

Kronauer made sure she wasn’t watching him through her eyelashes and he turned away. He would rather that she didn’t see his shame. He still felt like he had endured an assault.

—Does he do that often? he asked.

—Do what? Samiya Schmidt whispered.

Kronauer shrugged.

They both remained silent, as if trying to just be quiet and forget.

—He does that when he feels like it, Samiya Schmidt finally said. He comes and goes when he feels like it.

They mulled over the thought for several minutes, still not moving, and then Kronauer helped Samiya Schmidt get back up and they began to walk, leaning against each other. Samiya Schmidt said that she could make the last two kilometers on her own. She had to stop often. She leaned on a tree for support, caught her breath, waited until her heart started up again or regained a normal rhythm. Kronauer stopped, went over to her, stood ready to help if she fainted. He used these stops to restore some of his energy, as well.

Then the forest brightened. Behind the trees there was sky. They walked five hundred more meters to the east. The trees were airy, the ground springy and neat. Kronauer noticed the clumps of dwarf rowans, raspberry bushes, Siberian foxgloves, and then they came out of the forest and went down the tar path toward the Levanidovo and the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz.

A man was busy a bit farther down in a ditch. Samiya Schmidt stammered something along the lines of how that was her father, and then she was quiet.