Radiant Terminus

• Inside the warehouse, the temperature wasn’t dropping. It never dropped. The sheet-metal walls were always warm, even in the winter when it was freezing, and they emitted a soft and constant light, rendering all heating and lighting equipment unnecessary.

After the nuclear reactor that powered the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz caught fire, the hangar had been used to store the irradiated material the liquidators had collected in the area. It was an enormous, ugly building, intended to hold massive quantities of garbage, and it had been constructed right above the burning ruins of the little power plant. The liquidators had found it best to use preexisting structures to store the stock of dangerous trash and bury it all in the same place. A well sat in the center of the building. In it went everything that people wanted to get rid of forever.

The well had been dug by the nuclear core itself when, after vaporizing everything in range, it had gone mad and begun to sink into the earth. The engineer Barguzin, the only surviving member of the team that had designed the hangar, claimed that the hole was regular and vertical and about two kilometers deep. According to him, at the bottom of the hole, the core had stopped moving. It would stay there, always mad but no longer moving, no longer trying to reach the innermost depths of earth proper. It would simply feed on what it received from on high.

• Every month, indeed, the core was fed. The heavy cover for the well was opened, and some of the bric-a-brac collected over the last season or two was knocked over the edge; just to show that people weren’t panicking and weren’t afraid of pathetic radionuclides. Tables and chairs, television sets, the tarry carcasses of cows and cowherds, tractor motors, charred schoolteachers who had been forgotten in their classrooms during the critical period, computers, remains of phosphorescent crows, moles, does, wolves, squirrels, clothes that looked perfect but had only to be shaken to set off a haze of sparks, inflated toothpaste tubes filled with constantly simmering toothpaste, albino dogs and cats, clusters of iron that continued to rumble with an inner fire, new combine harvesters that hadn’t yet been broken in and which gleamed at midnight as if they were lying in full sunlight, garden forks, hoes, axes, debarkers, accordions that spat out more gamma rays than folkloric melodies, pinewood planks that looked like ebony planks, Stakhanovites in their Sunday best with their hands mummified around their diplomas, forgotten when the event halls were evacuated. The ledgers with their pages turning day and night. Cash-register money, the copper coins clinking and shifting without anyone nearby. These were the sorts of things thrown into the void.

The Gramma Udgul was the one to handle the maneuver. She arbitrarily decided on the days to open the well and told the improvised liquidators which things should feed the core. The Gramma Udgul was also the only person who had the idea to stoop down by the chasm and talk to the core to make it happy.

When she hunched, the undetectable wind from the depths hit her in the face. This caress didn’t bother her and she went on with her monologue. Nothing could be heard, not even the crush of objects or bodies that had arrived at their destination after falling two thousand meters. The Gramma Udgul’s voice sank into the well’s dark mystery without an echo. The kolkhozniks helping the old woman waited nearby until she had finished her sorcerous, vehement screams. They looked like a group of zombies in the last stages of their existence. Aside from some occasional reserve soldiers, these uncommunicative men were the core of the male population still alive at Radiant Terminus, and they could be counted on the fingers of one hand: the engineer Barguzin; the demobilized, one-armed Abazayev; and the tractor driver Morgovian.

• A few words about the Gramma Udgul. About her hardiness which science cannot explain. About her beliefs, about her path to glory and darkness. And about her eighty-year-old, in-shape body, doomed to eternity.

One hundred years earlier, she had begun her long career as a liquidator. She was thirty-two years old then; she was a nurse’s aide and, as the Second Soviet Union experienced its first serious collapses, she dreamed of sacrificing herself for communism-bound humanity. And so she had joined the kamikaze corps that was sent close to the nuclear power plants, which were all breaking down or exploding at the time. I recall that thousands of them had been built in order to make each production plant, each city neighborhood, each kolkhoz self-sufficient. But, despite all the precautions and security measures, the accidents multiplied and the habitable areas diminished. Of course all those who invented these seemingly clean and robust generator models had been executed, but that hadn’t solved any problems. Massive regions had to be evacuated and left to ruin. The triumphant march toward communism, already hampered by outside attacks, found its pace slowed down even further. When the Gramma Udgul volunteered, the liquidators had become a pillar on which society teetered. The candidates for this noble task, however, weren’t rushing to the recruitment offices. Only heroes were signing up. Only young idealistic fanatics, or the same old militants who hid their fear by gritting their indomitable Bolshevik teeth.

The Gramma Udgul worked selflessly on the first building site, and then on those that followed. She knew that she was immolating herself, that she was offering up her health and her life for the collective’s future well-being, for the radiant future of her children and grandchildren, or rather everyone else’s, because she had been warned that the radiation would render her sterile. She helped evacuate the population, she piled up the trucks with the evacuees’ goods, she soothed those who were hysterical, she went on to arrest the thieves and lent a hand when they had to be immediately executed, she was involved in building the shields and concrete layers around the unapproachable cisterns, close to the cores that did whatever they wanted to. It was demanding, dangerous work. However, in contrast to the other heroic men and women who had quickly succumbed, she kept on living.

Her body had responded positively to this repeated exposure to fissile matter. The ionizing rays had destroyed all the sick and potentially cancerous cells her flesh might harbor. Radioactivity had certainly made her slightly iridescent in the darkness, but above all it had stopped the process of aging in her flesh, and according to what the Gramma Udgul thoroughly suspected, it had been stopped forever. These phenomena also had inconveniences and, particularly, they had caught the attention of the authorities who asked her several times, not without some irritation, why she wasn’t dying. The Party had trouble accepting that she refused to go with her comrades in liquidation to the grave. A proposed official reprimand was discussed and, even if it was closed for being judged absurd and even odious, it nonetheless remained in her folder, a stain. From then on, her troubles never ended. They kept on singing her praises in the press and depicting her as a Soviet woman of extraordinary devotion and courage, but they managed not to mention, moreover, that she was fit as a fiddle.

• At first, the Gramma Udgul submitted without complaint to the psychological exams that were ordered regularly, but after five or six years she had had enough, and she didn’t seem very willing when she was asked to donate her body to science as quickly as possible. She only responded to convocation notices intermittently. She had clearly been singled out without any explanation, both in the realms of medicine and normal civilian life. She knew that she was being watched as an unreliable individual, and she understood that she had been deemed unworthy of promotion to the Party’s honorary body, as had more or less automatically been the case for every cosmonaut, author of epics, and television celebrity. She didn’t complain about her iridescence or her immortality, and she didn’t make a single comment about the political injustice she was suffering. She wrote self-criticisms when asked, she kept taking part in community meetings, and, when the opportunity presented itself again, she left for the liquidation sites, always willingly. She had a sense of discipline and she didn’t claim to be clever enough to contradict the Party.

Decades went by. The authorities changed, co-opted themselves, grew old, were rejuvenated, but never reviewed their evaluation of her, and, generation after generation, they considered her immortality, intentional or not, an insult to the toiling masses. They kept an eye on her organic deviationism. However, that eye had an unclear view. Her extraordinary abilities in battling the atoms’ unforeseen wrath were undeniable. She was frequently called upon for her irreplaceable experience, and behind closed doors she was frequently awarded the titles and medals she had earned: Valiant Combatant of the Atom, Red Heroine, Glorious Liquidator, Intrepid Red Doyenne, Veteran, Red Big Sister. She pinned the certificates above her bed, but she rarely mentioned them, rarely or not at all. In her building, she was just a small anonymous person. She wasn’t the sort to show an invalid’s card at stores in hopes of skipping the line.

In this way, a century went by. A century of setting out again and again for nuclear ovens on the brink of meltdown, mixing fuel rods with gloves ill-suited to the task, crossing the countryside, laughing yet bleak, going into ghost towns, digging communal graves, and shooting down thieves. She worked hard with teams as their members collapsed one after another and decayed in weeks. She helped with hurried funerals in places filled with silence and strewn with ossified birds, then, upon her return to the capital, she was paraded on solemn occasions, during which she was decorated with awards normally given to the dead. Then she went back to normal life. She settled back in her job at a local clinic. Her frequent requests for time off to go fight enemy matter had hampered her upward trajectory, and she remained a nurse’s aide—a first-class one, but still just a nurse’s aide. And, once she was at work, she was again forced to deal with the Party and the suspicions of its teams, undergo humiliating procedures, rewrite her autobiography for the thousandth time, do her self-criticisms over again, and, on top of all that, she had to appear at the Medical Academy’s meetings, justify her natural and ideological state in front of embryologists, in front of xenologists, in front of special works councils that didn’t hesitate to accuse her of petit-bourgeois individualism in the face of death, and even of witchcraft.

She put an end to this endless cycle.

One day, she acted in a fit of pique.

She applied for a disaster site far away from everything, having made a firm decision there and then never to come back. She simply had to go to a closed-off province, already quarantined for a half-century after uncontrollable setbacks in the military facilities. Some minimal human activity persisted there, with a few agricultural enterprises and several camps, but the urban areas, even the small ones, had been evacuated. And, conveniently enough, the Red Star sovkhoz had just indicated that there was a situation of utmost urgency at its nuclear power site, and, in the same distress call, had spoken of a neighboring kolkhoz, Radiant Terminus, also in trouble. The region had been kept under military confidentiality since its annexation to the Second Soviet Union, and nobody could quite pinpoint it on a map. The Red Star was indicated by a question mark, close to a large forest and a place called the Levanidovo, but there was no hint anywhere of a Radiant Terminus.

• They had brought the Gramma Udgul and her squadron on a bus that had stopped at the edge of the province, then they had given everybody sidecars to get themselves to the accident site. The road continued, but no person or thing could be seen on it and, out of fear of radiation, the drivers decided to turn around two hundred kilometers sooner than expected.

The Gramma Udgul’s companions had unanimously picked her to head the squad. They were proud to work under such a popular figure of the Orbise because, even if the Party kept having trouble publicly recognizing her merits, the Orbise’s masses happily paid homage to her and weren’t irritated that she wasn’t dead. She had the astonishing ability to constitute a liquidation brigade out of any workforce found nearby. She was accompanied by some thirty scientists, firefighters, and engineers ready to wade through boiling-hot cooling ponds and breached cores in sovkhoz and kolkhoz alike. They had all sworn to do their best until their spinal cords had become nothing more than blackened mallows.

Their sidecars trundled down the empty roads, then, when the sidecars ran out of gas, they crossed the forest on foot to the Levanidovo, where they split up in two teams.

The Gramma Udgul came to the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz and was surprised and overjoyed to discover that the president was a certain Solovyei, her first husband, a comrade whom she had loved very much and whom she had been taken away from ninety years earlier. This Solovyei wasn’t a citizen as respectful of the official proletarian obligations as she was and, despite believing in egalitarianism, he had his own views, on which he had imposed moral arrangements that nobody was allowed to judge. In short, he had long since turned his back on the Party. After an eternity of imprisonment and vagrancy, he had finally settled into this hidden corner as a member of an independent commune that maintained very weak links with the institutions and authorities of the Orbise.

As she gave herself over to the pleasure of finding Solovyei again and reminiscing about their lost youth, the Gramma Udgul let the scientists carry out preliminary measures, assess the damage for millennia to come, and then explain the situation during a general assembly of the Red Star and Radiant Terminus survivors. The teams then began to work at full force. Using shortcuts that he alone knew, Solovyei guided them through the forest to get from one site to another quickly. The two agricultural complexes were effectively separated by a strip of taiga that foolhardy people could easily get lost in.

The Red Star sovkhoz had been abandoned after three days. Since the innards of its plant was burning outside the reactor vessel, but not presenting any major performance issues, the firefighters had suggested leaving the building as it was, and coming back several years later to remove the most problematic waste. The barns and pigsties were opened, the livestock and poultry encouraged to go die on the open steppes, and all the surviving sovkhozniks and liquidators withdrew to the Radiant Terminus area, where the core was already sinking into the earth’s bowels. The Gramma Udgul had approved the plans for the hangar, requisitioned sturdy men and women to begin construction, and outlined the framework for decontamination, which in her opinion would take four or five centuries, taking into account the few hands available. Then she did her best to care for her team members as they died. The scientists went first, closely followed by the engineers. The firefighters held out for a week longer, and in turn, they went out in shreds, torn apart by deadly cancers and burns. Aside from the engineer Barguzin, who also seemed to be immune to radiation, the whole squadron had died in enthusiastic but atrocious suffering.

For three months, she sent a report to the Party every two weeks in which she copied down the readings from the few thermometers and measurement instruments still in working order, and described the liquidation’s progress, as well as her short-term and medium-term prognoses. On schematic maps, drawn according to Solovyei’s directions, she delineated the large perimeter where from that point on it would be ill-advised to venture without having taken iodine pills and put on hazmat suits. At the end of the message she gave an exhaustive list of countrymen, specialists, and non-specialists who had died and whose corpses had been thrown into the well, because this well’s liquidating function had been activated, albeit in a strictly experimental manner. In a postscript, she sometimes wondered about the tactics used to reestablish the ideological norms of Radiant Terminus in a kolkhoz where class warfare had never happened in an orthodox fashion, although on the whole without straying from the egalitarian mentality dear to our hearts. She never received a reply. Then the mailman had thyroid problems in the middle of the forest and lay down for a long while under the larches, putting an end to mail delivery to and from the Levanidovo.

So the Gramma Udgul began living her life without deferring to the Party at every moment. This break with the hierarchy and supreme guides had induced stress, and for several months she suffered nightmares and even some mental confusion. She tended to see the worst everywhere. Then, thanks to Solovyei’s affectionate presence, she succeeded in overcoming her doubts and stressful thoughts.

In reality, when the correspondence had broken off, the Party had concluded that she had been killed in turn by the heavy bombardment of murderous particles. Due to the numerous proofs of ideological steadfastness she had furnished in the past, nobody suspected that she had defected or taken advantage of her immortality to go down deviationist paths in this region.

Her name was added to the list of proletariat martyrs who had fought against matter’s insanities, and she was given one of the few medals she hadn’t yet received: the posthumous distinction of Foremother of the Proletarian Pantheon. Then they ran barbed wire around the last points of entry into the province and decreed the region unsuitable for human life.

• The Radiant Terminus kolkhoz bore closer resemblance to a den of thieves than an agricultural establishment, and from an ideological point of view, there was a pure and simple aberration here, which was a striking contrast to what the Gramma Udgul had imagined for her exile. However, her adolescent urges asked only to be reawakened, with their radicalism, their ferocity, this dissatisfied gaze the young had for the real world. Deep down, more than any wish to be part of the world revolution’s triumph, she still had the childish desire to live out her destiny like an adventure film. And Solovyei certainly emblematized this: defiance of all laws, astonishment, love, a descent into the forbidden, into the hereafter, into the unexplored spaces of dreams, into sorcerous realms. He bent down and looked her in the eyes, he offered her his support, his complicity, his lucidity, his anarchist nonconformity. He helped her distance herself from the Party without apostasy or pain. It took months for her to find peace. But from the first day he had welcomed her as if she were the missing piece of the magical edifice that was the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, a formerly lost piece he had waited his whole life for, and which he was extraordinarily happy to find at long last.

Solovyei was the only man who had mattered in her life. She had met him at a liquidation site, at Kungurtug, when she was a beautiful woman in the bloom of her thirty-sixth year, already noticed by the authorities for her miraculous resistance to radiation. The place was completely isolated, in the middle of the mountains, close to a small lake that, after the accident, held water more closely resembling lukewarm mercury. All the liquidators, except for the two of them, had died in the following weeks. Like the Gramma Udgul, Solovyei had a body unaffected by delirious neutrons, which he happily explained by claiming that he had descended from a line of Bolshevik shamans and magicians who had continually evolved on the border between life, death, and sleep. These provocative explanations didn’t please the authorities at all, especially when he accompanied his words with mocking laughter and insults at the bureaucracy and its managers. She fell for him after a nighttime walk along the glimmering banks of Tere-Khol, the nearby lake, and although he was already too anarchist to join the Komsomol, she loved him exactly as he was, without any attempt to make him change his mind about the five-year plan or his telluric view of communism. They parted ways after Kungurtug, but they stayed in touch, and finally she went to be with him in Abakan, the little city in the province where he lived.

They lived in harmony together in Abakan, hardly bothered by their political differences of opinion or the fact that she couldn’t have children. Although they never registered with the Soviet authorities, they considered themselves husband and wife. They both worked at a school for deaf-mutes, she as a caregiver and he as group leader. When needed, they left for sites where nuclear accidents required their presence. They were two irreproachable citizens at the forefront of the fight against misfortune. However, their good health had marked them out for surveillance, and naturally not just by the medical research services. The Gramma Udgul’s autobiographies, written several times during special sessions, cleared her of any wrongdoing, but Solovyei’s only made things worse for him. Solovyei took pride in being not only a revolutionary, but also a poet, and so he felt that he had the right to say anything that went through his head loud and clear. The prospect of having to write lies to save his skin infuriated him. He sabotaged his self-criticisms by inserting esoteric narracts, considerations of the apocalypse, and politically incorrect discourses on sexuality and dreams. On the official deposition papers, he expounded on his hope that there would come a time when only shamans, sorcery experts, mages, and oneiromancy disciples would be in charge of the battle between classes and they would wander like nomads through the cities and the countryside. Solovyei’s relations with the authorities grew acrimonious. After four years of life together, the Party encouraged the Gramma Udgul to leave her comrade, which she refused to do.

Then Solovyei disappeared without a trace. The Gramma Udgul immediately started investigating by talking to every administrative and police body she knew. She was told to wait for Solovyei himself to give some sign, implying that he had simply chosen to divorce her without going to the trouble of explaining himself. For two years, she pestered the departments. She made the most of the private sessions where she was asked to rewrite her autobiography and asked the officers if they had any news about her husband. The answers varied, sometimes unkind and sometimes sympathetic, but, in short, she never got the least bit of workable information. Solovyei had vanished. Solovyei had gone somewhere else. She knew nothing else about him for the next ninety-one years.

And that’s why now, after so many decades where each of them 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 stopped to look at the pillows. There were rings of sweat on it. She didn’t remember exactly where they’d come from—a Red Star dormitory, an isolated izba in the forest, a cupboard in one of the Radiant Terminus farms? She rummaged through her memories for five or six seconds, but nothing came. Who knew what sleeper had sweated there, she thought. Then she went back to Barguzin and his laziness.

—Or maybe he’s sucked up too many becquerels and died, she said.

She was there, in the middle of the path between two mounds of radioactive scrap metal, grumbling once again.

—Wouldn’t be the first time, she grumbled. He’s from the new generation, they just die off whenever they can.

• Barguzin actually was often a victim of what conventional wisdom would term death. He no longer breathed, his body had started to adopt a cadaverous pose, and in particular his heart and his brain refused to work. Beneath his eyelids, his gaze was lifeless, his pupils didn’t respond to anything. His skin was becoming unappetizingly waxy. The Gramma Udgul had to shake him over and over, put him in the sunlight when there was sun or in moonlight when the moon shone, and she rubbed his forehead with heavy-heavy water, then with deathly-deathly water, then she poured lively-lively water between his eyes, as in the tales the bards had sung. Barguzin responded to this treatment and regained normal color. He got back up, thanked her, and went back to work in the kolkhoz repair shop. He, too, had a body that had gone wrong in a useful way when it came to radiation; he, too, turned out to be resistant to radionuclides, but his resistance wasn’t the same sort as that which allowed the Gramma Udgul and Solovyei to stand at the doors of immortality. Barguzin remained fragile and always close to death. Without the Gramma Udgul and her urgent care, he would long since have been turned into mere residue fit for throwing into the well, along with other toxic matter and agricultural objects.

• After a bit of toilet, the Gramma Udgul went back to sitting down in her favorite armchair. She had a collection of newspapers beside her that had been put together by Solovyei, to try to make sense of what had happened in terms of the world revolution during his time in the work camps. Because that was where he had ended up after leaving Akaban, for forty-five years straight starting, after a disorganized life, with periods of conditional freedom, of banishment to inhospitable regions, which alternated with new arrests, new transfers to special zones, not to mention gallivanting across the taiga with bands of mystic thieves, shamans, escaped convicts, and highwaymen. He made no effort to settle down and regularly ended up back behind bars and even in front of the execution squad, whether for serious disagreements with the powers that be or for various trifles connected to his shady character, such as brawling with a superior or inappropriately mugging bureaucrats.

She took the gazette at the top of the pile and fumbled through the headlines. The newspaper was from the previous century, but the news was encouraging.

The revolution made headway on all fronts and the number of battles increased. At that point, the Second Soviet Union covered most of the globe. There were still several distant continents with pockets of aggressive capitalists, and there was no denying that the domestic nuclear disasters had made the survival of the world population rather problematic, but the situation had improved, at least under the military plan.

—Good, she said. As planned, we’re headed toward total victory, just have to be a bit patient. Just a matter of time.

Satisfied, she gave up the headlines and dipped into the pages inside. She looked for the weather report to compare the printed information with the reality of the sky above Radiant Terminus, and came once again to the conclusion that the press was full of nonsense.

• Solovyei came into the hangar by a side door and weaved between the mounds of trash that impeded all movement in a straight line. Without being a maze, the place gave the impression of having been put together to prevent direct access to the well that constituted its center. Solovyei let his eyes wander over the various piles, noticed several milking machines, dairy vats, industrial churners, old manual churners, cheese racks, zinc mixers. Everything seemed to be in good shape. Everything was clean and in good shape, but showering the immediate vicinity with a storm of deadly particles.

He thought of the cows that had flourished in the region and which were now an extinct species, and of the kolkhozniks who had spent a major part of their life standing alongside these enormous ruminants, their cowpats and flies, their mooing and swollen udders, and who had now gone extinct as well. He wondered if the cows had had an existence worthy of consideration and if the men and women who had taken care of them had died heroes or not. He wondered this without any sarcasm, but without any emotion, because this question really didn’t trouble him in the least. He had built his own existence around values beside heroism and, since he was president of the kolkhoz, he gave priority to black magic, to incursions into the world of dreams and parallel universes filled with zombies, wonderful daughters, animals, and fires. Heroism and cows barely had any place there.

Then he kept on walking. Not far from the decontamination tarp that hid the toilet, the Gramma Udgul was sitting in her favorite armchair and smoking a pipe while reading under her breath a newspaper describing the news eighty years ago. Solovyei had a heavy tread that couldn’t go unnoticed, the surroundings shook around him like he was a knight from the Middle Ages, but the Gramma Udgul acted as if she didn’t hear him.

She didn’t even raise an eye when he walked up to her.

—What are you doing, reading that newspaper? the kolkhoz director asked in mock indignation. I thought you’d started organizing my complete works. Have you already gotten discouraged?

The Gramma Udgul’s collarbone shook as she sighed, and then she set the newspaper on the pile. The paper disintegrated as soon as it was touched. Specks of pulp dusted her black dress. She brushed them off before talking.

—Your texts are too hard for me, she said as she looked down. No clue how to get started. They’re ravings. They don’t even have dates on them. I can’t organize that muck.

—Well, reading old gazettes won’t help move things along, Solovyei said.

—Guess not, the Gramma Udgul said.

Solovyei came closer and tenderly stroked the base of her neck, as he might with a person he had shared his daily life with for years, in a time of elation and courage, and then lost for nearly a hundred years.

She looked up and smiled. Her gray eyes were covered with leukomas that had grown opaque over the iris, but in their center, they sparkled.

—Maybe if you started with the cylinders, Solovyei suggested. They’re spoken words. Can’t put a strain on your eyes. They’re spoken words from my trances, when I walked into the fire or after I went through the doors of reality or death. I recorded them in the hereafter. Not so hard to organize.

—I’ve been listening to those old cylinders for a while, the Gramma Udgul shot back. They’re unbelievable rantings uttered by a madman. I don’t like them. They should all be thrown away. If the Party stumbled upon them, they’d put you right back in the camps or some place for schizophrenics.

—Yes, that’s exactly right, Solovyei said.

—When I’ve heard them all, I’ll put them with everything that has to get thrown into the core, the Gramma Udgul replied.

—Don’t destroy those, Solovyei said. I spoke those words during my trances. It’s never been translated into any earthly language. They’re valuable accounts. Could be useful later.

—Who would they be useful for? the Gramma Udgul said.

—That depends on who’s still on earth, Solovyei said.

—We didn’t start a revolution to listen to these insane words, the Gramma Udgul said. Nobody’s going to understand that. It’s ideological sabotage and so on. I’ll number them, your cylinders, but then they’re going into the pit. The core can make whatever it wants of it.

—It might like them, Solovyei laughed. They were also composed for readers like it.

The Gramma Udgul angrily muttered something indiscernible. He takes everything as a joke, except for his daughters. I’ll have to talk to the core about that one of these days.

—Well, I’ll say this, if a committee stumbled upon this, you’d be good for fifteen or twenty more years of rigorous imprisonment. At least.

—You think? Solovyei said. Even with you as president, with all your medals and a team of easily swayed good little Komsomols?

—If I were president, you wouldn’t escape a firing squad, the Gramma Udgul laughed lightly.

Then she began humming as he caressed the back of her head.

Their tenderness was palpable.

• They lay together in the hangar for several minutes. Barguzin hadn’t appeared, they knew they were alone, and they weren’t embarrassed to coo at each other.

The Gramma Udgul was in a good mood again. Under Solovyei’s affectionate hand, she daydreamed once more about the joy of the waltz, the accordion, and the ideal worker who had turned her head at sunrise. Solovyei relaxed. The morning was just starting, the day was bright, the warehouse thrummed agreeably under the combined effect of the radiation and the sun’s heat, and so Solovyei slipped into an almost unmoving dance with his old friend. The dance was magical, like all dances of love, but it didn’t carry any real sexual freight, and he didn’t feel any frustration in the least. He let himself fall little by little into romanticism and he went into an image instead of unleashing his body. Even though he had plenty of other experiences and even though he felt that he was in the prime of his years and far from the end of his hardy masculine life, he accepted this barely sexual relationship. He accepted it because it was actually very deep and very beautiful.

—What if we listened to one? he asked suddenly.

The Gramma Udgul came out of her reverie.

—One what? One cylinder?

—Well, what if we listened to one, just to see?

He was no longer hugging her and he went to open the cupboard where the Gramma Udgul had put away the phonograph.

The device had a spring mechanism. Solovyei set it on the pile of newspapers and cranked the handle until it stopped, and then he took a cylinder at random from one of the archive crates.

—Which one did you pick? the Gramma Udgul asked.

—I didn’t look, Solovyei said, setting the black cylinder in the notches. I didn’t pick. None of them have names or dates on them. Just a voice bursting out in black space. It’s as much in the present as the past. Or even the future. Listen to it with your gut, not your ears.

Then he pulled the arm and needle over the wax.

—Listen to yourself, the Gramma Udgul said. You’re saying that it’s both present and not present. How do you expect me to organize that?

The needle hissed for two seconds, then the voice was around them: bizarre, deformed, like it was actually from an intermediary world, barely comprehensible and unmoored.

• Then he became a shadow with the knife he had been hiding in front of his face, there was now just a shadow with the knife, a single shadow that was sometimes black, sometimes dark, and as his face glimmered subtly with the embers’ every movement, he gathered together his throaty voices and imagined devotees around him and, focusing on the slim edge of the blade remnants of bravery, and thundering his sighs in his most haughtily low registers, in his ample but extraordinary registers, exhaling his terminal curse in deep waves, rolling off his tongue notes still far less audible than extinguished stars, and also thinking of his scattered daughters, and thinking of his daughters turned away from him, and thinking of his noble daughters lost, forever away from him and lost, and inventing haphazardly new ways of whispering that avenge, inventing whispers made with murderous words, with murderous phrases, and wrapping himself in the memory of his short existence and his short laughs and his dead and his daughters, and thinking about the futures his daughters had promised he would experience, and focusing on the point a remnant of a useless lie, because he never had the chance to speak articulately to his daughters at a distance nor to communicate intelligently with them at a distance, focusing that on the sharp iron, and trying not to be brought down by a sudden insolent greed for the horizon nor by stupor, and thinking of his beloved daughters he never had the chance to pamper or protect or even quickly perceive, between two railings or two wars, between two black absences, and raising his head again to accompany the slow dance of his cutlass and the slow dance of its point, noiselessly raising his shadowy head, hiding once more the extinguished shadow, and thinking again of the catastrophic fate of his daughters he never was able to save from misfortune, and who, if they ever knew happiness, never shared a single crumb of it with him, and thinking of his daughters whose happiness he wasn’t able to apprehend even by proxy, and groaning speeches of painful ignorance, dead waves of already-dead words, groaning calmly endless discussions already long since dulled, he searched haphazardly for an artery and he said: “Come!” Then, already in absolute tatters, he turned toward the image no less in tears that followed him, itself hidden behind sharp iron, and they exchanged glances, and as he wanted to pretend not to feel anything ominous and pretend not to know what to stammer now and how to end, he said again, but nobody nearby heard his indistinct wheeze: “Tomorrow or yesterday, no dying for any reason!” Then he spoke again a little of his daughters and expired.

• The needle moved onto the unrecorded wax and sputtered disagreeably before Solovyei stopped the mechanism. The Gramma Udgul pouted, but the kolkhoz director bore a triumphant look.

—Did you like that? he asked.

—It’s too far from socialist realism for me, she sighed. It’s just poetic, slightly perverse nonsense, petit-bourgeois fantasy. It’s like a threatening riddle. None of it makes sense.

—There’s nothing to understand, Solovyei replied.

The Gramma Udgul’s face clouded over.

—There’s no clear class line, she continued. The proletariat would hate that.

Solovyei was putting the cylinder back in its crate.

—Shall we listen to a little more? he suggested.

—Hmm, the Gramma Udgul said.

—Before you throw them to the core.

—Don’t think I’m doing it because I want to, the Gramma Udgul said.

Their eyes drew level. Solovyei smiled while furrowing his eyebrows comically. He kept on making faces for a few seconds, until the Gramma Udgul relaxed.

—I’m just doing my work, she said.

—Go on, I’m playing another one, Solovyei said. Then I’m going back to the kolkhoz.

—Whatever you like, the Gramma Udgul sighed.

• He was masked in leather and copper, as often, and then he took off his terrible bird’s head and, once the smoke subsided, he peeled away from the brick where the fire had forced him to stay for nearly a thousand years. Some mercury flowed noisily along his arms. He hunched toward those who were facing the reflections and, without clearing his voice, he spoke to the scribe who had died. “Go,” he said. “Write what nobody else has told you over the centuries.” As it fell, the mercury made a greater din than his own breath. The scribe didn’t move. For a year or two, he had the impression that this writer at his service was a woman, then the impression went away. Then, he threatened the scribe with bits of burning wall and he continued, but, this time, while hurling words in encrypted language: “Go! Hadeff Kakain! Hoddîm!” And, as the scribe didn’t write anything, he crushed the head under his heel and squatted by the remnants.