21

•      He took one step into the snow, then a second, then he went down the hill, leaving behind the Gramma Udgul’s awful warehouse, her awful junk, and her various awful creatures. The snowflakes stuck to his face. He frequently had to bat his eyelashes or blow to keep them off his lips. They were delicate. They didn’t melt. Under his soles, the snow groaned. During the daytime lull, the wind had crystallized a crust that now hid several centimeters deep, and every so often something fragile gave way under the weight of his body. When the slope increased, the ice resisted, and then he slipped. As he didn’t have gloves, he kept his hands in his pockets, and instead of using his arms to balance, he slowed down so as not to fall over. The light became increasingly gray. A lone crow came out of nowhere several meters from him, cawed, and swiftly disappeared off to his left, doubtless to take shelter in the forest that was already invisible, drowned in the falling night and the snow.

The afternoon was at its end. He was in a rush to get to the village. The main road stretched out, covered in a uniform layer, very white and perfectly blank. Nobody had trampled it for hours. To the left and the right, the first structures of the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz were slowly taking on rounded and softened shapes, lacking all angles. The rest of the Levanidovo was phantasmagorical. The forest encircling the village was no longer discernible.

What’s your plan, Kronauer, you sham soldier? he suddenly wondered. What were you planning to do, you crummy fighter, actually kill Solovyei? And how would you do it, and why? And what are you going to do if you don’t succeed? . . . And who will you leave with, if you don’t fail? . . . For where? With Myriam Umarik and Barguzin, the model couple, a nymphomaniac and a dying man? With Samiya Schmidt and her anti-male books, if she’s still alive? With that ice princess Hannko Vogulian? . . . Where would you go? What would you do? . . . Did you think about that? . . .

•      Just when he came to the Pioneers’ House, a gust of wind lifted the snow off the road and blinded him. He covered his face with the crook of his arm. Without any gloves, his hands were covered in frost. He stopped walking. Until that moment, the snow had fallen mostly vertically and silently. Well, that’s the final straw, when the wind’s mixed in, he thought. The snow beat against his coat, crackled against his elbow, on top of his head. An icy crust grew between the brim of his shapka and his eyebrows. Several crystals melted on his tongue, unleashing the flavors of winter.

The snow whistled.

The day ended, the road was already dark.

He hunched forward and kept walking. He had put his hands back in his coat pockets and squinted against the pins and needles that the aggressive snowflakes, the half-snowflakes, the miniscule needles inflicted upon his face. His eyelids were nearly shut and he went about fifty meters without seeing anything, then, just as he was about to bump into the fire hydrant in front of Myriam Umarik’s house, he swerved and turned toward the Soviet. Forty paces still separated him from the columns and front steps. He crossed the distance thinking about nothing except the cold against his cheeks and the gusts of wind attacking him treacherously, sometimes head-on, sometimes sidelong, trying to knock him off balance or make him change direction. Forty paces, then twelve or fifteen. Without stopping, he went up the steps that disappeared beneath an immaculate layer and pushed open the front door.

The hall was lit only by the poor light coming from the street. Kronauer didn’t give any thought to the illumination and right away he stamped and scrubbed his boots against the wall so as not to keep the slippery mass stuck beneath his soles. He couldn’t let himself slip on the tiles if the battle against Solovyei took place here and now. Once he was sure he couldn’t slip and fall easily, he shut the door behind him. The door banged, the whistling stopped. After the noise of the wind, the sudden silence enveloped him.

He had only been inside once, to inscribe his name in the kolkhoz registers as a temporary resident. Although he knew nothing about the rest of Solovyei’s actual residence—the part of the building where he of course had never set foot—he was familiar, more or less, with what seemed to be the administrative section. Outside a side hallway that led to Solovyei’s place, there were two padded doors opening onto offices, and the entrance to a storeroom where the liquidators had once set aside smaller irradiated materials, and where even now they kept sensitive objects that had to be categorized before being added to the Gramma Udgul’s disgusting piles. Kronauer crossed the hall and, just on the off chance, he tried opening the storeroom door. It wasn’t locked.

He went in.

His fingers reached the switch and turned on the ceiling light.

•      As if fate had decided to make everything very simple for him right now, at the end of the room stood a gun rack that was missing its lock; it contained two hunting guns and three weapons of war. He took out a Simonov rifle from the First Soviet Union, and an SKS with a scratched handle, but which didn’t look too outdated. The cartridges and clips lay in a jumbled pile next to the rack. Without wasting any time he took out a clip and loaded it into the rifle, and then a second one that he put in a pocket. Then he told himself that perhaps he could take a third one and he was about to rummage again in the box of munitions when he heard a noise in the hall. Someone was coming, quite slowly. Trained in the military, Kronauer loaded a preliminary cartridge into the chamber and aimed the rifle barrel at the door. At that moment, an imposing form planted itself on the threshold of the room. The form had a head covered with a travel bag. It didn’t seem perturbed by the threat aimed at it and its first act was to turn off the ceiling light, as if following a memo about conserving energy, or as if it preferred the dialogue or confrontation to take place in a thick darkness.

Something twisted in Kronauer’s gut. Dread, uncertainty. The darkness had come too quickly. He hadn’t had the time to convince himself that this apparition was indeed Solovyei. His adversary’s head was hidden beneath some sort of semi-rigid cover, large and invertebrate enough to suggest more a suitcase than a grotesque carnival mask. Two eye-holes had been punched in this vaguely rectangular, tanned-leather case, but in the weak light from the street Kronauer wasn’t able to make out its eyes, and certainly not the wild-animal blaze characteristic of Solovyei. Maybe the kolkhoz president had chosen this absurd getup to hide the wound that Samiya Schmidt had inflicted upon him the previous night? A metal bar had passed through his skull from the right eye to the left ear. Maybe the mask served to protect a massive bandage or a hideous wound? What if, behind the leather, was a face that bore no relationship to Solovyei’s, an unknown face? The one standing on the storeroom threshold didn’t have a definite height, because the shapeless bag made him taller. As for his size, it couldn’t really be assessed, because he was wrapped in a heavy dog-fur coat, a mantle Kronauer hadn’t ever noticed on anybody in the Levanidovo. Beneath this mass of pelt, practically anybody in the village could have appeared as imposing as Solovyei.

A heavy silence remained after the noise of the switch being flipped. The two protagonists didn’t challenge each other; they seemed to be waiting. The dog-fur coat filled a sizable part of the doorframe and didn’t shrink beneath Kronauer’s threat. Kronauer had pointed his rifle at it and didn’t lower his weapon.

In the street there were audible gusts of wind sprinkling snow on the windows of the hall.

The empty hall.

The shadows of the evening and the storm had annulled all color, reducing the confrontation to a black-and-white image.

A form frozen in front of the door, half-human, half-animal, topped with a travel bag that gave him a wild and unnerving look as if it had come out of a collection of surrealist collages.

The Simonov rifle in Kronauer’s hands. A China-made SKS, maybe specifically the model the Chinese also called Type 56, or maybe not.

The silence between the gusts of wind.

The mild scent of industrial grease coming off the rifle.

The scents of staleness, of cardboard, and radioactive Bakelite floating in the storeroom.

At that point, the mysterious form sighed, a powerful beast’s breath. Then, under cover of the leather, a mouth began to produce a whispered hum that had something religious in its basic musicality. The hall’s emptiness amplified it enough for the words to be distinct. For two seconds, maybe three, Kronauer thought it was a curse from a deranged spirit, and then . . .

Kronauer no longer had any hair, but, if he still had any, it would have stood up on end. Beneath the cotton lining of his shapka, the skin of his scalp contracted.

—What’s your plan, Kronauer, you sham soldier? the masked form whispered.

Word for word what he had thought at the start of the main road, right when he had hesitated beneath the gusting wind.

—What were you planning to do, you crummy fighter, actually kill Solovyei? And how would you do it, and why? And what are you going to do if you don’t succeed? . . . And who will you leave with, if you don’t fail? . . . For where? With Myriam Umarik and Barguzin, the model couple, a nymphomaniac and a dying man? With Samiya Schmidt and her anti-male books, if she’s still alive? With that ice princess Hannko Vogulian? . . . Where would you go? What would you do? . . . Did you think about that? . . .

The voice was deformed by the thick leather membrane it had to pass through, and it reproduced perfectly the questions Kronauer had formulated on the street. It sounds like my voice, he thought despondently. Not completely, but it sounds like it. But no, he thought, I’m not the one talking.

The masked creature modulated and interrupted his speech, as if it was remembering the rough outlines of a song rather than anxious reflections, and certainly as if it didn’t attach any importance to the text it was speaking. When it had finished its recitation, it repeated it completely, but this time raising its tone and scattering whining or mocking notes throughout the sentences. The result was atrocious. Then it was quiet.

This could only have been a sleight of hand by this dirty magician, Kronauer thought. It’s his way of doing things. A recording through a membrane and, when it ends, he goes over it again. And even if it’s not him hiding beneath this disguise, it’s clearly one of his creatures.

He held his rifle steadily and his index finger was ready to pull the trigger, but, as he still had his doubts about the target, he waited a little longer.

He knew that, if the gun went off, the bullet would go right into the other’s torso.

There’s no point in holding off, he thought.

Do it, he thought. Either way I’m screwed.

And he fired.

•      The other form took the shot and slumped forward as if he had just been hit in the stomach with a sandbag rather than a bullet, then he stepped back and crept to the left and only then did he begin to emit squeaks that didn’t resemble screams of pain, but rather grotesque groans like angry clowns in circus performances. The moans echoed in the hall and Kronauer, galvanized by an adrenaline rush, sped toward the door, intent on seeing the wounded thing’s status and, if needed, to finish it off. The floor of the storeroom was covered, it was dark, and he lost time stumbling over boxes containing television or computer screens. His heart beat a fast rhythm, his temples were swollen and pulsating. When he came out into the hall, the wounded thing was making its way outside. It had swiftly crossed the hall, opened the door, and was already disappearing outside.

There wasn’t any trace of blood on the tile floor.

I got him, Kronauer thought. But the bleeding hasn’t gone on long enough to soak his clothes. Soon it’ll make its way down his stomach and his legs.

He was a little annoyed to see that his victim was stable enough to escape the building.

But that was a deadly blow, he thought. It went right through his stomach. He’ll die in the street.

He crossed the hall as well, almost running as the murderous excitement of the hunt caught hold of him, and he wanted more than anything to be sure that he hadn’t missed his mark. He wanted to see his prey lying in the snow, its coat open on a gaping wound, he wanted to walk up to it, lean over it, hear its death-rattles, and pull off its filthy head cover.

•      In the main road, day was nothing more than a memory. The last gleams of light reflected off the ground. Kronauer’s gaze swept the area and saw nothing. The snow kept falling with the same intensity as before. The wind blew intermittently, without any fixed direction, in violent gusts followed by unforeseen calm.

Where’d it go? Kronauer wondered.

On the steps, he only saw the footprints he had left right before going into the Soviet building. Nobody had gone down the steps recently. If the wounded thing wasn’t a ghost, it still had to be on the threshold.

Tense, ready to fire a second time, Kronauer inspected the esplanade, looked behind the columns decorating the façade. There was no possible hiding place and the snow was unbroken.

Once again, Kronauer felt the skin on his scalp contracting in fear beneath his shapka. He crouched down and carefully scrutinized the traces on the ground. Nobody, aside from himself, had trod on the steps. The adrenaline that had propelled him outside, which had driven him forward like a predator sure of his deed, was already so diluted that it no longer had any effect. He felt his legs shaking nervously.

Solovyei, he thought. Don’t think I’m impressed by your wizardry. Your appearances, your disappearances—don’t imagine for one second that it has an effect on me. It’s just smoke and mirrors. I’m not fooled.

But the backs of his legs and his calves showed clear signs of weakness and he leaned against one of the columns. He had goose bumps.

The wind, which had relented, now increased and whirled around him. The snowflakes hurtled onto his eyelids, agglomerations of stars. He also felt them pounding on his hands. He didn’t have icy fingers yet, but he knew that in a few moments he would no longer be able to count on them to pull the trigger at the right moment. He hoisted his rifle over his shoulder and dug his hands into his pockets.

It was night. The Levanidovo’s streetlamps didn’t light up, whether because Samiya Schmidt had destroyed the public lighting the previous night, or because Solovyei had deliberately turned them off in order to have an advantage in the darkness. The village seemed dead. Nobody had come down the hill after the work day at the warehouse. The kolkhozniks, the back-up workers recruited from the hereafter, and Solovyei’s daughters stayed up there, in the warmth, with ionizing rays and the Gramma Udgul. Maybe they had considered it wise not to venture just then into the snowstorm, or rather, predicting the bouts of violence in the village, they had decided to wait until calm was restored. They must be up there, getting ready to spend a night by the well, Kronauer thought.

He had the impression of being all alone in the heart of the Levanidovo, for a duel with Solovyei and its first round finished just now in an unintelligible way. Unintelligible and unnerving.

He scanned the street, which the natural brightness of the snow allowed him to see. Shades in the shadows. Dark masses. Incessantly moving ridges, whirling or vertical. Clear spaces that sheer habit forced him to say were white.

Not a window was lit.

The village disappeared.

The snow whistled in gusts that whipped across his face.

When the wind increased, the flakes hit the Soviet’s columns with a flurry of sharp, almost metallic noises.

Nothing living appeared.

I’m going to wait here one moment, he thought. Watch what happens and think about what I should do.

The snow beat against his eyelids, his mouth. He shook the cotton strip that covered his ears and wiped the belt holding his rifle on his shoulder. He quickly put his icy hand back in his coat.

Not worth it if I end up with joints frozen solid, he thought.

•      He pulled away from the column he’d been leaning against, and he went down the stairs, then began to walk against the wind for about twenty meters. The street was dark, but there were enough landmarks for him to walk straight. The snow and the wind kept pushing him around. He went to Hannko Vogulian’s house and he tried to open the door. Contrary to what had practically been a rule in the village, it was locked. He leaned against it and aimed his weapon at the Soviet. If someone had come out at that moment, he would have shot regardless of the target or its resemblance or lack thereof to the president of the kolkhoz. He stayed there for a minute, plagued by freezing gusts, with the ice crystals clinking on his fur coat, his shapka, his shapka’s earflaps. He held his rifle for a steady, intuitive shot, enough to hit any creature that might appear on the steps of the Soviet. But nobody came out. Without hoisting his rifle back over his shoulder, he dusted its upper side, wiped his hands of the layer of snow covering them, and slipped them once more into his pockets to warm them back up.

The snow that had gotten into his pockets melted reluctantly.

He hadn’t been able to focus on a specific plan of action.

What if I left for good right now? he thought. What if I went to the forest? There’s a hut near the first rows of trees, I can spend the night there, and then . . . Then, good-bye, Radiant Terminus . . .

Of course not, he corrected himself. I have to avenge Vassilissa Marachvili first. I have to finish off this monster. And besides, I’d have trouble finding that old hut, in the darkness and the wind.

Then he thought of Vassilissa Marachvili again. He forced himself to dredge up images of his short time with her. The images were poor, repetitive, and lifeless. A smiling, timeless face, always turned toward him at the same angle. Her body outstretched in the grasses at the moment he’d left her. A kiss at twilight, behind Ilyushenko’s back, her lips pressed against his, hands wrapped around his back, but, ultimately, they were anonymous sensations, as those he’d experienced with other girls. He had to admit that the attachment he felt for her was now more abstract than actual. Really, only Irina Echenguyen was permanently etched in his memory, and behind the shock he’d felt when he’d discovered Vassilissa Marachvili’s body, a body that had been soiled magically, worked over magically by Solovyei to restore life or quasi-life, beyond the disgust and rage this discovery had provoked in him, he realized that his desire to kill the president of the kolkhoz had murkier roots.

Not worth nitpicking, Kronauer, he said soundlessly, half-opening his lips to blow on the flakes that had settled there, you also want to gun down Solovyei the alpha male, because it’s the elder who’s dominating the Radiant Terminus pack. That’s a reason from the Mesozoic or Cenozoic eras. That’s from the night of time and for you it’s not honorable.

His mouth barely moved. He chewed as many flakes as words and, at the end of each clause, he sighed.

There’s some cock’s language behind all this, he kept thinking silently. You can’t bear that the kolkhozniks circle around their president like planets around their sun, you really blame those three girls for having been accomplices to their father while you came and went in the Levanidovo like an idiot. You want to punish Solovyei for the abominations that Vassilissa Marachvili had to suffer. You have a gun and you want to shoot anything that moves. But, beneath all that, beneath the awful sludge of murder and vengeance, there’s your spasms of a frustrated male machine, there are hundreds of millions of years of the animal cock that order your actions and cock’s gestures and your cock’s thoughts. And more than anything, that’s what there is.

•      At that moment in his speech it seemed that someone was coming down the main street, down the middle, up by the Pioneers’ House.

It was a quiet spot between the gusts, and the snow fell straight down. It was dense and black, in less and less airy snowflakes, covering every sight in a thick and very, very dark gray curtain.

The form Kronauer had imagined seeing walking from the Pioneers’ House disappeared in the darkness and then reappeared, still moving, but without having truly progressed. In reality, despite shaking its arms and wriggling its waist, it was buried in the snow to its knees and was at a standstill. It appeared to be moving. It appeared to be theatrically and grotesquely moving. The massive black coat that protected it prevented any clear determination of whether it was male or female. Its face was hidden beneath a scarf and on its head was a gigantic hat, a sort of incredibly thick Turkmen astrakhan hat with unreasonably long fur, almost as voluminous as the travel bag used as a mask for Solovyei’s first creature. It called to mind a blazing sphere that didn’t blaze, a burned-out sun flinging in every direction not rays, but its long frozen tentacles.

Kronauer took aim. The black coat was fifty or sixty meters away. He didn’t know his rifle well and it wasn’t a sniper weapon, but he felt that the bullet would fly toward its goal and hit hard, right in the torso.

What if it was one of Solovyei’s daughters? he suddenly thought. What if it was Myriam Umarik?

The other’s wriggling certainly did remind him of the voluptuous undulations that often shook Myriam Umarik’s belly and rear. But the coat erased all bodily shape, the snow blurred the image, the night prevented all certainty. At this distance and in the darkness, Kronauer was ready to shoot at someone whose identity and intentions he couldn’t be sure of.

I can’t do that, he told himself. That doesn’t make any sense.

The black coat in his line of sight had stopped moving. It was now a black stack topped with a sort of black, burned-out star. It was stuck in the snow, between the Pioneers’ House and the communist cooperative. Its immobility made a shot aimed at it even more absurd.

On Petrification Considered as a System of Defense, he remembered. A post-exotic work that had been republished at the time he’d met Irina Echenguyen, and which had provoked controversy and several arrests. On pretext of being humorous, the book flirted with several counterrevolutionary positions. Irina Echenguyen hadn’t finished it and had criticized it harshly.

He thought furtively of Irina Echenguyen, trying not to remember her unhappy end, then, his finger curled around the trigger, he went back to scrutinizing the petrified form. He stayed there for half a minute, still certain that the tiny movement of his finger on the trigger could send a warhead toward his target and it would land dead-center. The wind hadn’t picked up. The snow hailed down on the collar of his coat, on his arms, on the Simonov’s breech. At the other end of the bullet’s possible trajectory, the black coat was in the middle of the road and, powdered bit by bit with ice, it began to whiten in the darkness.

Kronauer lowered his weapon. He had the idea of shooting at several meters in front of the immobile form, in order to see its reaction and make a decision on the fate that awaited it, but when he started moving and shifting his line of sight, his index finger pressed impatiently on the trigger and the shot went off. The explosion deafened him, he shut his eyes. He opened them immediately, but at that exact moment he saw a light at the edge of his field of vision. A burst of light on his left. Without having taken the time to see if the black fur coat had been hit or not, he turned his head toward the Soviet.

Someone had just appeared on the doorstep, aiming the weak beam of a flashlight at the steps as if to examine Kronauer’s footsteps engraved in the snow. Thousands of snowflakes could be seen speeding by in the faint yellow cone that the light projected. The person holding the flashlight was dressed in a dog-fur or wolf-fur coat, and on its shoulders, enveloping and hiding its head, it bore a sort of extravagantly proportioned leather handbag.

Kronauer quickly shifted the direction of his rifle, aimed at the half-suitcase occupying the top of his adversary, and shot. The other gave a sharp squeak, turned off its flashlight, and disappeared back into the Soviet. For eight or ten seconds, there came a string of groans that seemed insincere and strange. The screams echoed powerfully in the hall. Then everything went quiet.

At that moment, the wind picked up.

The snow slapped Kronauer; he suddenly realized that he had started to breathe as if after a violent effort.

The street whirled.

The wind began to whoop around the Levanidovo. Masses of ice burst around Kronauer, on all the vertical surfaces beside him and on his coat.

He was able to see less and less. By the Pioneers’ House, if the black coat was still in the same place, it couldn’t be seen any longer.

The night promised to be a long one.

•      His rifle pointed straight ahead, Kronauer crossed the road and went to the Soviet. The light was meager. The wind threw screaming bursts of snow on him and pushed him violently to the side, without really knocking him over, but forcing him to weave. The chill bit into the tops of his hands. His right finger, which wavered between the trigger guard and the trigger itself, was about to lose its ability to feel. He moved it and pressed it against the wood carcass so as not to risk an accidental shot. The wood was as icy as the metal. Before going up the steps, he looked all around. The snow beat on his eyelids and, past the first few meters, he couldn’t make out anything but gray whistling. In the darkness he, too, had become an uninterpretable, half-animal, dangerous form.

He went up the steps carefully, more out of fear of slipping than out of any worry of an assault from the shadows. All sorts of attacks were possible—a gunshot, a knife stab, an ax blow, hand-to-hand combat with an adversary weighing twice as much as he did, who would immediately rip away his rifle as well as half his hand. All sorts of attacks. However, in the current confrontation, he still saw himself more as hunter than hunted. He paid attention to the ground, but he was certain that things were going well. The ice under the thin layer of snow was threatening. It was of a good thickness and wouldn’t shatter when he set his foot on it.

Without skidding and without incident, he entered the shadowy space of the hall and shut the door behind him. The blizzard’s infrequent groans could still be heard, but so much more weakly that instead of counteracting they underlined the silence that reigned on the ground floor and throughout the entire building.

On the lookout, Kronauer stayed immobile for a long while by the door. At least a full minute. His index finger was in place again to pull the trigger. He tried to catch a movement or breath nearby or far off in the building, but he couldn’t catch anything. After this bout of vigilance, he brushed the bulk of the snow he’d carried off his body and his weapon and, as he’d already done earlier, he shook his boots and kicked them against the wall. The noise reverberated in the hall’s emptiness. He didn’t take any care to be discreet. He knew that his entrance couldn’t have gone unnoticed and that his adversary, if he was still in the area and watching him from the shadows, knew his position down to the centimeter.

In order to hear what was around him better, he had untied the string that kept his shapka’s earflaps folded over his cheeks. Wherever he was hidden, his adversary didn’t make himself shown. Paradoxically, the light in the hall was better than on the street. The natural brightness of the snow, here, wasn’t thwarted by whirlwinds. It filtered weakly through the windows, but it was enough for Kronauer to get his bearings and distinguish the whitewashed walls from the black openings that faced him: the hallway leading to Solovyei’s apartments, the padded doors that opened onto offices, the entrance to the storeroom. He waited another few minutes for his fingers to warm up, for the snow on his weapon to melt, and for his eyes to acclimatize completely to the darkness. Then, although he hadn’t noticed any suspicious noise in front of him, he moved. As he walked with his rifle sometimes pointed toward the hallway, sometimes toward the various ground-floor doors, he went toward the storeroom. He hadn’t had the time, earlier, to take a third clip, and he wanted to have a good ammunition reserve. It was also a place he now knew and which, for this reason, seemed safer than elsewhere. He decided to go in, find new clips, wait a little, and think.

•      When he stepped on the threshold of the storeroom, a brutal sensation of déjà vu paralyzed him. I’ve already experienced this, he thought, as anxiety mounted. He stood in the doorway, firmly planted, massive as a bear and threatening the shadow in front of him. I’ve already stood like this on this threshold, he was thinking. He paused for a second, and then he regained the use of his muscles. He got a grip on himself. Without letting go of his rifle, he reached with his left hand toward the light switch. The switch produced a familiar noise of mechanical tumbling, but the ceiling light reacted with a dry click along with a flash that blinded Kronauer and didn’t illuminate anything. The bulb had burned out. For a second, the white and then red imprint of the incandescent filament stayed on Kronauer’s retinas, and, in front of him, he only had an image of total, undifferentiated blackness. It would be difficult to find the box with the cartridges, he groused, half to himself, half whispering. It’s too messy in there to find good cartridges just by feeling, he continued. His mouth moved, a weak moaning sound escaped. Then, out of some inexplicable desire to be heard or to hear himself, he began whispering distinctly, like a drunk person or a shaman warming up before a prayer.

—What are you imagining, Kronauer? he whispered. You want cartridges? . . . And who are you thinking of fighting against, you poor idiot? . . . You want to resist a siege? . . . Have you planned a massacre? . . . Do you have a plan, Kronauer, you sham soldier? . . .

As he formulated this last question, something heavy slammed into his torso, stealing his breath and forcing him to stagger forward. An indefinite mass, come out of the depths, had fallen upon him and hit him between the sternum and the waist. The fur and leather of his coat had partially absorbed the shock. He bent down and stepped back beneath the blow. Whatever had jostled him was sizable, contorted, and soft. He immediately rejected the possibility of a bullet shot from a weapon he hadn’t heard go off. The silence in the storeroom was resounding. It was more like a sand bag or a dead animal that had flown at him at full speed. A magical projectile or a dirty trick invented by Solovyei, he thought, then, as he was losing his balance, he took a second step backward.

He went back another meter, slipping on the tiles. He had groaned in surprise and pain and, now he was quiet. The sand bag or the corpse that had been thrown at him had bounced somewhere within the shadows and was now heavy and unmoving, doubtless across the threshold. A big dog or human corpse, he thought.

In the storeroom, nobody had given any sign of life. But it came from there, he thought. He stood up slowly. He still had in his stomach a feeling of a brutal weight. A dead animal, a big dog or a wolf, he thought. That’s what was thrown at me. Or someone’s body.

But that doesn’t make sense, he thought. He tried not to picture what had happened. Fear grew in his gut and he wanted to deny it completely.

Now he was in an upright position. Under his right sole, a small lump of ice had gotten stuck and caused his boot to slip to the side when he put his weight on it. His torso and his hips were aching. What I know is that I was attacked, he thought. He aimed the SKS at the depths of the storeroom and he shot twice. The bullets flew into the scrap metal, ricocheted. Something fell, a metal box, its contents scattered quickly, maybe coins or medals, then nothing. In the hall, the echoes of the detonation bounced from angle to angle with evident joy and diminished his bad feeling. The racket was considerable. Then the gunfire unquestionably belonged to the past and now Kronauer felt his heart beating between his sides and his throat.

He was currently standing within the black doorframe of the storeroom, in the center of a swirl of hot grease and powder. And, as no sign of life or death came from the darkness, he didn’t know what to do in the face of the shadows, in the face of consecutive magic spells, and in the face of the fear he kept pushing away but which came back again and again.

The fear. It grew, it disappeared, he drove it away. But it was there.

•      He ruled out entering the storeroom. No way to know if the two randomly released bullets had hit whoever was hiding in the room—the one who was lurking there, completely immobile and silent, doubtless neither wounded nor dead, holding his breath and waiting for the best moment to counter-attack. The president of the kolkhoz, or one of the servile creatures surrounding him in his hideous poems. In any case, someone who had enough magical powers to send flying a human or semi-human or animal corpse or maybe just a bag filled with organs and meat. Maybe, Kronauer thought, he’s planning for me to die of fear. He was ready to fire again and he focused on detecting any distant sound or movement. But he only detected absence.

He crossed the hall backward, constantly watching the black entrance of the storeroom. The light was meager but, once he felt a wall he could lean on against his back, he considered it enough to survey the theater of operations and he positioned himself in a corner. He was away from the windows. If traces of light beams came from outside, none would land directly on him. He felt like he had found a spot hard for a menacing gaze to apprehend. It was an absurd feeling, especially considering the adversary he was up against. But he had that feeling. The SKS in firing position, he moved his line of sight onto the storeroom entrance at moments, or onto the hallway entrance leading to Solovyei’s rooms, or the door leading to the street.

As he kept moving his rifle, he wasn’t discreet at all, and, having acknowledged that in any case he would be detected by the enemy, he allowed himself to move a little to warm up. He was no longer exposed to the glacial wind, and the coat Hannko Vogulian had selected for him was warm, his fur-lined boots protected him from the cold seeping out of the floor, but anxiety had weakened his body and he was still shivering. His hands didn’t warm up. He breathed on them and he shook himself a bit to get his blood flowing again. His stomach still had the sensation of having made contact with this sizable mass that had been thrown at him from the darkness and the more he thought about it, the more he was certain that something vile had hit his stomach. A corpse or a huge bundle filled with grease and meat, he repeated as he tapped his feet on the tiles, as much to increase the circulation through his legs as to make noise and distract his body from the disgust and fear infecting it.

When he pointed his rifle at the storeroom, he forced himself to scrutinize the thick shadows and glimpse this mass that, after having jostled him violently, had fallen on the threshold. It should have been just beyond the entrance or on the tiles, close to the door. But the tiles seemed bare of all presence. But I’m sure I haven’t been dreaming, he thought. It hit me sideways up here, it was heavy, it flew toward me at full speed and then I heard it fall on the ground. It has to be slumped over the threshold. Or it crawled back without my noticing. It crawled back, it moved without making any noise, it went back where it came from.

I should have shot at it right then, he scolded himself.

Who knows if it’ll throw itself at me again before I can do something to it, he thought. As fast or even faster than the first time. As fast as a bullet.

He stayed calm for several minutes. He aimed at the storeroom entrance, a black-on-black rectangle. A fatal shot could also come from there and, if it was well-aimed, he would be unable to respond. The idea of taking a bullet didn’t bother him. Death wasn’t one of his wishes, but he accepted the prospect, partly because he was a soldier and partly because it would be a quick way of leaving the Levanidovo and its deleterious atmosphere, its interregnums and its oneiric traps. And at least that would put an end to this hunting amok, this anger amok, and this fear amok, and all that went with it—total regression to primitive hunting, intelligence sidelined for instincts, and, especially, deep down, an irrepressible desire to kill, to slaughter, and to hurt, even if he couldn’t remember anymore what had brought about this nightmare.

I don’t even know anymore whether or not I’ve swerved away from Marxist principles, he thought. Then he didn’t think anymore.

Half an hour went by. Kronauer started shifting around again. Sometimes he stood, sometimes he squatted. Most of the time, he pointed his SKS at the storeroom’s opening, but nothing moved and he had no reason to fire.

•      A preternatural peace reigned in the Soviet. Aside from a few gestures Kronauer made, there was no longer any movement. Only the noises from outside filled the space. The noises came from outside and from darkness.

The blizzard’s assaults in the street.

The sheets of snow scattering violently against the windows.

The gusts of wind successively filling the street.

And, within the walls, nothing to report.

Waiting. Interminable watching. Sometimes a heavy breath, a worried hiccup Kronauer couldn’t hold back.

Darkness. A dark wait. The minutes went by, each one more oppressive than the last. Am I fighting or sleeping? Kronauer thought. A dark uncertainty.

Another half an hour passed.

Unable to bear it any longer, Kronauer energetically crossed the hall, stood at the entrance to the storeroom, and shot three bullets in a row, aiming at the directions where he thought someone could be lying or standing. The bullets hit hard obstacles, walls. He heard metal things flying off and falling with a racket to the floor. Clearly no living or dead adversary made of meat and grease had received a projectile. The empty cartridge cases bounced on the tiles by Kronauer’s feet. He let the detonation’s echoes, the gunpowder smell fade away. The short seconds of the fusillade stretched out a bit and then dissipated. They hadn’t come to anything. Kronauer had hoped for a scream, a sigh, or at least the sound of steel piercing an enemy body. But nothing of the sort came. He didn’t move his rifle, he stood unmoving in front of the door, as if puzzled by the absence of any result of his offensive, or maybe also meditating before a hail of bullets came, because he knew he was overwhelmingly exposed to any return fire. He wanted to rock like a bear confronted by some danger, or like a madman confronted by himself, but he held back. In a flash, he wondered if he shouldn’t say something, as much to speak to the threats surrounding him, which were becoming less and less human, as to hear some sign of life from himself. Then the idea faded away. The rest of his thoughts were confused. He stayed there for a minute, perhaps two, frozen and indecisive. Then, since nothing had happened, he left.

•      He went past the padded doors that opened onto the administrative rooms and, after a last look around the empty hall, he went into the hallway leading to Solovyei’s private domain. Now he had gone into a part of the building he didn’t know, and he went slowly. For some unknown and unclear reason, he felt that he wouldn’t encounter any traps on this floor, which didn’t prevent him from being ready to shoot at the slightest shift in the thick darkness, at the least impression of a suspicious presence. He went a meter and a half into the hallway, then two meters. The floor was parquet, the boards groaned. The noise announced his position at every moment. He suddenly hunched down and froze. What good is curling up going to do you, Kronauer? he thought. You’re making too much noise, even your coat is whispering when it rubs against the floor. You’re drawing attention to yourself. Is that what you want? . . . You want a bastard to gun you down before you’ve had time to clean out Radiant Terminus?

After several moments of thinking, he decided that the darkness put him at a disadvantage and that he had nothing to lose by trying to turn on the lights. He got back up and went back to the beginning of the hallway. The parquet creaked violently beneath him. All while aiming his weapon at the darkness, he now walked with his left hand along the wall. It didn’t take him long to feel the protruding shape of a light switch. He immediately flicked it. The president of the kolkhoz hadn’t thought to cut off the power, or he hadn’t considered it necessary. Right away, Kronauer found himself beneath three ceiling lights that illuminated the full length of the corridor. The corridor was empty. There wasn’t anybody to shoot at.

The décor didn’t seem particularly special, and after the action of the previous hours, and beneath this strong light, it was astonishingly banal. Everything was painted in bright colors, light yellow, administrative green. The air smelled of warm radiators and varnish. On Kronauer’s right, a set of stairs led up. Kronauer aimed his SKS at the steps and then lined it up with the hallway. He was certain that it was useless to go up higher. A certainty without any basis, but a firm one. At the far end was a set of stairs that led down. It’s that way, he thought. He had practically no reason, these scrawny and meager phrases had simply occurred to him.

Two rooms opened onto the hallway. These were soulless spots, with office furniture, mismatched or damaged chairs. Waiting rooms rather than living rooms or bedrooms. In the first one there was a couch and a low table on which a shattered carafe and glasses black with dust waited pitifully. His rifle pointed forward, Kronauer kicked the door, turned on the light, swept his eyes over the space, then he went back into the hallway. In this way he respected the theater of commando intervention in confined environments. Somehow he was still convinced that Solovyei wasn’t hiding there, that Solovyei was waiting for him somewhere, in the basement, and he was only delaying the moment when he would have to go underground to find his target. Once he had come out of the second room, he knew that he couldn’t postpone the next scene any longer. He would have to go down the stairs at the end of the hallway.

•      He didn’t count the steps. There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five. When he reached the last one, he was warned by a noise from above. In the doorframe appeared a silhouette, whose head was hidden by a plastic barrel in which two holes had been punched to see. This receptacle had been cut out to be carried on its shoulders, and so it more or less resembled a monstrously proportioned cosmonaut’s helmet. In contrast, and despite being enlarged and inflated by a foxtail coat, the intruder’s body seemed to be modestly sized.

Maybe it’s a woman, Kronauer thought.

Sure, maybe a woman, but, whoever this is, it’s one of Solovyei’s creations, he finished.

He aimed the rifle toward the hallway and fired. A first bullet doubtless too high and, immediately, a second bullet that hit home.

Man or woman or something else, the silhouette jumped back and, once out of sight, it began to let out glum and inarticulate, sharp screams of pain, despair, or fury.

Kronauer was glad not to have missed his mark. The screams astonished him and tore his heart, but the stupid delight of a hunter prevailed, this physical satisfaction that predators felt when killing. There it is, he thought without elaborating.

He looked up for several more seconds. His hands were shaking.

His amok killer’s hands, insane hands inflicting death upon every person he met. They shook.

The screams suddenly stopped. He was standing on the last step of the stairs and he felt himself deep inside the frenetic shudder of having killed.

The light up above went out.

Of course it went out, he thought, without any further explanation.

•      He went down the last step and he was in the boiler room and, immediately, some of his energy came back. Now he was very close to Solovyei’s nest. Now he was making his way into a territory he knew nothing about and where any attack against him might be fatal. It would be hard to protect himself, he thought. The place was illuminated and, despite the maze of tubes, cables, pipes, and machines, it seemed to provide few hiding places. Kronauer gritted his teeth, took several steps, and stood behind a cistern set on cinder blocks. At least this way he would avoid a shot to his face, and it was also a good vantage point for familiarizing himself with the space where the battle might now take place.

Beyond the installations that stretched out exuberantly over every surface of the basement, there were entrances to tunnels. Kronauer saw them and didn’t have any intention of venturing into them. You have no idea at all what’s in these tunnels, he thought. Don’t get in there, it’ll be the end of you at the first curve. He had never been warned of such a subterranean network which, as was known, allowed the villagers to circulate when too-low temperatures and walls of snow otherwise prevented it. They never told me about anything like this, he thought. Just like with Vassilissa Marachvili, they kept me out of the loop. They didn’t share any details about anything. Rage filled him again. He swore under his breath against the Levanidovo’s inhabitants, against Solovyei, curses in Russian and in camp Mongolian, in mass-grave German. They pricked me with their dirty phonograph needles, he moaned, they numbed my intelligence to the bone, they always set things up so I wouldn’t think hard or even very much, wouldn’t understand their little schemes!

He caught himself. The rifle was shaking again in his hands, this time more out of anxiety than out of murderous excitement. He leaned against the wall. You have to focus, Kronauer, this is war. Don’t waste your energy complaining. The enemy may have already aimed their own weapons at you, this isn’t the moment to flinch. He whispered several more Mongolian swear words to take heart once again. In a few moments, his trembling had subsided. He had managed to find at least some of the calm needed to attack and to try to kill.

In front of him, for dozens of meters, the complex, disorganized, and absurd conglomeration that the dying engineers had conceived to guarantee the Levanidovo’s electrical permanence stretched out. While figuring out the configuration of the place, Kronauer had a thought for these heroes and heroines, these unparalleled technicians sent by the capital to do the impossible and save the population, or at least assure the survivors a minimum of comfort. Our own, he thought. These courageous men and women who didn’t hesitate at the moment of sacrifice, who had said good-bye to rest and sleep, with the self-abnegation that had always characterized the partisans, the unrepentant, and the egalitarians pure and simple. In less than three weeks, while their intestines and their cerebellums turned into ashen rags, they had started on the circuits needed for the turbines to turn and the current to improve. Then they had finally separated from their painful bodies, from their nauseating flesh.

Kronauer put an end to this fraternal homage and for the next minute he was completely occupied with military scouting. To get close to the core he would have to breach a complicated lattice of tubes and pipes, go past pumps, cisterns, oil furnaces turned into steam boilers, containers repurposed as maintenance pools, as well as tar-coated doors that opened onto nothing, which were perhaps intended to be confinement spaces but hadn’t been finished in time. This compact universe was bogged down with swaths of cables and a multitude of junction boxes that hung and snaked in every direction. The damage Samiya Schmidt had wrought the previous night had added steam leaks or oil and hot-water runoffs along the walls. The cement Kronauer was preparing to walk along was filthy with black streaks. Who knows if this is heavy water, lively water, and deathly water, or tar, he thought. He noticed the surface, which seemed to shine, several bubbles that occasionally increased in size then burst. Who knows, he thought.

•      He began to make his way to the core. He didn’t know many of the kolkhoz’s secrets, but, thanks to the indiscretions of people here and there, he knew that Solovyei had the habit of sleeping or resting in the Soviet’s boiler, close to the nuclear core. He had learned that and, a week earlier, he had dreamed that he himself had come into a small nuclear plant, right behind Solovyei and intending to spy on him. Then he had seen Solovyei go into a compartment where tubes filled with rumbling matter reddened, shaking his peasant’s lambskin coat and delivering in front of the flames and for the flames an insane, incestuous poem. This dream-image had startled him when he had awoken, but he had forgotten it, and now it came back in full force, blending without much distortion into the real world. Once again he was in a small nuclear plant, on a path that led both to Solovyei and toward a space of radioactive embers, of shadows and magic. If there was a place where the president of the kolkhoz could be hiding, waiting for the wound that Samiya Schmidt had inflicted upon him to heal, it was certainly there.

•      The whole basement was bathed in warmth. Behind the mocking shields, the fissile material radiated. The pipes were burning. Some were covered with glints that looked like lines of insects, and, after sizzling for several seconds, disappeared. Glimmers appeared, dimmed by the electrical light, but white, blue, sometimes a shiny jet-black. The concrete walls emitting the oven’s vibrations were barely approachable. At the entrance to one of the tunnels, the evacuation tubes aspirated the clouds expelled by turbines and drained them out by the forest, but the gigantic joints just a bit upwind were already exuding steam. The continuous jets of vapor didn’t help the temperatures. Beneath his heavy fur coat, Kronauer was now smothered. Sweat rolled down his entire body. On his forehead, he could feel that the levee formed by his shapka’s soaked brim was about to break. Drops were already streaming down his temples, oozing toward his eyelids, stinging his eyes. In the spots where he was holding it, his rifle was wet. He wiped his right hand on his coat. Its fur had imprisoned the molten snow. He set his hand back under the trigger guard. It was even damper than before.

•      I shot how many times? he asked himself abruptly. How many bullets now?

He tried to count the shots he had taken in the building and on the street, but he lost count and he left the question unanswered. He had come too close to Solovyei’s nest to uncock his gun and look at the magazine, or resume his memorization exercises. Nor was this the moment to remove his right hand and rummage in his pocket for the clip he had commandeered from the storeroom. He wasn’t very sure that a cartridge was left in his weapon’s breech. He hoped there was, but he wasn’t completely sure.

Now he went, centimeter by centimeter, along the wall of a concrete cube where the nuclear core the engineers and the heroes had cobbled together was humming. He had reached Solovyei’s nest. The wall smelled of carbonized meat, of actinides. Pipes zigzagged over the ground, crossed at every moment with waves of glimmers that went out and then almost immediately came back, like shivers, like a light feather raised by the wind, like a phenomenon connected to life, to living, or some sort of similar death. The glimmers were gray, sometimes orange. When Kronauer set his foot on one of these tubes, the groaning stopped, but he felt like they were going through his body by his bones, and, a second later, the SKS’s barrel in turn bristled with small plumes. On the ground were oily puddles, shaken by ripples, unusually shiny. Kronauer avoided them, but when he couldn’t do otherwise, he stepped in them with disgust.

Then he made his way toward the entrance to the concrete cube he had just circumvented. He couldn’t get to the actual entrance without crossing a partial barricade of tarry cables and burning pipes. So he was facing a hardened mattress, filthy or powdered with soot, which was surrounded with naphtheous water and shadow. An overwhelming smell of Bakelite in fusion meandered through the black space. As Kronauer had both predicted and dreaded, Solovyei was in his nest. He was sitting on the mattress, his legs crossed, his boots thrown thoughtlessly on his bed, making the place just a little dirtier.

For no reason, this insignificant detail shocked Kronauer. Look at that, this brute, he thought suddenly, this animal, he puts his boots where he lies down to sleep.

•      The president of the kolkhoz had a horrible head wound. Already on the path to recovery, certainly, thanks to the unguents and lively water that the Gramma Udgul had applied at the end of the previous night, and because Solovyei belonged to a category of creatures who reconstituted themselves quickly no matter the extent of physical damage suffered, but it was still absolutely hideous, this wound. The iron pipe that Samiya Schmidt had buried in his eye was still there. Solovyei had doubtless asked someone to pull it out, or maybe he himself was in charge of doing that, but the pain had hampered the operation and the pipe was sticking more than ever out of his left ear, streaked with lumpy brain matter and bits of bone. On that side, Solovyei’s mess of hair was sticky, as if coated in sludge. The space from where the iron pipe had entered to the left ear was nothing more than a pocket of blood-soaked pulp. The kolkhoz president’s face had lost its leonine presence and it took effort to see something other than mutilation and suffering. His working eye was shut. He opened it halfway and for a fraction of a second Kronauer felt all the contemptuous malice Solovyei was capable of, all his baleful mocking, and his rage.

On the mattress, there were untied bandages, compresses soaked with brownish liquids, clothes filthy with lumps like cowpats. And a semi-rigid leather bag, which had been reused and cut out to be used as a massive mask.

He took off his mask, Kronauer thought. Then, under the blow of the gaze that Solovyei had shot him just then, he wasn’t able to finish whatever it was. I was at war, he thought. Broken faces, I’ve seen them. It always has an effect.

Yes, he thought sadly. It always has a hell of an effect.

He stood upright in a lake of black liquid.

•      Kronauer’s rifle pointed right at the upper part of Solovyei’s stomach, right where his neck began.

The discreet whirring of turbines.

A disgusting odor of molten Bakelite.

Other odors, of hot metal, of livid plutonium.

Solovyei sitting on a dirty mattress, a homeless person caught in a cave.

Around the mattress, the ground covered with blistering water, thick like ink.

Solovyei’s mutilated head.

His right eye suddenly wide open, cruel, golden.

The pipes crossing anarchically in the middle distance of the image, in front, behind, on the sides, forming miniature labyrinths, following the blueprints drawn by schizophrenic plumbers.

A dry sauna heat.

Sometimes short intense glimmers in the boiler room, like magnesium flames.

Flights of sparkles from the soldered joints, from the mattress, from Kronauer’s coat and rifle, from Solovyei’s wounds.

A door coated in a velvet of small unmoving flames.

Sometimes the lapping of black-black water, getting angry all on its own.

The nuclear hell behind the door.

Kronauer soaked in sweat, blinded by sweat, smelling all around him the scent of his fear.

Every so often, sniffling from Solovyei, then nothing.

Darkness.

Waiting.

•      Solovyei didn’t move, he just fixed his hypnotic eye on the man threatening him.

Kronauer, positioned to say several words before firing on the other one, thought for several seconds as to what he might say. Nothing came to him, no vengeful declaration, no argument justifying the execution to come. But there has to be something, he thought. No image blazed in front of him, no depiction of the crimes he could have accused the kolkhoz president of. Only with great confusion did he remember the reason he was there, in this basement, with a weapon of war aimed at a silent, wounded man. A woman appeared in his consciousness, but he didn’t recognize her, or did, but so poorly that she was merely a conventional shadow. He had forgotten what Vassilissa Marachvili had looked like before, during, and after the manipulations Solovyei had forced her to undergo. He saw Irina Echenguyen in his arms again, happy and young, then dying in the hospital, then dead, massacred. He remembered that someone had recently said to him “I’m with you,” certainly a woman, but he wondered if the phrase had been uttered in reality or in a dream. As for remembering the name of this woman who had assured him of her sympathy, and what sort of relationship he’d had with her, he was unable to remember. Maybe it was Irina Echenguyen again, or Vassilissa Marachvili, or one of Solovyei’s daughters, the youngest one, who had the guts to pummel Solovyei and bury an iron pipe in his brain. He didn’t even try to bring forth the name or the face of this daughter. He was exhausted. The bout of amok violence was reaching its end, and, like a seizure, it began its ebb by replacing his consciousness with a cloudy dough, full of incomplete images and tears. He felt tired, extremely tired. Not worth the trouble to say sentences, he thought. Not worth the trouble to dig through all the mud of your memory, Kronauer, he thought. A horrible fatigue fell upon him. His brain only focused on trifles: his smell of sweat, the dirty mattress, the fate of Marxism-Leninism.

He held onto his weapon. Well, I have nothing to say, he thought. I only have to finish the job.

With that, he pulled the trigger. The firing pin clicked in the void.

—Ah, I thought you were a good soldier, Solovyei remarked in a cheeky voice, distorted by his swollen mouth.

—I used up my clip, Kronauer explained.

He stood sheepishly, dazed, sweaty and hot, his hands numb.

Three seconds went by.

—Look at that, this brute, Solovyei said cruelly. This animal, he puts his boots where he lies down to die.

—What, what are you . . . Kronauer stammered.

He lowered his eyes, and then his head. The soles of his boots were plunged in a lake of black water. Beneath, something burning was trembling. Irradiated cement, or maybe already the indescribable matter one walks on during the forty-nine days after death, when at least one has courage or luck.

—So what, it’s just black water, he said.

It was black water, indeed, or oil, and as it had the properties of a mirror, he saw in it his own reflection. He saw, aside from a fur hat, a bestial killer’s physiognomy, his lightless gaze, and, almost immediately, a shovel or a spade coming down upon him. Someone had approached him from behind and, without warning, put him where he couldn’t hurt anyone.

So there it is, he thought, someone smashed in my skull.

Then he slumped down and lay there where Solovyei had predicted, in the black water.