23

•      I woke up later. Much later. I smelled terrible, like waste oil, rotting flesh, urine, world-weariness. Terrible oil, terrible flesh, shooter or shootee’s urine, truly terrible weariness. A horrifying smell. I budged a little and the stench intensified. It’ll only get worse, I thought. So don’t move.

All my joints ached. At the bottom of my rib cage, the pains were fiery. Every heartbeat sent a migrainous wave up my skull. It hit the back of my brain and scattered all over, through my jaw. It broke apart, it dispersed, but, before it had completely gone away, it was replaced by the next one.

I didn’t want to open my eyes. Get used to the pain and the smell first, I thought. Accept that banging in your head first. It’s flowing past your eye sockets, going from the greasy layer of your eyeballs to the upper half of the vitreous humor, reaching the top of your cheekbones, find a way to bear that. Then you’ll open your eyes or vomit or both.

Five minutes had gone by. I hadn’t moved a millimeter. I was stretched out by a wall. I could feel unfinished floorboards along my back and beneath me, covered with filth and dried mud. They exuded a smell of earth and wood, which I’d always appreciated even if those were also the smells of coffins. The stench isn’t coming from the ground, I thought. It’s coming from you.

My eyes were sealed shut by the detritus of tears and blood, and, as I had trouble scrubbing them clean, I gave up. So I must have been crying without realizing it, I thought.

I kept feeling horrible breakers in my skull and I took my time before adding to this backwash the inevitably bewildering images of the place I was in. Of course, I repeated. I must have been crying. Who knows if it was pain or sadness.

Several seconds fell away.

Or shame, I thought.

•      So what happened? Before? This night, the days before? Before I slept?

The memories pounded behind my eyes in the same rhythm as the waves of the migraine. Shreds of spumy images. Appeared, disappeared.

I don’t remember anything, I thought.

This observation was an exaggeration. But, for the moment, that was where I was.

•      The temperature wasn’t icy, but I didn’t mind that I was wrapped in a coat. Between my body and this mantle there were only indescribable, gray, formless rags like the ones on corpses in mass graves. My body reeked, these cloths gave off whiffs of grime, but the coat was what stank most. The fur had been soaked in grease, despair, and blood, the hairs were stickily clumped together. There were better things to protect against the cold.

I took several deep breaths even if, quite honestly, I had realized that I didn’t need or want much air. The mustiness was overwhelming, but the images were gone. Some streaks of memories were replacing them. They flashed haphazardly. A night of hunts, of murders. These facts came in bits and pieces. I had left the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse. I went down to the village in the snow. Wind, sharp needles of ice, harsh fall of night. Then and abruptly a sort of funereal dance full of violence and strange opacity. A sort of funereal dance, I thought. At some point you were carrying a gun, I thought. At some point you were talking with Solovyei. But about what, and what did you do with the rifle, no idea, I thought.

•      The cell wasn’t anything special in and of itself. A narrow wooden bunk held by two chains, and a hole for pissing that had to lead to a drainpipe outside. Instead of a window, air and light came through a small grille in the door, as well as from the hole for pissing.

So I’ve been transferred again, I thought.

It would be good if I could open my eyes, I thought. But they’re already open, I thought, trying to reason with myself. Otherwise I wouldn’t know about the grille, the chains holding these boards, the hole.

Try to open them anyway, I insisted.

For a minute or two, my head had been hurting less. I was still lying on the ground, I was barely moving, I didn’t feel like I was breathing, but who knew. New smells were still coming, horrible smells dirtying my nostrils, winding from my coat, from the air outside or from the caves and poorly shut openings of my flesh, including my liver, stomach, spleen, and marrow, the despicable nuances of these inner and outer stenches. It would be better if you opened your eyes now, I thought. Why better? I cut in. Because, lying like this among deleterious gases, you’ll end up understanding nothing anymore, fainting again, or depressing yourself. There’s nothing special to understand, I objected. I’ve been transferred. It’s already happened to me and it happens to everyone. Well, I thought. It’s true that it already happened to you and that it will happen to you one thousand and forty-seven more times, and even ten thousand one hundred and eleven times.

I shrugged. One thousand forty-seven and even ten thousand one hundred and eleven times were numbers that didn’t normally come out of my mouth and which more likely belonged to Solovyei’s language, to his curses and his threats. All the more reason to open your eyes, I thought, for no reason.

I opened my eyes. I had practically no headache anymore. Around me the darkness was complete. The grille, the hole for pissing, and the boards might have been nearby, but whether my eyelids were raised or I’d let them rest, the darkness was complete. It was complete, heavy, and oily.

So I’m in black oil, I thought. In heavy oil, in heavy-heavy oil, in heavy black oil.

•      Shit, I swore in Russian, Tyvan, and camp German, I’m here deep in black oil and it looks like I’ll be here for one thousand forty-seven years, or even for ten thousand four hundred and one full years!