38

•      At the same moment, or perhaps a little earlier, let’s say for example thirteen hundred forty-two lunar months earlier, Myriam Umarik heard a noise in the distance and woke up. She had been dreaming that her father was visiting her in her house in the Levanidovo, that he had briefly seduced her, then broken all the furniture and all the windows and raped her. She had opened her eyes right at the worst of it, and at first she had trouble leaving behind her fear, overcoming her urge to vomit, and understanding that she was beyond Solovyei’s reach, in a reality less painful than that of her nightmare.

She stood up. She had fallen asleep sitting on the little bench that was an extension of the gatekeeper’s shed she had made her residence. She had moved there sixty-seven years earlier with her husband, the engineer Barguzin. The night was stifling and she went out to doze in the open air, in light clothes, not caring about the mosquitoes just as plentiful outside the shed as inside.

The sun had risen and sprinkled gold on the peaks of the birches. It was already warm. This was the end of July, in the middle of a heat wave.

She banged on the wooden partition just behind her, so Barguzin would know something was happening outside. Just out of sheer respect for propriety. In reality, over the years, Barguzin had been lying on the bed, inert and mute, and, as the Gramma Udgul wasn’t there anymore to rub his face with heavy-heavy water, then with deathly-deathly water, and then to revive him by pouring lively-lively water between his eyes, his state hadn’t changed.

—Hey Barguzin! she said in a raspy voice that couldn’t be heard by interlopers. I think somebody’s coming!

•      They had both fled the Levanidovo. Radiant Terminus had become unlivable. Shortly after the massacre, the provisional nuclear power plant had exploded in the Soviet’s basement, the accident had ended the energy and hot-water supply in the kolkhoz. A burning wave had set fire to the majority of the kolkhoz’s houses through the underground network. Most of the inhabitants no longer showed any signs of life. Solovyei wandered in the main road, inhaling the smoke and silent fumes, walking on the piles of burned debris, whispering or declaiming poems. He walked heavily and proudly as if nothing had happened, and he only calmed down at night, when he went to join the Gramma Udgul in her hangar, which had suffered less than the rest of the village.

Numb with cold and fear, still drawn to the old dream of collaborating with the Organs, Myriam Umarik and Barguzin had left Radiant Terminus a week before the thaw, without saying good-bye to anyone. They had stocked up on several pemmican loaves, enough to last them until spring and through all the winters to come. In a laminated envelope, able to resist decades of rain and snow, they had enclosed a letter addressed to the Regional Commission for Recruitment into the Organs, where they offered their services for all inspections, surveillance missions, or even executions of people’s enemies the Organs deemed necessary.

For lack of a post office, the letter hadn’t been sent, and even so Myriam Umarik and Barguzin both knew deep down that there was no longer a Regional Commission of the Organs, or any Organs, or even a population to monitor, that there was nothing of the sort for thousands of kilometers, but they felt that they had done something crucial, something that marked their separation from the kolkhoz and its demonic president, and that above all signified their return to general society, which was composed of the living, or at least the dead. And once they had found this gatekeeper’s hut after months of wandering, they had settled in with the idea that they would start a new existence there. They would make themselves useful by rigorously recording the passing trains and vagrants headed from the taiga to nowhere. They’d had enough basic Marxist-Leninist training to put themselves completely into policing power.

The line was closed down and no traveler got lost in the area. But they took their work seriously and always stayed on the lookout, certain that their responsibility was to monitor all movements in the region, both military and civil, and, in this spirit, every month they prepared exhaustive reports on the subject—orally because they didn’t have any paper to write them on.

•      Myriam Umarik got off the bench and looked in the direction of the noise that had woken her up. As there were trees and undergrowth all around, she could barely make out anything specific.

In front of the cottage, the rails had been immersed in grasses and, forty meters off, the tracks joined a grove of birches and disappeared. A thirty-year-old pine had taken root between two crossties and seemed to be positioning itself as the triumphant vanguard of further vegetation. In the other direction, the rails went on for three hundred meters, then sank into a burial mound. There were trees everywhere, with mingled scents, as was often the case on the edge of the taiga. Another time, the steppes had dominated the area, and the forest was now invading it little by little.

Beyond a little curtain of pines, Myriam Umarik saw movement, some colors that weren’t those of the forest, then it was hidden by a crease in the terrain, then it reappeared. Branches were audibly cracking and echoing under the mature trees.

Myriam Umarik’s heart pounded. She hadn’t seen anyone in years and she was afraid she no longer knew how to handle meeting a traveler. Suddenly, she realized she was half naked. She hurried into the hut to put on a skirt and wrap her shoulders in a shawl. She shook Barguzin, who didn’t react, and then she quickly went back out to the doorstep. Now she was standing next to the bench and she waited for the visitors to come.

It was a small caravan of peddlers like the ones who had gone from village to village even before the dawn of industrial capitalism. It was composed of three men, one a teenager, and two overburdened animals who seemed to have mutant bovines as their ancestors, and who more than anything looked like obstinate and mute masses, with hair that swept the ground and prevented her from determining the exact number of their feet. All gave off stifling fragrances of grease, which preceded them horribly for a good twenty meters and made Myriam Umarik want to vomit.

The men were wearing lambskin coats, they had colored shirts on, merchants’ hats, but their clothes were in such disrepair that the rags had no elegance at all. They had faces darkened by filth, and their beards were thick, which displeased Myriam Umarik, as she had lost all her hair in the Levanidovo while in contact with plutonium, and she had to be satisfied with wigs.

•      She let them approach as she stood stock-solid several meters from the hut, then she saluted them in the manner of the Altaic Mongols, which seemed most appropriate, welcomed them, and offered to slake their thirst. All three of them made faces and she went to find a pan filled with water that they would share greedily.

Two were fortysomething men, robust and extremely noisome, and the third was a young adult even dirtier than his elders. Myriam Umarik had trouble hiding her disgust, but she smiled at them and swayed from one foot to the other, which made her look like someone who urgently needed to urinate.

A conversation began. They were salvagers as well as peddlers. They scoured ruins and were looking for a refugee camp or a work camp to unload treasures and products. They asked Myriam Umarik about concentration structures in the area and about any paths that might lead to those.

—There’s nothing of the sort here, Myriam Umarik replied.

These individuals didn’t please her at all, their activities were clearly associated with those of the people’s enemies, and their fetid odors nauseated her.

Then they asked her what she was doing, in the forest, in this hut so far away from everything.

—I’m from the Second Soviet Union, Myriam Umarik declared nervously, while throwing back her head arrogantly. With my husband, here, we watch for trouble. Even in the most distant corners, the supreme law of the proletarian revolution reigns. Here we warn people not to stand on the tracks, to cross them carefully, not to ruin the common good. We alert the authorities to hooligans, suspects, and partisans of capitalism.

The three men laughed through their beards.

Then they tied her up. One of them went inside the hut to see whether the husband she had mentioned could pose a problem, then he came back to say that he was harmless. Then, in turns, they raped her.