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,
