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
