A small morning breeze blew, a bit acrid, bearing the smell of herbs preparing for the end of summer and for death.
Barely risen, the sun had disappeared behind a barrier of clouds. The temperature in the air was autumnal. Birds chirruped somewhere in the stretches of degenerate buckwheat still separating Kronauer from the edge of the forest. A family of steppe songbirds that had survived, belonging no doubt to a species that was already nearly extinct. Kronauer listened to them for a minute, then they fell silent. They had detected a presence, they hid in the middle of the grasses, and they went quiet.
Five minutes later, he had crossed a ditch and entered the forest.
• The undergrowth wasn’t bushy, there were barely any obstacles between the trees. Here and there a fallen larch, a stretch of black mud, but, overall, practically nothing. He quickly disappeared among the trunks. The light diminished; it took on brown and red hues on account of the dead needles covering the ground. He remembered the spot on the horizon where the smoke had been visible the previous day, and that was the direction he went in, toward this hypothetical village. Nothing else was in his head.
In the forest a heavy silence prevailed. Kronauer’s footsteps. A muffled noise, crunches that did not echo. A few mushrooms. Chanterelles, puffballs, clouded agarics, cortinars.
As he steeled himself for hours and hours of humdrum walking, he saw, about a kilometer off to his left, a structure vaguely resembling an entrance to an underground tomb, and he approached. It was a fountain fed by a natural spring. The basin was protected by a stone arch. The water was scarce, just a few cupfuls at the bottom of a hollowed-out lava stream. It had scarcely any moss and looked clear. At the bottom of the basin, an emerald-green fern had taken root and spread out its wavy fronds: unnerving, splendid.
On the other side of the structure, sitting on the ground, was a young girl who seemed to be dead.
Kronauer hunched over the water and at first he lapped it up, like an animal. The water was cold. He held back from taking too much and stood up again, then he succumbed to temptation and went back to drinking.
Then he tried to fill the two bottles he had carried the whole distance on a string hanging from his neck. He couldn’t submerge them in the too-shallow basin. Nothing got through the bottle’s neck. He struggled for three minutes, moving the bottles every which way, but to no avail. The water flowed in through a small crevice under which there was no way to position a receptacle. The water did spill out of the stone basin when it overflowed and subsequently made its way back, naturally, down into the earth, but right now the flow was too meager and the shallow basin was half empty. He hung the bottles back around his neck and drank once more by cupping the water in his palms.
• The tinkling song of drops falling in the basin.
The taste of the water. A faint scent of peat, of slightly peppery silica. An impression of transparency, of infinity. The feeling of being able to experience that, of not being dead yet.
The silence of the forest.
The hammering of a woodpecker determinedly pecking at bark, a few hundred meters from the fountain.
Then, once again, silence.
• Kronauer turned toward the girl leaning against the fountain and looked at her. She was short, with a head barely bigger than a child’s and, indeed, she seemed to be barely out of adolescence. Judging by her unmoving eyelids, as well as her slightly disjointed pose, she had already left this world. Her clothes were tattered, with smudges of clay and tears. She was wearing pants and army boots, a military shirt that was unbuttoned at the top. Her chest was visible, as well as her left breast down to the nipple. Pearl-white skin, a dark areola that was nearly brown. It was a breast slightly larger than would have been suspected given her body’s slim proportions. Kronauer reached out. He grabbed the collar and pulled the fabric a bit to hide this flesh that had unintentionally come into view. He felt a breath on his wrist. The girl was breathing. He had thought she was just a corpse, but she was breathing.
Her physiognomy betrayed a Siberian ancestry, the memory of forebears come from nowhere to wander as nomads through the gaps of the taiga, back to the midst of nowhere, but overall, and because of both her clothes and her pale complexion, she looked like a Chinese woman who had traveled through the twentieth century to take part in a new campaign against the right-wings. Jet-black braids framed her face, accentuating her adolescent age. They were half undone and dirty. As usual for this sort of face, it seemed to be both very ordinary and very beautiful. Her left cheek was streaked with dirt and mud. The girl had fallen or gone to sleep on the ground before leaning against the fountain and passing out. Whatever had happened before she had lost consciousness, she had kept, beyond exhaustion and pain, a sharp and sullen expression. Her jaw was still clenched, her eyebrows were still furrowed. She had to be a sturdy sort. She had wanted to fight to the end against internal collapse, against night.
She opened her eyes and, seeing a man facing her who looked in every way like a lawless escapee from the camps, brought her hand to her shirt collar, as if the first measure to take upon waking had to be to protect her neck from a stranger’s gaze. Her fingers gripped the collar, slowly pulled tight her clothes, and then she lowered her arms in order to lie down on the earth. She folded up her legs and now she tried to stand up again. She didn’t have the strength. She couldn’t get up from the ground. A groan escaped her lips.
—Why are you looking at me? she asked, her voice cracking.
She was afraid. She was unable to stand upright, and, in this deserted place, a man towered over her without saying anything. How long had he been there? Dread shook her eyelashes and her lips.
—I come from the Red Star sovkhoz, Kronauer said.
He hadn’t spoken since the previous day and the words came out with difficulty. He wanted to explain his own weariness as quickly as possible. So she would understand that she had nothing to fear from him.
—I have comrades there. A man and a woman. The woman is dying. They have nothing to drink. I tried to fill some bottles, but I can’t. Is there a village a bit farther off?
The girl nodded confusedly and shut her eyes. She had dark brown eyes, a small mouth, which was very pale on her pale face. She held back another moan. She had to hurt somewhere, behind her forehead, in her body, and, in any case, she was very, very tired.
It wasn’t clear what this movement of her head meant, assuming that it was some sort of reply.
• —I have to get to this village, Kronauer said again. It’s a matter of life or death for my comrades.
—I don’t believe you, said the girl.
She didn’t open her eyes to talk. It seemed like she was talking while in sleep or in her death throes.
—Red Star is abandoned, she went on. It doesn’t exist anymore. Everything’s irradiated. Nobody lives there.
—Hang on, I didn’t say I lived in the sovkhoz, Kronauer said. I didn’t say that. We got there, all three of us, by following the railroad. We don’t have anything to do with the sovkhoz.
He stopped to take a breath. He was standing over this exhausted woman, but he himself felt ill as well. Every now and then, the trees swayed, split, the verticals waved. He felt like he was going to fall into some kind of coma, like the night before right on the edge of the forest.
He closed his eyes for three, four seconds.
•
