her for the next school year.
By a pitch-black moonless night, he called up the fires of the nuclear heart of the small kolkhoz reactor, and he entered death through the fire, as he often did during his self-imposed exile at Radiant Terminus. Once he had gone beyond the fire, he had gone looking for a teacher. His needs were twofold: first, the teacher in question had to agree to work in the Levanidovo without any question about salary or risk premiums, and second, he had to teach the class without lecherously ogling the three students, nearly all of whom were already nubile. Rummaging through the ashes of dreams, he unearthed a former political captain who had become a cooperative worker, and then been shot for corruption. All too happy to leave the shadows where he had moped around, the man—named Julius Togböd—accepted the job and started working in the Levanidovo school, and he brought his students up to a reasonable educational level. But, after three semesters, he started to lecherously ogle Hannko, the oldest of the three girls, and Solovyei had to intervene.
Solovyei, as father of the students and as president of the kolkhoz, reproached him, then knocked him unconscious with a shovel, and then dragged him into the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse to the well. Even though it wasn’t a workday, the Gramma Udgul had no problem letting him unscrew the heavy cover. The schoolteacher ended his journey two kilometers deep and whether he lecherously ogled the nuclear core or not could only be guessed at. The Gramma Udgul didn’t broach the topic in her conversations with the core, rightly considering it a private matter.
Following this disagreeable experience, the school still existed, but Solovyei’s daughters were asked to work as autodidacts. They went there in the morning and studied together lazily and disorganizedly. They read heavily, because the House of the People library was well-furnished with agitprop pamphlets and the classics of economics and literature. All the important male and female novelists of the Orbise were there: Ellen Dawkes, Erdogan Mayayo, Maria Kwoll, Verena Nordstrand, and a full spread of others. The girls read those authors in preference to technical works. Their father, however, warned them against the nihilistic nonsense of the poets and the tragic uselessness of their fictions. In spite of such admonishments, they steeped themselves in the post-exotic masterpieces. They understood that Solovyei, who prided himself on writing, was expressing an opinion that an author’s allure could overpower critical impartiality.
From time to time, an adult came to round out their incomplete education. He would tell them a story or share his experiences with them. The adults were rarely skilled at transmitting their knowledge; they had never learned how to teach, and they had never considered the question of adapting a curriculum for their small audience, but they took their job to heart. They did their best to explain how the world they had experienced worked. Some days, the Gramma Udgul taught the girls how to use the kolkhoz rifles and explained how to put together a firing squad, and other days, she described the liquidation campaigns she’d gone on, how the liquidators had died, her ongoing difficulties with the Party and her clashes with the medical commissions that had examined her in public to study the mechanisms of her immortality. The engineer Barguzin talked about electrical and nuclear installations, short circuits and angry atoms, and he also discussed his blackouts and his passages through death, as well as his reawakenings after being treated with heavy-heavy water, deathly-deathly water, and lively-lively water. He tried his hardest never to look his students in the face, out of fear that he might be accused of inappropriate conduct by Solovyei and end up prematurely at the bottom of the liquidation well. The one-armed man Abazayev came to gesticulate in front of the blackboard and recount once again the convoluted circumstances that had resulted in the loss of his right arm, a misfortune connected to his enlistment in the army that he sometimes wanted to link to a heroic act, sometimes to a surprise attack by capitalist henchmen, sometimes to hand-to-hand combat with a property manager, but according to Solovyei he had simply suffered from meningitis and poor medical care. When Abazayev was sufficiently enmeshed in discussing the reasons for his amputation, he changed the topic and gave directions for how to clean drainage canals, transport irradiated materials in carts, and smoke moles out of their burrows, three specialties he excelled at in the Levanidovo. The tractor driver Morgovian stepped in, as well. He didn’t talk often, but he came in. As there were no longer any working tractors in the village, he focused on the kolkhoz beehives and henhouses. He sketched out diagrams of hives on the blackboard and copied in chalk the list of symptoms for avian flu. He also abstained from looking at the three students who, over the years, looked more and more like beautiful young women well worth courting or marrying.
Other improvised teachers sometimes showed up in front of the students. They were usually former members of the Gramma Udgul’s liquidation team who hadn’t survived the radiation, or kolkhozniks who had died in the forest or in the open fields, angry at being left unburied. They came into the classroom, knocked over chairs, and tried to talk, but the girls drove them out.
Solovyei personally never opened the schoolroom door to round out his daughters’ education. He preferred to go into their dreams. Whether he chose to go through fire, to enter body and soul into this black space, or to fly forcefully through the shamanic skies, some nights, he ended up deep in their sleep and walked around without knocking. He had edifying conversations with them where he declaimed his own poems in a hissing voice, but mostly he took advantage of his visit to explore the nooks and crannies of their consciousness, their fantasies, their secret desires. He was obsessed by the ills men could inflict upon them and he watched them, feeling that they were too young to know how to defend themselves against their lovers’ vileness. The girls respected Solovyei and did not deny him their love, but from the day they had their first periods, they began to hate this sort of intrusion, this imperious and unnatural penetration, and in the morning, silently or openly, they remembered that he had appeared within them, that he had disturbed their privacy, and that he had forced himself on them to explore the hidden secrets of their unconscious and their body in general. They remembered the trips he had wantonly taken within themselves. It was a memory that disgusted them and that they refused to consider trivial or furtive, that they were not willing to relegate to the numerous dream-sensations that waking cleared away. They could not forgive him for that. The next morning, if they saw their father on the way to school, they barely said hello to him, and they made it clear that they were sulking.
• Samiya Schmidt was now thirty-one years old. She had stopped going to school twelve years earlier. She hadn’t left with a solid university education, but she had practical knowledge in nearly every realm of agricultural mechanics as well as theoretical knowledge about economics, the history of the camps, and occupational medicine, because, aside from Maria Kwoll’s fictions, she had, for lack of anything better, devoured the popularized booklets from the House of the People library one after another. The kolkhoz president had awarded her a diploma with honors at the end of her studies, in case she needed one on the outside, but she stayed in the Levanidovo and married the tractor driver Morgovian.
Her marriage to Morgovian hadn’t been a catastrophe, but nobody would say that it had made her happy. Morgovian was afraid of her and he behaved himself as a result. She struck an animalistic fear into him. Partly because she was the daughter of the kolkhoz president and also because she was an authoritarian sort with intellectual and emotional needs he couldn’t understand. And finally, he was terrified by the bouts of insanity she sometimes had, during which she would run as fast as possible through their house and through the main road of the kolkhoz, scarcely touching down on the ground and whispering extraordinarily violent and strange curses. She came and went like this and then disappeared into the forest for days on end. Hardly had their short month on honeymoon gone by when the first of these bouts happened. Morgovian was paralyzed with horror and sadness. From then on he began to avoid her, spending as much time as possible collecting dead animals at the forest’s edge or fixing the henhouse netting—or he claimed he needed to fight the Asian hornets so as to spend entire weeks camping by the hives.
Their union’s disintegration pleased Solovyei, who had had trouble accepting it in principle, and who moreover played a major role in the mental disturbances Samiya Schmidt was subject to. Indeed, he kept paying her his nocturnal visits and walking supreme throughout her dreams, which caused serious disruptions
