bird, no small animal.
Here and there, giant anthills, without any apparent bustle but perhaps inhabited by black and teeming colonies.
Samiya Schmidt and Kronauer no longer speak.
The crossing is harder and harder.
The scene is darker and darker.
• The old forest isn’t an earthly place like the others. Nothing comparable exists in other forest of similar size, nor in the taiga, which is boundless and where people die. Unless they take a horribly long and uncertain path, you can’t reach the Levanidovo and its Radiant Terminus kolkhoz without crossing it. But crossing it also means wandering under its menacing trees, advancing without any landmarks, blindly, means walking with difficulty among its strange traps, beyond all duration, means going both straight ahead and in circles, as if poisoned, as if drugged, breathing with difficulty, as in a nightmare where you can hear your own snoring and moaning but where wakefulness never comes, means oppression without the least idea of where your fear comes from, means dreading noise every bit as much as silence, means losing reason and, finally, understanding neither noise nor silence. Being in the heart of the old forest also means sometimes no longer feeling exhaustion, floating between life and death, hanging between breathlessness and exhalation, between sleepiness and wakefulness, also means understanding that you are a strange inhabitant of your own body, not really at home, like a particularly unwelcome guest who has overstayed and who is accepted because expulsion is not possible, who is accepted until there comes a way to separate painfully, who is accepted while waiting for the opportunity to hunt or kill you.
The old forest is a place that belongs to Solovyei.
It is the entrance to Solovyei’s worlds.
When you walk through the old forest, when you crush under your boots the twigs fallen from the trees, the centenarian pines, the black larches, when your face is stroked or slapped by dripping mosses, you end up in a transitional world, in something where everything exists intensely, where nothing is illusory, but, at the same time, you have the disturbing feeling of being imprisoned within an image, and moving around within someone else’s dream, in a Bardo where you are a foreigner yourself, where you are an unwanted intruder, neither living nor dead, in an unending and endless dream.
Whether you realize it or not, you are in a realm where Solovyei is the absolute master. You may move in the shadows of the plants, you may try to move and to think in order to escape, but, in the old forest, you are first and foremost dreamed up by Solovyei.
And in there, quite simply, you cannot be anything other than a creature of Solovyei’s.
• As confirmation: in the last kilometer, Kronauer entered some sort of hypnotic numbness. He stopped thinking. This mental abdication came with physical relief. He didn’t feel his exhaustion. On his back, Samiya Schmidt didn’t weigh more than a feather. He trod without stumbling over the marshy ground, he crossed the obstacles of rotten, tangled branches, he climbed over the barricades of old mossy trunks, and he came back down without losing his balance. He breathed in the gas that wafted from the standing water without fainting. With one hand, he pushed away the wet undergrowth that threatened to smack him. He didn’t disturb the anthills taller than himself, he swerved past them without touching anything or angering or scaring their inhabitants. Besides, he didn’t know whether beneath their crust of earth and needles numerous insects twisted and turned, or whether these constructions were vestiges of a lost civilization, because not a single creature was visible in the area. He advanced as if within a dream, without any real awareness of his body or that of Samiya Schmidt. He advanced in this way, and around him the morning stretched out, hardly bright and as if devoid of any future.
Suddenly, as they emerged into a clearing filled with ferns, a strong whistling began in front of them, from the place where the trees resumed, as if from the black tufts where the lowest branches hung. A sound that at first mainly resembled the cawing of a bird of prey, and which immediately transformed into a shrill, increasingly piercing note. This note did not tolerate any modulation. It only mounted in violence. It bore into Kronauer’s eardrums.
He slid Samiya Schmidt onto the ground, or rather, he set her down as quickly as possible to cover his ears with his hands. He grimaced. He said or screamed something that was stolen away.
On every surface of the clearing the ferns trembled, as if they too were trying to struggle against a sound assaulting them. The sky was now just a leaden gray blanket stifling the earth. It only gave a dim light. Several dozen meters away from Kronauer, on the other side of the clearing, the forest had taken on the appearance of a gigantic mass, dark green, compactly alive and hostile. The trees shifted, their tops came together and back apart above the space. High or low, the branches had started to move in a frenzy. No wind, no storm was shaking them, but they shook. They swept the air around them. They seemed to have cast off their vegetal nature, to have become animalistic, to be obeying chaos and fury. Some of them began to whistle in turn.
Kronauer was certain the trees were watching him.
—What is that? he yelled as he turned toward Samiya Schmidt. What is that over there?
Samiya Schmidt had drawn back to the edge of the clearing. She leaned against a trunk before answering. She had a sullen expression on her face. Her eyes were obstinately focused on the tips of her boots, as if she didn’t want to watch what was happening.
—It’s nothing, she finally said. We’re in one of Solovyei’s dreams. He’s not happy that you’re with me.
Kronauer walked up to Samiya Schmidt and looked at her, aghast. He kept his ears covered and he found it necessary to talk loudly to make himself heard.
—He’s not happy that I’m with you? he shouted.
Samiya Schmidt shrugged helplessly.
—That’s my father. He doesn’t want you to hurt me, she said.
Solovyei’s unbearable whistling stretched out.
Kronauer crouched down, got back up. The pain ran from his head to his tailbone, along his spinal cord. The sharp note wreaked havoc in his skull. He tried to ease the pain by squatting, then, because that didn’t change anything, he got back up. He looked like a demented gymnast in rags.
—It’s nothing, Samiya Schmidt said. He’ll stop.
—It’s really horrible, Kronauer moaned.
—Yes, it’s horrible, but he’ll stop, Samiya Schmidt promised.
• They sat side by side on the warm ground, on some roots. They waited for the screaming to stop. Samiya Schmidt didn’t cover her ears. She seemed irritated, but not overly inconvenienced. She was still one of Solovyei’s daughters, she must have a particular internal resistance, something borne through his genes. A sort of immunity against her father’s aggressions, acoustic or oneiric or otherwise.
Ten minutes went by like this, then the whistling diminished, the trees stopped shaking and fidgeting with frightening aggressiveness, they stopped screaming, they stopped acting like a collective animal of unlikely dimensions. Kronauer had already uncovered his ears. In his head, in his backbone, the pain had gone immediately. But he still had the feeling that the branches were watching him menacingly, and soon the whistling was replaced by a voice that came from nowhere.
Then he took the mask in which his face lived, his face of a beggar-bird beneath the storm, of a tattered bird thirsty for thunder, declaimed someone with authoritative, cruel solemnity.
