that seemed transformed by wax, fire, sputtering, and which also carried echoes, as if before coming into daylight it had to go through tunnels or black pipes. It was shivering hideously and still hideously distinct, and in reality it neglected the obstacle of the eardrum to strike more deeply, in the barely protected layers of the brain, beneath memories, there where unease, animal fury, and ancestral fears hid, still unformulated.
—And that, what is that? Kronauer asked again.
—Those are my father’s poems, Samiya Schmidt said, barely disguising her annoyance. He’ll declaim one or two, and then he’ll . . .
She paused. The verb she was about to use had sexual connotations, which deeply revolted her.
—He’ll what? Kronauer asked.
—He’ll pull out, Samiya Schmidt finished tonelessly. Then it’ll be over. He’ll pull out from us and it’ll be over.
• He put on the hardened skin of this mask that stank of black oil and the remains of the fire and, as the flashes fell slowly on the turf and the ashes around him, he began to beg for thunder, and, as no noise went to the trouble of rattling the space, he bent down in a pose of feigned humility and he rummaged for an hour or two among the leaves and the earth wet with brackish water and wine from casks, he stirred the humus with its sprouts scorched by the violent electricity, and, when he had rummaged the deep earth and its mucus like carcasses for a long while, he got back up and opened his eyes again, at least the ones he had shut to suggest non-impudence. Nothing had changed, except perhaps the walls of the space had closed in. As before, the darkness was stricken by lightning, but this sort illuminated the countryside less and less. He kept on begging in the silence. He moved around, counting his steps by fours or thousand-and-thirty-fives depending on his mood, which was foul. What he saw only aroused useless anger, which he hid as best as he could or which he managed to soften by imagining that he had been split in two and his double was walking somewhere else, with his daughters or his occasional wives, his war wives, or his taiga lovers. Sometimes he beat his wings, but the shadows were too deep for anyone to notice, and, besides, he had reached a chasm where his loneliness no longer had any witnesses. At one moment, he began to think more about his daughters. He called to them instead of speaking to the thunder. Neither his daughters nor the thunder answered him. In the end he stretched out in the mire, sighed horrible curses through the holes of his mask, and disappeared.
• As brutally as it had invaded Kronauer’s soul and the clearing, the voice stopped resonating. Suddenly the forest regained its banal character. Despite its perennial darkness and thickness, it no longer seemed fantastical in any way, magical in any way, terrifying in any way. The trees were no longer capable of sight or sound. Solovyei had left the scene.
Kronauer let out a sigh. Even if this declamation hadn’t been accompanied with pain, he had received it like a vile incursion. The fundamentally hermetic content of his discourse hadn’t touched or unnerved him, even though he had sensed, beneath the sentences, ahead of them, a malevolent thought, a selfish and lawless cruelty. But the way of conveying this discourse had repulsed him. He had clearly felt someone creeping inside him, settling in and sauntering around his cranial vault without the least respect for his privacy. It was both psychical and physical. He was talking to him and violating him. He who was speaking the poem had raped him and then pulled out. Kronauer hadn’t known how to defend himself against this outrage, how to stop this aggression, and now he felt wretched. His passiveness had upset him terribly, and somehow he felt both guilty and dirty.
—There, said Samiya Schmidt. It’s over. For now, it’s over.
She was now leaning at the base of a larch, and there, her head thrown back, she shut her eyes to talk in a fading voice.
Kronauer made sure she wasn’t watching him through her eyelashes and he turned away. He would rather that she didn’t see his shame. He still felt like he had endured an assault.
—Does he do that often? he asked.
—Do what? Samiya Schmidt whispered.
Kronauer shrugged.
They both remained silent, as if trying to just be quiet and forget.
—He does that when he feels like it, Samiya Schmidt finally said. He comes and goes when he feels like it.
They mulled over the thought for several minutes, still not moving, and then Kronauer helped Samiya Schmidt get back up and they began to walk, leaning against each other. Samiya Schmidt said that she could make the last two kilometers on her own. She had to stop often. She leaned on a tree for support, caught her breath, waited until her heart started up again or regained a normal rhythm. Kronauer stopped, went over to her, stood ready to help if she fainted. He used these stops to restore some of his energy, as well.
Then the forest brightened. Behind the trees there was sky. They walked five hundred more meters to the east. The trees were airy, the ground springy and neat. Kronauer noticed the clumps of dwarf rowans, raspberry bushes, Siberian foxgloves, and then they came out of the forest and went down the tar path toward the Levanidovo and the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz.
A man was busy a bit farther down in a ditch. Samiya Schmidt stammered something along the lines of how that was her father, and then she was quiet.
4
• Two hundred meters from the first house of the village, the president of the kolkhoz was hunkered down in a ditch, gathering mushrooms. He had cut the lower part of a nicely sized penny cap and, without turning toward the two shadows that had left the forest and were drawing near, he examined the cap which was a beautiful gleaming brown and he inhaled the scent, his eyes half-closed, tilting his head approvingly. The scent ought to be wonderful, as all the produce saturated with radionuclides was, but his contented sigh was overdone and rang false. He actually didn’t care about his harvest, and indeed only cared about one thing: watching his daughter Samiya Schmidt’s reappearance. She had been gone for forty-eight hours, and here she was, back and in the arms of a stranger, a soldier in a military jacket that was far too warm for the weather, its pockets torn and dangling, and with bottles jangling from his hips and, on his shoulder, two army bags filthy with dirt and blood. A deserter.
As Kronauer and Samiya Schmidt drew near, Solovyei stuffed the mushroom into a plastic bag and got up. He kept his countryman’s knife in his hand and, rather than sheathe it, he pointed it vaguely in Kronauer’s direction.
He was a tall man, bearded, scrubby, with an irascible, heroic face. His hair and his beard were still black, as if he were still in his forties or fifties, but he was about the same age as the Gramma Udgul. He towered a full head over Kronauer and, in size, the two men weren’t comparable. With his fairground wrestler’s chest and shoulders, his torso with bulging abs, the kolkhoz president gave an impression of invincibility. His irises, which were tawny and coppery, impinged upon the space reserved for the white of the eye—an oddity often seen among predators and equally often among thaumaturgists. It wasn’t possible to meet such a gaze without straining not to drown in it, and it was easier to look away, but the result was a feeling of smallness and defeat. This Solovyei was clad in a white collarless shirt, cinched at the waist by a leather belt on which he had slung an ax. His thick canvas pants puffed where they were tucked into massive black leather boots. In short, he seemed to have come out of a Tolstoy novella describing a scene between muzhiks and kulaks in a prehistoric era, before the earliest collective farms.
• The road descended behind Solovyei and, after half a kilometer, it became the main thoroughfare of the village of the Levanidovo. The kolkhoz buildings and the farms were interconnected by dirt roads and, although they were spread out over a considerable space, there was a center of sorts, with houses facing
