showers, she explained. There were once prisoners here.
Suddenly the girls became talkative. They wanted to talk with Kronauer before his shower, whether to update him on the kolkhoz’s business, or maybe tease him, or in any case indicate his unimportance compared to them.
—After a rekulakization attempt, Hannko Vogulian said, long ago. We hadn’t been born yet. It was before the kolkhoz was renamed Radiant Terminus. If the Organs hadn’t gotten involved, it would definitely have been the return of capitalism and all the muck that goes with that. This was used for two or three years as a reeducation center. Then Solovyei became president and it was all shut down.
Myriam Umarik went on.
—During the accident, it was reopened, she said. We needed a place to pile up the irradiated things while waiting for the Gramma Udgul’s warehouse to become operational.
—We found so much useless irradiated stuff on every corner, Hannko Vogulian added. We had to store it all somewhere.
The two daughters’ chattering echoed through the room. They made Kronauer dizzy; he didn’t need this avalanche of words to give him trouble.
—We keep calling this the prison, Myriam Umarik said as she swayed her hips, but nowadays we use it more as a community house. Nobody’s really living here. Sometimes Solovyei comes here to take a shower, when the one in the Soviet is clogged.
Kronauer finally had a pause in conversation to ask something he needed to know.
—What about me, am I a prisoner? he asked.
—A prisoner, no, but you’re under Solovyei’s watch, Myriam Umarik said.
—What does that mean, under his watch?
—Oh, it doesn’t really mean much at all, Hannko Vogulian said. He just holds power of life or death over you, nothing more.
Myriam Umarik held up an arm and leaned against the doorframe. The gesture stretched her blouse and accentuated her large bosom.
—You’re under his watch, solider, she said. You’re not in prison.
—The window in your room doesn’t open. The door locks.
—Be careful, the water gets boiling hot sometimes, Hannko Vogulian said. You have to turn the cold water knob all the way. If there’s one thing we don’t need more of in this kolkhoz, it’s hot water.
—Because of the core, Myriam Umarik explained.
• After the women shut the door behind them, Kronauer undressed and got under the pipes. He decided to stand under the fifth shower, in the middle of the room. He took Hannko Vogulian’s advice, turning the cold-water knob all the way, and the water, although it was very warm, didn’t scald him. It smelled strongly of gravel, with an aftertaste of something that had to be iodine or cesium.
Kronauer’s short hair and his skull seemed coated with a sort of grease he wasn’t able to completely get rid of. His chest and limbs were filthy. The lower part of his stomach reluctantly shed some sort of excremental suet that had become embedded. As he scrubbed energetically, he felt hair being rubbed away by his hands, by the water. Becoming bald and hairless were the same to him. He knew that this was the minimum price to pay for staying in forbidden nuclear zones and for not having avoided numerous nuclear power plants in decay, the very last ones being the one at the Red Star sovkhoz, and this one in the Levanidovo.
The animal stink still hung around him in spite of what seemed to have been a meticulous scouring. This self-loathing weighed him down retroactively. He thought of the women who had been around him after he had fainted: Myriam Umarik, Hannko Vogulian. They must have felt some revulsion when they handled him and lay him down in the cell. He also thought of those who, earlier, must have had to press their head against him: first, Vassilissa Marachvili during their wandering on the steppes, and then Samiya Schmidt while they had crossed the forest together. When she dangled on his back as if she were dying.
He soaped himself up once more and rinsed again, and, when the water flowing toward the drain looked merely frothy and not grayish, he stood under the pounding rain for a while longer. He felt revived. The water, the steam, the soap all had given him new strength. And doubtless also the iodine and plutonium that dropped above, as in the byliny about the deathly-deathly water and the lively-lively water that the enchantresses poured over the dead to bring them out of their fatal sleep.
Then he shut off the water and he went to dry himself by the bench. On the floor, his coat and his rags formed an appalling heap. He pushed them aside without touching them, using the edge of the zinc basin, and he moved away as quickly as possible. Then he got dressed. He put on the underclothes that Samiya Schmidt had taken from the wardrobe of her husband, the tractor driver Morgovian, and then he put on one of the engineer Barguzin’s shirts. The new pants and new boots had been taken from the Gramma Udgul’s dump. There was certainly enough there to set an ionizing-ray detector into a frenzy. Kronauer had no way of knowing it, but even if he had been told that he was introducing into his tissues something that would assuredly put him into a coffin straightaway, he would have retorted, no, not at all, and on the contrary, the radiation’s always been keeping me nicely in shape. He might have added that the dangers of escaped atoms were largely exaggerated by enemy propaganda, and what mattered to him at this moment was that his feet fit properly in these new shoes.
And that he felt comfortable in his new shirt. But he did feel comfortable. These women had good eyes. Everything fit him exactly.
• Three women. The only three women in the village, not counting the Gramma Udgul.
Three sisters.
Three daughters who had Solovyei as their presumed father, born as has already been said to unknown mothers.
Samiya Schmidt, the youngest daughter, married to the tractor driver Morgovian.
Myriam Umarik, the middle daughter, married to the engineer Barguzin.
Hannko Vogulian, the oldest daughter of the three, presumably widowed, married to the wandering musician Schulhoff, a runaway deportee who hadn’t spent more than a week in the Levanidovo, and then had disappeared, fortunately without impregnating her.
• Hannko Vogulian had only experienced three days of marriage, after she and Schulhoff had fallen in love at first sight and immediately united in passionate love.
Aldolay Schulhoff had appeared one Monday in the village and, that Thursday, in the marriage register dusted off for the occasion, the two young lovers signed their commitment to live together, no matter what happened, until their death. Solovyei, as president of the kolkhoz, had to affix his signature to the bottom of the page, but it was after trying for the previous forty-eight hours to dissuade his daughter and, in short, he violently disagreed. He had threatened to oppose this union in every way possible, but this one was properly sealed by an official act, and, once the register was set back in the right cabinet, he had to understand and accept that he had a new son-in-law. However, the marriage only lasted until the next Sunday, the day when the search to find Schulhoff hadn’t turned up anything. From Saturday night, in fact, Schulhoff had disappeared without leaving behind any explanation or trace. Hannko Vogulian had insisted on organizing a search as well as using the loudspeakers along the main street, so that the calls would cut through all the nearby countryside, and all the Levanidovo waited nervously through Sunday night, but Schulhoff didn’t reappear. He had somehow ceased to exist in the village, and, in Hannko Vogulian’s life, at least her unimagined life,
