spared no pain as the brigade leader of the hunt, but he couldn’t be bothered to seem sad for his daughter’s sudden widowing. He declared that the page of Hannko Vogulian’s marriage had been turned and then, whenever there was a question about Schulhoff’s disappearance, when someone brought up this mystery again, he looked up at the sky and claimed not to have anything special to say, even though several kolkhozniks and his own daughters suspected him of having played a decisive role in the whole matter.
Despite the shortness of his stay in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, Schulhoff had left behind a lasting memory, and not just in Hannko Vogulian’s thoughts.
He was an itinerant singer, with a beautiful presence, dark-haired, with a splendid voice he had trained since childhood, which allowed him to slip instantaneously from the deepest sounds to the inhuman harmonics of throat singing. He had mastered several languages: Beltir, Koybal, Kyzyl, Kacha, Old American, Camp Russian, Olcha, Khalkha, and, depending on his audience, he chose one dialect or another, adapting his stories so that his listeners could find heroes familiar to their sensibility and their culture. He carried books in his bag and everything suggested that he was full of gentleness, intelligence, and sensitivity. It hadn’t taken Hannko Vogulian more than a minute to fall under his spell and decide that he would be the man of her life. She had always been a prudent girl, but in this instant she succumbed to her impulses and instincts without the least compunction and, from the first night, she went to be with him at the Pioneers’ House where he was staying and she devoted herself to him. She offered herself up to Aldolay Schulhoff. And he, who had been seduced by her and could never run out of rhapsodies or adjectives for her eyes of different colors, had happily fallen into this sudden passion. Maybe he was tired of wandering endlessly from one end of the land to the other, but he immediately saw himself settling down for good in Radiant Terminus. Among the sweet nothings they whispered those few nights, there had been promises and the immediate prospect of a proper marriage. Despite Solovyei’s ill will, they made it happen three days later in the Soviet Assembly Room with the one-armed Abazayev, Myriam Umarik, and Samiya Schmidt as witnesses.
Saturday evening, in homage to the kolkhozniks who had welcomed him into the fold, he brought out his rhapsodist’s instruments and sang the long and famous bylina that described, in poetic prose and in music, Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber. In reality, he was performing a Buryat legend, but, as his audience was predominantly oriented toward the Russian collective memory, he reshaped it with great skill to emphasize the universal elements of Ilya Muromets’s heroic saga.
Everyone in the Levanidovo thought his adaptation was original and his interpretation worthy of admiration. While his voice wasn’t that of a bass singer and seemed thinner, he managed to make vibrant, sustained, and deep notes soar from his chest, notes that immediately entranced his listeners, and then he unfurled a melodic, tranquil narrative without a single pause, and his voice changed throughout the dialogues, shifting instantaneously from the metallic tones of harmonic singing to the feminine softness of the lyric text, then to the rumbling of pure song. Tears rolled down the cheeks of Solovyei’s three daughters, who were not used to emotion provoked by song and a zither’s melody, by the flowery language of the epic narrative. The demobilized Abazayev was also overwhelmed by the music and spent his time wiping his cheeks with the empty sleeve of his jacket, stained with mole poison. The engineer Barguzin couldn’t bear the tension of this much beauty. He died once again that night. The Gramma Udgul had to administer her shock therapy with heavy-heavy water, deathly-deathly water, and lively-lively water. Solovyei, who had originally declared that he wouldn’t attend the concert, changed his mind and came into the assembly room dressed in a midnight-blue shirt and perfectly waxed boots that he only wore on special occasions. He sat solemnly across from his new son-in-law and he seemed to enjoy the performance from its start to its finish. He clapped in rhythm on his massive thigh with happiness evident on his face, even though the previous night he had been angrily lecturing his daughter about the young bridegroom’s paltry value, about his pitiable stature as a bard, forced to earn his living by selling his talent and begging in obscure places, in fisheries, in scarcely-known logging sites.
• That night, that Saturday night, Solovyei had withdrawn wordlessly after hugging Schulhoff. The witnesses recalled that he seemed rather good-natured when saying his farewells and, in any case, that he didn’t seem to be having a bad day. But after midnight sounds came from the basements of the Soviet, the whistling that always resulted when he was entering his worlds or other people’s dreams. Hannko Vogulian went back to her place after the concert to warm the bed and she waited in vain for Schulhoff to come join her. After putting his zither in its cover, Schulhoff went out in the street to smoke a cigarette in front of the Pioneers’ House, to look at the starry sky and come back down to earth after hours and hours of poetic and musical soaring. Then there was no trace of his existence on earth. In front of the Pioneers’ House there was no cigarette butt nor lighter to be found, and, when she was asked about the whole thing much later, the Gramma Udgul grumbled that in all probability Schulhoff had been swallowed up by a black hole, which nobody believed, except for herself and Solovyei.
As for Solovyei, even if most of the Levanidovo’s inhabitants believed that he had entered the Soviet’s cauldron, the core of the backup power plant that had run smoothly since the larger power plant’s failure, even if his daughters were convinced that he had gone through the flames to reach the shamanic space of non-life and non-death, to organize within this darkness Schulhoff’s abduction and liquidation, he claimed to be astonished by Hannko Vogulian’s husband’s inexplicable departure. He called on all the police powers at his disposal in the kolkhoz so that the Sunday hunt would have a happy end, then, in the days that followed, he led an energetic and thorough investigation with searches through the village’s empty huts and the underground passages that crisscrossed the Levanidovo to allow movement during the iciest and snowiest months, but his efforts came to naught, and he demonstrated his annoyance publicly. When Hannko Vogulian realized she had been widowed, he seemed to sympathize with her grief, and he promised her that her husband would come back to life one day, that she would find Schulhoff again, and that he himself would track Schulhoff down through his divinations. He never implied that he bore the least responsibility in this saga. But, in everybody’s opinion, he did.
• After the shower, Kronauer went back up the prison hallway to his cell, the room where he had lain during his blackout, then, hearing some noise, he went in that direction and found himself in the kitchen, which had barely any utensils or cupboards and more closely resembled a small refectory. The two sisters were waiting for him with tea and a plate of toasted flour. They told him that they had forgotten to put anything for shaving in the shower room, and that there was a razor and washbasin in a nook, in case he still had any hair.
—Eh, my hair doesn’t grow very fast these days, he said.
The daughters simpered, especially Myriam Umarik, who also stroked her thick and shiny jet-black hair.
—If you stay in this place, it’ll come in even slower, Hannko Vogulian said.
—I’m not staying, Kronauer said.
Hannko Vogulian shrugged. After a few seconds, she told him that, generally, he was free to come and go and that he could walk through the village, but he should go to the Gramma Udgul’s place by the end of the morning.
—She wants to see what you look like, Myriam Umarik said. She wants to make sure you’re not an enemy of the people.
—The Gramma Udgul can come later, Kronauer said as he choked on a spoonful of toasted flour. I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to meet everyone in the kolkhoz. My comrades are dying of hunger and thirst by the railroad tracks. I have to go back there. It’s urgent.
He wasn’t sure if he had the strength to go back immediately. To trek back through the forest, without a guide, with a bag of food on his back and a jerrican filled to the brim with water in his hand. But doing anything else, lounging here, was absolutely out of the
