old lady, while his comrades were dying by the railroad tracks.
—I have to go back, he insisted.
—Solovyei went down there with Morgovian, Hannko Vogulian said.
—Morgovian?
—Samiya Schmidt’s husband.
—They brought all the necessities, Myriam Umarik said.
Her shoulders and breasts heaved. Kronauer tried not to pay attention, but these heaves bothered him.
—And medicine for your wife, she added.
—She’s not my wife, Kronauer said right away.
He felt unburdened of a great weight. Vassilissa Marachvili and Ilyushenko’s rescue was well under way. So Solovyei was taking care of it, then. He was a gruff giant, completely disagreeable, but he was taking care of it.
5
• Hannko Vogulian took Kronauer to the end of the village, two hundred meters past the prison they had left. She pointed out the buildings when they corresponded to something specific: the Soviet, Myriam Umarik’s house, the canteen, the communist cooperative, the public library, the Pioneers’ House. When they came to the end of the road, she stopped. The road continued into the countryside in the form of a path that climbed up the hill. She indicated with a sweep of her arms the massive warehouse run by the Gramma Udgul. Her arms were bare, and not even the finest down covered her extraordinarily pale skin. The sun played on her left ear and the light shone through with a delicious rosiness.
—I’m not going with you, she said. I have things to do.
Kronauer nodded. Since she was standing next to him, he could avoid meeting her strange eyes.
He went the rest of the way thinking about Hannko Vogulian rather than the Gramma Udgul, and when he stepped into the warehouse, he was almost surprised to see the old woman standing right in front of him. She was twisting and turning at the bottom of a mountain of scrap iron, wearily repeating the same fruitless gestures. In fact, she was putting on an act to welcome Kronauer, who she must have seen on the road since he’d left the village and whom she wanted to understand that the warehouse wasn’t a place to laze around.
The Gramma Udgul got up and put her hands on her waist, mainly to look serious and difficult in front of Kronauer, because she didn’t feel any pain in her back. Her joints had been strengthened by the salutary effects of gamma-ray radiation exposure, and weren’t arthritic now, and wouldn’t be at any point in the foreseeable future. Before she spoke, she slowly looked over Kronauer, from head to toe, suspiciously, unhappily.
—You’re wearing one of Barguzin’s shirts, she said once she was done.
Her disapproval was evident.
—It’s what Myriam Umarik gave me, Kronauer said defensively. I didn’t have anything left to wear.
—Barguzin’s not dead yet, the Gramma Udgul said. I’d be the first one to know. When he dies I pour water over him to bring him back. Thus far, he’s always come back. No need to bury him alive.
—It’s just a shirt, Kronauer said with a puzzled look.
—Myriam Umarik is very beautiful, the Gramma Udgul said.
—Yes, Kronauer agreed. No doubt about it.
—She’s one of Solovyei’s daughters, the Gramma Udgul said warningly. Don’t even think for a second about hurting her.
—Why would I hurt her? Kronauer protested.
—She’s married, the Gramma Udgul said. Don’t expect her to cheat on Barguzin if he’s not dead.
—I’ve never expected that, Kronauer said angrily.
—If you hurt her or her sisters, Solovyei will never forgive you.
Kronauer shrugged.
—He’ll follow you for at least a thousand seven hundred and nine years, the Gramma Udgul warned. A thousand seven hundred and nine years or thereabouts, and maybe even twice that.
• A little later, after having thoroughly interrogated Kronauer about his military and political background, his beliefs, and his class membership, the Gramma Udgul gave him a tour of the warehouse. She showed him the location of the well and its purpose, describing with obvious sympathy the core simmering at its bottom, two kilometers deep, then she took him around several mountains of brand-new garbage and, at the end, she went back to sit down in her armchair, in front of the heavy curtain that marked off her strictly private space.
Kronauer inspected the imposing mass of Solovyei’s archives among which the Gramma Udgul was sitting. On a small table there was a machine for reading the recorded cylinders, and beneath the table, several crates filled with wax or Bakelite cylinders.
He hadn’t been asked to comment, so Kronauer stayed quiet.
The Gramma Udgul in turn had relented, or at least she now talked without trying to be aggressive. She had concluded from the interrogation that this nearly-fortysomething man belonged to a group of red soldiers that wasn’t suspected of apostasy or treachery. She had talked with him about the last egalitarian areas of the Orbise and their downfall, and Kronauer’s political background pleased her. She knew, of course, that really trusting him would take months of investigation and imprisonment, along with multiple autobiographies written during sleep deprivation, but, for now, she didn’t see any reason to give him trouble. He had to tell her in detail about the period of military retreat, when he and his comrades had fired at a demented officer. That was a gray area, typical behavior for an adventurer susceptible to anarchist impulses rather than Bolshevik intelligence. On the one hand, she approved that he hadn’t let himself be trapped in a suicide mission, and on the other she wondered if opening fire on a superior wasn’t, at the end of the day, an awfully leftist act.
• She tilted her head to indicate the papers and boxes of cylinders.
—See all that, she said. Solovyei calls that his complete works. He’s joking, but I know he’s attached to them. And sometimes he says it’s a treasure, the only example in the world of post-shamanic poetry. It certainly isn’t like anything, and politically it’s nauseating and subversive more than anything else. They weren’t made for any specific audience. These are complete works for no audience.
Kronauer nodded in feigned interest. Everything having to do with Solovyei usually tended to bother him, these incessant mentions, full of vagaries and threats, as if the land and the inhabitants of the kolkhoz had magically submitted to their president. Besides, he didn’t believe that the Gramma Udgul would really establish a rapport with him at the expense of Solovyei’s literary ambitions. There was no reason for this complicity to arise just then. The Gramma Udgul wasn’t stupid and, if this was the direction she’d steered the conversation, it had to be so he’d say something bad about Solovyei. This had to be a trap the old woman had set, and he had no intention of falling into it. As for Solovyei’s poetic achievements, he remembered experiencing an unbearable example in the forest, before he had come to the Levanidovo, completely unbearable and humiliating, and he didn’t plan on sharing his memory of this experience with the Gramma Udgul.
—Well, maybe someone will find it all charming one day, he said sardonically.
—Nobody
