the original tar layer.
• A bit earlier on, a train had appeared on the edge of the horizon. It was so unexpected that they had first thought they were experiencing a collective delirium on their deathbeds, only to realize that they weren’t dreaming. They cautiously hid themselves in the plants, Vassilissa Marachvili stretched out on a bed of crackling stalks. The convoy slid slowly into the meadow, going from the north directly to its mysterious destination, but instead of continuing its route it rolled to a stop just before the starred door, right by a building that would, in the heyday of the sovkhoz’s splendor, have housed a poultry farm.
The train braked, like a boat docking, without any metallic screeching, and for a protracted minute, the diesel motor wheezed softly. Apparently a freight train or a transport for troops or prisoners. A locomotive, four windowless cars, all dilapidated and dirty. Minutes went by: three, then five, then a few more. Nobody appeared. The engineer was nowhere to be seen.
Above the steppe the sky glittered. A uniformly and magnificently gray vault. Clouds, warm air, and plants all bore witness to the fact that the humans had no place here, and yet they made people want to fill their lungs and sing hymns to nature, to its inexhaustible force, and to its beauty. From time to time, flocks of crows flew over the dark strip that marked the beginning of the taiga. They went northwest and disappeared somewhere above this universe of black trees where men seemed even more unwelcome than in the steppe.
• The forest, Kronauer thought. All right for a short trip, so long as we stick to the edges. But once we go deep within, there’s no longer any northeast or southwest. Directions don’t exist anymore, we’ll have to make do with a world of wolves, of bears, and mushrooms, and we won’t make our way out again, even when we walk in a straight line for hundreds of kilometers. He was already imagining the first rows of trees, and he quickly saw the gloomy thicknesses, the dead pines, fallen to their natural death thirty or forty years earlier, blackened with moss but resistant to rot. His parents had escaped camps and gotten lost there, in the taiga, and they had disappeared there. He couldn’t think of the forest without recalling the tragic image of this man and this woman whom he had never known. Ever since he had been old enough to think of them, he had imagined them as a pair of nomads, forever neither alive nor dead—just lost. Don’t make the same mistake they did, he thought. The taiga can’t be a refuge, an alternative to death or the camps. It’s vastnesses where man has no place. There’s only shadow and bad encounters. Unless we’re animals, we can’t live in there.
He took a few seconds before abandoning the idea. Then he came back to the steppe that was rippling once more under a gust of wind. He saw the stopped train again, and, above the world, the cloudy and infinite sky.
The diesel motor wasn’t groaning anymore.
He squinted.
The dying woman moaned again.
• With his too-hot and too-long felt coat, ill-suited to the weather, his too-big boots, and his head shorn of hair that wouldn’t grow again, Kronauer looks like many of us—I mean that at first glance he looks like a corpse or a soldier from the civil war, running away without having won a single victory, an exhausted and suspicious-looking and strung-out man.
He sits on the balls of his feet in order to stay unnoticed. The plants come up to his shoulders, but as he squats down they close over his head. He has spent his childhood in orphanages, in urban zones, far away from meadows and, theoretically, he ought not to know the names of the plants surrounding him right then. But a woman had given him some knowledge of botany, a woman expert in plant nomenclature, and, out of nostalgia for this dead lover, he gazes thoughtfully at the steppe grasses, focusing on whether they have ears, oval leaves, lyrate leaves, whether they grow in bulbs or rhizomes. After examining them, he labels them. Downwind and nearby great ogronts, clumps of kvoina, zabakulians, septentrines, Jeanne-of-the-Communists, foxbarrens, and aldousses are whispering.
Now he watches the bottom of the hill, less than half a kilometer off. The bustle isn’t great. The engineer has gone out along the locomotive—an engine manufactured at the beginning of the Second Soviet Union—but he has gone down the small steps and, after having walked about twenty meters in the grass, he has lain down on the ground. And there, he has clearly already fallen asleep or passed out.
Then the cars’ doors had opened one by one.
Soldiers had come out of the second and third cars. Foot soldiers in rags, walking and gesturing like drunk or sick men. Kronauer counted four. After taking several staggering steps, they leaned against the wood door, their heads lolling or turned toward the clouds. Barely moving, not talking. Then they passed around a cigarette. Once the tobacco was used up, three of the men dragged themselves back to their respective cars. The fourth went off to satisfy his natural urge. He’s descended about twenty meters down the path into a huge thicket of sage. The growth swallowed him up completely. He hasn’t reappeared since.
It seems like the convoy has come to a halt in front of the ruins of the Red Star, as if it was an important railroad stop or even a station where passengers had planned to embark or debark. The locomotive motor has been switched off, and nothing suggests that the conductor will start it again anytime soon.
—Maybe they’re out of fuel, Ilyushenko suggests.
• Ilyushenko, Kronauer, and Vassilissa Marachvili composed a harmonious trio, bound together by durable ties that felt much like old, unbreakable sentiments of camaraderie. But when they came into the empty lands together for a communal march toward death, they had only known each other for a few days. More specifically, Kronauer was a new figure to Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili. Given the circumstances of the Orbise’s fall, forty-eight hours was certainly as good as a year, and several days a full decade. When they snuck under the barbed-wire fence of no return, it was as if they had lived together a long time and shared everything—joys and regrets, beliefs, disillusionments, and fights for egalitarianism. The Orbise’s last redoubts had been taken by the enemy and they had ended up together in a small rearguard formation taking in survivors who still wanted to fight. Unfortunately, their commander had gone crazy and, after a week of hiding, the formation was no longer what they had hoped it would be when they had joined it. Their group was no longer the germ of a future resistance army, but rather an assortment of disoriented deserters, driven toward nothingness by a suicidal visionary. The commander apparently wanted to recapture the Orbise by calling on demonic, alien, and kamikaze forces. They moved around the capital’s periphery without any strategy, submitting to his senseless but iron will. The commander gave absurd orders, sent men on suicide bombings where there were no victims aside from civilians and themselves. When he pointed his gun at a recalcitrant man, rebels disarmed him and then shot him before heading off in all directions. Kronauer, Vassilissa Marachvili, and Ilyushenko hadn’t shirked when they had to fire at their leader, but after doing justice, they said good-bye to their futures and went toward the irradiated no-man’s-lands, the empty territories, far from enemies and far from any hope.
• Ilyushenko. A tanned fortysomething, faithful like us to the party since his adolescence, and also enthusiastic enough during his membership in the Komsomol to have a crest with a sickle, a hammer, and a rifle and rising sun in the background tattooed on his neck. The crest had been burned into his skin by an artist no doubt equally as enthusiastic, but who hadn’t mastered his art, so that the drawing didn’t seem to refer to the culture of the proletarian revolution—it looked like a tangled mess on which a sort of spider sat. Ilyushenko had been forced to carry this ruined image upon his neck, but he hid it under his shirt collar or a scarf. In an encyclopedia of capitalist universes, he had seen reproductions of punk tattoos with tarantulas and repulsive webs and, even though these were images from a world destroyed two hundred years earlier, he didn’t want to be mistaken for having nostalgia for neo-fascist nihilism. He was a man of average height, with robust muscles, who didn’t like idle talk and knew how to fight. He had formerly been a truck
