didn’t know how to read the sky like a map, he’d never been raised like a farmer or a trapper.
Waist-deep, sometimes shoulder-deep in a verdurous ocean, he pressed ahead rather than save his strength. His body hurt but he refused to accept it. He hadn’t let himself stop during the first two kilometers, assuming that he needed to evade the watchman’s potential gunfire, and after that, he hadn’t let himself stop for more than the ten or twelve seconds needed to catch his breath. He was wholly focused on his goal. He wanted to reach the forest’s edge before nightfall, so he could cross it the next morning at daybreak and go straight through the trees until he emerged and saw a village. It was a simple goal. A clear and simple action. Vassilissa Marachvili’s life depended on his accomplishing it.
From time to time he’d trample through marshes. Then he’d stop to see if there wasn’t a spring or a pool nearby for him to drink and refill his bottle and the one he’d taken from Vassilissa Marachvili’s belt. The ground was wet and sometimes had a muddy consistency, but he never found water in a salvageable form. He’d keep looking one or two minutes, rummaging through argamanche shrubs or bushes of gourgouledes-pauvres, which usually cropped up near water sources. He spread apart the pulpy stalks of lancelottes and grumes-ameres in vain. Then, muttering a quick rosary of curses, he went back on his way.
Plants that obstruct his calves, his knees, his thighs. Plants that rarely snap, except for dame-exquises, regrignelle, deadchive plumes, or folle-en-jouisse. Hard, elastic, violent plants. Plants that give way at the slightest touch, like twistsprouts, fine-brousse, majdahar, souffe-magnifique, caped mudbeaks, or mere-du-lépreux. Plants that feet could never crush. Plants that give off strong and disagreeable scents, such as torchpotils or pugnaise-des-errants, and even pestilential scents, especially the dangue-à-clochettes. Plants that look like thick hedges. Plants that exhale their perfumes with evening’s arrival. Plants with acrid sap. Plants with heady sap, like diaze-lights or dive-diazes. Dark green, emerald green, yellowish green, silvery green like huckster terbabary, bronze green like ravine terbabary. Seeds, dull green, shiny green, ears. No flowers. Plants that don’t resemble anything, besides drabness and absence. Soft, weak plants. Large stretches with fewer insects than in the summer months, but still buzzing with grasshoppers and flies.
The noise of this progress. Its screeching violence. A man pushing at full speed through vegetation that doesn’t welcome him at all. A man crossing the steppes instead of sleeping on the ground. A man breaking the plants’ silence.
The occasional crow high above. Five or six of them, often fewer, flying toward the forest. Always toward the northeast or the east, as if there was only one possible direction. The occasional shrill cry under the sky. As if, out of what little solidarity with other animals remained, or out of respect for a fairy-tale tradition, they were trying to give the lost man a useful direction or a warning. Kronauer didn’t slow down even to watch them go by. He looked up, but he didn’t slow down.
• Kronauer went, his body fixated on the effort, while his thoughts wandered. Several planes of consciousness merged within him, just like when he was falling asleep, and, without any conflict, intermingled. He grew obsessed with the idea of getting to the village at all costs and he saw himself in a rather cinematic sequence, in which the villagers around him heard his pleas and rushed to the Red Star sovkhoz with water and supplies. All the while he kept envisioning Vassilissa Marachvili and Ilyushenko in distress on the hill, doomed to lie in the grasses and keep quiet so as not to be noticed by the soldiers who had bivouacked by the rails. But other images merged with these: moments of loving friendship that had developed among the three over the last weeks, around campfires, along deserted paths, amid ghost towns, after interminable hours of walking in the open steppes. The particulars of this long walk. Their farewell to rifles and cartridges, which they had decided were no longer of any help to them and which they hid in a bakery oven in a dead city.
Cold raindrops breaking up a star-studded night.
Two wild cows visible in the distance.
Vassilissa Marachvili not turning around to undress, before going to wash herself in a brown lake. The smell of Vassilissa Marachvili’s body still shivering on the lakeshore, her sweat replaced by the stink of mud.
The “forbidden” and “danger” signs that rust had eaten away. Over a skull framed in red and black, snails that, before dying, had left heavy trails of slime.
Ilyushenko looking for one last cookie in his rucksack and not finding it.
Vassilissa Marachvili’s teeth, which he had, many times at their trip’s start, imagined sliding his tongue across.
Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili whispering.
The skin a grass snake had shed in the middle of the road.
The idea that they had been irradiated, that they were baking, and were already dead, in the process of breaking apart at the base of a reactor.
A railway track disappearing beneath stinging nettles.
Villages far off, lifeless and repulsive.
A stop close to a wrecked nuclear power plant, in a place open to the winds but stinking of grease, and the discussion they’d had to decide if it was grease from sheep or from bears.
But we were the ones who smelled bad, he suddenly realized.
He stopped walking, saw the sky brighter behind him than over the forest. The steppes stretched out endlessly, wavy, velvety, hued yellow and green with white smudges indicating tufts of Jeanne-of-the-Communists, spotted doroglosses.
He caught his breath. He breathed in the vastness deeply.
You’re on the steppes, Kronauer, he thought. There’s no shame in being here for the end. It’s beautiful. Appreciate it. Not everyone gets to die on the steppes.
• The steppes. He had spent his childhood in the city, in an orphanage that rarely took trips to the countryside; what passed for trips were days dedicated to the communal potato harvest. Urban settings were practically everything he knew. His universe of references was circumscribed by wide avenues, inner courtyards, gray buildings, and exhaust fumes. Still, the movies and books the school had deluged him with had allowed him to roam, meander, and travel among the grassy spaces flattened under the blue sky, alongside the Scythians, the Avars, the Pechenegs, the Tatars, the Red Cavalry, and, of course, in the company of the mythic Russian heroes of Kiev every single child in the Orbise knew: Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovitch, and all their partners, rivals, and comrades. The steppes eventually became as familiar and essential to him as the capital’s streets. And later, when he was no longer a child, he fell in love with Irina Echenguyen—and, in this theater of epic horseback rides beloved by the Orbise’s orphans and communards alike, this unforgettable woman had fostered his love for botany.
Irina Echenguyen, like the rest of us, also loved those Russian byliny and the scenes of endless prairies intertwined with millennia of history, from the Scythian Empire to the Second Soviet Union, by way of Genghis Kahn’s thunderous horses and Chapayev’s crackling machine guns. But, above all, she was a member of a scientific team that worked on naming uncultivated grasses and wild plants in general. Kronauer didn’t have the expert knowledge she did, and he remained wholly unable to help her in her complicated classifications, but he had learned to see the grasses as something other than an undifferentiated mass of plants. He had hundreds of names in his head, lists he had watched her patiently put together when he lived with her, had reread with her, had recited together with her as if they were post-exotic litanies.
They were married for ten years. Irina Echenguyen died after a long illness, during a counter-revolutionary attack. She was put on a drip in
