tore out tubes and needles, broke all the medical equipment, and then raped the women, even the ones who already looked like corpses. It was a group of dog-headed enemies, zealots for exploiting men for the sake of men. Then they deserted the place, but before they left, they killed Irina Echenguyen.
• Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.
• A pair of crows, very low, did not caw as they passed right over his head. The sky was far less blinding than it had been earlier. Dusk was coming. The temperature had dropped and every now and then harsh gusts of wind blew. The black line of the forest, now much nearer, had ceased to be an abstract image. It was already resolving into trees and branches, with perceptibly different heights and thicknesses. He still had two kilometers to go before reaching it.
That’s good, he thought. I’ll have time to get there before night falls.
He had already stumbled several times and he took another break. One minute, he thought. Just one minute.
The smoke that had just a minute ago suggested the possibility of a village was now faded away. Now there weren’t any points of reference left. Only, in front of him, the dark mass of the first larches.
He closed his eyes so his dizziness and exhaustion would dissipate. A gray and erratic layer of clouds spun behind his eyelids, but it was mainly the darkness of the forest he was thinking about.
Damn it, Kronauer, he reproached himself, don’t tell me you’ve got the willies! Your parents died in the taiga, so what? You’re still far from the taiga, it’s just a slightly dark wood, it won’t be more than a few kilometers deep. Two or three hours of walking, and you’ll end up in fields with a village and countrymen. Get a hold of yourself! Don’t give up that fast! Your little troubles are nothing compared to the apocalypse that hit the Orbise!
• He was thirty-nine years old. He was born in the Orbise. All his schooling had been focused on the future of Communes for workers and countrymen.
His view of the world was illuminated by proletarian morality: self-sacrifice, altruism, and confrontation. And like all of us, of course, he had suffered the world revolution’s setbacks and collapses. We didn’t understand how the rich and their mafias had managed to win the trust of the laboring classes. And before our rage, first had been our stupefaction when we realized that these masters of unhappiness were triumphing around the globe and were on the brink of annihilating the last of us. We had no explanation when we interrogated ourselves about humanity’s bad choices. Marxist optimism prevented us from seeing the proof of serious defects in the genetic heritage of our species, an idiotic affinity for self-destruction, a masochist apathy in the face of predators, and perhaps even above all a fundamental inability when it came to collectivism. We thought this deep down, but, as the official theory relayed these hypotheses with a shrug of the shoulders, we didn’t broach the topic, even among comrades. Even in joking among comrades.
Kronauer’s intellectual education after high school had been wrecked and there were huge holes in his knowledge, like so many other young people in the Orbise when their studies were interrupted by chaos and defeats. If the worldwide situation hadn’t been so unfavorable to egalitarianism, perhaps he would have turned toward a quiet career with an apprenticeship that wasn’t too long, a career nothing like a soldier’s. He wasn’t very interested in abstract things. He did like books and happily borrowed novels from the local libraries, but a list of what he’d borrowed, aside from political classics, would show that his preferences veered toward inoffensive adventure stories and the most traditional post-exotic bluettes. Deep down, even if he wasn’t loath to sit down for hours reading in silence, he didn’t feel comfortable when he was confronted with the complex structures of the soul, and he much preferred action. One example had actually disrupted his existence. When the Komsomol had suggested it, he had refused to join a school for Party officials, and asked to be assigned to an operating unit. After his first year of training, he would have been assigned a political instructor’s minor responsibilities, but the propaganda work didn’t appeal to him. He wanted direct confrontation with enemies or traitors. The Orbise was in danger. Military violence seemed more natural to him than meetings where he would have to call for military violence. Therefore the start of civil war hadn’t troubled him in the least. He’d immediately joined the standing army, and he’d been sent to work with one of the clandestine organizations that found unconventional ways to heckle the enemy. Then he had been assigned to a Special Intelligence Center. Aside, of course, from periods of peace when he went back to civil life as a worker without much qualification, sometimes in construction and sometimes in the food industry, he had been fighting here and there for fifteen years now. He had never been wounded. He was in the prime of life. That said, he had seen too many corpses, witnessed too many defeats, and he had lost most of the hope he’d still had.
• He started walking again. He couldn’t keep a steady pace. The two kilometers that still separated him from the forest’s edge seemed to stretch out interminably. Keep going, Kronauer, keep going and don’t think, don’t look, don’t count the meters you’ve walked, don’t count what’s left, don’t count anything! . . . Don’t listen to anything but your footsteps, don’t look at the sky, keep going like you’re in good shape!
The landscape was already taking on the gray and purple hues of twilight.
He veered away to avoid a barely visible burial mound; there had been thousands of them on the steppes since the Bronze Age, a kurgan that had been built on his path, tamped down and nondescript, a symbol of existences wasted and millennia gone for nothing, just to witness the collapse of egalitarianism and a wave of derelicts just like the very first nomads eons earlier. Now he staggered by a field of hare-rye, a mutant variety that had appeared in the countryside thirty years earlier, and then was cultivated close to the capital to make flour that tasted like cardboard. He stepped into the withered, unappealingly brown ears, then he went through. He drifted as if drunk. And suddenly his legs. They gave way beneath him. He hobbled ten more meters, and then he kneeled on the ground and slumped down.
Well, he thought, trying to get back up. It’s nothing. A wave of tiredness.
He couldn’t get himself back upright. His muscles wouldn’t respond. There were cramps in his neck, all his joints were on fire. He breathed loudly.
You think you’re still alive, a voice suddenly said in him, inside his head, but unfamiliar.
—What! he grumbled. What’s going . . .
He waved his hand like he was trying to swat away flies or wasps. He was on his knees, exhausted. And this voice.
You think you’re still alive, but it’s over. You’re just a relic. Your corpse is already rotting somewhere on the moist earth and you don’t get that it’s over. It’s just after-death mumbo-jumbo bouncing around in your head. Don’t keep trying. Just lie down where you fell and wait for the crows to take care of your burial.
Then, just as quickly as it had come, the voice left. It left him entirely, without a trace in his memory, as if it had never spoken in him. Once again he found himself alone, with his breath short and hoarse, with his bodily pains, his exhaustion.
Just a moment of tiredness, he thought, a big one. Nothing serious. Night won’t fall for another half an hour, three-quarters of an hour. I’m going to lie down. Just not enough food, dehydration. I’m going to lie down until it passes. As it is, my legs won’t get me anywhere.
He lay down. Above his head, when he opened his eyes, the sky had started to whirl again. He shut his eyes against his nausea. Shaken once more by the wind, the plants brushed against him. He listened.
False
