he thought. Racines-rieuses, lovushkas, solivaines. This too will pass. Even if I black out for a minute, this will pass. Then I’ll get back up, and if it’s not too dark I’ll go sleep under the trees, at the edge by the first trees, and I’ll wait for dawn before going into the forest. Hang in there, Kronauer! Tomorrow you’ll be in the village, and then it’ll be okay. Everything’s spinning right now, but this will pass.
Tomorrow. In the village. It’ll be okay.
• Chiennelaines, doroglosses. Lovushkas-du-savatier, rogue solivaines, aromatic solivaines.
2
• Inside the warehouse, the temperature wasn’t dropping. It never dropped. The sheet-metal walls were always warm, even in the winter when it was freezing, and they emitted a soft and constant light, rendering all heating and lighting equipment unnecessary.
After the nuclear reactor that powered the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz caught fire, the hangar had been used to store the irradiated material the liquidators had collected in the area. It was an enormous, ugly building, intended to hold massive quantities of garbage, and it had been constructed right above the burning ruins of the little power plant. The liquidators had found it best to use preexisting structures to store the stock of dangerous trash and bury it all in the same place. A well sat in the center of the building. In it went everything that people wanted to get rid of forever.
The well had been dug by the nuclear core itself when, after vaporizing everything in range, it had gone mad and begun to sink into the earth. The engineer Barguzin, the only surviving member of the team that had designed the hangar, claimed that the hole was regular and vertical and about two kilometers deep. According to him, at the bottom of the hole, the core had stopped moving. It would stay there, always mad but no longer moving, no longer trying to reach the innermost depths of earth proper. It would simply feed on what it received from on high.
• Every month, indeed, the core was fed. The heavy cover for the well was opened, and some of the bric-a-brac collected over the last season or two was knocked over the edge; just to show that people weren’t panicking and weren’t afraid of pathetic radionuclides. Tables and chairs, television sets, the tarry carcasses of cows and cowherds, tractor motors, charred schoolteachers who had been forgotten in their classrooms during the critical period, computers, remains of phosphorescent crows, moles, does, wolves, squirrels, clothes that looked perfect but had only to be shaken to set off a haze of sparks, inflated toothpaste tubes filled with constantly simmering toothpaste, albino dogs and cats, clusters of iron that continued to rumble with an inner fire, new combine harvesters that hadn’t yet been broken in and which gleamed at midnight as if they were lying in full sunlight, garden forks, hoes, axes, debarkers, accordions that spat out more gamma rays than folkloric melodies, pinewood planks that looked like ebony planks, Stakhanovites in their Sunday best with their hands mummified around their diplomas, forgotten when the event halls were evacuated. The ledgers with their pages turning day and night. Cash-register money, the copper coins clinking and shifting without anyone nearby. These were the sorts of things thrown into the void.
The Gramma Udgul was the one to handle the maneuver. She arbitrarily decided on the days to open the well and told the improvised liquidators which things should feed the core. The Gramma Udgul was also the only person who had the idea to stoop down by the chasm and talk to the core to make it happy.
When she hunched, the undetectable wind from the depths hit her in the face. This caress didn’t bother her and she went on with her monologue. Nothing could be heard, not even the crush of objects or bodies that had arrived at their destination after falling two thousand meters. The Gramma Udgul’s voice sank into the well’s dark mystery without an echo. The kolkhozniks helping the old woman waited nearby until she had finished her sorcerous, vehement screams. They looked like a group of zombies in the last stages of their existence. Aside from some occasional reserve soldiers, these uncommunicative men were the core of the male population still alive at Radiant Terminus, and they could be counted on the fingers of one hand: the engineer Barguzin; the demobilized, one-armed Abazayev; and the tractor driver Morgovian.
• A few words about the Gramma Udgul. About her hardiness which science cannot explain. About her beliefs, about her path to glory and darkness. And about her eighty-year-old, in-shape body, doomed to eternity.
One hundred years earlier, she had begun her long career as a liquidator. She was thirty-two years old then; she was a nurse’s aide and, as the Second Soviet Union experienced its first serious collapses, she dreamed of sacrificing herself for communism-bound humanity. And so she had joined the kamikaze corps that was sent close to the nuclear power plants, which were all breaking down or exploding at the time. I recall that thousands of them had been built in order to make each production plant, each city neighborhood, each kolkhoz self-sufficient. But, despite all the precautions and security measures, the accidents multiplied and the habitable areas diminished. Of course all those who invented these seemingly clean and robust generator models had been executed, but that hadn’t solved any problems. Massive regions had to be evacuated and left to ruin. The triumphant march toward communism, already hampered by outside attacks, found its pace slowed down even further. When the Gramma Udgul volunteered, the liquidators had become a pillar on which society teetered. The candidates for this noble task, however, weren’t rushing to the recruitment offices. Only heroes were signing up. Only young idealistic fanatics, or the same old militants who hid their fear by gritting their indomitable Bolshevik teeth.
The Gramma Udgul worked selflessly on the first building site, and then on those that followed. She knew that she was immolating herself, that she was offering up her health and her life for the collective’s future well-being, for the radiant future of her children and grandchildren, or rather everyone else’s, because she had been warned that the radiation would render her sterile. She helped evacuate the population, she piled up the trucks with the evacuees’ goods, she soothed those who were hysterical, she went on to arrest the thieves and lent a hand when they had to be immediately executed, she was involved in building the shields and concrete layers around the unapproachable cisterns, close to the cores that did whatever they wanted to. It was demanding, dangerous work. However, in contrast to the other heroic men and women who had quickly succumbed, she kept on living.
Her body had responded positively to this repeated exposure to fissile matter. The ionizing rays had destroyed all the sick and potentially cancerous cells her flesh might harbor. Radioactivity had certainly made her slightly iridescent in the darkness, but above all it had stopped the process of aging in her flesh, and according to what the Gramma Udgul thoroughly suspected, it had been stopped forever. These phenomena also had inconveniences and, particularly, they had caught the attention of the authorities who asked her several times, not without some irritation, why she wasn’t dying. The Party had trouble accepting that she refused to go with her comrades in liquidation to the grave. A proposed official reprimand was discussed and, even if it was closed for being judged absurd and even odious, it nonetheless remained in her folder, a stain. From then on, her troubles never ended. They kept on singing her praises in the press and depicting her as a Soviet woman of extraordinary devotion and courage, but they managed not to mention, moreover, that she was fit as a fiddle.
• At first, the Gramma Udgul submitted without complaint to the psychological exams that were ordered regularly, but after five or six years she had had enough, and she didn’t seem very willing when she was asked to donate her body to science as quickly as possible. She only responded to convocation notices intermittently. She had clearly been singled out without any explanation, both in the realms of medicine and normal civilian life. She knew that she was being watched as an unreliable individual, and she understood that she had been deemed unworthy of promotion to the Party’s honorary body, as had more or less automatically been the case for every cosmonaut, author of epics, and television celebrity. She didn’t complain about her iridescence or her immortality, and she didn’t make a single comment about the political injustice she was suffering. She wrote self-criticisms when asked,
