and, when the opportunity presented itself again, she left for the liquidation sites, always willingly. She had a sense of discipline and she didn’t claim to be clever enough to contradict the Party.
Decades went by. The authorities changed, co-opted themselves, grew old, were rejuvenated, but never reviewed their evaluation of her, and, generation after generation, they considered her immortality, intentional or not, an insult to the toiling masses. They kept an eye on her organic deviationism. However, that eye had an unclear view. Her extraordinary abilities in battling the atoms’ unforeseen wrath were undeniable. She was frequently called upon for her irreplaceable experience, and behind closed doors she was frequently awarded the titles and medals she had earned: Valiant Combatant of the Atom, Red Heroine, Glorious Liquidator, Intrepid Red Doyenne, Veteran, Red Big Sister. She pinned the certificates above her bed, but she rarely mentioned them, rarely or not at all. In her building, she was just a small anonymous person. She wasn’t the sort to show an invalid’s card at stores in hopes of skipping the line.
In this way, a century went by. A century of setting out again and again for nuclear ovens on the brink of meltdown, mixing fuel rods with gloves ill-suited to the task, crossing the countryside, laughing yet bleak, going into ghost towns, digging communal graves, and shooting down thieves. She worked hard with teams as their members collapsed one after another and decayed in weeks. She helped with hurried funerals in places filled with silence and strewn with ossified birds, then, upon her return to the capital, she was paraded on solemn occasions, during which she was decorated with awards normally given to the dead. Then she went back to normal life. She settled back in her job at a local clinic. Her frequent requests for time off to go fight enemy matter had hampered her upward trajectory, and she remained a nurse’s aide—a first-class one, but still just a nurse’s aide. And, once she was at work, she was again forced to deal with the Party and the suspicions of its teams, undergo humiliating procedures, rewrite her autobiography for the thousandth time, do her self-criticisms over again, and, on top of all that, she had to appear at the Medical Academy’s meetings, justify her natural and ideological state in front of embryologists, in front of xenologists, in front of special works councils that didn’t hesitate to accuse her of petit-bourgeois individualism in the face of death, and even of witchcraft.
She put an end to this endless cycle.
One day, she acted in a fit of pique.
She applied for a disaster site far away from everything, having made a firm decision there and then never to come back. She simply had to go to a closed-off province, already quarantined for a half-century after uncontrollable setbacks in the military facilities. Some minimal human activity persisted there, with a few agricultural enterprises and several camps, but the urban areas, even the small ones, had been evacuated. And, conveniently enough, the Red Star sovkhoz had just indicated that there was a situation of utmost urgency at its nuclear power site, and, in the same distress call, had spoken of a neighboring kolkhoz, Radiant Terminus, also in trouble. The region had been kept under military confidentiality since its annexation to the Second Soviet Union, and nobody could quite pinpoint it on a map. The Red Star was indicated by a question mark, close to a large forest and a place called the Levanidovo, but there was no hint anywhere of a Radiant Terminus.
• They had brought the Gramma Udgul and her squadron on a bus that had stopped at the edge of the province, then they had given everybody sidecars to get themselves to the accident site. The road continued, but no person or thing could be seen on it and, out of fear of radiation, the drivers decided to turn around two hundred kilometers sooner than expected.
The Gramma Udgul’s companions had unanimously picked her to head the squad. They were proud to work under such a popular figure of the Orbise because, even if the Party kept having trouble publicly recognizing her merits, the Orbise’s masses happily paid homage to her and weren’t irritated that she wasn’t dead. She had the astonishing ability to constitute a liquidation brigade out of any workforce found nearby. She was accompanied by some thirty scientists, firefighters, and engineers ready to wade through boiling-hot cooling ponds and breached cores in sovkhoz and kolkhoz alike. They had all sworn to do their best until their spinal cords had become nothing more than blackened mallows.
Their sidecars trundled down the empty roads, then, when the sidecars ran out of gas, they crossed the forest on foot to the Levanidovo, where they split up in two teams.
The Gramma Udgul came to the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz and was surprised and overjoyed to discover that the president was a certain Solovyei, her first husband, a comrade whom she had loved very much and whom she had been taken away from ninety years earlier. This Solovyei wasn’t a citizen as respectful of the official proletarian obligations as she was and, despite believing in egalitarianism, he had his own views, on which he had imposed moral arrangements that nobody was allowed to judge. In short, he had long since turned his back on the Party. After an eternity of imprisonment and vagrancy, he had finally settled into this hidden corner as a member of an independent commune that maintained very weak links with the institutions and authorities of the Orbise.
As she gave herself over to the pleasure of finding Solovyei again and reminiscing about their lost youth, the Gramma Udgul let the scientists carry out preliminary measures, assess the damage for millennia to come, and then explain the situation during a general assembly of the Red Star and Radiant Terminus survivors. The teams then began to work at full force. Using shortcuts that he alone knew, Solovyei guided them through the forest to get from one site to another quickly. The two agricultural complexes were effectively separated by a strip of taiga that foolhardy people could easily get lost in.
The Red Star sovkhoz had been abandoned after three days. Since the innards of its plant was burning outside the reactor vessel, but not presenting any major performance issues, the firefighters had suggested leaving the building as it was, and coming back several years later to remove the most problematic waste. The barns and pigsties were opened, the livestock and poultry encouraged to go die on the open steppes, and all the surviving sovkhozniks and liquidators withdrew to the Radiant Terminus area, where the core was already sinking into the earth’s bowels. The Gramma Udgul had approved the plans for the hangar, requisitioned sturdy men and women to begin construction, and outlined the framework for decontamination, which in her opinion would take four or five centuries, taking into account the few hands available. Then she did her best to care for her team members as they died. The scientists went first, closely followed by the engineers. The firefighters held out for a week longer, and in turn, they went out in shreds, torn apart by deadly cancers and burns. Aside from the engineer Barguzin, who also seemed to be immune to radiation, the whole squadron had died in enthusiastic but atrocious suffering.
For three months, she sent a report to the Party every two weeks in which she copied down the readings from the few thermometers and measurement instruments still in working order, and described the liquidation’s progress, as well as her short-term and medium-term prognoses. On schematic maps, drawn according to Solovyei’s directions, she delineated the large perimeter where from that point on it would be ill-advised to venture without having taken iodine pills and put on hazmat suits. At the end of the message she gave an exhaustive list of countrymen, specialists, and non-specialists who had died and whose corpses had been thrown into the well, because this well’s liquidating function had been activated, albeit in a strictly experimental manner. In a postscript, she sometimes wondered about the tactics used to reestablish the ideological norms of Radiant Terminus in a kolkhoz where class warfare had never happened in an orthodox fashion, although on the whole without straying from the egalitarian mentality dear to our hearts. She never received a reply. Then the mailman had thyroid problems in the middle of the forest and lay down for a long while under the larches, putting an end to mail delivery to and from the Levanidovo.
So the Gramma Udgul began living her life without deferring to the Party at every moment. This break with the hierarchy and supreme guides had induced stress, and for several months she suffered nightmares and even some mental confusion. She tended to see the worst everywhere. Then, thanks to Solovyei’s
