this, you’d be good for fifteen or twenty more years of rigorous imprisonment. At least.
—You think? Solovyei said. Even with you as president, with all your medals and a team of easily swayed good little Komsomols?
—If I were president, you wouldn’t escape a firing squad, the Gramma Udgul laughed lightly.
Then she began humming as he caressed the back of her head.
Their tenderness was palpable.
• They lay together in the hangar for several minutes. Barguzin hadn’t appeared, they knew they were alone, and they weren’t embarrassed to coo at each other.
The Gramma Udgul was in a good mood again. Under Solovyei’s affectionate hand, she daydreamed once more about the joy of the waltz, the accordion, and the ideal worker who had turned her head at sunrise. Solovyei relaxed. The morning was just starting, the day was bright, the warehouse thrummed agreeably under the combined effect of the radiation and the sun’s heat, and so Solovyei slipped into an almost unmoving dance with his old friend. The dance was magical, like all dances of love, but it didn’t carry any real sexual freight, and he didn’t feel any frustration in the least. He let himself fall little by little into romanticism and he went into an image instead of unleashing his body. Even though he had plenty of other experiences and even though he felt that he was in the prime of his years and far from the end of his hardy masculine life, he accepted this barely sexual relationship. He accepted it because it was actually very deep and very beautiful.
—What if we listened to one? he asked suddenly.
The Gramma Udgul came out of her reverie.
—One what? One cylinder?
—Well, what if we listened to one, just to see?
He was no longer hugging her and he went to open the cupboard where the Gramma Udgul had put away the phonograph.
The device had a spring mechanism. Solovyei set it on the pile of newspapers and cranked the handle until it stopped, and then he took a cylinder at random from one of the archive crates.
—Which one did you pick? the Gramma Udgul asked.
—I didn’t look, Solovyei said, setting the black cylinder in the notches. I didn’t pick. None of them have names or dates on them. Just a voice bursting out in black space. It’s as much in the present as the past. Or even the future. Listen to it with your gut, not your ears.
Then he pulled the arm and needle over the wax.
—Listen to yourself, the Gramma Udgul said. You’re saying that it’s both present and not present. How do you expect me to organize that?
The needle hissed for two seconds, then the voice was around them: bizarre, deformed, like it was actually from an intermediary world, barely comprehensible and unmoored.
• Then he became a shadow with the knife he had been hiding in front of his face, there was now just a shadow with the knife, a single shadow that was sometimes black, sometimes dark, and as his face glimmered subtly with the embers’ every movement, he gathered together his throaty voices and imagined devotees around him and, focusing on the slim edge of the blade remnants of bravery, and thundering his sighs in his most haughtily low registers, in his ample but extraordinary registers, exhaling his terminal curse in deep waves, rolling off his tongue notes still far less audible than extinguished stars, and also thinking of his scattered daughters, and thinking of his daughters turned away from him, and thinking of his noble daughters lost, forever away from him and lost, and inventing haphazardly new ways of whispering that avenge, inventing whispers made with murderous words, with murderous phrases, and wrapping himself in the memory of his short existence and his short laughs and his dead and his daughters, and thinking about the futures his daughters had promised he would experience, and focusing on the point a remnant of a useless lie, because he never had the chance to speak articulately to his daughters at a distance nor to communicate intelligently with them at a distance, focusing that on the sharp iron, and trying not to be brought down by a sudden insolent greed for the horizon nor by stupor, and thinking of his beloved daughters he never had the chance to pamper or protect or even quickly perceive, between two railings or two wars, between two black absences, and raising his head again to accompany the slow dance of his cutlass and the slow dance of its point, noiselessly raising his shadowy head, hiding once more the extinguished shadow, and thinking again of the catastrophic fate of his daughters he never was able to save from misfortune, and who, if they ever knew happiness, never shared a single crumb of it with him, and thinking of his daughters whose happiness he wasn’t able to apprehend even by proxy, and groaning speeches of painful ignorance, dead waves of already-dead words, groaning calmly endless discussions already long since dulled, he searched haphazardly for an artery and he said: “Come!” Then, already in absolute tatters, he turned toward the image no less in tears that followed him, itself hidden behind sharp iron, and they exchanged glances, and as he wanted to pretend not to feel anything ominous and pretend not to know what to stammer now and how to end, he said again, but nobody nearby heard his indistinct wheeze: “Tomorrow or yesterday, no dying for any reason!” Then he spoke again a little of his daughters and expired.
• The needle moved onto the unrecorded wax and sputtered disagreeably before Solovyei stopped the mechanism. The Gramma Udgul pouted, but the kolkhoz director bore a triumphant look.
—Did you like that? he asked.
—It’s too far from socialist realism for me, she sighed. It’s just poetic, slightly perverse nonsense, petit-bourgeois fantasy. It’s like a threatening riddle. None of it makes sense.
—There’s nothing to understand, Solovyei replied.
The Gramma Udgul’s face clouded over.
—There’s no clear class line, she continued. The proletariat would hate that.
Solovyei was putting the cylinder back in its crate.
—Shall we listen to a little more? he suggested.
—Hmm, the Gramma Udgul said.
—Before you throw them to the core.
—Don’t think I’m doing it because I want to, the Gramma Udgul said.
Their eyes drew level. Solovyei smiled while furrowing his eyebrows comically. He kept on making faces for a few seconds, until the Gramma Udgul relaxed.
—I’m just doing my work, she said.
—Go on, I’m playing another one, Solovyei said. Then I’m going back to the kolkhoz.
—Whatever you like, the Gramma Udgul sighed.
• He was masked in leather and copper, as often, and then he took off his terrible bird’s head and, once the smoke subsided, he peeled away from the brick where the fire had forced him to stay for nearly a thousand years. Some mercury flowed noisily along his arms. He hunched toward those who were facing the reflections and, without clearing his voice, he spoke to the scribe who had died. “Go,” he said. “Write what nobody else has told you over the centuries.” As it fell, the mercury made a greater din than his own breath. The scribe didn’t move. For a year or two, he had the impression that this writer at his service was a woman, then the impression went away. Then, he threatened the scribe with bits of burning wall and he continued, but, this time, while hurling words in encrypted language: “Go! Hadeff Kakain! Hoddîm!” And, as the scribe didn’t write anything, he crushed the head under his heel and squatted by the remnants.
3
• The day had started. Kronauer regained consciousness and got to his feet. The rough fabric of his coat was stained with moist earth and bits of grass. Blades of lovuskhas, solivaines. A crushed budardian ear. Ants wandered over the fibrous scraps. Seven or eight.
The night had not given him back much strength and he lost his balance trying to clear the ants away. The empty bottles he carried over his shoulder bothered him. They clinked against each other. He stumbled for two meters before regaining some stability. He had trouble catching his breath.