folded around his hips. Kronauer somehow kept her upright. Sometimes he grabbed her ankles, sometimes he crossed his arms to hold her calves. Samiya Schmidt had been reticent at first about being in such close contact with this unknown man; she didn’t want to be pressed up against him, intertwined with him at all. At the trip’s start, she had stood up while refusing his help and, when they started walking, she tried to stay all the way upright. The first several hundred meters were an ordeal. She staggered and, so as not to fall, kept holding onto Kronauer. Then she fell down and he convinced her to drag herself behind him, on him.
For Kronauer, even though she was a small woman who barely weighed more than a child, she was a difficult burden to carry. Every step diminished somewhat the restorative effects of the fresh water, and fasting had weakened his body. He hadn’t eaten for days. After a painful half-kilometer he lost his rhythm and began to stumble under the weight. He exhaled heavily. Drops of sweat ran down his forehead and from his armpits.
—Stop, Samiya Schmidt growled suddenly. We’re not going far like this. We’ll never get to the Levanidovo.
—You told me it wasn’t far, Kronauer said stubbornly.
—We’ll have to cross the old forest, Samiya Schmidt said.
He set her down on the ground. She shakily stood up by him, then she was overcome by nausea and went to lean against a larch to vomit. Kronauer watched her heave. He felt the sweat on his face building up and then falling in huge drops. He noticed a rocky outcrop and walked the five or six steps to sit on it.
I won’t be able to get back up, he thought. I don’t have any strength left. We’re both going to die in the trees, this half-dead girl and me.
Samiya Schmidt spent a minute bent in half, then she pulled herself back up and went over, swaying, to Kronauer. She sat on the other end of the outcrop. They both had trouble catching their breath.
—It’ll be easier later on, she said, clearly talking about herself. Have to wait for it to go away.
—What is it? Kronauer asked.
—It’ll go away, she insisted with effort. But have to wait.
She was sitting three meters away from him. She turned toward him and looked furtively in his eyes. Within Kronauer’s gray-blue irises, there was no trace of dishonor. He had touched her legs, her body had been thrashed around while her breasts had rubbed and pushed against his shoulder blades, he had panted while holding her against his body. But now he looked at her calmly, with brotherhood and sadness more than anything. He didn’t seem like one of these men torn by sexual frenzy, ready to grunt, attack, and spray sperm over everything feminine within reach, like those men Maria Kwoll had described in her feminist writings. She had never met these sorts of men in the village, where all the inhabitants, except for Solovyei, constantly teetered between comas and inexpressible mental and physical exhaustion, but she knew that they existed and that they might appear time and time again, and not just in Maria Kwoll or Sonia Velazquez’s incendiary writings. She knew all about the dirty tricks they were capable of. Maria Kwoll was graphic enough to describe them unflinchingly in her numerous ranting texts. This soldier seemed in no way to be a male in rut, but who knew.
The image of rape overwhelmed her.
—Don’t you think for one second about hurting me, she said before she could help herself. The president of the kolkhoz isn’t the sort to forgive that. I’m his daughter, remember that. He’s not a little president of a nowhere kolkhoz. He’ll be dogging you for at least a thousand eight hundred and thirteen lunar years and then some. I’d rather warn you before you think up anything nasty.
Kronauer shrugged. This girl was disturbed. If he had realized it earlier, he would have tried to get to the Levanidovo on his own without calling on her as a guide. So far, she hadn’t been any help and, instead, she’d only made his trek harder and slower. What if I abandoned her? he thought to himself. Then he caught himself. Too late, Kronauer, like it or not you’re responsible for this girl now. She’s not all right in her head, but you’ve taken some responsibility for her, so stick with it. You haven’t lost your morals entirely yet. And if you get up and leave without turning around to see if she follows you or not, how will you explain to the kolkhozniks that you left behind the daughter of their president lying on the ground?
—Tell me about your father, Kronauer said.
—I have nothing to tell you about my father, Samiya Schmidt shot back. The less you see of him, the better off you’ll be.
The conversation ended on that note.
After having rested for about an hour, they set off again.
Kronauer felt like he had gained a bit of energy. He suggested that she climb once more onto his back and she accepted without saying a word.
• The old forest.
Now the scene is darker.
Not a bit of sky above their heads. Only black branches. Dark layers of black branches. A thick fabric, heavy and unmoving.
Kronauer carrying Samiya Schmidt on his back.
Strong smells.
Resin, rotting peat mosses, decomposing trees, marsh gas. Stinking wafts from deep layers of the earth. Scents of bark, viscosities stagnating beneath the bark, mustiness of larvae. Mushrooms. Moist stumps. Monstrous accumulations of polypores, oxtongues, giant clavarias, branchy hedgehogs. Fetid tears on the edge of conks.
An intense silence that nothing shatters.
The irregular noise of Kronauer’s footsteps, and that silence that immediately becomes unbroken.
Twigs snapping under his boots. Sometimes, under the grass and the ferns, the suctioning noise of mud. Then, once again, the silence that nothing disturbs.
Samiya Schmidt’s breath on Kronauer’s neck, behind his ear. Samiya Schmidt’s panting in Kronauer’s hair that reeks from his wanderings, the grease, the dust.
The bottles knocking, the bags, which every so often bang against Samiya Schmidt’s calves, Kronauer’s elbows.
The tangled, slanted trunks, most often arrayed in long cascades like witch grass. Mysterious blockades covered in mosses. Obstacles best skirted around, sometimes with a hundred meters’ walk, rather than sinking to one’s ankles in puddles of dark water, in clayey troughs.
The color of these mosses, an unvarying, nearly-black green. The disagreeable texture of this witch grass that has to be pushed aside with faces and shoulders.
At every moment, this cool and damp caress on your face.
At every moment, the feeling of something malevolent feeling its way toward you.
No bird, no small animal.
Here and there, giant anthills, without any apparent bustle but perhaps inhabited by black and teeming colonies.
Samiya Schmidt and Kronauer no longer speak.
The crossing is harder and harder.
The scene is darker and darker.
• The old forest isn’t an earthly place like the others. Nothing comparable exists in other forest of similar size, nor in the taiga, which is boundless and where people die. Unless they take a horribly long and uncertain path, you can’t reach the Levanidovo and its Radiant Terminus kolkhoz without crossing it. But crossing it also means wandering under its menacing trees, advancing without any landmarks, blindly, means walking with difficulty among its strange traps, beyond all duration, means going both straight ahead and in circles, as if poisoned, as if drugged, breathing with difficulty, as in a nightmare where you can hear your own snoring and moaning but where wakefulness never comes, means oppression without the least idea of where your fear comes from, means dreading noise every bit as much as silence, means losing reason and, finally, understanding neither noise nor silence. Being in the heart of the old forest also means sometimes no longer feeling exhaustion, floating between life and death, hanging between breathlessness and exhalation, between sleepiness and wakefulness,