This self-loathing weighed him down retroactively. He thought of the women who had been around him after he had fainted: Myriam Umarik, Hannko Vogulian. They must have felt some revulsion when they handled him and lay him down in the cell. He also thought of those who, earlier, must have had to press their head against him: first, Vassilissa Marachvili during their wandering on the steppes, and then Samiya Schmidt while they had crossed the forest together. When she dangled on his back as if she were dying.
He soaped himself up once more and rinsed again, and, when the water flowing toward the drain looked merely frothy and not grayish, he stood under the pounding rain for a while longer. He felt revived. The water, the steam, the soap all had given him new strength. And doubtless also the iodine and plutonium that dropped above, as in the byliny about the deathly-deathly water and the lively-lively water that the enchantresses poured over the dead to bring them out of their fatal sleep.
Then he shut off the water and he went to dry himself by the bench. On the floor, his coat and his rags formed an appalling heap. He pushed them aside without touching them, using the edge of the zinc basin, and he moved away as quickly as possible. Then he got dressed. He put on the underclothes that Samiya Schmidt had taken from the wardrobe of her husband, the tractor driver Morgovian, and then he put on one of the engineer Barguzin’s shirts. The new pants and new boots had been taken from the Gramma Udgul’s dump. There was certainly enough there to set an ionizing-ray detector into a frenzy. Kronauer had no way of knowing it, but even if he had been told that he was introducing into his tissues something that would assuredly put him into a coffin straightaway, he would have retorted, no, not at all, and on the contrary, the radiation’s always been keeping me nicely in shape. He might have added that the dangers of escaped atoms were largely exaggerated by enemy propaganda, and what mattered to him at this moment was that his feet fit properly in these new shoes.
And that he felt comfortable in his new shirt. But he did feel comfortable. These women had good eyes. Everything fit him exactly.
• Three women. The only three women in the village, not counting the Gramma Udgul.
Three sisters.
Three daughters who had Solovyei as their presumed father, born as has already been said to unknown mothers.
Samiya Schmidt, the youngest daughter, married to the tractor driver Morgovian.
Myriam Umarik, the middle daughter, married to the engineer Barguzin.
Hannko Vogulian, the oldest daughter of the three, presumably widowed, married to the wandering musician Schulhoff, a runaway deportee who hadn’t spent more than a week in the Levanidovo, and then had disappeared, fortunately without impregnating her.
• Hannko Vogulian had only experienced three days of marriage, after she and Schulhoff had fallen in love at first sight and immediately united in passionate love.
Aldolay Schulhoff had appeared one Monday in the village and, that Thursday, in the marriage register dusted off for the occasion, the two young lovers signed their commitment to live together, no matter what happened, until their death. Solovyei, as president of the kolkhoz, had to affix his signature to the bottom of the page, but it was after trying for the previous forty-eight hours to dissuade his daughter and, in short, he violently disagreed. He had threatened to oppose this union in every way possible, but this one was properly sealed by an official act, and, once the register was set back in the right cabinet, he had to understand and accept that he had a new son-in-law. However, the marriage only lasted until the next Sunday, the day when the search to find Schulhoff hadn’t turned up anything. From Saturday night, in fact, Schulhoff had disappeared without leaving behind any explanation or trace. Hannko Vogulian had insisted on organizing a search as well as using the loudspeakers along the main street, so that the calls would cut through all the nearby countryside, and all the Levanidovo waited nervously through Sunday night, but Schulhoff didn’t reappear. He had somehow ceased to exist in the village, and, in Hannko Vogulian’s life, at least her unimagined life, he was no more.
Solovyei spared no pain as the brigade leader of the hunt, but he couldn’t be bothered to seem sad for his daughter’s sudden widowing. He declared that the page of Hannko Vogulian’s marriage had been turned and then, whenever there was a question about Schulhoff’s disappearance, when someone brought up this mystery again, he looked up at the sky and claimed not to have anything special to say, even though several kolkhozniks and his own daughters suspected him of having played a decisive role in the whole matter.
Despite the shortness of his stay in the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, Schulhoff had left behind a lasting memory, and not just in Hannko Vogulian’s thoughts.
He was an itinerant singer, with a beautiful presence, dark-haired, with a splendid voice he had trained since childhood, which allowed him to slip instantaneously from the deepest sounds to the inhuman harmonics of throat singing. He had mastered several languages: Beltir, Koybal, Kyzyl, Kacha, Old American, Camp Russian, Olcha, Khalkha, and, depending on his audience, he chose one dialect or another, adapting his stories so that his listeners could find heroes familiar to their sensibility and their culture. He carried books in his bag and everything suggested that he was full of gentleness, intelligence, and sensitivity. It hadn’t taken Hannko Vogulian more than a minute to fall under his spell and decide that he would be the man of her life. She had always been a prudent girl, but in this instant she succumbed to her impulses and instincts without the least compunction and, from the first night, she went to be with him at the Pioneers’ House where he was staying and she devoted herself to him. She offered herself up to Aldolay Schulhoff. And he, who had been seduced by her and could never run out of rhapsodies or adjectives for her eyes of different colors, had happily fallen into this sudden passion. Maybe he was tired of wandering endlessly from one end of the land to the other, but he immediately saw himself settling down for good in Radiant Terminus. Among the sweet nothings they whispered those few nights, there had been promises and the immediate prospect of a proper marriage. Despite Solovyei’s ill will, they made it happen three days later in the Soviet Assembly Room with the one-armed Abazayev, Myriam Umarik, and Samiya Schmidt as witnesses.
Saturday evening, in homage to the kolkhozniks who had welcomed him into the fold, he brought out his rhapsodist’s instruments and sang the long and famous bylina that described, in poetic prose and in music, Ilya Muromets and Nightingale the Robber. In reality, he was performing a Buryat legend, but, as his audience was predominantly oriented toward the Russian collective memory, he reshaped it with great skill to emphasize the universal elements of Ilya Muromets’s heroic saga.
Everyone in the Levanidovo thought his adaptation was original and his interpretation worthy of admiration. While his voice wasn’t that of a bass singer and seemed thinner, he managed to make vibrant, sustained, and deep notes soar from his chest, notes that immediately entranced his listeners, and then he unfurled a melodic, tranquil narrative without a single pause, and his voice changed throughout the dialogues, shifting instantaneously from the metallic tones of harmonic singing to the feminine softness of the lyric text, then to the rumbling of pure song. Tears rolled down the cheeks of Solovyei’s three daughters, who were not used to emotion provoked by song and a zither’s melody, by the flowery language of the epic narrative. The demobilized Abazayev was also overwhelmed by the music and spent his time wiping his cheeks with the empty sleeve of his jacket, stained with mole poison. The engineer Barguzin couldn’t bear the tension of this much beauty. He died once again that night. The Gramma Udgul had to administer her shock therapy with heavy-heavy water, deathly-deathly water, and lively-lively water. Solovyei, who had originally declared that he wouldn’t attend the concert, changed his mind and came into the assembly room dressed in a midnight-blue shirt and perfectly waxed boots that he only wore on special occasions. He sat solemnly across from his new son-in-law and he seemed to enjoy the performance from its start to its finish. He clapped in rhythm on his massive thigh with happiness evident on his face, even though the previous night he had been angrily lecturing his daughter about the young bridegroom’s paltry value, about his pitiable stature as a bard, forced to earn his living by selling his talent and begging in obscure places, in fisheries, in scarcely-known logging sites.
• That night, that Saturday night, Solovyei had withdrawn wordlessly after hugging Schulhoff. The witnesses recalled that