of brand-new garbage and, at the end, she went back to sit down in her armchair, in front of the heavy curtain that marked off her strictly private space.
Kronauer inspected the imposing mass of Solovyei’s archives among which the Gramma Udgul was sitting. On a small table there was a machine for reading the recorded cylinders, and beneath the table, several crates filled with wax or Bakelite cylinders.
He hadn’t been asked to comment, so Kronauer stayed quiet.
The Gramma Udgul in turn had relented, or at least she now talked without trying to be aggressive. She had concluded from the interrogation that this nearly-fortysomething man belonged to a group of red soldiers that wasn’t suspected of apostasy or treachery. She had talked with him about the last egalitarian areas of the Orbise and their downfall, and Kronauer’s political background pleased her. She knew, of course, that really trusting him would take months of investigation and imprisonment, along with multiple autobiographies written during sleep deprivation, but, for now, she didn’t see any reason to give him trouble. He had to tell her in detail about the period of military retreat, when he and his comrades had fired at a demented officer. That was a gray area, typical behavior for an adventurer susceptible to anarchist impulses rather than Bolshevik intelligence. On the one hand, she approved that he hadn’t let himself be trapped in a suicide mission, and on the other she wondered if opening fire on a superior wasn’t, at the end of the day, an awfully leftist act.
• She tilted her head to indicate the papers and boxes of cylinders.
—See all that, she said. Solovyei calls that his complete works. He’s joking, but I know he’s attached to them. And sometimes he says it’s a treasure, the only example in the world of post-shamanic poetry. It certainly isn’t like anything, and politically it’s nauseating and subversive more than anything else. They weren’t made for any specific audience. These are complete works for no audience.
Kronauer nodded in feigned interest. Everything having to do with Solovyei usually tended to bother him, these incessant mentions, full of vagaries and threats, as if the land and the inhabitants of the kolkhoz had magically submitted to their president. Besides, he didn’t believe that the Gramma Udgul would really establish a rapport with him at the expense of Solovyei’s literary ambitions. There was no reason for this complicity to arise just then. The Gramma Udgul wasn’t stupid and, if this was the direction she’d steered the conversation, it had to be so he’d say something bad about Solovyei. This had to be a trap the old woman had set, and he had no intention of falling into it. As for Solovyei’s poetic achievements, he remembered experiencing an unbearable example in the forest, before he had come to the Levanidovo, completely unbearable and humiliating, and he didn’t plan on sharing his memory of this experience with the Gramma Udgul.
—Well, maybe someone will find it all charming one day, he said sardonically.
—Nobody with a proper head on his shoulders would, the Gramma Udgul said. They’re vile mutterings. A little like the post-exotic writers, back in the day, during their mystical period. But worse. Mutterings recorded when he’s gallivanting through the atomic flames, through death or black space.
—Ah, Kronauer said.
The Gramma Udgul began to take her smoking materials out of an apron pocket, and she made herself comfortable while packing bits of tobacco into her pipe. Silence had settled between the two of them and throughout the whole warehouse. Kronauer was more or less at attention in front of her, and every so often he ran his hand over his shaved head, more for something to do than to straighten the half-millimeter of hair that dotted his skin and which would, by all appearances, fall out and not grow back until his death.
As the silence stretched out, Kronauer went to look at the phonograph more closely.
It was a device like the ones they had started making again, based on the old models, when they had believed that the enemy had weapons able to remotely destroy the mechanisms of electronic devices. This unfounded rumor had set off a panic in the industry and in the population, and it had kick-started a pilot plant for reinventing engines that ran on springs or other forces that didn’t require power. The rumor was quickly stamped out, but the first non-electronic models had already come off the production lines, demonstrating the ability of our engineers to adapt and the superiority of our technology, let us say our survival technology, in the race to the bottom we’ve had with imperialism. These prototypes weren’t produced in large numbers, but they were distributed through the network of cooperatives so that the working-class population would stay in touch with our culture and enrich it with local contributions. And so here and there working phonographs could be found, as well as blank cylinders without which these objects would have lost nearly all their significance. Kronauer handled the copper horn, caressed the diaphragm’s membrane, examined the needle; then he looked at the box full of cylinders and took out one to look more closely.
He could feel the Gramma Udgul’s hostility on his back and he turned toward her. She took the pipe out of her mouth.
—Didn’t you see what’s written on the cylinder? she asked icily.
Kronauer rotated the cylinder, which at first glance seemed not to have any information on it; then he saw an inscription in gray letters on the end. He had to hold it up to the light to read it. Like traces of graphite on slate.
—Well, there are a few letters, he said. F T T L T T D A T T D.
—It’s an abbreviation, the Gramma Udgul said unhelpfully.
—I don’t know how to decode that.
The Gramma Udgul blew a cloud of smoke at Kronauer. Her face was frowning and unfriendly.
—You really aren’t smart, soldier, she said.
—No.
—It means “Forbidden to the Living, to the Dead, and to the Dogs.”
She spoke these words with an ominous aggression, as if he was undeniably guilty of something, but refused to admit it. Kronauer decided to be as straightforward as possible.
—I’m not any of those, he said.
—Sure, you say that, the Gramma Udgul grumbled.
They watched each other without talking for several seconds.
—Ow! Kronauer suddenly yelled.
—What happened? the Gramma Udgul jumped up.
—Nothing, Kronauer said. I just pricked myself on the diaphragm needle. I wanted to put the cylinder in the spindle to see how it worked, and I pricked myself.
• Kronauer has pricked his finger on the phonograph needle.
A small drop of blood grows on the end of his index finger.
A sting, and then everything changes.
Sleeping Beauty pricked herself on her spindle and that cost her a hundred years of sleep and immobility.
Kronauer doesn’t fall down, doesn’t fall asleep. He doesn’t dream for a second of making any comparison between this fairy-tale princess and himself, between the old spinster and the Gramma Udgul, between the spindle’s point and the phonograph’s needle. He has nothing in his head resembling children’s stories, and he simply looks at the drop of blood swelling on his finger. He looks at it, then he brings it to his lips and he licks it.
The taste of blood on his tongue. And there, as in the shower, an aftertaste of cesium and iodide.
Kronauer has drawn blood on an object belonging to Solovyei, which is an integral part of Solovyei’s memories, which is used to broadcast Solovyei’s voice, a magic machine that speaks Solovyei’s poems out loud, his memories, Solovyei’s emphatic howls, Solovyei’s terrible admonitions and dreams.
A miniscule wound, and then everything changes.
Kronauer feels a light numbness in the pad of his finger, a barely noticeable pain. A new droplet of blood appears on his fingertip, he lets it tremble before licking it up, but already everything has changed.
Kronauer