to rifles and cartridges, which they had decided were no longer of any help to them and which they hid in a bakery oven in a dead city.
Cold raindrops breaking up a star-studded night.
Two wild cows visible in the distance.
Vassilissa Marachvili not turning around to undress, before going to wash herself in a brown lake. The smell of Vassilissa Marachvili’s body still shivering on the lakeshore, her sweat replaced by the stink of mud.
The “forbidden” and “danger” signs that rust had eaten away. Over a skull framed in red and black, snails that, before dying, had left heavy trails of slime.
Ilyushenko looking for one last cookie in his rucksack and not finding it.
Vassilissa Marachvili’s teeth, which he had, many times at their trip’s start, imagined sliding his tongue across.
Ilyushenko and Vassilissa Marachvili whispering.
The skin a grass snake had shed in the middle of the road.
The idea that they had been irradiated, that they were baking, and were already dead, in the process of breaking apart at the base of a reactor.
A railway track disappearing beneath stinging nettles.
Villages far off, lifeless and repulsive.
A stop close to a wrecked nuclear power plant, in a place open to the winds but stinking of grease, and the discussion they’d had to decide if it was grease from sheep or from bears.
But we were the ones who smelled bad, he suddenly realized.
He stopped walking, saw the sky brighter behind him than over the forest. The steppes stretched out endlessly, wavy, velvety, hued yellow and green with white smudges indicating tufts of Jeanne-of-the-Communists, spotted doroglosses.
He caught his breath. He breathed in the vastness deeply.
You’re on the steppes, Kronauer, he thought. There’s no shame in being here for the end. It’s beautiful. Appreciate it. Not everyone gets to die on the steppes.
• The steppes. He had spent his childhood in the city, in an orphanage that rarely took trips to the countryside; what passed for trips were days dedicated to the communal potato harvest. Urban settings were practically everything he knew. His universe of references was circumscribed by wide avenues, inner courtyards, gray buildings, and exhaust fumes. Still, the movies and books the school had deluged him with had allowed him to roam, meander, and travel among the grassy spaces flattened under the blue sky, alongside the Scythians, the Avars, the Pechenegs, the Tatars, the Red Cavalry, and, of course, in the company of the mythic Russian heroes of Kiev every single child in the Orbise knew: Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovitch, and all their partners, rivals, and comrades. The steppes eventually became as familiar and essential to him as the capital’s streets. And later, when he was no longer a child, he fell in love with Irina Echenguyen—and, in this theater of epic horseback rides beloved by the Orbise’s orphans and communards alike, this unforgettable woman had fostered his love for botany.
Irina Echenguyen, like the rest of us, also loved those Russian byliny and the scenes of endless prairies intertwined with millennia of history, from the Scythian Empire to the Second Soviet Union, by way of Genghis Kahn’s thunderous horses and Chapayev’s crackling machine guns. But, above all, she was a member of a scientific team that worked on naming uncultivated grasses and wild plants in general. Kronauer didn’t have the expert knowledge she did, and he remained wholly unable to help her in her complicated classifications, but he had learned to see the grasses as something other than an undifferentiated mass of plants. He had hundreds of names in his head, lists he had watched her patiently put together when he lived with her, had reread with her, had recited together with her as if they were post-exotic litanies.
They were married for ten years. Irina Echenguyen died after a long illness, during a counter-revolutionary attack. She was put on a drip in a clinic. The counter-revolutionaries burst into the common room where she had been resting with a dozen other female cancer patients, tore out tubes and needles, broke all the medical equipment, and then raped the women, even the ones who already looked like corpses. It was a group of dog-headed enemies, zealots for exploiting men for the sake of men. Then they deserted the place, but before they left, they killed Irina Echenguyen.
• Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.
• A pair of crows, very low, did not caw as they passed right over his head. The sky was far less blinding than it had been earlier. Dusk was coming. The temperature had dropped and every now and then harsh gusts of wind blew. The black line of the forest, now much nearer, had ceased to be an abstract image. It was already resolving into trees and branches, with perceptibly different heights and thicknesses. He still had two kilometers to go before reaching it.
That’s good, he thought. I’ll have time to get there before night falls.
He had already stumbled several times and he took another break. One minute, he thought. Just one minute.
The smoke that had just a minute ago suggested the possibility of a village was now faded away. Now there weren’t any points of reference left. Only, in front of him, the dark mass of the first larches.
He closed his eyes so his dizziness and exhaustion would dissipate. A gray and erratic layer of clouds spun behind his eyelids, but it was mainly the darkness of the forest he was thinking about.
Damn it, Kronauer, he reproached himself, don’t tell me you’ve got the willies! Your parents died in the taiga, so what? You’re still far from the taiga, it’s just a slightly dark wood, it won’t be more than a few kilometers deep. Two or three hours of walking, and you’ll end up in fields with a village and countrymen. Get a hold of yourself! Don’t give up that fast! Your little troubles are nothing compared to the apocalypse that hit the Orbise!
• He was thirty-nine years old. He was born in the Orbise. All his schooling had been focused on the future of Communes for workers and countrymen.
His view of the world was illuminated by proletarian morality: self-sacrifice, altruism, and confrontation. And like all of us, of course, he had suffered the world revolution’s setbacks and collapses. We didn’t understand how the rich and their mafias had managed to win the trust of the laboring classes. And before our rage, first had been our stupefaction when we realized that these masters of unhappiness were triumphing around the globe and were on the brink of annihilating the last of us. We had no explanation when we interrogated ourselves about humanity’s bad choices. Marxist optimism prevented us from seeing the proof of serious defects in the genetic heritage of our species, an idiotic affinity for self-destruction, a masochist apathy in the face of predators, and perhaps even above all a fundamental inability when it came to collectivism. We thought this deep down, but, as the official theory relayed these hypotheses with a shrug of the shoulders, we didn’t broach the topic, even among comrades. Even in joking among comrades.
Kronauer’s intellectual education after high school had been wrecked and there were huge holes in his knowledge, like so many other young people in the Orbise when their studies were interrupted by chaos and defeats. If the worldwide situation hadn’t been so unfavorable to egalitarianism, perhaps he would have turned toward a quiet career with an apprenticeship that wasn’t too long, a career nothing like a soldier’s. He wasn’t very interested in abstract things. He did like books and happily borrowed novels from the local libraries, but a list of what he’d borrowed, aside from political classics, would show that his preferences veered toward inoffensive adventure stories and the most traditional post-exotic bluettes. Deep down, even if he wasn’t loath to sit down for hours reading in silence, he didn’t feel comfortable when he was confronted with the complex structures of the soul, and he much preferred action. One example had actually disrupted his existence. When the Komsomol had suggested it, he had refused to join a school for Party officials, and asked to be assigned to an operating unit. After his first year of training, he would have been assigned a political instructor’s minor responsibilities, but the