in danger. Military violence seemed more natural to him than meetings where he would have to call for military violence. Therefore the start of civil war hadn’t troubled him in the least. He’d immediately joined the standing army, and he’d been sent to work with one of the clandestine organizations that found unconventional ways to heckle the enemy. Then he had been assigned to a Special Intelligence Center. Aside, of course, from periods of peace when he went back to civil life as a worker without much qualification, sometimes in construction and sometimes in the food industry, he had been fighting here and there for fifteen years now. He had never been wounded. He was in the prime of life. That said, he had seen too many corpses, witnessed too many defeats, and he had lost most of the hope he’d still had.
• He started walking again. He couldn’t keep a steady pace. The two kilometers that still separated him from the forest’s edge seemed to stretch out interminably. Keep going, Kronauer, keep going and don’t think, don’t look, don’t count the meters you’ve walked, don’t count what’s left, don’t count anything! . . . Don’t listen to anything but your footsteps, don’t look at the sky, keep going like you’re in good shape!
The landscape was already taking on the gray and purple hues of twilight.
He veered away to avoid a barely visible burial mound; there had been thousands of them on the steppes since the Bronze Age, a kurgan that had been built on his path, tamped down and nondescript, a symbol of existences wasted and millennia gone for nothing, just to witness the collapse of egalitarianism and a wave of derelicts just like the very first nomads eons earlier. Now he staggered by a field of hare-rye, a mutant variety that had appeared in the countryside thirty years earlier, and then was cultivated close to the capital to make flour that tasted like cardboard. He stepped into the withered, unappealingly brown ears, then he went through. He drifted as if drunk. And suddenly his legs. They gave way beneath him. He hobbled ten more meters, and then he kneeled on the ground and slumped down.
Well, he thought, trying to get back up. It’s nothing. A wave of tiredness.
He couldn’t get himself back upright. His muscles wouldn’t respond. There were cramps in his neck, all his joints were on fire. He breathed loudly.
You think you’re still alive, a voice suddenly said in him, inside his head, but unfamiliar.
—What! he grumbled. What’s going . . .
He waved his hand like he was trying to swat away flies or wasps. He was on his knees, exhausted. And this voice.
You think you’re still alive, but it’s over. You’re just a relic. Your corpse is already rotting somewhere on the moist earth and you don’t get that it’s over. It’s just after-death mumbo-jumbo bouncing around in your head. Don’t keep trying. Just lie down where you fell and wait for the crows to take care of your burial.
Then, just as quickly as it had come, the voice left. It left him entirely, without a trace in his memory, as if it had never spoken in him. Once again he found himself alone, with his breath short and hoarse, with his bodily pains, his exhaustion.
Just a moment of tiredness, he thought, a big one. Nothing serious. Night won’t fall for another half an hour, three-quarters of an hour. I’m going to lie down. Just not enough food, dehydration. I’m going to lie down until it passes. As it is, my legs won’t get me anywhere.
He lay down. Above his head, when he opened his eyes, the sky had started to whirl again. He shut his eyes against his nausea. Shaken once more by the wind, the plants brushed against him. He listened.
False ryegrass, he thought. Racines-rieuses, lovushkas, solivaines. This too will pass. Even if I black out for a minute, this will pass. Then I’ll get back up, and if it’s not too dark I’ll go sleep under the trees, at the edge by the first trees, and I’ll wait for dawn before going into the forest. Hang in there, Kronauer! Tomorrow you’ll be in the village, and then it’ll be okay. Everything’s spinning right now, but this will pass.
Tomorrow. In the village. It’ll be okay.
• Chiennelaines, doroglosses. Lovushkas-du-savatier, rogue solivaines, aromatic solivaines.
2
• Inside the warehouse, the temperature wasn’t dropping. It never dropped. The sheet-metal walls were always warm, even in the winter when it was freezing, and they emitted a soft and constant light, rendering all heating and lighting equipment unnecessary.
After the nuclear reactor that powered the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz caught fire, the hangar had been used to store the irradiated material the liquidators had collected in the area. It was an enormous, ugly building, intended to hold massive quantities of garbage, and it had been constructed right above the burning ruins of the little power plant. The liquidators had found it best to use preexisting structures to store the stock of dangerous trash and bury it all in the same place. A well sat in the center of the building. In it went everything that people wanted to get rid of forever.
The well had been dug by the nuclear core itself when, after vaporizing everything in range, it had gone mad and begun to sink into the earth. The engineer Barguzin, the only surviving member of the team that had designed the hangar, claimed that the hole was regular and vertical and about two kilometers deep. According to him, at the bottom of the hole, the core had stopped moving. It would stay there, always mad but no longer moving, no longer trying to reach the innermost depths of earth proper. It would simply feed on what it received from on high.
• Every month, indeed, the core was fed. The heavy cover for the well was opened, and some of the bric-a-brac collected over the last season or two was knocked over the edge; just to show that people weren’t panicking and weren’t afraid of pathetic radionuclides. Tables and chairs, television sets, the tarry carcasses of cows and cowherds, tractor motors, charred schoolteachers who had been forgotten in their classrooms during the critical period, computers, remains of phosphorescent crows, moles, does, wolves, squirrels, clothes that looked perfect but had only to be shaken to set off a haze of sparks, inflated toothpaste tubes filled with constantly simmering toothpaste, albino dogs and cats, clusters of iron that continued to rumble with an inner fire, new combine harvesters that hadn’t yet been broken in and which gleamed at midnight as if they were lying in full sunlight, garden forks, hoes, axes, debarkers, accordions that spat out more gamma rays than folkloric melodies, pinewood planks that looked like ebony planks, Stakhanovites in their Sunday best with their hands mummified around their diplomas, forgotten when the event halls were evacuated. The ledgers with their pages turning day and night. Cash-register money, the copper coins clinking and shifting without anyone nearby. These were the sorts of things thrown into the void.
The Gramma Udgul was the one to handle the maneuver. She arbitrarily decided on the days to open the well and told the improvised liquidators which things should feed the core. The Gramma Udgul was also the only person who had the idea to stoop down by the chasm and talk to the core to make it happy.
When she hunched, the undetectable wind from the depths hit her in the face. This caress didn’t bother her and she went on with her monologue. Nothing could be heard, not even the crush of objects or bodies that had arrived at their destination after falling two thousand meters. The Gramma Udgul’s voice sank into the well’s dark mystery without an echo. The kolkhozniks helping the old woman waited nearby until she had finished her sorcerous, vehement screams. They looked like a group of zombies in the last stages of their existence. Aside from some occasional reserve soldiers, these uncommunicative men were the core of the male population still alive at Radiant Terminus, and they could be counted on the fingers of one hand: the engineer Barguzin; the demobilized, one-armed Abazayev; and the tractor driver Morgovian.
• A few words about the Gramma Udgul. About her hardiness which science cannot explain. About her beliefs, about her path to glory and darkness. And about her eighty-year-old, in-shape body, doomed to eternity.
One hundred years earlier, she had begun her long career as a liquidator. She was thirty-two years old then; she was a nurse’s aide and, as the Second Soviet Union experienced its first serious collapses, she dreamed of sacrificing herself for communism-bound humanity. And so she had joined the kamikaze corps that