corner as a member of an independent commune that maintained very weak links with the institutions and authorities of the Orbise.
As she gave herself over to the pleasure of finding Solovyei again and reminiscing about their lost youth, the Gramma Udgul let the scientists carry out preliminary measures, assess the damage for millennia to come, and then explain the situation during a general assembly of the Red Star and Radiant Terminus survivors. The teams then began to work at full force. Using shortcuts that he alone knew, Solovyei guided them through the forest to get from one site to another quickly. The two agricultural complexes were effectively separated by a strip of taiga that foolhardy people could easily get lost in.
The Red Star sovkhoz had been abandoned after three days. Since the innards of its plant was burning outside the reactor vessel, but not presenting any major performance issues, the firefighters had suggested leaving the building as it was, and coming back several years later to remove the most problematic waste. The barns and pigsties were opened, the livestock and poultry encouraged to go die on the open steppes, and all the surviving sovkhozniks and liquidators withdrew to the Radiant Terminus area, where the core was already sinking into the earth’s bowels. The Gramma Udgul had approved the plans for the hangar, requisitioned sturdy men and women to begin construction, and outlined the framework for decontamination, which in her opinion would take four or five centuries, taking into account the few hands available. Then she did her best to care for her team members as they died. The scientists went first, closely followed by the engineers. The firefighters held out for a week longer, and in turn, they went out in shreds, torn apart by deadly cancers and burns. Aside from the engineer Barguzin, who also seemed to be immune to radiation, the whole squadron had died in enthusiastic but atrocious suffering.
For three months, she sent a report to the Party every two weeks in which she copied down the readings from the few thermometers and measurement instruments still in working order, and described the liquidation’s progress, as well as her short-term and medium-term prognoses. On schematic maps, drawn according to Solovyei’s directions, she delineated the large perimeter where from that point on it would be ill-advised to venture without having taken iodine pills and put on hazmat suits. At the end of the message she gave an exhaustive list of countrymen, specialists, and non-specialists who had died and whose corpses had been thrown into the well, because this well’s liquidating function had been activated, albeit in a strictly experimental manner. In a postscript, she sometimes wondered about the tactics used to reestablish the ideological norms of Radiant Terminus in a kolkhoz where class warfare had never happened in an orthodox fashion, although on the whole without straying from the egalitarian mentality dear to our hearts. She never received a reply. Then the mailman had thyroid problems in the middle of the forest and lay down for a long while under the larches, putting an end to mail delivery to and from the Levanidovo.
So the Gramma Udgul began living her life without deferring to the Party at every moment. This break with the hierarchy and supreme guides had induced stress, and for several months she suffered nightmares and even some mental confusion. She tended to see the worst everywhere. Then, thanks to Solovyei’s affectionate presence, she succeeded in overcoming her doubts and stressful thoughts.
In reality, when the correspondence had broken off, the Party had concluded that she had been killed in turn by the heavy bombardment of murderous particles. Due to the numerous proofs of ideological steadfastness she had furnished in the past, nobody suspected that she had defected or taken advantage of her immortality to go down deviationist paths in this region.
Her name was added to the list of proletariat martyrs who had fought against matter’s insanities, and she was given one of the few medals she hadn’t yet received: the posthumous distinction of Foremother of the Proletarian Pantheon. Then they ran barbed wire around the last points of entry into the province and decreed the region unsuitable for human life.
• The Radiant Terminus kolkhoz bore closer resemblance to a den of thieves than an agricultural establishment, and from an ideological point of view, there was a pure and simple aberration here, which was a striking contrast to what the Gramma Udgul had imagined for her exile. However, her adolescent urges asked only to be reawakened, with their radicalism, their ferocity, this dissatisfied gaze the young had for the real world. Deep down, more than any wish to be part of the world revolution’s triumph, she still had the childish desire to live out her destiny like an adventure film. And Solovyei certainly emblematized this: defiance of all laws, astonishment, love, a descent into the forbidden, into the hereafter, into the unexplored spaces of dreams, into sorcerous realms. He bent down and looked her in the eyes, he offered her his support, his complicity, his lucidity, his anarchist nonconformity. He helped her distance herself from the Party without apostasy or pain. It took months for her to find peace. But from the first day he had welcomed her as if she were the missing piece of the magical edifice that was the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz, a formerly lost piece he had waited his whole life for, and which he was extraordinarily happy to find at long last.
Solovyei was the only man who had mattered in her life. She had met him at a liquidation site, at Kungurtug, when she was a beautiful woman in the bloom of her thirty-sixth year, already noticed by the authorities for her miraculous resistance to radiation. The place was completely isolated, in the middle of the mountains, close to a small lake that, after the accident, held water more closely resembling lukewarm mercury. All the liquidators, except for the two of them, had died in the following weeks. Like the Gramma Udgul, Solovyei had a body unaffected by delirious neutrons, which he happily explained by claiming that he had descended from a line of Bolshevik shamans and magicians who had continually evolved on the border between life, death, and sleep. These provocative explanations didn’t please the authorities at all, especially when he accompanied his words with mocking laughter and insults at the bureaucracy and its managers. She fell for him after a nighttime walk along the glimmering banks of Tere-Khol, the nearby lake, and although he was already too anarchist to join the Komsomol, she loved him exactly as he was, without any attempt to make him change his mind about the five-year plan or his telluric view of communism. They parted ways after Kungurtug, but they stayed in touch, and finally she went to be with him in Abakan, the little city in the province where he lived.
They lived in harmony together in Abakan, hardly bothered by their political differences of opinion or the fact that she couldn’t have children. Although they never registered with the Soviet authorities, they considered themselves husband and wife. They both worked at a school for deaf-mutes, she as a caregiver and he as group leader. When needed, they left for sites where nuclear accidents required their presence. They were two irreproachable citizens at the forefront of the fight against misfortune. However, their good health had marked them out for surveillance, and naturally not just by the medical research services. The Gramma Udgul’s autobiographies, written several times during special sessions, cleared her of any wrongdoing, but Solovyei’s only made things worse for him. Solovyei took pride in being not only a revolutionary, but also a poet, and so he felt that he had the right to say anything that went through his head loud and clear. The prospect of having to write lies to save his skin infuriated him. He sabotaged his self-criticisms by inserting esoteric narracts, considerations of the apocalypse, and politically incorrect discourses on sexuality and dreams. On the official deposition papers, he expounded on his hope that there would come a time when only shamans, sorcery experts, mages, and oneiromancy disciples would be in charge of the battle between classes and they would wander like nomads through the cities and the countryside. Solovyei’s relations with the authorities grew acrimonious. After four years of life together, the Party encouraged the Gramma Udgul to leave her comrade, which she refused to do.
Then Solovyei disappeared without a trace. The Gramma Udgul immediately started investigating by talking to every administrative and police body she knew. She was told to wait for Solovyei himself to give some sign, implying that he had simply chosen to divorce her without going to the trouble of explaining himself. For two years, she pestered the departments. She made the most of the private sessions where she was asked to rewrite her autobiography and asked the officers if they had any news about her husband. The answers varied, sometimes unkind and sometimes sympathetic, but, in short, she never got the least bit of workable information. Solovyei had vanished. Solovyei had gone somewhere else. She knew nothing else about him for the next ninety-one years.
And