Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine

Author:Antoine Volodine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781940953533
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2017-02-13T22:00:00+00:00

part three

AMOK

16

• Meanwhile, in the Levanidovo, night had fallen. The main road was empty and, although not a flake was fluttering in the air yet, it smelled of black ice and winter. Myriam Umarik had forecast snowfall for the next day, and Samiya Schmidt, in the library, had drily noted to Kronauer that neither her sister’s prophecies nor her swaying hips were needed to verify the meteorological evidence. She had abruptly turned her back to Kronauer when he told her that he would rather borrow an adventure book than a new lesson on the repugnant sexuality of males. “By James Oliver Curwood or Jack London,” he suggested while looking at Samiya Schmidt’s black braids, and her back shook with indignation at the idea of his trying to escape Maria Kwoll and the wholesome theories of her disciples. Small, serious, with this strict hairstyle, she had never lost her unusual resemblance to a Chinese woman from the cultural revolution. “Stories about trappers in the forest,” Kronauer insisted. “We don’t have those,” Samiya Schmidt finally declared without looking at her index cards. “We don’t have them anymore. They were too contaminated with particles, they ended up in the well.”

The night was like all the others.

At mealtime, Kronauer left his new room and went to the canteen. He only had to walk thirty meters from the prison.

At the canteen he roasted four spoonfuls of flour diluted in water and butter—still astonished as always that the butter hadn’t run out, and noticing that the stock of flour seemed inexhaustible—then he poured himself a bowl of the broth gently simmering on the stove. He was alone. The meals rarely varied but the ingredients never disappeared, which he knew because it was regularly his turn to cook. One day, when he asked one-armed Abazayev for an explanation as to this relative abundance of edible foodstuffs in the Levanidovo since the kolkhoz hadn’t been in production for decades, Abazayev had looked behind him to make sure that nobody was listening, and whispered that it was stolen goods. “Stolen from who?” Kronauer asked, whispering as well. “From merchants,” Abazayev claimed, “from merchant caravans lost in the old forest.” Kronauer retorted that no merchant caravan had crossed the taiga for several centuries, and Abazayev was irritated. He considered Kronauer’s incredulity rude, but he was especially afraid of having said far too much, and from then on he was wholly incommunicative on the topic. “Is the president organizing the looting?” Kronauer asked, to keep the conversation going. “Is it Solovyei? Is he acting alone?” But Abazayev didn’t say anything else and seemed to be mentally incapacitated. “What about the merchants?” Kronauer kept interrogating in vain. “What becomes of them? What happens to them when they are robbed? Does Solovyei kill them?”

• Kronauer finished his meal, washed the dish, and left. The street was lit, he saw Hannko Vogulian going back into her house like a shadow come from nowhere; then he noticed Morgovian, Barguzin, and Myriam Umarik coming out of the Soviet and talking amiably.

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