But no matter, I’m not one for crying over such things. I hit him once, it was enough. His body slid down the rocky slope into the ravine and in an instant he was gone. It was over.
I’m left alone, so now I can ditch the radio transmitter; against my chest under my windbreaker is a leather pouch full of documents. And the little suitcase, the strongbox, of course, the revolution’s gold reserves, the fruit of many years’ labor. Money for the insurrectional revolutionary committee — money that was donated, or confiscated, voluntarily, or not quite. The suitcase was nice and full, our comrade commissar wasn’t a spendthrift, not a single cent went to waste. Rightly so, comrade! — our comrade commissar, may he rest in peace, was the first to fall in the ambush.
Saturday, a requiem in the church. The voice of the priest and the cantor, singing deeply, as if in a well. Up above on the roof tiles, where the awning butts up against the monastery gates, drops are pelting down, the rain doesn’t stop. My eyes are closing — in the oats, I tell myself, in the sacks of hay is the best hiding place. I can’t let myself fall asleep, yet my eyes are closing on their own, I hear them whispering inside, with the cross, with the censer. The cantor is singing or reading something, undoubtedly from the Epistles. Then the priest: Leave, he says, the dead to bury their dead. Traitor, I say to myself, and fall asleep just like that. It’s only then that I see the donkey — munching oats in silence, his back is wet, sticking out from under the overhang, the rain pouring down on him from above.
And there really was an office there, I saw it, ratty with a broken-down door, in the center of the hallway, in the center of the central wing, where with watering yet curious eyes I went down the smoke-filled corridors. In order to realize that it was burning of its own accord—the Party Headquarters, lit up like a Christmas tree from the tension of memory-laden holiday electricity. Self-ignition, self-immolation, intended to illuminate — or to make futile all illumination of — the interior of the secret.
And from deep inside I saw his skull — there really was a person there, either real or an actor. Some extra, an impostor, left to stroll in the lamplight, to throw shadows on the curtains, in the windows glowing in the night like eyes.
In the end the bonfire collapsed in on itself, the last dying spark of the five-pointed star fell into the ashes. In the morning, after nights like this one, there remains only cold, clumped dust, like black talcum powder on a photographic negative. And the sense of something unfinished.
The path to justice somehow turned out to be long and painful. Contempt grew during the long stretch before its realization — but not contempt for K-shev, but for all the others who delayed the decision. Rather deep contempt.
When I leave the stone atrium of the burning and hissing Party Headquarters, I find myself in the Empty Space, where just moments ago there had been a crowd in the mood for revolution. There were still people there — after all, I wasn’t alone in rushing inside, weren’t they rushing in right alongside me? But now I come down the steps, look around with wide-open, sleepy eyes — and there is no one on the yellow-paved square. No one.
That’s what I really hate, their running away. K-shev didn’t run away anywhere, he didn’t scamper off to save himself from uncomfortable questions. He is not anonymous, in fact, he is the focus. He really is a construct, yet his name still does the trick, as a necessity or a threat.
And they got scared all right, they jumped right out of their skins when he began to flare up — from the inside, from his idolatrous, hollow womb. Because they didn’t have any fire of their own to fight him with, they turned their backs and hid in the darkened streets, to avoid being melted down. Lugging stolen things — cups, food, chairs and televisions, bottles of sunflower oil. Even in the night’s fake flames, reeking like burning rubber and gasoline, even then some yellow suns managed to turn their wheels. The people ran, saving themselves from the overwhelming heat. The sun was shining from another place. The isolation of the darkness stretched between it and the square, yet it was as if we suddenly sensed its breathing. The other side of the sun. The dark side of things. It gaped for a second and blinked like the eyelid of an unknown colossus. So as not to process what they had seen, everyone simply gasped. And since most of them were drunk on top of everything, they simply swallowed their tongues.
I remember. I hate. I despise them. If I had the chance, I’d punish them over and over again, every time with the same thing: fear that transforms into horror. But I don’t think even that would be enough. Those two guys should have raped her in that crappy apartment, without a second thought. They should’ve kicked my ass — who knows, maybe even killed me. I should’ve burned up in that building, released by someone like a rat into a maze, along with all the rest of them. The firemen who kept not showing up. The victims who became perpetrators — without necessarily wanting to, without wanting to at all — simply out of curiosity. I don’t remember very welclass="underline" was I, too, carrying a blazing torch made of rolled-up Party newspapers? If they wanted to, they could probably convince me of it. For my part, I would admit it — not for their, but rather for my own personal, satisfaction. I would confirm every act of participation and non-participation, of aggression or passivity, with which or without which the revolution took place. Because the revolution itself is also a fabrication: there was no revolution. No change was brought about, K-shev simply changed his country. Meaning that he packed his bags to go on vacation, to go take a cure abroad. Now I am familiarizing myself visually with his destination — on the way to the clinic, running.
On the way to the clinic, in a sprint, which finally makes me vomit.
Vomiting
This is the fifteenth kilometer, the physical limit, the barrier. The stomach erupts, the diaphragm sucks air downward and purges everything. I didn’t stop in time, I didn’t cut short my sprint, maybe I even wanted it to happen like that, to fall to the pavement, trampled by the athletes who move through Hamburg’s morning haze in deer-like bounds. But I don’t fall, training is training, after alclass="underline" my palms slam onto my thighs of their own accord for support, my kneecaps rasp over the joints. On the ground between my shoes — a splotch of stomach acid and wetness; sweat drips from my face. I haven’t eaten since last night, there’s the little dead ball of airplane food, swallowed up and tossed back out gain.
But I still can’t breathe, the ellipses just outside my field of vision are still quavering. I’ve still got half a minute to go, within thirty seconds my ribcage should have recovered from its collapse. The muscles that expand and contract the ribs — let them come back into action. “Let breathing commence,” commands the national sports medicine doctor, Comrade K-shev, who, despite being in a coma, continues to wait for me. And for that reason I don’t want to faint here, ironically, on this path, which runs into the first street next to the coastal road and where a sign hangs right above my head:
A. S. MAKARENKO-STRASSE
Go to hell, Anton Semyonovich!
2. DEEDS & DOCUMENTS
Lexicon
of one boy’s personal aversions to K-shev
1) He wasn’t handsome, he didn’t look like a good guy, not even like a bad guy — in short, he just wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t ugly, either. He didn’t possess that certain something that inspires love/fear in the heart of a child.