The Gramma Udgul worked selflessly on the first building site, and then on those that followed. She knew that she was immolating herself, that she was offering up her health and her life for the collective’s future well-being, for the radiant future of her children and grandchildren, or rather everyone else’s, because she had been warned that the radiation would render her sterile. She helped evacuate the population, she piled up the trucks with the evacuees’ goods, she soothed those who were hysterical, she went on to arrest the thieves and lent a hand when they had to be immediately executed, she was involved in building the shields and concrete layers around the unapproachable cisterns, close to the cores that did whatever they wanted to. It was demanding, dangerous work. However, in contrast to the other heroic men and women who had quickly succumbed, she kept on living.
Her body had responded positively to this repeated exposure to fissile matter. The ionizing rays had destroyed all the sick and potentially cancerous cells her flesh might harbor. Radioactivity had certainly made her slightly iridescent in the darkness, but above all it had stopped the process of aging in her flesh, and according to what the Gramma Udgul thoroughly suspected, it had been stopped forever. These phenomena also had inconveniences and, particularly, they had caught the attention of the authorities who asked her several times, not without some irritation, why she wasn’t dying. The Party had trouble accepting that she refused to go with her comrades in liquidation to the grave. A proposed official reprimand was discussed and, even if it was closed for being judged absurd and even odious, it nonetheless remained in her folder, a stain. From then on, her troubles never ended. They kept on singing her praises in the press and depicting her as a Soviet woman of extraordinary devotion and courage, but they managed not to mention, moreover, that she was fit as a fiddle.
• At first, the Gramma Udgul submitted without complaint to the psychological exams that were ordered regularly, but after five or six years she had had enough, and she didn’t seem very willing when she was asked to donate her body to science as quickly as possible. She only responded to convocation notices intermittently. She had clearly been singled out without any explanation, both in the realms of medicine and normal civilian life. She knew that she was being watched as an unreliable individual, and she understood that she had been deemed unworthy of promotion to the Party’s honorary body, as had more or less automatically been the case for every cosmonaut, author of epics, and television celebrity. She didn’t complain about her iridescence or her immortality, and she didn’t make a single comment about the political injustice she was suffering. She wrote self-criticisms when asked, she kept taking part in community meetings, and, when the opportunity presented itself again, she left for the liquidation sites, always willingly. She had a sense of discipline and she didn’t claim to be clever enough to contradict the Party.
Decades went by. The authorities changed, co-opted themselves, grew old, were rejuvenated, but never reviewed their evaluation of her, and, generation after generation, they considered her immortality, intentional or not, an insult to the toiling masses. They kept an eye on her organic deviationism. However, that eye had an unclear view. Her extraordinary abilities in battling the atoms’ unforeseen wrath were undeniable. She was frequently called upon for her irreplaceable experience, and behind closed doors she was frequently awarded the titles and medals she had earned: Valiant Combatant of the Atom, Red Heroine, Glorious Liquidator, Intrepid Red Doyenne, Veteran, Red Big Sister. She pinned the certificates above her bed, but she rarely mentioned them, rarely or not at all. In her building, she was just a small anonymous person. She wasn’t the sort to show an invalid’s card at stores in hopes of skipping the line.
In this way, a century went by. A century of setting out again and again for nuclear ovens on the brink of meltdown, mixing fuel rods with gloves ill-suited to the task, crossing the countryside, laughing yet bleak, going into ghost towns, digging communal graves, and shooting down thieves. She worked hard with teams as their members collapsed one after another and decayed in weeks. She helped with hurried funerals in places filled with silence and strewn with ossified birds, then, upon her return to the capital, she was paraded on solemn occasions, during which she was decorated with awards normally given to the dead. Then she went back to normal life. She settled back in her job at a local clinic. Her frequent requests for time off to go fight enemy matter had hampered her upward trajectory, and she remained a nurse’s aide—a first-class one, but still just a nurse’s aide. And, once she was at work, she was again forced to deal with the Party and the suspicions of its teams, undergo humiliating procedures, rewrite her autobiography for the thousandth time, do her self-criticisms over again, and, on top of all that, she had to appear at the Medical Academy’s meetings, justify her natural and ideological state in front of embryologists, in front of xenologists, in front of special works councils that didn’t hesitate to accuse her of petit-bourgeois individualism in the face of death, and even of witchcraft.
She put an end to this endless cycle.
One day, she acted in a fit of pique.
She applied for a disaster site far away from everything, having made a firm decision there and then never to come back. She simply had to go to a closed-off province, already quarantined for a half-century after uncontrollable setbacks in the military facilities. Some minimal human activity persisted there, with a few agricultural enterprises and several camps, but the urban areas, even the small ones, had been evacuated. And, conveniently enough, the Red Star sovkhoz had just indicated that there was a situation of utmost urgency at its nuclear power site, and, in the same distress call, had spoken of a neighboring kolkhoz, Radiant Terminus, also in trouble. The region had been kept under military confidentiality since its annexation to the Second Soviet Union, and nobody could quite pinpoint it on a map. The Red Star was indicated by a question mark, close to a large forest and a place called the Levanidovo, but there was no hint anywhere of a Radiant Terminus.
• They had brought the Gramma Udgul and her squadron on a bus that had stopped at the edge of the province, then they had given everybody sidecars to get themselves to the accident site. The road continued, but no person or thing could be seen on it and, out of fear of radiation, the drivers decided to turn around two hundred kilometers sooner than expected.
The Gramma Udgul’s companions had unanimously picked her to head the squad. They were proud to work under such a popular figure of the Orbise because, even if the Party kept having trouble publicly recognizing her merits, the Orbise’s masses happily paid homage to her and weren’t irritated that she wasn’t dead. She had the astonishing ability to constitute a liquidation brigade out of any workforce found nearby. She was accompanied by some thirty scientists, firefighters, and engineers ready to wade through boiling-hot cooling ponds and breached cores in sovkhoz and kolkhoz alike. They had all sworn to do their best until their spinal cords had become nothing more than blackened mallows.
Their sidecars trundled down the empty roads, then, when the sidecars ran out of gas, they crossed the forest on foot to the Levanidovo, where they split up in two teams.
The Gramma Udgul came to the Radiant Terminus kolkhoz and was surprised and overjoyed to discover that the president was a certain Solovyei, her first husband, a comrade whom she had loved very much and whom she had been taken away from ninety years earlier. This Solovyei wasn’t a citizen as respectful of the official proletarian obligations as she was and, despite believing in egalitarianism, he had his own views, on which he had imposed moral arrangements that nobody was allowed to judge. In short, he had long since turned his back on the Party. After an eternity of imprisonment and vagrancy, he had finally