PRAISE FOR MANUELA DRAEGER
“With the calm strangeness of dreams, and humor deepened by a hint of melancholy, these wonderful stories fool around on the frontiers of the imagination.”—Shelley Jackson
“An excellent post-exotic collection for the author with multiple heteronyms, whose work constantly expands its territory to others that are ever more eccentric, dark, yet cheerful.”—Le Monde
“The stories are dreamlike, cozy, and creepy and wistful all at once. They remind me of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll stories, if the Moomin adventures unrolled against a backdrop of subtle bleakness. Everything’s happy, yet you feel like everything is destroyed. They also remind me of Chagall’s paintings, if the paintings were hanging in a bomb shelter.”—Sofia Samatar
“These stories are both wryly charming and disarmingly smart, whether one approaches them for whimsical entertainment or for a sort of narrative deconstruction.”—Tobias Carroll, Tor.com
“If you’ve ever read anything like In the Time of the Blue Ball, it must’ve been at least five green balls ago, because this book is strange and unlike other books.”—Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Every page introduces another curiosity in Draeger’s cabinet of wonders.”—Publishers Weekly
“These are bizarre, touching, delightful—truly perfect dreams.”—Alicia Kennedy, Pank
Also by
Manuela Draeger
In the Time of the Blue Ball
ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS
Manuela Draeger
Translated from the
French by
J.T. Mahany
Copyright © Editions de l’Olivier, 2010
Translation copyright © 2021 by J.T. Mahany
First edition, 2021
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-948830-26-3 / ISBN-10: 1-948830-26-4
This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.
Cover Design by Jenny Volvovski
Interior Design by Anthony Blake
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
CONTENTS
Bolcho Pride
My Parents
ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS
Bolcho Pride
1.
Your name is Imayo Özbeg. You are burning. I go to you. My memories are yours.
Your name is Imayo Özbeg. We were raised in the same barracks. You are burning. I go to you. In this moment we are all moving toward you. My memories are yours.
Your name is Imayo Özbeg, and we have always considered each other members of the same family. We share in our heads images of the same street, with its barbed-wire-covered doors and its corridors open sometimes to darkness, sometimes to the silent pain of the poor, sometimes to nothing. We went to the same school. We were raised by the same grandmothers, the same uncles and aunts, and, for several years, we slept in the same barracks. In the company of adults, we regularly marched in the Bolshevik Pride parade. This year things went poorly. You are burning. I go to you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths. Your memory trickles from your eyes. My memories are yours.
Your name is Imayo Özbeg, and, if one wishes to meet you, one must wander for a bit in the Amaniyak Kree district, in the center of the Negrini Bloc. From now on, to see you and speak to you, I will have to wander once more, but this will be after a long journey in another world, and there is no indication that this world exists. We have always considered each other members of the same family. We share in our heads images of the same street, with its barbed-wire-covered doors and its corridors open sometimes to darkness, sometimes to the silent pain of the poor, sometimes to nothing. The streets have numbers, but we preferred to give them the names of our heroes and heroines, the names of our dragons, the names of our martyrs. Adiyana Soledad, Leel Fourmanova, Iada Thünal, Ravial Mawash, Domar Dong.
We went to the same school, across from the Doumna Tathaï barracks. You were good friends with my little brother. For two years, you sat at the same desk. We were raised by the same grandmothers, the same uncles and aunts, and, for several years, we slept in the same barracks. In the company of adults, we regularly marched in the Bolshevik Pride parade. When I go back very far in my memory, when I direct myself toward the fog that precedes conscious childhood, I see that I have retained the images of the demonstrations and the festival. Deformed, fragmentary, reinvented, but I’ve held onto them. It’s true that in our gray daily lives, they were like sudden explosions of color. Every year, around the middle of October, the Bolshevik Pride festival, also known as Bolcho Pride, took place. Try to remember how it illuminated our childhood. With all the other families from the neighboring ghettos, we joined the flood of people going to participate in the festivities. Big and small, no one avoided having a good time, and it was even the one moment, in twelve months’ time, when we’d hear laughter cascade everywhere around us. This year things went poorly, Bolcho Pride was a festival of violence and pain.
You are burning. I go to you. In this moment, we are with you. We all move toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths.
Your memory trickles from your eyes.
My memories are yours.
Your name is Imayo Özbeg, and, if one wishes to meet you, one must wander for a bit in the Amaniyak Kree neighborhood, in the center of the Negrini Bloc. From now on, to see you and speak to you, I will have to wander once more, but this will be after a long journey in another world, and there is no indication that this world exists. Whether you remain unattainable there, lock yourself away there like a sick wolf, or to the contrary hope for many visitors, it will be difficult to find you. We all know that between us there will soon be awful and uncrossable ravines. From the moment we are extinguished, multiple obstacles will separate us. But let’s not talk about the future. Let’s not talk about the uncertain and incomprehensible. Let’s talk about our past, let’s examine one last time the years when we were, when we are together.
Let’s talk about our childhood. We have always considered each other members of the same family. We share in our heads images of the same street, with its barbed-wire-covered doors and it corridors open sometimes to darkness, sometimes to the silent pain of the poor, sometimes to nothing. The streets have numbers, but we preferred to give them the names of our heroes and heroines, the names of our dragons, the names of our martyrs. Adiyana Soledad Street, Leel Fourmanova Street, Iada Thünal Alley, Ravial Mawash Boulevard, Domar Dong Crossing.
We went to the same school, across from the Doumna Tathaï barracks. You were good friends with my little brother. In elementary school, we shared the same desk. We were raised by the same grandmothers, the same uncles and aunts, and, for several years, we slept in the same barracks. In the company of adults, we regularly marched in the Bolshevik Pride parade. When I go back very far in my memory, when I direct myself toward the fog that precedes conscious childhood, I see that I have retained the images of the demonstrations and the festival. Deformed, fragmentary, reinvented, but I’ve held onto them. It’s true that in our gray daily lives, they were like sudden explosions of color, and that even a baby could tell the di
fference between the two.
Every year, around the middle of October, the Bolshevik Pride festival, also known as Bolcho Pride, took place. Try to remember how it illuminated our childhood. With all the other families from the neighboring ghettos, we joined the flood of people going to participate in the festivities. Big and small, everyone gave in to the revelry, and it was the one moment, in twelve months’ time, when we’d hear laughter cascade everywhere around us.
Bolcho Pride was technically forbidden, but there were so many of us that the police on that day laid low, kept their distance, and only intervened at the moment of dispersion, when our best and brightest began expressing their rage with Molotov cocktails, or by lynching several informers or spies. I must also say that, at the time, the authorities already considered us to be inoffensive vestiges, absurd remnants of the past, mothballed and ridiculous fossils, and they accorded us the right to demonstrate in order to channel our bitterness, as well as, I think, to update their files on subversive elements, and to evaluate the state of our forces. On the path of our immense parade, or strolling between the stands, we would often come across suspicious-looking tourists, dressed like everyone else in military tatters, but outfitted with high-end cameras or miniaturized camcorders. These are the people who get disemboweled at the end of the parade, who don’t have the intelligence to hide in time. Our Komsomols don’t give them a chance, and, to tell the truth, especially today when we’ve lost several of our own, I don’t pity them at all.
When I evoke Bolcho Pride, and I suppose your impressions and mine overlap, I first of all remember imprecise images from my childhood, memories of madness crossed between legs and knees, I remember the enormous, uninterrupted rumble of marching demonstrators. When I fall, I am caught. When I am tired, someone lifts me up onto their shoulders, an uncle, my father, I do not know. From my unbalanced perch, having to lean against hair smelling of sweat and damp wood so as not to slide off, I tower over the outpouring of the masses. My uncle or my father, or an adult belonging to this broad category, holds me by an ankle, his other hand busy directing cries of rage, fist closed, at the sky and the capitalists. I don’t understand a word of what the multitude is shouting. I cling tight to my carrier’s forehead. I’m a little afraid of this thundering tide surrounding me. I’m afraid of suddenly falling to the ground and being trampled by the proletarian legions. The fear excites me. I let out shouts of my own, shrill cries meant more for myself than the enemy. I’m beside myself.
I then find more recent images, tied to an age when I had already claimed language and when, doubtlessly, I must have possessed my first thoughts of egalitarian ideology. I remember being electrified with emotion the evening before, as I unwrapped the clothes the adults had given me for the next day. Most of the time, my existence as a little girl was ignored and I was dressed like Dzerzhinsky. I was proud to wear a felt military helmet and put on a false goatee and mustache. My little brother regularly received a Chapayev costume. He never complained about having to play the role of such a celebrated, heroically red individual during the festival, but he did put forward a few doubts on the pillbox cap that was thrust onto his head, and that, cobbled together by Granny Holgolde or one of the other grandmothers out of swatches of old blanket, poorly recreated the magnificent original worn by the commander of the Twenty-Fifth Division, made of black lambskin. My little brother thought his cap wasn’t as stylish as my helmet, and his disappointment was obvious when he compared his simple black mustache to my Dzerzhinskian pilosity, which was less thick, but twice the length. Like good comrades, we often traded our symbols of these implacable leaders, and, very quickly, our disguises deteriorated. We became hybrids more carnivalesque than revolutionary, for which the adults didn’t dare reproach us. We were little. They bent down to caress us and fix the bands keeping our masks in place. Sometimes they uttered a few joyful remarks on the beginnings of the Cheka or the machine guns of the Ural. But, most of the time, they were content to affectionately encourage us to grow up and carry on. As advice goes, this was a bit vague, but I think we understood what they meant: fidelity to the cause of the vanquished, the pursuit of combat regardless of the irreversibility of defeat, enthusiasm in thinking about lost opportunities. We were going to grow up and, until our deaths, hold high the flags of all these disasters.
The festive agitation took hold of nearly everyone we knew, children and adults, manics and depressives, bigmouthed chatterboxes as well as the rebellious-faced taciturn. Bolcho Pride, the great people’s demonstration, its roaring surge, was approaching. For a week or two, the mood of the family environment and the ghetto changed. Despondency was placed between two parentheses. The feeling of having no future was dimmed. We were all suddenly certain of our belonging to a community of brave souls, valiant, lucid, optimistic proletarians, on the point of being led to something luminous that would break our millenary habits of collapse, enslavement, and defeat. From one house to the next, people could be heard calling out to each other differently, their voices seemingly perked up by the imminence of a new insurrectional fraternity. Songs would ring out at any given moment, coming for example from the crystal sets that had escaped police searches, or released by windup gramophones that had been patched up and greased during the summer, and that, despite the efforts of our red technicians, rarely succeeded at remaining operational for more than half a day. Revolutionary music, Komsomol choruses, and Soviet tangos from the third decade of the twentieth century, so indispensable to our culture, provided round-the-clock accompaniment to demonstration preparations. Tests and repetitions had fatal consequences for the mechanisms, and often, come the actual day of Bolcho Pride, they expelled grating hiccups instead of lively melodies, or remained mute. Nonetheless, there were enough surviving machines, and enough loudspeakers, to give ample triumph to the sonic ambiance of the event.
Granny Holgolde clearly felt younger around this time of year. The adults would bring it up in their conversations and banter, and she herself would recognize it, with a touch of mischief, claiming that the wind and scent of October had always quickened her pulse, regenerated her neurons, and kept her skin free from the blemishes of old age.
But, this year, things had taken a turn for the worse, and Bolcho Pride was a festival of violence and suffering.
You are burning. I go to you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths.
Your memory trickles from your eyes.
My memories are yours.
2.
You are burning on the second floor of the Kam Yip Building. Everything is crackling around you. Drogman Baatar is dead. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths. My memories are yours.
You are burning on the second floor of the Kam Yip Building. Everything is crackling around you. Drogman Baatar is dead. I am moving toward you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths.
Your memory trickles from your eyes.
My memories are yours.
You are burning on the second floor of the Kam Yip Building. Everything is crackling around you. Drogman Baatar is dead. Elli Zlank is burning too, somewhere on the ground floor. Maryama Adougaï is no longer screaming for help.
Fires have been a part of our daily lives since infancy. The camp’s apartment buildings had faulty electrical installations. There was one short circuit after another. They were often benign, to no consequence other than outages and the stench of melting plastic, though sometimes they were more serious, and we had to quickly evacuate our homes, surrounded by shouts, smoke, and panic. There were also the bombs dropped from the sky by the enemy, always accompanied by immense flames and suffering.
That is why, even during periods of calm, we believed we were both subhumans and dwellers in ruins and fire.
I remember the books we used to read, the stories the adults used to tell us. Our culture went in many directions, but, in most cases, it reflected the r
eality of our routine: an egalitarian brotherhood desecrated by all, a panorama of ashes, barricades, imprisonment, a heavy sky, and from above, the fatal burst of flames.
I am moving toward you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you. We are exchanging our last breaths.
Your memory trickles from your eyes.
My memories are yours.
You are burning on the second floor of the Kam Yip Building. Everything is crackling around you. Drogman Baatar is dead. Elli Zlank is burning too, somewhere on the ground floor. Maryama Adougaï is no longer screaming for help. She may no longer be alive.
You close your eyes, you mumble confused words, as if your body were already no longer your own, no longer responding to you, translating into your mouth a drunkard’s miserable slurrings.
Fires have been a part of our daily lives since infancy. The camp’s apartment buildings had faulty electrical installations. There was one short circuit after another. They were often benign, to no consequence other than outages and the stench of melting plastic, though sometimes they were more serious, and we had to quickly evacuate our homes, surrounded by shouts, smoke, and panic. There were also the bombs dropped from the sky by the enemy, always accompanied by immense flames and suffering.
That is why, even during periods of calm, we believed we were both subhumans and dwellers in ruins and fire.
I remember the books we used to read, the stories the adults used to tell us. Our culture went in many directions, but, in most cases, it reflected the reality of our routine. After journeying through oneiric lands, we would quickly return to the territories we had always known: an egalitarian brotherhood desecrated by all, a panorama of ashes, barricades, imprisonment, a heavy sky, and from above, the fatal burst of flames.
Eleven Sooty Dreams Page 1
