Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  Let us take, for example, the fantastical narrations Granny Holgolde invented for us when she wasn’t busy managing our concealment or planning the insurrectional tempests meant, in a few fiery days and nights, to set things right on Earth. Granny Holgolde loved to laugh, she loved the humor of disaster, and all her stories were nowhere near as mournful as our ordinary landscapes, though many of them were. I’m thinking in particular of the ones about our favorite heroines: the elephant Marta Ashkarot or Igriyana Gogshog, the old wandering killer, or even Bobby Potemkine, the sad loser. Nor am I forgetting the tales in which those half-human birds Granny Holgolde called strange cormorants appeared, the ones who knew how to live in fire, secrecy, and death. None of those stories were specifically meant for children, save for their educational function. It was a matter of not letting our sense of the magical be misled down too-ambivalent paths; it was also a matter of giving us role models to better face adversity, at least until our deaths. To know what to do when the time comes, know how to overcome our terror, know how to keep courage and strike down the enemy at all costs.

  An image here of Granny Holgolde.

  There. We are gathered, standing, sitting, around her. We are waiting for her to recount Marta Ashkarot’s or Igriyana Gogshog’s adventure, left unfinished from the week before. You are there too, Imayo Özbeg, with your chestnut locks hanging down the middle of your forehead, the rest of your hair disheveled, and your shining black eyes, a dreamer’s eyes, usually fixed not on us, but on new horizons.

  I had just turned seven when the adults around us started talking about a Bolcho Pride that would be like none other. We slyly repeated the bits of phrases we caught when they talked among themselves. As we understood it, the great demonstration would be even more euphoric than usual. Our astrologers had calculated that we were no more than one hundred years away from the beginning of the world revolution. Only one-hundred-times-three-hundred-sixty-five days now separated us from the irrepressible tide of the humble, of their definitive surge into the annals of history. One-hundred-times-twelve months of nothing until, in all the cities, on all the continents, the camps would empty, the egalitarian insurrection would fly from victory to victory, the poor would take destiny into their own hands: thus had our red legends predicted since the dawn of time. One round century, and then things would improve for the global population. There would be no more waiting forever.

  “Things are taking a good turn,” Granny Holgolde assured us.

  We politely stepped aside to avoid her wolf-like breath and sputters.

  “They’re on track to succeed,” she claimed.

  She was chewing on dried ewe’s cheese mixed with strips of smoked meat, a typical snack of that era, enjoyed mainly during the autumnal celebrations. Our minor retreat did not offend her. She was hard set in her ways, extolling an iron hierarchy in the Party and respect for one’s elders, but with us, her great-grandchildren, she forgave everything.

  Granny Holgolde was unbelievably old; her legs no longer carried her and her body had decided to shrivel up over the past sixty years, but she had kept her great big head from her younger years, and, even if her chewing reminded us of a cow’s rumination, we didn’t feel so uncomfortable that we wouldn’t rub against her when we were brought to greet her.

  “It’ll come very quickly now,” she rejoiced.

  Her small, milky gray eyes sparkled with political satisfaction, revolutionary zeal, and her love for good food.

  “Prepare yourselves, little ones,” she said heatedly. “Prepare yourselves, it’s coming fast, as if tomorrow!”

  Other images still.

  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.

  3.

  Other images still.

  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.

  Other images still.

  Granny Holgolde had the hiccups. She was drinking something. A second earlier, her stomach had sent up to her tongue a bit of ewe’s milk and pemmican, and now she was swallowing it again. She pushed her glasses, which had slid down, back on her nose, then she gulped down several more mouthfuls. The drink had whitened the rim of her mouth and formed a small pearl on the mustache adorning her upper lip. She calmly emptied her glass and placed it next to the armchair that served as her throne twenty-four hours a day. She never slept, in the hope of witnessing, no matter the time, the awakening of the world revolution, the widespread conflagration, and the advent of proletarian brotherhood. The glass clinked on the bedside table and, since it was too close to the edge and threatened to fall, Aunt Boyol hurriedly stuck out her hand and pushed it back.

  No one else had budged, particularly among the children. Granny Holgolde had interrupted her tale to quench her thirst, but she had not declared that she would continue the story later. She had simply taken a short break, and at a critical moment, too, when the elephant Marta Ashkarot smelled before her the presence of the void and decided not to take a single step more until the light of day had returned. Like the elephant, we had just been plodding slowly through the darkness, watching out for everything, the scents of the equatorial forest, the sounds and silences of the night, the quivering of leaves in the undergrowth. The parenthesis of the ewe’s milk was closed. Granny Holgolde wiped her lips with the back of her hand. We were about to sniff once again before us, with our trunk, in order to discover whether the ravine at our feet was deep or shallow.

  About once a month, the grandmothers and aunts who had us in their charge brought us to Granny Holgolde. For security reasons, she often changed residences, but she always carried with her her throne and her smell of curdled dairy, her smells of campfire, mushrooms, and handmade bombs. We were gathered before her, in a semicircle, fifteen or so little boys and girls, our eyes glued to her. Granny Holgolde spoke from a poorly lit alcove, in a corner of the main room of the house that had been hers for the past half year and that she called the sovkhoz, because the windows looked out onto an abandoned plot of land where two geese and a black dog often roamed. The real animals interested us, but Marta Ashkarot, the elephant, took priority. She existed within Granny Holgolde’s tale, within Granny Holgolde’s head and mouth, and we watched nothing else.

  In the large room also stood the soldier Daravidias and the soldier Brudmann, as well as the inevitable sanitary inspector, who was in uniform and took notes on the state of the premises, the identities of those present, and the tenor of their words. The sanitary inspector’s name was certainly inscribed on the tag pinned to her breast pocket, but we despised her too much to ever dream of trying to distinguish her from the other camp guards with whom fate had forced us to live. No one looked at her, no one was interested in her movements, she remained a nameless enemy, a member of one of the camp’s obscure repressive institutions, and, though every one of us fantasized about opportunities and ways to kill her, we refused her the right to exist clearly in our thoughts. I have no desire to alter her status now. She moved among us while scribbling who knows what information in her official notebook, but she was not part of the room. She was not part of the room, and so enough about her.

  From time to time, the soldier Daravidias and the soldier Brudmann glanced toward the window. This was a period when the majority of the members of the Werschwell Fraction had left for the front, and when pogromist raids were becoming increasingly rare, doubtlessly because, in order to reach us, they had to break through too many barricades. Since our childhood, if one excludes the bombardments, spontaneous fires, and nocturnal arrests, the camp had been a safe place for us. Nonetheless, the soldier Daravidias and the soldier Brudmann assumed their responsibilities and kept watch outside. They were at the ready to organize our defense, and I know that the presence o
f the sanitary inspector reassured them, since in the case of the enemy’s unforeseen intervention, they would have immediately taken her hostage.

  On the other side of the window, in the vague plot of land and even beyond the fence crowned by barbed wire, nothing was happening. The geese, plump and ridiculous, were milling about between two clumps of burdock. The dog was sleeping.

  “And then, my little ones,” Granny Holgolde continued, “the elephant grew wary. It was better to wait for dawn, the light’s return, rather than rush blindly over a precipice. It was better to take two steps back than one step forward.”

  Granny Holgolde furrowed her already very wrinkled face and cleared her throat, like she always did when she was going to make an important remark. We knew this signal well. We concentrated even harder.

  “You know, my little ones, sometimes you have to step back a little or tread water while waiting for the darkness to pass. What is essential is not to lose sight of advancing, of moving forward at all costs, and of not giving up. Even if something blinds us, we can’t lose sight of that. You must always remember, never give up.”

  Suddenly, Granny Holgolde became animated. Her head was once more filled with grandiose objectives, the terminal defeat of misfortune, the triumphal dance of the proletariat all across the planet, peace and equality between primates, undermen, and human or semi-human species. Her eyes were sparkling. She scratched her stomach through her yellowish cotton blouse.

  At the same time as the elephant’s thoughts, some of these grandiose objectives filtered into us, inevitably.

  The sanitary inspector took notes.

  We were speechless.

  “Yes, my gentle ones, all that matters is knowing that we will never give up, and that, even when we get there, well established, in the comfort of the revolution, we must continue moving forward without stopping!”

  We were all wide-eyed, drinking in the storyteller’s words. I am going to try to remember everyone who was there.

  Imayo Özbeg, with his strand of hair stuck to his forehead.

  My cousins Bouïna Yogideth, Maryama Adougaï, Wulva Kanaan, Lilni and Doumda Daliko, Rishma Bakitron, Rita Mirvrakis, Adoulia Brougz.

  Little Drogman Baatar, chubby but fretful, with very dark hair.

  The Ming twins.

  Laura Gheen, who, despite her age of seven, still had not spoken a word, but who, that aside, wasn’t slow at all.

  Elli Zlank, the worst dressed of us all.

  The eldest of the group, Aliya Meteliyan, who had let most of the boys and girls inspect her crotch, admiring on her invitation the hairs that had begun to appear on her pubis.

  And, to finish the list, my little brother and me.

  At that moment, a bullet fired from who knows where shattered the window to our right, the window looking out onto the vague terrain. As vigilant as the soldier Daravidias and the soldier Brudmann were, they couldn’t prevent the unpredictable shots from snipers. The bullet whizzed over our heads and landed somewhere inside the sanitary inspector, between her notebook and her neck.

  The soldier Daravidias posted himself near the window while the grandmothers and aunts made us get on all fours and huddle together against the least exposed wall. Outside, we heard the sound of running, a frantic cackling, then a second shot. The dog was barking.

  The soldier Brudmann crouched over the inspector, who was lying on the floor. He offered to examine her wound, but she rebuked him violently, as if she suspected him of wanting to take advantage of the situation to ogle her chest or strangle her.

  “It’s nothing,” the soldier Daravidias said. “It’s just a goose hunter who missed his target.”

  “We’ll take care of you,” the soldier Brudmann said to the sanitary inspector. “It’s nothing, it was just a goose hunter.”

  Granny Holgolde shrugged her shoulders.

  “Leave her alone,” she advised. “We have nothing to do with her.”

  The inspector was struggling. She had begun to bleed and moan, but Granny Holgolde continued to forbid the soldier Brudmann from touching her.

  “She took the bullet not far from her heart,” Brudmann diagnosed and stood. “She’s not going to make it. Someone’ll have to either finish her off or take her to the hospital.”

  The inspector started screaming something unintelligible. Brudmann was staring down at her, without sympathy. The soldier Daravidias joined him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to the woman. “It’s going to pass. It wasn’t meant for you.”

  “Leave her alone,” Granny Holgolde repeated. “Let her be. We have nothing to do with her, geese or not.”

  We, the little ones, witnessed the scene while lamenting the consequences of the rifle: we would not know, for a long time, how Marta Ashkarot would cross the chasm that had opened in front of her.

  Distant images.

  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.

  4.

  Your memory trickles from your eyes.

  Other scenes. Other sequences still that project themselves disorderedly onto the screens of our memory. Our childhood, our adolescence, then this part of time among the adults, this final journey that is ending poorly. You are burning. My memories are blending with those of my already dead or dying comrades. I go to you. My memories are yours. The images are deteriorated, they are lost, they are distant. Some contain sounds and smells, others do not. Under the influence of cinema, in unconscious homage to those screenings in unventilated rooms, in hidden cellars, some have subtitles, like in foreign films. Other images are in black and white, or sepia, though they are recent ones.

  They are very recent, even. But their emotion is too strong and they appear as events from thirty or forty years ago, though it was actually hours, not years. Thirty or forty hours have passed, or perhaps fewer. These images belong to the immediate present, though they are already yellowed from the fumes, deformed by the night, by destruction, by dreams. Already, a number of men and women who appear in them breathe no more. Already, they no longer have a body, now living through the first hallucinations of death, imagining that they have been transformed into strange cormorants, or that they are groping around with disgust in the sooty halls where they were absorbed once deceased. Already they are walking in shadows, their only consolation a glass of ewe’s milk and a few crumbs of pemmican that they must ration if they want to hold out for forty-nine days.

  I go to you. In this moment, we are with you. We are all moving toward you, toward all of you. We are exchanging our last breaths. Beside Imayo Özbeg, Elli Zlank, and Drogman Baatar are those who accompanied them in the disastrous attack on the Kam Yip Building and who also find themselves trapped by the flames: Maryama Adougaï, Ouassila Albachvili, Dariana Freek, Loula Maldarivian, Taïa “Chicha” Torff. All in this moment have stopped fighting, they are stretching their hands toward the shadows, finding nothing, understanding nothing. They walk with difficulty, having lost their bodies, their ability to judge and decide, their sense of reality, going into the greatest possible solitude, obliterated, having lost everything. The memories of these final days are there, more in me than in you. Landscapes both interior and exterior have been ruined by bister soot, cooked flesh, and death. We are all moving toward Imayo Özbeg, we are all moving toward you with these memories, these incredibly recent memories preceding our last, catastrophic Bolcho Pride.

  It was thirty or forty hours ago, or perhaps fewer.

  The night. There is a light rain. As a cost-saving measure, and to impede the preparations of the imminent Pride, the camp’s administration has plunged the Negrini Bloc, along with neighboring districts, into darkness. The camp reeks of the damp, light-deprived night, it reeks of soaked hovels, dilapidated clothes, faces, hair, and dreams. Eleonor Ouzbachi Street is dark. Margyar Schrag Avenue is dark.

  Kordobane Street is dar
k, too. But something is blazing three hundred meters away, at its intersection with Kwam Kok Boulevard.

  Suddenly you can see Granny Holgolde, hurrying toward the fire. She is dressed in dark rags, with a jabot made of faded white lace that ruffled against her large chest, and a skirt that resembles a petticoat. She is jogging. You can hear her ragged breaths. Although in our youth, she was confined to her nonagenarian’s armchair, she has never stopped growing younger, and, on that night, two days ago, she possesses the form of a widow of seventy years, or even fewer, held back by no medical complications. She is brandishing a hatchet to attack the flame-locked doors, and, as she runs, she’s striking every balustrade and iron slab she passes. She is shouting. She wants to sound the alarm and wake every sleeping activist, sympathizer, Party member, and fellow traveler.

  The more time passes, the more the light of the flames reflects off the drizzle-soaked street and Granny Holgolde’s hard physiognomy, deformed by her hatred for the fire and the emotion of the current disaster. What is burning, now very close, fifty meters away, is the place where we store our belongings, the masks, flags, and cardboard statues that show off the glory of the Negrini Bloc during Bolcho Pride.

  A few silhouettes come and go. Some stand frozen before the spectacle.

  Bolshevik Pride days have always been divided into three categories: extremely successful, somewhat successful, and disappointing. This one promises to be one of the worst yet. In the night, on Kordobane Street, we already know that it will have to be classified separately—not disappointing, but catastrophic.

  Granny Holgolde throws herself onto the building’s entrance and swings her hatchet into it. Passersby try to pull her away. There is no way to save whatever remains inside. The flames whirl and roar louder and louder. The heat rises from moment to moment. The passersby seize Granny Holgolde by the waist, by the shoulders, they shout at her that no one is trapped in there, that only objects will be destroyed, that she has to get away from the fire. Imayo Özbeg struggles to take the hatchet from her hands. She resists. She fights back. The action is confused. From a distance, since everyone is yelling and moving about, the scene looks like a group of quarreling drunks. I approach in turn. Granny Holgolde is dripping with sweat, her glistening skin like crimson copper. She reluctantly lets go of her weapon. Something explodes upstairs. Grit and embers scatter above us, raining down. It’s time to leave.