Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  Granny Holgolde catches her breath. In the light of the flames, she resembles an old goddess made of terracotta. For some reason, Taïa “Chicha” Torff carefully wipes Granny Holgolde’s face, then ties a grayish bandana around her head. Granny Holgolde thanks her as she picks up her hatchet, which she is now holding, letting it swing against her leg.

  “We have to find out who’s done this,” Granny Holgolde mutters. “They have to be punished.”

  We all made vague signs of agreement. Needless to say, when we can get our hands on a wrongdoer, we don’t get in the way of making them pay for their crimes. But, here, everything points to there not being enough time to carry out an investigation before Bolcho Pride. The guilty party might be a saboteur, or someone careless who tossed a cigarette butt behind them without putting it out, or, most likely, the guilty party is bad luck. The electrical wiring caused a short circuit. There is no one to punish.

  “If I find him,” Granny Holgolde said, “I won’t hesitate to take care of him myself. I’ve got everything I need right here to crack open his skull.”

  Opposite us, the warehouse burns.

  On Kwam Kok Boulevard, half a dozen comrades rush back and forth with buckets and a cistern on a lurching cart. Nothing will be saved.

  We think again of what the Chinese in the Margyar Schrag Barracks said to us. According to them, we have entered a Water Goat year, and their annals attest that this is an astrological combination unfavorable to humans and subhumans, as well as to bolshevism in general. We see once more Granny Holgolde shrug her shoulders and treat them like birds of ill omen, and declaring, as she laughs with them, that she only pays attention to prophecies when they announce the coming collapse of capitalism.

  Whatever it is, opposite us, the warehouse burns.

  The days of Bolshevik Pride have always unfurled in comparable scenarios and, in order for our memory to tell them apart, we attribute to them a grade of satisfaction: magnificent, not too bad, or terrible. This one is already in a class of its own, below all others. It starts with a calamity.

  Once again, something explodes upstairs. A torrential braid, sometimes orange, sometimes black, writhes through a window.

  Granny Holgolde shakes her hatchet and trembles with rage.

  “Bring that son of a bitch to me,” she demands.

  Then it is morning. An infamous dawn over Kordobane Street. Everything has been reduced to ash.

  So as not to have a lackluster parade, we decide to hastily rebuild everything that has been destroyed. Only one day remains before the start of the festival and we don’t have a minute to spare.

  We withdraw into another empty space, Dolmar Dong Crossing. Granny Holgolde sits in a corner and directs the operations, but, despite her iron will and excellent health, she feels the repercussions of spending the entire night awake and, from time to time, begins to nod off. Between two thundering instructions, her eyes close. We then hear her snoring like an old woman and begin to think that she hasn’t really rejuvenated as much as she tells us. She wakes without warning and immediately exhorts us to work faster. It’s obvious that we shouldn’t inform her of her mid-sentence nap. The bandana Chicha tied around her forehead slides more and more often over her eyelids. With her wizened hands wringing on top of her tattered black skirt, she looks more like a mental patient than a director of the Party’s secret structures.

  Under this slightly cantankerous surveillance, we try to attend to the most pressing matters. The day should have been dedicated to the uprooting and defacing of signs posted by the administration, threatening proclamations outlawing our parade, outlawing any gathering of demonstrators, outlawing costumes and slogans, authorizing only a handful of cotton candy stands and book stalls, along with a list of forbidden publications. Instead of roaming the streets with containers of tar to render all of this prose illegible, we are cutting up scraps of fabric to serve as flags. All we have at our disposal are old shirts and rags. We have nothing to dye them red. Our reserves of andrinople and vermilion paint are still smoking at the intersection of Kordobane Street and Kwam Kok Boulevard. Drogman Baatar is drawing raised fists, stars, submachine guns, and intertwined hammers and sickles on pieces of cloth, his paintbrush dripping with oil. Elli Zlank has requisitioned the firefighters’ useless cart, removed the cistern, and is nailing together hardboard silhouettes meant to replace the people’s commissars who were carbonized just a few hours ago. The silhouettes are all the same. Granny Holgolde tasks me and Maryama Adougaï with personalizing them. She insists that we place signs around their necks bearing their names. It’s a bad idea, but she insists. I think it brings to mind the infamous and defamatory signs the Ybürs have to wear on their backs when they leave the camp for work or to wander around the city, in the extraordinary case that they’ve survived extermination.

  “With that around their necks, they’ll look like punching bags,” I say.

  “You have a twisted mind, my child,” Granny Holgolde reproaches.

  “My parents wore signs like that before they were shot,” Imayo Özbeg says.

  Granny Holgolde’s face darkens once more.

  “With their names hanging from their necks, they’d look like undesirable individuals,” Drogman Baatar suddenly chimes in, standing next to us with a can of motor oil. “Undesirable individuals denounced before the masses, during the First Chinese Cultural Revolution. They’re just missing a pointed hat.”

  “To me,” Maryama Adougaï interrupts, “the leaders’ silhouettes look like training targets at a shooting range.”

  “You children are full of nonsense today,” Granny Holgolde protests.

  We are all tired. The flags are incredibly ugly. Our plywood helmsmen don’t look like their prestigious models, they look like nothing, they look like undesirable individuals, like counterrevolutionaries of the ninth stinking category, like targets. The firefighters’ cart brings to mind a wagon for the condemned. When we march to express our pride, the Negrini Bloc’s vanguard will seem like a carnival of exhausted mendicants, emerging from a world without color or form, emerging from a strange mass grave, already dead but electrified by a posthumous will to forget nothing, never to give up for any reason, to renounce none of the virtues buried with them long ago. And devoutly conveying vague, wooden, forgotten, unspeakable gods, transporting them to who knows what dismal execution site, still celebrating them despite their obvious defeat and impossible persistence.

  Then someone enters with an accordion and begins to play waltzes from the Second Soviet Union, and Granny Holgolde rises, chooses Elli Zlank as a dance partner, and twirls impeccably, though with a certain diligence, which adds an unnatural element to her elegance.

  The image of Granny Holgolde, several hours before the worst of our Bolshevik Prides, turning in rhythm inside an old truck depot, surrounded by poorly made flags, drooping plywood, oil stains. One of the very last images.

  Distant images. Farther and farther away. Closer and closer.

  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.

  Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Lamp

  It was a basic elephant trap. A wire stretched across the trail, right where pachyderms were likely to tread; two stakes to hold the wire in place, which only a very large animal would have the strength to unearth; a mechanism to shoot off a cluster of firecrackers; and the firecrackers themselves. Simply tripping over it would blow everything up in three seconds flat. The humans who had created it didn’t want to injure or kill, and in any case, they didn’t have the technology to whip up a lethal weapon, but they were counting on the frightful suddenness of the detonations to awake in the animal a feeling of terror. The elephant could only quickly turn back around and flee, panic-stricken, unable to comprehend the din in the darkness a few steps ahead of it. It would remember a lasting fear, and would never come back. Such was the fun
ction of the trap. Such was its philosophy.

  Marta Ashkarot walked a few meters forward without touching the wire that barred the route. She observed the firing mechanism for a moment and then defused it with the tip of her trunk. Then she picked up a firecracker and began to chew on it pensively. Several years before, she had discovered that she enjoyed the taste of potassium nitrate. She never overindulged, but, when the opportunity presented itself, she didn’t deny herself the small pleasure. Even the wrapping had a candy-like appeal: the spoonful of plaster, the cardboard tube. Even the by-products had an agreeable flavor: the charcoal, the sulfur.

  Oh yes, she thought. Oh yes, indeed. I’m quite the foodie, aren’t I?

  The veil of bamboo was thick enough to conceal her, and she moved with suppleness, without crunching the fallen leaves all around her. If, in spite of the late hour, anyone were keeping watch, they wouldn’t have been able to detect her presence. She approached the vegetation’s edge and stopped to observe what lay beyond.

  Before her feet were cultivated fields, sweet potato plantations, and the village’s territory.

  It was night, a moonless night. Beyond the fields, a dozen shacks were lined up around a rectangle of beaten earth, which must have had the pretension of being a street, the main and only street in the settlement. A single light was on. It shone above a hovel even smaller than the others, though less dilapidated.

  An administrative building, Marta Ashkarot deduced.

  Administration! the elephant thought. The hominids’ last pride before their return to the primitive horde or their pure and simple disappearance. It’s what separates them from animals. One last collective affirmation, as important for them as their subsistence agriculture and firecrackers.

  The lamp illuminated an overhang. Still unmoving in her plant-covered hiding spot, Marta Ashkarot concentrated her gaze. At the risk of being blinded, she stared at the light and its surrounding environs. She wanted to figure out what sort of institution was hosted behind those planks. Sometimes, humans or assimilees continued to practice the art of writing, scribbling on walls the handful of official terms they had retained. If that’s an institution, they may have slathered its name in paint somewhere, the elephant thought.

  Several medium-sized, rather active spiders could be tallied in the light; they were busy wrapping freshly caught butterflies in silk. But there was no visible inscription that indicated the nature of the administration or its hours of operation. In contrast to the night, the light fixture was a form of optical violence. Marta Ashkarot averted her eyes and squeezed shut her eyelids five or six times to fill them with tears and dispel the imprint of the incandescent filaments. She waited for her optic nerve to stop sending her messages in burn marks and thunderbolts.

  She waited for a long minute.

  She reflected.

  Spiders eating butterflies. A lamp lit in front of an office, on the village’s main street. Hominids sleeping in their filthy huts.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, really, she thought.

  The stars in her ocular globes had finally stopped dancing.

  She shook her immense ears. The bamboo leaves rustled against her skin. The powerful stalks hung like springs over her neck, her flanks.

  Alright, I’m going over there, she decided.

  She pushed through the bamboo stalks without breaking them and exited the thicket. Now she was out in the open. The ground was dusty, and after a damp, watered layer, became hard. Her feet left practically no prints in the soil.

  She crossed the vegetable patches, stepped onto the street, and stopped before the administrative shack and its lightbulb. The building did not have an ironclad solidity. It was obvious that a pachyderm attempting to squeeze inside would distort the entire frame.

  The man working the desk had heard a noise and must have feared that his guest was taking the initiative to enter, for suddenly he clicked a latch, put a rudimentary wooden sign on himself, and appeared at the threshold, his hand raised above his forehead, more to protect himself from the light of the lamp than to salute any sort of greeting.

  “Would you mind if I turned that off?” he asked.

  “No,” the elephant said.

  They remained there for several moments, saying nothing. The man had just switched off the electricity and there they were, face to face, waiting for their filament-blinded retinal tissues to reconstruct themselves.

  “It’s protocol,” the man finally said. “It’s bad for your eyes, and keeps you from seeing in the dark, but those are the orders.”

  “Ah,” the elephant said.

  “Do you remember the First Soviet Union? Right at the start, someone said that if the Soviets wanted to achieve communism, they first needed more electricity. He was a short bald man. His name escapes me.”

  “I vaguely recall,” Marta Ashkarot reflected. “Soviets, more electricity, yes. But I no longer remember whether it was to achieve communism or socialism. That was seven or eight centuries ago, at any rate.”

  She swayed back and forth, and, when her head approached the awning, she felt the heat of the bulb, its filament taking some time to cool, and smelled the scent of the butterflies dissolving from the gastric juices that the spiders had injected into them.

  The man was not afraid of her and stood a meter away, calmly, without gesticulating, quite the opposite of how peasants act in the presence of pachyderms.

  “At any case, in the long run, we got there,” the man said. “That bald Russian was right.”

  Marta Ashkarot silently agreed. Then, with her trunk, she gestured toward the shack that, now no longer artificially illuminated, was much more visible.

  “Is that the village soviet?” she asked.

  “It was, yes,” the man explained. “The village soviet. But, in the surrounding areas, there was a decline in population, so we regrouped. Now, it’s more of a regional soviet. Interregional even, since there’s not much else around anymore.”

  “Hmmm! Interregional!” the elephant exclaimed in admiration.

  “Well, yes,” the man said.

  He puffed out his chest, as if he felt invested with a titanic responsibility, and Marta Ashkarot noticed that he was wobbling slightly. There was no smell of alcohol on his breath. Perhaps he had succumbed to the giddiness of success.

  Their dialogue paused. Around them, the village was sleeping. Four houses were inhabited, maybe five. At the center was a medium-sized agglomeration, on which circumstances had bestowed the status of capital. In the context of the population’s rarefaction and even extinction, the soviet administered a nearly continental territory.

  “That does mean though,” the man continued, “that with this lamp and this soviet, communism presides over an immense part of the world.”

  “I don’t know about communism,” Marta Ashkarot rectified. “Maybe just its preparatory phase. Maybe just socialism.”

  The man continued puffing out his chest.

  “Hardly matters,” he said.

  “Yes,” the elephant conceded. “No reason to quibble over words.”

  “Of course not,” the man said. “Words don’t matter. What matters is that it’s been established. And this time, it’s here to stay.”

  Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Paper

  Marta Ashkarot shoved her shoulder one last time against the dark wall. The bricks came loose, just a few at first, as if the wall were accepting its wounds with regret, then, suddenly, the whole structure collapsed. The hole was enormous and, once the fracas had died down, Marta Ashkarot stepped over the rubble. She crossed through the dust and entered into her new home. Her old abode instantly faded into a nebulous bad memory. Thus the elephant had gone, from home to home, for several centuries, without asking too many questions about the inevitable or the end. Everything had begun inside a dream, and the system functioned without any glitches: she led a normal life, associated with one home or another, and then, when the time of her personal extinction approached, a force pushed her toward a cha
nge in habitation, often either in a rather strange manner or while she slept. She then found herself in another existence, in the next home, and she started all over again, just like everyone else.

  She started all over again, certainly, just like everyone else. But, even though she hadn’t asked fate for it, she benefited from favorable treatment. Whenever she changed existences, she only had to go through the phases of rebirth and the choice of wombs, and not through the phases of childhood or adolescence, with their countless atrocious episodes of training, apprenticeship, and indoctrination. She passed directly from one adulthood to the next. The process came about after her first death, and, ever since, it hadn’t changed. That said, the transition was not without fear or pain. Often, Marta Ashkarot felt that she was brushing against a barrier that just barely separated her from death or something comparable, just as horrible, or even more horrible than death. And sometimes she was also convinced that the home she had left would be replaced with nothing. At the very worst moment, when she was counting her respirations in order to stave off her final breath, something would whisper into her mind that her consciousness was going to cease to exist, that she herself had arrived at the end of the road, and that, now, the agony of death would be revealed to her, followed by complete darkness. But fortunately, up to this point, reality had always refuted her apprehensions. And when, once more established someplace new, she thought back on the anguishes she had suffered, she chalked them up to a natural phenomenon from which she was not the only creature to suffer, and that, to the contrary, must torment many individuals, such as animals that shed their skin, or that hide themselves in borrowed shells, or especially the ones that slumber inside cocoons in order to soften themselves into a foul pulp, so as to be reconstituted in an ephemeral form, intended for egg-laying and death. It’s true that the comparison had no scientific basis. Well no, she reflected, elephants don’t wander through saltwater in search of a better-fitting shell. Nor do they sleep in their own silk and dream of waking up with wings. At any rate, I’ve never been particularly envious of wings, she concluded.