Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  But let’s get to the point.

  Maryama Adougaï passed through Alley Number Eleven, crossed the old train track, and began to head down Leel Fourmanova Street. No one was accompanying her to the washhouse. She was now twenty years old. She had fashioned a wagon out of a plank outfitted with four wheels, on which she had placed two twelve-liter jerricans and a bucket with a lid. She was pulling the wagon by a rope. The wheels creaked as the cart noisily jostled over the uneven ground. It was three o’clock in the morning; the din resounded from one end of the deserted street to the other. The sky was dark, cloudy, lacking in heaviness since it was already autumn, when nocturnal storms become rare. The night was hot and still. In front of Liars’ Bridge, Maryama Adougaï slowed and looked around. There was no other living soul on the street, and from the other side of the passage, she saw a light shining, illuminating the main wall of the washhouse. Whiffs of mold and stains drifted from the gloomy vault, a stench of cellars, latrines, rear barracks. We always stopped for a moment there, letting a draft come to us, along with images from our childhood.

  Once her memory had reproduced the childish screams she had made in our company during every trip through Liars’ Bridge, Maryama Adougaï ventured into the nauseating space. She advanced using the lights in the washhouse’s square as a reference point. The wagon’s squeaks reverberated beneath the vault. She held her breath to keep from swallowing the stench. The remaining distance had diminished: twenty-five steps at most, a large portion of which were taken in apnea.

  She came out into the square and, without glancing at the backdrop, without lifting her eyes toward the dreary buildings, the barbed wire barricades, and condemned streets of Bloc 709, she approached the washhouse.

  Beneath the first spigot was an assortment of bottles.

  She brought her wagon to the center spigot.

  The civil defense soldiers were dozing on an old sofa they had salvaged from an abandoned house on Leel Fourmanova Street. Beneath their feet lay a notebook in which they were supposed to record any incidents along with their watch hours. The sound of the wagon woke them. Wordlessly, they nodded their heads in Maryama Adougaï’s direction to let her know that she could take as much water as she pleased.

  Maryama Adougaï propped the first jerrican on the grate spanning the furrow, then she loosened the spigot’s wheel. The water ran with force, the container was quickly filled to the brim. She shut off the spigot, screwed on the jerrican’s cap, heaved it back on the wagon with a pelvic thrust, and was about to pick up the bucket when, suddenly, she saw me.

  She had just placed her hand on the bucket’s handle. And at that moment, suddenly, she saw me.

  Around midnight, I had been thrown onto the spiked barricade. My hands were caught higher in the barbed wire, and I looked like I was trying to mimic a bird with its wings spread, an abnormally large fowl, sprawled and silent within an atrocious net. I was no longer in pain. I had stopped breathing a little after midnight, and I had then decided to stay and watch the coming of dawn. Maryama Adougaï’s appearance there made me happy in a way I could have never dared to hope for. As soon as I saw her emerge from the black space of the tunnel, I’d wanted to reveal myself, shake the barbed rampart in order to attract her attention, but I didn’t have enough strength.

  Maryama Adougaï saw me, exhaled a groan of bleak surprise, and dropped her bucket. She stood up, walked past the soldiers’ pitiful sofa, and headed toward me. The soldiers immediately came out of their reverie. The oldest one was already standing.

  “Where does she think she’s going?” he grumbled.

  “That’s my brother,” Maryama Adougaï explained without stopping. The other man hesitated, then followed in her footsteps.

  “No touching, no taking the body,” he warned. “He has to stay like that until tomorrow night.”

  She was now standing before me, three meters away, no closer, though not because she intended to obey the soldier, but because the barbed wire had been trimmed and reinforced over the decades, and now resembled a monstrous and shapeless briar patch, laden with buds and suckers that could sting, rend, and tear at a distance. Lit only by the bulb shining over the washhouse, the scene unfolded in half-darkness. Maryama Adougaï could hardly make out the wire’s vicious claws. The only thing she saw clearly was my body, which was right under the light of the lamp, appearing to float between sky and earth, along with, just behind the spiny shrub, an abandoned road, bricked-up windows, rotting roofs, the void.

  Since Maryama Adougaï wasn’t trying to remove me from where I was, and since she remained quiet and unmoving before me, the soldier made no gestures in her direction, though he did stand nearby to keep an eye on her. Our dialogue was going to unfurl in the presence of an unfriendly ear. The circumstances were dire, but fundamentally the same ones that had determined our behavior since birth. We knew how to cope: talk about something else, speak without speaking, only show emotion in a way incomprehensible to the enemy, leave essential things in the shadows.

  “Jean Adougaï,” Maryama Adougaï murmured, “I thought they’d taken you to a reeducation center. What are you doing here?”

  “I had some problems with the staff,” I said. “I fought with them. I didn’t want to learn their language.”

  “Were there casualties, Jean Adougaï?”

  “Oh, yes, a few. I couldn’t understand what they were asking. They harassed me. I defended myself.”

  There was a silence.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “It’s nighttime,” Maryama Adougaï replied.

  “I’m waiting for dawn,” I said.

  “You seem well, little brother,” Maryama Adougaï remarked.

  By Maryama Adougaï’s side, the soldier shrugged.

  “Have you gone to see Aunt Boyol?” I asked, after a new silence.

  “She’s feeling fine,” Maryama Adougaï said. “She’s singing songs, making some final adjustments to our maximum program.”

  “It’s a beautiful program,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s a beautiful program,” Maryama Adougaï repeated.

  The soldier was growing impatient. He touched my little sister’s arm.

  “This interview is over,” he said gruffly. “She’s going back to fill her containers.”

  “Keep waiting, little brother,” Maryama Adougaï murmured.

  I would have liked to make a gesture with the tips of my fingers, a gesture of approval and trust, or say something affectionate. But I couldn’t manage to do it. Everything was scrambled up in my head. I didn’t have much control left.

  “It’s going to be alright,” I said. “I have everything under control.”

  My voice didn’t carry. I don’t think Maryama Adougaï heard me.

  “She’s going to stop crying now,” the soldier insisted. “The interview is over, life goes on. She’s going to stop crying. There’s nothing she can do now. There’s nothing anyone can do. That’s how it is.”

  “Yes, that’s how it is,” I said.

  To bring the scene to a close.

  Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Camp

  Marta Ashkarot stopped for a moment at the entrance to the camp, just in front of the large gate, then she continued walking and pushed through the barrier with her titanic knees. The ruined gateway was a combination of metal and wood. The iron plates split under the pressure, the planks were already rotted, and an opening was created, but, in order to condemn the path, the last soldiers to pass through had taken care to knit a thick band of barbed wire around the fence, and the elephant was wary of the parts that could still spring up or irrationally attack and cause terrible injury. She especially didn’t want to lacerate her trunk and so she took several precautions. The fence and scrap iron resisted for a good half dozen seconds, then crumbled into dust, as if they had been waiting for this intervention to renounce all form and vanish. The splintered wood smelled of mushrooms. The barbed wire also had a strong odor, though rather one of guano and rust. The fria
ble scales scattered without even a single nick. None of the spines on the wire had survived corrosion. The formidable points had become nothing more than inoffensive snowflakes.

  Time’s taken its toll on this place, Marta Ashkarot thought, as a wave of fatalistic nostalgia washed over her body. Thirty-five, sixty-two, a hundred forty years? For her, untouched by time or death, simply changing homes at the end of her life, such numbers had lost most of their meaning. Her counting of years obeyed increasingly imprecise methods of calculation. What could she have said about the age of this camp? That it had been abandoned for a very, very long time, was all she could say. She knew she was incapable of any sort of dating process attached to reality, so it was better to stick to vague formulations. The camp belonged to a distant epoch, that’s all. It had been abandoned, the door had been forever shut and padlocked by its last occupants. Then humidity, lunar acidity, terrestrial gravity, silence, and wind had seen to its disintegration.

  In the past, the camp had covered a spectacularly vast surface, and there had once been a period when you could have walked for an entire day in a straight line without reaching either end, but, these days, it was impossible to ascertain its dimensions, as the forest had overtaken the terrain, gradually replacing it over time. Once through the gate, there was no sense of the camp’s immensity, only the feeling of being among the ruins of a small backwoods resort, with a few open-air barracks, some permanent houses, and a dispensary. Farther afield, no matter which direction you went, the facilities had been submerged in bamboo, trees, or tall grass. Between the gate and the green, dense, and visibly impenetrable barricade standing two hundred meters away, a street had survived, despite everything. It must be the main road, leading to official accommodations and administrative buildings, as well as the pavilion where distinguished guests were lodged when they arrived from the capital.

  Marta Ashkarot advanced slowly along this path. On both her right and left, the view was the same: collapsed constructions that were hardly recognizable from their glory days, and houses with shattered windows, filled with dirt, from which sprouted abundant, evil-looking tufts, creepers, and shrubs. The camp may have experienced a period of at least partial repopulation, as here and there on crumbled roofs you could see remnants of tarps, the traces of an attempt at reclaiming the ruins, but, at present, everything was deserted. There was a heavy silence. Even the monkeys had decided to avoid this place, and their cries were extremely distant, nearly inaudible.

  Marta Ashkarot had just traveled five hundred meters and was about to turn onto a second street, also overgrown and lined with demolished houses, when a face materialized without warning in her field of vision.

  It was a human face. Thirty meters away, an old man had passed by a window and turned toward the newcomer, in an attitude that expressed a stupefaction so strong it almost looked sorrowful. The old man was blind. His body floated within a tattered uniform, and, in suitable places, his head and hands emerged, discolored by the same disastrous shade of tropical humus.

  The small house that the man occupied seemed to have sunk askew into the earth. He had evacuated a considerable amount of rubble in order to make the space habitable, chaotically disseminating it all around the base of the outer walls of his abode, like a series of disheveled molehills. Following the definitive collapse of the roof, shelter had been secured by a structure of khaki canvas, patched haphazardly according to an approximative, poor-sighted technique.

  “Is that you, Volodia?” the man suddenly asked, breaking from the petrification that had characterized him until that point.

  Marta Ashkarot didn’t respond. She felt she had nothing to respond with. She stood still. She breathed in information through the tip of her trunk, trying to understand just who this unknown blind man was and what he wanted.

  The man looked like a young soldier from the Chinese Cultural Revolution who had let nearly three-quarters of a century pass without ever dreaming of changing his outfit. He washed his clothes regularly enough, and surely had the camp’s military laundry at his disposition to restore his padded jacket for the past five or ten years, but his tastes in fashion had remained the same. He had grown old in this uniform, he had become decrepit inside it, and it was where he had encountered his first attacks of blindness, followed later by the permanent darkening of his retinas.

  Marta Ashkarot took a few steps forward. The stranger had surmised a presence, but was incapable of grasping its form. His features expressed anxiety and uncertainty. The elephant blew a double note through her long nostrils to test his auditive capacities, as well as to identify herself as an intelligent animal, heavy but inoffensive. This sound wasn’t a trumpet, but its origin could hardly be mistaken. The stranger didn’t react. There was no additional strain on his face. He had heard nothing. It seemed that the blind old man was hard of hearing as well.

  Moved by a feeling of compassion, Marta Ashkarot was about to speak when the man continued talking, repeating his question from a minute ago.

  “Is that you, Volodia?” he repeated. “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew we’d see each other again someday.”

  Marta Ashkarot walked up to the house, skirted past one of the molehills, and planted herself in front of the window, a few steps away from the ledge on which the man was leaning.

  She was now curiously observing his octogenarian face, eroded by fate and a solitary life amid nature. She evaluated his survivor’s body. He was tanned, mummified, but appeared solid. His teeth, for example, had resisted the ravages of time. If no great climatic catastrophe occurred, and if the wars of extermination didn’t reach this region in the coming years, this individual could still hold on for at least another decade.

  “I knew you’d come back, Volodia,” the old man continued. “I knew you’d come back to demand an explanation from me. I waited for you. I’ll tell you everything.”

  Marta Ashkarot flapped her ears to chase away the flies and mosquitoes buzzing around her head. It had rained during the night and, taking advantage of the sun’s return, insects were everywhere. They witnessed the scene, though without any particular appreciation of it, purely as parasites.

  “Do you see the state you left me in?” the old man said. “A whole life has gone by. It was as cruel for you as it was for me. Do you see what I’ve become? Do you see, Volodia?”

  “Of course,” Marta Ashkarot said.

  The old man’s expression turned sullen.

  “It wasn’t easy for you or for me,” he said.

  The elephant glanced around. She found this conversation unpleasant and was already thinking about taking off. At the first intersection, the camp merged with the forest. Banana and mango trees stood at the vanguard, and beyond there was nothing but an indescribable clutter.

  “I know you’re annoyed with me,” the old man said. “You’ve always thought it was me who denounced you as a rightist. You thought I was a conspirator in the whole ordeal.”

  “Ah,” Marta Ashkarot said.

  “Don’t you remember?” the old man shouted. “You accused me of denouncing you, you showered me with insults in front of everyone. And then they took you away and you disappeared.”

  Leaning on the window, the old man became agitated. He seemed to be sniffing the air to determine the location of his interlocutor. He cast his glassy eyes about at random, on targets distant or close, on clouds, on anthills, on the elephant, to no avail. He had lifted up an arm as if to point out something. He pointed at nothing. His face expressed anxiety, confusion, and anger all at once.

  “Well it wasn’t me. Do you remember Irina? Fat Irina?”

  “No,” the elephant said.

  “My wife, at the time. Dammit, Volodia, try to remember! She was the committee secretary. Remember now?”

  “Oh, yes,” Marta Ashkarot said. “Fat Irina.”

  “She’s the one who denounced you,” the old man sighed, sweeping away mosquitos with his right hand. “She’s the one who wrote the first report against you. It wasn
’t me. But then things got out of hand.”

  Marta Ashkarot let out a rumble. It was to punctuate the stranger’s soliloquy and encourage him to give more details.

  “Then, you know how it goes,” the old man said. “We all started making reports against each other. Things got out of hand. But the first one was written by her. Fat Irina. It was her. The first denunciation.”

  “And now,” Marta Ashkarot remarked, “you’re denouncing your wife.”

  She was no longer making an effort to disguise her voice and, even if the stranger was hard of hearing, he was suddenly taken with doubt.

  “Is that you, Volodia?” he asked, rubbing his face, as if he had just smelled a whiff of sulfuric or acidic gas.

  Marta Ashkarot shrugged. She was preparing to leave back through where she had come from and didn’t want to participate anymore in this exchange.

  “Is that you, Volodia?” the stranger asked again. “Why won’t you answer me?”

  She gazed at the gray, heavy sky, the empty clouds. There were no birds above the forest. She had begun to turn around.

  “It wasn’t easy for anyone,” the old man said in an aggressive tone. “Don’t think you were the only one to suffer, Volodia. Everyone’s had a hard time of it.”

  He paused. The elephant had stopped in her U-turn. She felt as though he were going to add something important. She was no longer looking at him, but she continued to listen.

  “Huh? What did you say?” the old man asked.

  “Nothing,” the elephant let slip.

  “Everyone’s had a really hard time of it,” the stranger grumbled. “But at least it wasn’t for nothing.”

  Adults

  In the common room, whenever the schoolteacher was arrested or killed, there was a Red soldier who often gave us our lessons. There were always new teachers, but, in the interims, he was called in. The man’s name was Schumann; he had lost his right arm in combat on the frontlines of Orbise, he had to be in his thirties, and his scientific knowledge was just barely greater than our own. Pedagogically speaking, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that he was useless. Since we were young, we didn’t really notice, but, thinking back on it, yes, he was useless.