Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  I rubbed my burning cheek in silence. When Rita Mirvrakis slapped you, she didn’t hold back.

  “I thought he was going to kill me,” I said in a breath.

  Rita Mirvrakis shrugged her small shoulders. She was two years older than me, she towered over me by a head, but she had small shoulders.

  “He should’ve,” she shot back.

  “What?” I asked, dreading the ensuing confirmation, but unable to admit that Rita Mirvrakis might wish me that much harm. “Should’ve what?”

  My voice was bloodless, but I was holding back my tears.

  “Killed you,” she confirmed coldly.

  I harbored a more than fraternal affection for Rita Mirvrakis, and she knew it. She saw that her retort had hurt me. Distraught, frozen, I was about to sob. She touched my arm and changed her tone.

  “I’m joking,” she said. “Idiot.”

  Rita Mirvrakis had witnessed the decapitation and burning of her family, specifically her grandmother, one of her mothers, an aunt, her brothers. Adopted by neighbors in Camp 801, she lived more or less normally for about two years, until her replacement parents were arrested during a genetic conformity inspection. She then ended up with us, in the children’s section of the Molinari Barracks, although she might have preferred the women’s dormitory. These numerous experiences had hardened her, or rather, had given her an anxious personality, which for the most part she successfully hid behind a haughty, meanish coldness, though she couldn’t always control it. That’s when she would suffer fits. Without warning, she would lose consciousness of her surroundings and wall herself off, unspeaking, or conversely, babbling continuously for an hour or two, an outpouring of her delirium. She would inundate us with her dark visions and nightmares. This frightened the other children, who quickly shrank away from her, but I stayed nearby until she came back to reality. I have to say that we had a special connection. With me, she could set aside her coldness and even be tender. She knew that she flustered me, but, instead of making fun of me or stringing me along, she accepted me by her side as if I were her little brother. She needed someone to lean on, like all of us. Night-time in the Molinari Barracks allowed us to deepen our complicity. We’d often meet in her bed and, before falling asleep next to each other, we’d talk about the world into which we’d been born, retelling Granny Holgolde’s tales, inventing stories of vengeance and imagining better worlds where we were the heroes—and where nonetheless, despite our efforts, everything ended terribly.

  “You saw the millipede too, right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But you can’t tell the teacher that.”

  Our quarrel ended there. Once again we were like brother and sister, a pair of juvenile outcasts, two punished delinquents who didn’t really know what their punishment was supposed to be. Expulsion from class was an extraordinary situation. Soldier Schumann had innovated with us, and, on the scale of consequences, this was unprecedented, outlandish even. We had never imagined it before and had no idea what to do with it.

  “Where do we go now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  Around us, the street was dark. The classroom was located in a sub-basement of the meeting hall, and, after a flight of steps, we exited directly into the city. We had a choice: return to the hall, wander the empty barracks and rest homes for invalids and the mentally ill, risk being reprimanded by the nurse’s aides and the insane, or go on an adventure—first to the heart of the Harkovat District, then beyond, to the Kanal and even further, to places that were not totally unknown to us but which we had never visited outside parades, under guardian supervision.

  Rita Mirvrakis grabbed the fingers of my right hand for a few seconds and dragged me along. She’d decided to venture into unexplored territories. Then she let go of my hand and I began to walk beside her.

  “What if the director sees us?” I asked worriedly.

  “We’ll tell her we’re going to buy some milk.”

  “Milk?”

  “Yes, we’ll tell her that the soldier sent us out for a can of milk. For a lesson.”

  “Oh,” I said skeptically.

  “A lesson on poisons and antidotes. She’ll believe us.”

  “What if she doesn’t?” I objected.

  “We’ll kill her.”

  I turned toward her and stared into her eyes. They were cloudy, like whenever she discharged odd images, terrible images, frightening images, like during her delirious episodes.

  “We’ll drown her in milk, in poison,” she muttered through her teeth, more to herself than to me. “In a puddle of poison. We’ll lay her down next to the soldier and decapitate them both.”

  “We don’t have a knife,” I objected.

  “We’ll decapitate them by hand, with our teeth,” she muttered.

  There was nothing particularly abnormal about Rita Mirvrakis’s intonations. I withdrew into myself for a few minutes. I felt like I couldn’t tell if I was awake or if I had plunged into a new dream, into a place more nightmarish, more oneiric, than my real existence. I no longer knew at what level of reality to place myself. I don’t know about you, but it’s something I wondered about regularly at the time and, same as today, I never could be at all certain.

  The streets came one after another. Alley 488. Alley 489. Noura Slaheer Street. Thilmiya Grootz Street. Ogoussone Thoroughfare. Alley 604. Loudjima Mahaorian Street. Jean and Mariya Harfalar Street.

  Street followed street. They were littered with garbage, vibrant with fetidity, with sordid recollections.

  “What if we went to Granny Holgolde’s?” I suggested.

  “Do you know where she lives?” Rita Mirvrakis shot back.

  “No,” I confessed.

  My companion stared at me with dismay.

  “What if we went to Granny Holgolde’s?” she aped.

  “Fine,” I said, annoyed.

  “Idiot,” she said.

  We’d left the Harkovat District behind us, passing by indistinct buildings, abandoned worksites, where it was impossible to tell if they were in the middle of demolition or reconstruction. We walked for hours. Sometimes, for two or three hundred meters, the streets would be bustling. Vagrants, semi-vagrants, closed-face proletarians, guardsmen, guardswomen, all kinds of crippled people, men, women, uniformed supervisors, all heading to their mysterious destinations, saying nothing to us. They were indifferent to our presence. Or maybe, if this turned out to be a dream, we didn’t have enough substance to attract their attention. In any case, the disregard in which we were held felt quite comfortable to us. We had no problem walking on twilit sidewalks when there were sidewalks, avoiding collision with objects and the living.

  “By the way, are you still there, Rita?” Rita Mirvrakis asked herself quietly. “Don’t you think it stinks here? Huh? … You don’t smell that? …”

  She was talking to herself, as she often did, making up questions and their answers, sometimes developing one point or another, or an image, in considerable detail, unconcerned with my opinion or even proof that someone was listening to her.

  The city did stink. We didn’t mind leaving the hall’s poorly lit corridors and tunnels behind, or going outside into the open air, but the open air in question carried with it all the bad odors that pervaded our dead-end world; it mixed together the effluvia of prisons and camps, the stench of black war, covert or brutal depending on the season, the musk of the war’s bombs, barbed-wire fences, chemical dustings, still-smoking ruins nearby, ruins that stopped smoking decades ago, content with giving off memories of fire and wailing: all these smells combined as well with the odors of nurseries and hospices for subhumans, the wind of distress, repressed or vivid and unhealed, the flatulence of this world, flatulence that spoke of the suffering of nearly everyone around us and elsewhere. That was what we inhaled into our always-open mouths in the camp or during our trips to town. And, doubtlessly because we had just thought of it, we felt as if at this very moment it carried fresh smells, like
a completely new horror that had suddenly and violently insinuated itself into our nostrils.

  “Well, Rita, I think it absolutely stinks,” Rita Mirvrakis continued in the same tone. “Of course it stinks … it smells bad and it’ll always smell bad … How could it be any different … Tardaz Street, Kam Yip Street, piles of dirty clothes … Albert Trott Street, the city morgue … Varkaunas Street, butcher’s shops … collapsed houses … Holger Schmidt Street, the refugee barracks…”

  She listed a few more places, then she was quiet.

  “We might still not be far from Granny Holgolde’s,” I said. “I recognize one of the places I went to once, with Aunt Kirkuk and Soldier Robmann.”

  Rita Mirvrakis stopped to scrutinize the area. She looked both lost and like she didn’t care.

  “I don’t remember Soldier Robmann,” she said. “I don’t remember coming here with Aunt Kirkuk.”

  We were next to an intersection. I went to read what the signs said. They were high up and faded. Ounda Street, Vincents-Sanchaise Street. I returned to Rita and gave my report.

  “Vincents-Sanchaise Street,” she repeated. “Fine. We’ll go there.”

  “To Granny Holgolde’s house?” I asked.

  “No, idiot,” Rita Mirvrakis said. “Granny Holgolde moved into a sovkhoz. It’s not anywhere near here. Just the opposite. It’s basically in the countryside. Don’t you remember when we went there? We had to get in a van. We rode for a long time. It’s outside the city, kilometers away.

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  Stepping onto Vincents-Sanchaise Street, we started talking about what our memory could contain, what it stored askew, accumulated memories that never came out again, false memories. It was a conversation with which we were familiar. Both of us complained about our poor memory. We complained about the tricks it played on us. Oftentimes, no matter what images we had to recall that should have been immediately available to us, nothing came. We had to invent them.

  “I don’t even remember my birth,” Rita Mirvrakis ended up saying. “Same for whatever happened next. Everything’s all scrambled up to today. It’s a mishmash of images that aren’t really real. It’s like I don’t have a past I can actually believe in.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you too?” She stopped.

  “It’s like … like I can’t …” I stammered.

  “It’s like he can’t!” she mocked.

  “Uh …” I continued. “Like I can’t … can’t really believe in what came before …”

  “Idiot,” she said.

  Evening loomed. The already-weak light was dimming. The rag heaps brushing against us lost even more of their faces, and, even more often, smelled of sweat, of rust, of working in mud and dust, of blood.

  “It’s what’ll come next that you shouldn’t believe in,” Rita Mirvrakis suddenly said.

  “Oh,” I said, wary.

  Wary, or maybe stricken with idiocy, actually.

  “You also shouldn’t believe in what there is during,” Rita Mirvrakis added. “The images we see while our eyes are open. It’s better not to believe in the present.”

  Vincents-Sanchaise Street had a bad reputation. Whenever they mentioned it, the adults claimed that it was easy to get lost there, and that also the enemy had spies there disguised as subhumans who reported to camp authorities, regularly updating the list of surviving Ybürs and Bolshevist sympathizers. It was a dark, winding street, sometimes wide, sometimes reduced to an ill-defined corridor between two grimy walls. It seemed to not have an end, continuing with the same name at intersections in whichever direction you decided to go. The entrances to barracks and houses weren’t lit, and, though the shops were always open, they were behind wavy, half-lowered metal shutters that rid them of any attractive qualities. At night, passersby looked like roving animals, prisoners, dressed in tatters and mired in frightening, grouchy meditation. I think it would have been wiser to call it the Vincents-Sanchaise District, since there was once a time when the side streets, alleys, and avenues all shared the same name. We walked throughout for half an hour, with lumps in our throats from the dread of getting lost, our heads full of awful imagery. It involved all manner of harsh punishments and bodily injuries.

  “I believe we’re lost,” I finally said.

  “I told you, don’t believe anything,” Rita Mirvrakis replied.

  At that same moment, there was the whistling of a bomb falling from the sky in the distance, then, after a few seconds, an explosion. There was only one detonation—this particular attack wasn’t very important. The iron shutters near us trembled, and we could hear annoyed exclamations from the other side of the walls.

  Suddenly, the street was empty.

  The street. Suddenly. It had emptied of passersby. No more rags approached or followed us.

  A troubling street, more than dusky now. The rutted pavement, illuminated by the brush of lights from the half-closed stores. And already the memory of the bomb that faded and transformed, only leaving us with questions without answers. And no one.

  “What if the war’s started again?” I whispered.

  I could barely see Rita Mirvrakis. Rather than keep walking, she had sunk into the entryway of a small apartment. Against the wall dangled a plastic envelope. Inside it was a list. Rita Mirvrakis raised herself up on the tips of her toes and struggled to decipher the names of the residents.

  She turned back toward me and sighed.

  “The war never ended,” she said. “It has no reason to end.”

  I made an objection. For years, we’d enjoyed a relative calm. Alarms and gunfire were rare.

  “It can only keep on going,” she added. “And we’re in it until we die.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “An aunt’s name. My parents said that I had an aunt on Vincents-Sanchaise Street, and that she could take care of me in an emergency.”

  “Which of your parents?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember,” said Rita Mirvrakis. “I was young. Maybe the first ones, maybe the second.”

  “Is that why we’re on Vincents-Sanchaise Street?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s why,” she said.

  “Can she take care of me too?” I asked apprehensively.

  “Idiot,” Rita Mirvrakis exhaled. “Obviously. We’re together.”

  I huddled next to Rita Mirvrakis and tried to read the names on the list with her.

  “What was her name?” I asked.

  “Daadza Bourbal.” Rita Mirvrakis hesitated. “I’m not really sure. I was little. Daadza or Irma.”

  We were crossing over into darkness, with all the more difficulty since the sheet—a list of names just like the thousand, ten thousand even, others that existed in the camp—was above our height. Despite the dampness, the ink wasn’t smeared too badly. The names were followed by recent dates. I suppose they were more likely disappearance dates than move-in dates.

  “There’s no Daadza Bourbal in this house,” Rita Mirvrakis finally said.

  “We’ll have to look somewhere else,” I proposed.

  The notion that an aunt was going to take care of us rested on empty hopes, but I liked it. I felt like I could examine dozens of resident lists in the dark.

  “We only had a one in a thousand chance of finding her,” Rita Mirvrakis commented. “We didn’t find her, that’s all. We’ll never find her.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We’re still going to look some more, but we won’t find her,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “She might be dead, too,” I observed.

  I wasn’t thinking about the possible death of this Daadza Bourbal, I just wanted to agree wholeheartedly with whatever my friend was thinking. I was agreeing at random.

  “We’re going to look for her some more,” Rita Mirvrakis repeated.

  Intent on consulting a new list, we directed ourselves toward the entrance of the nearest apartment. On the way, from a space between the two
buildings, someone called out to us. There was a small workshop hidden behind a metal curtain. Cut off by the sheet was an open door. It revealed a place of diminished size, cluttered with scrap iron and dismantled objects, doused in yellowy light by a neon tube. In the midst of this bric-a-brac presided a man. He was sitting on a car seat held in place by makeshift wedges, among which we noticed the carcass of a radio transmitter and the remains of a baby stroller. One second was enough to classify this individual as one of the disheartened who had nothing left to lose. He was, in any case, depressed enough to continue, despite his defeat and poor state of dress, wearing his old uniform. He wasn’t sporting any medals, but his chest was bedecked with charms and talismans. All around this character were piled cardboard boxes, utensils, engine parts, bits of furniture, and old rags. Right at the moment when he addressed us, a porcelain door-handle had loudly fallen to the pyramid’s base, and now, instead of engaging in conversation with us, he was stooped over and picking it up while grumbling to himself. I think he was somewhere between forty and fifty years old, but his shaved head and craggy face, marked by the pains of war, made him appear much older.

  We examined him from the street, trying to determine whether he was unhinged or friendly. We considered the appalling stories that blackened Vincents-Sanchaise Street’s reputation: child-killers, dark magic, cannibalism. Given the current time and lack of other people around, we should have run far in the opposite direction, but we hesitated. In general, when an adult called out to us, we’d politely freeze and wait to learn more; it’s how we’d been brought up.

  “Who is that?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Rita Mirvrakis muttered. “It’s a soldier.”

  “What does he want?”

  “No clue.”

  The demobilizee had just stood up. He’d placed the handle by his side. It was very damaged.

  “You children look like you’re looking for something,” he said, his voice deep, weary, a little cracked.

  We could now better see his devastated face, the short gray hairs on his bristly skull, his thin cheeks, his tired, strung-out ascetic’s gaze. His uniform was too big for his size and was covered in stains. His sad eyes landed on me, then, so as not to frighten me, turned away.