Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  Can I help you? They seemed to say.

  Rita Mirvrakis gave me a nudge. She’d decided that we could trust this man.

  “We’re looking for someone,” she said, sidling into the workshop.

  She had grabbed my hand, making me cross the threshold right behind her. I stepped in turn over the metal bar that marked the bottom of the narrow door. We were now inside the small space. We were now fully and yellowishly illuminated by the neon tube. We were now with our espadrilles brushing past the first circle of disassembled objects: twisted shafts and nails. The demobilizee moved and, once again, something tumbled from the summit of the scrap iron pile. It was an enamel coffeepot. The demobilizee let it roll into a nook with a sink and some toilets.

  “And who is that someone?” he asked.

  “My aunt,” Rita Mirvrakis said boldly. “Daadza Bourbal.”

  The man paused, then cleared his throat.

  “I once knew an Irma Bourbal,” he said. “She used to live in the barracks on Albert Trott Street. Then she came here.”

  “That’s my aunt,” Rita Mirvrakis replied.

  “She’s dead,” the soldier said. “It didn’t go well for her. She had a place not far from here, two hundred meters away. It was a messy death.”

  “Oh,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “They captured her during an inspection,” the demobilizee continued. “They accused her of being an Ybür. Are you an Ybür, little girl?”

  “No,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “I am,” I interrupted.

  “They dragged her in the street behind their truck,” the old man said. “She was a friend of mine. She passed right in front of the shop. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I’m an Ybür, too.”

  In the middle of his amulets, medals, and lucky charms, there was a dangling string. It was wrapped around his neck. He grabbed it and revealed the sign that, until then, had remained hidden behind his back.

  It is unknown what this creature is, or even if it is alive, the sign read. Only an autopsy can establish these facts. Whoever you are, ensure the victory of scientific truth. Aid science. Kill this creature.

  Not without pride, I in turn exposed the cardboard rectangle that always swayed against my back, and whose contents were the same. There too, the brave were exhorted to shed light on scientific truth by taking adequate measures. Dissect, dissect, my cardboard advised. Something will always come out of it.

  The demobilizee nodded his head approvingly.

  “We were in a meeting hall, but we got chased out,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “You can stay here tonight,” the old man proposed. “They’ve started dropping bombs again.”

  “We heard,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “It’s dangerous to go out when they’re dropping bombs,” the old man warned.

  “We know,” Rita Mirvrakis said.

  “What’s your name?” the demobilizee asked.

  “Rita Mirvrakis.”

  “And yours?”

  “Imayo Özbeg.”

  “Good,” the old man declared. “We’re blood relatives.”

  He rose, took a cup from his pile, and left to fill it with tap water. Then he offered it to us. His amulets jingled as he walked. Some of them had bells. There were dozens of them. We swallowed a few mouthfuls. After our long walk through the city, our lips and tongues were completely dry.

  “Want some more?” the soldier asked.

  He looked at us wearily.

  “Yes please,” I said.

  We drank a second cup. The container’s rim smelled like motor oil, but we were thirsty.

  We were intrigued by the charms. Few people wore them in the camp, except for exorcists and shamans, whom Granny Holgolde was always badmouthing. She accused them of practicing low magic and offending proletarian materialism and its fundamental values.

  “Are you a shaman?” I asked.

  “Um, well,” the soldier replied.

  “Do you do exorcisms?” Rita Mirvrakis asked.

  “Of course not,” the soldier protested. “But I can tell the future. People come to me for that, not to buy scrap metal … Imayo Özbeg, do you want me to read your fortune?”

  “Yes, but do Rita Mirvrakis first,” I proposed.

  “No,” she immediately refused. “We don’t have time. We have to go.”

  However, she had sat on a crate after finishing the cup of water, and made no effort to get up.

  She suddenly seemed odd. She had that look that sometimes deformed her face, before her pained sobs or delirious monologues.

  “Go where?” the soldier asked.

  My friend didn’t respond. There was a silence. Outside, the street was empty. We heard a siren very far in the distance, several kilometers away. But that was all.

  “Irma Bourbal,” Rita Mirvrakis continued, “did she look like me?”

  “No,” said the soldier. “She was much taller than you. They tied her to the back of their truck with barbed wire and dragged her. When she passed by here, she already looked like nothing at all.”

  “I’m like her, anyway,” Rita Mirvrakis muttered.

  “It was raining,” the soldier recounted. “Her body bounced through puddles. I had a hard time recognizing her, even though I knew it was her. Anyhow, she didn’t look like you. She had a bad death.”

  “She looked like me,” Rita Mirvrakis declared obstinately.

  “No, she didn’t,” the soldier said.

  He had an exhausted intonation and, after starting to make a gesture of denial, he frowned and remained silent for one, two minutes. Rita Mirvrakis lowered her head. She looked at who-knows-what, her eyes unmoving. I think she was already somewhere else, in her inner world, with her memories, her ghosts, and her terrible inventions.

  I didn’t know what would be best to do, so I remained standing in front of the demobilizee, planted on my heels, swaying as little as possible, like Soldier Schumann had taught us during our attention exercises.

  From time to time, the neon tube crackled, but the light never changed. Despite the disorder and the shadows, the workshop’s atmosphere was peaceful, though, obviously, somewhat strange, with these three persons who were together and unspeaking.

  After a moment, the demobilizee came out of his sulk.

  “So, do you want me to tell you your fortune, Imayo Özbeg?” he asked me.

  I made a sign that meant yes.

  The soldier made me sit beside him, on his car seat, and took my wrist in his coarse hand. We were pressed between two walls of junk, against lead tubes, dented wheels, rusted sluices, smashed electrical circuits, blackened lamps, twisted spoons and forks. From where I sat, I could see the iron shutter, and, beyond, the street with its leprosy of indistinctly glistening tar beneath the rays of a streetlight. The silhouettes of passersby were remarkable, though there wasn’t enough time to determine to whom they belonged, or whether they were men or women. I didn’t turn toward the soldier, who was speaking slowly and softly, as if half asleep and forever searching for ideas, images, and words. I breathed in the air filled with dust and metal shavings. I kept glancing at Rita Mirvrakis, hoping to catch her attention, watching for her complicity, but she didn’t look at me. By my side, the soldier gave off a smell of burnt cardboard, of dirty clothing, of verdigris. It also occurred to me to close my eyes in order to better hear the phrases he pronounced, some of which, closer to mumbling than speech, escaped me.

  It had been repeated to us a thousand times not to budge when an adult was talking to us, and I was immobile. But this immobility had another origin as well. Quite simply, his words petrified me. I felt as if the soldier, instead of amiably chatting about my future, was trying his best to instill me with fear. According to him, everything had gone bad right from the start and would continue to go bad right until the end.

  No one had ever read my fortune before. I imagined that he was going to tell me about travels, encounters, mysterious astral conjunctions. I wasn’t expecting anything particularly n
ice, but I was expecting something else.

  “Whether you want it or not,” the soldier said, “there is bad luck within you, Imayo Özbeg … it came with your birth … you were brought out of the darkness on a bad date … the very same day as the beginning of an ugly new war … you had to be pulled out with chains … you did your best not to emerge … you resisted, uselessly … misfortune also entered into your dreams at the same moment … and that, that will haunt you until your last breath … but even after that … it will follow you in your path to rebirth … there is no Clear Light for you in what is to come … in your fate, nothing will shine, except for unwanted flames, flames that bite and bring suffering … no other light on the path … Don’t think you’re the only one, if that is any comfort … For hominids and undermen of your kind, there is no exit or Clear Light … only a permanent feeling of failure … only the feeling of struggle without end, whether in dreams or in death … Sometimes it is as if you are struggling in a burning, tarry glue … no hope of even transforming at the last moment into a strange cormorant … wings unable to spread … bones dislocated from the effort to take flight … feathers gathered in a crumpled mass, stuck one to the other … breast faded … this is misfortune … orifices blocked by something neither solid nor liquid … breathing becoming more and more difficult … no more vertical, no more horizontal … a slanted, indeterminate bath, in an incomprehensible material … no more sides to reach or touch, nothing stable anywhere … a strange drowning … naphtha, oil … no recognizable sensation, no light … A struggle for nothing … When your turn comes, you will struggle in vain … if not in tar, then surrounded by flames … another misfortune … At first within the fire there are splendid colors … it is the heart of wonders … you are surrounded by orange scarves … profound shades that poets and painters claim to know how to describe … but they don’t know what it all looks like from the inside … when you are inside the flames and burning … It’s something else, another world … at first you think you’ve seen it before … then you make out other colors, terminal colors … fiery bronze, hellish yellow … smoky red, smoky crimson … and other colors still, with names unknown to the living … dark mochan … uldamor … camphormander … light mizerine, sparkling cynosure … mordant orange … If it’s your turn in the flames, you’ll struggle within, Imayo Özbeg … in vain … for animals, undermen, and humans, the outcome is always the same … you’ll writhe in vain against adversity, in uldamor dispersal, in mizerine blindness … and then it will be all the same, you’ll see … then you’ll struggle in vain in the heart of death … even your rebirth won’t happen … This is misfortune … You can’t prepare for it, can’t avoid it … Mordant orange at the end, but it’s not the end … Imayo Özbeg, you will find refuge nowhere … Whether in life or in death … Your name burns … Your name will burn … Others will go to you, to your rescue or simply to accompany you, but even your name will burn … No one will be able to recognize you among the ashes … You will be nothing more than a strange cormorant in the depths of red … But what does anyone know about your future … no one knows anything about anything, we’re already at the end of time … knowledge is worthless … preparation has no meaning … There’s nothing but the flames to enter in death … There’s nothing but dark tar and dark flames … Sometimes it’s enough to set forth on the strange path of Bolshevism … it’s enough to enter into that strange dream … Imayo Özbeg, you have this dream within you, as do we all … If your turn comes, you will struggle … you will try to put an end to misfortune … you will vainly try, when your turn comes, to put an end to misfortune … you will struggle between heaven and earth, in a squalid cluster of barbed wire … Achieving nothing … And then everything will be all the same … the blazing successes to start, the thousand-year-old victories, and almost immediately afterward the irreversible collapses, the defeats … the crushings … your bones and your intelligence will be ground into screams … at the final second you will contemplate your useless life, your fruitless death … your wounds … You have this dream within you like us all … you’ll see … another form of misfortune that nothing can heal … And then …”

  I had already heard enough. With an abrupt twist, I pulled back my hand. The soldier didn’t try to take my wrist again; he shrugged and stopped talking. We were motionless, side by side, breathless, him from having spoken, me from having listened.

  I felt like I had been beaten, or at least like I had been heavily and longly lectured for a sin I had not committed, but of which I was ashamed, despite everything, a sin inscribed within me since time immemorial, indelible and difficult to define.

  I turned toward Rita Mirvrakis. I needed her protection, her false indifference, mean and affectionate. I needed to go to her and feel that we were together. Now she too gave the impression of having been beaten. She was curled up and trembling on the crate near the sink. Her eyes took in nothing of the exterior world. They looked glassy and mad.

  “She’s sick,” I rasped.

  “Who are you talking about?” the soldier asked, thinking about I don’t know what.

  “Rita Mirvrakis, I said. “She’s sick.”

  The soldier looked in the girl’s direction and, instantly, came out of his near-sleepwalking state. He jumped down from his seat and went to fill a cup of water and tried to make Rita Mirvrakis drink. Since she wouldn’t part her lips, he put the container down, grabbed a piece of cloth, and, after moistening it under the spigot, returned to her. He began to softly wipe her pale face.

  “Have you ever seen her in this state before?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “She has episodes.”

  “It’s filth from times past coming to the surface,” the demobilizee said. “She, too, carries misfortune within her. It wells up from the past and spreads. It forms terrible images inside her skull and explodes. It destroys her interior. Maybe what I said brought it out. She took it for her own.”

  “Yes,” I said, annoyed. “It’s what you said that brought it out.”

  “She needs something sweet to counter the pain,” the soldier sighed.

  I scanned the room. Everything there was hard, blunt, and covered in grime. The soldier in turn looked around for something soft and caressing among the clutter and, finding nothing, became distraught and whined impotently. On the skin of his shaved head, between the close-cropped hairs, appeared tiny droplets of sweat. Rita Mirvrakis’s episode pained him strongly, and his unease was transmitted to me, augmenting my own. I felt overwhelmed by fear. Out of sympathy for Rita Mirvrakis, I began to imagine the horrors that she was remembering or envisioning. Arrests, decapitations, screams, burnings. All of that mixed together with what the soldier had just evoked, with suffocation, with unknowable shades of red, with my own death in the middle of the flames.

  “Go buy a jar of cream, Imayo Özbeg,” the demobilizee proposed in a hoarse voice. “I have nothing for her here. The cream should do her some good.”

  “I don’t have any money,” I protested. “I don’t know where the dairy store is.”

  “Tell the dairywoman that it’s for the soldier Özbeg. She’ll give me credit. Tell her that the soldier Özbeg says it’s urgent.”

  “Your name’s Özbeg too?” I asked, stunned.

  “Yes, mine too. Like you. We’re family.”

  “Oh,” I commented, suspicious.

  “That’s how I know the details of your misfortune,” the soldier explained.

  “Granny Holgolde never told me about you,” I remarked.

  “Granny Holgolde doesn’t have loose lips,” the soldier approved. “In the camp, it’s better not to show off one’s relatives and genetic links.”

  I once again felt left in the dark. Out of everything in the world, I didn’t understand the ways and secrets of adults the most.

  “Genetic links, understand?” the soldier said.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

  The soldier Özbeg
’s skull shone beneath the neon light.

  Rita Mirvrakis’s state had not improved. There were bubbles of saliva at the corners of her lips. I went to touch her arm. She didn’t react to my gesture. I felt the tension in her, the movement of frightening images, the collapse of her will in the face of such pain.

  “Do you know where the dairy store is?” the soldier repeated.

  “No,” I said.

  “Leave here and take a right. Go to the end of the street. There’s a small landing with some stairs. You’ll go down the steps. You can’t miss it. At the bottom, turn left. There’ll be a short street. The night is really dark. But there’s always a light on above a doorway. You can use it to guide your way. It’s the entrance to a barracks. Right next door is the dairy shop.”

  The soldier finished his description of the route.

  “Did you get all that or do you want me to repeat it?” he asked.

  “Landing, stairs, to the left a street with a light,” I said. “That’s not complicated. I won’t get lost.”

  “Then go, Imayo Özbeg,” the soldier said. “Go as fast as you can. Do you love Rita Mirvrakis?”

  “Yes,” I said in a breath.

  “Then go quickly and come back just as quickly.”

  “What kind of cream?” I asked, suddenly panicked.

  “A medium-sized one,” the soldier clarified. “Like this.”

  He showed me the size with his hands. I nodded. He had already returned to Rita Mirvrakis. Once again he applied the damp rag to her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth, her wrists. Then he plucked off several of his charms and placed them on the little girl’s stomach.

  I rushed outside. The street was dark. Two sirens were blaring in the distance, clamoring in dismal variations. It wasn’t raining, there was no fog, but the humidity in the air and the bituminous wind from the bomb that had just been dropped somewhere in the city were both palpable.

  I barely crossed paths with anyone. For the first few hundred meters, I turned around every three steps to glance at the light from the workshop. It reassured and, in a certain way, spoke to me. There were other lamps sparking in the distance, but it was solely that one I tried to keep in my sight. I imagined the soldier stooped over Rita Mirvrakis, dampening her forehead, wiping her tears that didn’t flow, shuffling around her, trying to calm her and ease her pain, her fears, whispering encouragements that she didn’t want to listen to or couldn’t hear. Then I started walking even faster. This portion of Vincents-Sanchaise Street was less shadowy, since it benefitted from the light of an ancient watchtower situated just behind a row of low houses. No one had scaled the tower’s ladder in dozens of years, but there was still a working projector, doubtlessly fed by a special electrical grid. I ran past the tower and, five minutes later, found myself in front of the stairs the soldier had told me about. I went down them four at a time. Everything corresponded exactly to what he had described: the short street, the thick darkness, the orienting door lamp. I walked forward, taking precautions to keep myself from tripping. I regularly touched the wall to my right. The sirens were still blaring, but they sounded much farther away than when I was traversing Vincents-Sanchaise Street, and around me now I heard mainly the steady music of my own footsteps.