“Open it anyway,” the woman said.
“It’s going to blow,” the man warned.
“What can you do,” the dairywoman replied.
Her husband struggled with latches and bars, and maybe also with a valve that at first was stuck in place, but then began to creak with each quarter turn. After a minute, something came loose, a metallic object banged against the ground. There was the sound of whining hinges.
“Don’t move,” the man warned.
There was an inhaling sound. Suddenly, a lukewarm breeze from the other side covered me in a thin layer of dust. I continued to cry silently and, from time to time, rubbed my eyelids with the hand that wasn’t imprisoned in the dairywoman’s. The wind made my fingers begin to smell like charcoal, underground substances, and mouse urine. Then, the wind stopped. I supposed the problems due to the absence of an airlock were now resolved.
The dairywoman pulled me behind her into the dark and we crossed the threshold of that strange door, which for the two adults symbolized a permanent farewell to cream production and small business ownership, and for me a farewell to the city in flames and the one I loved, and for us all, a farewell to existence as we knew it.
I began walking alongside my guide. The ground made a squeaking sound as we treaded over it, as if it were made of scoria. The dairywoman’s husband had closed the door behind us before catching up. No one could see a thing. We had left the city and its flashes and rumbles of war. I think we were moving through a tunnel, but there weren’t any echoes, and we seemed to be out in open air, in a place where the sky, for one reason or another, had disappeared. Nothing could be confirmed. There was no sound other than that of our feet pressing against the ground’s friable surface. The temperature was mild, the humidity agreeable. The two adults didn’t speak a word. The dairywoman’s husband was having trouble breathing and, every fifty meters, would stop to wheeze and express a violent pain. Without commentary, the dairywoman would stop too, and, hand in hand, we would wait for the straggler. Then the woman let go of me. She knew that, now, I had accompanied them too far for me to flee, too far into the darkness and too far into the incomprehensible and the unknown.
We moved blindly, slowly, bending toward the shadows as one bends toward an adverse wind. We tried our best not to waver or collide with each other and, when it did happen, we felt discomfort and quickly backed away, as if we had been burned, or, in any case, as if we wanted to bring an end to an obscene situation.
Around midnight, a man suddenly appeared on our left and began walking with us, without exchanging a word with the dairy-woman or her husband; I couldn’t tell whether he was someone familiar to them or someone unwelcome. I listened to the ground crinkle beneath his feet and, occasionally, the clearing of his throat and his breathing. He too was short-winded. He kept pace with us, but at the same time, he always stayed a few meters away from our group, so as not to stumble into one of us by accident. I had the impression that neither the dairywoman nor her husband were aware of his presence, or at least that they tolerated him with no regard, as if he were simply a wandering dog that decided to follow them, wanting neither food nor pets. When the dairywoman’s husband stopped to breathe, our traveling companion continued walking for a dozen or so steps, then stopped in turn, waiting, like us, for the invalid to find a bearable pulmonary rhythm and catch up to us.
We continued like this for an hour or two more, then the dairy-woman decreed that it was time to rest for a moment. We had no more strength. The unknown man froze nearby. The light all around us was almost nonexistent, like in the ocean’s abyssal zones. Nothing broke the silence after we stopped treading the ground, covered in ash, scoria, or some other friable material. On the other side of the seal, we had crossed into a different world. Total darkness, monotony, bleak odors—all served as scenery in an aimless march and indecisive rumination on current events, past lives, and those whom we had left behind forever. I couldn’t help but think about the place after death the soldier Schumann would talk about, repeating the lessons of his Buddhist comrades in the barracks. I also remembered Granny Holgolde’s tales, the tunnels and black deserts that the elephant Ashkarot traversed whenever she changed existences and homes. We were in a world of that type. The difference perhaps was that we were crossing it together instead of being forced to confront a frightening solitude.
All three of us sat on the ground. The dairywoman’s husband opened his bag and took out a bottle of milk. He handed it to the dairywoman. I heard a swallowing sound. He in turn quenched his thirst.
Then he sought out my hands and invited me to close my fingers around the glass container.
“Don’t drink more than a mouthful,” he advised. “It’s condensed.”
“It has pemmican in it,” the dairywoman added.
I swallowed two gulps. The liquid was grainy and tasted like meat, but it comforted me. After drinking, I wiped my lips and gave the bottle back to him.
“We can survive a few weeks more on that,” the husband said.
“Of course,” the dairywoman commented.
We remained seated for a moment, saying nothing. We were in a row, facing the vast nothing, our eyes taking in the total absence of image and light, unable to distinguish between the top and bottom of the shadows. There may have been an immense vault above us, or a sky, and before us an endless black plain, or walls. We saw nothing. Beneath us, the ground was neither cold nor hot. Our bodies were now very close to one another, and I wasn’t disturbed at all by the dairywoman’s heat, even though not long ago, when we were walking, the slightest brush from her side or her hand filled me with shame. I listened to her husband’s wheezing inhalations, the sounds coming from her stomach.
Several meters away from us, our traveling companion had finally settled on the ground. I didn’t know whether he was slouched or squatting or even sitting like us, but I heard him fill and empty his lungs in an irregular, convulsive manner. It was impossible to guess if he was saddened not to be invited to share in our meal or if he didn’t care at all.
“You know, Özbeg,” the dairywoman said suddenly, “we have less than a one-in-a-hundred chance of getting out of here. It was that or the gas. At any rate, if you’d gone back, you’d be dead right now. You probably would have put up a fight on Vincents-Sanchaise Street, but you wouldn’t have lasted. You’d reach the top of the stairs and get buried in tar. By the time you opened your mouth to scream, you’d already be swallowed up by the flames. You wouldn’t have been able to find your little fiancée, Milvamakis.”
I cut in.
“Rita Mirvrakis,” I corrected.
My voice was distorted by a sob. I hadn’t been able to cry for hours, but occasionally I felt a spasm of despair seize my rib cage.
“You wouldn’t even have been able to see her,” the dairywoman continued. “You would’ve been trapped in the bitumen right from the start. You’d sink in it to your knees, then to your chest, with nothing below you to keep you upright. The flames would’ve lapped you up. You would’ve tried to breathe, but you’d only breathe in the gas. You wouldn’t have even had the time to open your mouth to call Rifka Marvrakis by her name.”
“Rita Mirvrakis,” I said.
“That’s what I mean,” she continued. “You would’ve just breathed in toxic gas. Then you’d be dead. Your body would’ve turned into something like liquid soot. You’d have been stuck in the tar headfirst. It would’ve swallowed you up. Your head would be a piece of black cheese. The flames would’ve lapped you up again. Then it would’ve all been over.”
“Don’t say that,” the dairywoman’s husband exhaled violently.
“Why?” she protested. “Aren’t I right?”
“You still shouldn’t say it. It’s scaring him.”
I heard a coat rustle. The dairywoman turned to face me.
“Are you scared, Özbeg?” she asked.
“No,” I lied.
Thus ended our conversation.
We didn’t even th
ink about getting up. We stayed there, neither moving nor speaking, for a length of time I can’t evaluate with any precision, at first several hours, but then, since the nights had no end and came with no change in temperature or light, in all likelihood a day or two, or a short week. I felt numb, but didn’t want to sleep. I thought of my past life, of the school hall, of Rita Mirvrakis, of my barrackmates, of the soldier Schumann, of Granny Holgolde and other adults. The images turned slowly inside my head. I listened to the sounds produced at my side by the bodies of the dairywoman and her husband, the labored breathing of the stranger camping with us here in the dark. There existed no other way to measure the time. The gurglings emitted by the dairywoman’s mouth, stomach, and intestines, the flatulences, the whistling emitted from the lungs of first one adult, then the other—these are what gave rhythm to the night. From time to time as well, the dairywoman would get up to relieve herself at a distance. For some reason, only she was concerned with this need. It was an expedition made without discretion, since she feared not being able to find her way back, and so never strayed far. We followed her movements with our ears, and I even had the impression that the two men, the husband and our unknown traveling companion, were holding their breath for the entire duration of the event. I was also curious about what was happening and, orienting my face toward where she was squatting, I tried to imagine precisely the different phases of the operation. Then she would come back to us and, often, her husband would take advantage of the occasion to decree a lunch break, as if all three of us had just carried out a considerable task, following which our bodies required nourishment posthaste. He would uncork the same bottle of milk and pass it around. Once more, I would swallow a mouthful or two of the pemmican-infused liquid in silence, with the feeling that I had thus prolonged my survival by at least one more night. Then everything from before would resume, the monotony of the hours, the monotony of the bodily murmurs, and the monotony of the absolute darkness.
Much later, an incident disrupted this routine.
While on one of her excremental adventures, the dairywoman happened to miscalculate her return trajectory and lost her way. I heard her stand up after urinating, to the right of where I was sitting, about fifteen meters or so away. She adjusted her clothes and began walking, her footsteps heavy, causing the ashy ground below her to squeak. At first I thought she had mixed up her directions, but we had fallen into the habit of remaining practically mute, exchanging no words at all with one another, so I felt it would be too bizarre for me to call out to her. I also thought she would quickly correct herself. But then, after passing by us at eye level, she veered off and, turning toward the stranger’s campsite, headed into the distance. She stopped, listened, took two steps in one direction, listened, shuffled her feet, then bravely took a dozen more steps, then stopped again. Everyone could perceive her hesitation, anguished and anguishing in its form. I was going to signal our presence to her with some kind of shout, but I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know her name and, as I was reflecting on what to yell, the dairywoman’s husband grabbed my arm and squeezed it lightly. I understood that he was forbidding me from making any kind of sound.
“She’s going to get lost,” I whispered.
“You can’t raise your voice,” he breathed. “Not for any reason.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We don’t shout here,” he said.
“But she won’t be able to get back,” I said.
At that moment, I heard the man who, up to then, had been resting nearby, get up and begin to walk. He was following her. Their steps now seemed synchronized. They couldn’t be more than twenty meters apart from each other.
“That man’s walking behind her,” I whispered.
I don’t know whether he was following or chasing her. But he was walking behind her and, according to the noises, it seemed that he was catching up to her little by little. Already the sounds had diminished, as the increasing distance made them less and less audible, but that’s how it seemed. I shivered. I thought of a falcon inexorably approaching its prey.
“He’s going to catch her,” I whispered.
“Yes,” the husband rasped. “He thinks she has the milk.”
I heard him grope around and then gasp. He was looking for his bag but couldn’t find it.
“Well,” he finally said. “She took the milk. I didn’t hear a thing. Neither of us did. She ran off with the milk.”
I didn’t really care, but I gasped slightly as well.
“She ran off with the milk and that guy,” the dairywoman’s husband said.
“Oh,” I commented.
For two or three minutes, the steps echoed in the crushing silence of the night, then they faded away completely and forever.
Several hours more went by. We were sitting side by side, the dairywoman’s husband and I, looking straight ahead, seeing nothing. He said nothing more about the milk his wife had pilfered. He was having enormous trouble breathing and seemed primarily occupied by his final moments.
“Meeting in basement thirty-six,” he suddenly roared.
Then I heard him collapse. He was no longer breathing.
I stayed there for a long time without reacting. Then I stretched out my hand to touch the corpse beside me. There was neither anything nor anyone.
I knew then that I was dreaming, and felt relieved.
I only have to wait for the end of the night, I thought. I’m going to wake up. I’ll open my eyes and once more see everything real around me. I only have to calmly wait for that reappearance, I thought. It’s going to come, sooner or later.
The ground’s warmth invited me to lay down, so I made myself comfortable, my arms crossed behind my head. I thought about everyone I was going to see again, my barrackmates, the guards, our aunts, Granny Holgolde, the soldiers in the hall, the invalids, the demobilizees, the insane.
And, of course, I thought about you, Rita Mirvrakis. I was going toward you. I knew there was nothing more to do but to wait.
I’m still waiting. But I was moving toward you and, in this moment still, I am moving toward you, Rita Mirvrakis, I am moving toward you.
Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Abyss
The rain had stopped a good twenty minutes ago, but the humidity was still dripping onto the leaves of banana trees, giant rhubarbs, monstrous philodendrons, and, when she stopped walking, Marta Ashkarot listened to the nocturnal silence and delighted in its music, at once monotonous and irregular. It was a very hot hour of the night. The forest was drowned in a torrid mist. Clouds floated at a low altitude, exaggerating the sense of heavy dampness and obscuring the starlight. The elephant advanced carefully on the deserted route, an old trail that had been largely swallowed up by the surrounding vegetation, but which also, at key points, had conserved its nature as a path created by professional clearers, and which had remained practically unchanged since the time when humans were the dominant species.
Marta Ashkarot walked slowly. Under more normal atmospheric conditions, she would have noticed residual glimmers even on dark, starless nights, but, this day, the blackness of the sky was joined by the opacity of the fog, and she could see nothing. This did not stop her from tranquilly pushing ahead, however. She didn’t pay too much mind to the mudholes, puddles, and bogs whose presence she would surmise just before sinking up to her knees. When a fallen log barred the path, she would detect the obstacle with her trunk and step over it. Sometimes she would wind up startling a family of tree frogs or a cane toad, and sometimes she would hear a large grass snake hastily slither away so as not to be trampled beneath her feet, but this was far from a common occurrence. The forest was devoid of beasts, not to mention hominids and monkeys, which she never came across anymore. In the semiaquatic world, like everywhere else, life had made itself scarce.
All around her, silence reigned.
Her eyes provided her with no information, and in order to guide herself she had to rely on her senses of smell and hearing. She progressed this way, ear
s deployed and trunk on alert, as she dexterously pranced about, often slowing to take in the night. She felt dripping sweat, mud, and plant sap all over her body. She didn’t forbid herself from sleeping, from time to time. She would ensconce herself within a thicket, preferably beneath a ceriman or a carambola, so she could chew on the tree’s fruits while she napped. That kept her well rested so she could continue forward on her blind march.
She had traveled a kilometer since her last break, when suddenly she felt a current of air. There was a breeze blowing against her forehead and feet. It produced a very faint whistle and lowered the temperature at least three or four degrees. The air was moving from right to left, and seemed to cross the path. Well, what’s this? she thought. Nothing could explain such a phenomenon. She quickly came to a halt in order to explore the darkness and find out more. She swung her trunk forward and around her flanks, sniffed intensely, and thought. She repeated these operations for an entire minute. All her observations concurred: there was no more vegetation ahead of her, no more trail, no more trees. There was only sky and fog. As strange as it seemed, the path abruptly stopped. It ended sharply at a ravine or abyss. Instead of falling into a pothole, or sinking into a quagmire or puddle, a normal occurrence in a forest, quite simply she was at the brink of a fatal plunge over an unknown precipice.
On contemplation, a shiver of both vertigo and fear ran through her. She couldn’t be certain of the depth of the chasm before her, but it was in fact a chasm. The coolness of the air and absence of any echo made clear that she was now in the presence of a prodigious void.
The elephant took a step back. She was not very delicate, in general, but in this case, she had measured the risk and faltered.
“Well,” she muttered. “One more step and you’d wind up in a thousand pieces at the bottom of a ravine, old Marta!”
Gosh, she thought. Almost three hundred meters, I bet. There I was on my merry way and now here I am. I would’ve gotten it good! I’d have been marmalade right about now! Paste!
Eleven Sooty Dreams Page 10
