Eleven Sooty Dreams

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by Manuela Draeger


  The mechanism for her survival had been first set in motion within a dream, she remembered, but that explained nothing, since, ever since that time, she hadn’t resided in any oneiric world at all. She had noted no difference in her existence from before. Something had simply changed for her in the succession of physiological periods and, in brief, she never reached old age. Whenever decline reared its head, she would be taken by an irrepressible will to action. All the cells in her body would whisper to her that the time had come to move on. And then she would leave her home, travel down a dark alley when she was in an urban environment, or through a thicket of tall grass if in the countryside, and she would trot straight ahead, guided more by instinct than rational calculations, until she pushed her way into a newfound home. That’s how it went. The installation within four walls took some time to materialize, the walk had its crepuscular and arduous parts, but, in most cases, it took no longer than forty-nine days.

  Often, the place where Marta Ashkarot was obliged to start her existence anew differed little from the one she had just left behind. But it also happened to entail a radical change in scenery, social circle, and culture. So Marta Ashkarot adapted, all while making sure to keep her biological, ideological, and intellectual markers intact. When the windows of her new home opened onto a world governed by counterrevolution, extermination, or religious wars, she joined resistance organizations—if they still existed—and waited for what was to come. Neither stoically, nor heroically, nor miserably, she waited for what was to come. And it always came, no matter what. It was just a matter of preparing herself and knowing how to react at just the right moment.

  Sometimes, Marta Ashkarot’s journey through one existence would not last long. She would have just enough time to enter a new place and get her bearings when suddenly she’d find herself sliding down a new corridor to leave once more. These short experiences could generally be explained by the fact that she had burst forth into one region or another on the globe where the genocidal atmosphere was unbreathable. In places like those, Marta Ashkarot figured among the potential victims and, after a very brief period, she would be caught by the killers. But there were also chains of circumstances that could not be linked to the ethno-political abominations of hominids, and which were simply unlucky. For example, she might be confronted with unforeseen climatic catastrophes or epidemics. She had thus traversed the multiplication of the seas of bitumen, the bird flu pandemic, and even a gas explosion at 9 Brim Akaouliev Street, where she was living in the ground-floor apartment as a shaman. She always referred to her march into a new existence as a move—an adequate term, in one sense, since it certainly consisted of translating from one home to another, but also, in another sense, an inadequate term, for she passed from one place to another without bringing along any bags or personal effects, completely nude.

  And, this time, the journey was undertaken with complication and slowness, even though, for the last step, she only had to shove through a tiny brick partition. The march that had preceded this liberatory moment had been long and tedious. She had met with falls, darkness, days of extreme solitude inside extremely dirty labyrinths. For weeks, without food or water or any way to counter the pressure of the intense blackness on her body and mind, Marta Ashkarot had progressed from cellar to cellar, from tunnel to tunnel. The interminable process had been nothing but a series of obstacles. At every instant she had to knock down walls by pressing down on them with all her weight. She ultimately imagined that she was moving through an old prison of phenomenally vast dimensions, or an abandoned military factory, or a monastery whose cells were all firmly shut. She stuck to the north-north-eastward course she had chosen at the start, without thinking about it too much, and which she had maintained despite the difficulties, so as not to get turned around. She would break her way into a new room, wait for the suffocating dance of dust to end, then almost immediately begin to feel around for the next demolition.

  Seven long, monotonous weeks were thus spent smashing piles of cinderblocks, splitting plywood, or exploding brick barriers. The situation had worsened in the final fifteen days, as there had been a bloom of miasmatic plagues. The air had become nothing but a decoction of pathogenic horrors. Marta Ashkarot’s lungs refused to absorb such a toxic mixture, and the elephant finished her dark trek in apnea.

  As she destroyed the final wall, Marta Ashkarot still had no idea that she was reaching the end of her grueling journey. The bricks scattered and she was suddenly bathed in light. Real air filled her mouth, reached her trachea, and beat a path to her lungs. Just like in the jungle and in her dreams, she lifted her trunk, held it between the bumps on her head, and began to trumpet. An intense satisfaction enveloped her. She now understood that her move was over. She opened her eyes wide.

  She opened her eyes wide. Then she stepped over the rubble and entered her new home.

  She wasn’t alone. Oh I see, she thought, this place is already occupied.

  She was in a large meeting room, with a long table in its center that resembled those imposing pieces of furniture in public libraries where each seat is marked by a number and an individual lamp. There were no numbers here, but, as outside it was already night, the lamps illuminated from below twenty or so people sitting with sheets of paper and pencils. Everyone had the appearance and clothes of functionaries, or perhaps worker and peasant syndicalists. Men, women. Many of them turned to look at Marta Ashkarot.

  “We were waiting for you to come back,” one of them said.

  Marta Ashkarot glanced over her shoulder. Contrary to what was still in her immediate memory, the walls hadn’t suffered from her entrance into the room. No heap of debris exhaled dust behind her. In reality, the second before, she had just come through a quite ordinary door. A windowed door. She had come through it without breaking anything and she had calmly closed it behind her. On the glass was attached a sign extolling the virtues of the union between proletarians, soldiers, and farmers, and, just above that, screwed into the wood, there was an enameled metal plaque indicating that on the other side were the women’s restrooms.

  Adapt, Marta Ashkarot thought.

  Above all, don’t lose your cool. Adapt and integrate.

  She faced the assembly and quickly analyzed the group. Those present hadn’t dressed in finery for the meeting, but they had clearly made an effort not to come in work clothes or overalls. Several of them were resting their strong laborer’s hands on the table, on the duplicated sheets of paper detailing the day’s agenda, and which were all still free of any sort of scribble.

  Marta Ashkarot took note of these hands, the damaged nails and fingers highlighted by the individual lamps, then she cast her gaze around the vast room, with its excess chairs stacked in one corner, its large windows that opened onto a night poorly combated by urban illumination, its metal cabinets, its decorations consisting mainly of tourist advertisements and political posters. Then she sat down. There was a free chair to the right of the meeting’s president.

  “So,” he said softly, “when you go to the bathroom, you take your time.”

  “Was there a problem?” the woman sitting next to her asked.

  “There wasn’t any paper,” Marta Ashkarot explained. “I had to use the agenda.”

  “To clean yourself?”

  “Yes, of course. To clean myself.”

  The four or five people who had heard Marta Ashkarot’s explanation fidgeted and grimaced. They expressed their indignation by widening their eyes, but it was difficult to tell whether this indignation was pretend or real. After this demonstration of shock—the recipients of which being both Marta Ashkarot and the general assembly—they pivoted toward the president of the meeting. They were waiting for a reaction on his part. In the past, wiping oneself with an official document guaranteed a trip to the reeducation camp, or, in certain years, the platoon. Times had changed, but still.

  “Well what,” Marta Ashkarot continued. “It wasn’t a formal communication from the Central Committee. It wa
s nothing. Just some local matters. The schedule for the next meeting, repairing public enclosures, donations for the elderly.”

  The president cleared his throat, but said nothing. The appropriate words did not come to his lips.

  “You could have used something else,” the woman sitting next to Marta Ashkarot muttered.

  “What, something else?” the elephant protested. “No, I couldn’t have. And besides, times have changed.”

  There was a silence. She noticed that the entire room avoided meeting her gaze. Her neighbor had reddened and was preoccupying herself with a theatrical examination of the document in front of her. The president’s face was stony. He cleared his throat once again.

  Perhaps I’ve made a mistake in my assessment, Marta Ashkarot thought. This is going to be difficult to fix.

  Now, opposite her, she noticed a delegate who was examining her with a grimace of disgust, the kind reserved for a traitor or an enemy. He was about to intervene.

  Perhaps times haven’t changed much, after all.

  Liars’ Bridge

  When she went to fetch water, Maryama Adougaï had to pass through Alley Number Eleven, cross over the old train track, and head down Leel Fourmanova Street. She then came once again to the train track, which she crossed anew, but this time by passing below, as she had to set foot inside a small, lightless tunnel with grimy walls, neither very tall nor very wide. Since time immemorial, this place has been called Liars’ Bridge. On the other side, the city continued, but an immediate barrier blocked the way. You’d come out of the tunnel and find yourself in a quite vast square, which functioned as a sort of cul-de-sac. All the exits were closed off by spiked blockades and barbed wire, stretched from one house to the next, up to the second and sometimes even third floor, or knotted into tangles to forbid access to the portion of train track looming over the scenery. Beyond these titanic spiderwebs stretched Bloc 709: an urban sector emptied of its inhabitants, its streets full of unsightly grasses, the smell of decay, bricked-up windows, façades covered in black moss, crumbling barracks. The square, by contrast, remained a lively place. In its center stood a deserted washhouse, where we went to get water. From one of its walls jutted three high-flow spigots. They were watched over by civil defense soldiers whom camp authorities had entrusted with minor order-keeping tasks. Since there was no schedule for using the washhouse, many of us preferred to go at night, meaning that at even three or four in the morning you could hear the sound of tanks being filled, the knocking of containers on the drain grate or the furrow’s cement side, or the voices of soldiers attempting to converse with water carriers.

  Liars’ Bridge had marked our childhoods in several ways, and when I say our childhoods I obviously mean Maryama Adougaï’s as well. For some of us, she was our cousin, and for others, our little sister. I remember, for example, the expeditions for water we undertook in the company of the enormous Aunt Boyol, who at the time, in the absence of our parents, who had left to fight or die elsewhere, had taken us under her wing. Officially, if the term could have any meaning in the Negrini Bloc, Aunt Boyol was our adoptive mother.

  Aunt Boyol didn’t allow us to treat passing under the bridge like any ordinary step on the road to the washhouse. She would assemble us before the dark opening and, to start, she would make us quiet down. We would stop our bickering and obediently park ourselves in front of her, like students with a schoolteacher. Once she had made sure that we were willing to listen to her, she would begin to tell us terrible things. We had already heard the story many times, but we always listened to it with a shiver of discovery. The passage beneath Liars’ Bridge, she explained, was a test in which our fates hung in the balance. We could very easily lose our lives within: liars risked losing their heads halfway through.

  Especially lying children, she’d clarify.

  Aunt Boyol didn’t ask us about any recent lies we might have been guilty of. She was content just to give us warning. She claimed that she had witnessed many times in the past the fatal punishment of boys and girls who had lied. They started to walk under the bridge like normal, when, suddenly, their head would go flying. They’d stagger back and forth, holding out their arms like the blind, swinging around wildly, then silently collapsed. That’s how it happened, she continued, opening her eyes wide and miming the horrible scene.

  Like many adults at the time, Aunt Boyol didn’t resort to euphemisms, and so nothing softened the horror of her descriptions. We were thus entitled to the heads bouncing and rolling over the dirty ground, the bulging eyes whose lids would never close again, the gushing of blood from the space between shoulders. And, for good measure, the dead-meat sound of the body when it hit the ground. This was the expression she generally used when she wanted to impress us even more than usual. The dead-meat sound. Such tales put us in a state of intense dread, and through the years it produced an effect on our behavior. Since then, we’ve thought twice before lying, to be sure. But, above all, we’d learned to trick our minds into not remembering our lies. We had to wash out every inner stain and rebuild this falsely clean terrain with sincerity and innocence. Thanks to our mental gymnastics, the difficult truths and untruths that accompanied them were all blown away. This sort of powerful self-defense technique may have been exactly what Aunt Boyol was trying to teach us.

  Once Aunt Boyol had finished her sermon, she’d make a gesture that meant the time for us to cross the threshold had come.

  We would gather speed, suppress the butterflies in our stomachs, and dash, shouting, into the tunnel. It was only about fifteen meters long, but to us it seemed endless and infinitely dark. We were sure we were being chased by a flying meat cleaver, and we even sometimes very distinctly felt it graze the backs of our necks. I remember putting my hands behind my neck so the blade wouldn’t nick my skin. Maryama Adougaï, who was five or six years old then, would let out ear-piercing shrieks that reverberated and magnified beneath the black vault. All around us, the walls stunk of the dampness, saltpeter, and rust of public urinals. Coming out the other side and touching the washhouse was our deliverance. For somewhat unclear reasons, which we never explored in depth, going back through the passage the other way presented no danger whatsoever, regardless of one’s hypocritical fabulations, false declarations, or stories.

  But Liars’ Bridge wasn’t just a lie detector or revealer of childish guilt. It was also the place where we witnessed our first deaths. In all likelihood the authorities chose the washhouse as a prime location for delivering their vision of the world and their messages because the need for water meant the people of the Negrini Bloc couldn’t avoid going there. For example, when a new campaign for literacy, humanist hygiene, or moral reimplantation arose, we would often see the initial effects near the public spigots. The messages delivered by the authorities at those moments were easy to understand. They were composed in a universal language and practically always had the same content: magnanimity and even laxity toward those who complied, freedom of speech for those who followed the movement, extreme severity toward those who opposed the current campaign or persisted in advocating violent action and the murder of public officials.

  Our first contact with corpses had shaken us, but, after a few difficult nights, the awfulness of our nightmares diminished, probably because those executed had lived in a barracks far from our own and weren’t a part of our daily lives. We knew their names: Galbour Damdal and Drok Bamarbak. They had refused to be vaccinated, refused to go to the reeducation center, refused to salute the flag, and, on top of all that, they beat to death the humanitarian in charge of their case with a chair. Galbour Damdal’s body was hung from the vault of Liars’ Bridge, while Drok Bamarbak’s was thrown onto the hedge of barbed wire that surrounded Bloc 709. The adults who came to fill their jerricans were obviously not allowed to take them down, and they gazed at the bodies while exhaling an endless series of sighs. That day, Aunt Boyol didn’t give us a speech in front of the entrance to the tunnel, but, for my little sister Maryama Adougaï and m
yself, the fear of feeling a blade slice our necks was joined by the fear of our shoulders suddenly being touched by Galbour Damdal’s cadaver, with its adult weight, its dampness, and its dead-meat sound.

  Fifteen years later, and the camp authorities haven’t changed at all, nor has Liars’ Bridge and its urine-soaked stench, nor the organization of our daily existence, nor the journey for water, nor our collective ill will toward international charity programs, nor the persistence among the majority of us of ideologies glorifying armed vengeance and reprisals against those responsible for suffering. Aunt Boyol was still alive, as well. She had doubled in size, and, cloistered in her room, unable to move, was still growing. It seemed that she had said farewell to death and that her body had reacted to the prospect of life without end by swelling prodigiously. Interested in her case, a veterinary aid organization transferred her to a special laboratory, on the other side of the city, where we visited her once a month. She no longer recognized us. She spent her days humming old anarchist songs or muttering egalitarian sutras that explained how to rebuild the world upon new bases, starting with the absolute and definitive destruction of everything. It was enough to bring an ear to her mouth to understand that she had not lost her mind and that her program, though strongly colored by maximalism, had set quite reasonable limits for itself. Aunt Boyol wasn’t deranged, but had simply, in the antiseptic chamber where she was held prisoner, withdrawn into herself, and was now waiting.

 

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