“Good thing you stopped in time, old girl!” she whispered under her breath.
Her heart was pounding. A foul, animalistic sweat pooled beneath her breast, and, spurred by emotion, she hadn’t been able to avoid letting out a small burst of urine between her hind feet.
Well, that’s enough of that, she thought. I’ll wait for morning and won’t move an inch until then.
Her journey that night had come to an end.
You shouldn’t always rush blindly ahead, she thought to finish.
She sat down, her four feet, still trembling, planted on the ground. Then her enormous muscles relaxed, as the images that had provoked her surprise urination began to fade. One after the other, the dark visions of her death lost their dreadful realism. Her carcass broken on the pebbles and scree, her skull in a thousand pieces, her limbs twisted into intolerable positions. Little by little, she forgot her fear.
For four or five hours, there wasn’t a sound, save for the blowing of the wind that indicated the gap’s presence, and, from time to time, the ringing of drops on the leaves of giant fig trees and in the forest’s puddles.
The singing of the wind. The singing of water on leaves. The impenetrable dark.
The hours passed.
The shadows were covered in a padded blanket of fog.
Marta Ashkarot slept.
Then, although nothing interrupted the night, she heard footsteps. Footsteps! Coming down the path was a bipedal creature endowed with shoes, and thus related to hominids or something like them. The creature was walking, it seemed, at a brisk pace, without taking any particular precautions. It strode boldly through the darkness, indifferent to obstacles, piles of leaves, or sludgy mires. Its rhythm was steady, and Marta Ashkarot imagined it swinging its arms with enthusiasm, rather than holding them ahead in order to defend itself against any surprises in the night.
A soldier, the elephant thought. It might be an infantryman, and one who’s got some guts, too.
Two hundred meters separated them, then the distance quickly reduced, and the figure was right beside Marta Ashkarot. It advanced like a precise mechanism. It brushed past the elephant without seeing her and, without any aggression, continued on its way. It went straight toward the abyss. Marta Ashkarot stretched out her trunk and pulled it back at the last second. The stranger shouted in surprise and fear, a sharp, piercing shout. It seemed this intrepid walker was a woman.
“You were going to fall into the ravine,” the elephant said.
“What ravine?” the woman asked.
“The path stops up ahead,” the elephant explained. “There’s a hole. You can’t see a thing. It’d be better to wait for dawn and find a different route.”
She still had the end of her trunk solidly curled over the shoulder of her interlocutor and felt her begin to relax. At first, the woman hadn’t understood what was happening, and doubtlessly thought it was an attack, but, now, she was calming down.
“Let me go,” she said.
Marta Ashkarot withdrew her trunk back to her mouth and stepped a meter away.
The woman went to feel out the place where the path ended and whistled through her teeth.
“It seems deep,” she admitted.
“See?” the elephant said.
They agreed to wait for the morning together and took advantage of the situation to have a peaceful talk. The woman’s name was Irina Wu. She was fifty-seven years old. She wanted to join a revolutionary unit whose existence she had learned of in her youth, the Red Women’s Detachment.
“That’s just an old legend,” the elephant said. “No one’s been in this region for ages. No more revolutionaries, no more heroic resistance fighters, no more of anything.”
“Don’t be a defeatist,” Irina Wu said. “In the past, we used to put defeatists up against the wall.”
“There aren’t any walls anymore either,” the elephant remarked.
“If that’s the case, we’ll build them again,” Irina Wu promised.
She belonged to a species of impertinent optimists. Marta Ashkarot did not share her voluntaristic euphoria and inserted here and there several cooling objections, but she carefully considered her words. She envied this woman’s capacity for rejecting catastrophe, for downplaying all its aspects, and for considering a negative tone to be tantamount to betraying the Party, to denying the Party’s traditions and theorists, and especially to shoving aside the thousands of humans who had once placed their hope in egalitarianism. That there were no more survivors to contemplate the disaster did not deflate Irina Wu’s spirit, and, as the elephant did not hold to dealing with truisms and arguments like an old sectarian, she didn’t make any effort to contradict her. The two conversed amicably, without polemicizing, as comrades. Thus they reached morning.
The fog cleared with the night, and when the light of dawn finally broke, both Irina Wu and Marta Ashkarot crept forward to where the path disappeared, in order to get a look at their surroundings.
It was a vision so astounding, so beautiful, that the two let a long—a very long—moment go by without uttering a word. It was as though they were completely paralyzed.
They were at the edge of a spectacular crevice, a geological accident that must have affected the entire continental shelf and was responsible for the appearance of an immense cliff. The earth had collapsed along an extraordinarily straight and brutal line, which now stretched without interruption from east to west, from mist to mist, dividing the earth into two horizontal worlds, separated and mirrored, into two lands covered in dense and fluffy vegetation, in emerald green, soft green, old green, foggy green, rubber plant green, banana tree green, from which here and there emerged impossibly tall, vine-covered trees with neither name nor form, which in a distant time or place would have played host to hordes of chattering monkeys. The cliff was about eighty meters tall and quite steep. With the right equipment, alpinists may have been able to risk a descent. But, for ordinary travelers, it offered no possibility of crossing. You would have to either turn around, or walk alongside the void for days, perhaps weeks, searching for a place less abrupt.
“It’s like the waterfalls of the Zambezi, but without any water,” Marta Ashkarot observed.
“You’ve been to the Zambezi?” Irina Wu asked in amazement.
“No,” the elephant said. “But I’ve heard of it.”
The two were filled with emotion in the face of this gigantic rift in the earth, this forest extending over two levels, and which, now that it was lit by the light of the heavy, equatorial, sunless sky, was witness to the immensity of the world, its admirable serenity.
Irina Wu was dressed like anyone who desired to join a red women’s detachment: an infantry outfit made of long-lasting hessian, though worn thin from numerous washings and years of wandering, pants that didn’t cling to the legs, solid espadrilles, a cap adorned with a red star. She wore across her stomach a small bag containing a bit of cloth, basic toiletries, a thermos, and survival gear. She was crouching at the edge of the precipice.
“Be careful not to fall, dear,” the elephant said with concern.
Irina Wu made a vague gesture. She seemed to be struggling with emotion more than vertigo, and didn’t wish to flaunt these sentiments. Marta Ashkarot noticed the tears in her eyes.
They remained for another hour side by side, facing the void, facing the sky and the green world, unmoving and beyond compare.
“It’s magnificent,” Irina Wu finally said.
“Yes,” Marta Ashkarot agreed. “It’s magnificent.”
Irina Wu stretched her hand downward and toward the horizon.
“We’re in a place with practically infinite resources,” she said. “There’s all the water and wood we could want. The climate is ideal. We can rebuild everything, recreate cities, industrialize.”
“Bah,” the elephant objected.
“We’ll divide production between all the workers. We’ll establish a classless society.”
“Bah,” the elephant obj
ected once more. “We’d need at least a few more people for that.”
Irina Wu nodded her head.
“Well, I know that’s a problem,” Irina Wu admitted. “I don’t have my head buried in the sand. You’re right. For this to really take flight, we’d need at least a few more.”
My Parents
1.
For a wide decade of the last century, Granny Holgolde was the director of a service that managed the reinsertion of assassins of important enemies and mercenaries, and, as a middle manager, contributed generously to the persistence of the underground vanguard, to the clandestine progression of revolutionary currents, and to the promise that one day, at the global level, the mutinies would begin anew. Those under Granny Holgolde’s protection escaped the police for good. They became nameless and insignificant, working modest and diverse jobs, sometimes as employees in inconsequential administrations, sometimes in food companies, or otherwise as public writers on the outskirts of the camps, but sometimes they were given missions as well, and would then once more lend a hand to lost clandestines or shadowy militants, or assist asylum escapees, to outcasts like us, tempted by an immediate and radical communism, at odds with the mechanisms of public morality.
My father had benefited from Granny Holgolde’s special aid, and, the year he met my mother, he was managing a tiny workshop that repaired household objects such as hairdryers, radiocassettes, and bicycles. The workshop had an agreement with a neighboring factory, which provided it with brass wire, threaded rods, and metal scraps that my father worked and transformed into spare parts.
One day, my mother, who was working as a sweeper in the mechanics’ workshops, was tasked with transporting a crate from one place to another.
She had placed the crate on her delivery tricycle’s trailer, and, while pedaling dreamily along the Kanal, already in sight of the warehouse where my father was stationed, she was attacked by Werschwell Fraction activists. Since she hadn’t turned around in time and could no longer flee, my mother defended herself. My grandmothers had taught her how to fight. However, she was no match against two quadragenarians well-trained in genetic cleansing and humanitarian operations in the ghettos. She had first tried to dissuade them from touching her, opposing their vulgar remarks with a disquieting indifference, but this kind of subtlety almost never works on brutish types, and, when physical confrontation became inevitable, she wounded the skinnier of the two with a blade to the face. The man was bleeding and shouting as if she had slit his throat when his companion, at first stunned by this Ybür woman facing them down, started to move toward her. The blood and pain had heightened their fury. My mother then knew that all was lost.
It was here that my father intervened. In the time before he had become Granny Holgolde’s protégé, he too had learned how to fight, but from instructors who were not stage fighters, and whose techniques all had as their objective the death of one’s adversary. He ran toward the Kanal and, in less than half a minute, caught up with the trio, obviously in order to stand up for the woman in danger. He was a swift and efficient man. First he broke the skinny one’s spinal column with a blow to the neck. Then he jabbed an enormous spike twice into the other one’s temple. Versions vary with the telling, and sometimes it’s a carpenter’s nail, while other times a screwdriver. Regardless, he jabbed the object into the other one’s temple.
It was just after, next to these bodies, surrounded by heaps of scrap metal, that my mother and father met.
2.
My mother was pedaling along the Kanal, towing behind her a crate haphazardly filled with iron scraps, copper tubes, threaded rods, wingnuts, and all sorts of electrical castoffs. She had been entrusted with these things at the factory. The courier who was ordinarily in charge of this miserable route was absent, and, since she had finished her cleaning duties, she had been asked to take his place. She was to bring her cargo to a maker who worked in a small repair shop, where these bits of garbage would become useful tools, living pieces, thanks to which broken machines would work once more. I believe the crate was heavy, and that my mother, on her tricycle, had to make an effort to keep going, weaving, perhaps, across the Kanal’s deserted quay.
The weather was a little cold, as this was in October. The cloudy, poorly lit sky loomed over the landscape. Camp 801 in this place was composed mainly of abandoned construction sites and houses whose windows were sealed with bricks or planks, or which were demolished. Some were closed off with barbed wire. From the corner of her eye, beyond the railing, my mother caught the image of stagnant, dark green waters, dirtied here and there by a gray film of pollution. On her right, apart from the crumbling houses, she passed by fences on which had been pasted propaganda posters, with portraits of leaders or deputies, which she ignored, which deserved nothing but sputum, and to which she didn’t spare the slightest thought. Protesters had scratched injurious comments over them. The ink on the aging paper had faded. The commenters must have been killed, maimed, or sent to solitary confinement a long time ago.
My mother attempted to decipher the worn, hastily scrawled phrases, made under the influence of powerless indignation and fear. She meditated on what she herself would have written. In any case, her attention was distracted, and she was slow to notice the two men who seemed to be in the middle of a conversation on the quay, in front of a gray, dead house that looked to have once been home to a restaurant or bar. They were standing next to a door that was vaguely condemned by a square of sheet metal. She wondered who they were waiting for. She continued pedaling in their direction. They were planted there like dumb statues, staring at that decrepit restaurant. Perhaps they had wanted to go inside, warm up, and drink a beer. Or perhaps this place had been chosen by them as a meeting point for another person who hadn’t arrived yet. Or perhaps they were waiting for someone to come out of the abandoned building and join them. They were standing there and they were smoking.
Then, though it was too late for her to turn back, she saw that they were wearing Werschwell Fraction armbands. Two short-haired quadragenarians in brown leather jackets, surrounded by an aura of malevolence. She was already in the pogromists’ twisted sight. A stocky boar and his associate, who was an entire head taller. One heavy brute with a dauntless appearance, and one irritable. Two dangerous animals.
They suddenly came to life, letting out one last breath and throwing their still-lit cigarettes onto the ground.
It wasn’t my mother in particular that they were waiting for, but, since she was there, they decided to give her what she had coming. My mother was an Ybür, and this was obvious; my mother was a worker, and thus potentially sympathetic to egalitarians and subversives, and this was obvious.
The two Werschwell Fraction soldiers moved almost lethargically as they placed themselves in the middle of the path. My mother stopped. The taller and skinnier of the two men walked toward my mother and grabbed her tricycle’s handlebars.
The landscape was gray and unwelcoming. At the end of the quay, the Kanal sunk beneath a vault, then curved to the west. The street where my father worked began there, less than a hundred meters away. The entire area looked uninhabited. The repair shop was open, and my mother had the impression that someone there was stooped over a workbench, but everywhere else, there was nothing and no one.
There was nothing and no one, and the image suddenly seemed frozen, hopeless, consisting of only this Ybür woman and the two armband-wearing quadragenarians facing her, in the morning’s silent monotones, beside the dirty green water of the Kanal.
3.
My father was in the middle of dismantling a refrigerator motor when he saw, a hundred meters away from his workshop, on the Kanal quay, something resembling a silent quarrel. Two brutes were bothering a young woman as she stared them down.
My father abandoned his workbench, walked to the doorway of his miniscule shop, and squinted. Although he didn’t wear glasses yet, his vision back then was already deficient. However, he could see enough to notice around the men’s arms th
e ribbon of crimson, burgundy, and purple with which the defenders of order adorned their flags and liturgical pieces. He then grabbed a screwdriver and ran toward the small gathering.
The two men hadn’t seen him approach and, once he was close to them, he realized they were in a state of growling, quasi-animal rage. At the very start of the hostilities, the young woman had been able to turn back to the trailer and pick up a metal triangle from the crate. She had used it as a razor to slash the tall skinny one’s face, the closer of her two aggressors. She was right to do such, she had no other choice, and her hand hadn’t trembled. Any one of us would have done the same thing. But the result of this action was to drag her adversaries into a violence certainly less hesitant than when they had merely blocked her way. The one with the body of a wrestler had walked up to her, disarmed her with a smack, then pulled her from the bike on which she had been keeping her balance, and, in the same moment, threw her onto the ground to give her a thrashing. His skinnier companion was shouting spasmodic and whining protests. He was kept bringing his hands to the wound and then hysterically examining the blood. My father felt something resonate between them that was difficult to describe, but which quickly grew and was related to a desire for destruction, for murder, for breaking a body. They had just wanted to scare an Ybür, to humiliate and doubtlessly molest one, but, now, everything indicated that they were going to turn their victim into a mass of inert, dismantled meat, with neither consciousness nor life.
My father had been socially reinserted a year ago, setting aside, at Granny Holgolde’s advice, all politico-military activity, but this retirement weighed on him. I suppose that after having spent a period of his existence eliminating individuals directly participating in human suffering, it is difficult to remain passive in a society where the Werschwell Fraction calls the shots.
The two men hadn’t noticed my father, or they took him for a negligible witness they could always deal with later. The wrestler had pushed my mother against one of the trailer’s wheels and was kicking her in the stomach, head, and arms. My mother was squirming, crouched in an unfavorable position that didn’t allow her to stretch out her right leg and reach her assailant’s testicles. The nervous wounded man had finally shut up, and, his cheeks glistening, he was coming around the trailer to seize my mother by the shoulder, or to grab her hair or throat.
Eleven Sooty Dreams Page 11