Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  My father caught up with this second animal at the moment when he was leaning over my mother and, using the handle of his screwdriver, struck him as hard as he could. Breaking a man’s neck in one fell swoop demands an intricate understanding of the human skeleton, married to a perfect mastery of martial techniques. My father possessed this understanding, he had this mastery. The man collapsed onto the tricycle without making a sound, though his fall was noisy and chaotic, accompanied by the flipping of the trailer and squealing of all the metal joints. Even a scrapped doorbell rang during the brief flurry. The larger man paused his beating and turned toward my father, but, before he realized what was happening, my father flipped his screwdriver around and stabbed him in the temple once, then twice, with the tip.

  The man took a step forward, as if he wished to keep fighting, or at the very least express a heinous reproach, but then he stood still, his arms hanging alongside his body. He no longer moved. Then his legs faltered, his torso sagged, and he fell headfirst onto the oily cement that covered the pavement.

  With that, the violence came to an end.

  For about twenty seconds, everything was calm. If anyone was still breathing, it could no longer be heard. Neither my father nor my mother could hear the sounds of their bodies.

  Then my mother decided that she had remained lying down long enough.

  Now, she was getting up.

  She dusted off her pants, wiped away the drops of blood splattered on her cheeks, and massaged her aching legs. She still had not truly met my father’s gaze.

  Now, they began to perceive the sounds of the surrounding world.

  There they were, the two of them, breathing heavily, standing over their enemies, who had already breathed their last. And still they hesitated to look each other in the eye.

  4.

  My father and mother wordlessly dragged the bodies of the two Werschwell Fraction soldiers over to the wrought-iron railing that bordered the Kanal. There was no great distance to cross, but both of them were shaken by what had just happened and the emotion drained them of some of their strength. I think they still hadn’t exchanged a single word at this point. They took the corpses from the scene of the fight, deciding it best not to leave them in plain sight, next to the tricycle and the cart. They started with the one who had been disfigured with the blade of scrap. They laid him along the railing, taking care to orient his punctured face toward the Kanal, then, without pausing, they went back for the one who looked like a wrestler and who had pummeled my mother with his feet. My mother was in pain, and she wheezed through her teeth. My father’s forehead and cheeks were dripping with sweat. They dragged the heavy cadaver by its arms. This one’s eyes weren’t closed and its head bobbed, giving it an unfriendly and disapproving appearance. They placed it next to its comrade. They waited several seconds for their heartbeats to calm, and, since nothing within them would calm, they continued their macabre task. They sat the two corpses up, then lifted them and tipped them, one after the other, over the railing.

  No one witnessed their struggle. The neighborhood was deserted.

  The corpses quickly rolled down the concrete embankment. The slope was steep and the dead men looked like they were in a hurry to reach the Kanal. The wrestler touched the water and slid in, going under without a second thought, but the other cadaver stopped rolling and lolled in a hideous pose, his legs submerged in the basin, his arms raised, his trunk out of the water, as if he wished to embrace the dry world one last time before his disappearance. Then he seemed to refuse to sink, and to the contrary behaved like a drowning victim pulling himself out of the Kanal, taking a moment to rest before resuming his normal activities on solid ground. His head and spinal column formed an unacceptable angle. His slashed face had left a mark on the cement and continued to leak blood.

  My father and mother leaned on the guardrail, but they didn’t linger to watch this spectacle. As soon as the larger man’s body sunk beneath the surface, they turned around and slowly returned to the tricycle and its trailer.

  In that moment, my mother felt her legs give out beneath her. She could no longer keep her disgust over what had happened or her fear hidden. She didn’t cry, but her breathing suddenly lost its regularity. Rather than holding this woman against himself to reassure her and telling her, for example, that it was all over and everything would be fine, my father turned her around gently. He picked up from her back the cardboard rectangle that the law required her to wear whenever she went out in the streets, and removed it.

  This woman is still alive, it read. Isn’t there something abnormal about this?

  Once he had sent the required announcement flying toward the Kanal, my mother regained her cool. She was proud, strong-willed, and couldn’t stand her rescuer taking her for a weakling. She in turn detached the announcement suspended between my father’s shoulders.

  If this man is not yet drowning in a pool of his own blood, it read, an anomaly has occurred. Whoever is reading this, make things right.

  Then, they stood there for a moment longer, staring at each other.

  Very high up in the sky, just beneath the oppressive clouds, seagulls were flying; if they were making any noise, no one could hear them. Then, behind the window of the old restaurant, which at first appeared abandoned but, in reality, a family of refugees had taken shelter in, a baby began to cry.

  That’s when my parents decided to get married.

  Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Arsenal

  The elephant woke, peeled open her beautiful brown eyes, tiny as they were compared to the rest of her body, and observed the space around her. She hadn’t had the chance to sleep for quite a long time, and she had almost forgotten what it felt like to emerge back into consciousness after a time of absence. Seven weeks earlier, she had left her last home, and, since then, she had done nothing but walk interminably. And this particular journey seemed more boring and exhausting than the previous ones. Her memory continuously harried her with her growing fatigue, the dreadful monotony of the route, the shadows rubbing against her powerful bare shoulders and stomach. Like always when one undertakes a long voyage into inexistence after one’s own death, she had been assaulted by terrible visions. But she had especially suffered from a tenacious insomnia, she hadn’t closed her eyes for a second, and, by consequence, she had at no moment known the ineffable pleasure of waking. Now, she was delighting in her return to the world of the senses without realizing the fading of her own consciousness. Well now, she first thought, just when did you sit down, old Marta? Have you lost your head or what? She tried to recall the events that had comprised the seventh week of her path through the land of the neither-living-nor-dead, but nothing in particular came to mind. She wasn’t able to conjure up any significant memories. So she focused on the present, on that which was unfolding in the present, both within and around herself. She had reached the black space’s exit, she had just crossed the last meters separating her from her new home. Soon she would burst forth into a new, completely unknown world where fate had long reserved a space for her among the adults. There. It was time. She was receiving initial impressions from the outer world that would from now on be her own. At the same time, she was taking possession of her new body.

  But this moment of waking did not come with an ineffable pleasure, not at all.

  Her retinas captured an initial image, and, about ten seconds later, the message that thundered in her brain warned of danger, immediate and mortal danger. She was running. The outside world was an abomination, and her body, to escape it, was struggling and plunging blindly into the night.

  To make matters worse, this time around Marta Ashkarot had inherited a human skin, an experience she had lived through more than once already, which she had never enjoyed and which she enjoyed even less at the present moment. She was now barely a meter seventy in height, with a disheveled mane of black hair and the pitiful face of a panic-stricken woman in her thirties. She was standing unsteadily on two legs, she had no trunk, and her ears
were dwarfish stubs that couldn’t even move on their own. She had no muscles worthy of the name, and she ran poorly, not to mention the additional discomfort coming from her chest with every step she took. And her nostrils detected the odor of fear in her armpits, her abdomen, and over the rest of the clothed or naked parts of her body. She found herself isolated and jostled among a small group of people, humans as well, or at least appearing as such, who were zigzagging into the flames, pushed forward by the noises and shouts of the pogrom. She had no idea what awaited her in the coming minutes. The street was a battlefield marked by the sound of shattering windows, the whistle of stabbing knives, the muffled hammering of clubs on hands, legs, temples. An unbelievable rumbling of hatred whirled around her like the roar of a great waterfall.

  The extermination had started again.

  The massacres were continuing once more.

  Marta Ashkarot was fleeing along a sloped street between two rows of vandalized houses. She had finally awakened, but her memories of her bleak journey through the Bardo were already lost in the smoke. Everything connecting her to previous experiences and adventures had dissipated from her mind. Something subsisted, it’s true, a feeling of avidity and crisis that ordered her to quickly understand the world in which she was now going to carry out a portion of her existence. There was no respite for her to discover her new home at her own pace and build a unique universe of references. She screamed. The empty space in her head was immediately filled with horror, with images of meaningless violence and insanity and her lack of a future. She was running with the others on a sloped street, with other Ybürs, with, on her left and right, burning houses, fallen Ybürs who were still crawling as they burned, Ybürs lying in the gutter who were no longer crawling, no longer moving, as they burned. The sky was black, the electricity had been cut, the only light came from burning structures and living torches. The light was red, the light crackled and twisted over clothing and flesh, or vehicles ablaze, or smoking apartment windows. The light was alive and fickle, and made frightening leaps in intensity, sometimes disappearing completely, as if to express its disgust with the scene and its inhabitants. Then it was reborn, orange and bloodstained, and after a few terrifying seconds of blind running, it allowed once more for trotting or galloping while avoiding obstacles and, more importantly, soldiers from the Werschwell Fraction, allied with the Zaasch Group’s militiamen, gesticulating as they laughed wildly, drunk on crime, gross superiority, and alcohol.

  Next to Marta Ashkarot was a disheveled young woman who occasionally would draw away to circumvent a flaming car or an Ybür being beaten by murderers, or to avoid slipping on shards of glass in the middle of the street. The elephant could sense this woman even when she didn’t see her, and, although she did not recall having any sort of friendly or even neighborly relationship, she behaved as if the two had been close for quite a long time and as if, in the current catastrophe, they shared a bond of solidarity. Whenever the woman fell behind, Marta Ashkarot would slow a little to let her catch up.

  Both of them were out of breath.

  They soon arrived at a large square, a place where the pogrom had not yet reached the height of its furor. Marta Ashkarot crossed the dark space, which seemed nearly silent after the din she had just left. A few forms moved in the shadows, criminals were at work here too, but they were fewer in number than elsewhere. She looped back around to avoid a quartet of soldiers attacking an indistinct mass. Still followed by the disheveled woman, she dove into an alleyway that appeared to be completely deserted. There was a light glowing on a storefront, the power was still on in this sector. Without slowing, they reached the entrance to a small apartment building. They pushed open the door and flattened themselves against the wall. Out of clumsiness, while searching for something with her hand, Marta Ashkarot pressed a button, and the automatic lights switched on. The corridor was cluttered with a jumble of gas meters and mailboxes. Stretched all across the ceiling were cracked pipes, out of which seeped black foam and excremental stenches. The floor’s tiling was filthy and, farther in, the wooden staircase’s first few steps appeared to have been smashed with a hatchet. Then the lights went out.

  They had walked a meter and were now leaning against the mailboxes. In the humid darkness that surrounded them, they listened to the sounds and clamors of the pogrom that suddenly seemed far in the distance. They stayed there, flank against flank, taking the time to catch their breath. Their hair and clothes gave off a dirty steam.

  “We’re not far from the Party arsenal,” the woman finally said in an exhausted voice.

  “You know where the arsenal is?” Marta Ashkarot asked, stunned.

  “Of course,” the woman said. “At the end of the corridor. Where the stairs begin, there’s a door that looks like it goes into a closet.”

  “Let’s go,” Marta Ashkarot said.

  “If we don’t give them the code, they won’t let us enter,” the woman said.

  “Do you know it?”

  “Know what?”

  “The code. Do you know the code?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s go to the door and you knock.”

  They groped their way to the staircase. They didn’t want to switch on the lights again. Almost undetectable beneath the steps, in a recess that the light would never have reached anyway, the arsenal entrance was small and discouraging. The woman knocked three times quickly in succession, then once loudly, followed by a pause, then she began again. After the third set, the guard opened the door. A lightbulb shone wanly behind his back. It was a man in his fifties. His face was covered in soot, and, like a miner coming out of a mine, his eyes looked abnormally white.

  “You’ve arrived just in time,” he said in a predominantly panicked tone. “They’re getting close to the courtyard exit. Do you have the munitions?”

  “What munitions?” the woman asked.

  “You didn’t bring anything?” the man asked sadly.

  Marta Ashkarot shrugged.

  “We better come in and close the door,” she said. “You can see the light from the street. No need to attract attention.”

  Once inside, they looked at each other awkwardly. The guard did nothing to mask his disappointment.

  “I thought you were coming with cartridges,” he deplored once again while shaking his head.

  The three of them found themselves in the darkness of a nook that served as a wardrobe. An oily smock and a black coat were hanging on the wall, taking up nearly the entire space. From there, they slipped behind a stack of empty cardboard boxes, after which they were in the arsenal’s main room, a not particularly large room to tell the truth, whose only furniture was a mattress lying on the tiled floor, some plastic bags filled with crumpled laundry, and two stools. Behind a screen made of juxtaposed planks, one could just make out the outline of a toilet bowl. A metal sink had been installed just beside it. Near the sink were some hanging towels, tin cans, a saucepan on a portable stove, and two rifles. The room was both livable and lived in.

  Marta Ashkarot quickly took note of her surroundings, then lowered her eyes to the mattress and its occupant.

  Under the bare lightbulb lay a gravely wounded man. His face was hidden beneath a smoke-stained shirt, and, underneath, he was shivering. A blanket was partially wrapped around his body. His legs stank of charcoal and roasted flesh.

  “Who’s that?” the woman asked.

  The wounded man began to moan. He was conscious. He tried to speak from beneath the shirt covering his face, but his lips and mouth had to be in a deplorable state, and, once he had realized that his words were incomprehensible, he stopped.

  “That’s the military branch director,” the guard said. “He was doused in gasoline, but he managed to escape and come here.”

  The wounded man tried to say something else. He made an effort to articulate distinctly.

  “Do they have the cartridges?” Marta Ashkarot interpreted.

  “No,” the man replied. “It’s two woman
comrades. They don’t have anything.”

  Marta Ashkarot went to the sink, leaned over the rifles, and examined them without touching. They were Korean rifles, from the time of the Second Soviet Union. She didn’t have enough military know-how to verify whether or not they were loaded, but she promised herself she would take one, shoulder it, and use it against any potential assailants, whether monsters from the Werschwell Fraction, barbarians from the Zaasch Group, or soldiers from the Humanist Alliance. She was ready.

  “Are they loaded?” she asked.

  She turned toward her fighting companions. With every breath he exhaled, the wounded man let out a pained groan. Above him, the arsenal guard looked worried sick, and his pants were damp with urine. The woman who had run down the street with Marta Ashkarot had taken a few steps away from them, doubtlessly so as not to be contaminated by the despair resonating from the two men. She had stepped over a bag of dirty laundry and was now pressed against the wall, stained with grime, neglect, and an inescapably bleak future. She wasn’t completely listless, but scarcely moved. Marta Ashkarot, who until then hadn’t had the time to get a look at her face, found her beautiful. She had to be twenty-five or twenty-six years old and, under her common tracksuit, the elephant could make out her perfect, elegant body, not yet ruined by suffering and bloat.

  The elephant took the guns, one in each hand, and walked around the mattress, the military director, and the arsenal guard, who was nodding his head like an idiot. She couldn’t stop herself from having a sexist thought. It’s often that way with men, she reflected. When the situation is a dead end, they don’t know what to do.