Eleven Sooty Dreams

by Manuela Draeger

  Then she went to the woman and handed her a gun.

  “My name’s Marta,” she said. “Yours?”

  “Joana.”

  Leading to the courtyard was a small iron door, with, at the top, a grated skylight protected by an interior shutter. The noises outside had increased. The pogromists were invading the neighborhood they had left abandoned for the past half hour. They had spread to the adjacent street and, now that they were approaching the courtyard, Marta Ashkarot could hear their excited voices, the clamor of shattering windows, and the cries of people who had spent the evening playing dead in the shadows. They were being dragged out of their homes and beaten.

  “We need to turn off the lamp,” Joana ordered.

  The arsenal guard leapt toward the switch without a word, and they were suddenly plunged into a heavy darkness, to listen carefully to their loathsome reality and remain silent.

  There was a minute of respite.

  The wounded man no longer emitted any sound. He had perhaps already died. The guard was at his bedside, his audible breathing interspersed with sobs of helplessness.

  In the street, the Zaasch Group soldiers were banging on closed doors and ordering anyone on the other side of them to open up.

  Then several criminals burst into the courtyard, and blows reverberated against the skylight and the iron panel. For one reason or another, doubtlessly because they had noticed a trickle of light before, the soldiers knew that the building was occupied. Judging from the voices, there had to be a half dozen of them. Several were exchanging brief humanist considerations on the current action, while others were bellowing loudly.

  “They’re not loaded,” the arsenal guard muttered.

  “What?” the elephant asked.

  “The rifles,” the man said. “They’re not loaded.”

  His voice was at odds with the din outside and the increasingly loud knocks on the door.

  “Oh,” the elephant commented.

  “Don’t be scared, Marta,” Joana said. “We’ll bash their heads in with the grips.”

  “Oh yes,” Marta Ashkarot said. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go on the offensive. We’ll bash their heads in with the grips.”

  Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The End

  Marta Ashkarot realized that someone had stumbled over the threshold of the little house where she had slept through the morning, and then heard a hand or paw pressing urgently against the doorframe. After that, there were several seconds of silence, followed by the sound of fingers knocking on the wooden panel. At first, she had turned her head toward the door, but made no other movement, flabbergasted as she was, since she still couldn’t believe her ears. Fingers! A hand! Hominians have a way of knocking on wood that can’t be confused with any other animal, even though Marta Ashkarot had been certain that humanity, in this part of the world just as everywhere else, had gone completely extinct. She had lived here for the past four years, ranging over long distances, and not once, in all this time, had she come across representatives of the old dominant species. For a moment, she thought she was still dreaming, but then, once more, human bones, which she also assumed were covered in skin, briefly drummed against the panel so as to announce their presence.

  The knocks were lacking in energy.

  There was nothing imperious or formidable about them at all.

  The elephant groaned two syllables to announce that she was coming to open the door, then pushed away the blanket under which she had spent the night. Hay and vegetable litter rustled around her. Whenever she chose to hole up inside a dwelling, she always brought some things with her to make the stay a little less uncomfortable. This helped her to then collapse until morning without bruising herself too much on the painfully vertical and horizontal surfaces that evolved bipeds were once so fond of, back when they still built houses. Her body had aged, she was made aware of this at the slightest provocation, and there were times when the thought of sleeping on hard ground displeased her greatly. She felt she was approaching the end, that she was now passing through her final existence. And so she allowed herself a morsel of softness. She wasn’t proud of this, but, considering the circumstances, she wasn’t ashamed of it either.

  She stood and gazed at the light emerging from the tiny window. Rather than a proper house, this was a log cabin, a robust and poorly lit construction, conceived to fight back against assaults of cold and snow, a little izba that bore witness to ages long past, since for many decades, even in the farthest reaches of the north, glacial wind and vigorous winters belonged solely to legend. Let’s be more precise. They would have belonged to legend if there were still individuals capable of preserving collective memory and making sagas or fables out of it. But no one wandered the earth anymore, no one recounted the past, and no one remembered anything of what had happened. This izba no longer had any reason to exist or story to tell. The elephant had moved in because she had come across it while on her journey and because she felt too exhausted to look for better shelter, but she hadn’t given any thought to the people who built it, let alone the climatic conditions that explained the stinginess of its dimensions and its poor lighting.

  She opened the door. Since she didn’t wish to remain inside the uncomfortable dwelling, she squeezed through the door frame, crossed the threshold, and went outside, in the process shoving aside the two people standing there. She walked about ten meters through the warm grass before turning around to greet her visitors.

  They were a hominid couple dressed in rags. Both were in their forties, which indicated that they possessed a nearly miraculous aptitude for endurance, but they both looked quite decrepit and, despite their robust constitution, it was obvious that they were at their physiological limits. The man the elephant had shoved had fallen across the threshold and was making little effort to get back up. The woman, leaning against the izba’s exterior, stared at Marta Ashkarot with both steadfastness and exhaustion. Her features betrayed an immense lassitude. The two of them, man and woman alike, had faces matching the situation, the hard and dirty faces of survivors.

  The man’s hands trembled. He began to grab onto the logs in order to wrest himself into a vertical position. He moved slowly to save his strength. Finally, he leaned his body beside the woman’s. Then he searched for her hand and held it in his own.

  Now all three of them were staring at one another. The elephant swung forward and back and let her trunk dangle lazily beneath her mouth. The two hominids were holding hands as their lungs produced asthmatic whistlings in cadence. It wasn’t clear whether they were considering their words to engage in conversation, or if they were simply thinking about their physical distress and how not to be drowned and asphyxiated by it.

  The woman controlled her wheezing and closed her eyes in order to gather a bit of additional strength.

  “Is the meeting cancelled?” she finally articulated.

  What meeting? Marta Ashkarot wondered.

  She had been kicked out of the Party a century ago, for her complacency regarding the theses of adventurists, and, since she never expressed the desire to be reintegrated, the broken bond had never been fixed, and the meanings transformed in her memory into a kind of folklore that no longer concerned her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  The two vagrants struggled to move their lips, but only the woman was in any sort of state to make sounds.

  “The quorum,” the woman explained. “We won’t be able to make it.”

  This was no organizational secret, but Marta Ashkarot had the impression that she had weighed the pros and cons before revealing the reason for the plight. It was however already known that the Party was undergoing a serious crisis.

  A minute passed. The three were silent and didn’t move.

  “If you want,” Marta Ashkarot finally proposed out of compassion, “we can hold a meeting here, just the three of us.”

  The vagrants’ expressions didn’t change. They had the look of people who have faced adversity so often that their flesh
has, little by little, turned to wood, their minds ensconced in a hermetic shell that isolates them from ordinary emotions. Marta Ashkarot’s proposition was unexpected and potentially lifesaving, but still they expressed no surprise.

  “This will be the final one, then,” the man spoke up.

  “Well, we’ll see about that,” the elephant replied.

  She knew that with hominids, it was always necessary to maintain hope, even if it was uninspired and artificial, and especially when the absence of all hope was particularly flagrant.

  The couple didn’t react, but she could tell that they were reinvigorated. She took advantage of the situation to treat herself to an observation of her surroundings.

  It was a summer morning. Birch trees surrounded the house in an anarchic fashion and, further afield, there were the barely visible curves of hills covered in straw. Since the preceding century, plants had given up on strong, vibrant colors, and changed between faded yellows and uncertain grays, although, that said, they didn’t appear unhealthy. Unlike more evolved living organisms and animals, they had found within themselves the resources to adapt to the molecular alterations of the atmosphere and earth. The landscape, in this part of the countryside, continued to play its role, producing tranquility and beauty.

  “What is the agenda?” the woman asked.

  “Are you talking to me?” Marta Ashkarot inquired.

  “Well yes,” the woman said.

  The elephant heaved her powerful shoulders. She hadn’t participated in any kind of political activity for the past ninety-four years and hadn’t cared about any kind of agenda since the meeting where, her expulsion for ideological divergence notwithstanding, the plan had been to discuss the emerging conditions of the disappearance of living species. She dug deep into her memory and the title of the discussion returned word-for-word to her tongue.

  “Universal happiness in an unfavorable global context,” she responded.

  “Wait,” the woman remarked. “That’s exactly the reason we were going to hold the meeting, before it was cancelled.”

  “Only the Party cares about that theme,” the man commented, suddenly distrustful. “Are you a member of the Party?”

  The elephant lifted her trunk, scratched herself lightly behind the ear, and let it fall back down.

  “These questions come up with some regularity in the Party,” she responded.

  “So you’re a Party member then,” the man said, reassured.

  “I used to be,” Marta Ashkarot replied. “I was a member before your parents were born.”

  “Good,” the woman judged in a breath. “It’s better that way. We’re among our own kind.”

  “Yes,” the elephant said. “We’re among our own kind.”

  She had pity for the two, who had held fast despite the suite of new historical, chemical, and genetic syntheses. Two individuals who had received at birth, by pure chance, an exceptional capacity for endurance, and whose fate had been to survive, even while everyone else had long disappeared. Two beings whose singular presence against the wall of squared trunks appeared almost heroic, even if their heroism wasn’t the result of a personal choice.

  She took a few steps forward. Before starting the meeting, she wanted to take them to the spring just behind the house. The water was fresh and abundant, it ran into a slate basin, and, to make use of it, a ladle and bucket were provided. They could have a drink, recover a bit of their strength, and relax.

  At that instant, the sky began to rumble and, instead of making their way to the water, they lifted their heads.

  There were no objects flying above them, obviously. No machines had skimmed the clouds in eons. Militaries had lasted much longer than humans, but, in their pressurized chambers and environmental suits, they had ultimately run afoul of the fate shared by all—they had ceased to live. Even if a few remaining pilots were still capable of some tiny scrap of organic activity from within their earthbound planes, they certainly didn’t have the power to go out and spread flames or viscous gas among the last holdouts of the global population. These lethal missions were now at odds with the deaths of the killers just as much as with the disappearance of their targets.

  The sky rumbled continuously across its entire span, throughout its entire depth, and this vibration was completely unrecognizable. It wasn’t deafening. It even had a certain gentleness to it.

  The fabric’s coming undone, Marta Ashkarot thought. The fabric of the universe. It’s coming undone. It’s destroying itself. The end is very near.

  The countryside was calm. If there had still been birds or little wild mammals, one would have perhaps witnessed an animal panic, distraught cries, a hysterical exodus of rats and rabbits. But the countryside was empty and nothing of the sort came to pass. The birches weren’t disturbed by a single breath. The morning was gray, cloudy, and warm, like usual. And, up above, the sky was rumbling.

  “What’s that?” the woman asked worriedly.

  “Are you talking to me?” the elephant asked.

  “Yes,” the woman murmured with effort.

  “It’s the end,” Marta Ashkarot said.

  “The end of what?” the woman murmured again.

  “I don’t know,” the elephant said. “The end of the world. Soon there’ll be nothing anymore. Nothing. No memories to speak of, no memories to listen to.”

  The three of them were silent. If there was anything they were trying to imagine, it wasn’t the end of the world, with which they were already quite familiar. It was what would come after.

  Curiously, after all the years and existences marked by degradation and agony, things at this particular moment were rather peaceful. The sky continued to vibrate and rumble, but the noise suddenly stopped and an intense feeling of relief descended on the three characters. They had arrived at the end of a road, they were entering an image, and the sentiment that had engulfed them was, for all three, more or less the same: they had accomplished their duty as living beings in coming this far, and, now, they were free.

  Now, they found themselves gathered in a sort of final photograph, and, when everything ends, it isn’t really so bad, especially since this photograph wasn’t frightening at all—to the contrary, to them it was incredibly harmonious.

  The trunks of the birch trees were lit from the east by an orange glow that could, in a pinch, have been the rising sun, but in reality was simply the world in its final instant. The color intensified, originating from inside the trunks, until it became a brilliant shade of vermilion, then it stabilized. It didn’t dull, it didn’t grow, shining out from the sapwood, and, throughout the entire forest, there was a luminescence as incongruous as it was beautiful, as if the heart of all matter had been replaced by embers, as if it were a phenomenon completely unfettered by destruction and sorrow.

  Universal happiness in an unfavorable global context, Marta Ashkarot thought. Here it is.

  She was happy to be frozen in a magnificent end of the world devoid of violence.

  The noise from the sky had not returned. The world no longer existed. The birches were consumed from the inside. Matter had dissolved. The countryside was eternally matinal, unmoving, and warm.

  The two humans were holding hands. They were leaning against the world’s last house, they were resting on the dark logs of the izba and staring out with the hard and dirty faces of survivors.

  Everyone was for one final moment immobile inside this final image. The image was going to disappear.

  The image disappeared. The luminous red persisted within the retinas, causing the viewer to think once more on the trees, the earth, the inner fire. Then one of the three opened their eyes again, and saw that the red was still there, as a clear and natural reality, at least on the birch trunks, on the earth. Then, from reality’s point of view, it was the end.

  Memories

  Like your hair, like your face, the street is in flames. The situation is hopeless, the pain unbearable, your disgust for the world has reached a limit beyond which you
can only manage a brief and terminal scream, but you wait. You are certain that there will be an end. You know that this end is bound to come.

  The window facing you opens and shuts, blown by the wind from the fire, as if Maryama Adougaï’s arm were shaking it in agitation. The window facing you opens and shuts, swung by the wind from the fire, from the incendiary breaths whirling outside the building. Everyone understands that it is only a playful current of air, that nothing other is intervening, especially not the hand of an animal or human. But each time the window moves, our hearts leap. The window opens and shuts, sometimes violently, and we jolt with the worst images in our heads, as if Maryama Adougaï’s caramelized arm really were over there, actively shaking it back and forth.

  The glass ended up exploding and, in the frame, several glass shards persevere, like solidly ingrained teeth, like soot-stained fangs, ungleaming. The flames create smoke, the smoke creates fragments that flit up to the middle of the street then fall. What is happening inside the building, just behind the window, cannot be seen.

  A rag, the color of a burgundy mop, comes into view. It clings to a piece of glass or a nail. It won’t have enough time to fly away from the flames. For half a minute, it appears as if someone is standing near the opening and is using it, this rag, to signal their presence. But this is not the case. No one is standing there. The rag is like many of us, in that it has no chance of escape. Something painful is holding it back, kept inside the blaze, a makeshift hook, an unfortunate hook. For half a minute, we think of it, of this rag. We think of it and we watch it. It does its best to last. It quivers. It quivers and writhes between two jets of smoke. Then it goes up in flames.

  The wall does not split quickly. We are there, it is very dark. All paths are blocked, the air is unbreathable. The air no longer exists. Our tears do not reach the edge of our cheeks. They evaporate halfway or are absorbed by the dust. We are not crying over our ruined fate, over the death we now must face much too soon, in the flower of youth. We are not lamenting for so little. If we are crying, it is because our eyes sting. The smoke has thickened, it carries with it acidic substances. In the weak light, we passively examine the fissuring wall. The cracks are taking time to branch outward. They appear and divide slowly. We do not see much, and neither do we have any desire to see what is happening. The air no longer exists, the light is irregular. We are no longer crying. No, we are no longer crying. We remain for a moment with our eyes closed. Everything is too hot. Then, we watch the wall once more. Inside the cracks, the paint forms blisters, and, around the blisters, something hisses. We do not cry, but we do close our eyes.