We crossed the first twenty meters by zigzagging through the shadows, between mountains of clothes and shoes that stunk of gasoline. We tramped through puddles or over soaked fabrics. “Hey,” one of us muttered, “they’ve emptied out who knows how many jerricans here!” “Another bad omen, I think.” “I won’t even look at anything anymore,” Chicha said. Elli Zlank told us to shut up and pointed to something in a vague direction, wrinkling his face to listen. We were suddenly paralyzed, a frozen group of outcast boys and girls pricking up our ears to catch the noises Elli Zlank had heard. There was nothing in the returned silence for several seconds, except for the Bolcho Pride slogans roaring over the neighborhood, then, at the other end of the building, I distinctly picked up the rattling of metal cans on the ground, followed by the echo of a stream, then a few words, then an uninterpretable scraping, then, once more, a spilling.
This is when we committed our greatest and only mistake. Instead of calling off the operation, instead of hastily retracing our steps, we continued onward up the stairs to the second floor, where we thought the arsenal would be.
We reached the second floor without any problems. The men who were finishing up pouring gasoline all over the ground floor may have heard us, or they may not have. The shouts and slogans of Bolcho Pride may have covered up the sound of our footsteps. They had no intention of going back to the sections of the building they had already taken care of. They must have made sure that none of their own would risk being left behind, and they wanted to leave the premises as quickly as possible. They knew that no one could still be wandering around the warehouse, and if by chance any thieves or basically animal undermen had broken into the building, this could be considered minor collateral damage at most. Any intruders only had themselves to blame if they were overtaken by misfortune.
The sounds made by the fire starters faded once we had forced open the door to the arsenal. We were, it goes without saying, very aware of the danger. But, since nothing yet had happened, we figured we had the time to grab a few armfuls of Kalashnikovs, cartridge boxes, and some pistols dating back to the First Soviet Union before running off. The door finally gave way. We stood just inside the room. It was overflowing with pistols, tossed haphazardly into crates. Some Stechkin-Avramovs, Yariguins, Tokarevs, Makarovs, Serdyukovs, and one Bogdanov. It was difficult to determine whether they were broken or still usable. We had lost half a minute to weighing and examining them, and, as we began to pick up the crates to transport them outside, the fire sparked on the ground floor, and we immediately realized that we could no longer go back downstairs and leave the Kam Yip Building in one piece.
In order to impress the Disciplinary Commission and ensure our rehabilitation, Granny Holgolde went around the trial room and closed the already restrictive openings, and, once everything was plunged into a suffocating darkness, she dragged to the stage a piece of sheet metal. She had gained a lot of weight over the past few years and had difficulty walking, but her obstinance demanded respect and, in her presence, no one made a sound. On the center of the metal, which resembled a small baking sheet, she placed a cloth figure in effigy of Ouassila Albachvili, then she declared that she wished to speak for five minutes in the name of our little sister Ouassila. No one uttered any objection, so she assumed that she had been given the right to do so. She then poured a glass of gasoline over the doll’s head and lit the doll on fire. “Finally, I, Ouassila Albachvili, have decided to keep my mouth shut,” she said, and then was silent. The Disciplinary Commission didn’t know what to do, and its members remained calm, surrounded by the smell of gasoline and char, their eyes watering, their mouths severe, their souls vague, and their breathing constrained.
There were several hearings. They took place sometimes behind closed doors, other times out in the open. When the Commission undertook its work inside some enclosure or another, Granny Holgolde was the sole individual to cross the threshold. Whenever she entered she appeared full of determination and even often on the brink of fury. Her eyes flashed with lightning, and, if there had been any human or animal in her way, it would have moved without further ado. Later, when she came back out, she looked exhausted, crushed by fate, and her disheveled clothes smelled of grease, petrol, and indoor fire.
In the case of certain hearings that took place in public, Granny Holgolde would ask a soldier to push her wheelchair to the Negrini Bloc’s barracks for invalids and the mentally ill. Once a compact audience of polytraumatized and schizophrenic individuals had formed before her, she would copy the voice of one or another of us, usually Rita Mirvrakis, whose inflections weren’t too different from her own, and she would repeat a few passages from our maximum program. From this she selected sutras that wouldn’t risk shocking the masses, then she would recount in her own way the failed operation in the Kam Yip Building, with which she mixed meditations on eternity and certain strange cormorants that she claimed to have seen at several important junctures in centuries past, then, if her oration hadn’t yet worn her out, she would declare the hearing adjourned and continue to call out to the masses and speak, this time in her own voice.
It took the ground floor less than ten seconds to transform into a sea of fire. We were cut off from all routes back to the street. Evacuation was now impossible. We leaned over the balcony guardrail to see the extent of the nightmare. A burning heat stung our cheeks and eyelids. “If the Party had been warned,” Maryama Adougaï ventured, “they could have saved us from outside!” “The Party no longer exists,” Imayo Özbeg remarked. The second floor windows were unopenable. They were placed high up, and most of them were sealed with bricks, iron lattices, or pilings. “Maybe it existed in the past, but today, it’s not even in basement thirty-six, it simply no longer exists.” Loula Maldarivian then proposed to the girls to make use of the pistols we were going to requisition. “When we’re surrounded by fire,” she suggested, “when we can’t take any more pain and fear, we can use them to kill ourselves.” We had agreed, we had turned back toward the arsenal with the thought of gathering any ammunition we could find. Drogman Baatar distributed cartridges to anyone who wanted them. “It was really worth going through all this just to shoot one bullet,” Taïa Torff grumbled, then walked away with her Stechkin. I don’t know if she later made use of it, if she knew how to release the safety catch, if she pressed the barrel against her throat or beneath her floating ribs.
Granny Holgolde lit a marionette on fire, on which she had inscribed the name Imayo Özbeg, and declared that now through her everyone would hear the voice and explanations of Imayo Özbeg and no one else. The Disciplinary Commission gave her the sign to continue, and she said: “I solemnly affirm that at no moment did I doubt the existence of the Party. It is certain that our general collapse, punctuated here and there by occasional capitulations and lost battles, could have led me to believe that the Party had vanished for good. But I refused to come to that conclusion and, in any case, I kept my opinion to myself and never expressed it aloud, even as I was engulfed by flames.”
The boiling smoke had begun to singe the skin on our hands and faces. The hair on some of our heads was beginning to burn. “Do you remember, in Granny Holgolde’s tales, when the elephant changed homes?” Dariana Freek asked. “When she took her first steps into the intermediary worlds, and stopped worrying about the horrible past and horrible present?” “No,” Loula Maldarivian said. “I don’t remember and I don’t care.”
Once all the dolls representing us had burned, the Disciplinary Commission recessed to deliberate, and, once she was finally all alone, Granny Holgolde collapsed onto the ground. “My dears,” she exclaimed, her voice made indecipherable by her sobs, “all my little ones! You burned for nothing! We’re all at the bottom of the hole, and the Party doesn’t seem to know which direction to go to get out, but, whatever happens, we’re all with you!”
A few words now on Ouassila Albachvili, also called, like me, Rita Mirvrakis, and on Loula Maldarivian, whom quite a few people also called Rita Mirvraki
s. To say, above all, that within the flames, we were together. The words have no importance, but they exist and they emphasize, in their own way, our closeness within the inferno in the Kam Yip Building. All three of us, for a moment, were together, and what we shared will stay with us like a precious, indestructible jewel of loving friendship. Ouassila Albachvili has, like me, a long black braid that swings against her spine when she walks. She has the looks of a woman from the Caucasus, a superb woman from the Caucasus. Her hair is thick. It descends to the bottom of her back when she moves. It pulls on the top of her forehead and causes her to have a bearing that the guards and teachers always found arrogant and inappropriate. Ouassila Albachvili took advantage of Bolcho Pride to dress up as an outcast Georgian princess, far from everything, magnificent. She still has in her jacket pocket some of the hairpieces that once allowed her to take on the appearance of Dzerzhinsky, hairpieces dating from the time when she was a little girl and which resembled nothing, and obviously very little of Iron Felix’s own pilosity. It’s no more than a scrap of grimy fiber, an amulet she’s saved since the time when her parents foisted Bolshevik costumes upon her without giving too much thought to whether she would prefer to inhabit the false skin of a man or a woman. With the help of nostalgia, she is like us all, she now thinks that this was a time when the camp knew moments of great joy, and that Bolcho Pride was one of them. It might be doubtful, but that’s what she believes, at least when all around us everything is going poorly. She closes her hand on this talisman stuck to the bottom of her pocket along with crumbs of food. She touches it and mumbles the magic spells that Granny Holgolde taught her, calling for the terrible punishment of all those responsible for disaster and all those who obeyed them and who continue to this day to obey them. I am doing the same thing. I, too, curl my fingers around the residue of a distant Pride from my childhood, a strand of Rosa Luxembourg’s chignon. I, too, pronounce maledictions. One day the camp authorities, the soldiers of the Zaasch Group, and all those who possess the world will be instantaneously reduced to ghosts, and, if the revolution doesn’t take care of it, we can always count on natural catastrophes. This is what my curses prophesize. One day, whatever happens, they will all shrivel up and be ground to tar, nothing more than bad memories. Loula Maldarivian is wearing a buckle from Chapayev’s ushanka as a pendant. It is perhaps an homage to Chapayev, perhaps an homage to her little brother, who was killed when he was very young, a few days after having worn this very outfit. Loula Maldarivian’s hair is brown like gingerbread and she is wearing generally Mongolian rags, which suit her well, since she is broad-shouldered and has short and solid legs. She lifts her hand to her chest, presses Chapayev’s buckle between her breasts, and murmurs one of Granny Holgolde’s terrifying prayers. The flames surround us. Already we are together, reunited. But we were also together later. I will speak of it. Later and even more together.
Then Loula Maldarivian falls on me, and for a moment we’re lying on top of one another, amid the cracklings and pain. Then Ouassila Albachvili collapses onto us, onto what remains of us, a sort of indistinct blaze, which hardly moves and no longer vociferates. All three of us are together. We speak our name one last time, Rita Mirvrakis, Rita Mirvrakis, Rita Mirvrakis, then we are silent.
We were surprised by and still little accustomed to our strange bird bodies, little familiar with the prolonging of time and existence inside the fire. I freed myself from the sooty heap we had formed and made my way to the next closest heap, where the most disparate of objects were now neighbors, witnesses to a civilization and culture we had once known ourselves or which had been known generations before, to which we felt a total closeness and solidarity. I pulled from the jumble a record player, I picked it up and placed it on a table so it would be horizontal and secure. I began to examine it, trying to understand how it functioned, if it still possessed a wire and pin to plug into an outlet, when Rita Mirvrakis made a gesture with her fingers, covered in blue, white, and indigo feathers, indicating that the device didn’t need electricity in order to work. “In similar circumstances,” she claimed in a voice whose intensity shocked me, “no electricity is needed.” I had no reason not to believe her. We were stuck in one reality among several others, amid flames that looked like immutable tapestries, and electricity belonged to another world. Electricity could be forgotten, strange magic was our only guide. Rita Mirvrakis was holding a vinyl disc in her hand, which she had just pulled from a pocket, and I saw, according to the Cyrillic characters on the label, that the disc had been pressed during the First Soviet Union. She placed the black circle onto the platter, I moved the arm into place, and the mechanism began to rotate. At the center of the frozen scene, in the heart of this frozen inferno which would forever be our home, this black disc turning at thirty-three rotations per minute was an extraordinary event. I don’t know if it could be called a miracle, but, in any case, it made us happy.
I placed the needle on the first black ridge and stepped away. Now all three of us were standing against each other, next to the record player, then we separated slightly and formed a sort of approximative circle around the device’s speaker.
The voice belonged to one of the great heartrending singers of the First Soviet Union, Lyudmila Zykina. I don’t know what you would have thought of it, in our stead, in the silence of the flames that resembled shining stalagmites. I suppose all the same that you, too, would have been deeply moved. The song was a simple and harrowing melody. A peasant woman has just lost her wedding ring, she finds it, she thinks with sorrow of the man whom she loves and who is now gone. She puts on a white dress and prepares to walk through the snow into the night, hoping for nothing, relying on the moon to light her path. The inferno around us burns very slowly. The torches lazily writhe and sway. The temperature is pleasant. Everything is immobile. We had folded our wings along our flanks and, aware that we too would never again see the man whom we loved, or the snow, or the night, we felt tears run through the down on our faces.
Your name is Maryama Adougaï. You are at the edge of the abyss. Time has cracked around you, space is no more. You would like for me to approach you one last time, to cling to you tightly one last time, for the fear of abandonment and the pain of solitude to diminish. You call out. Time and space are no more, the blazing dark is no more. You say your name, our name, and you call out. You speak our memories, you would like to speak our memories, those which belong to you and those which are buried within others and which they have never told to anyone else. You would like to dig up our memories. You open your mouth, but inside there is no more breath, no more words. You are within the abyss and you call out. No one responds. You spread your wings, you unfurl them, you move the air and the burning shadows around you. You would like to take flight, or at least stay afloat somewhere, between two worlds. You would like to fly and to forget for a very long time.
Your name Maryama Adougaï. I have the same name, too. Many of us are the same, now. This is the end. We all have the same name, all of us. A moment ago, this name was Rita Mirvrakis, but now we are called Maryama Adougaï, all of us, boys and girls alike. You are on the edge of the abyss or have already fallen in. Time has cracked around you, space is no more. You would like for me to approach you one last time, to cling to you tightly one last time, for the fear of abandonment and the pain of solitude to diminish. You call out. Time and space are no more, the flames and the blazing dark are no more. You say your name, our name, and you call out. You speak our memories, those in the light and those which are buried. You would like to cry, but your tears have vanished, there are no more tears or dry eyes. You would like to speak our memories, those which belong to you and those which are buried within others and which they have never told to anyone else. You would like to dig up our memories which have always lain beneath tons of bitumen and earth. You open your mouth, but inside there is no more breath, no more words. You are within the black abyss and you call out. No one responds, not even Maryama Adougaï. You spread your wings, you unfur
l them, you move the air and the burning shadows around you. You would like to take flight, or at least stay afloat somewhere, between two worlds. You would like to fly and to forget for a very long time. You would like to glide high above the Kam Yip Building, above the Amaniyak Kree District, above Vincents-Sanchaise Street, like a person who is neither sure she knows how to fly nor sure she wishes to land. You would like to forget everything for a very long time above the washhouse, above Liars’ Bridge, above the barbed wire that surrounds Bloc 709 and the Negrini Bloc, above the barracks for invalids and the mentally ill, above the administrative buildings, above the slaughterhouses, above the soldiers, above our cadavers and our memories, reduced to next to nothing. I no longer have the strength to forget, I no longer have the strength to speak to you, but: my memories are yours.
Manuela Draeger is one of French author Antoine Volodine’s numerous heteronyms belonging to a community of imaginary authors that includes Lutz Bassmann and Elli Kronauer. Since 2002, she has regularly published novels for adolescents with L’Ecole des Loisirs. Eleven Sooty Dreams is her second book to be translated into English.
J.T. Mahany is a graduate of the MA program in Literary Translation Studies at the University of Rochester and received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. His translation of Antoine Volodine's Bardo or Not Bardo won the inaugural Albertine Prize in 2017.
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