It’s the smell that wakes her. Dirty rags, soiled skin. Someone has stopped in front of the door. Not touching the door but stopped just in front. A refugee, a vagabond. A newly arrived wanderer who does not respect the curfew.
Or a dead man, Kree thinks.
She opens her eyes on darkness. She isn’t in the habit of getting scared for no reason, but here’s her heart beating fit to burst. And goosebumps all down her legs, her arms. A dead man. A dead man prowling around in the building.
She has the impression that she let out a scream just before coming out of sleep, but she isn’t sure. She tries to recall the last dream visions that tore apart her head. They’re hidden. Nothing remaining but black, a dense, impenetrable black. And that smell of dirty clothes forming the pathway between reality and nightmare, that stagnant wind of unclean skin, of mass grave. If there was a story, or images, they’ve dissolved at high speed.
Around Kree the night goes on, but the deepest darkness has already passed. Behind the window the sky has started to change color. A good number of the stars have gone out.
The room’s angles are becoming discernable. The bare walls. The bare angles.
Nothing out of the ordinary. The door hasn’t been forced. The lock and chain are in place. The table, the trunks, the chair haven’t moved. Nobody has entered. Obviously. Nobody has entered, nobody has approached her during her sleep.
At the foot of the mattress, Loka yawns, lets out a whine and goes back to sleep. Kree has just risen to a seat. She needs to move, to change position so she can chase away whatever has assailed her, the idea of a living dead man spying from behind the door. She hears the blood tapping dully behind her eardrums, less and less quickly. Her heart is slowing. She listens for what is moving farther away, outside her body. Loka. Loka is breathing loudly. She’s always breathed loudly. A powerful black wolf-dog. She has remained lying down. A sign there’s nothing to fear.
Much farther down, in the street, three or four men are pulling and pushing a cart, now and then letting out grunts of effort. Reeducateds, no doubt, on provisions or cleaning duty. The rubber-coated wheels crunch gravel and skid. An unhappy voice. An indistinct curse. Then nothing. Then once again the squeak of suspension springs, again sighs that sound like complaints. There’s a dip in the middle of the street; on foot you barely notice it, but it’s different when you’re hauling a cart. The cart moves alongside the building for a minute, then the noise decreases. On the first floor, Brother #9 is seized by a fit of coughing. He has lung cancer, he doesn’t have much time left. Brother #9, Kree’s only neighbor. Then silence returns.
Five stories up, where Kree lives, not a sound on the whole floor.
She lies down again. She’s settled onto her back. Whatever woke her no longer floats anywhere but in her dreams. Male sweat, worn-out cloth, organs open to the sky. Just the kind of stench the dead leave in their wake when they come out of the mass graves. Or else maybe. Maybe it came from that guy, the one Myriam Agazaki gave her address to, that former soldier with the sailor hat. Kree breathes, inhales carefully. Try as she might she can no longer catch the vile stench that pulled her out of sleep. Now the first thing in her nostrils is dust and rancid blankets, and then Loka’s breath, the acrid warmth of Loka’s fur.
The dog smell is getting too strong. Kree will have to bring her to the river for a wash.
Dawn approaches. Only a few stars shining beyond the windows. Dark blue above the city. But fewer glistenings, no longer that abundance of icy stones. Less clear darkness.
Kree sniffs and sniffs, trying to revive her memory of the smell. She reconstitutes it mentally without perceiving it again. She imagines someone behind the door, just outside the apartment, a malevolent shadow. But she doesn’t believe in it anymore. Her calm has returned. She knows nobody was spying in the hallway. A fear that came from nowhere has disappeared into nowhere.
She thinks of the shady barefoot guy smoking across from Myriam Agazaki’s house the other day. A guy her friend thinks is good-looking. The head of a stubborn soldier, a fighter forged in great defeats. A ferocious loser. She imagines him, gives him life. Since Myriam Agazaki was so stupid as to give him the building’s address, he might well have managed to work his way up six stories and find her door, stand like a statue before the door waiting for her to open it. Considering the hour, certainly not to take tea with her. No. Maybe not to cause her any harm, but to surprise her and enter her apartment. To have sex with her.
Kree’s sense of smell has sharpened over the past few years. She’s realized that she trusts her nose just as much as she trusts her eyes or ears to gather information about her surroundings. And even to assess people. Maybe because of the fact that her vision has weakened. Her body is trying to compensate for the weakness. The world of smells has opened up to her, as if she had stumbled into the world of wild animals. Then Loka came into her life. The beautiful black dog, her beloved black dog. Loka came to live with her and, very soon, Kree judged her animal companion was more competent than herself when it came to sniffing out the dangers that surrounded them, and to learning about the individuals they encountered via olfactory means. Kree entrusted Loka with that role. Her own sense of smell, however, had retained the capacities that had appeared before the dog’s arrival. And, basically, they made a team. They were accomplices. Facing an unknown something or someone, they sniffed at the same time and almost in the same manner. Then they would exchange a brief glance to verify that their intuitions were in agreement, and if a need arose, they divided up the task and they acted. If it was necessary to fight, for example, which occurred only rarely but did occur, they fought together.
Kree throws off the sheet and gets up. She goes to the window.
Loka rises to her feet and, after a second, she moves toward the apartment door. Kree hears her snuffle a few times and sneeze, muzzle at ground level, then the dog returns near and leans her head against Kree’s leg. She’s signaling to Kree that there’s no nasty scoundrel in the corridor and there never was one. Kree bends toward her, caresses her spine, the dog gives her two licks on the hand and, with this rite accomplished, she goes back to sprawl at the foot of the mattress.
In her place as friend and guardian.
Now Kree faces the window as the grip of worry loosens. She turns her back on the door. With dreary pleasure she reimagines the scene of her fear and she writes a little internal play. The theater set has only one actor, a man or a corpse, motivated by sleazy intentions. He waits in the hallway, he approaches the door, he stands still, and he waits. He holds his breath, he takes care not to betray his presence, but he exhales an odor that denounces him. Sweat-soaked soldier’s rags, a cadaver’s underpants. An odor that denounces him and wakes her with a start.
Then she lets go of her fantasy. The aggressor, the corpse, the deserter, becomes once again an inoffensive shadow. She doesn’t even go back to verify one more time that the chain is in place, the lock is set.
No more anxiety. She hesitates; she could do the same as Loka, lie back down and go back to sleep. And then, no.
She opens the window. It resists, as it often does. She has to force the handle. The wood has swollen in the humidity of evening. The hinges weren’t crooked when they were attached, but, between the war and a couple of earthquakes, the frame shifted, so everything is off. Kree doesn’t like sleeping in an enclosed space, but she prefers to seal up any openings while she’s sleeping, even if her bedroom becomes uncomfortable for lack of air. She makes sure to barricade the door, of course. And everything else. Evacuation routes, the badly covered vents where the warmth of central heat once flowed, back when the climate was harsher, when the buildings were inhabited by fragile, delicate people and not by survivors who are indifferent to everything or almost everything. Obsessed with the intrusion of undesirable pests, she blocks holes, possible entry points.
Pests. Insects. Arthropods of all kinds, spiders, millipedes, centipedes. Birds. When darkness descends on the city, the pests come to life. They take advantage of the humans’ silence and inactivity, the creeping things, the bats, the vultures. All these creatures like nothing better than to take possession of rooms they consider available for their convenience. They’re hard to chase away, and even when they have no intention of setting up camp, they foul the ground and the walls with their excretions, their feathers, their webs and sloughed-off skins.
She sets her elbows against the windowsill and leans out. A warm humidity falls across her face, a heavy veil of city smells. Burnt fuel oil, dust from demolished areas, dust from crumbling cement, earth dust from the countryside, dust descended from sawdust, pollens, faraway dying forests, animal sweat, human sweat, butane, excrement. Wood, smoke from campfires, grilled meat. The air is soft. In the city, as elsewhere, the temperature is pleasant. A permanent warmth with variations in moisture according to the season, a few drier weeks before and after winter. Down below, the streets form a patchwork against a black background. The buildings are all alike, mostly one-story houses. Kree’s building is an exception, along with the four or five other towers punctuating the landscape here and there, which are too dilapidated to be occupied. From the height of the sixth floor, Kree enjoys an exceptional view. She overlooks everything.
After the last exodus the city was rebuilt under the direction of the terrible mendicants, and a good tenth of the buildings have been spruced up and rehabilitated, which does not prevent the whole from maintaining a uniform ugliness. A few spots, here and there, to which a name can be attached. The shopping center in Central, the Aniya Viett sector, the House of Mendicants, the Mariya Kahn sector, the Mariya Kahn dormitory, the river.
The sky is just about to brighten. Kree doesn’t move, she waits. She watches as the final stars disappear. From time to time she closes her eyes, she enjoys taking her time to absorb the silence. She has always loved the dawn. The best moment to take stock or to die.
And then.
Then, the day comes. Three vultures take off from the nearest tower, the Stern Tower, sailing toward the river, disappearing. She ends her contemplation. She leaves her spot at the window. She rolls the mattress against the wall, she folds half of the covers, which have been adequately aired during her long pause before the void, and she puts them away in one of the trunks. She does not forget to slip in, here and there, the perfumed stones Myriam Agazaki has given her, which Myriam says are better than soap chips for absorbing moisture and fighting the lingering odors of sleep, the lingering odors of private dirtiness, intimate salts, and sebum.
Loka trots from one room to another, tail beating against her flanks, impatient to go out.
Kree hesitates at first before opening the door to the outside. Just at the moment that she’s pulling the lock and the chain, she thinks back to her dream, the stranger who might be standing sentinel in the hallway, spying, and even though she’s entirely convinced that this is nothing but her imagination, she lays her hand on a bladed weapon that always hangs suspended at the entry. A long, slim machete, finely curved like a samurai sword. She unhooks it. And finally she opens up, for the sake of the dog and her swollen bladder. Everything is ink black beyond the threshold. Kree does not edge her head into the doorframe. She knows there’s no risk that she’ll be confronted by an aggressive bandit, wearing a sailor hat or not, but she remains on her toes. She adopts a low defensive position, the door won’t get in her way, at the least attack she will swing, cutting an arc that starts at the adversary’s groin and terminates under the ear, a fatal slash. And then nothing happens, there’s nobody there for her to cut. Loka slides past the length of her right leg, leaps down the stairs, and takes off. A second after the dog’s departure, Kree’s already slammed the door. Once again she closes, locks, and chains it. Loka’s outing will take a while. A half hour, an hour. Time for Kree to wash up and do some housekeeping.
She grabs the broom and right away she has to tangle with a massive spider, enormous. A makhagamba. Big abdomen, big head, thick claws. Anchored on the bottom of the brush, near the handle. One might wonder by what path the spider could have entered, and when. In any case, she’s there. Horribly tarantular. With several pairs of indecipherable eyes shining amid her fur. Determined not to capitulate, to occupy that which she considers her own territory. The spider refuses to move, she is sure of herself, her claws have contracted slightly, gripping her perch with the violence of one who knows she is within her rights. Kree holds the broom outside the window and shakes it. The spider hangs on. At every shake she emits a puff of stubborn, shadowy and suicidal terror, but she hangs on. Kree scrapes the brush against the windowsill, as if a chunk of tar were stuck to it. She tries to trap the spider between the cement and the wooden handle. Suddenly the creature lets go. She is not seen again.
Kree murmurs a prayer. She doesn’t care about wishing the makhagamba safe travels in the spider bardo, and she isn’t thinking of asking the gods to pardon her for disrespecting one of their creations. She doesn’t have the same religious sentiment as Myriam Agazaki, she feels no remorse when she snuffs out an existence. In reality, she is praying for herself. She’d prefer for the horrible thing to drop to the ground floor like a rock and not, instead, to choose to cling to the building’s façade a few centimeters below, with the intention of hobbling back into the apartment and taking her revenge. This is what Kree’s prayer asks for. She does not know whom or what superior forces she’s addressing, but she asks.
Just in case, she closes the window.
She goes to wash up. Her hands are trembling. She has fought men and women and wild dogs, she has fought heavy and malodorous rapists to the death, she has fought soldiers. She has beaten them, or else she would not be here to say so. This doesn’t mean that she’s sure, after combat, of remaining always the supreme mistress of her nerves. One is never all that proud when stepping away from the aggressor one has maimed without pity, and sometimes decapitated for good measure. Most of the time, on the contrary, the feeling is emptiness and shame. But what Kree knows for sure and certain, at least, is that after an altercation with a spider her hands always tremble and her temples throb. She has already thought about this issue and discussed it with Myriam Agazaki. Why this exaggerated emotion, why this froth of anxiety. There’s no doubt about the outcome, the adversary is tiny, and yet she spends ten times more energy than needed, as if the beast before her were monstrous in size, as if she might lose. Myriam Agazaki has her theory. The fight is to the death against death, she claims. Each time you find yourself again and again settling scores what are a half-million years old. If Myriam Agazaki is to be believed, in the Paleozoic era a competition began between the spiders and the rest of the world. A competition to the death against death between incompatible forms of existence. And, again according to Myriam Agazaki, the struggle will never come to an end. Or rather, it will.
The struggle will end with the total defeat of the rest of the world. When nothing else can remain standing, she says sometimes, when no one is left to say anything, not a single animal left to eat the rest of the plants, the spiders will have won the war, and then the spiders will dance.
This morning, the water pressure is strong enough and the temperature is pleasant. The tanks on the roof are full, they were fed by the previous week’s rain and, since then, showered with sunlight for hours and hours. There are times when the faucet barely condescends to spit out a thin trickle. Times when drought threatens. But now the flow is continuous. Even if the clouds balk at caving in, if they pass on high without letting loose a downpour, the reserves are not quickly exhausted. And then, in the building, there aren’t many residents to be satisfied. Only two. Kree, on the sixth floor, and Brother #9, on the first.
She crouches in the shower stall and soaps herself in strategic locations. Her feet, her hands, whose palms preserve the memory of grappling with the makhagamba. Armpits, between the legs. She isn’t obsessed with the constant renewal of acidity and grime in the folds and cracks, but she thinks about them. It’s something that bothers her whenever she thinks about it. And she thinks about it often. She started to attach importance to this when she switched from childhood to adolescence, when, although for a long time she had been a little girl, she found herself changed from one day to the next, changed into a woman, adult and alone in the world. It disturbed her to bleed between her thighs in a regular and irrepressible manner, and from that point on she began to hate, not really her body, but that which worked constantly against the hygiene of her body. The incessant excretion of ferments, impurities, and filth. That nauseating animality that reminds us of the slightest negligence. A humiliating degradation at every moment. She never forgets it. While she washes, for example, she never fails to ruminate on the topic. Or in her mental monologues, when she argues over the subject of sex, on the question of having or not having sex, on her memories of the times when she’s had sex.
She washes and rinses with care. The faucet flows generously, the water is delicious, from time to time the froth of warm pearlescence that escapes from the shower head seems burning hot, just as long ago in normal houses or in the sanitary barracks in camps.
She’s thinking about nothing.
She’s thinking about the deserter who might have come prowling around her place.
She thinks about the needles that pierce her head, which started to blur her vision again a week ago, bringing on the sudden rains of blood. It hasn’t even been very long since she went to see Myriam Agazaki about the pins. She’ll have to return to get a few more of them pulled out.
She thinks about Loka, who has started to smell bad and whom she must absolutely take to the riverside for a bath.
She lets her thoughts come and go in contact with the water.
She thinks about her life: how many years left.
Or maybe how many months, how many days.
Morning. Bright morning.
Kree has gotten dressed after her shower. Again she opens the windows of her little apartment, bedroom and kitchen. She opens them wide. The damp heat brushes her face as it enters, then continues on its way inside. Just as at dawn, the wave of moisture is infused with residues of smoke and gusts from the city.
The sky is very bright. Barely visible in the distance, a handful of vultures form vast circles in the direction of the river. They must be soaring over the Mariya Kahn dormitory. There was a death among the refugees, and they’ve placed the dead man on the dormitory’s terrace, so that his flesh will be shared between the birds, the scavengers. A sky burial. A ritual that the terrible mendicants tolerate, even if they disapprove and encourage putting cadavers in the earth. For a brief second, Kree is visited by the absurd idea that she has been through several types of funerals, and that maybe, somewhere in that series, she, too, was once torn to pieces by vultures. Ah well I don’t know what I would like that. The idea disappears after an instant. It melts in the light of the sky. It is no longer there.
In the west, a few clouds. Over there is the Ölguz Kunguryang sector, which often serves as a passageway between nowhere and the city. Nobody lives there, except refugees who wait for one or two nights to get registered and then reeducated. Besides those fear-crushed shadows, the west also carries promises of rain, but this morning the clouds are thready, without density. They’ll disperse as soon as the sun starts blazing. The day will be pleasant.
If what a blood rain doesn’t darken it, Kree thinks.
She leans over to inspect the façade, then she pulls back. She doesn’t want to get the makhagamba stuck in her hair, nor one of the makhagamba’s companions hanging above the window either. She has to squint against the already blinding sky. No trace of the spider. She must have fallen vertically and crashed fifteen meters farther down. Or maybe not. Kree’s gaze did not follow the spider’s black fall. Who knows if the makhagamba didn’t quickly catch hold of the wall, or if she took advantage of some protuberance in the masonry, a gutter? And then scrambled nightmarishly back up, full of fury against her fate and the human who tried to murder her?
Kree passes a hand over her head. Her body under shelter, separated from the windowsill by a secure anti-makhagamba distance, she gazes at the now brilliantly sunlit city. Now the houses are gray and white. You might almost think you were looking out over a metropolis that had not suffered through a war. The city was low, there had been no spectacular collapses. Rubble, ghosts of cars and trucks scattered around everywhere, but it was relatively rare that a street was impassable. Kree squints, she tries as always to reconstitute the city’s geography. She goes over the most recognizable buildings, the ones around Central, and farther to the northeast the ancient gathering antennae for wanderers, the wounded, the traumatized, for survivors, for the destitute, the unemployed, the insane. The remains of the things trying to exist in the emergency, at one time. Everything blurs together. Between the brilliant sky and her terrible vision, anyway, she can’t distinguish much.
Loka scratches at the door, and when Kree doesn’t open it immediately, she yelps, once, twice. Kree cuts her reverie short. She unlocks the door, unhooks the machete suspended on the wall, and she ventures out into the hallway, letting the door gape open behind her. So she’ll have room to fall back in case of a problem. Loka throws herself against Kree’s legs, barks, runs into the apartment, then turns around and comes back. The hallway is bright with light from her apartment and from a translucent trapdoor that allows access to the terrace. The ladder has not moved. In the dust, prints left by Kree and the dog, none that are strange. Kree goes to check the apartments next door, which she has closed up so she won’t have any neighbors. The boards nailed across the frames haven’t been pulled down.
Loka sniffs at the entry to the stairs, in front of the ladder, in the corners. In front of the closed doors of the neighboring apartments. She seeks out Kree’s eyes to convey the results of her investigation. Nothing suspicious on this floor.
Kree shrugs, she goes back over the threshold of her apartment, she retakes possession of the space. She pours some water in Loka’s bowl and shares a piece of soaked pemmican with the dog.
It’s a basic recipe that always reminds her of the man who taught it to her, a Bachbak soldier who followed her for a few days in a column of refugees, who claimed he wanted to give her security and protection. She was barely a teenager. They went off to camp in a shack a little apart from the group. When she crushes the bits of dried meat and mixes them with some ground grain meal, when she pours water over the paste, always she sees before her this soldier, commenting on the ratio to follow, and, with that, she sees the image of this solder who was determined, a little later, to rape her. She sees again the man’s frenetic agitation, his pants down, his penis purple in the shadows, his mad eyes, his hoarse words, and then his throat opened up, his blood spurting forth as if chasing Kree’s blade, then the sound of him falling to the ground. Not her first murder, but still, a moment in her life that her memory does not relinquish.
Kree prepares her Bachbak-style pemmican a day in advance, with crumbled meat, fat, and cornmeal. In the morning, she adds a bit more water and eats it cold.
“Okay, let’s go,” she says to Loka once their bowls are empty.
She often talks to Loka. Sometimes she makes whole speeches. When she tries to dissuade Loka from venturing down to the riverbanks where some shoeless, poorly reeducated bums catch dogs and eat them, for example. She addresses Loka as she would a person. Loka gives her opinion; she comes in at the end of the sentence. A little whine, a bark, a head tilt. And always a spark of intelligence in her gaze. Her bright brown eyes shining.
The intelligence of her gaze, Kree thinks, as she padlocks the door.
She enters the staircase without taking any particular precautions, since the dog is going ahead and does not stop, does not growl, does not signal the slightest dangerous oddity. The stairs turn like a snail shell around the elevator shaft. All the doors opening on this shaft were cemented shut when the deserted building was rehabilitated by a group of pioneers. Before the arrival of the terrible mendicants.
The pioneers. From very far away and no one knows where. From nowhere, no doubt. Wishing to create an example of a utopian commune here. An impenetrable citadel within which they would realize the seed of egalitarian society. A magnificent plan. Constructing communism in a modest corner of the ruined world. Welcoming recruits and teaching them.
Swiftly they began fighting amongst themselves. With ferocity, over personal problems, linked to food and women. Within a few months, the utopian commune had become a hell of blood, brawls, and fatal ambushes. The collective project produced nothing positive, with the exception of the security of the lugubrious pit of the elevator and the light that pierced up to the third floor inside the shaft, which were inarguable improvements to the space, made in the first enthusiastic weeks of occupation. Above the third floor, the work was interrupted and never finished. Everything remained dark. Once the building was abandoned, no squatters turned up to take ownership. Such elevated shelters did not suit the urban culture of survivors. They sought low, isolated structures, easy to abandon in case of fire or aggression. From the beginning the pioneers had gone against custom by choosing a six-story tower for their utopian commune. Also against custom, unfortunately, was their hope to work together despite reality, misery, promiscuity, as well as, most of all, their idea they could avoid or overcome the insatiable human desire to make things worse. Their commune did not last; they killed each other and their confrontations made most of the building’s apartments unusable. One more reason Kree isn’t likely to be bothered by neighbors. Nobody is trying to live next to or below her apartment.
She has no neighbors, and she isn’t complaining about it. As for Brother #9, who lives almost at street level, let’s just say he doesn’t count. He often stands next to the door, as if watching the comings and goings, when she’s the only person passing by him. They exchange polite greetings, and often he asks, with an informer’s curiosity, about her plans for the day. Kree responds in the appropriate manner. He doesn’t count.
Kree calls Loka so she won’t jump on Brother #9 or dash off into the street like a mad thing, but the dog doesn’t obey. Kree continues to descend. Already Loka is going wild on the rubble of the entry hallway. Kree can hear her running off into the street and disappearing. On the building’s threshold, Kree stands still. After the shadowy descent, the shock of daylight is suddenly too strong. A pain deep in her ocular spheres. A piercing pain. Now, without any warning, she can’t see anything. Then a crimson curtain sways before her, a curtain of blood replaces the streetscape. Vertical stripes, red dashes falling to the ground. In silence, although sometimes the din of a deluge rushes over the wine-dark image. Today, only the red downpour, without the sound. No hammering. She closes her eyes. She counts slowly to ten. Sometimes the rain lasts only a fraction of a second, other times it goes on for an hour. The curtain that empurples everything, fogs everything, the hail, the streams. But this morning she counts to ten, to twenty, and there is no sound around her; she counts to thirty and the colors begin to fade. The rain of blood flows back into a private reservoir of hallucinations, below awareness, in the hermetic territories where she is lost. She counts slowly, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, to forty.
Then she starts again, from one to fifty, more and more slowly.
Pain and color vanish abruptly.
Loka has returned to twist around her legs. A conspiratorial whine and, again, the dog runs to the intersection. She turns her head toward Kree. She’s waiting. She’s asking if she should go right or left.
From the entry to the building, Brother #9 makes a sign with his hand. Kree waves her hand to greet him in turn.
She sets off. She takes a right.
Before going to work, she’ll have time to get some food at the cooperative near Central.
Her service as housekeeper begins at seven o’clock.
She’ll make a detour through Central and the cooperative. And then she’ll arrive at the House of Mendicants. Brother #15 will tell her the schedule for the day, she’ll take up a broom with no spider on it, and she’ll begin cleaning the courtyard.
And then, a normal day on the horizon.
Work until the early afternoon.
Then a walk with Loka to the Aniya Viett sector. Maybe some tea with Myriam Agazaki. The blood rains are coming back. It’s time to make an appointment for yet another session of needle extraction.
The cooperative has taken over the area of Central’s former commercial gallery. Its purpose is to provide food for those interested in food or who need it in order to continue living, which is not at all the case for everyone. Basic food products are available in trays and containers. All night, teams of reeducateds sort through it. Surveillance patrols lend a hand as well. The food is crude, with little variety. Vegetables and fruits come from the gardens in the Jan Oltchum sector. Dried meat is prepared in the Baherdjee combine. You can take some at your discretion, although not in excess, of course. Canteens have priority, but after distribution to the collectives, individuals are allowed to glean as they wish from whatever’s left. There are always two or three terrible mendicants there to prevent abuse, spot the sneaks, and begin elimination procedures against them. Their system has never failed so far, and no one dreams of questioning it. The products never run out. Dishonest gluttons and thieves disappear and do not reappear. The terrible mendicants take care of it. It’s the basis on which both our present and our future is constructed.
After making her selections, Kree goes to the House of Mendicants. She carries a bag full of provisions over her shoulder, she has taken some for herself and some for Myriam Agazaki. Basic ingredients. Flour, strongly scented pieces of meat, dried beef, maybe, or lizard. A small armful of greens.
Brother #15 is sitting on a stool, before the front desk. They exchange casual greetings. They know each other by heart. Kree has been doing the housekeeping here for years.
Look, thinks Kree. A weird look what he’s got this morning.
Is he angry with me or what? she thinks.
Bah. I’ve got nothing to fear from him.
Nor from the others, she thinks.
The terrible mendicants are like all administrators and directors since the dawn of time, they are privately rejected by the population that they administer. All things considered, though, they aren’t so terrible as all that. That adjective was attributed to them when they first took power in the city, and to get started, they established rules and put an end to disorder. It is true that, during that time, it was better not to go against them. But today, once you’ve understood and you share their vision of the world, there isn’t really much to fear from them. Kree has little trouble molding herself in their image, she doesn’t have to do any mental contortions to adapt to their language. All in all, the terrible mendicants’ ideology is basically very close to her own. She adopts their vocabulary with sincerity, she repeats their magic words. With sincerity, and, at the same time, without belief, because she doesn’t believe in anything. She entrusts herself to fate as if she were walking in the world after death, she feels that she is floating without memories in an existence that does not end, that will not end, she moves forward in that existence from day to day. So, to her, being a passive sympathizer to the terrible mendicants seems like an excellent thing, or at least, the only thing.
“Kree Toronto,” Brother #15 says, “just in time. Just when we were looking for a representative from the working class. We have a reeducation meeting on the schedule that will end with maybe a self-criticism or an execution order.”
“An execution order?”
“A request that the masses they want to be done with an agent of the enemy.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me, and anyway there aren’t any more enemies,” Kree objects.
“There will be enemies for another thousand years,” #15 says.
“And then, I don’t have time,” Kree goes on.
“It’s a solemn meeting. We cannot do it without a representative person what represents the poor or the assimilated peasants,” #15 says.
As always when a terrible mendicant pronounces a sacred political phrase, his voice hardens. He’s stiffened in his seat. Suddenly his gaze is directed toward past struggles and the coming of the classless society. The left corner of his lips trembles slightly in a dominating smile.
“I don’t belong to the peasants, and I live somewhere other than a dormitory,” Kree retorts.
“And so?”
“And so I’m more one of the semi-poor people.”
“Bah,” #15 puffs, to sweep away the objection.
Really, she has no desire to represent the masses in a public gathering. She is a sympathizer, she approves of some eliminations, but when she can, she manages to escape the most boring political tasks. Not always. When she can.
“People know you, Kree Toronto,” #15 continues. “You’re not just anyone in the city. You’re one of the first to arrive. From the beginning you have never behaved in a reactionary manner. We’ve never gotten any complaints against you. Nobody has ever said anything about your dog.”
“What is there to say,” Kree grumbles.
“And then, you are a role model for our children.”
“What children?” Kree says, startled. “There have been zero children around here for years.”
Brother #15’s lips contract into a sort of pout, his expression becomes simultaneously more severe and wearier. He’s beginning to tire of Kree’s arguments.
“Children or no, you are a role model, Kree Toronto. I’m telling you that you must come. We need your presence as a delegate of the workers and the peasants. I’m telling you that you must attend the self-criticism. It’s so everything will be done according to the rules.”
“I don’t have time,” Kree digs in. “And you didn’t tell me who it is what has to do their self-criticism.”
“That’s not your business. We’re not asking your opinion on that.”
“And why what you don’t do the execution without a trial? Self-criticisms they’re useless if you’ve just offed the critic.”
Brother #15’s gaze hits Kree like a bullet. In his beggar’s uniform, he looks very much like an immovable stone.
“Self-criticisms they are not useless. They are useful in educating the masses,” he intones heavily.
Kree gives in with a half-submissive, half-idiotic look.
“They are not done so that the enemy will get pardoned,” #15 clarifies.
“Oh well, okay,” Kree says docilely. “I didn’t know that.”
“That’s how it is,” Brother #15 concludes.
“But we don’t pardon,” Kree remarks.
“We never pardon a class enemy,” snaps #15.
They remain silent for a handful of seconds.
“It’s in the early afternoon?” Kree asks.
“Yes, fourteen hundred hours.”
Kree accepts, she nods her head yes.
“Okay, and now?” she asks. “What am I doing this morning?”
#15 gives her a light schedule. Quick cleaning in the offices. No mopping, so she can go faster. A message to bring to Brother #27.
“Don’t forget the meeting at fourteen hundred hours.”
“No,” says Kree.
She opens the door to the service closet. She leaves her bag with the packets of more-or-less dried meat, more-or-less lizard. She’s even managed to rustle up a gingerroot and a box of vegetables by digging deep in the container. The vegetables don’t have a name. They have small, thick yellow leaves: strange. She’ll ask Myriam Agazaki to identify them if she thinks of it.
She pushes the dried-out mop aside with her foot and takes a broom. She looks at it. There’s no spider on it.
Brother #27 occupies a lodging on the ground floor of a small two-story house where nobody else lives. It’s on the border between Central and the Mariya Kahn sector, at the start of a very long street that stretches all the way to the river. Kree knows the house; she’s passed by it often, sometimes accompanied by Loka, sometimes not. #27’s house is marked by an unvarnished, blackened wood façade, which the owner has augmented with black and red fabric streamers and clusters of bells, as if it were a religious building, although no doubt #27’s idea is only to show new arrivals that the place is inhabited and there is no use in trying to requisition it. But it’s true that it feels as if you were approaching a modest sanctuary. That impression is further strengthened by a vertical banner hanging behind the window, dark red, with calligraphic characters belonging to an unknown alphabet—known, perhaps, only to the communists and wizards of the old times.
The message. What Brother #15 charged Kree with carrying to Brother #27. She pinches it between her index finger and thumb. She’d like to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It’s a folded piece of paper, and she is not so indiscreet that she would read it on the way, nor does she have any desire to do so. A gray paper, smelling of coconut oil, just like the back offices of the House of Mendicants where they rarely ask Kree to sweep, as if their territory were more sacred than elsewhere, as if the delegates of the martyred peoples and their rags weren’t really welcome there. When #15 gave her the paper, he had such a severe and solemn air that she took it without a word, as if it were an object to be handled with caution, a dangerous package rather than a letter.
She knocks on the door of the little house and Brother #27 opens up with a wide smile, pronouncing a phrase of warm salutation. His hands are busy with a broad macramé panel, which he has just been finishing when Kree arrives. His smile chills when she holds out what she has brought. A shadow passes abruptly over his face, just as severe and solemn as the one fixed on #15’s physiognomy a little earlier. Then he sits down again, with a good-natured invitation to come in and drink some tea. He shows her his incomplete panel of woven strings and explains that it’s a demon-ward meant to keep counterrevolutionaries in retreat.
“And it’s also to scare Brother #8.”
“Bah,” Kree comments.
Lifting her eyebrows, she asks him why he brought up Brother #8, a terrible mendicant who isn’t often in the city, who lives nobody knows where, as if he were following the rules of clandestinity, and appears only on meeting days. Facing her, #27 stifles a laugh; he even makes a vague gesture corresponding to repentance, as if he wished she would disregard his previous words, and he doesn’t explain. He leads her into the room and shows her to a chair. She sits.
#27’s home is just as spartan as Kree’s, nothing but a gas burner, three chairs, a trunk, and a bed with slats and no mattress, although the walls aren’t quite so bare. Magical objects instead of the machete and weaponry. Amulets, belts in brown leather stretched over bits of iron, tufts of red fur, the shriveled paws of small animals. All decorations belonging more to the world of witchcraft than the world of egalitarianists. That said, #27 never professes anything departing from official orthodoxy, and, if he stands out among the Brothers, his shamanic performances are in no way the reason. From a sartorial perspective, he blends in with the others. Like all those who hold power in the city, he wears a miserable, black, anonymous uniform, going either barefoot or in canvas shoes. Of course, he is fatter, even a bit pudgy, with furry arms and hands, traits that distinguish him, physically speaking, but most of all it’s his manner of addressing anyone and everyone that sets him apart. Rather than taking a sententious tone, he hammers out the sacred phrases with humor sparkling in his eyes. He doesn’t frighten his listeners; he puts them at ease. No doubt his belief in the terrible mendicants’ ideology is sincere, hard as iron, yet one might imagine he hopes the masses or, shall we say, the representatives of the working, peasant, and martyred masses, such as Kree, would adhere to that ideology with a sort of insouciant joy.
After sitting down, Kree gets back up and remains standing while #27 heats water. He jokes around; he drives the conversation without demonstrating any interest in the letter from the House of Mendicants. He hasn’t unfolded it, he’s thrown it on the bed next to his macramé demon-ward and, when it slips between two slats, he watches it fall to the floor and makes no move to pick it up.
They speak of one thing and another. The weather. The increase in spider attacks. The color and smell of the river next to the Mariya Kahn dormitory. He teases her by seeming to doubt Loka’s existence, pretending he’s never seen Loka next to Kree, pretending he doesn’t believe she has a dog. He criticizes the tea he’s just served her; he considers it insipid, and when she returns to the question of Loka, he makes ironic reflections about Brother #1 and Brother #2, whose existence he also contests. His words are ambiguous to the point that Kree wonders if he’s not taking advantage of the chance to compare #1 and #2 with dogs. She does not dare comment about this to him. He asks her about Myriam Agazaki; he knows the ties of friendship that the two women maintain. He has learned, who knows how, about the shaking tent Myriam Agazaki has installed in her courtyard. He asks questions about the shaking tent, he’d like her to tell him if it works, if she knows the installer. Kree keeps things vague, suddenly putting up her guard. She has a feeling that #27 is trying to worm information out of her. Even if she likes the terrible mendicants well enough, her personal ethics forbid her to act as a snitch. Or even simply an informant, which often comes to the same thing. If the mendicants in power want information, they can talk to someone else.
Brother #27 perceives her reticence and he does not take offense, and, as the conversation peters out, he moves to pick up the letter that Kree brought him from under the bed. He’s still smiling, and then he isn’t. He peruses the sheet of paper. Kree sees him lose his debonaire attitude, let out a long sigh. He studies what he has just read a little longer, as if verifying the meaning of an unclear phrasing, then once again he tosses the letter onto the leather bed frame. This time it does not fall to the ground. He turns his round bon vivant’s head toward Kree, all his air of mischief vanished. His gaze crosses Kree’s, but goes beyond her, somewhere far away where she isn’t there.
For a half minute, Kree concentrates on sipping the last drops of her tea. The silence between them is unpleasant. Now she’s in a hurry to leave the room.
She rises, goes to return her tea cup to the sink.
“Bad news?” she says casually.
“Oh no,” Brother #27 says. “Just an invitation to a ceremony.”
“Is it for right now?” Kree asks.
“Yes. Right now. So that the poor peasants can put me back on the right path.”
At fourteen hundred hours she presents herself in the Party Room at the House of Mendicants. The place is familiar, partly because it’s the place where large reeducation and self-criticism sessions take place but also because she cleans it regularly with broom, rags, and mop. She cleans the walls only once a year, and even then not all the way to the top. She doesn’t use a stepladder to reach the frieze of ridiculous red and black cockades up near the ceiling. She lets it gather dust. Tarnished, worn, the frieze doesn’t evoke the eternal revolution so much as it creates an impression of abandonment. The same goes for the three macramé panels hanging above the stage, no doubt the work of Brother #27. Someone once told Kree they represented the fundamental principles, but the explanation was brief and unconvincing. They’re sacred panels, yet the design is so abstract that, if not for the red ribbons and streamers stuck to them, nobody would have the slightest idea that they carry any kind of message or tribute to the mendicants’ powerful ideology.
Six reeducables are sitting in the first row. Rigid, plunged into minute contemplation of whatever lies before them: a stage of gray planks and, on top of it, a dark wooden table and three empty chairs. A theater scene. The six main spectators have arrived in advance and they’re on very good behavior. Scattered around this little group stand the terrible mendicants in traditional garb, the mourning uniform in black cotton borrowed from images of Asia, maybe Cambodia, old photographs taken in the times when Asia and Cambodia still existed; that was a long time ago. They like slipping into the matching unisex uniforms. It assures them that they have concretely realized the radical fraternal equality that they espouse.
And, all things considered, it is a step in that direction, after all.
Kree remembers. She herself once wanted to adopt those pauper’s rags. To blend in with the terrible mendicants. To melt into them. She did not find them at all repellent, very much the opposite. She was in the city when they came to take control, when they were taking the first steps toward extinguishing the nightmare of war and wandering over the infinite destroyed lands. For some time after she arrived, agitated with the euphoria of having survived the massacres, she dreamed of actively working toward what the Brothers sought, the transition to a more just society. She wanted to join completely with those who played a galvanizing role. She didn’t mind losing her name; she found the idea appealing, to exist only in the form of a number. With whatever fabric she could find, she set to work constructing a black jacket for herself. Then, after a period of exaltation, she had doubts. She repressed them, then she let them invade her. At her core she felt that it would be hard for her, as it had been hard during all of her preceding existences, to integrate herself into a monastic collectivity that would accept no deviation, no ideological distance, no contradiction. Hard to literally annihilate herself in that collectivity. And, rather swiftly, she realized that she was more interested in dressing up in black than in the Brothers’ morality. She’d made her own morality for decades; she could be egalitarian without any need for terrible mendicants. Some of the Brothers’ proclamations suddenly started to strike her as debatable, or absurd. Her motivation crumbled away. The desire to be associated with a number was starting to go away. It came back now and then, that desire, when the solitude grew too strong; it still does now and then, but mostly it doesn’t haunt her anymore. That was the end of her laborious sewing exercises. The black jacket and pants remained unfinished in a corner, then one day she tore them apart to make dish rags and underpants.
Not far from the reeducables, in the corner between the stage and the wall, Kree recognizes Brother #27. He’s standing with his back turned, but he’s easy to identify. His heavy body, his hairy neck. Black clothes worn lusterless from frequent washing. He is immobile, a little hunched, and like her he is focused on examining the stage in front of him. His macramé demon-ward is tied around his neck. He had time to finish it, Kree thinks. She wonders what he’s doing there, why he stays in that spot, in that inexplicable position. He has always been a bit apart from the other terrible mendicants, and in that spot, he is even more so.
He’s not participating in managing the reeducables, Kree thinks. It’s more like he’s one of them.
She chooses a place near the door. On an empty bench, she leans back against the wall. She sits. She’d rather not get herself noticed. She’ll attend the meeting as she’s been asked, in the role of representative of the poor and assimilated peasants, but she has no desire to make herself visible. She prefers to remain in back. If there’s a vote by raised hands or by acclamation, she will get up; she will show that she is not lukewarm politically and that she approves one hundred percent the building of the transition and its more severe demands. But then, as soon as possible, she’ll leave. She doesn’t disapprove of anything, not much anyway, but she’ll be the first to leave as soon as the audience is invited to disperse. She’ll take off without looking over her shoulder, she’ll leave them to their final sorcerors’ incantations and their secret sayings, which always follow decisions made by the masses in public.
Gradually the room fills. Normal citizens, residents of Central that Kree recognizes, from the Jan Oltchum sector, the Ölguz Kunguryang sector, women and men dressed in whatever they could find, the recently reeducated, unknown people from the Mariya Kahn dormitory. A hundred or so people in all. Self-criticism meetings always attract people. Myriam Agazaki hasn’t come. She hates this kind of spectacle.
Brother #8 and Brother #12 enter one after the other. With their carefully shaven skulls, they look like two monks disguised as Khmer Rouge, or the opposite: two genocidists trying to pass themselves off as monks. All signs indicate that they’ll play the starring roles in the meeting to come. The roles of hosts and supreme judges. They stand very close to the first row. They do not even glance at the six reeducables. They turn toward the audience to assess the numbers. A good crowd. The masses are there. They approach Brother #27, speak to him without looking at him; he doesn’t look at them either. They order him to take off his demon-ward, which he does quickly, without arguing. It vanishes into a small bag, which he sets down nearby, then he pushes it farther away; he wants everyone to understand he’s separated himself from it.
There’s no one sitting next to Kree. She leans on the divider, and she starts thinking about Loka. She imagines the dog at this moment: digging among the ruins in search of rats or forgotten scraps, strolling freely through the city. Like a mother worrying about her child, Kree tries to persuade herself that Loka avoids the areas where some refugees trap dogs to eat them in a stew or to use their skins, to make clothing out of them. Loka is smart, she has a map of the dangerous areas in her head, she knows she must not make incursions without her mistress into the Wastes or near the Mariya Kahn dormitory. She can transform into a she-wolf if anyone gives her trouble. But she might not be big enough to defend herself against hunters, seasoned trappers, the starving. Every evening, Kree returns to her sixth floor with the same anxious question: will she or will she not find Loka before the door, safe and sound, wagging her tail and blinking her amber eyes?
As she’s dreaming and imagining Loka returning to the house, lying in front of the apartment doorway, Loka and her magnificent eyes, Kree hears someone saying her name. Brother #15. He approaches swiftly and plants himself in front of her. He looks as though he’s terribly irritated. He repeats something, something that was said on stage when she wasn’t paying attention. In the audience, several of the tattered paupers have turned around and are staring at her reproachfully. #15 touches her arm, he shakes her, at the same time addressing her in a curt voice. Brother #8 and Brother #12 are waiting for her. They’ve just taken their place behind the table that occupies center stage. They’ve invited her to join them. A representative of the martyred people must sit in between the two of them, before the poor and semi-poor urban masses. And that representative is Kree. The aforementioned representative gets up. Without wasting time on excuses or guilty looks she obeys Brother #15’s order. She walks up the side aisle with a firm step and, in the silence and the creaking of the stage boards, she sits down facing the audience in her turn.
The smell of wood, dust, sawdust, too, for longhorn beetles have been digging out their tunnels here and there. Trace odors from the mop that she passed over the stage four days before, when she hadn’t the slightest idea that the Brothers would call on her to put on a show there soon.
As if she were presiding over the meeting with Brother #8 on one side and Brother #12 on the other, now she looms over the room. An ideal position for examining the reeducables and terrible mendicants in the front row. Despite the blurry image transmitted by her defective eyes, she recognizes the guy that Myriam Agazaki is trying to marry her off to, the shady-looking deserter that she suspected of prowling the hallway of the sixth floor in the night. Well, there he is, she thinks. He isn’t wearing his sailor cap, and there are pale lines clearly visible on his bronze-colored head. Scars due to kicks with a broken boot, saber cuts, or torture. She directs her nostrils toward him, but she can’t manage to distinguish his smell among all the others. The odors of collective habitation waft from the reeducables’ skins, smells of unfinished showers, soap without lather, damp rags. A pathetic cleanliness. All have made an effort to present themselves with the least neglected appearance possible.
And other, nearer smells. Just next to her, Brother #8 and Brother #12 are emitting strong gusts. A powerful remnant of coconut oil clings to the fabric. They must have participated in a late meeting last night, at the House of Mendicants. In the back offices. The lamp smoke is encrusted in the fibers of their black cotton uniforms. On the collar, the sleeves of their mourning overalls. On their naked scalps.
By way of introduction, Brother #12 explains Kree’s presence on the stage. He says she was chosen as a representative of the struggling proletarians and the peasants and the assimilated urban groups. In a vibrant voice he assures everyone that there is no known blot on her revolutionary record, and through her they will listen attentively to the perspective of the masses and the marginalized classes. Unsure how to respond to this avalanche of magic words, Kree acquiesces quickly by nodding her head and, when he turns toward her, she mutters two syllables of approval. They ask no more of her.
Then Brother #12 forgets Kree and begins a longer speech. He talks about egalitarianism, the transition to the future, the even more radiant times to come afterward, about real egalitarianism, the final preparatory stage of egalitarianism, egalitarianism in its higher stage. He insists on discipline, on the love of work well done, the meaning of sacrifice for the collective well-being; he encourages the refusal of despair even when it’s evident that nothing’s moving forward. He demands effort on the part of those men and women who haven’t yet sincerely joined the society under construction, those men and women who remain attached to the ghosts of the past, he stigmatizes those men and women who would turn back the march of history.
He says “those men and women,” yet there are only men among the reeducables, and for a second Kree wonders if this precaution isn’t directed at her. But only for a second. If there were the slightest doubt about her ideologically, they wouldn’t have chosen her to carry the banner of the working classes.
Brother #12 gives way to Brother #8, on Kree’s left.
Brother #8 repeats, in overall theme, Brother #12’s speech. But he expands on the question of religious deviationism, the temptation that some men and women experience to consider the world from a less materialist angle than is proper, then he goes on to the current resurgence of superstitions, the recent usage of lucky charms and demon-wards among the population, including by certain individuals who have fraudulently inserted themselves into its first ranks. He fulminates against the practice of witchcraft, which carries the seeds for the fall of egalitarianism. Kree isn’t quite sure, but she gets the feeling Brother #27’s magical decorations are what he’s railing about. Brother #27 doesn’t seem completely relaxed. His eyes aren’t lifted frankly toward the speaker, his gaze flits around, lands now on Brother #12’s feet, his canvas shoes, now on tiny details that he seems to have noticed on the boards, maybe the longhorn beetles annoyed by their voices, or bits of wood.
Next comes a moment of reeducational recitation. #8 and #12 take turns speaking. They reel off very short fragments from the dogma, phrases that they invite the reeducables to repeat after them. The reeducables obey. They reproduce the dogma diligently, in a contrite and humble manner. When the text takes on more inspired notes, at the end of the slogan, they raise their tone to indicate how much fervor they’re experiencing. The exercise goes on forever. In a struggle against boredom, perhaps, a few anonymous people in the room take upon themselves a choral function, beginning to mutter in time with the reeducables without being asked. Kree doesn’t open her mouth; she lets her mind wander, all the while maintaining a stiff mask. In her role as spokesperson for the repressed classes, such a sullen mask is proper, full of intransigence and bitterness. In the first row, Brother #27 moves his lips; he, too, accompanies the reeducables’ recitation, and, in the midst of all the noise, Kree can clearly recognize his voice. He isn’t acting like the anonymous audience members, like the free listeners, he isn’t participating spontaneously in the liturgy, he is in fact obeying the order given from the stage and he’s speaking loudly. He’s obeying the terrible mendicants who want to correct his errors in judgment and his deviations. He’s being reeducated.
Well, yeah, obviously, Kree thinks. That’s what the message she brought him this morning must have contained: a summons to a reeducation meeting. With, perhaps, a self-criticism and a pronouncement of execution to top off the show.
Brother #27. His plump wrestler’s silhouette, his solid muscle that looks deceptively like solid fat. His hairy face, his hands furry as a great ape’s. Kree isolates his voice effortlessly, more assured than the voices of the other reeducables. She tries to read his expression, a veil of unorthodox humor, but her vision is too poor to catch it at a distance. She doesn’t catch anything. The phrases Brother #27 is repeating are ones he’s known by heart for many years. He does not distort them. He makes sure to pronounce them in a distinct and forceful manner. He rocks gently back and forth, he avoids looking around, and he addresses the words to himself rather than to his peers as they watch him from the stage or to the divinities who created egalitarianism.
After they’ve gone through the dogma slogan by slogan, Brother #8 and Brother #12 end the litany, and silence falls. Then #8 begins speaking again. A scolding tone. He recalls that, even among the best, there is a great temptation to wander toward unacceptable shamanic practices. Some can be tolerated, others are clearly seeking alliance with enemy forces, uncontrollable forces, demons, ambiguous divinities, suspicious divinities. One of the greatest threats to menace the survivors or assimilated is the lack of vigilance, that they will allow themselves to be seduced by dreams and nothingness. His speech complete, he turns toward Kree. He asks her if the poor peasants and the mothers of children agree with what he has just said. Kree quickly and solemnly agrees. #8 then declares that they must eliminate those men and women who draw the community in a direction counter to history. As he speaks of both men and women at once, again Kree thinks that maybe he’s accusing her indirectly of having allowed the egalitarianist ideology and hope to rot within her. She swallows her saliva. #8 once again interrupts himself, looks at her, seeks her approval. She raises her gaze to the sky, as if she’s thinking intensely, then, with theatrical intensity, again she nods her head in affirmation. Satisfied, but without flaunting his satisfaction, #8 speaks of the unanimous agreement of the popular masses. He explains that this agreement was necessary. Unanimity is always required before a decision of elimination can be pronounced. He goes on to say that the eliminated are not always called to a public self-criticism, because they may counter the procedure and take advantage of it to diseducate the masses. He turns one final time toward Kree so she can confirm that the vanguard and the godless and masterless proletarians accept this exceptional disposition. At this second, Kree perceives distinctly a movement from Brother #27, who lifts his gaze toward the tribunal and then lowers it, and there, perhaps, the hint of a smile. Again she nods in agreement, in a serious yet demonstrative manner. No sound comes out of her throat. Above her, #8 makes a small series of hand gestures to show that they are closing a file, regarding which there is nothing more to be said. One might really think he was manipulating a stack of papers, putting it back in order and closing up the stiff folder that contained it. He sits up straight in his chair again, for he’s gotten a little hunched, and he gives way to Brother #12.
#12 distributes the tasks in the collective interest that they must accomplish in the days to come, until the next evaluation meeting, which he hopes will be positive, for everyone’s sake. He names the reeducables and the exemplary citizens who will act as their tutors. Doumfaf Moroudji, Sariyan Lov, Leonor Morskoï, Trystal Daadour, Abayïl Whitewater. Kree hears these names and she knows that she’ll forget them, but she focuses her attention on the man with the sailor hat and the scarred head, the wanderer who might have prowled around her building in the night. And thus she learns two things at the same time: this man’s name is Griz Uttikuma, and Brother #12 wants to assign her, Kree, to oversee him and to monitor his progress in egalitarianist consciousness.
Griz Uttikuma will do roadwork.
She exchanges a look with him.
Prior to this, she hasn’t watched the reeducables from the height of the stage, so as to avoid adding to their troubles, she’s avoided meeting their gaze. They keep their eyes lowered as a sign of docility anyway, and it would have been impossible to communicate with them, even in a furtive manner. Now that the hour of reeducation is coming to an end and the atmosphere has not been weighed down by a standard self-criticism, everyone returns to their normal attitudes. Everyone among the active participants as well as the audience. Theatrical necessities are no longer required. Kree seeks the gaze of Griz Uttikuma and, with contact established, he does not turn away. He is just in front of her, below but very close. She can see him well.
They meet calmly and in silence, as if they were suddenly outside the House of Mendicants and away from the swelling noise that marks the end of the meeting and the departure of the spectators. Kree has a silent exchange with Griz Uttikuma, not really by telepathy, but almost. Immediately, she senses their relations will be peaceful. In an instant her distrust falls away, her precaution against him, against his suspicious appearance, his supposed nocturnal incursions in her building. Griz Uttikuma’s eyes are the color of dark ashes and they express a nonchalant fatalism. And perhaps the desire to share it with Kree, this nonchalance. He is proposing a nonaggression pact with her, within the context of his reeducation, first, but his proposal is also more general, less defined. Kree responds with a nod; she lets him know that she agrees. She does not waver from her severe rigidity as representative of the peasants and poor urban masses. But she signals to Griz Uttikuma that she agrees. Everything will go forward without trouble, with a good understanding. The man sustains her gaze for two or three seconds, then he lowers his eyes.
Then, bravely, he looks at her again.
Then he turns away to join his comrades in misery, who are leaving the room in single file.
They meet again three days later at the appointed hour, in Drödzaki Street, where one end is blocked with rubble and the other obstructed by the wreckage of a truck. Partly obstructed. The crumpled chassis sits on rims without tires, scaly with rust, shedding flakes of rust year after year. Wanderers may have occupied the cabin, forty or fifty years prior, and everything that might have once existed inside has disappeared. The doors are gone. The hood is torn off the front, which looks like a dragon’s gullet, stripped of its motor, the batteries burst and melted into a formless mass, yawning open with a black tongue. Maybe a military vehicle, but it’s hard to tell. Not much can be recognized amidst the scrap metal. The dragon is hunched at a slant, watching over the passage. It discourages intruders from wandering into its territory.
A street one might hesitate to go down. There’s the dragon, first of all, but nobody would have any desire to go farther. The rutted street. Patches of tar, piles of dirt, gravel, holes. On the left and on the right, gray houses stuck close together, one after another. No façades, a series of back walls, what used to be called a back alley in English, back before English became a dead language. Sometimes, down at the bottom of the decrepit walls, a backdoor, a hidden, shameful door. And on the first and second floors, miserly, narrow windows here and there, probably for ventilation in bathrooms and closets.
An incongruous cicada stridulates hysterically somewhere within this gray passageway.
The sun beats heavily on the city. Its heat is almost hellish, humid, more humid than usual. Kree’s temples are dripping. She wipes the drops off with the back of her sleeve and they reappear. More spring forth in her armpits, on her back, her belly.
At some point, someone set up a square plywood sign near the truck. WORK. Someone took the trouble to write that in white paint, with a hard-to-read symbol that might be interpreted as forbidding passage. Probably a terrible mendicant painted it with a zealous brush. Forbidden to nonauthorized persons. Recalling it, Kree shrugs. She goes around the ruin of the truck and she plunges into the street.
The cicada’s deafening cry fills the space. When Kree comes to the singer’s level, it falls silent. It must be hidden in a tuft of grass overflowing from a gutter. It falls silent, back to a burning silence of sinister walls and sweat.
For a long time, the street with its two ends blocked has been a long rectangle without any clear purpose, an urban space with no reason for its existence. Something about the atmosphere suggests, also, that it bears more relation to a cemetery than to a passageway. Something in the odor that hovers within the leprous ugliness of the walls.
A cemetery. A cemetery atmosphere. The smell. The ugliness. Kree doesn’t ask any questions about them. This isn’t the first time she’s been here. She knows very well where it comes from.
She’s been released from her morning’s work at the House of Mendicants, since Brother #15 named her head of the team. She’s carrying a shovel over one shoulder. It’s not for repairing the road. She’s already performed this same task several times, here, in the same conditions, with requisitioneds or reeducables. It’s almost always the same thing. A burial. Make a hole. Place the cadaver of the executed in the earth. Fill the hole back up. Spread tar over the hole. A task in service of the collective, a duty to be accomplished in the name of the popular masses. A task like any other. Not glorious, not exciting. Just like any other job.
In the middle of the road, sitting on a pile of dirt next to a wheelbarrow full of tar, Griz Uttikuma is smoking calmly. Wearing his habitual sailor’s cap on his head. Kree comes up; ever since the meeting at the House of Mendicants she’s known that she would meet him again at some work site or other, him as a road worker and her as supervisor and reeducation agent. She skirts a pothole, then she gives him a long, untroubled look. His hard features, the creases on his forehead, on his cheeks. His hooked nose with its broken bridge. His eyes a piercing gray. A manner like he fears nothing. Like he’s lived through too much to feel any fear. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t get up. Kree comes closer, she leans her shovel against the wheelbarrow. The handles are burning, the powerful emanations of tar coming from underneath the oily drop cloth, protection meant to keep the mix at the right temperature.
“I can give you my name again,” the man says. “Griz Uttikuma.”
“I know,” she says. “And I’m Kree. Kree Toronto.”
In the ashes of his gaze, fine black lines. Kree has never been at such a short distance from him, has never looked deep into his eyes like this. During their last encounter, she was on a stage, and he was lower, humbled, in the first row. They had exchanged a sign of understanding, but they were too far away from each other, and she hadn’t really been able to examine his iris in detail. She is doing it now.
Slowly she examines his iris in detail.
She allows a second to pass like this, then two, three, four. She savors the vertiginous gray with its brutal confidence. She can justify this, if necessary, by her poor vision. Then she realizes that she’s staring him down as if she wanted to make him surrender, as if she wanted him to admit his inferiority in the hierarchy, and she lowers her gaze. That isn’t what she wants. Soon she tries a smirk to put an end to what he might have interpreted as the arrogance of a camp guardian. But already he’s lowered his head. Like an animal that is not obliged to submit but isn’t seeking conflict, he recognizes her authority. He pivots to the hole that he’s dug.
“I came early with the tar,” he explains. “Brother #8 he came by with Lov and the tools. He ordered me to do this, to dig there. Here. There was a hard crust I went after with a pickaxe, but after that it was practically no problem doing it with the spade. It went quick with the spade.”
“I know,” Kree says. “The soil is good, not rocky. That’s why what the terrible mendicants they chose this spot.”
Griz shrugs his shoulders.
“Looks like a grave,” he says. “Is it for me, or what?”
“It’s not for you,” Kree reassures him. “There’s never any executions here.”
“Bah.” Griz allows himself to doubt.
“No, never,” Kree affirms.
The cicada takes up its strident song again. Very loud, though not so loud it prevents them from talking.
She sits next to him on the pile of dirt, her head turned toward the entry to the dead-end street. Beyond the truck, about thirty meters away, the blinding white of the avenue contrasts with the darkness hanging over the work site. Cruelly the sun floods the world. The light forces Kree to grimace, she looks between her lashes. Everything is empty. Nobody shows up.
“Who is it we’re waiting for?” Griz asks, from a meter away.
Kree responds with a gesture. She doesn’t know. Her arm lifts, stops midway, then falls again.
“They’ll come,” she promises.
“If this drags out,” Griz grumbles, “that tar it’ll get cold.”
They remain for a minute without saying anything. They listen to the cicada. The odor of tar dominates at first, although the earth beneath Kree’s bottom is full of smells, too. Caved-in cellars, animal rot, mouse urine. They breathe in all these smells in great gulps, and they do not speak. Kree would like to question this Griz Uttikuma, to know more about him. Not really about what happened before he arrived in the city. More about his current life, his way of taking things in the here and now. About his present. About the rest, his biography, the horrors he’s survived, Kree has no wish to hear. She never will learn anything about that.
Nobody ever reveals anything about their past. Whether reeducable or reeducated, near the terrible mendicants or at a distance, nobody ever ventures to speak of those things out loud. They know, they’ve already been told, the subject is taboo, something to keep wrapped in lies so the dirty and monstrous years do not spread anew within awareness, do not crash in again like dirty, monstrous waves. When it is absolutely necessary to pour out what one has lived through long ago, when it is necessary to answer questions during self-criticism and adjustment sessions, only sad inventions may pass their lips.
Kree or Griz, Myriam or Gomchen, one or the other. Or yet others. Even in private our confessions are nothing but fictions and confabulations. We keep the essential parts of our past silent, and when we’re forced to come back to them, to plunge ourselves back in by referring to them, strange mirages arise, strange tricks. Through allusions or in details, we recount a life other than our own. We invent a hell different from the one we have miraculously escaped. Hideous tales, imaginary horrors, baroque nightmares. In reality, we have known worse. We soak against our will in these stories, so that nothing or almost nothing unbearable will again start to burn inside us and destroy us. It is a feint in self-defense. It is ourselves we are deceiving.
Between two small windows, Kree notices a black line. Her poor vision doesn’t tell her much. At first she thinks it’s a large crack due to a seismic shake, then she gets the sense that the line is moving, changing its level and form. Now the line lowers on the wall about a quarter meter, now it disappears and even gets interrupted. She tries to see better but, despite her ocular and facial gymnastics, the line remains blurry.
“What is that, over there?” she asks, lifting her hand.
“Where’s that?” Griz asks.
She points more clearly to the line that intrigues her.
“There. Between the windows. I’ve got bad eyes,” she explains.
“A colony of spiders,” Griz assesses. “Blue massaquayas. They’re moving to a new spot. They’re not venomous.”
Kree stops looking in that direction. Blurry as it is, the sight disgusts her.
“I wouldn’t advise them to come anywhere near here,” she says.
“They’re not venomous, but they know how to fight,” Griz adds.
“So do I,” Kree clarifies.
At this moment, three men appear at the entry to the dead-end street. Dressed in black with a straw hat and a wide black-and-white checked bandana tied around his neck, Brother #8 leads the way. Behind him, the two reeducables: Whitewater and Morskoï. They’re bustling around a wheelbarrow, which contains an enormous plastic bag. It’s not easy work. The bag is hanging overboard, it’s slipping; Whitewater has to hold it in place while Morskoï, in charge of the wheelbarrow handles, attempts unsuccessfully to drive in a straight line and reduce the wobbling. Tensed arms, pained grimaces of concentration. Two men in their fifties without much talent for burial work, but putting their backs into it, sparing no effort. Neither is wearing a head covering and their bald, tanned scalps are gleaming with sweat. Streaming, even. Brother #8 seems unaffected by the heat. He swings a small jerrycan at the end of one arm. He doesn’t turn back toward the reeducables; he doesn’t offer any encouragement, any comment on transportational techniques. He ignores them. When they reach the ruined truck, Morskoï and Whitewater stop before the gullet of the dragon. They stand still next to their wheelbarrow and they wait for orders.
#8 alone moves in Kree’s direction and toward the hole that Griz Uttikuma has dug.
Kree and Griz leave the dirt pile they’ve been sitting on. They get up. Brother #8 comes up to them, he inspects the hole that Griz has dug. He circles around. He observes the pile of yellowish dirt. He expresses nothing, no judgment, neither satisfaction nor reproach. After a few seconds, he addresses Kree:
“Kree Toronto, this isn’t your first time. You know how this goes. At the end, pack the tar down well. So there isn’t any hump.”
Kree nods. She knows how all this goes.
“After that, your job here will be done. Whitewater and Morskoï they’ll bring back the wheelbarrow and the tools to the House. Uttikuma he can go back to his dormitory.”
“Understood,” Griz says.
A submission that may not be entirely sincere. Brother #8 throws him an icy glance.
“Someone will come get you tomorrow at dawn. You are at the service of the cooperative.”
The terrible mendicant waits for Whitewater and Morskoï to approach, then he gives them a signal. They mumble a few phrases regarding the virtues of collective effort, regarding work well done, work in the service of the people, regarding the people, regarding the never completed battle against counterrevolutionary individualism and its countless manifestations. Then he points out the jerrycan.
“There’s not much, it’s heating oil. At the end, don’t forget, you have to give them a good cleaning, the tools and the wheelbarrow used to transport the tar.”
Then he leaves.
Whitewater and his associate Morskoï have abandoned the wheelbarrow a little beyond the truck carcass. They had approached to listen to Brother #8 speak. Now that #8 has dictated his instructions, turned his back on everyone, and gone away, they, too, lean over the hole to evaluate its dimensions. They wipe off the sweat flowing down their faces, and they let out a syllable of approval. The hole is deep, it should work. Then they return to the wheelbarrow.
Whitewater grasps the handles and gives it a bump with his torso, a first propulsion. He’s unable to restrain a wheeze. The wheelbarrow lifts up and, again, just as when they arrived, lists to one side and wavers. The thick plastic bag starts to slip again; Morskoï tries to push it back in place but does not succeed. Whitewater sets the wheelbarrow back down. They haven’t managed half a meter. They’re really not experts in corpse transportation. They get moving again. They zigzag a few meters. Morskoï warns Whitewater about a depression in the dirt just before him. Whitewater’s mistake is that he doesn’t go far enough around. A hole of small size, the mud at its base cracked and dry, but the edges are crumbly. Now, there, the wheel gets too close. It pulverizes the tiny earthen rampart bordering the tiny crater; it slides a fatal ten or so centimeters and suddenly stops short. A new wheeze bursts forth from Whitewater’s lips. A whimper of disappointment. The wheelbarrow leans portside like a rowboat about to capsize. During the seconds that follow, Morskoï struggles against the bag as it threatens to fall from the skiff. Whitewater attempts to stabilize the whole, to return the vehicle to horizontality. His arm gets twisted in the effort and he lets out a howl of pain. Now a howl instead of a whimper. Finally he manages to counteract the skiff’s toppling motion. Now he can offer assistance to Morskoï. Between the two of them, they manage to pummel and push the black bag and ensure its balance for the final few meters left in their path and, when they’re almost certain that the transport will now occur without any further accident, Whitewater grasps the handles anew. This time he grits his teeth and emits no sound. He unblocks the wheel and, in a single burst of rage, throws himself forward. There are five meters still to cross. He’s flushed with the energy of despair. Only three more meters, only two. He’s coming around the pile of dirt, he’s avoiding Kree and Griz, he bumps the jerrycan and the wheelbarrow full of tar, he pays no further attention to Morskoï’s potential interventions, whatever Morskoï might or might not do to prevent his cargo from tumbling out of the skiff before arriving in safe harbor.
“Careful!” Morskoï bellows.
“I’m gonna make it!” bellows Whitewater in return.
Full of rage, paying no more attention to the equilibrium of his burden, he rushes straight toward the ditch that Griz has dug.
“Wait! Stop!” Kree yells.
Whitewater has completely lost control over his speed and direction.
One second stretches measurelessly, yells merge and blur together, then silence in the lungs, in the throats. The disaster has taken place. Whitewater has failed to stop in time, and at the moment when he might have tried to do so, the wheel plunged into the unknown. The wheelbarrow pitched over before reaching the hole. It has violently escaped its conductor, not without attempting to brutalize his armpits and jaw with a terrible blow of the handle as it passes. Miraculously, Whitewater escapes mutilation. The plastic bag is hurled from the skiff and tumbles haphazardly into the hole. The wheelbarrow falls immediately after it, as if in spite, as if disappointed that it failed to deliver its uppercut, failed to crack Whitewater’s skull. It gets stuck at a slant between the walls of the hole, in an odd yet logical manner, since the hole is neither wide enough nor deep enough to engulf it.
Now, the four people assemble around the scene of the accident, sponging their foreheads, scalps, and eyelids, breathing hard. All are nodding in a pensive manner. They’re keeping their thoughts to themselves, but at first glance one might think they all approve of what has happened. Morskoï whistles between his teeth, expressing something like relief, or in any case expressing no objection. Work in service of the people might be accomplished with a bit more skill, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. Whitewater, for his part, hasn’t raised his hands to his head, so as to at least feign some consternation at this chaotic ending. On the contrary, Kree can see a feeling of triumph shading across his sweat-slicked face. The shadow disappears, but it was there.
“That thing almost smacked me in the snout,” Whitewater mutters.
Obviously the two men still have some progress to make before they can call themselves reeducated and feel proud of it.
Despite her role as intermediary between the reeducables and the Brothers, Kree has no intention of holding forth with any moralistic speeches. Brother #8 has disappeared and, here, she doesn’t feel like the representative of the poor and the assimilated peasants. She doesn’t feel invested with the slightest ideological responsibility. In silence, she helps Griz disengage the hapless wheelbarrow. They park it off to one side.
Once the wheelbarrow problem is solved, Kree returns to lean over the hole. The plastic bag was damaged and torn in its fall. Part of its contents have become visible. The cadaver to be buried isn’t occupying the space in the traditional manner. The body, rather than reclining on its back, looks like it’s trying to crouch in a corner, but since it hasn’t quite succeeded, now it’s in the process of figuring out how to stand back up, whatever the cost. One can make out the shoulders straining against the black plastic, the knees pushing. A mummy that wants to be finished with an uncomfortable situation.
Through the tear an arm and part of a black cotton jacket are recognizable. A furry arm, a hand covered in hair.
So that’s really it, they executed Brother #27, Kree thinks.
They killed him down by the river, or probably in one of the back offices of the House of Mendicants, among the shadows and close smells of smoke and coconut oil. She can picture the scene in her mind without difficulty. The killers in their pathetic uniforms, Brother #27 not moving, waiting and maintaining his dignity.
Several memories. Brother #27. Three days earlier, he was chewing and regurgitating the magic words they were throwing at him in the tribunal, like food for animals being fattened. Obvious precepts, pompous and idiotic. His impassivity while his peers humiliated him in public. When she thinks back on it, deep down, he didn’t believe the things coming out of his mouth. He was pretending. Another memory: the demon-ward made of string, an object that he’d had enough time to complete, but it wasn’t sufficient to protect him. Another memory: the austere room with its shamanic decorations, the traps for malevolent forces, the dream catchers. The warm welcome, the tea. Ambiguous jokes about Brother #1, sarcasm directed casually against Brother #2. The letter that he tosses on the bed, that falls down to the bare floor, that he doesn’t pick up. And then his poorly hidden bitterness when finally he took notice of the message that it was her mission to bring him, that message of death.
Griz has asked her a question. She hasn’t answered. He repeats it.
“Should we put him the way he’s supposed to be?”
“Not worth the effort,” Kree says.
He’s better this way, she thinks.
“Fine,” says Whitewater.
If what he wakes up and wants to get out, he’ll have less work to do than if what he was lying down, Kree thinks then.
Next, they fill up the hole, all four of them. They help each other with their hands, with the shovel and spade, or with bits of wood that fall in. At the end, Morskoï and Whitewater work on leveling out the soil by stamping on it. They follow a rhythm. Maybe the dance steps of Indians on the plains. A hunting dance, a war dance, not a dance for calling the dead, anyway. Who knows where these two men come from. Who knows what people in the process of dying off they lived with in their previous lives. And, besides, it’s possible they do not follow any sorceror’s rhythm. Maybe they’re simply dancing a spontaneous dance of despair. In her role as worksite supervisor, she puts an end to it.
“That’s enough,” she declares. “Let’s put the tar down now.”
She lifts the protective sheet that was keeping the tar hot under cover, and she begins to throw shovelfuls over the fresh earth. It’s a tiring operation. The tar is heavy, and since it’s already cooled down a bit, it’s not very malleable. Griz spreads out the very black and smoking clumps. In the absence of a rake, he does his best with the spade. They’re all trying not to touch the burning paste directly. They succeed, but at the cost of wavering or capricious movements giving their collective the look of a disorganized ballet. Whitewater and Morskoï use the scraps from a gutter. They spare no effort. Kree turns the wheelbarrow over to evacuate the final black clumps. There’s pain in her hands, in her guts, in all her joints.
A heat that vibrates among them, under them, invisible fumes that seize them by the throat. The vapors of petrol and asphalt. They’re everywhere in the air. They’re intoxicating.
To pack down the tar, Whitewater goes to pull the bottom part of a door off a ruined house deep in the dead end. He needs help from Morskoï. They carry this panel back and place it over the tar, then they climb on top and take up their dance again. They stamp their feet in rhythm. Yes, maybe they are, in fact, performing a sorceror’s dance for the dead, for rest, or to encourage the dead not to be afraid, no matter what happens. To offer some commonsense instructions: continue elsewhere without the burdens of memory, regrets, or mementos of defeat. When they’ve finished tamping down one side, they move the wooden rectangle so that the oily surface will be perfectly level. They don’t stop until all unevenness is gone.
“Well, there’s no more bumps,” Whitewater concludes.
“Is that good?” Griz asks, turning toward Kree.
“Yeah, sure,” Kree approves.
Next everyone cleans the tools with the heating oil: the shovel, the spade, the inside of the wheelbarrow that was used to transport tar, the soles of their shoes.
Griz goes to rest the half-door against the wall of the ruined house.
Kree gathers herself on top of the remade street. A meter below, Brother #27 is snoozing in an impossible position, no doubt having accepted his fate, or perhaps unhappy because he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him. What he did to find himself there, in a torn plastic bag under a heavy layer of earth and tar. Maybe his memory is playing tricks on him and already the final moments of his previous existence are no more than a meaningless dream. In this moment, who knows, he might imagine that he was killed by some monsters bursting out of the black space. Maybe he’s forgotten the details of his execution, the final minutes, the final seconds. Kree doesn’t dig into the question, she simply wants to say a prayer. She hesitates. No doubt Myriam Agazaki would know better than she does how to attend to Brother #27 in his tomb, what phrases to pronounce, what soothing, consoling spells. Myriam Agazaki has much more knowledge than Kree in this area.
And so now Kree stands at the edge of the hot tar. She concentrates and in silence she says a prayer, the first one that comes to mind. A prayer asking forgiveness, as if she were directly or indirectly responsible for Brother #27’s death. A prayer after killing. Very similar to the one that Myriam Agazaki says when she has to prevent a spider from causing harm. The words don’t correspond to this situation and Kree knows it. But if Brother #27 is listening, he will receive the message with kindness. She thinks about him very hard; she wishes him the best. Then she lets the others know her moment of mystical solitude is finished.
Morskoï has gathered the tools and the empty jerrycan, and he’s thrown them into the wheelbarrow that once contained the shrouded body. He’s entirely soaked, and the sweat has not stopped emitting from his exhausted face, from his scalp wounded by the blows of sun and insect bites.
“Morskoï, what’s your name, your first name?” Kree asks.
A grimace. The question irritates him.
“Leonor,” he answers finally.
“That’s more of a girl’s name,” Kree remarks.
“They made a mistake when they signed me up and it stayed that way,” Morskoï tells them.
He’ll have to get used to explaining himself on this point, but he’s a little annoyed.
“It’s not very important,” Kree consoles him.
“For me, at this point, no. It’s not important at all.”
A silence. All four standing, one next to the other, in the heat of the road, two steps from the rectangle of tar still radiating additional heat.
They set out toward the opening of Drödzaki Street, toward the dragon in its terminal stage. Both Morskoï and Whitewater have an empty or mostly empty wheelbarrow to push, now light. Kree takes care to walk as far as possible from the line of spiders, who have continued moving from one house to the other. She makes sure not to look closely at them. She doesn’t want that obscenity of transhumance engraved in her memory.
“What are those bugs?” Whitewater asks.
“Blue massaquayas,” Kree says. “Not poisonous, but they know how to fight.”
While Whitewater and Morskoï move away with calm steps, two workers pushing their wheelbarrows with their labor complete, Kree asks Griz where he’s found a place to stay in tent campsite or in a dormitory, or if he’s squatting in a house. She wants to know which way he’s going to go now.
They’ve left the shadow-filled road of the worksite, and they’ve stopped in the sunshine, Griz and Kree, with the rusting dragon that guards the grounds behind them. Rather than separating on a brief goodbye, they follow the two reeducateds with their gaze, as if they were in charge of watching them. Once Whitewater and Morskoï have turned a corner and disappeared behind a wall, Griz takes out a cigarette and lights it, without offering her one, as if he knows she doesn’t smoke.
“Mariya Kahn dormitory?” she suggests.
He doesn’t answer her question until he’s already taken a drag.
“No,” he says, “another one. Near the ford. The Holsch dormitory, it’s called.”
Kree asks other questions. They begin discussing. She’s conscious she’s keeping Griz back. She wonders what her relationship is to this man. Or rather if they’re going to have a relationship after this, after this foul funeral episode, the cleaning oil and the blue massaquayas who know how to fight. If they’ll see each other in some context other than reeducation and forced labor in the service of the people.
A semblance of conversation ties into the Holsch dormitory, the lodging conditions in the various sectors of the city. Griz explains that, once his reeducation is complete, he’ll look for an individual space somewhere near Central. The dormitory is fine, it’s got the correct sanitary fixtures, the occupants near his bed are refugees, not too noisy. Despite all that, he’s in a hurry to move into some nook where he’ll have complete independence.
“Even if there’s a lot more spiders in the city than on the port,” he considers it wise to clarify.
“There aren’t any spiders in your dormitory?” Kree asks.
“The syndicate uses disinfectant,” Griz explains. “They don’t enjoy that. And then, in my opinion, on the port they seem less numerous. That’s how it is.”
They start talking about spiders: gray mygals, massaquayas, makhagambas, tataguamas, tchakagagnas, spotted tarantulas. All those creatures that make Kree nauseous and that are part of our daily life, just as the terrible mendicants are. Kree offers Myriam Agazaki’s theory on the rift between the spiders and all the other living species on Earth, as old as time, and, rather than continuing in that vein, the conversation turns to Myriam Agazaki, her abilities as a healer.
“She told me I was going to die, and she gave me your address,” Griz announces calmly.
Kree swallows.
“Bah,” she reacts.
She frowns. She looks off in the distance. Uninhabited houses, roofs in poor condition, terraces tufted with growing brush. She can’t make anything out. Everything is blurry.
“I wonder why what she said that,” Kree answers finally.
“Why she said I was going to die?” Griz returns immediately.
“No, the address. Why what she said the address where I live.”
Griz shakes his head. He doesn’t seem to see any problem there.
Kree decides this is the right moment to bring up the subject that’s been bothering her for several days. She’s waited long enough. Now’s the time.
“I don’t know if it’s true one of these nights you came exploring my building,” she says in a cold voice. “You climbed up to the sixth floor. You stood in the hallway a minute. Did I dream it or what?”
“Bah,” Griz says elusively. “Maybe you were dreaming.”
“An hour before dawn,” Kree specifies. “You came up to my door.”
Griz pulls his cigarette out from between his lips and lets a little smoke escape. He doesn’t show any intention to comment.
“You came up to my place that night or you didn’t come?” Kree attacks.
Griz frowns.
“I went up, then I went back down,” he says finally.
“Why?” Kree asks.
“Why did I go down?”
A tone carrying as much irony as carelessness.
At the same time, Kree has to acknowledge that it’s all the same to her: this Griz Uttikuma strolled up to her place, the stroll took place at night, and he strolled back down without insisting. He is in reeducation, but he doesn’t look like he belongs to the enemy class, and besides, if that were the case, the mendicants would have taken him aside and eliminated him as soon as he arrived. Suddenly she’s finding excuses for everything he says, everything he does. Suddenly she accepts him as a normal guy with whom she can quite easily begin a normal relationship, as a comrade or even a friend.
She stares at Griz point-blank, without blinking. Again she stares at him with an intense nonchalance, even a provocative ambiguity. She’s aware that she’s breaking boundaries. She moves toward him and without considering the consequences. But something pushes her to leave all caution aside. At the heart of this rough, bony face, with its dark, tanned, and crevassed skin, shine eyes of an extraordinary gray. Maybe one day she’d like to lose herself in them. One day, or soon. Or maybe right away. Myriam Agazaki was right: he’s a good-looking man, this Griz Uttikuma. She wishes Loka were here. The dog would have come up to his legs, she would have smelled him, she would have evaluated him objectively, animally, and she would have given her opinion.
Griz meets her eyes without turning his away. In truth, she cannot decipher anything in them. As if he expressed no feeling at all. It’s the gaze of a man who knows how to handle himself in the face of aggression. A fighter’s gaze. He doesn’t give Kree any indication of what’s going through his mind, what he’s planning to do or say in the next few seconds. Kree plunges into him, then she reemerges. She doesn’t let herself drown there, at least not today. She has almost let down her guard and now she takes herself in hand again. The instant of turmoil will last only a fraction of a second. She possesses some aptitude in combat, too, some of the skills of a killer. Anything that might have been legible in her pupils, in her irises, some weakness, an expectation, she allows to fade. They go on looking at each other, only a slim distance between them, but there is no more exchange.
A silence.
“On that topic,” Kree says. “Since that night you came just in front of my door. I don’t know what Myriam Agazaki she would have told you about me. But something what she might not have told you, I’m telling you. I hate anyone having sex with me. If what you ever come to my place and that’s your intention, I’m warning you: I’ll kill you.”
Griz shrugs. He keeps on holding Kree’s gaze, but without the slightest hint of defiance. He has something to say, but he isn’t in a hurry.
“I don’t have sex with anyone,” he says when he decides to speak.
“Ah,” Kree reacts.
“I’ve taken a vow of abstinence,” he declares.
“Ah, so that’s it,” Kree marvels. “You’re a monk?”
“No. I could have been, at one time in my life, long ago. But no.”
A handful of seconds later, Griz returns to the question of abstinence.
“It’s to be faithful to Smoura Tigrit,” he explains.
“Your woman?” Kree asks.
“No,” Griz replies. “An egg.”
Kree flinches. She cannot avoid a clenching of her eyelids, an almost panicky flutter of eyelashes. She questions the peaceful gray of his eyes. Under the surface, nothing seems to have changed. On the surface, even less. He’s crazy, this guy, she thinks. He’s insane.
She falls back a few centimeters, as if shifting her balance on her legs. She swallows a little. She has to camouflage her uneasiness. To continue the conversation as if everything being said was entirely normal.
“We all do that,” she comments.
“Do what?” he asks, then finally he looks away.
Kree doesn’t know how to go on.
“We’re all faithful,” she says.
He lets out a long sigh.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s either loyalty or betrayal.”
Smoura Tigrit, Kree thinks. An egg. Staying faithful to an egg. Taking a vow of abstinence to stay faithful to an egg. We all do that.
But Kree Toronto and Griz Uttikuma got together at her place fairly regularly after that. One day he brought some disinfectant in a plastic canteen that he’d found in his dormitory, and together they doused all the areas surrounding the windows and the bottom of the door. The consequence of this operation, whether logical or illogical, was that no makhagamba ever again returned to haunt Kree’s wee hours.
Griz chatted with her about one thing and another, although, of course, never about the past. When it came to opening up the chapters of their previous existences, both of them remained evasive. They claimed to have completely forgotten, to have buried away the details of those hideous events, and, in fact, even the idea of unearthing them was repellent. The present was sufficient, with its highs and lows and improbable tomorrows. Griz never complained about the terrible mendicants. He accepted reeducation as an ordeal necessary for his integration in the city and he never missed a single session. As far as he knew, his reeducation was moving smoothly toward its completion. After that, he planned to work with Gomchen, with whom he got along well, expanding the Tibetan’s business by adding to telephonics a line of shaking tents. “Shaking tents, that’s the future,” he claimed, with an emphatic tone that made it impossible to tell whether he was joking or serious.
The Brothers had not assigned the task of overseeing him during his work praxis to Kree again, and he got a variety of people as contacts, men and woman who spent a day or an afternoon accompanying him and taking him under their wings, but he hadn’t made friends with any of them. He saw Kree as having a special status. He did not take it too far. He went to her apartment; he helped her out a bit from time to time. He climbed up onto her building’s rooftop terrace to exterminate the spiders. He cemented a broken step in the darkness of the fourth-floor staircase. He was trying, so far without success, to dig up some glasses for her that would suit her weak vision. He never ventured into subjects that were ambiguous or obscene.
Sometimes Kree wondered whether, all things considered, they shouldn’t lie down one alongside the other, take off their clothes and have sex, but since she didn’t really want to and he didn’t suggest it, they never did so. She spoke to Myriam Agazaki about it. Myriam Agazaki did not encourage chastity. Glowing from her Tibetan, she advised Kree to try the experiment, at least once. Kree objected that Griz Uttikuma had made a vow of abstinence so as to remain faithful to Smoura Tigrit, the egg called Smoura Tigrit. The conversation wandered then, over nightmares brought on by the war, over the birds, the floating worlds, magical worlds, parallel worlds. Myriam Agazaki lamented the insane visions that came upon men traumatized by the horrors of the front and the black space in general. Apocalyptic visions of flames, cadavers, an infinite march through infinite landscapes of ash. Not all had lived through abominations connected to eggs, to imprisonment in an egg or undying love consecrated to an egg. In this, Gomchen and Griz were a bit different, and their nightmares did not connect to anything with real consistency out of Kree’s memory or Myriam Agazaki’s memory. “I like them very much,” Myriam Agazaki would say, “they’re our comrades in disaster, but there’s something in their heads what sure isn’t working right. They’ve accumulated some bad muck what rots their lives. It messes up their common sense.”
Kree liked Griz Uttikuma very much, and when he had finished his reeducation, she had him come over even more often. She appreciated his solidity, his lack of sexual aggression, the consideration he showed for her. She had nothing to reproach him with, except for his neglectful attitude regarding Loka. He acted as though the dog did not exist. Even when Loka came to rub against his legs or gave his hand a lick, he did not react in any way. No pat on the back, no pets, not even a furtive one, not the slightest glance. He ignored her. The dog did not take offense, but Kree had ended up feeling a certain resentment. Loka was an important part of her life, and she didn’t understand why Griz refused to take any notice of her.
A friction persisted between them on this topic. It was natural that things about their past existences remained unsaid, but less natural when it came to things about the present. One day, as she was dividing a piece of soaked pemmican in three equal portions, one for herself, one for him, and one for the dog, Kree even asked Griz about his relations with dogs, and, in addition, what he thought of Loka. Griz, ordinarily very sure of himself in his answers as well as in his silences, suddenly hesitated for a long time.
“Loka, yeah . . . Her, it’s something else.”
He bent his head without saying anything. His gaze wavered. Then he continued:
“But dogs, you know, I don’t like to touch them. The memories are too bad. One night someone sent dogs after me. Four of them. I killed all four. Even when the dogs they’re big, even when they’re fierce, I can do that. As long as they don’t get to your throat you can do that. But that means cracking their joints and you feel sorry for them. The dog’s suffering is horrible and you feel sorry for them. In my hands the feeling is still there, what I’m dismembering them. Dogs when they come near me, always I feel like I’m tearing them apart.”
Kree didn’t want to know anything more. She, too, knew the technique for taking down a fighting dog at close quarters. Take advantage of the moment when the dog has immobilized its jaws in empty space to grab it by the paws and violently wrench them. A very short time. She had done it, too.
Griz was not talkative when the topic was Smoura Tigrit, either. Kree sometimes tried to imagine Griz’s relationship with an egg, and the vow of abstinence he had made in the presence or in memory of this egg, but nothing came to mind, no image, and, after a half minute of wandering, she gave up on the subject, considering it too freighted with madness, too worrisome and sickening. It was one of the numerous rifts between the two of them that she had given up on crossing.
But sometimes she returned to Smoura Tigrit and spoke of her as if Smoura Tigrit were a missing woman. He did not unburden himself, but a few phrases escaped him, always the same ones as the conversations flowed by, as the weeks flowed by. Their dialogue was strange, but in the end they did not always avoid it, in the end they trusted each other enough to approach the topic and make Smoura Tigrit a topic of conversation that did not upset them, perhaps because Griz’s lies were perfectly established and perhaps because Kree, who held no illusions as to their veracity, made no effort whatsoever to dismantle them.
A conversation similar to this one:
“So you, you lived in an egg, too?” she would ask, gently, as if she attached no importance to the question.
“I’m not the first,” he would say discreetly. “And not the last either.”
“For a long time?”
“You don’t count the time. You suffocate.”
“You remember everything?”
“When? When you’re in the egg, or afterward, when you’ve gotten out?”
“Both.”
“Inside the egg you suffocate. You think you’re going to die. You think you can’t get out. You don’t think you’re going to be reborn. You think about your whole life beforehand, you remember that. Your entire awful life beforehand, up until your death. You might not have any air but memories you’ve got.”
“And then, when you get out?”
“When you get out, right away you’re plunged into the terrible life of the world. The outside world. You don’t have time anymore to remember what it was like, life before the outside.”
“But you remember the egg, you remember Smoura Tigrit.”
“Yeah, sure, I wasn’t able to forget it.”
That sort of exchange. In the afternoon, the morning, the night. Griz might come at any time. Kree was always happy to welcome him.
Or this dialogue, about Smoura Tigrit:
“One day Smoura Tigrit she came into my egg. We were both suffocating, the two of us. We shared the air between the two of us. We were squeezed together.”
“Did she talk?”
“Not much. She spoke so I would swear a promise. After the promise we had memories what they were the same. We were too much together to tell the difference. I promised fidelity and abstinence. She left first, before me. She left under the rain.”
“Under the rain?”
“Yeah, under the rain, in the mud.”
“What was she like?”
“The mud?”
“No. What was she like, Smoura Tigrit.”
“I don’t remember. But I promised. I remember the promise.”
“And now where is she? Are you going to look for her?”
“I promised I would find her. I don’t know where she is now. I know she is far away, I know she is close. I’m waiting. She might be looking, too. One day we’ll find each other. I get dizzy sometimes. Myriam Agazaki she predicted not too long until I die. Maybe I’m dying one more time again soon and over there I find her. I’m dying soon and I’m looking for her until I find her.”
“And then?”
“Then what?”
“Then.”
“Then, nothing.”