When there’s nothing left to eat but rice, the Old Woman summons her two sons. Sevastian must go out on the hunt again and bring home rabbit or a deer. Osip sounds the foghorn, four blasts ring out – — — — then waits. Several hours later, Noé appears at the door for a few minutes carrying a torch, a stake, a wooden mallet; she breaks up the ice and melts any fragments that resist, taking care not to damage the hinges, singing as she works. These are the tower’s only moments of tranquility: the children glue their ears to the keyhole; they listen to the scraping against the icebound wood, their mother’s voice subdues them. When finally the door gives way, they want to throw themselves into her arms but don’t dare. There they are, the three of them filling the doorway. Calmly Noé puts away her tools; Sevastian steps over the children’s small bodies, walks outside, and closes the door behind him. Before he decamps to the woods, he topples his wife into the snow and takes her right there. The children hear their grunting and sighs, and Osip watches through the spyglass. He wants to grab hold of his penis, but the wind on the gallery is too strong.
2
The sailors trudge into Seiche and leave deep prints with their wet boots. When they remove them, their toes are swollen and bright red or black and dead, the yellow nails detached; the flesh of their feet is puckered and bulges to their ankles. The cold spreads unimpeded from the sea to the village, it gnaws at men’s skin and freezes their eyeballs.
How is it possible, a summer so hot, a winter so cold?
The fog and snow obscure all light for twelve weeks. The silhouettes making their way across the sea look like ghosts rising up from the grey ice all around. As a child, Osip would head down to the docks each year and watch the spectres advance. As the sailors approached, they’d take form: brown faces; thin, flat eyelids; their beards, braided like women’s scalps, consuming their cheeks up to the eyes. They reach the banks more dead than alive, their eyelashes rigid with frost, their clothing as stiff as bones.
They don’t speak.
They’re frightening.
Seiche has two whorehouses and a clandestine bar open twenty weeks a year (twelve in the winter, eight in the summer). Here, in cabins made of barely planed boards, the cargo ship crowd resuscitates. The giants eat little, drink lots; they knock back beer in great gulps, foam trickling down their chins. They wipe their faces with their sleeves, then wring the fabric out over their pint glasses. They are brutes from seedy parts who signed up with the first passing tub; foreign flocks; merchants of tea and spices, lithe and squeaky-clean, standing to drink potato brandy from chipped cups; dice players who ante up worn coins or the beautiful Sabine, come down from the Cité for them.
Once thawed, the seamen tell stories of women and monsters.
Osip listens reverently, hidden between barrels that reek of cheap wine.
Sometimes someone will get up on a table, miming a siren’s hips or the attack of an octopus with his hands; he’ll raise his shirt and expose his side punctured by a narwhal’s tusk. Osip’s eyes open wide; he has no idea what a narwhal is, but it must be incredibly fierce to pierce a man as strong as this one.
Age ten, he stays for three days in the stench and the ruckus of the saloon. He doesn’t eat, and when it gets too much for him, he shuts his eyes, sleeps standing, propped up by kegs of beer. All around the din continues, only at dawn does the noise abate: it’s the silence of the helmsmen slumped over the tables that wakens Osip. He walks among the bodies and takes a closer look at the deformed features, the scars and wounds. Soon he learns to distinguish the scrap dealers from those who transport provisions. The first have deep cuts on their thumb and index finger — actually, it’s remarkable they still have all their digits — and the second are always ready to head out; they drink less, tell better tales, their stories evoking countries where cherry blossoms fill trees. As soon as the ice weakens, they’ll return to their boat to break up the floes with the hull of their ship and open the way for the others.
On the fourth morning, a tall, slim fellow — his neck long and slender like a woman’s, his skin black, his cloak pale grey and lined with fur — springs to his feet as Osip walks by. The boy gives a start and jumps back, then trips over a gruff bear of a man slumped over his pitcher of beer.
— You got somewhere to live?
Osip gives a half-hearted nod.
— Go home.
Osip doesn’t move. He looks at the gold jewelry shining around the man’s throat, wants to speak, but his lips are thick.
— You’re not made for the sea.
Osip rubs his eyes, they’re sticky and itchy and he has trouble opening them fully.
— Noise scares you. You’d rather go hungry than steal a piece of bread off a table. Go home.
The man lowers his head. The day before, he’d heard two seamen talk of carting the boy off to their rust bucket once the ice melted.
— You’ll starve to death on the ocean.
— I want to see things.
— There’s nothing to see. The world’s the same wherever you go. Ports, smooth water, rough water, women who’ll open up for change and wail when you take your leave. Everywhere the same, I tell you.
Osip doesn’t budge. The mariner turns, rummages through a large canvas bag, then holds out a lacquered box embossed in gold.
— This is what I carry on my ship. You, you think it’s pretty, mysterious. I’ve got six hundred others identical to this. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. I’ll give it to you if you go home and don’t come back.
Osip’s heart is pounding in his throat, he feels a sudden rush of heat, and his mouth goes slack as though his tongue has lost its shape. He’s never owned anything as precious as this. Gingerly, he takes the box, stares at it a while, then slips it inside his coat, hides it under his sweater. On his way out, he decides to give it to his mother as a present. The eldest has never brought back anything this beautiful for her. But then the idea of parting with the box becomes unbearable and he presses it tighter to his belly. Its texture is cold and smooth. At first, he walks slowly, often turning back to look at the grey wooden cabin; the black man stands in the doorway, isn’t going anywhere. At one point he shouts, “Put the leaves in hot water.”
Osip hasn’t eaten for days. He walks into the house, chews stale bread and collapses beside Leander, who’s asleep on the mattress in the little bedroom. The box jabs him in the ribs. He keeps it there.
3
It’s the same box Osip fills every autumn with the leaves Sevastian brings him back from Seiche. Winter passes and the stock of tea dwindles. Come springtime, he must find other sources of pleasure. Reclaiming Noé’s body, turned cold and white by the north wind; counting the ships that didn’t survive the ice; sounding the horn to scatter the flocks of geese sweeping through the sky.
Once the frost eases, the children go outside. The lighthouse is Osip’s again. He spends days alone by his lantern. The spyglass takes the place of his right eye and the sun weathers his face, leaving a pale circle beneath one eyebrow.
He prefers the boys from a distance.
The youngsters have lived one on top of the other for too long. As soon as the Old Woman lets them go, Abel races toward the forest. He’s off like a shot the minute the door opens, wanting nothing to do with the beach; he only stops once, in front of Noé’s cabin, stands at the foot of the porch — unlike other years, his mother’s house is shut tight — and stays put for a moment, wonders if he should knock. In both hands, he’s carrying the rabbit snares Sevastian taught him to make during the weeks of cold. Osip observes him from above. The boy sets foot on the first step, changes his mind. He glances over his shoulder, then sprints for the forest again. He finds the hideout under its protective winter layers, pulls away the carefully placed pine boughs and sweeps up the brown needles, then sets his traps, prepares for summer.
Seth, he runs for three days straight. Anywhe
re, in all directions, only stopping to climb trees or jump into puddles of melted snow. He doesn’t share his brother’s qualms; he climbs onto the porch, pounds on his mother’s door, doesn’t wait for an answer, clambers up barrels, hitches himself onto the roof, slides back down the eavestrough, runs a few laps through the forest, then returns to the sea; steps over Dé eating sand, leaps from one rock to the next, doesn’t slip on the wet seaweed or slick stones. Later, once he’s burned off the winter’s excess energy, he drags home branches and bark, begs the Old Woman for wool scraps, then makes miniature boats that he launches onto the waves and watches as they run aground.
Sometimes the cloud cover thickens and turns a dark black, storms a frequent occurrence during spring’s high tides. The little ones have to be rounded up inside the tower. Sevastian slings Abel over his shoulder, the boy’s forehead banging against his father’s back. He’s shouting and laughing at the same time; he wanted to watch the storm from his hideout.
All night long, jellyfish are swept up in the breakers. By morning, they lie swollen like blisters on the smooth face of the beach.
Noé half-opens her door. Her head pokes through and the sun strikes her face; she shuts her eyes but keeps her nose in the light, breathes the salt-laden breeze. She stands motionless in the doorway, as if her body craves the shelter inside but her head refuses to return to the lair.
Cautiously, she makes her way outside. She’s not ghostly and emaciated like a hibernating animal. She does a full tour to measure the distance that separates her from each of her children. All of them have returned to their respective territories. Mie is the closest at hand, but other than in the evening, she never really comes near. Noé stakes her claim to the beach again, gathers up jellyfish in her pails. Mie makes her own footprints in the sand, walks in her mother’s for a while, then drops to the ground. Osip glances at the young girl lying on the beach but turns back to his woman, a giant silhouetted against the mist. Noé bends over. Noé straightens up. Noé gathers medusas the way the Old Woman does mushrooms. The pails bang against her thighs with each step; water runs down her skirt and pastes the fabric to her skin.
Soon enough, she is standing by the steps to the cabin, her enormous buckets filled to overflowing. One moment she’s holding a bucket in each hand, in the next they drop; it takes just a few seconds for her knuckles to give way under the weight of the pails that tumble to the ground. There’s water everywhere and, lying in the puddles, the indestructible blue spheres and their stinging tangle of tentacles.
Noé stares at her wrists, her fingers, lifts her arms to the light as though they were foreign to her. She turns, looks for something to explain what has just happened. There is no one; Mie is still lying in the waves, Seth’s bobbing around near his sister, Abel is off somewhere in the forest. Noé looks at the tipped-over pails and bends to pick up the jellyfish, folding herself into three — her shoulders, her pelvis, her knees — grabs the beasts bare-handed, her skin erupting in red blisters. She’s relieved: this pain can’t reach her.
She vomits.
Osip is watching from the gallery. He should go down but doesn’t budge, paralyzed at the sight of Noé’s clumsiness, her erratic movements, and the folly of her grabbing the jellyfish without protecting her fingers.
Once the flaccid bodies have been gathered up, she withdraws inside, shuts the door and goes to ground.
For days, she doesn’t resurface.
The black umbra of the ice is imprinted on the sand. The packs have melted, nothing remains but the ashes and dust that hid in their iridescent blue. Among the dead grasses, green spikes are emerging; their stalks quiver with the passing of birds and crabs. Here and there along the shore: traces of the pyre not yet extinguished by the wind. The whale carcass has been eaten by the family and by other passing creatures; slowly the sea washes over its bones and swallows them up one by one.
Osip turns his gaze to the beach. He’s seated at the top of the tower with the spyglass around his neck and doesn’t know what to focus on. Spectacles such as the flight of white geese in group formation no longer interest him, nor do the tails and the spouting of cetaceans above the waves, the waddling of porcupines descending from the forest at low tide, or the alighting of huge eagles on the lantern before they sectione for their prey.
What he really loves is watching Noé watch these same things.
Which leaves Mie. The little girl resembles Sevastian to an unpleasant degree — she has his flat nose, his pale round eyes. Some mornings, she sits herself down on the stairs in the tower and waits for the Old Woman to plait her hair. On these days, she’s a blend of her grandmother and her father; at times Osip watches her, unable to imagine what is going through her child’s head, wonders what she can be doing as she sits, immobile for hours at a time, amid the cranes of the northern cove or, immobile again, at the mouth of the river. Maybe, like him, Mie is lost. She’s used to hanging onto her mother’s skirts, only this spring her mother is nowhere to be found.
Osip lets his spyglass wander over the shore. Time devours everything: the days slip by, identical, even the ships leave him cold. He stops comparing the letters on their sides to the markings on the coins he keeps in his desk.
Several times, he heads down and knocks on Noé’s door. She doesn’t answer. He enters anyway. With each passing year, the cabin fills a little more with disquieting objects he tries not to see. He concentrates on her alone, touches her, lays her down on the bed and wraps himself around her. She must have lived off lard all winter long: her breasts hang heavy on her chest. She surrenders, but with greater resistance. Once he has finished, he no longer tidies the cabin; that has become impossible. He departs, leaving the door open behind him. He wishes that Noé would step outside and give meaning to his days again, but she pulls the sheets around her body, drags her way to the door, and slowly shuts it.
Osip returns to his lighthouse.
As leaves bud, unfurl and turn green in the trees, the ocean changes colour. Grey in winter, it veers to blue, then swells with turquoise and glimmers, darkens to cyan, to ultramarine, and then, in August, shifts to cerulean. Days pass, nothing happens.
* * *
One morning, Osip walks into the lighthouse kitchen and finds the eldest’s daughter there. She’s seated by the table, almost as though she’s waiting for him. She sits motionless, her child’s hands in her lap and her face, slightly round and slightly angular, calm and serious. When he enters, she murmurs, “Ah.” He pauses before her for a moment, then heads over to the hearth, puts water on to boil, pulls roots from a jar that he’ll infuse as he waits for teatime. When he turns, Mie is standing so close behind him that he gives a start. Her feral girl’s braids haven’t been redone for days, and she’s crowned with hair run amok. She examines him head to toe, her cheeks red, her body taut, her dress torn at the knees, her legs bitten by flies. She’s been twelve for ten days and she says, “I want you to teach me human sex.”
He wonders how much courage it must take for the little one to keep looking him in the eye. He wonders if a girl raised in Seiche would have asked such a question and, out of the blue, thinks of the boys wolfing down shellfish and sleeping in earthen hideouts.
Mie is twelve.
She is his brother’s daughter.
He says, “No.”
Then he skirts around her and heads up the tower stairs, tries to climb slowly but all he wants to do is run, to get as far away as possible from her blond aureole and scabbed elbows. He manages to take his time, closes the office door without slamming it, pulls the bolt and then, laying his ear against the keyhole, he listens, strains to hear Mie’s steps on the stairs, the distinctive scrape of her heels against stone, the heavy door of the lighthouse opening and closing.
4
Mie spends the first seven months of her life fastened to her mother’s flesh. When the snow melts, Noé uncouples her from her side. She must pry away the fingers
Mie wraps around her hair, remove her mouth from her breast and reacquaint her own belly, protected as it has been by the baby’s warmth, to the cold of the air. She lays the child in a wicker basket and crosses the spit of sand to the lighthouse. She doesn’t enter. She pushes open the door, sets the basket down on the sill and shoves it inside as far as possible. The little one is wrapped in shawls and scarves, her pale curls hidden under a kerchief; she lies for hours in her threadbare swaddling clothes, doesn’t cry, doesn’t babble. The Old Woman, laden with pine brush and branches, discovers her on her return from the forest.
She trades one load for the other, leaves the brushwood in the entrance, carries the basket up to her son, sets it down in the middle of the kitchen, waits. Brought up short, Osip stares at his niece. She has a fold where her wrists should be, as though her hands were thrust into the end of her arms without taking the time to match one appendage to the other. She breathes green bubbles from her nose. Osip tugs at a corner of his sleeve and wipes her tiny nostrils. He doesn’t understand how something so little can be so finely detailed: lips, forehead, ears, almond eyes. The child has her own distinctive traits, a serene, serious face.
He leans over her and she smiles.
He wants to touch her but doesn’t know how. For a moment, he holds a tentative hand over the basket, reaches out, then pulls back — not that the baby looks overly fragile — then clasps her belly. The little one slips, but he catches her. Which is when the Old Woman takes the child from him, grabs his wrist, bends his arm, places it against his torso and settles Mie there, her silky skull in the crook of his elbow, his huge man-paw underneath her miniscule knees.
The Body of the Beasts Page 8
