The infant falls asleep with a smile, it drools, a soft rattle to its breath already.
Osip takes over the care of the eldest’s child. Every time Sevastian returns from the forest, he snatches her from Osip, cuddles her, this daughter who looks like him, but the minute he tires of her, he lays her back down in the basket or holds her out to his brother. Osip’s heart starts beating again.
Often, he takes Mie to the lantern with him. The little one doesn’t move around much, just crawls a bit, creeping on all fours and staring at animals. She peers at birds perched on the railing, breaks into laughter when they fly away. If she whimpers, Osip changes her, tickles her ribs with his big finger, and she smiles; when nothing soothes her, he lays the baby on his stomach. His belly is soft, his heart beats slowly; she falls asleep listening to the rumbling against her side. He walks back to his spyglass, to the eldest’s woman bathing naked in the waves; the baby is a warm blanket protecting him from the sea’s squalls.
5
“Look here, your woman’s with child.” The Old Woman is frowning and shaking her grandmother’s finger, speaking as though it’s plain to see. “Sevastian, find me what I need to knit a new blanket.”
Osip is speechless. It never crossed his mind that Noé secreted herself away because she was expecting. With every other pregnancy, she’d kept on with her life till the little ones slid out from between her legs.
“She’s twenty-five weeks on,” the Old Woman adds.
Osip smiles. Newborns are what he likes best, babies he can hold in his hand, who need nothing but mash and their father’s skin.
Osip smiles, his brother calculates.
Twenty-five weeks, that’s six months. Sevastian counts back — August, July, June, May, April, March. This is a February baby, conceived in the snow while Osip was watching over the flock in his tower. Over the winter, the younger brother doesn’t venture out.
Osip smiles again, obligingly, when Sevastian states, “This child is mine.”
Standing in the kitchen, Sevastian has spread the first fall supplies out on the table: a bag of rice, a kilo of sugar, three flasks for the Old Woman, tobacco for Noé, a blank notebook for his daughter. After the first storms, the trail leading to Seiche will be cut off: it always takes him a dozen trips to assemble all the provisions they’ll need.
Sevastian empties his pouches, pulling out a new ladle, tea, two kilograms of salt, a glass jar full of yeast, three bags of potatoes. He throws the package of tea leaves over to Osip and repeats, “This child is mine.”
VI
1
To start with: her ankle boots, their leather weathered by time and their soles too heavy. Mie unlaces them the way she would at night, sitting on the end of the mattress. She has hidden her notebook recording her quest beneath it. On the floor are the drawings of the family tree she has made in the dust.
The laces are stiff with dirt and salt. It’s always a chore to untie their knots. When the lace gives, crusts of dried mud fall onto the floor and break into sandy crumbs. The Old Woman would tell her to get the broom and sweep it up, but she isn’t here, so Mie blows on the dust in order to scatter it more evenly across the floor. Her boots smell of wet leather; she likes the odour, pokes her nose under the tongue, inhales deeply, then throws them by the door. They land in a cloud of grey powder.
Her socks have turned red at the toes and around the heels. The irregularly shaped stains remind her of the maps Noé has drawn in her cabin. Mie takes the socks off one by one, rolling them down from her knees until they form two tight coils at the ends of her feet. She studies her toenails, tries to clean them with her thumb, twists her leg to smell the sole of her foot: not that bad.
She stands up, paces a little around the room. The great heron on the window ledge watches her with a bemused expression. She wishes she knew what order women normally follow when they undress. Might that have been something her great-grandmother taught the Old Woman before she slept with the Old Man? “First your blouse, then your skirt.” Or, “First your skirt, then your blouse.” What about her underwear? Fold it, lay it out, hide it away?
At night, she usually pulls her clothes over her head and leaves them balled up on the floor till the next day. Everything except her camisole and underpants. She doesn’t remember ever being fully naked in the lighthouse. Whenever she changes her underwear, first she puts on a slip, and whenever she changes her dress, she keeps her undergarments on.
She starts by taking off her skirt, folds it once, twice, against herself; the waist shrinks, the sides are still the same length. She lays it over the back of the chair. For the longest time, she stands by the window. They are two — she and the heron — examining her legs, ankle to knee: young maple saplings, as blond and downy as new branches.
Next, she takes off her woolen sweater, which she plans to fold and lay on the rocker over top of the skirt. Osip likes to rearrange Noé’s clothes and contemplate their interplay of colours and textures before concentrating on her skin. Mie has constructed an image in her mind: her clothes in a neat pile and her body beneath the sheet. She has imagined Osip discovering her clothing first — fall cotton and red knit — then her. She has convinced herself that the perfect pyramid of her clothes will change the way her uncle views her, but she isn’t able to fold her sweater right; it’s shrunken and shapeless, its neckline limp, distended under one arm, mended under the other. It doesn’t look like anything at all.
The heron keeps jabbing its beak in her direction then turning back to the sea. Mie imagines it’s making fun of her, or that maybe it wants to help. She asks, “Are you laughing at me?” and the bird shuts its eyes, stretches its wings even more.
Eventually, she rolls up the sweater in the bottom of a trunk and glances at the skirt — she likes it, at least — laid carefully over the back of the chair. She likes the way the grime fades from the hem to the waist. The fade in the fabric seems deliberate, so much has the dirt been absorbed by the cotton.
Wool underpants cover her thighs to the knee. The tail of her blouse hides a bit of her behind and the elastic in her skirt has left a mark around her waist. She has grown a lot this summer — her blouse gapes between the buttons. She has trouble undoing them without tearing the fabric, has to pull the sides together, suck in her belly and push each button through its hole.
Folding her blouse is easier. She smooths the collar down and makes sure it can be seen from the doorway.
Suddenly, she’s worried Osip will prefer the smell of Noé’s dresses to this tidy pile. She has often seen him plunge his nose into her mother’s clothes. She leans over her own that smell of nothing but wind and skin. She opens the Old Woman’s trunk, rummages among the scarves and shawls and finds, rolled up in a grey silk square, the pink perfume bottle she has seen her use from time to time. Carefully, she unwraps it, scrutinizes the vial, touches the atomizer — a long tassel of black thread hangs from the end of the spray pump. She pulls the pile of clothing over and gently presses down on the pump. Its fragrant mist shimmers like noon snow and then disappears, absorbed by the fabric. Mie buries her nose in the clothes. The perfume’s fragrance must have diminished with time. She pumps again, once, twice. Then stops, afraid the Old Woman will notice.
She wanders around in her camisole and underpants. Other than as a distorted reflection in rippling ponds, she has never seen herself from head to toe. She doesn’t know how her body looks and believes it to be more like Noé’s than it actually is. She’s aware that she’s not as tall and is slightly broader than her mother, but can’t quite manage to superimpose these differences on Noé’s appearance.
She approaches the window opening onto the sea. Red and grey ships pass close to the lighthouse and salute her uncle with a blast of their foghorns. She has never thought of him as a man of importance before. And yet he must be if these people from afar interrupt their routine to send him greetings.
The
scent of the perfume makes her head ache.
She can’t bring herself to shed the camisole. She sifts through the summer linens to find the diaphanous fabric she thought she’d cover herself with, then stretches out on the mattress, envelops herself in the translucent material and only then decides to remove the yellowed top that hides her body. Wrapped in gossamer, she gauges the transparency of the fabric by checking to see if the brownish circles of her breasts, her navel, and the hair below show through.
The heron has slid its head under one wing, whereas she, enveloped in the gauzy linen, keeps her eyes wide open.
2
Mie pushes on the door without knocking and enters the cabin like the wind. This is the first time she has ever set foot inside. She had bounded up from the shore, along the small path and up the stairs and — not even winded — onto the porch. She imagines herself to be the mist, the breeze, something free to roam anywhere without permission — and turns the doorknob. Then, as though this was nothing out of the ordinary, she gives the door a shove. It groans on its hinges and she walks over to the table made of planed planks of wood in the middle of the room. Only then does she come to a stop.
Now Mie is no longer a gust of wind, or a wisp of fog; she is herself standing in her mother’s lair.
At first she sees nothing. She smells the aroma of dried herbs, flowers, glue, mushrooms, and skins. Then her eyes become used to the half-light and she sees grey walls covered in drawings that have crumbled into dust, been washed out by water seepage, redrawn and moisture-stained once more. She immediately recognizes the sea, its flow and its meanders traversing the boards. She recognizes the forest, the clearings, and the paths to the cliffs, sees the trails taken by Sevastian and the brothers’ hideout, the hollows in the sand, the caves. A bed is propped against the wall. All paths are born here: the mattress is the cabin, the centre of the world.
The room is peopled with strange shadowy figures whose pupils, black as marbles, are turned on Mie. She furrows her brow and squints, tries to make out the monsters that share this lair. Slowly, they materialize: a half-dozen animals that seem to be alive but are well and truly dead. The creatures don’t frighten her. In one way or another, they are an extension of her mother. Even before she discerns them, Mie has fallen in love.
A fawn with giant bat wings outstretched on either side of its spine. The head, then torso, of a grey wolf that ends in a seal’s tail. The velvety antlers of a rabbit. The head of a buffalo adorned with crow feathers. A goose with the muzzle of a fox.
Mie draws closer, leans over an otter-salmon, lightly touches the barely perceptible seam between the two hides, one hairy, one covered in scales. The animal seems real. What kind of gaze does it level on the world? What would she see through its eyes? A string is tied to the end of its fin. Mie pinches it between her fingers and follows it to the wall. The string is fastened to a specific spot in the picture — a whitish atoll in the dark of the sea. After a while, accustomed to the half-darkness, she sees every strand linking the other beasts to pins on the walls. Seven creatures attached to as many islands.
In the centre, Noé reigns over them all.
If she looked up when she heard the little one enter, there’s no knowing now. Her neck strains toward her work, her forehead is bent over her hands. She is humming softly. She’s ensconced in an armchair, the springs of which offer no support, the seat hollow beneath her bottom. She’s busy sewing the spotted wings of an owl to the pelt of a hedgehog. Beside her, set out on a worn velvet cushion, are a squirrel’s tail and two pieces of polished jade. Once stuffed, the creature will fit in the palm of her hand.
Mie could never have conceived of so many curious objects gathered together in a single place. Jars of earth, bones, skulls; a ball that looks like the Old Woman’s skeins of wool but which is wrapped in thin, milky threads of spiders’ webs; canning jars; all sorts of herb bouquets hung by their roots; knives, wicker bags, oxidized copper pots and pans; hides stretched over windows and nailed to the floor; stars painted on the ceiling; misshapen pebbles and rocks; a teapot, two crystal glasses; straw and twig bundles; bowls of pine cones; an ivory pipe, jewelry, candles.
She lingers, looks around. She walks over to the fawn, touches its muzzle, the white insides of its ears. Its eyelashes quiver when she breathes on them. Its eyes are huge. Mie stares at the two black beads, imagines that this deer can also scrunch up its mind, plunge it into the skull of a human, and see the world through other eyes. The fawn’s bat wings are unfurled on either side of its spine, broad and powerful. Mie puts her hand on the membrane, then glides her finger to the claw of its thumb. She likes this animal, at once gentle and fierce, fragile on its skinny legs, strong with its open wings. Noé might have said, “It’s you,” though if she did she murmured the words so softly it all seems like a dream. But Mie looks at the fawn and knows. “It’s me.”
Three more beasts are her brothers. She recognizes them, and Osip and Sevastian too. The Old Woman must be the fox with a goose’s body.
It takes a long time before Mie remembers the reason for her visit — she’s transfixed by Noé’s precision, by her ability to comprehend the essence of her children despite not being familiar with their deeds, their strange habits, their voices, because she has hardly touched them at all, has not felt the way their hearts beat beneath their skin. But at last Mie steps closer to her mother, stands before her and says, “I asked Osip to take me like a woman.”
Noé’s fingers halt in mid-flight, her needle and thread like white fissures splitting the air. Mie thinks her hand beautiful, she likes the way its ring finger avoids touching the hide, its nails pink under the grime, the wrinkles on her knuckles accentuated by dust. Noé unkempt and full of grace.
— I asked Osip to take me like a woman.
Her mother raises her head. She says nothing, doesn’t look at Mie. She stares at the door open onto the beach and the sea. Her cheeks flush. Mie watches as they redden in the light streaming inside. Its radiance is carved into rectangles along the dark wall. Mie waits. The words need to find a way through the creatures, songs, and ocean maps. The path is long, the words need time. She stays put, her eyes as large as the fawn’s.
Finally, Noé inhales, draws the bottomless breath of an animal that is assumed to be dead but suddenly decides to breathe again. She speaks.
“You have to put jellyfish in a pit after a storm, otherwise the waves come back for them and flood the cabin.”
Mie wishes she had a response. Words bump up against her lips, she doesn’t know what to say, so she follows up with her other sentence.
“Maybe that way he’ll leave you alone.”
Noé hears, or perhaps she does not. She says, “If you want to spool spider webs, then you have to wait for dusk.”
Mie brings her fingers to her mother’s face, to her mottled features, her soft hair, brown, auburn, and white. Noé is like the stuffed animals, her eyes two black and piercing beads unwavering in the dark, her ankles sturdy despite their slimness, her skin pocked like a fish’s, strength in her neck, breast, and shoulders. She doesn’t react. Mie touches her cheek.
“You must leave at least the length of an arm between a fire and the cauldron or the lard will burn instead of melting.”
The little one stays still. Her fingers begin to tingle as if medusas were living beneath her mother’s skin. Her mother’s jaw clenches against her palm. Noé says, “Wash the bones. Always wash the bones with river water and salt,” then returns to her work. Mie is sure she’s creating the animal that will depict the child she’s carrying. A hedgehog-owl with a squirrel’s tail. She senses it will be a girl. Silent joy brings a rush of warmth. She’d like to know whether, before she was born, her mother created the fawn in the same way. How does she know the temperament of a baby before it is even thrust into the world? Or is she the one who creates it? She sews the wings onto the prickly fur, her awl piercing the skin, the thr
ead disappearing between the quills. This beast is quite unlike the fawn; its feathers are folded against its side and purely decorative, the possibility of flight aborted.
Mie is mesmerized by the silver flash of the needle in the darkness of the cabin. She watches her mother steady her arm against her belly and sew. Mie sits on a corner of the table, her feet dangling, slivers of wood piercing her thighs.
She breathes and her ribs open, a long, slow intake of air. She exhales, her torso stiffens and hollows out, her skeleton lengthens as do her spine and her head.
She tries something new. In the same way she became the bear, the otter, the crane, the crab, she becomes the cabin.
She feels between her walls the wild pulsating of her mother’s blood. A force, contained by partitions, that spills toward the ceiling, the door, and would break the windows and whip like a storm along the beach and as far as the lighthouse were it not kept in check. Its power is staggering to Mie, totally unanticipated. In taking on the spirit of the house, she thought she would grasp the life of its boards, the work of humidity on its wood, the mould eating away at the frame, the wind in the curtains, and just maybe, with a bit of luck, she would be able to tap into a little of Noé, see the traces of Osip’s visits, gain insight into their encounters. But her mother fills and overflows this space. Noé is the one securing the stones, making the glass tremble, distending the cushions’ fabric, swelling the doors. The cabin stays standing through her will alone.
Mie would like to focus on the objects. Contemplate them one by one, analyze the drawings on the walls, tame the spirit of the stuffed creatures, guess at what lies hidden in the urns and jars. But she can’t. Blood pounds in her ears, her throat tightens, a shiver courses through her arms from scapula to shoulder to elbow — something is crushing her ribs and her lungs. She has trouble breathing, collapses.
The Body of the Beasts Page 9
