The Body of the Beasts

by Audrée Wilhelmy

  This cabin will not be observed.

  The floor is covered in sand. This is the first thing she notices when she opens her eyes. The rough texture against her face. And then, she hears her. Noé, singing. Mie lies for eons on the ground, swaddled in her mother’s voice uniting the two of them, her future hedgehog sister and her, in the cabin returned to stillness.

  3

  Along the dock, tall vessels

  In sea swells silently tilting

  Fail to guard against cradles

  That women insist on rocking.

  Ensconced in the bed in the lighthouse, Mie tries to remember the rest of the words her mother sang in the cabin, but she can’t. She does remember lying there for a long time, slumped in front of the goose with a fox’s head, able to drag herself from the room only once Noé too had left it to watch the sun drop into the waves. She’d started by crouching under the table, her mother silhouetted against the light in the doorway — her skirts, her hair, her arms long and lithe like rope, her fingers skinny cords knotted at their ends. Mie glanced at the objects piled up on the shelf across from her and spotted a long, flat, narrow container. Staying low to the floor, she drew near, grabbed it, and slid it into her smock. Even though it was made of wood, the tobacco box kept clinking like metal; she went out the back way and, leaning against the wall of the cabin, opened the box — the small hinged lid inlaid with ivory and jade — and tipped its contents into her lap. A white feather, a copper sphere attached to a lock of black hair, a desiccated queen bee carefully wrapped in a piece of black fur. She didn’t have time to grasp the meaning of her discovery; the bushes shook and she stuffed everything into her pockets. Abel appeared and rushed over, wanted to know what she’d found in the house. He followed her to the beach, saying over and over, “Tell me.”

  4

  Picture our forest. See it stretching into the distance, farther than you can walk in a month’s time. Imagine the trees Sevastian has never seen, so remote are they, beyond mountains, beyond rivers, beyond lakes we know nothing of, their water as clear as that of the lagoons. It’s our forest, but it is infinite. The clearing is golden and grey. The ferns are autumn red. Leaves drop onto rocks. A brook cuts the clearing in two; its current has eaten the soil away. A pond lies in the shelter of a pine tree.

  Watch the black stag, his muzzle deep in the water. Have you seen how his hide is like the night? You have never encountered an animal like this, with antlers so tall and fur so dark. He is the only one of his kind, he lives deep in the forest where no one ventures but other beasts.

  He is our grandfather.

  He drinks. Look through his eyes. Do you see the glimmer of sunlight in the pond? Does the light remind you of the flame of a candle reflected in a window? It is dusk. Our grandmother paddles, her white wings like winter snow. There are no other swans in the forest. The crows say she fled from a castle’s pond and followed the twists and turns of the creek to the clearing here. When Grandfather Stag catches sight of her, the sun’s rays strike her plumage and she is sequined in gold.

  This is the story of a black stag and a swan who love one another, give birth to a daughter, and are devoured by wolves. The wolf pack raises the child until she falls into the river and is swept away to the sea, where she is taken in by a whale, who carries her on its back to humankind’s shore. Mie invents the story as she goes, picking up the objects around her that serve as her inspiration: the white feather she found in the tobacco box, branches like antlers spat out by the waves, a stone in the shape of a fish. She doesn’t want to talk about the creatures she discovered in the cabin, so she imagines something slightly different, better. As Abel showers her with questions, she sits on a dead tree trunk the sea deposited overnight, smoothed and burnished by salt and sand. She says, “This is the story of Noé.” And adds, “This is the story of where we come from.” Now she tells the tale.

  Grandmother Swan wraps her neck around Grandfather’s rack. With her beak, she caresses the black coat no one has seen on any other stag. Can you feel the soft caress of her feathers along the dark male’s fur? Their manner of loving is like nothing else in the forest.

  Mie doesn’t speak quickly, often she coughs. Her eyes pass from one brother to the other; she holds herself tall, turns her head this way and that, her hair a tempest around her scalp, her brow furrowing and smoothing out incessantly. Then she rises to her feet, sticks two branches in her headband, and walks as she always has, a little awkwardly and without grace. She has put her arms out in front of her belly, bends over and circles around the boys, swaying left then right; she’s a big, clumsy stag clasping the white feather, she brushes her brothers’ faces with its barbs.

  The sun begins its descent, turning both the beach and the children’s blond hair red.

  Wolves have clamped onto Grandmother Swan’s throat and decapitated her. Imagine the pleasure of fangs sinking into tender flesh. They shake her long white gullet, her beak striking the air then their flanks again and again; they let the blood run across their tongues and drip onto the snow. Her final shreds of skin tear away. To one side are her skull and half of her neck, to the other, her body. Her legs are slack, her outstretched wings have fallen back against her sides. All of Grandmother lies splattered on the ground. Can you feel the shiver of joy coursing through the pack? Imagine the pleasure of this warm soup in winter. Imagine the pleasure of pulsing entrails swelling with the fat they need to confront the cold. The pack devours her breast and her belly. It is beneath her carcass that they find the little girl, covered in blood and feathers. They eat her mother greedily and the stag, her father, his eye sockets empty and his viscera scattered across the clearing, lies a few metres away.

  Mie tells her tale. Abel plays with a stick and a length of rope. His fingers keep busy; he’s not watching what he’s doing, all his attention is focused on his sister’s voice and her bizarre dance. In the meantime, his hands make a fishing net all on their own. Seth’s legs are crossed, right foot under his left thigh, left foot under his right. His splayed knees tap against the ground, but otherwise he is calm. At one point, Noé passes close to the two of them, a large grey phantom against the open sea. She has covered her shoulders with the skin of a deer, her hair tumbles down her back, her heels sink into the sand. She disappears into the dunes beyond the trees by the cliffs.

  The she-wolf steps forward to take a bite of the child. The little one stares at her without blinking. She doesn’t cry. She is enveloped in her mother’s wing, naked against the soft, spattered feathers.

  Some time later, Sevastian appears along another path that leads from the lighthouse to the forest. On his back: an empty pouch, a metal bow. Mie likes his woodman’s shoulders. He waves at them before vanishing between the trees.

  If you are the whale, you feel a tiny little something tickling you. Imagine an ant on your leg, a button falling onto your belly. The little girl is no bigger than a stray pebble when she hits the flukes of your tail. The whale turns its pupil toward the something; she floats among the seaweed, she is blue and white.

  Finally, it’s Osip who makes his way down. He hesitates on the path. Mie thinks he’ll follow Noé to the cove, he only ever steps onto the beach for her. But he stays where he is, paces behind the young brothers, never coming to a stop, his footprints endlessly erased by the waves. He doesn’t come close enough to hear the story, but instead observes from afar. Mie keeps seeing him in the periphery of her gaze, the face of a man staring at her, and suddenly she begins to quake, her story unravels, the boys don’t listen quite as hard.

  She walks through cities full of shadows. She could have made out people in the play of light, but she sees nothing but obstacles. She is the daughter of a stag and a swan. The movement of her feet is a dance to avoid colliding with humans. There are white fountains and pink stones, houses taller than the cabin, as big as the lighthouse, arrows pointing to the sky, long grey shapes that evoke the sea. Forests are caged in by stakes.
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  A blast of wind from offshore bears the white feather aloft and carries it away. Abel, Seth, Mie: all three look up, follow it as it swirls out to the sea and, as Abel rushes into the water to retrieve it, Osip gathers the courage to move in closer. He pulls Mie by the arm, says nothing at first and then blurts out, “Okay you know the thing you asked me for the other day in the kitchen I’ll show you tomorrow after the noon ships.”

  5

  Every sound suggests the tapping of heels on the stone of the staircase.

  Not one is a footstep.

  Mie waits in her bed.

  She stares at the heron unfurling its wings on the window ledge. Beneath the sheet, she discovers the nakedness of her legs rubbing against each other, the soft, pale down of her calves, the rough skin on either side of her knees. Cold palms on warm thighs.

  She is familiar with her body when it is clothed. She has probed it beneath her garments and woolens; she has explored it despite the impediment of underwear (her hand blocked by the seam in her underpants, harsh fabric against her knuckles). She knows her lips and their flower shape, the slit as hollow as a swamp — when she inserts her fingers, they’re drawn further inside, like a foot sinking into mud that must then be tugged out — and the crack between her cheeks less moist than the rest, and the tangle of hairs. What she discovers, as she lies naked under the sheets, is the smallness of her body in the space of the room.

  She could leave. Join her brothers out hunting in the woods.

  The bird kicks against the window jamb.

  She dreams of living in the cabin, of making its treasures, windows, and ceiling her own. She wants the house to give itself up to her. The next time she sets foot inside, she will be a woman. Its walls will no longer resist her.

  Mie has found the words to use with Noé when next she confronts her. She repeats them several times over, speaking softly so that Osip won’t hear.

  — I know that you are bigger than Sitjaq.

  Facing the sea, the heron is about to soar away.

  — You are bigger than Sitjaq.

  She crumples up her being, clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and takes flight with the heron.

  VII

  1

  Noon’s shafts of light spill through the window. Osip’s thoughts have turned to the ephemera that gather in black columns on the shore come spring. Steam rises from his cup of tea the way the insects do from the ground. Ships cleave the waves and infiltrate the bay. He’s not watching the procession of red and white ships keeping time, daubs against the blue of sea and sky. He stays seated at the table his father made, takes tiny sips of tea. The leaves adhere to the rim of the cup; when they stick to his lips, he spits them out.

  How long will Sevastian be gone? He said he was heading for the mountains by Circé. A four-day walk to fetch the sweet beans the boys so love. The Old Woman uses them to buy herself peace and quiet in the winter when nothing else works.

  His first infusion of the fall. He drinks, turning the cup slowly in the palm of his hand. As it empties, the leaves adhere to the porcelain and soon nothing is left but their black pattern. Osip sighs. Sevastian told him some women can read the future simply by looking at the image created there.

  Mie is waiting for him. At first, he thought she wouldn’t come, but before the tide nibbled away at the path, he saw her leave the forest and cross the spit of land below. For the past two hours, she has been downstairs in the deserted bedroom. He has waited a good while to see if she would leave. She has stayed.

  Dé is with the Old Woman picking mushrooms in the clearing. Abel is doing the rounds of the snares he has set in the forest. Seth is playing with a boat he must have built during the summer. The path will soon be entirely swallowed up by the sea: no one will be able to come or go from the lighthouse till mid-afternoon.

  The drying leaves have settled in the shape of a cauldron, maybe an octopus, Osip can’t decide which. He dips his finger into the cup, touches the leaves, swirls them about, but not too much. He’d like to tweak the pattern slightly, change his life by moving a few specks around the bottom of a cup.

  A ship blows its horn. Not a warning — a greeting. Osip doesn’t climb up to the gallery to reply. If he did, he’d be tempted to pick up the spyglass and train it on Noé’s cabin. And if he sees Noé, he won’t go down to Mie.

  More than anything, he wishes the bottom of his cup would tell a story other than his own.

  He gets up, and in doing so scrapes the chair along the floor so that the little one in the room below will be sure to hear him, then walks out of the office. On the threshold, he hesitates — the bedroom, or the lookout? He places one foot on the first step and pauses, his life may be at stake, then at last, he turns his back to the lantern, his heavy shoes sounding on the stone. He grips the railing as he descends.

  VIII

  1

  Mie is asleep. She dreams of eels turning into ropes becoming snakes, bolting to the sea to escape her fingers. The creatures writhe across the waves, she runs after them, they mustn’t disappear. She sectiones and water closes over her, soon she is fully immersed, the waves’ roiling rocks her and pulls her gently to the bottom.

  Her dreams always end the same way. She drowns. Both in the dream and in her bed, she has stopped breathing. Then her skin begins to burn, it feels like she’s being boiled alive when suddenly she emerges from her slumber as if from the swell. She snaps up to a seated position, takes in great gulps of air. Cold burns her throat and grips her lungs.

  Osip is coming down the stairs.

  The echo of his footsteps resounds throughout the tower. His heel strikes the stairs and three other heels respond — it’s as though an army of men is advancing on her room.

  Mie trembles a little as she tries to rearrange her body under her veil. She no longer remembers what the precise positioning of her hands and torso should be. She recalls having pointed her toes to make her sturdy child’s legs look longer, but nothing more. And so, her calves look slim and her ankles slender, but she can only improvise from her hips to her head. She shivers, her heart has got to stop palpitating like the wings of an ailing butterfly, she won’t be alluring if she coughs and twitches.

  Osip has stopped on the landing. She imagines his thick silhouette on the other side of the door, his hand suspended in the air, his fingers hesitating on the doorknob. His sleeves rub against his belly — a rustling like paper that reverberates against the walls — and he raises his fingertips to his chin, the skin blue and stubbly; maybe he should have shaved, he doesn’t know.

  Mie’s breathing grows quiet. Along the window frame, a spider has spun its web and caught a bee. Mie tips her head back to see the captive better. Its yellow and black are now grey with filament. Mie never borrows the body of beasts about to perish, but they fascinate her all the same. She listens to the last traces of sound, the aborted intake of breath. The bee doesn’t die straight away, but soon it ceases its vain struggle. Mie finds it beautiful even from a distance; she has observed insects up so close that she can imagine the details that cannot be seen from the bed: the bee’s hind legs, the baskets of pollen in perfumed cushions against its belly, its proboscis, its antennae.

  She thinks of Seth, who loves honey the way the Old Woman does liquor. She thinks of the desiccated bee she found in the tobacco box. A queen. When Noé smokes the bees out from the hives and gathers the jelly in matte clay jars, she sings —

  The bee softly buzzes

  Laying eggs so round,

  To the larvae, her children,

  She sings from the swarm.

  Quick, quick, little queens

  Grow your iridescent wings

  So mine in turn can sweep me

  Aloft into the forest of trees.

  Mie closes her eyes. She did once borrow the body of a queen bee. Surrounded by the swarm, she abandoned a hive full of worker bees
because a new monarch was about to hatch among the cells. She gave up the nest that had become too small, too crowded, and left with half the colony to settle elsewhere. It made Mie think of her mother, a layer of eggs bearing children she ignored. From the big lighthouse mattress, she remembers the flight of the swarm. Half of her little ones buzzed around her — a continuous, protective song — as she abandoned her home and left a newborn daughter with the hive and the other half of her offspring.

  “You are bigger than Sitjaq.”

  Something shifts.

  Osip still hesitates on the landing. A southerly wind traverses the sheet. The bee breaks out of the web, its wings thrumming, and the spider falls and slips behind a piece of furniture. The escapee flits aimlessly for a while, then disappears through the window.

  Mie feels her heart drop into her stomach. She keeps lying there, hasn’t budged; other than the fugitive pollen-gatherer, nothing in the room has changed.

  Noé, the daughter of a swan and a stag, is a snow-white doe, a buzzard, a salamander, a wolf, a siren, a whale.

  Noé is a queen of bees.

  The kind of queen who leaves without waiting to see whether the new sovereign will be strong enough to take her place.

  Noé has drawn all the trails of the forest, using charcoal for the ones the boys take, red clay for Sevastian’s paths, and nothing but water warping the walls for several other translucent routes Mie does not recognize. Noé says, “You must put jellyfish in a pit . . .” when Mie tells her “I asked Osip to take me like a woman.”

  Noé dictates the laws of nature and those of the cabin.