by Ananda Devi
The trains, too, stop. Antennae snap. No more communication. No more mobile phones. No more internet. No more signals of any kind circulating, racing, slipping from one to another, connecting people less and less than they think, orphaning them even to themselves. The precious abstraction of our modern life—energy in all its forms—buckles beneath the assault of this other primal, primary energy that is nature. Man, in his protective bubble, realizes that he has no way of defending himself and that nature has always been playing cat and mouse with him. In no time at all, with a casual flick, it can sweep away everything he has built and destroy it as swiftly as an animal’s curt shriek.
And Mary, too, of course … She who had always been so scared, so scared of the cold … she will be pierced, stabbed, impaled by it. Nothing will have prepared her for this, not even her deep-rooted dread of winter, especially the ferrous winter which was the most deceptive and the most implacable sort, not even the numbness as she waits at first, as her body prepares to shrivel up and crackle in extreme temperatures. No, this time, it bears no resemblance to what she had known. It is an archaic cold, come from ice ages long since forgotten but which have awaited an opportune moment to resurge. A cold that crushes the very memory of heat. That seizes blood in the very motion of its flowing and arrests it with a mortal jolt. That makes bodies strange to themselves even as they escape to this other reality where immobility is the only possible or even desirable state.
She becomes like the city: still, feeble, fragile. Barely convinced that she is still alive, she lies down; she lets herself be taken and invaded; she is ready to give herself over to this state that suddenly seems to be a gentle, almost euphoric, way to die. “Hypothermia,” she whispers as an incantation, feeling the corners of her mouth freeze. Her lips are no longer able to part. Her eyelashes stick to her eyelids. The usual pains give way to another sensation that she, in her sleepiness, cannot quite identify. Her legs have separated. She begins to turn blue.
After some time, she feels Cub’s presence. She tries to see him through the eyelashes that have crosshatched her vision.
“Are you there?” she asks. “Is that you, Cub?”
“It’s me and it isn’t,” he replies. “I don’t know what miracle made it possible for you to hide the truth of my own death. We all believed that illusion. People saw me, I’m sure of it. But you didn’t just see me, you touched me, caressed me, took me in your arms. You let me go on believing that I was alive, just a little, for a few more nights. I still remember that dizziness … You were a benevolent spirit who embraced me at the moment I was the most bereft, the most desolate. You forgot yourself for my sake. You walked into guilt and you did not waver.”
Cub kneels in front of her and sets his hand on the icy body. He has no substance, no materiality. What he gives is warmth as he brings her limbs back to life, sets her blood flowing again with a pleasant pain through her blue fingernails and fingers, her bruised phalanges, her thighs crisscrossed with veins like cracks in an antique porcelain vase, her weak, slow, sad shoulders, her neck rigid with shame, her lips which had silently rejected what was beneath the surface, a sensual burn, an inexhaustible thirst within her body for bodies, for flesh, for nearness, for invasion. He plunges into Mary to return what she had given him, and their joy is brief but complete.
Finally she stretches her limbs and stands up again.
She has only just understood what he told her earlier. She tries to remember that night, but she cannot. She has a vague impression of a body up in the attic, but no, it was here, this body, with her, it was there, in her, there is no possibility she could be wrong about this.
“You have to go, now,” he says.
“Go where? I’d rather die here. I don’t have the choice. I was never alive. If you’re dead, then I’ve been dead, too, and for far longer.”
He feels, unfurling deep within him, a thousand icy blossoms.
ANANDA DEVI was born in Mauritius in 1957, and currently lives in France. She has published thirteen novels as well as short stories and poetry, and has won several literary awards, including the Académie française’s Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises.
JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN is the digital editor for literature of Music & Literature magazine. He previously translated Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins and his other translations include Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child.
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