The Body of the Beasts Read online

  She sits up in bed. The sheet slides down her belly and drops rumpled onto her thighs. She shivers as her back touches the cold stone.

  The bedroom is on the third floor of the lighthouse. It’s narrower than the rooms below, but when the waves are so high they breach the dike and hammer the tower, water doesn’t reach the apertures carved into its walls. The floor is taken up with a wide mattress stuffed with straw, feathers, and sand. Blankets have been thrown across it; at night, her brothers fight over a pink cotton comforter, worn but silky soft. Mie waits for them to start snoring before stepping over the Old Woman, Osip, and little Dé and then, without a sound, trading her bedspread for Abel and Seth’s quilt. In the winter Mie wonders if, in the crumbling cabin, Noé has what she needs to keep warm. On such nights she looks for birds flying into shore, but none appear before dawn. Distraught, she falls asleep by the window.

  The tower’s rooms are taller than they are wide. Above the bedroom, on the highest floor, Osip has set up an office. The logbooks and records for the lighthouse are filed in massive bookshelves built by Sevastian and mounted onto the walls, sheltered from waves and storms. Osip has placed his father’s work­table in the centre of the room and displayed all kinds of objects collected by former keepers there: foreign coins, binoculars and telescopes, magnifying glasses, compasses, and an astrolabe only Noé knows how to use. Osip spends his time either in this room, on the gallery, or in the lantern room, lugging his notebooks with him wherever he goes to jot down ships’ routes, their country of origin, their size, the temperature, the height of the waves, the tidal tables.

  Mie knows that Osip will leave his office to join her. She listens for his shuffling footsteps on the stairs and, at the sound of rustling, lies back and tries to strike a woman’s pose beneath the sheet. She has no idea how to arrange her hair and place her arms if she is to awaken desire. She thinks of Noé. She imagines her mother’s outstretched body when at last she falls asleep, exhausted from trekking along the cliffs, from Sevastian and Osip fighting over her, from all the children clamouring for her attention. Mie has never seen Noé relax. Still, she tries to imagine the sleep that overcomes her after dealing with the ardour of the two brothers, each in turn. Gradually, Mie finds the right angle for her hands, torso, and ankles, and then, more or less proud of her pose, she eyes the door.

  No one appears.

  She is alone with the thought of Osip.

  She tries to imagine how it will unfold, the way in which he’ll start to caress her, whether he’ll hurry or bide his time. Will he pat her cheek and her shoulder first, the way he does with the boys, the way he has done with her until today? She wonders what she would like. If he touches her belly straight off, will she be startled? The idea makes her tremble, whether from excitement or fear she’s not sure. Perhaps he’ll want to look on her before he tries anything. She pulls the sheet up closer to her chin. Her uncle will be gentle, he knows no other way.

  When he covets Noé, he descends from the lighthouse — his feet sink into the sand, he walks like a man who’s a stranger to the beach — and reaches the cabin. Mie finds a lizard, a bumblebee, borrows its body and observes Osip, watches him lead her mother over to the bed. All of a sudden, it’s as if Noé has become a malleable object; she has no will, she drops onto the mattress, facing the wall, her back to him. He removes her clothing, piece by piece, stares at the fabric of each garment to begin with, then the skin beneath them. He lifts her limbs, one by one, to remove her skirt and her blouse. Noé is without a spine; her arms fall to her sides the minute he releases them, he’s the one who lays her body down on the sheet. He frees the bun in her hair. Noé’s only movement is to hide her face, which she does without using her hands, turning her forehead so that strands of hair fall across her cheeks, over her eyes. Afterward, she doesn’t budge. Osip smells her clothes, her neck; he gathers up her garments, folds them, lays them down on a chair off to the side. Then he looks at Noé: the play of light across her skin, her scars, her shock of hair. Later he joins her, follows the swollen lines along her ribs, caresses her, strokes her head the way Mie pats the kittens, brushes the hair from her face, wanting to see all of her. Still Noé does not budge. She has vacated her body. Osip likes an empty shell. Once his mind is made up, he undoes his pants without removing them — Mie doesn’t know her uncle’s naked form the way she does her mother’s. He pushes against Noé’s white buttocks, grinds his pelvis like the wolves do, not for long — one, two minutes — then stops, sighs, and dozes off, his thick arms wrapped around Noé’s breasts, belly, and hips. She remains immobile, almost not breathing, her long dishevelled hair across Osip’s face and her own.

  Mie sinks into the sagging lighthouse mattress and, to calm herself, repeats over and over that she prefers her uncle to her father, who takes Noé abruptly, hiking up her skirt, pinning her to a wall, a tree, the ground. Sevastian-Benedikt mates like a stag or a drake, without preamble, in one fell swoop, then stands and returns to his forest. Noé stays put, whether on the ground or propped against the cabin; her elbows are scraped, she rubs them with her saliva, rights her dress, detaches wisps of hair from her face, wipes the sand from her cheeks.

  * * *

  Mie wants only to flee from the room so time will pass more quickly. She lies alone, air moving laboriously through her chest — not that she notices — shuts her eyes tight to listen to the sounds inside masked by the din of the waves. She strains to hear any buzzing or chirring announcing the arrival of an insect that might offer her a chance for escape. Silence. As though all creatures have abandoned her.

  She lies unmoving, in the position carefully chosen for her limbs.

  She rebuilds the tree in her mind. Sevastian-Benedikt is her father, Noé her mother. The Old Woman is Sevastian and Osip’s mother, and the younger Abel, Seth, and Dé may be her brothers or simply half a brother each. They have two fathers, which is to say none, as it is impossible to ascertain whether it was Sevastian or Osip who planted the seed for them in Noé’s body. All of which means that Osip must have started up with Noé after Sevastian, because otherwise Mie, like her brothers, would be unsure of her father. She is four years older than Abel, the second child, so somewhere between their two births, Osip took up with Noé.

  No one speaks of these things, evident to those in the know. It has taken a while for Mie to understand; she has drawn the family tree and its intertwined roots and branches in the sand dozens of times. Often, she has compared it to other trees — the trees of frogs or wolves, cranes, ducks, otters. Nowhere has she found anything similar.

  * * *

  —

  She points her toes to make her legs look longer. The angle of one elbow both obscures and reveals her heart, she has slid her other arm beneath her head and pulled her mop of hair behind her.

  She’s lost in thought. The offspring of other living creatures grow to assume their parents’ shape and strength. She has grasped the difference between the sexes. She need only watch Noé and learn the workings of her mother’s body to guess at the future of her own. She would like to look like her mother but has inherited nothing from her but her skin — unsightly marks accentuated by the sun; her face, arms, and trunk a mottled collection of brown and white constellations. At twelve, her face is nothing but freckles, thick lips, and pale eyes that stand out against the grime. Her solid frame, her blond hair, her limbs, all like her father’s. A snub nose, chalky lips, eyebrows and lashes that turn white in summer; no need for a family tree to know she is Sevastian-Benedikt Borya’s daughter in blood and body.

  In the bedroom, nothing. She counts the minutes for what seems like ages; she listens for sounds to herald her uncle’s arrival.

  Osip doesn’t appear.

  Sun filters through the narrow slits of the windows. The sea is alive with the calls of eider. Several hundred stop at the lighthouse, always on a journey elsewhere. In springtime, to Seiche; in autumn, out to the high seas. When ducklings
age, they become like the parent of their gender — the females resemble the mother, the males their father. Mie wishes it were all as straightforward with human beings, but the similarities among humans stop at their hidden organs.

  Mie will not grow up to become Noé.

  She sighs. Her hand under her skull has gone numb. Her carefully placed fingers curl, her arms fall to her torso, her knees bend, her chin drops.

  * * *

  She dreams she’s the beach.

  Her body of sand feels everything. By her navel, her little brothers grill rabbit on the embers of driftwood. Her father walks through her forest of hair, sometimes by her ear, sometimes her neck. The lighthouse stands beyond her ankles. At the tips of her toes, Osip keeps watch over the lantern. The Old Woman comes and goes on the path linking Mie’s feet to her belly, her son to her grandchildren; she carves the deep footprints of a heavy-set woman along Mie’s thighs.

  Animals traverse her dunes: lizards, marmots, raccoons, wolves, foxes, deer. Birds swoop by; sometimes she recognizes the draft beneath their large wings. Their landings tickle her but their claws leave no mark on her side. Her slumber continues. She feels the great movements that shape her from below; crabs and worms dislodge the soil and aerate it, tree roots drain the seawater, the surf carries old seeds out to sea and the waves bring in new ones. The dilapidated cabin lies heavy between her breasts. Its moulding timbers nourish the sand. Mie can discern the slow labour of carpenter ants, rodents, and termites breaking up the detritus to build their own nests.

  Noé is nowhere to be found. Glass beads, the planking of shipwrecks, and conches as small as fingernails: Mie feels everything, right to the raking of the ocean’s waves — but her mother, no. Her mother lives somewhere that is not the lighthouse.

  2

  It’s the wind that leads Noé to the sea. During a storm, schools of medusas are brought in with the swells and wash onto the shores around the lighthouse. The next day, Noé takes the path down from her cabin, runs her fingers along the dry grasses bordering the trail, steps onto the sand, and digs in her toes. Gusts of wind buffet her; she winds the folds of her skirts around her hands and grabs the jellyfish, one by one or in bunches, collecting them in pails of salt water to be prepared later for grilling on fires of brushwood.

  Mie entertains herself by following in her mother’s exact footsteps. The Old Woman won’t let the little one go barefoot, so Mie tramples Noé’s footprints with the hard soles of her shoes. She stretches her legs, leaping to imitate her mother’s giant strides before they’re erased by the waves. The tide is on the rise and will soon sweep up the brown seaweed again, the crabs and brittle sea urchins, the flotsam and jetsam of shipwrecks. In less than a quarter of an hour, Noé’s traces will be swallowed by the surf. Mie runs out of breath, slows down, then drops limply to the ground.

  She lies back and hollows out the loose sand with her head, imagines her hair buried in silt. The strands of her hair become roots. From the ends of her hair to her forehead, she taps into the moving soil. She is eleven. Her arms are stretched out in the form of a cross, her palms offered up to the air. She wiggles her fingers, tries to grab the gusts of wind and shape them into cold balls in her hands. Farther on, Noé is bent over a mound of shells, piling up the smaller ones and picking out the larger ones. She sorts through them all, throwing the empty conches back to the sea. When occasionally a shell appeals to her she slides it into her apron pocket. She’s singing.

  A man killed the goose

  To feed his family of four

  Later the stag was downed

  With arrows that ended their love

  Mie wraps herself in song, surf, wind. She tries to sink her being into Sitjaq. Flies walk across her face. Sometimes she wrinkles her nose to chase them off, sometimes she lets them be: their feet are a part of the world she’s trying to hear in its entirety.

  She’s not doing all that well. Dé’s cries break her concentration — as do the clacking of shells Noé throws over her shoulder, the foghorn, the call of migrating birds. The tide washes in, foam surrounds her ankles, her calves. The water is teeming with bits of seaweed that stick to her feet. Crabs make the sand by her ears crackle. Too much to absorb: she can no longer discern what to listen to and what to ignore.

  You cannot become the earth the way you become a heron, a turtle, a bee.

  She opens her eyes.

  Seth is above her, his face just a few inches from her own. He is six years old, has thick, bushy eyebrows, Osip’s fat chin, Sevastian’s forehead, the Old Woman’s traits, Noé’s hair. He’s the only one like that: with his mother’s dark mane. Everyone else’s is blond, darker or lighter depending on the season. When Mie finally opens an eyelid, he smiles. His child’s teeth sit loose between his lips, and he scrunches up his nose, wipes his mouth with his sleeve, spreading a streak of grey dirt from cheek to chin. As soon as he has her attention, he sprints along the beach in jerky gerbil bounds and then disappears behind the rocks.

  Mie understands: he’s found a creature he wants her to see.

  He is six, he doesn’t speak, but he loves to be told things.

  He leads Mie to the rocky terrain of the northern cove. She doesn’t need him to point whatever it is out to her. Before them: a small flock of huge birds, white and grey, necks that are black, part of their wings too, red foreheads. Long legs, slender throats.

  “They’re cranes.”

  Seth frowns. He looks at the shore birds, then back at Mie. She says again, “Cranes.” He waits. “They aren’t dangerous,” she adds. Now his expression changes; he turns away, makes a dash for the animals, arms open wide. The cranes draw themselves up to their full height — they’re twice as big as he is — ruffle their feathers, and swell their crops, but he’s not afraid: Mie said “they aren’t dangerous.” He gallops till they take flight, the birds panic-stricken by this animal they’ve failed to impress. Sand rises in a cloud as they spread their wings, Seth laughs and continues his charge, running in circles for a while and then trotting off, his attention drawn elsewhere. He heads for the forest, perhaps to join Abel in his earthen hideout, or to climb a tree and gather honey, Mie doesn’t know. She stays standing, watching as he dashes away. Seth disappears between two tree trunks.

  She is alone, and perches on a rock.

  It takes some time for the cranes to land again. They do so cautiously, survey their surroundings, make sure the rowdy creature has gone. Mie studies them. No chicks, three immature birds, two pairs and a few straggling loners. She chooses a female, smaller than the rest, because she likes her broad forehead and rust-speckled plumage.

  She takes a morsel of her being between her fingers.

  She sighs.

  She wishes it were as easy to become Sitjaq as it is to become the crane.

  The heartbeats are distinct — low, slow bursts. The pulsing starts in her chest and sets the ligaments of her throat to trembling. Seth’s disturbance has accelerated their cadence, but slowly her heart finds its rhythm, her adrenaline subsides, and her body grows calm. Blood no longer needs to be dispatched as quickly to her talons and wings.

  Mie is the crane, effortlessly. Her breathing falls into sync with the creature’s. Her neck, hands, and legs relax. The bird asks no questions and neither does she. Like the others, she parts eelgrass and flushes out the urchins and mussels hidden underneath. She doesn’t taste them. She doesn’t smell them. She apprehends their texture with her beak. Rough or smooth. Edible or not. The pickings slide from her mouth to her craw, accumulate against her heart and stay there.

  All her attention is focused on her immediate environment: food, predators, the colony. Suddenly, the world is full of simple things — the rustling of grasses at the edge of the forest, the tumbling of shells along the sand, the scrabbling of crabs to be intercepted as they cross the beach. The air is alive with the ardour of spring. Aside from her quarry and the warm breezes, n
othing else matters for Mie, though she does feel a quivering, an enticing, a disconcerting warmth that makes her squirm and shift her weight from one foot to the other before she returns half-heartedly to the crabs and rock lobsters. Time passes and the quivering spreads, extending to her wings, which she shakes. It radiates inside her gullet, she puffs out her throat and, finally, unsettled, returns to her meal.

  She stretches to her full size, scans her surroundings, and realizes she’s not the only one in this state. A male bounds toward her. He leaps high — a metre, if not more. Once he has her attention, he stops, throws his head back, beak open, neck taut. He clatters, lays his feathers flat against his back till they’re touching, bows low and straightens, five, six times in a row.

  It’s all so natural. Mie follows suit. She throws her head back toward her spine, her throat fully stretched: the cry emerges effortlessly, from her belly to the sky. She starts to hop again, her legs weave a dance, she rises just high enough to offer her breast for the male to rub against. Their wings open and close, but they don’t take flight. She bows, he stretches, then they both begin to jump. Initially he bounds higher than she does, then she bests him. Theirs is a perfect synchrony of gestures, songs, bodies.

  The crane has never experienced anything quite like it. Nor has Mie. When the male mounts her, she hesitates, entertaining for a moment the thought of vacating the animal, but she stays put, she feels the male’s weight on her back, she shakes herself, though not to chase him away but to make herself seem bigger. He manages not to nick her with his talons, hangs on to either side of her wings and folds his legs. He’s heavy. She lets the coupling take place. It’s quick. And appeasing.