When the male pulls away, Mie returns to her own body, her breathing ragged, her limbs rigid on the rock. She touches her belly, her hand on her sweater and then underneath. She strokes the surface of her arms. She caresses the skin along her shoulders where the male planted his long legs. Her palms are cold and her shoulders burning.
3
The cranes mate before spring has fully arrived. In the northern cove, drifts of snow still melt through the eelgrass. For the longest time, Mie remains with the birds, borrows the crane’s body: day after day she lets herself be mounted. Afterward, she caresses her belly, her arms, the hard tips of her breasts; she gives herself over to the gentle touch of her own hands.
When the migration resumes, she looks for other beasts — a wolf, wolverine, vole, mallard, hare, muskrat, buzzard — all of them rutting or in heat.
Three weeks after the cranes’ departure, Sevastian comes upon her sitting on a log where the pebble-bedded river, swollen by spring melt, overflows and floods its banks. Around her, squirrels frolic from one tree to the next. Her father calls out her name. She doesn’t respond. She sees neither Sevastian nor other creatures.
She is an otter.
She’s held underwater by a male, his jaw clamped tight around her neck.
She struggles, her legs thrashing, her fur sliding against the male’s slick body. At times, she surfaces, takes a breath, cries out, whistles; then she’s dragged to the bottom again, the other beast has her by the neck, his fat digits around her pelvis. He doesn’t let go. Her heart beats, weak but quick. She stalls, he holds on, she fights and fights — lashing out with her whole body, her paws, head, claws, teeth — then all of a sudden, the tension subsides. Water envelops her and muffles all sound. Around them fish are spawning, tadpoles swarming. Air bubbles everywhere brush against her fur. Mie swishes her tail to one side, revealing her nymphae. The male is ready, he thrusts, she lets him, she gasps for air but doesn’t fight, the male moves quickly, she lets herself sink. A to and fro carried by the current. The moment of grace lasting less than a minute. Soon she shakes her head, wanting the other otter to release the pressure on the nape of her neck. She’s had enough and covers her sex with her tail. He’s done his part, their two bodies separate and she resurfaces, swims quickly, climbs onto shore, snorts.
The other follows.
She tries to bite him. He retreats and now she chases him; he runs; he pulls too far ahead, starts to slow down, pretends to flee but always waits for her; at times, he lets her catch up; at others she passes him by and he chases her. They gambol along the riverbank, slide in the mud, run away from and toward each other, clutching and tumbling down the sand to the river, belly against belly, their fur mingling. They lick each other, rub their muzzles, wash their heads, their bodies; cuddle, embrace. Finally, they return to the water, she feels the other’s firm jaws around her neck, she thrashes, he takes a firm hold of her pelvis with his paws.
4
And, later, Mie is a bear. This time, she chooses a male on the prowl. In him, she tracks a female for days — from one nest to the next, one scat to another. Analyzes scents, fights rivals, chases away the offspring of the last litter. She no longer eats. She sniffs. She tracks. Her heavy paws crush dead trunks lying on the ground; June’s leaves rustle beneath her steps. Since morning, the she-bear has accepted her advance. Mie can tell by the whiff of her dribbled urine on the pines. She takes her time planning her approach and then, finally, the female stands before her, fat and willing.
Mie plunges her nose into the female’s fur, rummages between her thighs. A perfume of rutting. She lifts her enormous paws and lets them fall on the she-bear’s back, rubs her head against her haunch, slides her muzzle along her flank from hip to throat and sniffs beneath her chin: a full-body caress. The contact of their coats fills the void of hibernation: the solitary season is promptly forgotten, as is the fasting and the long period of the hunt.
Everywhere, berries have begun to adorn the bushes; mushrooms and roots pierce the soil. Nearby, salmon spawn. Mie is hungry. If she is to service the female, then she must eat. She runs to the eddies, poises herself on the rocks. An icy wave encircles her paws and brushes her belly. The fish wriggle as they swim upriver: Mie catches them in one lunge, her teeth planted in their gut. The salmon writhe in her maw, she carries them to the bank, tears off huge shreds of flesh as they squirm beneath her claws. She crunches down, their tails slap her in the face.
Occasionally, between mouthfuls, she catches the scent of her female. Desire sends a jolt through her body; she flays the fish and gnaws at their flanks. When there is nothing left but bones and a skull, she makes a headlong dash and throws her weight upon the other bear with such force that together the two fall back, mouth to brow, Mie’s huge paws on either side of the other’s midriff. Then she gets up, buries her muzzle in the she-bear’s ribs, nudges her to her feet, moves in behind and mounts her.
She must wrap herself completely around the other’s fur and flesh, grapple with the immensity of this beast. The male animal doesn’t register the size of the being beneath him, but Mie does. When he thrusts, when he burrows into the she-bear’s belly, the young girl marvels at this sectione into a warm, living creature. Against the penis, organs palpitate; she can feel the male’s heart throbbing in its sex and the she-bear’s heartbeats all around her. She bores in, drives, and plunges. Sperm rises and engorges her member, she thinks she will die inside the male — the desire so stupefying it could kill her — but the explosion relaxes the beast’s body; Mie returns to herself, to her legs and arms and hands. She touches the ground as though Sitjaq now belongs to her.
5
Rutting season passes, as do summer’s heat and golden light. Mie sleeps in the tower bed. She dreams she is the beach and, during this time, the cold makes its gradual way to the lighthouse. Still, she has covered herself only with the thin sheet reserved for heatwaves. She’d thought its transparency would please her uncle. In her torpor, her thoughts are for him alone — he whom she awaits but who does not come. A creaking of the stairs would surely wake her. The wind blows in from the sea, lifts the gauzy fabric and bares her ankles, her calves. The draft carries the scent of fall and, deep in its gusts, the threat of winter. Mie curls into a tight ball on the mattress, the hair on her legs bristling, her nipples hard, her feet tinged blue. The studied womanly poses are forgotten, her body candid in its young girl’s slumber.
A spider drops onto her forehead. Its thread shimmers in the light, its tiny legs tickle her and undo her concentration. She knits her brow, scrunches up her nose, soon moves her head and neck.
In her dream, wave upon wave scrub and ultimately unearth her carcass. She is no longer the beach, she has become herself again. She extricates herself from the ground, brushes off the layers of sand stuck to her arms. On shore, she finds three desiccated eels shrivelling in the weeds and swarmed by insects. Thick skins coated with sticky film, irises burnt by the light, whites like the eyes of the blind, slack jaws showing small, pointy teeth. They are intertwined like lengths of rope, too tangled to be sorted one from the other.
She shivers, both in her dream and in her room. Behind the windows, the sea frays into strands along the coasts. Channels, rivers, and streams wend their way across the continent, sectionide into deltas, and empty into the estuary northeast of the lighthouse, or into the giant flat ocean stretching to the south and the west.
Wrapped in her thin sheet, Mie continues to doze. She has spent the summer stealing the spirit of cranes and bears. She has learned through them how to mate. But when her father bent her mother over the cabin railing, when Osip rubbed his belly against Noé’s inert back, it hadn’t occured to her to borrow their eyes, their minds. She hasn’t imagined doing with humans what she has done with beasts. And so she lies there, kept from sleep by the significance of this thought: she knows the bodies of animals but nothing of her own.
She squirms.
She stays onshore and watches them cut across the waves.
There’s a rumbling in the air, but the horizon is calm.
III
1
The eldest brother’s woman has short, dirt-encrusted fingernails, but beneath the grime, they are a bright pink. Her fingers are covered in white patches that mottle her tan skin. Slowly, her hands have begun to wrinkle; at the knuckles, they look to be covered in scales, but the skin there is as silky as the skin behind her ears or on the soles of her feet.
This woman’s wrist, elbow, and shoulder are linked by two long stalks that trace a path from her nails to her neck. Her hair is matted by the salt of the sea and forms a nest against the nape of her neck. Her back is naked and free beneath her dresses, naked and free beneath the sheet. Her spine is curved like seaweed.
She is asleep.
Osip stands in the doorway to the cabin. He doesn’t dare step forward. He doesn’t want to leave. He stares at Noé, lying just a few steps away. Her rib cage rising and falling. The damp has turned her skin a lustrous bronze.
Her buttocks not quite covered by the sheet.
Osip stands at the threshold as he did before by the large villa; he breathes in the intoxicating air but doesn’t enter.
Ever since Father Borya’s death, the cabin has been abandoned. Outside, birch trees are slowly eating away at its walls. The trees are crushing the dilapidated dwelling, vegetation is buckling its planks and windows. The Old Woman and her son live only in the lighthouse now. In four years, this is the first time Osip has set foot on the north side of the beach.
He doesn’t cross the threshold. He stares. The room looks nothing like it used to. Overturned bookcases, sunken armchairs inhabited by vermin, curtains torn off and made into rough sheets, books, a fishing rod, a tobacco box, glass beads, shells, dresses, a pipe, an easel, a ladder, an umbrella. Everything in the cabin converges on the bed: the junk, the rust, the light filtered in beams through the windows’ filth.
Noé is asleep.
Three posts support the baldaquin. The fourth is broken. The mattress sags in the middle and the box spring has lost a few boards, which haven’t been replaced. Netting hangs from the ceiling, gathered up in the middle, dropping in a cascade around the canopy. It’s a greyish-beige, ultra-light, something akin to black mould climbing up it. Wind blows in through the door, the windows, the pierced roof; it lifts the netting to reveal Noé’s ankles, legs, the supple line of her back.
For ten days in a row, Osip circles the cabin, climbs the mildewed stairs, stands at the edge of the porch but does not cross it. Each time the same: he surveys his surroundings, makes sure the coast is clear, and then approaches; he hides behind the door frame, undoes his trousers, and climaxes quickly, imagining the head of his penis butting up against Noé where the line of her buttocks becomes one with her back.
On the eleventh day, the same again: he watches, ensures there’s no one nearby, unbuttons his trousers, but when Noé hears the sound of his hand at work on his penis, she sighs. Then, with a small gesture that means infinitely more to Osip, she pulls back the sheet and exposes herself from chignon to toe.
2
It takes a long time for Osip to notice her presence. From a distance, he sees nothing but a flaxen mark on the greyish sand of the northern cove. It resembles the shadow of a cloud rolling in from the sea. Osip glances at the boat without noticing it — he’s on his lighthouse watch, but his thoughts are elsewhere. He’s thinking of Noé’s body, the taste of her breasts, the scent of her bush, her thick mane, the contours of her skin that now is half his. The hulls of the passing ships are weathered, like the stranger’s back, their flags mirror the colour of her hair, of her lips. Noé is everywhere, except in the dunes of the northern cove.
The boat sits on a stretch of round pebbles that tumble to the coast. It’s a small craft made of bundles of bulrushes with a fair-sized hut on top and a birch mast. Osip picks it out when Noé raises the sail. The bluish-grey blemish suddenly appearing on the beach reminds him of the sheet she pulled back a few days ago to reveal her body. For a moment, he thinks of the way she rolled from her belly to face the wall and shivers at the memory of her quivering breast, her weight on the bed. Then his thoughts return to the oddness of whatever this bluish-grey thing is among the northern dunes.
His spyglass is back on the table in the office; he goes down to get it and returns to the gallery. It takes only a couple of seconds for him to adjust the lens and then both stand out clearly against the sand: a boat, and Noé, who has climbed on board.
She’s wearing thick canvas pants she must have unearthed among the old rags in the shack. Still heavy with the milk that fed Mie, her breasts are loose under Sevastian-Benedikt’s shirt, the wind rushing down her collar and making the sleeves balloon. Colourful bundles lie strewn across the beach, rolls of long paper, small coins, pails, a steamer trunk.
Osip reaches the shore just as Noé has finished storing the rigging beneath the rushes on the deck. She distributes the weight in the hold, attaches the fishing net to the hull. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair braided and away from her face; short leather boots hug her ankles.
This boat is made for travel.
Osip didn’t even know she owned a pair of boots.
He advances up the shore. He’s carrying ten-month old Mie in a rush basket. Something is making him stagger; he isn’t drunk — he doesn’t drink — but when he tries to speak, the words clump together in his mouth and come out all garbled. He looks ridiculous. Noé glances neither at him nor at the child he has deposited by the waves. She strips, pulling her blouse over her head with a sweeping motion, the same Osip has seen a hundred times before; there is still flab on her belly from carrying Mie, but to him the loose skin is more beautiful than the once taut flesh, he likes a body that tells a story. Noé sits on a rock, removes her boots, ties them together and throws them onto the boat. She unbuttons her pants; a broad flap covers the front. There are twelve buttons to undo before the pants fall, her breasts quivering each time she undoes another one. She rolls up her clothes and stuffs them into the hut, pushes the skiff into the sea. As she brings her weight to bear on the boat, the shape of the bulrushes is impressed on her flesh. The bottom slides over log rollers, the stones clattering against it sound like maracas. The boat hits the high waves, rocks back and forth, then rights itself and settles on the water.
Other than Noé, Osip has never touched a naked woman.
Mie is whimpering in her basket, she’s having trouble breathing; he needs the Old Woman here to soothe the child if he’s to find a way to keep her mother from leaving.
The tide is slowly rising. The surf has brought in medusas and Noé makes sure to avoid them as she wades toward her boat. The water has reached her belly by the time Osip’s hand seizes her by the shoulder and tugs. A brusque action that makes them both fall back toward the beach, Osip beneath her, Noé covered in brown seaweed that clings to her legs and feet. When Osip tries to speak, the words still bump up against his lips, so he says nothing. Noé gets to her feet, but he holds her back. She’s quicker than he is, so he uses his weight to make up for his stumbling. Slowly, the boat drifts toward the reefs. If Noé reaches the open sea, she’ll be gone for good. Osip doesn’t know how to swim, but she does. She twists and turns in the stones, her skin slippery to his touch, the boat floats away. Suddenly, she has freed herself. One moment, Osip’s nose is buried in her hair, and in the next, her feet, ankles, knees, and thighs are subme
rged. She sectiones between two breakers and disappears.
* * *
Poc.
When Mie hits the water, her body makes the same dull sound as the pigeons falling off the wire in Seiche. Poc. Nothing more.
Osip has thrown the baby as far as he is able. The little one floats, then slowly sinks. Noé turns back toward the shore. Osip doesn’t move, paralyzed by what he has done. He tries to understand the chain of thought that led him from Noé’s hair to the sacrifice of his niece.
Mie is nowhere to be seen.
The boat continues to gently drift.
Osip doesn’t know how to swim.
* * *
In the time it takes Noé to fish out the baby and bring her back to shore, the boat has capsized, its hull torn from prow to stern by a sharp rock.
Osip returns to the lighthouse, Mie wrapped in his shirt, asleep in the basket. The vessel’s cargo floats and scatters along the smooth surface of the water. The ebbing tide leaves behind a few remnants from the skiff and one of Noé’s ankle boots. All the rest is dragged out to sea.
3
Noé gathers up every bundle the tide brings back in. She spreads the bulrushes out on the ground, anchors them with rocks so they don’t scatter to the wind, and then, once the rushes are dry, rolls them together and piles them behind the cabin.
The Body of the Beasts Page 4