your looks,’ Mother would say. But I would repel everyone. I would end up scaring males: grimy old men and ugly runts alike. They would lock me in my bedroom and shake me, each one harder than the last. Only beautiful things are precious: those who have to be satisfied with their looks can be shaken silly.
My face didn’t belong to me. It took over my entire being. It came with me wherever I went. For me, existing involved my face, and facing the world meant showing it. Which is why, as a precautionary measure, Mother closed everything: the doors, the windows, the curtains, even her eyes when she had to look at me.
I was the only one who could read the passage of time on faces. Between when Father left and when he came home, his beard would have grown. Between when Father left and when he came home, I would have grown older. But he didn’t see me; when Father came back from the bush, he didn’t bother looking at me. He came back only for Mother. He came back to touch her difference.
I was always alone; Mother was the only one who ever came close to me. But her voice whispered too many maudlin things to ring true, truly true. I could see her tremble in my presence. She told me the kinds of things that one says but that don’t need repeating. She told me that the world is ugly and not worth the effort. She told me that you shouldn’t lift your skirt or walk alone in the forest, because there are dirty old men waiting for just that. She told me that you shouldn’t drink or eat too much, you should be desirable but let yourself be desired, be unforgettable but be forgotten, don’t let the sunlight in, remember the curtains, if people saw us what do you think they would say? The sun is for outside, happiness is for later, whatever you do don’t forget to say your prayers, and don’t bite your nails, always listen to Father and when he talks to you bow your head, when he scolds you bow it even more, don’t expect anything from life, anyway there is nothing more, climb up on my lap, come into my arms, take this slap, don’t duck the blows, and keep smiling.
Every day in the cabin, my pen flits above the cistern. I write for posterity, but also to replace Mother’s words with my own. If someone finds me, they can gather my remains and file my thoughts by topic and date. If, on the other hand, scientists eventually manage to bring the dead back to life but hesitate to do so as a matter of right, be they advised: I want them to revive me. I hereby give them permission.
V
Death doesn’t scare me. It’s not the end – even temporary – that frightens me. Only coming face to face with the Boots puts the fear of God into me. When they come – and I know they will come – I would like to be able to choose my mask. I’d smell like beer, whiskey, and musk. Have short, tousled hair. Know how to piss a good distance and take a long dump, with a newspaper. There is something unfair about not being able to choose your face: it’s like heading down a road that you know is going nowhere.
I get ready for the trenches. I prepare my armour and check my equipment. I have hung snares in the windows, curse words on the doors. I have made traps, erected barricades. I practise my battle cry and do drills. With concentration, I crane to look at my whiskers.
I awoke to a gunshot one night, and I haven’t slept since. I keep tossing and turning. I know that the Boots are striding this way, sniffing my tracks. They will eventually find my safe haven and make it unsafe.
I feel that the end is nigh, but my body does what it wants. Every time I move, my spine compresses. I pop and I crack. One day, for sure, I will be hollow and worn-out. I will disappear for good through the cracks in the floor. In the meantime, my nails grow and break.
Even though Hare is dead, he is aging. He is losing his fur and doesn’t keep me warm like he used to. Soon he will be good for nothing.
Misfortune never strikes but once, and so water is dripping through the cabin’s roof. I have to rip up the floorboards to place them over my head. The water stops dripping on my face, but now my feet are numb.
I’ve run out of wood. Yesterday, I burned the chairs. Soon it will be the sheets. I reach my hand toward the flames. It’s like kissing a man: it’s hot and dangerous. The air smells of old age, and smoke catches in my throat. I cough, exhausting myself, and cover my nose with my hands. I hold my breath, but I prefer suffocation to the cold outside. I stay in the shelter.
I plunge my head into the water. I open my mouth and swallow. The water shoots up my nose, into my throat and my lungs, and I hear a roar. My limbs go limp, and death tugs at my toes. And then it happens: My head rises from the water.
Lying in the cistern, I see the forest. One window is all that separates me from it. I listen to the waves of cold pound against the walls. They are trying to devour the cabin. To stop it from collapsing under their strength, I jump up and hurl my body against the walls. I stand with my feet as far apart as they will go. I stretch my arms as wide as I can. And the snow falls. And the trees ice over. And the valleys fill up. And the mountains grow older.
And that’s okay with me, I think.
VI
‘You’re not a monster,’ Mother used to say. ‘Just a little beast.’
For Mother, even though I was becoming a woman, I was still slender, something that can be caressed but that shouldn’t be caressed. The more my little face grew, the more Mother turned her breasts away from it. The first weeks, she cried like a baby, but she quickly learned to deal with my distinctive feature. She spent hours touching my chin, my hair, pressing her nose into my beard. In her mother’s voice, she would whisper that I must never leave the house. That the people outside wouldn’t understand. That, at best, they would understand only later.
So there was nothing to be done but to stay indoors, quiet and watchful. Nothing was supposed to change, and nothing did. I would leave my bedroom at night, only at night, at the same time as the flying fish. I would crawl through the dormer window and, like them, emerge in the light of the moon.
But my adventures and misadventures never went very far. My victims were hardly worthy of the name. While everyone slept, I would sneak into cottages and move things around. Sometimes, just sometimes, driven by the desire for real adventure, I wouldn’t put things back where they belonged before dawn. A mackerel would appear on the shoemaker’s counter. The seamstress would have to bend down and pick up her rosary. The lumberjacks would have to go to the living room for their gin. Yes, they were serious crimes, but they would be forgotten soon enough.
Mother no longer slept at night. She would stay up reading unreadable books, which she kept under lock and key in a dresser in the living room. One night, I hid in the wardrobe to watch her. She read out loud, and the words told of even more serious crimes than the ones reported on the radio. The next morning, I opened my French notebook and the dictionary for the first time. The day after that, I opened the bible.
I liked the bible. I liked it because it was so thick that it seemed I would never finish it, and since I had been told that people cannot die without having read it cover to cover, I figured that I would never die if I read it slowly, eternally.
Mother had turned away from the bible: she was withering away, slowly but surely, and wouldn’t let anyone in the house anymore. Except for one night, when I must have been ten years old, when Mother offered hospitality to a beggar woman. Mother felt sorry for her because of her face. Mother always felt sorry for faces.
I never saw the beggar woman’s face, but you don’t need to see a face to know that it arouses pity. Sometimes the voice is enough. Mother asked her for news of the lumberjacks and the war. The old woman told her what she knew. The rest she made up.
The next day, after she had gone, a trunk appeared in the middle of
