On the day Sofia and the Goose fled Abeu Ivor, there was a huge rainstorm. Sofia knew she could probably get out of the rain by going into the forest and finding shelter. But at the same time, she could not tolerate the trees in the rain. They turned into monsters. They became mad dogs. They lost all sense of human civilization. They acted as though they were at war with the clouds. They flung their sticks around like swords. They rattled their arms and legs. They acted like outraged male lions, furiously shaking their hair. They were like bears dancing about in the water. They shook the water off their heads. They encouraged the rain to come down and be destructive. They yelled out, We can take it!
There were trees that became so wild and the rain made them feel so young that they ripped their roots out of the ground and fell right over. They discarded their branches on the ground as though they were limbs lost on the battlefield. It made her wary of the trees. They were too used to death. So Sofia stayed on the road and got wet.
At one point, they came across large pieces of wood that had fallen from a tree in the middle of the road. They looked as though they could be put together to form a grey Elysian horse. She put her finger under the bark. It felt like the surface of a horse. She had the sudden electric memory of having touched a horse with a fingertip when she was little.
They walked for days. Occasionally Sofia and the Goose would come across solitary wandering citizens from their country. They also chose out-of-the-way routes. They also chose to walk down roads that were too small to accommodate the vehicles and numbers the army moved in. When they came across another person, they tried to pass with as little interaction as possible. There were collaborators everywhere. In fact, if you were a citizen of the country and you were still walking around, not confined to an internment camp or a town, there was a large chance you had traded something for that freedom. That was why they avoided eye contact with others.
There was a man who was bent under the weight of an enormous cloth sack over this shoulder. The bag was so large, it overwhelmed his form. He looked like a heap of garbage that was slowly moving. She did not greet it. She did not want to cause him to act like a human being. She did not want to awaken whatever was under that large pile because she might wake up his rage or heartbreak. Which would be akin to waking a bear from its slumber.
She wondered whether she was going to grow up to look like that. She wondered whether that was what growing up in this country now meant.
They came upon an old woman on the side of the road. She was wearing so many layers of clothing. The layers at the hem looked like strips of wallpaper that had been torn off. It was as though she had put on a different dress for every year of her life. It would take her an hour to get undressed. With each dress she removed, she would become younger. Eventually she would get to her wedding dress. And then a slip she put on as a young girl. And she would be as young and fragile and vulnerable as Sofia herself.
Sofia was always relieved by the sight of an old woman. She knew immediately and from afar that she was a citizen of the country. There was no way the Enemy would have brought along old women. They would shoot the elderly. But occasionally they thought they were not worth the bullets and let them wander around to their deaths. That was what the old woman seemed to be doing.
“Perhaps I am already dead. Who can say?” the Old Woman mused to Sofia and the Goose. “I only hope someone will tell me when I’m dead. Otherwise, how will I know?”
She invited them to have dinner around a fire with her. She roasted a hare. It had been so long since Sofia had had fresh meat that she let the juices run down the side of her mouth and chin. She knew she would have a hankering for hare now. She wondered whether Abelard and Balthazar were still at her grandmother’s house. And whether they had developed a taste for eating cats. Or were still eating the cookies her grandmother had stocked up on in the pantry.
The Old Woman asked them questions about where they were going and where Sofia’s parents were. “You can move to one of those cities in the north. Those weren’t evacuated in the same way. You’ll be around your own people, if that’s what you’re looking for. For me, I don’t care what country I’m in. I was sold like cattle when I was a young girl. I suppose it would have been the same in any country.”
The Goose spoke softly into Sofia’s ear. “I don’t feel safe around her. I think she is a witch. She’ll kill us both. She looks like she eats the fingers of young girls as a special treat.”
“Ah,” said the Old Woman, “a talking goose. I haven’t seen one since I was a very little girl. I thought they were all gone. I never missed them either. They never do anything but complain and criticize.” And she laughed from the bottom of her belly. And it made the sound of gravel churning.
The Goose was so outraged and offended by the Old Woman’s comments, he insisted they be on their way first thing in the morning. When Sofia showed the Old Woman her map and said they would be heading in the direction of the Black Market, the Old Woman said she could give them a ride to where the road crossed a river. Sofia was wary of driving on the road, as the chances of encountering Enemy soldiers seemed very high. But she was tempted by the idea of covering a distance. They walked with the Old Woman to a barn. She opened the door. There was a rusted truck inside. The front of the truck was missing a cover. The engine was exposed to the air. She banged the engine with a stick. A family of outraged rats skittered from it.
Her hands looked incredibly strong. They looked as though they had slapped dozens of children and then hundreds of grandchildren. And after all that love, she had been abandoned.
It seemed to Sofia as though it was the nature of women to be abandoned at a certain age. Her mother had told her that society tried to orchestrate the paths of women so that they would inevitably become more and more irrelevant in society until they were eventually invisible.
The truck made a horrible hacking noise, sputtering like a bitter smoker, until the engine finally wheezed one last death rattle and then began to purr. The Old Woman drove them down an empty back road. The drive was bumpy and nauseating. But they were so glad not to be walking. To be covering all these miles without any effort.
They reached a fork in the road as the sun was beginning to set. It was the magic hour. This was a time when creatures that lived only in the dark began planning their night out. All the eyes that could see in the dark began opening one by one. You could feel the electricity in the air. They could see you, but you could not see them. But you could feel them looking at you. It made you feel like an actor onstage, with a spotlight on you. And everyone was watching.
The audience knew more about your possible fate than you could. They knew what act you were in. They knew it was time for tragedy to befall you.
The Old Woman reached into her layers and pulled out a knife.
“You may go. But hand over the goose.”
At that, the Goose lunged at the woman and began pecking at her face. She wailed a throaty cry. Sofia opened the door and clambered out clumsily, throwing herself along with her bag out of the vehicle. She turned and the Goose leapt into her arms, like a pile of laundry tossed out a window. Sofia dropped the Goose to the earth, and they began running together. The Old Woman didn’t even make an attempt to follow. Old women could not run.
“Your countrymen are truly pieces of work,” was the first thing the Goose said once they found themselves tucked in a culvert for safety, and gasping for breath.
“It’s not their fault they are acting this way. It is because of the Enemy.”
“You talk about the Enemy. But I have not had any negative encounters with the Enemy. All I know is that I have had repeated meetings with people of your country, and they are, without exception, quite duplicitous and nasty.”
“Without exception! You mean to say I am duplicitous and nasty! You sound like the Enemy. I should hand you over to them since you seem to share the same worldview.”
They slept in a cave two nights. They slept in a barn another.
They walked along the river. She developed a facility for catching fish. Afterwards, she would build a small fire and fry her catch. And then eat it with her fingers, unable to wait until it cooled off.
Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she would be capable of feeding herself in the wild. But they needed shelter because winter was coming.
They spent another two nights in the woods with no sign of other life. Until they came upon a suitcase, lying abandoned in a gulley. Sofia staggered down the muddy incline to get to it immediately. She was desperate to see what signs of civilization awaited her. But as soon as she grasped the handle, the lightness disappointed her. She brought the empty suitcase with her into a clearing in the woods.
She opened it. Inside she found only a spool of red ribbon, which she took out and put in her pocket, as she was always in need of rope. Although the suitcase now had no contents whatsoever, it was not truly empty. It was filled with a smell. It smelled like mothballs and laundry and coffee and soup. It had absorbed all the smells of a comfortable home. The smell had wanted to stay in the suitcase. Which was normal. It was not the kind of smell that could exist in the woods. It needed four walls and a ceiling.
Sofia climbed into the suitcase and wrapped her arms and legs together. She closed her eyes and imagined she was in someone’s house. Not her own. But the home of someone else in the Capital. Sometimes her mother stayed too late at a dinner party and started drinking and didn’t want to go home. So Sofia had to climb onto the pile of strangers’ coats on the bed. And she had been ensconced in a mixture of perfumes and colognes. And all the products adults put on themselves to smell more inviting and welcoming to other people.
The lining inside the suitcase was covered in flowers, was dark green with patterns of dark orange tiger lilies. If you stood away from the pattern, it seemed entirely dark green. But as you looked closer, the colours appeared. Like goldfish appearing in the murky green water of an aquarium.
She thought she could stay there forever. Trapped in a memory. A memory is protected. You can’t change it. But you can always find it when you need it.
“Are we moving in, then?” The Goose stuck his head under the suitcase cover and peered around. Sofia laughed.
“One day I would like you to smell what women smell like in the city. We can buy a little perfume when we get to the Black Market. I’ll put some on the collar of my coat. And we can close our eyes and imagine we are at the florist’s to pick up our bouquet of flowers. I should like to smell like I am periwinkle bluebells.”
“I might like to smell like dying roses in September.”
“Then you shall! I would like to get a perfume that smells like the air outside the bakery on a winter day.”
“What about the smell of wood burning in a stove, chamomile tea, and a bloody nose?”
“That would indeed be a pleasurable smell. I would like a perfume that smells like old books. I always liked smelling the books when I got home from the Central Library. My mother would say, You don’t know who smelled that book before you. And I would find a little spot, away from everybody. In my closet or my bedroom, or behind the couch, and I would sit with my face down in the book and breathe in the smell.”
“And what do books smell like?”
“Like dry roses, lead pencil shavings, horses passing by on the street, and earthworms from the ground.”
“How I would like ink to write my own!”
“There will be ink at the Black Market. Rows and rows of small bottles. Like a row of whores, each desperate for you to dip your pen tip inside. And there will be enough ink to record all your gobbling. There will be enough ink to paint the sky black.”
Sofia took a large stick and used it to prop up the lid of the suitcase. She tied a piece of the red ribbon to the stick. She placed a handful of acorns and bark at the bottom of the suitcase. She went to sit inside a bush. She had to be as still as possible.
The hares were very odd in the forest. Hares were a very mysterious element in her country’s folklore. They were shape-shifters. In her country it was said that the most wretched individuals were reincarnated as hares. If you were hanged, you had to spend your next life as a hare. Before you were returned to a human form in the life after that.
The hares appeared only to those who were pure of heart. She did not think she was pure of heart at all. She had not done anything that was noble. In fact, she was the opposite of noble. She thought she was the worst little girl in the whole world.
She decided to try to see if she could remember the hare poem that had caused her such humiliation at school. Then at least she would know there was one poem no one could destroy. She could keep it hidden safely in her head. That was where she had previously kept everything. She stored so many of her ideas in her head when she was young. She didn’t even know what she was going to do with them. Why did she keep her ideas as though they had any value or pertinence? It was as though she believed there would be a time in her life when she was grown. And she would feel confident to say all the things she was thinking. And she would express her thoughts, and people would think they were of great value.
She fantasized about being an adult. She imagined herself sitting at a café, wearing a fabulous coat. She would say so many fascinating things. Everyone around the table would either laugh or be amazed at what she said. And she was sure some of her observations might be considered, if not revolutionary, then at least worth listening to. She thought there would be a time when she wasn’t afraid to speak.
She closed her eyes and opened her mouth. She recited the poem perfectly. When she opened her eyes, there was a hare standing near her. Then another one appeared out of nowhere. Like a splotch of ink that fell from the tip of a pen onto a page. Then three others appeared.
They moved in such tiny increments. They looked like chess pieces that were being moved in strange directions. That seemed to make no sense. But they were carefully orchestrated to checkmate you. An enormous one was so close, she was terrified.
The eyes looked so dead. They were like brown buttons sewn onto the coat of a child.
The hare closed its eyes. And Sofia felt an instant reprieve. From having to stare into those black holes. But when they opened again, she found herself staring at grey human eyes that bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother’s.
It hopped over to the suitcase. It smelled it. And then it leapt inside. Sofia jerked the ribbon hard, and the suitcase lid shut fast. She snapped the latches on the suitcase. She sat cross-legged, staring at it. And wept. The hare kept beating wildly inside the suitcase until Sofia could bear it no more. She unlatched the suitcase, and the small beast lurched out drunkenly for a moment, before turning and darting off, back into the woods.
“Why don’t we leave for the South?” the Goose asked, as he stared into their small fire.
“They have allied with the Enemy. In any case, they’ve never liked us.”
“I don’t have any idea how you managed to alienate the countries all around you. It’s troubling. Do you ever consider that you might have made an effort to be cordial?”
“Could you not blame the entire war on me now? It isn’t helpful.”
“Don’t you have any table manners?”
Sofia shrugged. She was sucking the flesh off a few scrawny fish they had managed to trap. She wiped her filthy hands on her coat and stockings. Clara was so fastidious about clothes and deportment. She was always annoyed at Sofia’s appearance. She would stop her at the door and tell the maid to fix her hair. “We are Bottoms, after all. People expect more from us, Sofia. They expect us to be regal.”
The extreme shock she imagined on her mother’s face if she saw her now, with her ragged clothes, men’s shoes, and filthy fingers, suddenly made her laugh. She threw her head back and began to hoot. It was a different kind of laugh. It was deeper. It was louder. It came from her whole body.
She kept laughing. She couldn’t control it. Her body began shaking. Tears started squeezing out of her eyes. She felt herself peeing a little. She was like a dog that became hysterical when there was a knock at the door and couldn’t simmer down again. She had never laughed out loud like that before. This was a different type of laugh. There was something powerful and rude about it.
She had seen teenage girls laugh like this. Everyone turned and looked at them with disapproving glances as though they were swearing. Men’s voices changed when they reached puberty. They became lower and gruffer. But with teenage girls, their laughs transformed. They grew louder and more aggressive.
She realized now why people were afraid of women laughing. Why men spent so much time trying to covet and control and curtail laughter and humour so they were the only ones who had access to this powerful force.
As though if she laughed long and hard enough, the soldiers would all break down. They would be too humiliated.
“Do you hope to meet your mother after the war?” said the Goose calmly, appraising her.
“No. I don’t believe I will see my mother after the war. I think she is dead.” Sofia wiped at the corners of her eyes.
“You can never know that. You are here and I am here. So it is true that people survive.”
“My mother would not have survived. She is an intellectual. They were murdering them all.”
“She could have disguised herself.”
“She did. But I think she was found out. She is dead. I know it in my bones.”
“It’s strange. You seem more frightened by the idea of her being alive than dead.”
Sofia was alarmed by this statement. She turned and saw the Goose looking at her. And he had seen just how vulnerable it made her. He would capitalize on that.
“So why do you want your own mother dead? What monstrous ideas do you have in your head? Possibly the one virtue humans have over animals is that they are affectionate towards their mothers.”
“Why do I have to have a bird tell me I’m inhumane?”
“It’s just an observation. That you are a peculiar example of your species. The Goose Girl frequently talked about her mother and always missed her. If that isn’t the truth, then tell me why you are hoping your mother is dead.”
“Not dead!”
“Sorry, not alive.”
Sofia considered this carefully.
“It’s not that I hope she is dead. I just hope never to see her again. What would she say if she saw me now. She would be appalled. She would make me feel so much dirtier and dumber. I don’t want to see myself through her eyes. It terrifies me. The idea of seeing her again. When I imagine it happening, I get upset for days. It gives me a particular feeling of dread I can’t get rid of for days.”
“I’m sure she looks a little worse for wear herself. War is never easy on a woman’s appearance.”
“Yes, but I don’t have her manuscript! I can’t explain that to her. She would never look at me the same.”
What she did not want to say was that her mother would want to know what she had done with her book. She also was aware that had she followed her mother’s instructions, she would not be alive at all. She would have climbed onto the trucks, as she was instructed. She would have been driven to wherever the other children were going.
“I want to be able to cry,” the Goose said abruptly.
“You shouldn’t wish that. Why would anyone want that? It makes your face look so ugly.”
“I watched the Goose Girl cry. I did not find it ugly at all. I found it rather impressive. And I quite relished what it did to her eyes. They looked like the ocean. And I swore I could see all sorts of things circulating in her irises. I could see small waves moving around. And ships sinking and albatrosses in her eyes. And after she wept, she always acted differently. As though she had forgotten all her problems. She would lie on the grass in a fit of exhausted ecstasy.”
“I feel that I don’t weep enough. I feel as though there is something wrong with me. If I were a normal girl, I would have been crying every day as we walked along the road. I would have been weeping at least because I’d lost my mother. I would have been weeping because everyone I know is dead. Because the country has been turned to rubble. I haven’t cried in so long. I don’t think I have any tears left.”
“Perhaps I can buy a small bottle of tears. Then I can apply them to my eyes. Do you think they will have tears at the Black Market?”
“Perhaps.”
“Where do the tears come from?”
“During peacetime these types of bottles can be quite hard to find. They get them from poor little girls and prostitutes. When normal girls cry, their mothers dab their tears with a handkerchief, or with their fingers, or with their kisses. But during the war everyone is hard up, so many little girls sell their tears. You might have the tears of a wealthy doctor running down your cheeks.”
“Will you buy some too?”
“Perhaps on the chance I see my mother again. I will be so shocked, I may not be able to cry. And I wouldn’t want to be impolite.”