The trees were very vain in the winter. They didn’t care that the world had grown cold and everyone’s life had become more difficult. Covered in white fur, they looked elegant. The snow highlighted the wild, beautiful shapes of their branches. As though they were wearing skimpy nightgowns on their wedding nights. They had changed the colour of their fur like certain foxes do.
At times, the trees were encased in ice. They were beautiful this way, too, but they were deadly. They were ready to drop knives on people without warning if there was the slightest noise or disturbance. If she was to call out, if the Goose was to quack or make a great ruffling noise, as he was wont to do, it would upset the trees, and they would try to kill them. She put her hands over her own mouth. It wasn’t just her either. It was incredibly quiet. The entire forest was still. There was not the sound of a footstep or a stick breaking underfoot.
They didn’t see another real flesh-and-blood person until they came across a girl cooking at a small fire by the road. When they approached, they realized it was not a girl at all. The boy was wearing lipstick and a white dress with holes in it over a pair of grey stockings. He was scrubbing all the dishes in one pot. And he was cooking in the other. There was a long leash attached to a stake on the side of the road and tied to a manacle on his ankle.
“Abelard!” Sofia whispered harshly. He turned and looked confused, and then a great smile of recognition broke across his face.
“Look who it is! Sofia and her remarkable goose!”
“What are you doing here?”
“The soldiers stopped by the house on the way to the Capital. There were so many, there was nowhere to hide. There were planes overhead that were able to see the house too. They captured Balthazar and me. Come have something to eat!”
He reached out with a baked potato that was slathered in butter. Sofia could not resist. She hurried over, grabbed the potato, and began eating it ravenously.
“This butter is magnificent,” Sofia cried, forgetting everything else in the world for a minute. “I had forgotten just how delicious butter is. I want to have butter on everything. When this war is over, I will have butter on my toast, on my fruit, on my meat, on my eggs. I will keep a small saucepan of butter heated up on the stove at all times so I can pour it over everything I eat. I have half a mind to pour it into a teacup and sip it just like that.”
“They were about to put me onto a train,” Abelard said, continuing his story. “But I told them I could do magical things if they would settle down for a moment and let me perform a trick.”
“Do you know any magic tricks?”
“I transformed into a horse in front of their very eyes. They believed I was the most funny actor they had ever encountered. I didn’t realize how humorous I was until I began performing for the soldiers. I knew my talent would be what saved my life. When I lived at the orphanage, they told me my clowning around would be the death of me. They said it was a terrible habit. But here I am!”
This impressed Sofia because Abelard had managed to barter for his life with art.
This seemed like a chink in the soldiers’ armour. It was said that people who related to art were more sensitive. If the soldiers appreciated Abelard’s art, perhaps they would be smitten with other aspects of the country’s culture and would rethink destroying all of it. Or perhaps the Enemy soldiers had spent so much time in the country now that they had absorbed some Elysian values. And had begun to have a penchant for the arts. It was the first time she thought she might have something in common with the Enemy. She also really admired Abelard’s theatrics. If she was apprehended by the Enemy, perhaps she could play the clarinet or recite a monologue from a play.
But the Goose, who had not said much, tugged on Sofia’s skirt. She bent down to listen.
“Ask him why exactly he has the chain on his ankle if the soldiers admired him so much.”
“I am going to be liberated if I manage to survive the walk to the western border,” Abelard said.
“Why wouldn’t you survive?” Sofia asked. “It isn’t that far.”
“Well, the walk there is very different for me than it is for others. It is more of a meander than a walk. I have to tiptoe over the ground to show people where to step. There are landmines everywhere. I must walk ahead of the others. I have been walking for months, but I have not been blown up. I have a special skill.”
“How on earth is that a skill!” the Goose exclaimed. “If he walks down a road and doesn’t blow up, it is because there was no mine there. It has nothing to do with talent. It’s not as though he is making the mines disappear by avoiding them.”
“It does take talent. A certain focus and patience. I learned that from Balthazar.”
“Balthazar!”
“Yes. At first we both were meant to walk. We walked together. They ordered us to hold hands. I quite liked that. It made me feel very secure to have my friend’s hand in mine. Especially in such dangerous circumstances. And even if I died, I could do it while holding the hand of somebody I loved. And isn’t that what everybody wants more than anything in life?
“But Balthazar didn’t like it. He said it made him seem like a child. He said that after a certain age, two boys should not be seen holding hands in public. It made him so uncomfortable. We were holding hands one day, and he pulled his from mine and started to run ahead as fast as he could. He was hurtling himself into the future. Then he exploded. It was ghastly. I thought I would never be able to walk another step. I was certain I would be terrified to walk forward. But now I am sure I can’t be killed.”
“Why on earth not?”
“My father was a thief, so it’s in my nature to be able to sneak around at night. I imagine that I am in a nursery and I am walking through a row of cribs. And in each crib is a baby. And the slightest noise will wake all the babies up. Why don’t you send the goose up ahead? If he blows up, it won’t be so tragic and we will have something to eat for dinner.”
“I would think it very tragic if my goose were to be blown up.”
“Well, I don’t imagine he would weigh enough to set off a landmine anyway. So perhaps he would only give us a false sense of confidence.”
“Can you tell us which roads are safe to walk on?” Sofia unrolled her map on the ground.
“A map! Look at that. You could be hanged for being in possession of such a thing. Anyone might betray you. There would be a handsome reward in it.” He bent over it. He began tracing the road he had already been on with his finger. “You ought to walk along this little road.”
She and Abelard moved the tips of their fingers along the map, discussing possible routes for her. He showed her a secret road that he had seen leading into the forest. “There’s a church through there if you want some shelter. The soldiers were too afraid to go that deep into the woods. So if you are running from them, go into the woods. They won’t follow you. They will have to sit and wait for you to come back out.”
“Isn’t it amazing,” said the Goose, “how the Enemy believes in your old religion more than you do?”
“If you aren’t one of the ones they want to kill, they are kind of lovely,” said Abelard.
“Ah,” said Sofia, “but we are. Shall we help you get unchained? I could bash it with a rock.”
“No,” said Abelard. “I want them to free me from this chain themselves. They will need actors in the Capital after the war. I would like to fit in. I know their language, after all. It’s a great gift. I don’t want to run around in the woods anymore. I want to be on the winning side. I don’t care what it takes.”
They walked away from Abelard, who believed that remaining attached to a manacle would somehow lead to his freedom. They were terrified of the road they were walking on.
“I’m frightened about being on the road right now,” Sofia said.
The Goose froze next to her.
“Can’t you feel it? I feel like there is another group of soldiers coming. I feel like the earth is shaking. Do you feel that? Thousands of footsteps.”
“Are you certain it’s not your heartbeat?” the Goose asked.
Sofia took the teacup out of her pocket. She put it on a stone and then placed the spoon inside. The spoon began to spin as though the soldiers were coming from all directions.
Sofia and the Goose ran deep into the great forest without any sense of where they were going.
So often her mother had dragged her to the theatre when she was far too young. She would frequently be the only child in the theatre. She milled around all the legs as though she were in a tall pine forest. She was terrified of being lost in the legs. There was no path or fixed direction among them. And just when she saw a possible path through them, they would shift and move. Closing off whatever direction she might have perceived in them before.
The dead leaves were like playbills scattered all over the sidewalk after a show.
Sofia stopped running and considered the trees. She took out her map and then pulled the spool of red ribbon from her pocket. She tied bows onto branches here and there so she would be able to find her way out. Sofia did not like to use her red ribbon. She liked to take it out of her pocket and unravel it, and then watch it dance in the air as though it were pouring blood.
The ground was all bumpy. She had to step over all the roots on the ground. They were like the arms of great sea creatures that might suddenly reach above the surface of the water and drag you a thousand feet below. But she stepped forward and remembered what Abelard had told her.
She knew the snow was coming again. They were looking for sanctuary. And when she saw the church among the trees, she knew that was going to be it. They were going to enter and stay a very long while. Opening the door was like opening the cover of a large Russian novel. One that was going to last for months and months and was filled with snowflakes.
There was a small chapel. Some of the older people in the country still believed in God. There wasn’t anything anyone could do or say to stop them. They still carried prayer cards inside their breast pockets as though they were the identity papers they would use when they got to heaven. Or at least that’s what they believed.
There was a framed painting of the Virgin Mary surrounded by flowers. It was like being at a funeral for the Virgin Mary. The flowers were made of cloth so no one had to water them.
There were three rows of pews. And the walls had been painted with flowers and songbirds. And a very small naked boy holding a lamb. He was being followed by a flock of sheep. They all seemed eager to be held by him.
Behind the chapel they opened a back door to find a small house where the minister once lived. They went inside it and dropped their bags.
Noticing the way that vines had crept into the house, through the windowsill and right through the wall, Sofia saw that it had begun to merge with nature. Nature was always ready to sneak back in and reclaim its stolen land. It happened surprisingly fast. And it did make her wonder whether a similar thing was happening to her. And whether she was turning into a woodland creature. Something she might have read about in her fable book.
She yanked opened a large wooden drawer that was sticky coming out. The furniture in the house was old, and it all had arthritis. Things stuck. It was difficult to open any door. It was as though each door was convinced it was a part of the wall. And then when it was finally ripped open, it no longer wanted to go back in.
The house was so cold. She turned on the faucet only to have a swirl of snowflakes fly out of it. When she turned off the faucet, there were still snowflakes floating around in the darkness.
Now that it was winter, Sofia would need some way to acquire meat for herself. She knew she only needed to capture two hares, male and female, and they would be able to mate. And she would soon be able to breed them. Again, she made a trap with a box and a cord attached to it. She captured three male hares and put them in a large bird cage that was in a back room of the house. There would be no question this time of letting any of them go.
Sofia took one out of the cage. She brought it into the kitchen. She put it on her lap. She petted it gently over and over again. She could feel the hare’s heart beating. It ticked wildly as though it were some sort of fast-moving timepiece. It seemed to be beating too quickly. It was wondrous that it did not have a heart attack. Then, as soon as she sensed the heartbeat was slowing down, she grabbed the hare by the ears, stood up, took her silver knife, and slit its throat over a metal bucket on the table.
She felt the hares’s heartbeat leave its body and enter her own. Her whole body shook with the force of it. She laid the dead hare on the table and felt herself shake so hard, her teeth knocked against one another. She shook violently, as though she had climbed out of a freezing lake.
“How gruesome,” said the Goose, who had walked into the kitchen and was standing in the doorway.
The Goose had no blood on his hands, or feet, so he was free to judge.
“When I see you kill that hare and not look at all regretful or perturbed by it, it makes me realize just how much of a psychopath you are. I realize the war brings out different sides to a person. Sides you might not have previously believed existed. But the war doesn’t lie, does it? We met at the beginning of the war, and now it appears only one of us is a murderer.
“It makes me nervous, of course. Because I know you are the type to sacrifice another for yourself. All I can say is that if only one of us survives the war, I think it’s safe to say it will be you. I’m always so concerned about other people and creatures killing me. And I am always putting my fate in your hands. But the irony of it all is that you are the one who is most likely to kill me. I don’t even find it terrifying. I only blame myself for being so foolish to think anything otherwise.”
He turned around and waddled out the door.
It was at that point that Sofia’s shivering toned down. She regained not so much her composure but her drive. And her drive was fuelled predominantly by hunger. She began to remove the hare’s skin. She was surprised she knew how to do such a thing. But her hunger made it so she knew exactly what to do. She had the instincts of a predator. So perhaps, in fact, everything the Goose had said about her was true.
She took a frying pan and put it on the stove. The hare’s meat began popping with smells and savours.
She had thought she might put some hare aside to eat later, so she could postpone killing another animal soon. But she could do nothing to stop herself from devouring the entire hare. She ate so fast that at first she had a stomach ache. It was as though the hare had formed and was kicking against her belly. She had cured hunger.
The red meat made her body feel different. She felt more awake than she had in a long time. She no longer had a headache. She began to see colours. Whereas before things had turned a sort of white, now their bright colours returned. As though the world had been newly dipped in dye.
She felt the way vampires did in folklore. Every molecule in her body was changing. The molecules were stronger. They lit up one by one the way the fairy lights came on during Christmas in the town square.
She cleaned up the table. She threw the bones of the hare away and mopped up all the blood.
She went to the cage. She looked at the remaining hares. One hare kept shifting its body in slightly different positions. As though it were the dial of a radio someone was trying to get to a station on. As though it were a planchette on a Ouija board that was having trouble communicating with the dead.
She looked into the eyes of one of the remaining hares. They were black and blank, framed with the eyelashes of a movie star. And the more she stared into them, the less she was able to understand. It was neither friend nor foe. And she realized this meant she was the hare’s enemy.
“The Goose Girl would never be able to kill the way you are,” the Goose said, interrupting her meditation.
Sofia swerved around towards the Goose, realizing she was feeling vicious.
“You always bring up that stupid girl when you want to irritate me. It’s ridiculous that you think you can make me jealous by describing a girl who works on a farm. A farmer! What did you even talk about? She couldn’t have had a very large vocabulary. Did you discuss the smell of hay? Why would I ever be intimidated by a farm girl? I was educated at the very best girls’ school in the Capital. I lived in a luxurious apartment. I went to see plays and ballets and operas all the time. I would not have been allowed to be friends with this Goose Girl. My mother would have considered it beneath me. She would have imagined the girl would bring me down. And that I would start acting like her.”
At that, the Goose froze. The only way to win an argument with the Goose—and by win, she meant make him stop his rant—was to humiliate him. Humiliation always made him suddenly stock-still. He would become completely immobile and stare at her, his eyes a more intense shade of blue. As though he had been hypnotized. He would be uncharacteristically quiet, incapable of saying a word.
She felt for the first time that she had a right to be angry. She had the right to express her anger. Her anger was like a dog she had let off the leash. And when she was angry, she let it govern her body, as though in a dance. She threw her hands up in the air. And let out a moan.
“Do you think my preferred companion is a goose? Why would I choose a goose to go through the war with? You make me more vulnerable. I could have had a Great Dane. Any dog, really. But have you seen Great Danes? They look like horses. It would make sense.”
He waddled off to a corner of the house and refused to look at Sofia. After this fight, they did not speak for two days. And afterwards, he never brought up the Goose Girl again.
“Sense!” he cried, but said no more.
She was wary about spending the whole winter in the house. But she had no choice. She couldn’t risk going out in the cold and having to sleep in the woods. And waking up to discover she was a frozen corpse.
They lit a fire in the hearth. They sat in front of it and immediately they became entranced.
Between the warmth emanating from the fire and the small theatre taking place in the flames, they became addicted. There was a strange play that took place in the fireplace every night. There were tiny players with unkempt red hair.
She made a lantern out of a large rusted tin can. She fashioned holes in the sides of it, near the top. She put it on the side of the bed, and she built a little fire in it. When the light from the fire glowed through the holes, it made a group of stars on the ceiling. She held her hands in front of the light. She made the shadow of a billy goat dancing around. It was so pretty. Sofia forgot that she had created it. And that it was not its own little being dancing for them. Having the time of its life, absolutely carefree.
The Goose raised his wings and cast an enormous shadow of an angel. It looked like an angel of death. And they both cowered when they saw it. They crept under the covers, closed their eyes, and went to sleep.
She drew a chessboard on a flat piece of wood. She took stones and drew the images of which pieces they were supposed to be on top of them. She drew a fat, wide crown for the king and a tall pointed one for the queen. She sat and played against the Goose. It was during these games that they conversed about intellectual topics.
The Goose always made inscrutable moves. But if she beat him at the game easily, he would become infuriated and would squawk angrily, accuse her of cheating, and knock all the pieces off the board with his spread wing.
And then he would shut his beak firmly, like a clasp on a purse. There was an armchair by the fire. The upholstery had an image of trees and a stream. He would climb into the chair and sit there as though he had discovered a little piece of Eden. The heat from the fire would cause him turn his head around 180 degrees, tuck it into his wings, and go to sleep.
Sofia looked at her reflection in the mirror. She was surprised at how grown-up she looked. It was as though a magical curse had been lifted and she was released from the body of a child. And could now return to her natural one.
Sofia found she did not want to bathe with the Goose anymore. This would mean they had to have two separate baths of water heated over the fire, which was wasteful. But she couldn’t bear for the Goose to see the changes her body was going through. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure whether she was humiliated by it, or she wanted to keep it a secret. But she didn’t want the Goose to see.
If they had met when she had already gone through puberty, she probably wouldn’t have minded. Celeste had had no problem bathing with the Goose.
But now that he had seen her body when it was that of a child, she couldn’t let him see it any other way. She felt as though he would accuse her body of being a lie. Or say that she was pretending to be something she was not. How strange it was to have the body of a woman. Didn’t a woman have more authority than a child?
The Goose would be angry because her new body would naturally demand a sort of deference. He would no longer be able to speak to her in a condescending way. She didn’t know why she felt guilty about taking this away from the Goose. She knew how much bullying her meant to the Goose.
Sometimes she had peculiar dreams. She was back at home in the Capital and she heard a voice she could not place singing in the bathroom. It was the voice of a male, but it was not her father’s. She opened the bathroom door to find Balthazar standing in front of the sink shaving. The bath had already been drawn. And she found herself taking her clothes off, as though in a trance, and climbing naked into the tub. And then she said, “Will you join me?” The shock of her own words awoke her from her sleep.
When she woke up from one of these dreams, she did not appreciate having the Goose there, wrapped up in her arms. She wanted to lie in that puddle of strangeness all by herself for a bit.
For a few moments after waking up, she still believed the events of her dream were at least plausible.
Sofia had never had a boyfriend.
In her school, it was customary to have a date to the Spring Ball. All the girls thought and planned and worried about the Spring Ball for months and months. Once you had gone to the Spring Ball, you were allowed to start dating boys and going out to movies and dances with them. It was at the Spring Ball that everyone broke the ice.
Whenever children asked their parents whether they could get romantically involved, they were told to wait at least until after the Spring Ball. But Sofia had never gone to the Spring Ball.
She had never shared an ice cream float with a boy at a diner. She had never let a boy hold her books on the way home. She had never waved her hat at a boy coming down the street on his bicycle.
She was small for her age. There were girls in her class who had begun to have more developed bodies. They were transforming into women right before her eyes. But nothing happened to Sofia’s body. The metamorphosis seemed too extraordinary to Sofia. And she was convinced it would never happen to her. She would be trapped in the body of a little girl forever. She would never be a sexual being, and Elysia celebrated being open about liking sex.
There were many aspects of Elysian culture that were reactionary. Where it might seem they had gone a little mad by overcorrecting. The Enemy was known for having severe anti-sex laws. Homosexuality, cross-dressing, prostitution, and all-night dancing were all illegal. So when Elysians had their own country, they collectively decided everyone should have complete sexual freedom.
There had been an entire museum show based on the gamines who were prostitutes in the Luminous Park neighbourhood. The pictures were drawn with pieces of charcoal on brown paper and then taped to the walls. There were so many prostitutes in the area that you felt as though you had walked into their personal space. They were not dressed in the manner of people who had left the house. Instead, many of them were in various states of disrobe. They slept ten to a room in hotels. They all lost weight because they could barely afford to eat. So their clothes began to hang off them in revealing ways. Sometimes they would slip out of a shoe and a stocking on the train.
There were groups of young boys who also sold their bodies. They always hung together. They tended to wear the most fanciful clothes. They dressed in top hats and wore old decorative army coats over soiled undershirts. Whenever Sofia saw these young men on the Luminous Park subway platform, she wondered what and who they were. And what did they mean to her.
Sofia grew to know the forest quickly. The Goose had a knack for finding bodies of water and found a lake that was icy to the touch, but he seemed not to mind. She sometimes swore there were figures following her when she walked in the woods, gathering mushrooms from under the snow. But when she turned, she found it was only ever a tree. Younger trees were more likely to pull up their roots and begin assuming the shapes of young women.
One day she saw a woman with her hair standing in dreadlocks up above her head. Sofia’s attention was drawn to the woman’s knees. They were red as though they had been dragged across the dirt. They had dark circular rings on them. She was naked and seemed unaffected by the cold. She did not have skin colours humans normally had. She had a greyish-bluish-brownish hue, the colour of bark and stones. Sofia was so terrified.
She tried to remind herself over and over again that they were not real. But her body froze when she saw them. She felt like a deer whose body had become completely immobile when she became aware of them. It was as though her blood had stopped flowing. And she had to wait for her heart to begin pumping warm blood through her veins so she knew she was alive.
She saw a very skinny woman running through the trees. It was as though she was trying to sneak back to her bedroom after having an affair with the son of the house. The trees were all mocking her with their sexuality. She had forgotten how, in such an old forest, there were still so many young trees.
There was a young man sitting on the edge of a cliff. His feet were dangling over the side while he looked straight ahead. He had a desolate stare on his face. He was considering jumping off. Sofia was about to call out to him, but then he turned back into a tree.
She was desperate for company, but she did not want to talk to the people in the trees at all. Her grandmother had told her to avoid tree people. She said once you started talking to them, you could never return to human discourse.
In many of the folktales she read, terrible things befell girls who spoke to strangers in the woods. There was almost always a villainous suitor in the tale. One whom the girl would be too friendly with. One who was out to rob the girl of everything she knew. One whom she was a fool to talk to. But why did she talk to him? Sofia could never understand why the girls in the fables always had such complicated conversations with ogres and giants and wolves.
If there was one word to describe these suitors, it was unpredictable. Their personality traits did not add up. They could be excessively kind and then commit the most heinous act. They might be effusive and caring, and then eat your dog when you went off to the washroom.
Sofia did not understand them, nor did she want to.