BUCK

Colourblind mystical eyes; freezes at the unknown.
Brays, small kingdoms of concrete music with geometry.

A PAIR OF YELLOWHEADED BLACKBIRDS pick at their feathers and rasp through reeds and fronds as though they are a couple that has grown old together, comfortable in each other’s personal hygiene and itinerant bodily noises. At least, this is what I imagine when the thin paper takes up the walnut ink. There is the lyrebird with the tail feathers of a dandy and a voice that can mimic everything from the circular rhythm of a tin-bladed fan to a barking dog. I have been saved from abject poverty. I am drawing biological illustrations for M. Barbary, a professor at the Sorbonne and an antiquarian book collector Mme. Tissaud knows, who deals in lithographs from early nineteenth-century publications. Butterflies, grassland animals, plants, birds, fish, crustaceans. These tender-faced creatures labelled, ordered, once drawn alive in their native habitats. I am replicating them, in my cold Parisian studio. Overcoat on, fingerless gloves, enough francs to pay for my flat, food, for coal and art supplies, though everything is getting harder to find. My own art waits on the easel. A group of horses in different colours with human eyes, in a dark stormed landscape. Tacita says she likes the way the wild eyes hint at a disturbing unnameable confrontation. Flowers grow from underneath. There are smaller scenes in the underpaint, in the corners.

The gallerists have taken an arm’s-length interest in Lev, but still treat him as the parvenu. I have been with him when a well-regarded gallery owner approached. She had a foxfur collar, tall shoes, and hair the colour of whisky. She found his poverty attractive. I could feel her appetite for him. She spoke with him in a low provocative tone, her hand on his arm, as though I wasn’t standing right there beside him. She wanted him to come to her gallery, to meet with her there. He remained cold, unreadable. Though she didn’t seem to mind. We weren’t introduced.

Some of his work is sold for good money. Though I really don’t know how he lives; he never discusses practical matters with me. I know from Tacita that he can spend whole weeks in his studio with no heating, with only tins of herring and alcohol to drink. He works so prolifically that he hangs his art by clothespegs like laundry.

He tells me nothing, I say to Tacita.

Well people who are too direct are uninteresting.

She is silent for a moment. Lev said what most fascinates him about you is your ability to read other people’s thoughts, to see other people’s dreams.

Other people’s dreams can be tedious, as it turns out, I say to Tacita, who ignores me.

He told Istvan that you are like one of those animal deities that lead people to the afterlife.

Really? I say, surprised. I am reminded of how his sensitivity stops me. This is not straightforward. I think of you and Istvan. So simple and quick.

God, I, you make it sound like a murder.

Oh, why not the kind artist from the academy who sends me notes and draws tiny still-lifes on sheets of letter-sized paper?

Yes, everything would be so much better, she says with fake excitement.

All right, Tas.

You would never be happy in such a slack union, I. Everything would be well arranged but lifeless. You would be adored but numb, without feeling. Besides, you’d feel guilty about eventually turning against someone who would have done nothing but continue to be himself.

But I wouldn’t be so troubled. I feel like I never get my fill. And then I worry that I am letting him absorb too much of me, so that he can use it to do what he needs to do. But this I don’t say to Tacita. Once things are said out loud, they can become true.

My last letter before Paris: Dear Mother, All is well. Am settling in nicely. Thank you for the notecards. Love to all. Though in truth, I am dying inside. And when they receive word of my expulsion, the only thing they are surprised by is how easily duplicity comes to me.

At convent school, I am an unenthusiastic student. My thoughts readily stray from the classroom to the outdoors. I have filled notebooks with drawings. I barely pass an exam. Every day I stare at Jesus, pretty as a girl, on the giant crucifix in the chapel where we say our morning prayer. All the girls’ eyes on the first naked man they’ve seen. They say he is handsome. They hold up fingers, blotting out the hipbones and blood. I count one hundred and twenty-seven references to animals in the bible. Forty-one of which are dogs. There are no cats. At one point, when they have us memorize passages of the bible, I refuse. Why? Sister Agatha asks, eyes narrowed. Because it is a book of fairy tales, I say standing against the wall, and not even good ones. Are you not concerned about the side effects of your godlessness? she asks. By side effects do you mean sound mental state? That was the first expulsion. Another came after I decided I wanted to be a saint. Mainly to see if I could levitate, something my brother Edgar and I had read and marvelled at. I was also caught listening to the nuns’ crystal radio. I didn’t have enough time to find a station, but felt life rushing in at the whistles and pops between stations as I turned the silver dial. Later I argue with the doleful Sister who taught science. She had a mouth twisted in a permanent scowl and smelled like an old book. She had us filling out qualitative analyses of the elements in writing, like a police report. The Sister performs experiments in the chemistry lab mechanically, with a sober rigour that borders on humorous. I feel an almost violent enthusiasm and am unable to wait for her droning instructions, managing to create a small explosion with potassium dropped in water. It sounds like a door slamming. I don’t hear the nun-shoes squeaking on tile as they all come running in because, for a moment, I’ve lost my hearing. I am stunned. I feel an excruciating sharp pain, and then liquid leaks out of my left ear. When I look at my fingers, I see that it is blood.

Mother is horrified when she hears. Though astonishingly, she acquiesces to my pleas to attend the art academy. This is the last one. After this, she says quietly, you are on your own. She agrees to it only because of Queenie. A week before I woke with fierce pain in my chest. All day, I was unable to breathe. Mother called that night. She didn’t have to say it, I already knew. Queenie had died. A heart attack. There was no space in my body for such great agony. I felt vague, rudderless. I wanted her to say something more, but there was just a low buzzing sound on the telephone during a long awkward pause. Well that’s it then, I said. No one said anything back.

A bright knock in the cold. He is in my room. Always north of him I see a light. He smells like the sun. From his coat he produces a lark’s nest woven with dark hair that could be mine. He holds it out to me with both hands cupped, like an offering. He also produces a pair of worn leather riding boots. They are for me. I immediately question where he got the money. I know he is hungry. He says he traded a painting. They are completely impractical, reflecting back my childhood with its opulence that makes me almost ashamed. But at the same time I realize how remote it is too. How there is very little of my childhood left that feels real anymore. He says, No. They are verging on a beauty that is in no way material.

I show him my illustration. He studies it for what feels like a long time and then he asks me what I’m doing it for.

So that I can live.

You should paint, if you want to live.

It seems so odd to be talking at all. I have been aching to see him. It has been days. The last time I saw him he held an olive in his teeth, passing it to my mouth, warm and salty and filling me full of desire. My cool fingers on his warm neck. Ravish me. We are surrounded by people in the dark and riotous café. He rips the shoulder of my dress with his teeth. I drink wine with my coat resting on my shoulders for the rest of the night, and listen to a café luminary recite long passages of Dante and Verlaine. After the cafés close, the artists will go to one another’s studios, taking bottles. Behind its shutters, Paris is a late town.

It almost doesn’t seem real that he is here, in this small blue room with little ornamentation. I hate myself for not asking all the things that have been occupying me. Ulyana. His wife. His absences. But instead he returns to silently alter my existence.

How difficult it is to say what you actually feel. Rough hands, blue refracting eyes. I find his presence blinding. I see how rare communication actually is. Real, true communication. So much remains unsayable between people. All the secrets we keep.

His mouth on mine. Brushes drop. Abandon. Pleasure bursting into a thousand pieces.

Tell me a story, Ivory.

Imagined or real?

All stories are real.

A long silence.

I look at the familiar corners of the room. My voice has a different sound.

Once there was a raven-haired woman with skin as white as marble who had a daughter, a feral, woodland child. It was difficult for the girl to live as a regular child, as she had been given the extraordinary gift of hearing the voices of living creatures. This did not please the mother. The child would only become herself alone, deep in the woods, which pleased the mother even less. One afternoon, the woman threw a garden party where she had servants put out triangular sandwiches, trays of teacups, cakes piled high on glass plates, everything creamy and opulent. The woodland child was forced into formal attire, a shiny red dress, with a sash that wound tighter as she breathed. She tried to creep across the gleaming wood floors, attempting to slip out unnoticed. The raven-haired mother caught sight of the red swirl out of the corner of her eye, and in a few strides her hands were on the woodland child’s shoulders. You remember Mr. Winter don’t you? the woman asked the girl. A dark eyebrow arched in disapproval as she conducted the girl toward the man with kind, wet, bovine eyes. The girl nodded hello. The man was tall and awkward, with a shyness almost worse than hers. She could see that he was fighting down his embarrassment. Clumps of his hair fell forward and bobbed up and down when he spoke. He did a sort of clipped head bow every time he acknowledged the girl, which she found endearing, though he often knocked heads with maidens who made excuses and scurried off. If he were an animal, the woodland child thought sadly, he would be prey.

I am told you are an accomplished rider, he said to the girl, his eyes like someone carefully not looking at a rat they’ve just seen run out of the host’s kitchen.

I am fond of horses, the girl said, looking at her shoes. The mother hooked a finger under the girl’s chin and directed it up.

Just horses then?

All animals, she said, unused to the interest of an adult human. It’s unfortunate we’ve not figured out how to communicate with them better, she added.

The woodland child’s mother remained tensely polite and was about to speak when she was abruptly led away by a birdlike woman. This was the girl’s cue. She slipped two hard-boiled eggs from their delicate arrangement into the pocket of her dress, and moved with arrowing purpose.

The grass was damp and glossy. The woodland child’s shoes were painted with mud as soon as they left the flagstones. She ran, the sun-striped oaks blurring. It was so quiet she could hear the sound of her own heart beating. She could see the house, a dot in the distance. The windows were like flashes of mirror, giving shape, small fragments of civilization in the brush. The woodland child stopped when she reached the trees. The woods that surrounded the house—unlike the ones she would later know that form tidy colonnades—were clumped, thick, and deep.

The girl was slightly afraid of being caught, though she knew the raven-haired mother would never leave her party to look for her. And so she let herself relax a little. She knelt down on the forest floor, carpeted in bluebells, and loosened her sash. She snapped a twig. And in an empty space on the shiny mud, she wrote. She didn’t use ordinary letters. It was a message for the forest animals, so she wrote the way they do. But as she dragged the stick, the hairs on the woodland child’s neck bristled. She knew she was being watched.

The woodland child jerked her head up. It was a buck. A huge rack of antlers and wide dark eyes. Its body stock-still. Even though it was a calm and gentle creature, she was terrified at being so startled and alone, this deep in the woods. Her heart beat wildly. She could hear its breathing. Its fear. Air released from its nostrils. She looked into his eyes like dead angels. Neither the girl nor the deer moved for a very long time. Their breathing was synchronous.

A faint gasp escaped through the woodland child’s lips. And then the strangest thing happened. The buck made the same sound. She stood paralyzed in this moment. Their eyes locked. The girl understood that if you gazed into someone’s eyes long enough, there was no need to ask any questions. What passes between galvanizes. Children can look into eyes forever. But when you look into a creature’s eyes long enough, everything they’ve ever known passes through you too. The shelterless life. Running until their heart is about to explode. The life that occurs in the open, and in part-darkness.

It was at that moment the woodland child understood that a mystic and a solitary creature were the same thing. Hours deep into the thicket, a darkness grew. The girl became aware of canopies of sound. Her attention was on the deer, but at the same time, on everything around her. A collusion occurred. The woodland child would protect the deer from the bows and bullets, and the deer would teach the woodland child its language.

The raven-haired mother had rays of anger radiating out of her when the woodland child finally returned home. The trays and glasses had all been cleared away. There were only small signs of the party that afternoon. Flowers throughout the house, the smell of lily-of-the-valley perfume mingled with tobacco in an unholy union. The girl knew to remain quiet. There was no use in attempting to defend herself to her mother, it was like burning green wood. But the raven-haired mother was oddly good-humoured, calm even.

That night she sat on the edge of woodland child’s bed and informed her that she would be sent far away. The forests and the animals were turning her into something unrecognizable. The mother knew, even then, that part of the girl already belonged to them.