The charcoal sticks are wrapped in rags and stored outside the entrance to the cabin. Once Noé had finished scattering the ashes from the bonfire, she dug up the carbonized sticks from beneath the stones, carefully wrapped them in dried seaweed, then the seaweed in cloth and the cloth in a tin box. Fifteen sticks per packet, twenty-two packets in the box and one rag full of broken ends.
Those sticks, it was like she was living off them. Osip watches the ramshackle cabin incessantly, on the lookout for Noé who never steps outside. He trains his spyglass on the porch and counts the disappearing bundles. Sometimes, a hand, a wrist, emerges from the doorway, dips into the box, grabs a bundle, then the door closes and the blond flash of arm disappears.
For two days, he resists. On the third, he comes down from his tower, cuts across the path, climbs the gentle slope to the beach — behind him, waves ferry shells, seaweed, dead fish — and tiptoes up the porch steps. Once at the door, he doesn’t know what to do. At first, he presses his eye to a window pane, but it’s dark inside and the window is dirty. He stands and stares at the door jamb for an eternity; finally he gives himself a shake and turns the knob. He tries not to make a sound, but the hinges creak and the door sticks, he has to give it a shove to get it to open. Behind the door, metal pails tip and clatter onto the floor.
Noé doesn’t turn around. She’s covered in black dust: on her hands, her arms, her face, beneath her nose, her chin, her neck. Wherever beads of perspiration collect, the charcoal adheres, as it does to her blouse and skirt, to the floor, the furniture, and the sheets.
In front of her, the wall is smeared with charcoal. At each end, blank surfaces, grey wood and strips of wallpaper. In the centre, a crude shadowy blotch with moving contours that make no sense. Noé darkens it some more, charcoal floats in a cloud around her hand. In some places she draws the outline of empty patches the size of a fist or a toe. Her gestures are fluid; it’s as though she’s making it up as she goes. The shadows extend to the blank territory at each end.
Noé lets herself be rocked by the strident screeching of the charcoal on the wall.
She is inside the image, caught up in the long line she continues to draw.
A river born in the northwest that runs to the south of the picture.
Sand on her tongue, in her throat, her nose, her ears, her eyes, in the bend of her elbows, on her knees, her belly, her neck; between her lips and in her opening, too, filled like a conch shell. Sand in her scalp for days on end, that itches and is scratched, sand that falls in fine grains as though her whole skull is nothing but a sandcastle. Crusted hair, a perpetual squeaking in her eardrums, specks disintegrating beneath her teeth, mouthful after mouthful, catching between her molars and gums; sand when she sneezes, in her mucus, in her feces, everywhere. And under the sand’s bite, the bite of salt; lesions on her limbs inflamed by the friction of the elements (halite, sediment, water); skin rough for days, months, the healing from huge waves dragging on forever.
Her life began with a drowning, in a meander in the long black line that descends from the top corner of the wall to the centre. Whatever happened in her early years and dragged her into that heavy swell, she does not remember. She came into the world at the age of four tangled in the nets of unknown fishermen, with the sharp taste of rye and the raspy texture of the ocean’s bottom on her tongue. Leaning over her: a huge woman and a man rubbing away layers of mud with their handkerchiefs. Their faces come back to her as she traces the river over and over again.
After her convalescence, by order of appearance:
— Wind on salt burns. The cold bite of its gusts against bared flesh: awakening of the body within the painful pleasure of senses heightened by the accident. She scrapes at the scabs to rip them off, exposes the wounds to squalls rolling in from the sea.
— The buttery, metallic taste of blood. That of exposed sores, bug bites, scratches, cleaned each time with licks of the tongue, even the tiniest abrasions pinched to release their claret, her mouth pursed to nurse the wounds.
— The sound of her own voice, explored in secret in coastal caves. The echo of songs ricocheting off rock faces.
— Her heels sinking into the silt of low tide. The slurp of suction beneath her feet, the ground sticky with seaweed, redolent of salty kelp.
— The rigidity of her clothes washed in seawater and dried in the breeze. The cold of their touch in early spring when ice melts into the river, the enveloping heat in September when the sun hits their seams and warms the fabric.
— Her shifting shape over the seasons and years, the shooting pain behind her knees as her legs grow, the cloth of her blouse rubbing against the swollen nipples of her budding breasts.
— Slick, muddy rocks and the sharp slice of clams beneath her feet.
Some days, messages from her senses are magnified. Rays of light filtering through the foliage, the sun through slatted fences or the lamp’s reflection in newly washed windows trigger strong reactions, sometimes so brutal that she flinches, falls to the ground, her eyes rolling back in her head, and remembers nothing afterward. The fat woman says she’s possessed, the man that a physician from the Cité could treat her. Noé doesn’t want to be cured, she likes the oblivion that consumes her, the reset to zero of her body and thoughts. For hours before the fits, tension seizes her hands and arms, her legs, heart, lungs: even the air is in excess, takes too much space in her belly. Noé knows that nothing but the black of sheer darkness will soothe her.
Noé’s life is on the wall. The expanse of white bordering the river is dazzling. Dust from the charcoal floats above the image, bringing to mind the flocks of ducks and geese that stopped on the shores of the village of Oss on their way north or south.
For fifteen years, Noé observes their flight and envies them. She knows the blue strip of spruce behind the houses and the boundary it forms, and has no idea what lies beyond. The trees look like soldiers aligned in tight rows, they protect the village but lay siege to it, too.
It takes the death of the fat woman and the man for her to plunge into the pine grove and discover the unfamiliar audacity of movement.
Bare trunks topped with cone-filled branches smell of resin, bristle with dry twigs — a labyrinth for insects and birds, especially woodpeckers, nesting in the boughs, also June bugs, and termites that tunnel their holes between tree bark and sapwood. On the ground, a carpet of yellow needles that creatures cross, leaving no trace. A damp circle, the vestige of late summer rains; a warmth different from that in the village, this one less breezy, and sheltered from the open sea’s moods.
Noé doesn’t draw the woods. She only traces waterways, though in the blank space to the north of the drawing she’s aware of the pine grove that can be crossed in less than an hour — a fake dense forest to keep the village children to the same hard life as their parents. Beyond, prairies stretching as far as the eye can see.
Over and over, she sketches the river’s dark lines, opens them to the sea. Her palm travels along the coast, she digs estuaries, rivers, lakes, follows the waterways, finds her homes again.
The filthy tents of a circus; a forest of blue huts; the partly submerged cloister of the Sisters of Sainte-Sainte-Anne; an oilcloth stretched between two trees, every night under different leafy boughs, across thirteen hundred square rods of green, golden, russet, and white fields; northern peoples’ shelters on the ice-covered taiga; old tubs and actual ships that toss, pitch, and rock; the baggage compartment of one train, another’s boxcar; mountain isbas; the deserted castle at Luce-aux-Farolles; coppices of birch and cedar, rabbit warrens, beech, almond, and fig groves; thatched farés; gîtes and hovels; Father Libouban’s hermitage; gourbis with walls of sand; caves; countless stables, cottages, and chartreuses; harbour warehouses and noisy factory hangars; church squares, temples; the gaudy windows of greasy smelling restaurants, the cots of Ismador’s boarding school, the attic of the Cité’s Opera house, then its grand train station.
She shades in the Bastindale River; above, she imagines flamboyant fields of wild mustard, and coastal villages identical to one another with their clotheslines and painted cottages: Lastaigne, Sérodes, Marydales, Bounia, Nan Mei. She reaches the open sea — the squeak of charcoal resembles that of ice ferried by the tides — and moves on to the ochre earth of the pigment quarries of Oronge; once more she hears the chant of the Circé grottos, the echo of waves against rock walls; and then, when the black mass of water swells into a bay, an ocean, she discovers again the first of the washed-up medusas announcing the welcoming beaches of Sikkim and Saint-Samovar; and finally, the cliffs of Triglav, the remote village of Seiche. Sevastian’s forest.
Sitjaq, she has drowned in the sea. It’s not on the map, it’s not on the wall, she has smudged its spit of sand, its rocks and lagoons, until they merge with the waves and leave no trace.
Osip is standing behind her. For a good while, he studies the drawing, understanding nothing. He backs up. He steps over the objects piled on the other side of the room, leans back against the partition wall, and examines her work from a distance. The blotch, Noé’s broad gestures. The drawing tapers off at both ends. Osip looks for meaning; doesn’t see black as water, white as land. He thinks he’s looking at the scribbling of a madwoman.
The charcoal crumbles, squeaks, Osip loathes the grating sound. He walks across the cabin, draws near, gently takes Noé’s hand, distances her from the wall. He doesn’t put his arms around her but leads her like a living bird, from the sea to the bed. One by one, he separates her fingers, the charcoal makes a gleeful sound as it strikes the floor.
The ocean is opaque, dotted with small dusty islands in the shape of ripe fruits. Noé has seen them on maps, globes, she has drawn them a hundred times: the curves and hollows and jagged edges of the coastlines, shoals, coves. She loves their contours, the movement of her hand following the shore. The geography of the Dark — this sea with its scattered atolls and sand islands — adheres to her own. Her sketches disappeared with the sinking of La Coquille, swallowed up by the ocean along with her rush bundles, but she has not forgotten them.
Drawing these wild lands, the islets lost in the waves, she feels again beneath her feet the texture of soils on which she has trod — silt, gravel, pebbles, sand, the soft humus of old forests, logs, stones, cobblestones; in the cabin, she lets herself be led by Osip, but beneath her toes she can feel the fifteen years of her peregrinations climbing her ankles, her calves, her legs.
Osip steers her across the room. She is nothing but a body. Her limbs sway like buffeted reeds; her heels drag along the floor, no one left to bid them to lift up. Her buttocks are the first to sink into the mattress, then her back, her shoulders, her head; it’s Osip who initiates her movements, directs them, chooses them.
Morning’s gusts beneath her dress, on her bare thighs and hips as she washes her buttocks, her hands, her face in rivers and ponds.
Her limbs’ exhaustion after days’ worth of walking and portaging.
The trickle of warm water, from her lips on the leather drinking pouch to her belly, when night falls and snowmelt sputters on the brush-fed fire. At the same time, crickets, frogs, cicadas; evening’s echoes replace those of the day. That hour of calm when sounds cohabit.
Noé doesn’t shut her eyes. To do so would mean she’d have to order them to close — lower her eyelids, join them together — but she is neither present nor able. Her lashes remain half-open, her mouth too, soft, round; the simple pressure of the shaft is enough to cause her lips to part even more.
The ocean and prairies, shimmering alike when traversed by the wind.
The body’s travel through landscapes.
Osip climaxes quickly, his sigh brief. Noé lies still, a tangle of hair and blackened clothing. For a moment, he looks at her, doesn’t know what to do. Then, calmly, he rearranges the furniture, the trunks, and the jumble cluttering up the congested half of the room. Against the drawing’s dark form, he places a table and three chairs; he finds a cracked vase, he washes it and centres it on a cloth. He steps out, gathers chicory and asters, and sets the mauve bouquet in the middle of the table. When he finally leaves, he has trampled whatever is left of the charcoal sticks and swept their dust between the floorboards. He has made tea.
Noé stays on the bed, a dirty thing in a tidy house. She doesn’t move. She has gone.