3

It’s the same box Osip fills every autumn with the leaves Sevastian brings him back from Seiche. Winter passes and the stock of tea dwindles. Come springtime, he must find other sources of pleasure. Reclaiming Noé’s body, turned cold and white by the north wind; counting the ships that didn’t survive the ice; sounding the horn to scatter the flocks of geese sweeping through the sky.

Once the frost eases, the children go outside. The lighthouse is Osip’s again. He spends days alone by his lantern. The spyglass takes the place of his right eye and the sun weathers his face, leaving a pale circle beneath one eyebrow.

He prefers the boys from a distance.

The youngsters have lived one on top of the other for too long. As soon as the Old Woman lets them go, Abel races toward the forest. He’s off like a shot the minute the door opens, wanting nothing to do with the beach; he only stops once, in front of Noé’s cabin, stands at the foot of the porch — unlike other years, his mother’s house is shut tight — and stays put for a moment, wonders if he should knock. In both hands, he’s carrying the rabbit snares Sevastian taught him to make during the weeks of cold. Osip observes him from above. The boy sets foot on the first step, changes his mind. He glances over his shoulder, then sprints for the forest again. He finds the hideout under its protective winter layers, pulls away the carefully placed pine boughs and sweeps up the brown needles, then sets his traps, prepares for summer.

Seth, he runs for three days straight. Anywhere, in all directions, only stopping to climb trees or jump into puddles of melted snow. He doesn’t share his brother’s qualms; he climbs onto the porch, pounds on his mother’s door, doesn’t wait for an answer, clambers up barrels, hitches himself onto the roof, slides back down the eavestrough, runs a few laps through the forest, then returns to the sea; steps over Dé eating sand, leaps from one rock to the next, doesn’t slip on the wet seaweed or slick stones. Later, once he’s burned off the winter’s excess energy, he drags home branches and bark, begs the Old Woman for wool scraps, then makes miniature boats that he launches onto the waves and watches as they run aground.

Sometimes the cloud cover thickens and turns a dark black, storms a frequent occurrence during spring’s high tides. The little ones have to be rounded up inside the tower. Sevastian slings Abel over his shoulder, the boy’s forehead banging against his father’s back. He’s shouting and laughing at the same time; he wanted to watch the storm from his hideout.

All night long, jellyfish are swept up in the breakers. By morning, they lie swollen like blisters on the smooth face of the beach.

Noé half-opens her door. Her head pokes through and the sun strikes her face; she shuts her eyes but keeps her nose in the light, breathes the salt-laden breeze. She stands motionless in the doorway, as if her body craves the shelter inside but her head refuses to return to the lair.

Cautiously, she makes her way outside. She’s not ghostly and emaciated like a hibernating animal. She does a full tour to measure the distance that separates her from each of her children. All of them have returned to their respective territories. Mie is the closest at hand, but other than in the evening, she never really comes near. Noé stakes her claim to the beach again, gathers up jellyfish in her pails. Mie makes her own footprints in the sand, walks in her mother’s for a while, then drops to the ground. Osip glances at the young girl lying on the beach but turns back to his woman, a giant silhouetted against the mist. Noé bends over. Noé straightens up. Noé gathers medusas the way the Old Woman does mushrooms. The pails bang against her thighs with each step; water runs down her skirt and pastes the fabric to her skin.

Soon enough, she is standing by the steps to the cabin, her enormous buckets filled to overflowing. One moment she’s holding a bucket in each hand, in the next they drop; it takes just a few seconds for her knuckles to give way under the weight of the pails that tumble to the ground. There’s water everywhere and, lying in the puddles, the indestructible blue spheres and their stinging tangle of tentacles.

Noé stares at her wrists, her fingers, lifts her arms to the light as though they were foreign to her. She turns, looks for something to explain what has just happened. There is no one; Mie is still lying in the waves, Seth’s bobbing around near his sister, Abel is off somewhere in the forest. Noé looks at the tipped-over pails and bends to pick up the jellyfish, folding herself into three — her shoulders, her pelvis, her knees — grabs the beasts bare-handed, her skin erupting in red blisters. She’s relieved: this pain can’t reach her.

She vomits.

Osip is watching from the gallery. He should go down but doesn’t budge, paralyzed at the sight of Noé’s clumsiness, her erratic movements, and the folly of her grabbing the jellyfish without protecting her fingers.

Once the flaccid bodies have been gathered up, she withdraws inside, shuts the door and goes to ground.

For days, she doesn’t resurface.

The black umbra of the ice is imprinted on the sand. The packs have melted, nothing remains but the ashes and dust that hid in their iridescent blue. Among the dead grasses, green spikes are emerging; their stalks quiver with the passing of birds and crabs. Here and there along the shore: traces of the pyre not yet extinguished by the wind. The whale carcass has been eaten by the family and by other passing creatures; slowly the sea washes over its bones and swallows them up one by one.

Osip turns his gaze to the beach. He’s seated at the top of the tower with the spyglass around his neck and doesn’t know what to focus on. Spectacles such as the flight of white geese in group formation no longer interest him, nor do the tails and the spouting of cetaceans above the waves, the waddling of porcupines descending from the forest at low tide, or the alighting of huge eagles on the lantern before they sectione for their prey.

What he really loves is watching Noé watch these same things.

Which leaves Mie. The little girl resembles Sevastian to an unpleasant degree — she has his flat nose, his pale round eyes. Some mornings, she sits herself down on the stairs in the tower and waits for the Old Woman to plait her hair. On these days, she’s a blend of her grandmother and her father; at times Osip watches her, unable to imagine what is going through her child’s head, wonders what she can be doing as she sits, immobile for hours at a time, amid the cranes of the northern cove or, immobile again, at the mouth of the river. Maybe, like him, Mie is lost. She’s used to hanging onto her mother’s skirts, only this spring her mother is nowhere to be found.

Osip lets his spyglass wander over the shore. Time devours everything: the days slip by, identical, even the ships leave him cold. He stops comparing the letters on their sides to the markings on the coins he keeps in his desk.

Several times, he heads down and knocks on Noé’s door. She doesn’t answer. He enters anyway. With each passing year, the cabin fills a little more with disquieting objects he tries not to see. He concentrates on her alone, touches her, lays her down on the bed and wraps himself around her. She must have lived off lard all winter long: her breasts hang heavy on her chest. She surrenders, but with greater resistance. Once he has finished, he no longer tidies the cabin; that has become impossible. He departs, leaving the door open behind him. He wishes that Noé would step outside and give meaning to his days again, but she pulls the sheets around her body, drags her way to the door, and slowly shuts it.

Osip returns to his lighthouse.

As leaves bud, unfurl and turn green in the trees, the ocean changes colour. Grey in winter, it veers to blue, then swells with turquoise and glimmers, darkens to cyan, to ultramarine, and then, in August, shifts to cerulean. Days pass, nothing happens.


One morning, Osip walks into the lighthouse kitchen and finds the eldest’s daughter there. She’s seated by the table, almost as though she’s waiting for him. She sits motionless, her child’s hands in her lap and her face, slightly round and slightly angular, calm and serious. When he enters, she murmurs, “Ah.” He pauses before her for a moment, then heads over to the hearth, puts water on to boil, pulls roots from a jar that he’ll infuse as he waits for teatime. When he turns, Mie is standing so close behind him that he gives a start. Her feral girl’s braids haven’t been redone for days, and she’s crowned with hair run amok. She examines him head to toe, her cheeks red, her body taut, her dress torn at the knees, her legs bitten by flies. She’s been twelve for ten days and she says, “I want you to teach me human sex.”

He wonders how much courage it must take for the little one to keep looking him in the eye. He wonders if a girl raised in Seiche would have asked such a question and, out of the blue, thinks of the boys wolfing down shellfish and sleeping in earthen hideouts.

Mie is twelve.

She is his brother’s daughter.

He says, “No.”

Then he skirts around her and heads up the tower stairs, tries to climb slowly but all he wants to do is run, to get as far away as possible from her blond aureole and scabbed elbows. He manages to take his time, closes the office door without slamming it, pulls the bolt and then, laying his ear against the keyhole, he listens, strains to hear Mie’s steps on the stairs, the distinctive scrape of her heels against stone, the heavy door of the lighthouse opening and closing.