Archibald Samuel - Arvida

Someone, bellowing, launched himself at the first of the renegades, his arms raised over his head to deal a heavy blow with his bludgeon. He’d hardly had time to begin his movement when the ronin took two steps forward and held the tip of his sabre to the man’s pulsing throat. He didn’t kill him. He made a sign for him to step aside, he ordered us all to step aside, then without a glance, plunged into the corridor that had been opened up, with the rest of the damned following behind.

The last one stopped and said:

“It’s over. You shouldn’t go up there.”

You had to be stupid to think we’d not go to see, to be certain that the threat was no more. Most of us rushed to the house, skirting the bonfire, and only a few turned back along with the renegades.

A strong wind rose up later that night, and blew embers and fiery brands into the house, through the windows. It was burned to its foundations, razed to the ground. No one ever missed it, but all of us who’d climbed on up, hours before the fire had been declared, regretted not having taken the renegade’s advice.

15

Akira Gengei said to himself, in Ainu:

The two women are now silent. The men here never speak of them, and on their orders, neither do their wives. And yet I feel, I sense that some of them still tend to their wounds, care for them and reopen them to keep Reiko’s art alive. Perhaps I’m the only one here who can still speak of all that, because I live in a language that no one any more understands.

The men who scaled the hill towards the house, despite the renegades’ warnings, found Misaka and Reiko carved up, dismembered, hacked into pieces that were scattered to all four corners of the house. The men must have been gratified, they must have told themselves that at last they had received their punishment, but they couldn’t really know if what they saw before their eyes was punishment or rapture. They couldn’t be certain. A fissure had worked its way into their minds, like a razor blade through the delicate flesh of their wives. They would have liked to believe that an ogre had staved in the doors of the property to bear off the women and drag them by their hair down to hell, but they had the vague feeling that whatever had come in search of Misaka and Reiko possessed the attributes of a woman and the attributes of a man, and that its fury had blown upon them like the wind through the window, making no more noise than the pad of a cat in an unmade bed. They knew that past a certain point, nothing had happened to Misaka and Reiko that they had not desired, and that whatever demon had come to ravish them, they had invoked it themselves, they had brought down its hands and claws upon themselves.

The house’s cold ashes were strewn over the peninsula, and the property is still abandoned. Travellers expected at Rausu never arrive, and the news of their disappearance reaches us by letter from Honshu, which is also an island, but that the people of Hokkaido still call “the mainland.”

As of the first snows, we find in places where no one ever sends flocks to graze, hoof prints, those of a buffalo or a goat walking on two legs. An old man told me one night that deeper still into the forest, there in the midst of brambles and thorns, where the bears themselves clear no paths, another series of prints joins up with those of the goat. They never run side by side for long, as if their owners knew each other well enough to exchange a greeting, but not enough to walk in convoy. Those prints are indistinct, like a child’s boot with at the tip a few red, almost brown drops like blood in the snow. The prints make three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood, three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood, three baby steps and fifteen drops of blood.

BLOOD SISTERS III

He’d died deep in the woods and they’d taken him to the funeral parlour to try and deal with the damage. He’d worked for Abitibi Consolidated, which everyone around called the Console. None of the guys had seen what happened. He’d been split open from shoulder to hip by a machine that could trim trees tall as cathedrals. No one knew how he’d got in the way of the lopper. They were deep in the woods and the guys said that the day before there was a little snow. In June, mind you. Seems he’d made a stain on the ground as big as a puddle of water, thick as molasses and red as a harlot’s mouth.

She was there just by chance. A friend had found her work in his parents’ bistro in France. She’d be staying ten days in Paris before getting on a train for Brittany, and she’d come to say goodbye to her parents before taking off.

The woman at the funeral parlour had been brought up to date, and she met her in a room that reminded her of the reading room in her grandparents’ house. The woman had very beautiful hands, with small fingers, both plump and delicate, and that’s all she could bring herself to think about.

“I’m sorry that you can’t attend the funeral.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re part of the family?”

“Yes.”

“His daughter?”

“No.”

There was a silence.

“You’re going back to Montreal tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’m taking the plane for Paris on Thursday.”

The woman sighed.

“I’ve never been to Paris.”

“Neither have I.”

Something wasn’t quite right, and the woman wouldn’t understand what it was until two days later. Sitting in front of the television set beside her sleeping husband, she would think again of the young woman and her heady odour and her large breasts offered to view through her dress’s plunging neckline. The colour black was the only thing appropriate in her appearance. The cut of her clothes and her perfume and her hair and her thick red lipstick and the brightness of her eyes spoke of something forbidden in that place. The woman would think of the young woman and then those deadly beauties in crime novels who poison their husbands to get their hands on the insurance money.

“She looked like a black widow.”

This idea, expressed aloud to herself alone, raised a thousand questions, and at that moment the only person capable of answering them was flying thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.

The embalmer was standing right beside his table when the widow entered the room. He turned to face her, and said:

“My sympathies, Miss.”

She didn’t answer.

He’d prepared a speech to warn her. Either he delivered it badly or she didn’t listen or there was no way to make her change her mind, because she said:

“I want to see him.”

The embalmer sighed. He took the sheet by the hem and folded it back to bare the cadaver to halfway down the chest. The woman didn’t move, not a gesture, not a twitch.

“I want to be with him for a while.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“Yes.”

She stayed there alone, beside the corpse.

It didn’t even look like a cadaver any more. You could imagine it was a body by the curve of the neck and left shoulder. The same line was interrupted on the right. The same line was broken off, splintered, and twisted on the right. The rest was a sculpture fashioned from an open wound with mutilated flesh and strips of grey skin bruised yellow and black.

Facing the carcass, she took from her handbag a sheet of paper folded in four. She opened it with care. The sheet was covered in tiny red handwriting. She cleared her throat and refolded it and began to talk while holding it, damp, in the palm of her hand.

“I came to tell you that I’m glad you’re dead. I know you didn’t only do bad things in your life, but I’m happy all the same and never never will I feel guilty for that. When I was small, during the catechism, Madame Verreault talked to us about the good Lord who was the father of little Jesus and who pardoned all our transgressions and forgave us all our sins. Grandmother had a bible. Thicker than the New Testament they gave us at school. Inside there were stories of the time before Jesus, and in those stories God doesn’t look like Father Christmas. Whenever he feels like it he imposes bizarre taboos, and he’s appalled by just about everything men do. He asks them to bathe their sins in blood, and to cut off the hands of thieves and to stone unfaithful women. I asked Madame Verreault how those two gods could inhabit the same book, and who’d decided to pass them off as only one. The catechism doesn’t have ready-made answers for questions like that. She did her best. She said God had always wanted to make peace in the world, and for that he had for a long time to present himself as very hard in order to hold in check all the evil running rampant in the hearts of men. God had pretended to be terrible before sending his Son to reveal to us that he was love. For our own good. A bit like my parents who loved me had to punish me when I was naughty. It was a nice try but I was already smart enough to recognize an explanation that was too convenient. I kept that in mind for a long time, and years later I finally understood. Because of you. It wasn’t the first time that you came to me but it was the first time that you said you loved me. That’s when I understood. God loved you like he loved me. He loved us both, He loved us, strange bed mates, you the burly man and me the child, he loved your hands on me and your sweaty underclothes, he loved my cold feet and my icy nose, he loved your past suffering as much as mine in the future. That’s when I understood, I’m telling you. God is love and that’s why he’s terrible. You can’t live, knowing that. You can just destroy your life and destroy your body and push others away and hurt others. You can just be evil and I was evil all the time and it’s your fault and the fault of the stupid God who loved you like he loved me, of God who loved you, big dirty dog, and who loved me, damaged little girl. Today I’m fine. I know that a God listens to murderous prayers, and I know that stretched out beside me you were an abomination to him. I’ve come to tell you that it doesn’t bother me if God divided your soul in two to bring the good half close to him. It doesn’t bother me if God was with you while the lopper tore you in two because now that you look like that, I forgive you too.”