The Dictionary of Animal Languages by Heidi Sopinka

Author:Heidi Sopinka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

BLACK SWAN

Each breath is the dark corner of an echo and contains the energy of wind, like two people whose paths are about to cross and then don’t.

A DARK VERTICAL LINE divides the mist. I recognize his gait and watch his shadow move across the grass. He has such radiance, you forgive him anything.

First he cannot see me. I am white, clothes waving like a flag, hair in black gusts. My breathing is slowed, the taste of his coppery mouth on my tongue. His hands on my fingers. He says, You’re so cold. And puts them inside his shirt.

We climb a monument modelled after an ancient Roman temple. Lev prefers this strange park sculpted from the ruins of one of Napoleon’s gypsum quarries. Despite the careful curation of exotic plants, it cannot shake what lies below. A history of blood and industry. Battles and bodies and murder, though now beautiful flowers grow. The swans are black. Paris from up here looks small. The silver rooftops and the domes of Sacré-Coeur appear over the treetops. And unlike every other park in Paris, here you can sit on the grass.

Lev is part nocturnal animal. He leaves the studio at night and wanders for hours, walking though Place des Vosges, through the cemeteries, behind the Pantheon, exploring the old Paris. Only sometimes can I come.

There are wet-root smells soaking through fog. His eyes whiter. My eyes blacker. The grass cold under his hands, he opens his eyes to the dark sky. A farness that makes him near. His presence all over my body. Hands on my ribs, hipbones. His mouth on my throat. Stars falling on skin. Fingers in fingers. The parts of the moon that glimmer through. Warmth. Violence. Bones licked clean. The thing that happens to us. Its full pleasure beating through me, shaking me awake, head clear, mind stilled. Longing and abandonment skinned off to ripeness, a daze of rapture.

When I first made the lines, he says, hands underneath his head, I was actually thinking about the honesty of trees. I think of the Buddhist monks, being silent, sitting. Who does that better than trees? Our backs on the damp grass as we look up, the sky pierced with sharp black branches.

In Siberia, near the Tunguska River, he says, when I was a boy, I heard about what the villagers thought was the end of the world. Everything shook. There was a cracking sound like lightning, and then a column of blue light brighter than the sun. Windows broke hundreds of kilometres away. All the trees were on fire. Eighty million trees burned to the ground. It was so isolated there that no one came to investigate. He closes his eyes. Twenty years later someone came to look at the hole that was left. Thousands of square kilometres. He laughs. It was a comet. The largest one to ever hit the Earth. Almost no one died because of where it was. If it had exploded four hours later, it would have taken out the whole of Petersburg.

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