Then the savage little statue shimmered back into reality and the true nature of her crime was revealed. But Rebeca Linke would never again try to balance out the two contradictory halves of herself. The only evidence of the poppy seed inside her was a muffled vegetable rattle, like hail hitting a windowpane. Although she was incapable of stringing together complex thoughts, she must have realized that this placid state could no longer be sustained. She was beholden to the present, like water held in the palm of a hand. Quickly placing the head on top of something, she stepped back to observe the effect in the darkness. The amputated body part continued to mutate, now adopting a stubborn disposition. Seen from a new perspective, the woman decided that she liked this version better than the little effigy of the peasant woman, with its round, protruding tongue. Fierce and angry from her chin to her eyebrows, temples, and hair, she regarded the incredible metamorphosis of the bodiless doll as a challenge. A strange, equivocal feeling came over her. She knelt down until she was at the same level as the head. “Amanda, I want to kiss you,” she murmured. But she was unable to consummate the act. As in a nightmare, the unreality of her mouth made it impossible.
Suddenly, she saw in horror that the head was still bleeding, the gaunt, pale face hankering for its blood. It was now paramount that she restore the natural order of things. She had to bring her thoughts back to the top and reconstruct the real universe with its stars above and ground below. She had to rewrite the primordial plan. In one graceful movement, the decapitated woman picked up her old head and shoved it on like a helmet. The unfamiliar weight made her sway for a moment. It was difficult, annoying, to have to look at the world through eyes. She was trapped in an attic where things and their images scratched pitilessly at the innocent air, clamoring for their rightful places. Fortunately, the two flows of sap combined easily, far more quickly than would ordinarily happen in a grafted plant.
All fixed? The woman ran her thumbs around her neck, where the wound had started to burn like a red-hot wire, but this was nothing compared to the urgency of her new vigil. She stumbled around, surveying the room. In fact, the anemic head seemed changed, quite different. But what did that matter? A subtle feeling of happiness was distorting her ability to make the comparison. Finally, her hand, which was being unusually slow, managed to get the door open. It had struggled with the handle for an age.
Out in the field, the woman’s night, the first night she had ever truly owned, began. Feeling dizzy, she tried to grab hold of something to steady herself, but there was nothing at hand. The stars shone down on her, clustered tightly as though their points had been soldered together. Even after her embarrassing fall, she was still dazzled. The night offered an unlimited opportunity to fulfill her desires. She was much freer than those sorry things in the sky—she was the night itself. The woman had to get up and ignore the brambles pricking the soles of her feet; the ground looked softer further on. She’d never walked barefoot before, not even on carpet or sand. But she decided to accept the thorns without protest, or at least as the stupid creatures they were: condemned to lie beneath her feet, always staring up at the universe. Her hands were empty, and as she continued walking, she decided to raise her palms so she could read the lines in the moonlight. The fabulous fates that had once been read there hesitantly, with an unnecessary amount of melodrama, as though the fortune-teller were unsure whether to reveal the complete truth, were now impossible to decipher. It was strange: she saw the old woman, the green eyes of a cat on her bony shoulder, the hanging jars, and the flowering branch across the window of the hut, but had not the slightest memory of the prophecy itself. All she knew was that it had been terrifying. She looked at the lines again the way a child who can’t read has to make do with the pictures in a book, and yet she thought she saw something that she had never suspected her hands could harbor. She lowered them and caressed her hips. As she walked, she felt the hidden bones moving inside of her, so straight and covered so simply. She was taking stock of every detail to replace her old fear with an absolute disregard for danger. When she reached her breasts, she felt as if she were rediscovering herself after a long bout of amnesia. They had lost their former pertness, but their suggestive heft made them much more satisfying than before. She lifted one in each hand and walked on. Now the smooth field began, but it wasn’t as soft or empty as it had seemed from afar. She was watched by hundreds of hidden eyes and chewed on by thousands of teeth. But this striking contrast, a true, genuine sensation, was alive beneath her feet. It flooded her body, filling it with messages.
Then came a new adventure: the forest. For a moment, the woman was stunned. The trees had sprung up suddenly, thick, dark, and rustling; she felt the sum of their breath on her face. She avoided them as best she could. Having walked thus far in a diagonal line, she found herself on the path of sand and leaves that separated the forest from the river. It was a relief to feel its soft bed, and she was tempted to lie down for a moment so she could look up at the sky without having to crane her neck. But suddenly, it seemed to her that the forest had recognized her, that it was spying on her. Either because she had grown used to the whispering or because it had stopped, she was swallowed by a brutal silence. She was lost in a mute, conspiratorial crowd.
“I’m as real as they are,” she murmured to calm herself down. “Only more mobile. I can escape them and their buried feet…”
Nothing happened; not one of them had the initiative to uproot itself. She quickened her pace along the sand and soon her new haste developed into a wild run through the trees. Standing on their single stumps, they looked like a procession of casualties of war. The woman stopped again. If this expectant silence was for her, she thought, they could hear all they wanted to know then and there, not that she was feeling very inspired. “A brief life story,” she said. “Enough to fill a small gravestone: Rebeca Linke, thirty years old. Left her personal life behind on a strange, timeless frontier.” Nothing. That same old desolation, a clash of different languages and customs. “Maybe things are looking for their origins,” she continued, still embittered by the curse of culture. She turned her floating head away and started walking again. With her new approach to life, nothing could upset her anymore, not even the mythical serpent, now old and no doubt toothless, even if he was still trying to play his game. As the owner of the night, she had no interest in ancient history, especially now that she knew it ended with the sorry chapter of modernity. Now that she had broken with the past, she was met with a vision of normalcy, the simple sleep of the common man, his confident snoring beating out a rhythm from the pillow. Others just like him would be doing the same, filling the earth’s night with noise from their prone heads next to their conscious, insomniac wives. How could anyone, she thought, especially the ruler of paradise—a being so full of wisdom and destiny—dare to use the excuse of such remote sin to arrange things so that these women lie awake next to sleeping men?
In the meantime, she had covered a sizable distance. This was probably the only benefit of thinking back to an absurd story that hardly applied to her. But, of course, she mustn’t try to tie up the loose ends: therein lay the danger. “Danger.” She said the word disdainfully, like a bird swaying on a creaking branch.