Echo North(2)

A host of doctors visited me, and I didn’t understand why. I crept downstairs and listened shamelessly outside the door to my father’s study while they talked about me. I heard things like “never fully heal” and “the cuts were too deep” and “infection” and “lucky if she isn’t blind.”

And then one day, as the first of the winter snows blew soft across our village, the doctor came to take the bandage off the left side of my face. My father watched intently as the doctor peeled the cloth away, and I held my breath and waited for it to be over. Horror and shock flashed across my father’s features, and for the first time, I realized what had happened to me might not be able to be undone.

“Cover your right eye,” the doctor instructed. “Can you see out of the left one?”

I lifted my hand and obeyed. The light was very bright, but I could see. I nodded.

The doctor let out a breath of relief.

My father shifted where he stood. The horror had left his expression, melding into a distance that unnerved me. “Is there anything you recommend for …” he trailed off, looking helplessly at the physician.

“Not unless God gives her new skin,” said the doctor. I think he meant it as a joke, but my father didn’t even smile.

I pushed past both of them and went out into the hall, padding to the room my mother had once shared with my father. She had a handsome mahogany vanity, with a mirror above. I stepped up to it and looked in.

Four angry, jagged lines ran down the left side of my face, from my forehead all the way to my chin—the marks from the wolf’s claws. My left eyelid was taut and scarred, my lips pulled up on one side.

I stared at my reflection, feeling dull and strange. I covered the right half of my face with one hand, studying the scars for a long while before switching to cover the left half and studying in turn the smooth, untouched skin.

Then I let my hand fall.

I heard my father’s step and turned to see him watching me from the doorway. “It isn’t so bad, little lamb. They will fade over time.” But sadness lingered in his eyes. He swept me into his arms and I clung to his neck, sobbing, while he stroked my hair and wept with me awhile.



MY FATHER OWNED AND RAN the bookshop in our tiny village. He was excessively proud of it: it had a green door and a brass knocker and a large shop window with carved wooden shutters. “It’s not a large living,” he always said, “but it’s enough.”

PETER ALKAEV, BOOKSELLER was painted in bold red letters across the window. That was how I first learned to spell my last name.

The summer after the incident with the wolf, my father sold our house, and he, my brother, Rodya, and I moved into the apartments over the shop. I had my own little room with a tiny circle window that looked out over the street, and all the books I could ever want.

My scars whitened as I got older—they didn’t fade. I learned very early that in the old tales of magic the wicked were always ugly and scarred, the good beautiful; I was not beautiful, but I wanted to be good, and after a while I couldn’t bear to read those stories anymore.

The villagers avoided me. My fellow students crossed themselves when I walked by, or openly laughed at me. They said the Devil had claimed my face and would someday come back for the rest of me. They said he wouldn’t have marked me if I didn’t already belong to him. Once, I tried to eat lunch with a girl called Sara. She liked to read, same as me—she was always carrying around thick tomes of history or poetry or science, her nose permanently stuck between the pages. I thought that gave me the right to try and befriend her, but she spat in my face and pelted me with stones.

I was the monster in her story. She was the heroine.

I didn’t try again.

Once, I wandered into the apothecary and bought a jar of cream for two silver pennies because the proprietor swore it would make the scars vanish completely by the end of the month.

It didn’t work, of course. Rodya found me crying in my bedroom and I told him what I’d done. He made jokes at the apothecary’s expense until I finally stopped crying and forced a smile for him, but I still felt like a fool. I buried the empty jar of cream in a little patch of earth behind the bookshop—it had been intended for a garden, but no one had ever planted anything and it remained barren. I couldn’t stand to confess what I’d done to my father.

By the time I turned fifteen, I had read nearly every book in the shop, and my father hired me as his assistant. “Her face might frighten the Devil who formed her,” I overheard one of my father’s patrons say, “but damned if she doesn’t know every word of the classics and can be counted on to point a fellow to the right book, every time.” This was one of the kindest things they said about me. There were many more less kind.

I withdrew more and more, trying to lose myself in running the shop. I organized the shelves and reorganized them. I wrapped books in paper and string for customers, I wrote letters to the booksellers in the city, sending for rare volumes we didn’t have. I kept my father’s account books in order, and when business was slow, I went to our upstairs apartments and scoured the rooms clean, one by one.

I kept busy, attempted to convince myself I was content. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shove away my loneliness, couldn’t bury it in my mind like I’d buried the jar of cream in the dirt where there ought to have been a garden.