PDCOO Chapter 25

The conversation had drifted to family, and Karlah found herself without anything to say. She scrambled for another thread.

She had plenty she wanted to say. Who are you, what does your uncle do, when are you going home, are you interested in my daughter—among other things.

But if she said all that, wouldn't he look at her with something in his expression that meant 'even hedgehogs love their own babies'—and then what? And what if he did, what was wrong with finding your own child precious—and so on until her thoughts were a knot she couldn't find the end of.

The silence wasn't going to wait for her.

"If there's nothing more you'd like me to clean—"

"W-wait! Bertram!"

"Yes."

"Is my daughter pretty?"

The silence returned.

Karlah, face now burning, began saying whatever came out of her mouth.

"No, that—came out wrong! The girl—well, her father was handsome, and it's not for me to say but I was considered a beauty in my time, and somehow she just didn't take after either of us. Not that I'm saying she's not attr—not—"

"By conventional standards, you are still considered a beauty. I believe that."

"Don't say things like that! I'm asking whether you find her—is Anna cute to you, is she pretty?"

"...I'm not sure. If you'd like to know, I could go and have a look at her and report back."

"You'd have to go look?"

"All I can picture right now is the top of her head."

There had been opportunities to see Anna's face properly—but most encounters had been in the evening or at night, or over meals. Either too dark to see clearly, or all he recalled was her cheeks stuffed round with food like a wild hamster. Or, like last night, dazzling under the moonlight.

So he'd go and look and report his findings. Which was a perfectly reasonable offer—but Karlah seized his sleeve.

"I'm not curious anymore. Go tidy the communal lodging!"

"Understood. And I'll keep what you said earlier to myself."

"What?"

"If Anna heard that you said she didn't take after you—that she's nothing to look at because of it—she'd be hurt."

More and more unbelievable.

He was taking shelter in her house and lecturing her on her own daughter's feelings.

At the wide back retreating from her, Karlah muttered with all the irritation she had:

"Do I need to look at her face to know? Even the back of Anna's head is already cute..."

"...Mama? What are you going on about at this hour?"

Anna had materialized in the restaurant doorway, staring at Karlah with uncertain eyes.

The communal pen's pigs were raised on by-products from the communal farm.

Before the war—before there was a communal farm or pen—this village's pigs, like pigs anywhere, had foraged in the forest. Soft roots and fallen fruit were their diet.

During the war, most pigs had been slaughtered or penned in small enclosures.

When the war ended, the villagers gave the surviving pigs their freedom back.

What one of them came home carrying in its snout was a human finger.

After that, a communal pen was built.

"...That said! The villagers spent some time after that collecting remains in the area. There shouldn't be any more pigs picking up bodies now."

Recounting this grim story with perfect equanimity, Anna walked the piglet alongside Bertram.

The creature advanced through its first-ever forest with absolute confidence. Its snout was already caked with dirt. It had swallowed several earthworms already.

Watching it grunt with satisfaction, Anna pulled a snack from her pocket. Something Bertram recognized: a small finger biscuit. Though perhaps not quite as buttery as those served somewhere considerably grander.

She held one out to him and spoke.

"You talked to my mother this morning. She seemed irritated."

"I appear to have said the wrong thing. I'll give it thought."

"Hmm... Bertram, you do understand that other people have feelings, don't you?"

"Yes. I can read them."

Bertram lowered his head—until Anna could just manage to look at his face.

"Here—the movement of the brows, the rise and fall of the eyes—I read these and collect cues from speech patterns to infer emotion from there. Something I learned during the war."

"Why bother learning it if you had your feelings removed to fight better?"

"A commander who doesn't know his soldiers' fear will find himself alone at the front the morning after camp. A general who misses the hostility of local residents will receive rations with potato sprouts mixed in."

Anna smiled thinly at the second example.

Years ago—the day soldiers had tried to seize the restaurant, and she'd resisted until her nose broke—the village people had deliberately mixed ash into the flour they handed over as military provisions.

It was hard to imagine Bertram doing such things to anyone. But in war, it was hard to avoid becoming someone's monster. Bertram must have been someone's monster at some point.

He still was one, by Karlah's lights. A minor sort.

Bertram seemed to know it.

"Anna. I want to demonstrate to Karlah that I'm safe. I'm not denying the fear she might feel from my mere presence—but at the very least, I'd like her to know I won't loot anything, or turn this place into another— why are you pulling at my trouser leg?"

"I want to grab your cheeks, but they're too high up. Oh—you were going to crouch down, weren't you? Don't."

"Of course."

He'd become somewhat easier to predict. In fine spirits, Anna stood up straight and addressed roughly where she estimated Bertram's face would be in the sunlight above her.

"You are not, to me, as frightening as a soldier encountered in wartime. If anything—you look harmless. Large on the outside but thoroughly unthreatening within."

"I beg your pardon?"

He had never in his life heard anything like it.

Before the war too, his size had always alarmed people. No one, anywhere, had ever once called him harmless.

But Anna's voice drove itself into his head with enough force to make him wonder: had I been mistaken all along?

"Repeat after me. I am harmless."

"...I am harmless."

"So stop trying to prove your harmlessness at every opportunity. Things like answering people's questions too literally, or feeling the need to respond to every offhand joke—those are the problem."

That, in Anna's view, was the core of it.

For someone with no emotions, Bertram was remarkably effective at making people miserable. If he weren't built the way he was, half his conversations with other men would have ended in fists.

But it wasn't as though either party wanted to fight.

When people first met Bertram, they were guarded. And when people are guarded, they tend to circle with jokes and bluffing—a probing exchange, pleasantries deployed as feints.

Bertram, meanwhile, was trying to prove his harmlessness as quickly as possible. So he answered everything with complete honesty and asked directly about anything he didn't understand.

When those two impulses met, what remained was one person's insides thoroughly shredded.

Rather than explain all of this to Bertram in full, Anna distilled it to the one answer that mattered.

"Trust me. You remember I called you cute? That was genuine—I meant it."

"I remember it. But I'm not naïve enough to believe I look harmless..."

"Oh, come on. Trust it while you're in this village, at least! From the chief to Dieter, everyone here knows you're not dangerous. Think about it: I'm the smallest adult in this village. Did I flinch when I first laid eyes on you? No! I tried to feed you immediately! So what's all this insisting on your own dangerousness?"

Anna swatted at his sleeve—she couldn't reach his back—swat after swat. The flapping fabric was steadily fraying her composure, and before Bertram had quite decided to speak, he found himself answering:

"Yes. In this village, I am harmless. Everyone knows it. I won't try to prove my harmlessness."

"Good."

Anna scooped up the piglet and scratched its head.

"Squee."

"Anna. What are you doing?"

"Your head is too high up for me to pat. And patting a grown adult on the head is strange anyway."

"..."

"Shall I pat yours?"

"I'm fine, thank you."

Anna set the piglet down. It waddled forward, hindquarters swaying, apparently sated enough to ignore even the wild raspberries growing nearby. The raspberries were Anna's by default.

The hands that had been scratching the piglet turned red.

Somewhere out of his line of sight, Anna's lips were undoubtedly turning red too.

When Bertram pictured it, Anna rose onto her toes toward him.

"Want some? You don't have to know what they taste like. The texture is the fun part—they pop."

"I'll have some."

Bertram accepted the slightly crushed raspberries from Anna's hand and tipped them into his mouth.

Probably, they tasted scorchingly red.

Days had passed since Bertram came back to stand before Karlah. Things that would once have been unimaginable had folded themselves into daily life.

Dieter kept appearing over the fence to glare at Bertram. But rather than actually confronting him over Anna, he always fled the moment before their eyes could meet. Thoroughly useless wretch.

Going into the forest with Bertram on the pretext of feeding the piglet had become part of Anna's daily routine.

At least Bertram seemed to have received some education in the art of passing as a person, because the frequency of his making customers want to tear their hair out had declined. But he was still, to Karlah, a constant source of irritation.

Once the piglet goes into heat, I'll have it slaughtered and send this man on his way.