If I Told You Once
Judy Budnitz
The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of ‘Flying Leap’ and ‘Nice Big American Baby’.This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall’s paintings and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family.Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the throne left vacant by Angela Carter.
JUDY BUDNITZ
If I Told You Once
Dedication (#u0bf59a62-2ba8-5132-88f5-f2cc2ae87dde)
For my grandparents,
Samuel and Phyllis Robbins
and
Max and Rose Budnitz
Contents
Cover (#u87971e60-d4b0-5f16-9d08-34e34fa4ada6)
Title Page (#u388a30f3-23c4-5339-b434-aa7efec7eb0e)
Dedication (#u5cd9ad7a-a7ab-5893-a2b8-a5871d1ce338)
Ilana (#u4f486b87-0050-5537-b47c-6b998e28ac02)
Sashie (#litres_trial_promo)
Ilana (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sashie (#litres_trial_promo)
Ilana (#litres_trial_promo)
Nomie (#litres_trial_promo)
Mara (#litres_trial_promo)
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Mara (#litres_trial_promo)
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Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Ilana (#ulink_6acce547-df58-5ac9-babb-dc528a757acb)
My family had lived in the same village for as long as anyone could remember. It was a place that lay buried in snow for nine months out of the year followed by three months of mud. It was the most desolate spot on earth and my family did not even realize it, because for generations they never ventured more than forty kilometers from the place. They were stubborn people.
It was a place where someone had forgotten to add the color: low gray clouds, crooked houses of weather-beaten wood, coils of smoke rising up from cookstoves and rubbish heaps. All the wives of the village cut from the same dull cloth to make clothes for their families. We ate gray bread. The men made a fermented liquor so colorless it was invisible, nothing but a raging headache stoppered in a jar.
People were simpler then. They kept their desires within reach. They had few possessions: a goat, a half-dozen chickens, a brass teapot, a cat so ugly it could kill mice merely by looking at them.
That was enough. After days cutting wood in the black forest with ice clogging their nostrils, the smell of a goat was a welcome thing.
In a place like that, the color of an egg yolk was something of a miracle.
My people were a clutching, clinging people. They had to be. What little they had, someone was always trying to snatch away.
I was born in violent times.
I am told I was a breach birth. My mother was in labor for more than thirty hours. I was her first child. All through her labor a winter storm ripped shingles from the roof. My father wanted to go for the midwife, but the violence of the storm kept him in. He could hear the evil spirits in the wind waiting to trick him, lead him in endless circles in the snow. People had been known to freeze to death just meters from their homes after getting lost on their way to the outhouse. My father paced in an agony of frustration.
In those times childbirth was the realm of midwives and women-friends. Men were forbidden to witness it, they were bad luck; they were kept out of the birthing room, often out of the house altogether. My mother writhed and moaned on the bed while my father stumped from window to window, caged and frantic. The house had only one room. He crouched in corners, tried to make himself invisible.
As the storm grew worse, so did my mother’s pains. My father put his fingers in his ears but could not bear it any longer. He went to the bedside and found my mother thrashing and screeching like one possessed, her long hair pasted to her face in sweaty scribbles. He knelt and rolled his sleeves, he put his blunt hands tentatively on her belly; he nudged and prodded, thinking he could shift the little body into position the way he did with unborn lambs. He tried to look only at the tight belly, not at my mother’s hectic face, her fingers tearing at his shirt, the pulpy strangeness between her legs. He pushed. Something burst with a wet pop. The bed was suddenly soaked with hot blood and my mother screamed with renewed vigor.
Just then there came a knock at the door.
The midwife! my father thought with relief, and flung the door open.
Two heavy figures filled the doorway and half a dozen more darkened the snow behind them. The men were shapeless in snow-stiffened clothes, their faces wrapped against the wind. But my father knew them immediately and his heart froze. He knew by their fur hats, the knives in their belts, their rank smell of raw meat and stolen horses. They were the bandits who haunted the black forests and roadways. They attacked indiscriminately, rich and poor alike.
The bandit leader slouched in the doorway as snow swirled past him into the room. He held out his hands, stepped closer to my father, smiled at him through his face-wraps.
Greetings, neighbor, he said, we wondered if you might extend your hospitality to such weary travelers as ourselves.
My father stood out of the wind, in the shadow cast by the door.
The bandit leader pulled his knife from its sheath, casually wiped it on his sleeve, and said: You wouldn’t turn anyone away on a night like this, would you? That would be too cruel, wouldn’t it?
He cocked his head; his ferrety eyes sought out my father’s. His band crowded closer. Their smell swept into the room like a foul breath.
Then my father stepped full into the light. He stood drenched in sweat, shirt torn, his beard standing up on his face in wild tufts, eyes bulging, and his arms wet to the elbows with blood. My mother’s squeals flew about him in a fury, a windstorm of shrieks and venom.
He held his hands out to them. Gentlemen, he said softly, as soon as I finish killing my wife, I will be glad to oblige you.
They looked at the blood, his crazed eyes, the scratches my mother’s nails had left on his chest. But it was my mother’s wrenching, inhuman cries that drove them back out into the storm.
I was born soon after, I slid out feet first and blue, the umbilical cord looped around my throat. Later people said it was an evil omen and I was destined for the gallows. My father caught me up, a slimy horrible thing, and shook me frantically like a defective toy until I screamed in indignation.
My mother, who had more right than anyone to call me an evil omen, instead declared that I was a lucky child, twice blessed and twice stubborn, destined to make my own way in the world.
Later she would go on to bear eight more children. At the start of her labors my father would walk seven kilometers into the forest and cut wood for hours, until my mother sent me to tell him it was safe to come home.
They loved each other very much, my parents. But love was different then. People didn’t talk about it, didn’t even think of the word, but it was there in every mouthful of food they shared. It was a simple thing, certain, it needed no discussion. Certain as blowing out a candle. Do you need to discuss whether the room will be dark?
My father was an enormous bearish man, hairy and dark, with a beard that enveloped half his face and seemed to trap more food than reached his mouth. People used to say that if my father got lost in the woods, he could survive two months or more with his beard to sustain him. My mother was small, less than half his size. She wore endless skirts and petticoats that billowed around her and made her seem as wide as she was tall. The skirts disguised her figure so completely that she looked the same whether she was nine months pregnant or not at all.
My growing-up years were a dark time. The bandits lurked in the woods. The timber wolves came down from the north. They mated for life and hunted in pairs; they were the size of calves, with ice-blue eyes. They were temperamental as children. Sometimes they came right into our yards, playing like puppies; other times they could snap a man’s leg in their jaws with no provocation. They were not pack wolves; they cared only for their mates and pups. In times of hunger she-wolves had been known to eat the pups of other wolves to gain the strength to nurse their own.
And there were bands of soldiers, too, who raided the villages periodically. They were more unpredictable than the wolves: they might demand livestock, or liquor, they might set homes ablaze for the sake of warming their hands, to melt the frost off their spurs. They took the young men off for the army, dragged them away in carts as the mothers ran alongside screaming good-byes to their sons and heaping curses on the soldiers. Such men were never heard from again.
Sometimes the bandits attacked the soldiers and stole their military boots and jackets for themselves. Sometimes the soldiers wore shaggy fur cloaks to keep out the cold. Sometimes the wolves walked on their hind legs like men.
In the dark they were indistinguishable from one another.
Once a week during the long winters people crowded into the village meetinghouse to pray. We were not particularly fervent; we came for the change of scene. People said that being trapped in one room with the same family members for months on end could drive a person mad.
People liked to tell of one couple who lived in the village before I was born. The two were newlyweds, and they decided to avoid the weekly services and live out the winter with no one but each other. They spent the entire cold season sitting side by side on the same bench before the fire. They stayed there so long they grew together, flesh to flesh. Like rolls running together in the oven, their skins melted and became one. When the spring came, they could not fit themselves through the door. People who peeked through their windows saw a single broad, monstrous figure scuttling madly about the room, sideways like a crab, the two faces cleaved cheek to cheek, the hands grabbing at bits of food and stuffing them indeterminately in either mouth, the hair of both heads grown together in an impenetrable mass.
All the men and women of the village came together. They broke down the wall of the little house, dragged the couple into the street. Eleven men and an ax were required to pry the two apart. There was blood in the snow and screaming. When the man found himself free he spun himself around three times and staggered off into the forest, bloody and torn down his left side. He was never seen again.
The woman stayed in the village. Her screams eventually faded to a constant low muttering, but she was never again whole. Her right arm and leg atrophied; she hobbled on a crutch. People took pity on her, they brought her firewood and rags. She dug clay from a corner of her yard and made soup from it. When I was a child I saw her often, wandering the forest or the village streets, singing and gathering stones, checking over her shoulder every few paces as if expecting someone. She was harmless, and some said holy.
When I was three my mother gave birth to my brother Ari.
He arrived in a snowstorm, as I did. The women say he crept from the womb unaided, took air without crying. They looked at the two bony knobs on his forehead, the wiry hair on his legs, and said he was a changeling, a goblin child. The women drew back from the bed, covering their mouths with their hands and pulling their skirts tight about them. They feared the changeling spirit would corrupt their bodies as well. The midwife, who was past childbearing age, wrapped the baby tightly and volunteered to carry him deep into the woods and leave him there. This was the practice in such cases, so that in the night the forest imps could take the child underground to his rightful home.
But my mother frowned and held the baby’s head to her breast. Stroking the thick dark hair, she said she would do the chore herself. She could not be dissuaded; as soon as the storm slackened she left me in the care of my father. Weak and bowlegged from her labor, she waddled into the forest.
My mother returned two days later, with the child asleep in her shawl. She was pale and resolute and my father did not question her. He held her in complete awe. Also he was glad to relinquish his responsibilities. My father could kill timber wolves with a wooden club or face down outlaws, but the cries of a three-year-old child drove him to distraction.
People said Ari seemed unchanged by the excursion, except that he had grown three teeth. My mother never offered an explanation but resumed her work and nursed the child without a word. No one dared confront her; she was known throughout the village for her fierceness. Rumors spread that she had marched into the forest and demanded an audience with the goblin king himself, then haggled with him relentlessly, as if he were a shopkeeper, until he agreed to exchange the goblin child for an identical human one.
Ari was quick to crawl but slow to walk. As he grew he loved to watch dancing and the fall of my father’s ax. He loved hair—he liked to pluck out bits of my father’s beard or the hair on his arms. Ari early developed a taste for raw meat. He infuriated my mother by sneaking raw scraps from the storeroom, and trying to sink his teeth into chickens before they had stopped twitching.
I grew up slowly. In that place many things grew slowly, the cold caused plants and people alike to shrink, contract, conserve their energy. My brother Ari soon grew taller than me, but his size was a liability; he was constantly hungry and cried through the night. My mother nursed him until the third child was born, and then she put him to sleep with me. At first I let him suck on my fingers, for comfort, but I soon discovered the sharpness of his teeth. He gnawed in his sleep. So I went down to the river and found smooth stones for him to suck, and he liked that. I gave him stones that I thought were too large for him to choke on, but I would sometimes wake up late at night and hear him crunching and swallowing them, his baby face smooth and serene.
As Ari grew older his forehead lost some of its knobbiness; he had my father’s strength and black hair. He was quick in his movements, but slow in speech. When people spoke to him, when he demanded explanations, I was the one to help him. He seemed to understand the words better in my voice.
My parents were constantly on the lookout for the soldiers who tried for years to catch my father and force him into the army. He was older than the usual conscripts, but famous for his strength. My parents knew that if he were taken away it was likely he would never return. Whenever soldiers came into the village searching for him, he would have liked to meet them with his fists, but my mother subjected him to her methods instead. She hid him: under the eaves, in a feather bed, in a rain barrel, once in her own voluminous skirts. When the soldiers came to call that day they found her placidly sewing beside the fire. After they left my father rolled from beneath her skirts gasping for air. He was flushed and embarrassed by his proximity to her legs; he fled the house, shamefaced. In those days people were intimate only at night, in darkness, under the covers and in the strictest privacy.
So my father evaded conscription year after year, and my mother produced more children, at yearly intervals. Practiced at labor, she learned to predict the time of birth and would lie darning stockings, peeling potatoes, until the last possible moment. My father had to add on to the house to make room for the children. He built us a kind of shed in the backyard, as if we were livestock. We slept on hay.
My mother taught me to knit and crochet, she taught me her knowledge of roots and herbs: plants for sickness, for cleansing, for visions. Ari was my constant companion. He was monstrously strong for his age, but thoughtless; he crashed into walls, tumbled down wells. Wherever he went in the village I had to accompany him to keep him from damaging our neighbors’ property. When I saw him reaching out to touch geese or lambs I had to grab him by the ear and pull him away. Soon he grew so large that when I did this he could jerk me off my feet by shaking his head.
People in the village whispered that he had a tail like an ox rolled up inside his trousers. I had seen no such tail when he was a baby; but then perhaps it sprouted when he entered adolescence, which began early in him. The villagers’ gossip did not affect him, but when my mother scolded he buried his head in her skirts and howled.
He often went on rampages in the forest. We did not know what he did there; he would disappear for hours and return with his hair full of burrs, his clothes in shreds, a brown crust on his lips, peaceful.
Only once did I lose my temper with him. It was one evening as I sat mending his padded jacket for the tenth time in as many days. The fire was low, and I pricked my finger again and again, and the hay padding was full of the small creatures my brother liked to collect, they rustled and squeaked horribly. Finally I flung the jacket at him, as he squatted humming in his usual corner, and cried: What is wrong with you? Have you no sense at all? Why can’t you act like other people?
He hugged the jacket to him, rocked back and forth on his heels humming in the back of his throat and staring glassy-eyed into the fire. My mother looked up sharply from the child she was nursing and said: There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s perfect, he belongs here. The look on her face, as she stroked Ari’s hair and held the child to her breast, made me feel I was the strange one.
When I was twelve my father killed a she-wolf and my mother sewed the hide into a cape for me. The wolf’s head made the hood, with the ears still intact; the front legs draped my shoulders, the tail dragged on the ground. It was a heavy, coarse thing with a rank smell, but it was warm.
That winter my mother sent me out often to gather the medicinal plants that grew under the snow. She could not go herself, she was expecting her fifth child and could not bend. So I put on the fur hood and spent hours in the woods. The trees there were dark skinned, broad limbed; even without their leaves they blocked the sunlight so that the forest was dim even at noon. The air was always deathly still except for the hush and slide of shifting snow, the trees moaning softly in the wind.
Each time I went I pushed deeper into the forest. I kept my ears pricked for the muffled crunch of footsteps in the snow. I hung a drawstring bag around my neck, crawled on my knees, and dug through the snow with my bare hands to find the plants my mother requested. My fingers grew red while my back and arms ran with sweat. I dug, warmed my hands in my armpits, dug again.
One afternoon as I knelt resting with my hands inside my blouse I heard a branch snap. It was early yet, but the light in the forest was like dusk, the snow glowed intensely blue. I had the sense of trees crowding around on all sides as if watching.
Ho there, young lady, said a voice.
I glanced around, pushed back my hood, and looked up. I saw dangling boots. A man sat perched on a branch high above my head. I wanted to run, but my knees were locked from kneeling in the cold so long, and I couldn’t move.
He said: It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? and smiled.
I stared. I knew he was a bandit, I could tell by his clothes, and the soft leather boots that came to his knees. The people in my village swaddled themselves against the cold, they wrapped themselves in layers of wool and burlap. But this man was dressed in clothes that cleaved to his body, tight trousers and short jacket, leaving his arms and legs free. He lounged there loose limbed and catlike.
You’ve been quite busy, haven’t you? he said.
I managed to stand up. Now I could see his face more clearly. It was a clean-shaven, sharp-featured face, blotched red and white from the cold. He smiled; there was something strained in the smile, in the way the sore-chapped lips stretched back from the teeth. His eyes were extraordinarily bright and piercing, I had never seen anything like them, little chips of ice in his face; even from that distance I could feel them drilling at me. His hair lay over his brow in long heavy tangles.
He looked so foreign to me; I had seen so few young men in my life. In my village adolescent boys were forced into the army the moment they began to lose their boyish figures, and the older men were like my father: bearded and barrel-chested with hair in their noses.
He tossed his head like a horse to shake the hair from his face. I saw the hunting knife in its sheath slung across his chest. I longed to run, my throat ached with it; but I could not look away from him, I was painfully fascinated by him, as by a mad dog, so that I was afraid to turn my back on him even to run away.
What have you got there, young lady? he said. His voice was the strangest thing of all, as if what he said was not at all what he meant. My knees creaked. I showed him the dirt-colored mushroom in my palm.
Give it here, he said. I gave it a toss; he swung out and caught it. I looked at him in that moment, stretched against the sky. I saw the straining cords of his throat, the delicate underside of jawbone.
I thought: he should wear a scarf, he will catch cold.
He held the mushroom between thumb and forefinger, inspected it with disgust.
What’s it for? he asked.
I could feel myself flushing.
Speak up he said, what will happen to me if I eat it?
It is for easing your birthing pains, I whispered.
He barked a short laugh, then said, I’ll keep it, since you found it near my tree. It’s my favorite tree, you see, because it has a face like my old granny. Do you see her nose, where that branch is broken off, and these two knotholes are eyes, and the rotted hollow down below just like her pruned-up mouth. Come closer and look. Come closer, I said.
I had never thought about things in such a way before, but suddenly when he described the face I could see it, as if something hidden had been swiftly revealed by his words, and I realized with a kind of sickening jolt that there was more than one way of seeing the world.
Since you gave me this, I should give you something in trade, he said. He slipped his hand into his shirt, pulled something out, and dropped it carelessly in the snow.
I should not have picked it up, but I did. It was shaped like an egg, but covered in stones that glittered like fire and ice, and shiny metal etched with tiny curling designs like lace. It glowed there in my cupped hands. I had never seen such colors before in my life.
Look inside, he said.
I peered into the peephole at the small end of the egg and saw a walled city with turnip-shaped towers, a garden, a sparkling frozen fountain, a domed sky full of stars.
Oh, I said. I raised it to my eye again. Such green, such gold, such unearthly blue. When I looked up at him once more the outside world had gone dull.
You like it, do you? he said. He was cleaning his nails with a knife as long as his forearm.
I nodded. His eyes moved in his face like insects.
Aren’t you a pretty girl? he said.
No, I said. I was not being insolent. I did not understand what he meant. In my village we knew only big and small, strong and weak, alive and dead. Any further distinctions were unnecessary.
Ha, he said. The pink tongue curled around his teeth.
Suddenly he straightened and slid the knife in its sheath. He reached into his shirt for the mushroom and with one smooth movement threw it far into the trees, so far I could not hear it land.
Look at that, he said. I seem to have lost your mushroom.
I saw the muscles tensing up beneath his trousers; the branch creaked a warning.
I suppose, he said, to be fair, you ought to give me something else.
I saw him preparing to leap. I spun and ran.
I staggered wildly, panting, limping on my stiff knees; I ran in a nightmare, the air thick as water, the afternoon light dying moment by moment. My breath crashed so loud in my ears I could hear nothing; I stumbled, fell, gathered up an armful of skirts and flailed on. I glanced over my shoulder expecting to see him just behind me, laughing with his little pointed teeth.
But he was not. I was light enough to run on the hard upper crust of snow, but the man had broken through it with his leap. I could see him far in the distance, wallowing and thrashing waist-deep in soft snow. Faintly I could hear his curses.
I ran home breathless, dragging my heavy soaked clothes. My mother looked at my slick face and asked what was the matter. I told her about the man in the forest, the tree like a face, his leap from the sky.
I did not tell her about the egg.
The egg! I should have flung it away when I ran, but I had been too frightened to think. So I kept it in my pocket, told no one; it was my first secret.
My mother knit her brow. She warned me not to tell my father. His solution would be to go bellowing off to the bandits’ camp in the woods, swinging his fists, cursing and brawling until they cut him to pieces.
She told me she would take care of it and said nothing further. Late that night I heard a stirring in the house. I crept to the window and saw her in the moonlight, waddling heavily toward the dark trees.
A week later she told me to go back to the forest to finish gathering the plants she needed. Her time was near. I did not want to go, I looked at her pleadingly, but she brushed me away and told me it was all right.
So I dressed as before and trudged back to the forest. The sky was dark and lowering, thick clouds scurried across the sky as if fleeing something just over the horizon. I jumped at every noise; darkness seemed to tease at the corners of my eyes. I did not want to go there, and yet I went there, I was drawn back to the same place I had been before, drawn by a kind of dread and a dreadful curiosity.
I approached the familiar tree. I saw a dark shape in the snow at its base and hesitated. It did not move. An abrupt hush fell over the woods, no wind stirred. I paused in my tracks and then a horrible cawing rose up all around me as hundreds of black crows launched themselves from the surrounding trees and took to the air. There were hundreds of them, flapping in their clumsy way like black rags jerked aloft on strings, beaks open with their harsh croaking. I felt droppings splatter on my cheek. I knew crows liked to travel alone or in pairs, they were not flocking birds.
Their cries faded away. I reached the tree and there, in a trampled place beneath its branches, lay my bandit. I knelt beside him. His throat was torn open. The blood had frozen before it dried; bright red smears colored the snow. I could study him closely now. His eyes were open and congealing; the irises were green, they looked crystallized, faceted, hard as glass. The skin on his face was smooth. I could not have said how old he was.
His hair fell back from his brow as if he had tossed his head back a moment before. His body lay stretched out loosely, as if he were napping, but all was cold and hard. His lip turned up; he seemed to be smiling. I could not be sure that he was dead. In that winter country the cold slowed the dying just as it slowed the living.
I learned later that my mother had gone to the forest at night carrying the scent glands from the she-wolf my father had killed; she had used them to leave wolf scent on all the trees in the area. This drew the she-wolf’s grieving mate, he came following the smell and seeking her; and as he nosed about whimpering like a child at the roots of trees, smelling her scent and unable to find her, he must have looked in the uncertain dusky light like something he was not. Perhaps to someone sitting in the trees above, he might have looked like a girl, kneeling, dressed in fur. Perhaps he had looked like me.
Imagine him jumping down.
The man and the wolf must both have been disappointed to see each other.
I sat a long time in the snow, looking at the face, holding the sparkling cold hand of a man preserved in ice; and for the first time I saw that I was not of that country, I did not have my mother’s fierceness in me, I did not have that fierceness of love that had kept my family alive for generations in that harsh place. It was a blind devotion, a vicious bloody animal love, and I wanted no part of it; for the first time I knew that I would leave.
I feared my mother, who pushed out child after child with her athletic loins, and seemed to grow stronger with each one, and clung to her children more tightly with each passing year. I grew in secret. I waited.
There were three of them.
They were always there, in the village where I grew up. With their milky eyes and incessant hissing, their hands tugging at invisible strings and weaving them all together.
Three old women.
They sat in a row on a single bench in the center of the village. Three women with the same face. People said they were sisters, or mother and daughters, cousins, no one knew for sure. In winter they huddled in their shawls with snow up to their knees. In summer the flies hung back from them at a respectful distance.
They had the same face, skin delicate with age, soft and threatening to tear like wet paper. The same face three times over, same violet-colored eyes sunk in purple-veined pouches of skin. People said if you watched closely you’d see them blink and breathe in unison. The pulses beating together in their temples.
In their hair insects wove their cocoons and greasy silk tents.
They had the same face but different mouths. One woman had an overabundance of teeth, two rows of them, overlapping each other like shingles. Another had no teeth at all, and a mouth that seemed to lead nowhere, a shallow wet impression in her face. The third had only one tooth. It was three inches long and pointed, a long yellow tusk, protruding from the corner of her mouth like a crafty cigar.
They worked as they jabbered. They sewed in unison, as if one brain led their six hands. One would unspool the thread, the second would measure it, the third would cut it. Or they would knit, weaving their way inward from three different directions, meeting in the middle to make sweaters designed for hunchbacks or armless giants. They could pluck a chicken in a matter of seconds, their hands swarming over the limp body like ants.
We had forgotten their names and were embarrassed to ask. They never moved from their bench. Their debris—the feathers, the ends of thread, the wads of phlegm they coughed up and spat into bits of paper, the crusts of bread—piled up around them year after year. Some said they were the grandmothers, or great-grandmothers or great-aunts, of everyone in the village. No one could remember. Their faces were indistinct with age, their features had run together like melted wax; no eyebrows, noses flattened and ridgeless, earlobes stretched long.
Talking, gossiping. Day and night.
Their voices were identical, and shrill, birds scolding. They interrupted and spoke over each other, a sharp irritating music, almost in harmony. Sometimes sweet and wet, mixed with harshness, like the sound of a mother crooning a lullaby to her child and bickering with her husband between verses.
They were telling each other stories, those three. Telling each other everything that had ever happened since time began.
We did not like to go near them. But still we could feel their eyes, hear their hissing and know they were speaking of us. The words they said would sound familiar, as if they had been eavesdropping on our dreams.
They recounted their version of history for anyone who would listen. We did not like to listen. We tried to ignore them, or drown them out. They spoke of things too terrible to bear. Like a mother who needs to forget the pain of childbirth so that she can go on to bear more children, the people I lived among needed to forget so they could go on.
The three women wove together threads of dark brown and red-gold and black; they were the hairs of everyone in the village, people said. We all felt the tug. We felt it when hesitating at a crossroads, we would feel a pressure on our scalps, and then later we would blame our decisions, good or bad, on the three women whom we thought of as witches or saints but were careful to never dignify with a spoken name.
I dreamt of them sometimes, and woke with my hands pressed to my ears.
There came a time when they began to speak, more vehemently than before, about a darkness rising up, a dark tide turning and coming to wash over us. Of atrocities beyond our comprehension, bodies piled high as haystacks, blood flowing like rivers through the streets, fire that would roll across the earth, blotting out the sun and making everything black. They spoke urgently of these things, gesturing, their spit flying in our faces.
But we ignored them, we told ourselves the darkness they spoke of was merely the next nightfall, or their own encroaching senility and approaching deaths which we secretly hoped for, to be rid of them. They’re mad, we said. Don’t listen, we told each other.
And it happened that it all came to pass, everything, just as they had said, with biblical accuracy. By then I had left the village, I had sought to escape their wagging tongues, the tugging of their crabbed fingers, the gossip they told of a future that was written, sealed, inescapable. As irrevocable as the past.
I told you so, they must have said when everything did come to pass. When the walls came down and the fire burst forth and the people raised their hands above their heads in supplication and swayed like a field of wheat in the wind.
I was not there to hear their voices ring out yet I heard the words anyway, those words followed me long afterward like a shadow, a slug trail, a mocking school yard chant: I told you so I told you so I told you so.
My mother taught me everything she knew, and for a long time I thought it was all I would ever need to know.
I sometimes saw the mother-love in her face, that animal fierceness, when she gathered my brothers and sisters to her, crushing them against her belly as if she wanted to swallow them whole. I saw it in her when they fell ill with fevers, when they were late coming home and she scanned the darkening forest for them, calling their names like a holy summons.
I saw it when Ari came to her and lay his head in her lap, his legs folded beneath him like a dog’s, nuzzling against her. She could trace his wanderings by the scars on his back. I saw how she wanted to fold her wings over him, conceal him, though he was bigger than she was.
That smell of his when he came back from the woods. The crust beneath his long yellow nails. He was unnatural.
I knew better than to say anything more about it in front of my mother.
Our neighbors came complaining of him, of animals he had fondled and stroked so roughly they collapsed. My mother looked at them and said: He’s only a child, he knows not what he does.
Some of the neighbors gave up when they saw my mother’s stubborn chin. But others persisted, pounding on our door every evening, demanding restitution. One called: Send your son over to pull my plow, seeing as how he killed my donkey. My mother ignored them, though their pounding made the bowls of soup jump on the table. Nails popped from the walls.
Those neighbors who persisted woke up several mornings later to find their beds infested with fat white worms, worms that burrowed into the crevices of their bodies as if seeking warmth. The worms bored into the flesh of their legs and bellies, as if they were corpses, leaving oozing tunnels to mark their progress.
They stopped bothering us; I suppose they decided to take their complaints elsewhere.
My mother instructed me to watch when she next gave birth. The cold room gradually grew hot as a furnace from the heat of her body and the windows steamed up. It was strange to see her lying down, splayed out like an overturned beetle. Her hair escaped her braid, it clung to her face and the bedclothes and wrapped itself around my hands as I wiped the sweat on her face.
She glared at me. I can wipe my own face, she said. I don’t need you here, I need you there, to see what I can’t.
I did not want to, but I lifted her skirt; she had not even undressed, she had stopped her sweeping only moments before. Her breath gusted through the room, lifted the hair from my damp forehead.
I saw her legs which I had never seen before and they looked just like mine, thin with knobby knees, fine dark hairs. Then I looked between her legs, and that was a sight.
It was something swollen, juicy, turned inside out. I thought I saw the scar, the place where her flesh had torn when I was born and then grown together again. I felt guilty for the damage I had done her. She was straining at the seams. I could see already the bulge of a skull, mottled white, a tracing of veins under skin, pushing outward larger and larger like a boil about to burst.
Remember, remember, this is what it is like, I told myself over and over, and I saw my mother’s hand tighten into a fist, heard her breath catch and crackle in her throat, and then the head came out, followed by the anticlimactic scrawny body, soft limp arms and legs, smeared with blood and white scum, and I took it, and shook it, and it screamed, and my mother sighed.
It was another girl.
My mother was up and at the stove within hours, feeding the other children, smiling at my father, her breasts hanging heavy and leaking dampness on her dress.
I said I would never have children. Said it to myself.
Soon after that, red wetness bloomed for the first time like poppies in my underclothes.
I was terrified, I did not know what it meant; I thought of my mother giving birth, the blood, the bulbous baby’s head nudging its way out of her body. The smell of blood, her smell and mine, was the same.
I thought of a baby coming out of me, a small one, perhaps the size of a rat, or a sparrow. Somehow I was certain it would be dark, hairy like Ari, with a wrinkled ancient face and tiny needle-sharp teeth. It would have whiskers, claws; it would gnaw disappointedly at my nipples which still lay flat on my chest, it would cling to me like a monkey. I imagined it crying, that abrasive baby-cry that cannot be ignored, but I also heard it berating me, in a deep petulant voice like the voices of our neighbors complaining. Can’t a man get a decent meal around here? it would say, pinching my breast with pygmy fingers.
I could already feel the thing moving inside me, shifting and cramping in my lower belly. How did it get there? I did not want it. I refused. I bent, clamped my legs together. I would not let it out. I would hold it inside me until it smothered. No one would know.
I folded myself small, I thought I was invisible, but my mother saw me crouched against the wall and asked what my trouble was.
I’m going to have a baby, I told her.
Her eyes widened, her lips drew back from her teeth. She said: How do you know? Did you meet someone else in the forest?
I told her about the little man I could feel trying to scratch his way out. I told her about the blood dripping. Just like yours, I said.
I see, she said.
She did not laugh at me. She explained to me what it was and why, and then she told me how to make a child, and how to unmake a child right after it has been made, and how to keep from making a child in the first place.
I was not as stupid as you must think. For years I had watched animals do it. But for some reason I had thought people were different from animals.
I don’t know how I could have thought so. Look at my mother. Look at Ari. Look at my father, toiling in endless circles like the ox hitched to the millstone.
But then I thought of the dead man in the woods, the man made of ice, his skin blue and white, his delicate features and shattered eyes. He was different, I thought; and inside his egg I thought I saw a picture of life more refined, more considered, a world where people had found a way to distinguish themselves from animals, a difference far beyond a two-legged stance or a knack for forks and spoons.
I wanted to find my way there.
My grandmother and grandfather lived in a one-room house within sight of ours. I did not know how old my grandmother was. She did not know herself.
She and my grandfather were so accustomed to each other that a single word or gesture between them carried the meaning of whole conversations. They had shared a pillow for so long they had begun to look alike. They even seemed to have exchanged some of their aspects. My grandfather’s hair was long and white and hung in ringlets like a schoolgirl’s. My grandmother had once had hair like that. Now it was nearly gone, it covered her head in a thin soft down and she had a man’s thick strong hands.
Their trade was the preparation of leather, and it seemed the chemicals they used to preserve the animal hides had worked to preserve their skin as well.
My grandmother had taught my mother her knowledge of herbs. Sometimes they went gathering together. My grandmother always walked first and my mother followed behind her, placing her feet in the prints my grandmother had made in the snow. When I went with them I walked behind my mother, stepping in the footprints that my grandmother had made and my mother had deepened.
I remember that my grandfather had a high ridged nose, narrow and red. My grandmother always washed his feet for him, every evening before they went to sleep. His circulation was so slow that he could no longer feel it, but she performed the nightly ritual anyway. It had become a habit.
My grandfather died suddenly one day in spring, simply froze up at the table, spoon in midair, soup dripping from his chin. Wipe your mouth, my grandmother told him sharply. It was the first complete sentence she had spoken to him in twenty years.
What, do you mean to say you don’t like it? my grandmother asked when he did not move.
After all these years? Too salty? she asked. Why didn’t you tell me, she said and the tears began to trickle down her face and that was how we discovered them hours later, salty soup and tears dripping down their faces and plinking back in their bowls with a sound like rain.
My mother brought my grandmother to live in the house with us. Our house did not seem to agree with her; she spent her time running around the kitchen and yard barefoot in her nightgown, hurling stones and insults at imaginary foes. She’s grieving, she misses your grandfather, my mother told me. She’s ill, my mother said. But I had seen my grandmother lift my father’s ax and hack chunks out of the walls of our house. She did not seem sick at all, she was stronger than ever.
My father tried to keep her shut in the house, for her own protection. She scampered about the rafters and kept company with the rooster. She told the rooster long garbled stories as she stroked his red drooping comb. Stories of how she had been forced to marry at the age of nine; stories of her nineteen children and the deaths of eleven of them.
That’s not true, is it? She’s making it up, isn’t she? I asked my mother.
How would you know? my mother sniffed. Were you there?
My grandmother became afraid of the floor and would not leave her perch in the rafters. My mother tossed food up to her. My grandmother hoarded bread and kept the rooster tucked beneath her arm, sometimes vanishing for days at a time in dark places under the eaves.
One evening she unexpectedly descended, went to the door, and released the rooster. He misses his flock, she announced and watched him strutting and preening in the yard for a long while before she joined us at the table. She perched on a chair and I saw that her toes had grown as long and grasping as a monkey’s.
She looked at me then, seized my fist in her own, and said: You don’t believe me now, but one day you will. You’ll see. You’ll see what it’s like.
I pretended I did not know what she meant, though I did. Apparently she had missed nothing from her perch above our heads. I tried to talk of other things and drown her out.
She spoke calmly and lucidly all evening and helped scrape the dishes, and afterward she stretched out on the table to sleep, declaring that a hard bed was best for an old back.
I slept with my hands over my ears that night to shut out her snores.
The next morning we woke to find that she had barricaded herself into a corner of the room. She had taken her cache of bread, stale, weeks old, hard as stone, and stacked the loaves up like bricks all around her.
We could hear her within, the tiniest of breaths.
We tried to dismantle her cairn, chipped away at the hard gray bread for hours.
By the time we reached her she was no longer breathing, just a curled-up mass of arms and legs, a dry husk. Clutched in her lap we found the rooster, his claws clenched in her nightgown, one red eye frozen and empty.
It was a winter years later when I made my decision. I must have been about sixteen then, I think, about your age. My mother and I were wringing wet clothes, hanging them out to dry in the cold air, my mother hugely pregnant as usual. Snow gritty as dust stung our faces. I saw her pause, sniff her fingers, then inhale deeply. She looked around wildly and ran. She had smelled the gunpowder stink of approaching soldiers.
We followed, my brothers and sisters and I. We were all so occupied with helping our mother hide our father that we neglected Ari.
We forgot Ari, so the first thing the soldiers saw when they entered the village was my brother tearing a live sheep apart with his bare hands, not for sport but simply out of his rough love.
The soldiers on their recruiting mission had heard rumors of a boy with impossible brutelike strength, and they had searched far and wide for him. Though nothing was said about it we knew it was our disgruntled, worm-racked neighbors who must have told them where to find him.
The soldier captain watched Ari rip the sheep piece from piece, till it was nothing but bloody meat, and then Ari laid the pieces out, carefully lined them up. He was trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets, breathing into the nostrils, trying to divine the clockwork that made it all move and bleat.
The captain watched, and his eyes gleamed; he clapped his hands, one of which was made of wood. His company of soldiers circled, and they wrapped my brother in iron chains which on his massive wrists and throat looked like flimsy jewelry, and they loaded him bawling into a cart to take him away to hone his special skills for the grand art of war, or so they said, and they tossed the chunks of sheep in after him, hoping to quiet him.
My mother ran from the house and chased after the departing cart, flinging curses at the soldiers, heaping them tenfold on their heads. The soldiers leaned down and jeered at her, with her swollen belly and waddling run. She spat at them, and one leaned down and dealt her such a blow that she fell in the mud and went into premature labor, right there in the street, before the eyes of all the men in the village.
For a single man to witness a birth was bad luck; for all the village men to witness it was such a bad omen that all the ensuing trouble that later befell the village was heaped on my mother; everyone said she was to blame for all that happened after and the village women never spoke to her again.
When all these things happened I knew it was time to leave.
Once upon a time, on a night when the houses lay buried to the eaves in snowdrifts and bits of ice danced on the wind, I left my village intending never to return.
Earlier that evening I had gone to bed in the back room with my brothers and sisters as usual. The others sighed and slept. I felt the warmth leave my fingers and feet.
I listened to my parents in their room. The bed frame creaked as my father sank down on it. I could picture him, his feet hanging off the end of the frame, head tipped back and the coarse beard sticking straight up.
Light seeped through the crack beneath their door. My mother was awake, I pictured her finishing some mending or nursing the latest child. She kept her hair covered during the day, and at night she put it in a single tight braid that reached past her waist in a thick, vicious-looking rope.
I listened to the sounds of the other room, my ears yearning toward the door: the whisper of candle flame, the creak of her chair, the chilling click of teeth as she bit off the thread. I hoarded the warm patch I had made in the sheets.
A strip of moonlight slanted through the window. I could see arms, fingers, ears: my younger brothers and sisters, sleeping in a heap like puppies. Some sucked their fingers as they slept; some sucked each other’s fingers. I could not distinguish between them in the dimness.
Ari had been my dear one, my favorite. He had absorbed my attentions, and now he was gone. I missed his rank warmth. When he was restless in the night I used to stroke his head, his hair so thick I could not see his scalp when I parted the hair with my fingers. He always slept with his eyes half open, the whites glowing and shifting like iridescent fish. His back made a graceful curve as he lay on his side, he clenched his teeth in what might have been a smile; in the dark you could not see how the thick hair grew down low on his neck, ending in a point between his shoulder blades. He roamed in his dreams, legs twitching like a sleeping dog’s. In the mornings when I drew the sheets back to air them I often found dry leaves, night crawlers, double-tailed insects waving their feelers in the sudden light.
I wondered where he slept now.
The wind thrashed around the house, the boards creaked; I heard the softest of breaths as my mother blew out the candle. One of my brothers cried out in his sleep: Look out—the fire! and then subsided. My father let out a businesslike grunt as he hoisted himself over my mother and began the task of creating yet another child. There came a sound I never heard from my mother during the day: a cooing, like mourning doves. The dim light from the window grew even softer; it began to snow.
It was falling thickly and steadily. It was the sort of snow that could hide a person’s tracks completely in a matter of hours.
It was time to leave.
I dressed in underclothes, flannel petticoats, skirts, jackets, woolen stockings. My mother had knitted the stockings so tightly they could almost stand up by themselves. Last I put on the boots, which would have fit half the people in the village. The local cobbler made boots in only two sizes, for the sake of convenience.
I wrapped my head in a shawl. My brothers and sisters were quiet, their faces blissful in sleep. They lay in a tangle of curves and bulges, whorled shapes, like vines in the garden patch. I suppose they looked like me, their hair, their eyes, but I had never bothered to notice. For too long I had thought of them only as annoyances that asked impossible questions and demanded breakfast.
I dug beneath my mattress and pulled out my secret, the egg I had kept warm under my body for years. It was still as deep and glittering as ever, with the city inside: the pointed towers, the starry sky, the carriages pulled by white horses with feathered headdresses, footmen with velvet trousers and mustaches like wings. I thought I saw them move. Perhaps it was my breath.
I left by the window and set out, the air prickling my face, the snow swirling around, white clouds against a darker sky. I tried to step lightly, but my footsteps crunched rudely in the snow, like cows chewing.
I did not look back.
It was the only home I had ever known. I could feel it behind me, hunched and glowering, its shoulders frosted with snow.
I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck, a sharp twinge that ran down my spine. I tried to run, but like a dream my steps seemed to grow even slower as my heart raced.
I knew my mother was watching from the window.
Standing with her arms folded beneath her breasts, chin out, her braid swaying pendulously behind her. She was at the window, or perhaps she was in the yard, heedless and barefoot in the snow, her eyes raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
I could feel her drawing me to her; like a spider she was sending out her threads, I could feel their tug in the small of my back. They drew tauter with every step I took. I knew if I paused, those threads would tighten, they would snap me back, I would be pulled home gliding so smoothly over the snow like an errant sled.
Oh, how she pulled at my hair. My scalp smarted.
I knew she was rolling up her sleeves, stretching out her arms; she was pursing her lips kisslike to draw in such a breath that my clothes streamed out behind me; she was undulating her fingers in the entrancing way she used to hypnotize the chickens before she chopped off their heads.
I kept walking, I knew not to look back. My mother had taught me nearly everything she knew, so I knew what she was up to, I was wise enough not to look at her face.
And yet if she had called out my name then, I think I would have gone running back to bury my face in her lap. The warmth of her body through her clothes, a smell like fields of wheat. Her voice could do that.
But she did not call out. Perhaps she was too proud for that.
I forged on, forcing stiff marionette knees. Her eyes nipped at the backs of my legs so that I stepped faster, and faster. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the village looked no bigger than the magic city inside my egg, and my mother was too small to be seen.
I was free of my mother at last. The threads snapped. I had beaten her. My body was my own; I felt something melt inside me, a hot jelly, sliding loose and shifting downward, pulsing. It was a frightening feeling, not unpleasant.
To the east, a faint glow paled and spread; the bare trees were thrown into stark black silhouettes against the paling sky. And I was very, very cold.
I tramped for hours as the snowfall abated. My nose and lips were numb, they were blunt stupid things stuck to my face; I wished I could knock them off the way you knock icicles from the eaves.
I thought of my mother. I supposed she had cursed me, cursed me the way I had seen her curse soldiers: with words too dangerous to utter aloud, so that she had to draw their shapes with her fingers in the air, with her own face carefully averted. The venom of her curses was so powerful it could sometimes rebound and scald her, like drops of boiling oil bouncing off the pan.
The thought of my mother’s curses brought on a stitch in my side and a blurry, sticky cloud in my right eye.
I had no idea where I was going, I only knew I was lengthening the distance between myself and home. Between myself and a life like my mother’s, a path worn deep in the dirt, a path packed so hard no grass could ever grow there, much less flowers.
I had never been outside my village, but I knew there were places that were different. I had glimpsed them in the egg, and in the words of the bandit in the woods. I thought of him, my bandit, with his sharp face and strange talk. I saw him lying in the snow, sunk deep as if in a feather mattress, his throat necklaced with blood and the marks of wolf’s teeth.
After I had found him so, I went home and burned my wolf hood. It made an awful stink. My mother watched but said nothing.
I would never have to feel her eyes again.
The thought should have made me happy.
I walked on. Once I heard an ax biting into wood, echoing through the trees. It reminded me of my father. From the sound alone I could judge the weight of the ax. I hurried on.
Twilight was falling, swiftly creeping up behind me.
I told myself I would keep traveling until I found a city, a place like the one I had seen in the egg. I would give myself a new name, walk among a different sort of people. I wanted to walk slowly in gardens, carelessly snapping twigs off branches as I passed, tossing pebbles in a fountain, watching the surface of the water break apart and, quivering, come together again to show me my face. That seemed the most perfect kind of luxury.
I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets. They should have been empty. I had brought nothing.
And yet I drew from my pockets several chunks of bread, some large leathery mushrooms, a carved wooden comb.
Gifts from my mother. She must have known all along.
In another pocket I found a pouch filled with my mother’s favorite herbs, the ones without names, dried and tied in bundles. There were plants like miniature trees, like tangled pubic hair, seaweed, bird feathers, crumpled paper. The smells rose up from the bag and fought each other.
My egg was knotted in my petticoat.
How stupid of me to think I could leave home without my mother knowing. She had known I would leave before I did. She had allowed me to leave. Perhaps she had watched, and tugged at me with her eyes merely to test my resolve. It seemed no matter how I tried to escape, I was still entangled in my mother’s plans.
I saw her braid swinging.
I saw her figure plowing smoothly through the snow before me, as if she had cart wheels beneath her skirts instead of legs.
I walked for five days.
On the evening of the fifth day I saw smoke in the distance. As I came closer I came upon a village, not unlike the one I had left. I wanted to go to one of those houses, ask for a place to sleep. But I couldn’t; they were too familiar. I had the sensation that whichever house I called at my mother would open the door. She’d fill the doorway, dusted with flour, sleeves rolled, arms folded, children clinging constantly to her skirts as if they’d been sewn there as ornaments.
So I skirted the village as night fell. I smelled bread baking.
How ugly the trees were now. Behind me the lights of the village glowed like warm embers.
Then, like a granted wish, I came abruptly to a clearing in the woods, and a small house with a peaked roof and smoke curling from two chimneys. A stone path led to the door, and I found myself knocking on it before I’d had a chance to think.
I could hear rustling inside, the crackle of fire. The doorstep on which I stood was worn, and the spot on the door where I’d rapped my knuckles was a silky smooth depression in the wood, as if countless hands had knocked before me.
Yes? said a voice and the door opened slightly. I stared into eyes that were a disturbing yellow, lashless and unblinking.
She looked me up and down. The eyebrows rose in crafty peaks.
Are you in trouble? she asked sharply. She wore shoes tipped with iron.
I nodded.
Well then, she said briskly, come inside, though you should have known to come to the back door.
The room inside was small and familiar. Wooden chairs, a low bed, a stone floor. Bunches of herbs hung drying near the fire. A piece of knitting lay interrupted on a chair.
She helped me remove my clothes. What I had at first thought was a hat perched on her head was in fact a dense mass of silvery gray braids wound together, a huge round loaf of hair. Her hands were spotted with age.
She hung my clothes on a chair to dry and said: Why don’t you sit and warm yourself for a minute? I opened my mouth to speak but she clicked her tongue at me and turned away.
There was a smell in the air, musty, faintly sickishly sweet; I could not place it. On shelves nearby stood stoppered jars and bottles of the sort people used for pickles and preserves. I looked closer and saw stored there twisted roots suspended in brine, the pale floating bodies of frogs, the milky globes of cows’ eyes, and jars and jars of a viscous liquid, reddish brown, with a dry crust on top.
A kettle stood on the hearth, and two mugs. Had she been expecting me? No, the mugs had been recently used; dregs of tea clung to the insides.
I heard the woman scrubbing her hands vigorously in a tub of water. Did you happen to bring anything to give me? she asked, peering over her shoulder.
I shrugged, shook my head.
Ah, they never do, she said to herself. She turned then and came toward me. I quickly backed away. Are you ready, then? she said. Her bared arms were terribly thin.
Don’t be changing your mind now, after you came all this way, she said. Hop up on the chair now, there you go. Her voice was firm; she grasped my arm and I found myself standing on the chair. Strands of my hair hung before my eyes like the bars of a cage.
She looked up at me with those yellow eyes, she put a hand on my thigh to still its trembling. The smell in the room was strange and terrible, a sweet rottenness; I could taste it.
My tongue seemed to have gone to sleep.
I saw that she held in her hand a bit of metal, like a piece of twisted wire.
Lift your skirts dearie, she said, you know it has to be done.
Her voice carried such command that I automatically gathered my skirts in my hands; I had lifted them nearly to my knees before I came to my senses and pushed her away and tumbled off the chair.
Hush, hush, she said and reached out to me, but I scuttled away from her on all fours. Hush, she said as I tried to explain myself at the top of my voice.
I quieted when the woman put away her horrible wire. She did not seem amused by the misunderstanding, but she gave me a bowl of soup and said I could sleep in the shed. I asked for her name; she told me to call her Baba.
That night as I lay in the shed, warming myself beside Baba’s yellow-eyed goat, I wondered about this strange woman. I thought about the house, how it had appeared as I approached with the stone path and the two chimneys. I realized there must be a second room, a second fireplace I had not seen.
I woke thinking of Ari, and found the goat nibbling my hair.
I thought I would move on that morning, but Baba came to me with a cool assessing look and said she could give me work if I cared to stay on for a few days. She had wood that needed splitting, and there were errands I could do for her since she did not like to go down to the village. In return she offered me a place to sleep.
I accepted, though I did not like or trust her. In the daylight her eyes took on a thick muddy color, like pus.
I did not like to admit to myself that I had left my mother only to find another. A grim substitute. I tried not to think about it.
So I spent days chopping. My father had taught me how to swing an ax. I worked myself into a rhythm and Baba stood by the back fence, watching.
She needed a great deal of wood; it seemed she kept both fireplaces burning much of the time. By now I had noticed the door that led to the room I had never seen. Although Baba entered it several times a day, she never invited me in. She sometimes emerged with dirty dishes, stale bed linen. I sometimes heard her voice through the wall, mingled with another’s.
From the village gossip I learned that Baba was the local herb woman, both midwife and doctor. There were whispers that she was a witch: some swore they had seen her flying through the air in a bucket; others insisted her house could raise itself up and walk about, on a pair of giant chicken legs.
And they whispered about the girls from neighboring villages who came to Baba secretly in the night, hoping she could save them from disgrace with that piece of wire that made me think of a rabbit snare.
One day a girl my own age beckoned me aside and told me something more, about the men of the village going to Baba in the dark hour before dawn, but her breath was so heavy in my ear that I could not understand what she said, and when I asked her to repeat it she blushed deeply and ran away.
In the evenings, sometimes, Baba combed my hair. I did not like the way she gathered my hairs from the comb, so carefully, then balled them and slipped them in her pocket.
I did not like her much.
During the day I saw sick villagers come to her door for ointments and tonics. Sometimes at night there would come a knock at the door to the shed where I slept, and I would find a pale nervous girl shivering outside. I’d bring the girl through the connecting passage to the main room, to Baba, who would immediately send me back to bed. I sometimes lay awake listening for the cries, the sobs, and Baba’s stern, soothing tones. In the mornings the floor would be scrubbed and clean.
Also at night came the older women worn out by childbirth. Baba gave them herbs to toughen their wombs, keep a new child from taking root. These women seemed more ashamed than the girls; they bowed their heads and gulped, these women who had borne ten or twelve children and felt guilty for calling a halt to it.
I watched all these things and stored them away.
One day in the village I heard rumors of a soldiers training camp nearby. The people spoke of a new recruit, a monstrous man of unnatural size and animal appetites, who ate flesh raw, wrestled bulls to the ground, and howled at the moon. The army officers hoped to train him, he would make a marvelous killing machine. The officers were having difficulty teaching him, he seemed not to understand their words and would sit moaning and scratching for hours. When provoked he went on rampages. People said he had already killed two men during one of his panics. But the officers would not give up, they would break him like a wild horse if necessary.
As I heard the story, my heart leaped up, then dropped like a stone.
It was Ari. I was sure of it. I would find him if I could, and take him with me wherever I went. It seemed an easy plan, in my head.
I did not like the way people spoke of him. He was not the monster they made him out to be. The things they said were true and not true at the same time.
Soon after, I was awakened late in the night by footsteps. The house was full of the heavy bumbling sounds of men. Their smell, manure and iron, reached my nostrils. I opened the door that connected the shed to the main room of the house, and peered in.
More than a dozen men from the village crowded the room. Baba stood among them, yellow eyes unblinking. No one spoke. Each man handed her something: a bag of sugar, silver coins, a basket of eggs. The men seemed restless, shifting their feet, with sweat standing out on their faces and necks. When Baba had received all the gifts she went to the door of the secret room, unlocked it, and led the men inside.
About fifteen minutes later they emerged. They seemed even more agitated than before and did not want to leave. But Baba herded them out and locked the door behind her. The men filed out into the snow.
On subsequent nights I awoke more and more often, to hear the shuffling of heavy feet and to witness the silent ceremony of gifts and visits to the secret room.
The next time I passed through the village I overheard the men talking in the blacksmith’s shop. They were talking in hushed tones of a love sickness, they spoke of going to Baba’s house to get the cure. It was a dangerous addiction, they said.
One of these men passed me later in the street. He was black haired and red skinned; he gave me a mocking smile, touched his cap, and went on his way.
I recognized him. He was one of Baba’s nighttime guests; his wife had borne him fourteen children and had recently come to Baba for an herb to stop a fifteenth.
I chopped wood and great horny calluses rose up on my hands.
One morning Baba was called away early to assist at a premature birth. When I was sure she had gone I began exploring her shelves, peering in boxes, holding jars up to the light. I heard a faint tune; at first I assumed it was something in my own head. But it did not go away, it went on and on and grew faintly annoying.
It was coming from the secret room.
It was the same voice I had heard many times before. But today it was clearer than ever.
I turned to look and nearly dropped the bottle I was holding. She had forgotten to lock the door, it was slightly ajar.
I put the bottle back on a shelf and walked toward the door as softly as I could, which was not soft at all, considering my cloddish shoes.
I pushed at the door and stepped inside.
The room was swathed in lace, yards and yards of it, the sort Baba spent hours knitting in the evenings. It draped the walls, hung in festoons from the ceiling. A fire burned brightly in a stone fireplace. The room was so warm I felt the sweat pop out on my face.
An enormous bed filled most of the room, a high bed covered in more lace, finely woven shawls, and quilts. And on this bed lounged such a girl as I had never seen before.
She lay sprawled in a loose robe, regarding me with unconcerned green eyes. She had the softest, whitest flesh I had ever seen; her face, her throat, her hands were smooth and unblemished. Her robe had fallen open in the front; I could see one of her breasts, a pale perfect mound. It looked like something rich and creamy you could eat with a spoon. Most extraordinary of all was her hair: somewhere between red and gold, it hung loose from her head, cascaded over the pillows, her shoulders, lay on the floor in a thick shining carpet. I was nearly stepping on it.
That rotten sweet smell was even stronger here.
Her face was pale and flowerlike; the cheeks were two spots of pink that I suspected were painted on. I gaped. She did not seem human; I wondered if she was something Baba had created: carved out of soap, baked in the oven, cultivated in the dark like a mushroom.
Close the door, cow-eyes, there’s a draft, she said. Her voice was that annoying singsong that had faintly haunted the house since I arrived.
I closed the door and stepped closer. I knelt beside her and studied her. I could not resist poking her arm; her flesh was as cushiony as it looked. It was flesh that had never worked or sweated under the sun. I poked her again. I fingered a thick handful of hair. She was a fascinating plaything. She lay there limply, regarding me indifferently.
Baba said there was a girl here, but she did not want you to see me, she said.
Why? I said, watching the hair slide and shimmer like water.
She said in her grating voice: I hate it here, I’m going mad in this room.
How long have you been here?
More than two years, I think. I’m not sure.
Why don’t you leave then? I said.
At that she raised herself up and began tossing aside the blankets that covered her lower body. Her legs entranced me: smooth, white, hairless. And then I saw that she had no feet.
How …
She leaned back and sighed. She told me how a man had gotten her into trouble, a married man her father’s age who pushed her down in the forest without a word and held her there. She had been in trouble and had heard Baba could help her out of it.
She said: I used to live in a village far away, I had to walk all night to get here, it was terribly cold and by the time I arrived my feet were frostbitten. Baba got rid of the baby, and I hardly felt it, for the pain in my feet. I got terribly sick and she took care of me for weeks, and when I came out of the fever I found myself here, in this room, and Baba told me my feet had turned black and fallen off, she hadn’t been able to save them from the frostbite. I couldn’t go home, after the trouble with the man, so she has kept me here, all this time.
Your hair, I said. Has it always been like this?
No, she said, it’s Baba’s doing, she rubs a horrible green paste into my scalp every night, and then it grows like weeds.
I said: Those men, why do they come here at night?
She laughed shrilly and said: They like to look. All they do is stand around and stare, with their mouths hanging open and their hands in their pockets. They stink, and they say the stupidest things.
Do they touch you?
Baba won’t let them, she has told them I am some kind of ridiculous fairy creature, and if they touch me I’ll shrivel up and turn to dust.
And they believe that?
Men are foolish, she said, they believe what they want to believe.
They only look?
Yes, Baba tells them that what they feel is an illness that requires a cure. Whether they believe that or not, they keep coming back. And bringing friends.
Do you like it? I whispered.
She said scornfully: Men are like cattle, easily led.
I fingered her hair. She let me. I wondered if Baba did the same thing.
When you leave Baba, will you take me with you? she said suddenly. I’ll go mad if I stay here much longer.
Her eyes traveled over my face. I felt myself flushing. I was conscious as never before of the sallowness of my skin, the narrowness of my face, the pink birthmark at the corner of my lips like a dribble of wine.
She said her name was Anya.
During the following days I visited her room often.
How I hated her whining voice.
But her body was a white smooth thing that I wanted to swallow whole. Even the blunt stubs of her legs were beautiful to me, there was something so naked and helpless about them. I split wood into smaller and smaller pieces and let the sweat run down my face to burn my eyes.
Baba watched us both and smiled.
The men continued their secret visits. As the winter dragged on they came more and more often, red eyed, distracted; they could not really see me, or Baba. They saw only the milky smooth skin, the red-gold hair that grew over the floor and climbed the walls like ivy. They looked and wiped their mouths.
Anya said scornful things to them, yet she seemed to luxuriate beneath their gazes like a cat being stroked. She kept her legs discreetly covered.
The men began coming every night. There were more than two dozen of them now. They shuffled into Anya’s room in shifts for their precious minutes. They began to come earlier in the night, some even came at dusk and lurked among the trees waiting for Baba to admit them. These men were burly with bushy beards like my father. But there was a desperation about them that made them slack mouthed and helpless. They seemed not to understand it themselves; I saw them shaking their heads over nothing, clucking their tongues.
Now when I went down to the village I heard muttering among the women. They had noticed the change in their husbands. They knew their men were visiting Baba’s house late at night, but none of them knew about the footless girl hidden there. Some women suspected Baba was offering herself to the men. That old hag? Impossible. How could they? the women asked each other. No man would touch her, they reassured themselves. But there were a few who said: She has bewitched them all.
Night after night they came.
On a night when the men were more frantic than ever, one of them refused to leave Anya’s room when his allotted time was up. Baba spoke sharply; he ignored her. She tugged his arm, but he brushed her away and swiftly knelt by the bedside, reaching out to touch Anya’s face as she recoiled in disgust.
Baba cried out angrily; the other men reluctantly dragged their friend from the room. Baba herded the men onto the doorstep, told them never to return, and turned the lock after them.
She watched from the window as they wandered back to the village, hanging their heads, sullen in the moonlight. Go to sleep, she told me. She went into Anya’s room and locked the door behind her. I lay awake thinking of her brown spotted hands touching Anya’s white ones.
The days that followed were queer silent ones.
One evening I heard the wail of a rising wind. The trees moaned and scraped against each other. A storm was brewing. I heard footsteps, glimpsed a dark figure darting among the trunks. I whirled about.
A branch snapped and I saw one of the village men approaching, his eyes cold and thoughtless. I ran to the house and he lurched behind me. Men were emerging from the wood on all sides, swaying and staggering up to the doorstep.
I slipped into the house from behind and barred the back door. I saw Baba standing in the front doorway, facing the men gathered there. Their bodies were dark and indistinct, their eyes glowing, like wandering spirits. They were demanding entrance, bellowing and snorting.
I saw Baba refusing, saw her hands brushing them away. The men’s faces fell. Like spiteful schoolboys they kicked each other, spat, began hurling small stones that flew past Baba and tocked on the floor.
Then a stone the size of a fist struck her on the temple and she fell back. I caught her under the arms and pulled her into the house. Her heavy head lay against my shoulder. The men looked shocked, suddenly ashamed, and they backed away, melting into the trees. I barred the door behind them.
I dragged Baba to the bed. There was no blood, but her breathing was shallow and a greenish bruise was rapidly forming over her temple.
In a matter of hours the bruise had deepened and spread over her entire face, as if her head were a rotten melon. In the dark hour before dawn her breathing stopped.
I wiped her mouth, pressed her lids shut. I held her head, touched the dense loaf of hair. I realized with a shock that it was not a mass of braids, or a knotted bun. Her gray hair was only the outer covering of a hard bony knob—an outgrowth of the skull itself. It was some sort of malignancy, some evil tumor, and most likely the blow had broken some membrane, freed the evil juices to seep through her head. Already her face was unrecognizable.
I watched the body settle and shrink, the skin drawing more tightly over the bones. Her body became a dry, light, tidy thing, almost childlike. She looked quite peaceful. Except for the violently discolored face.
I took the key from her pocket and went to Anya’s room. I told her Baba was gone and we made plans to leave.
But the men were back, circling the house like wild dogs.
Night fell. We heard them, they were running, circling, howling at the moon. We saw their eyes glowing green as they raised their heads, flaring their nostrils, scenting the wind.
They can smell you, I told Anya.
Don’t let them in, she said.
They circled, scratching at the walls, pounding at the door, wailing and chewing their lips.
Maybe if they could just come in and see you, they’d go home satisfied, I said.
No they wouldn’t, she said.
They waited all through the next day. They pressed their faces against the window, their eyes red and wild, their beards matted and sticky. They licked the glass.
Soon they would begin tearing the walls down.
I thought of my mother, felt my eyes darting and jumping like hers.
I went to Anya and said: I have a plan.
I helped her dress. Then I put my arms around her and tried to lift her from the bed. She was not much taller than me. But her body was impossibly heavy and limp. Her flesh was so soft in my arms, like a down mattress; I thought that if I slit her white skin, she’d spill out feathers. My knees buckled; I saw sparks, and I collapsed on the floor with her warm, flaccid, bedridden body on top of me.
Your hair, I panted.
Her abundant hair accounted for at least part of the weight. It was many meters long, and tangled and twined around the sheets, the bed frame, the oceans of lace that surrounded her like a cocoon.
I tried to free her hair, to gather it up like an armful of wheat. She lay uselessly on the floor as I tried to bind it up. Massy and bright, it slid from my fingers. I tripped over it, it was caught in my teeth.
It has to go, I said.
She screamed in protest as I went looking for scissors. She thrashed on the floor like a beached mermaid. Her hair resisted me; soon the scissors were blunted. The cries of the men outside made me frantic.
It has to be done, I said.
I fetched the ax from the shed and stood above her, her hair pinned beneath my feet; I raised the ax above my head, and as she cursed and her sideways face contorted in anger I let it fall. Again and again I chopped through the lush growth, severing it from its roots.
I caught my breath and smiled. Anya continued to heap her curses on me, even as she ran her fingers through her cropped hair savoring the new weightless freedom of her head and neck.
I lifted Anya, propped her outside the back door. Then I went to Baba’s bed, wrapped her brittle body in a sheet, and carried it into Anya’s room. I covered it in lace, arranged the armfuls of Anya’s red-gold hair around the head as if it grew there.
I blew out the candles. Moonlight from the one narrow window fell across Baba’s face.
The men had gathered again at the front door; they smashed their fists against it. The whole house shook. Their voices rose in unison.
I opened the door. The faces, thirty or more, filled the doorway, a single creature with many heads and countless hands. They reeked of musk and sweat and foul saliva held too long in the mouth.
Do you want to see her? I said.
They closed their mouths and nodded; I held the door open and they tramped past me. Heedlessly they stumbled into Anya’s room, pressing around the bed, all of them packing in at once.
I locked the bedroom door behind them.
Then I went outside, hoisted Anya across my back, and staggered out into the snow.
Soon we heard the screams, the blows, the breaking of glass, the splintering of wood. I tried to hasten my steps.
I had nearly reached the trees when I heard the crash of the door being broken down. Men were pouring from the house. Anya gripped my ear. I longed to fling her down in the snow and run, but she was so heavy I was rooted to the spot.
But the men did not come after us, though my tracks were clearly visible in the snow.
They were brawling with each other, hurling accusations, trampling the snow, staining the clearing with blood, beating each other with their fists. Each was accusing the other of touching the fairy-girl, as they had been warned not to do. Each blamed the others for turning their dream-woman into a rotting bag of bones and dust.
All of them held skeins of red-gold hair wrapped around their fists, or balled in their mouths.
I set out again, with Anya bouncing on my back like a sack of grain. Far away, down in the village, I saw a line of lights steadily approaching. It was the women of the village, who had finally decided to take matters into their own hands. They came carrying torches and kitchen knives, some with babies bound to their breasts. They were coming to burn out the witch, break her enchantments and end her filthy practices, and bring their husbands home.
I could hear them singing.
I walked for hours in the dark.
Near dawn I let Anya slide from my shoulder. Her skin was blotchy from the cold, her lips blue, her patchy hair disheveled. Looking at her flabby face, her piggish black nostrils, I remembered the strange desire I had once felt for her and wondered when exactly I had left it behind.
She rubbed her hands, glared at me.
I cleared a space in the snow, gathered dry sticks, lit a match. We huddled together, our breaths making clouds.
I heard a footstep and my heart froze.
A huge shape darted from among the trees, paused in the early-morning light, and squatted before our fire.
Anya gasped.
I smiled.
Ari picked at his teeth and watched us warily, crouching on his heels. He had grown a great deal in the months since I had seen him. He was broad shouldered, bulky, shaggy as a bear. His beard had begun, though he was still a child. Some clumsy past attempts at shaving had left scabs on his face. But his eyes were the same, and the curve of his spine graceful as a horse’s neck.
Oh Ari, I said. I went to him and cradled his head in my arms, stroking the stiff hair. He looked up at me, sighed, and curled his lip in the grimace that was as close as he came to a smile.
My brother, I told Anya. He can carry you, I said.
Ari’s lips were chapped and bleeding, and he licked at them hungrily. Did you escape? I asked him. Although it was obvious, from the coarse uniform he wore. The cheap army-issue boots were falling to pieces.
I tried to hold his hands. He shook me away as he always did. Then I noticed the leg iron, rusted with dried blood, on his left ankle.
Anya was watching us, fascination and disgust on her face.
I knew the soldiers would be looking for him. I had to bring him to a safe place. I knew we should have started walking right then. Ari could have taken Anya off my back. We might have gone a good distance before night.
But I fell asleep, my head pillowed on my arms.
Sometime later I struggled out of sleep to see Ari and Anya staring at each other across the fire. Ari looked at her with a kind of wide-eyed wonder, the way he looked at a new animal he had never seen before. His mouth worked; his fingers plucked at each other nervously. He ducked his head, then looked back at her and laughed. His laugh was a harsh sound, like choking.
Anya was pleased by his attention, I could tell. I could see the familiar, languid, lazy expression creep over her face. Ari held her eyes and eased slowly, fluidly closer.
Anya smiled. And then she ever so slightly loosened her coat, showed him a patch of white skin at her throat.
Ari reached out slowly to touch a stray bit of hair. She laughed nervously. And then Ari grunted, leaped, pounced. Suddenly she was splayed out in the snow. Ari had his mouth at her throat and was tearing insistently at her clothes, twisting her head this way and that, pressing and tugging at her limbs, sniffing in her ears and eyes.
He was just a child. He was only trying to see how she worked.
Anya screamed.
She screamed and screamed and would not stop screaming, not when I pulled Ari away from her, not when I slapped her face, not when the company of soldiers in their ugly brown uniforms came running stiffly through the trees, barking orders to each other and surrounding my brother with their guns.
They had been tracking my brother for two days; they had recently lost his trail but Anya’s voice led them back.
I stood and watched as my brother was taken away. The officer of the company stood beside me and barked orders. He wore tall shiny boots and carried a riding crop which he flicked impatiently against his leg. Between orders he ground his teeth; I could hear the rasp and squeak.
He sent one of his subordinates to fetch a horse and bring Anya back to the army camp. The other officers will be very glad to make her acquaintance, he said. I told him about her feet; he shrugged and said she would not need them.
I could not look at her as she was taken away. Her screams still echoed in my head. That gaping mouth.
Now I stood alone with the officer. I was not afraid of him. I could see his viciousness, it was something I understood. I had seen it before.
You should give up on my brother, I told him. He will never learn.
I’m not yet convinced of that, he said.
He’s too old, I said, he has been the way he is for too long for you to change him.
There are ways, he said.
What if there were others just like him? I said. Other ones, as big as him, and as strong, but young enough to teach the way you want.
What are you saying?
We have younger brothers, I told him. Take one of them, take all three of them, train them, and give up on Ari.
The officer chewed over the idea. I heard his teeth clicking.
What is the name of your village? he asked finally.
My village was too small to have a name.
So he said I would have to show him. He hoisted me up behind him on his horse, and we rode, to the jangling of bit and spurs, over hills and through forests, and I clung to his belt and felt immense hatred for the layer of red, bristly flesh that bulged over the collar of his uniform.
I did not know what would happen next. My younger brothers were not at all like Ari; they were ordinary, big headed, knobby kneed little boys with runny noses. I did not want to give them up to this officer. In my desperation I had been thinking only of my mother. I thought somehow that if I brought this man back to my mother, she would find a way to make everything all right. This man’s viciousness was no match for my mother’s.
As we jolted and galloped over hard-packed snow, I thought of her and wanted to crawl into her lap. She had managed to bring me home after all.
I knew she would smell us coming, with her nose for soldiers. I thought of her eyes snapping, skirts whirling as she formulated plans.
My mother.
We rode until we came to a place that I knew so well, I knew the shape of the hills and the bend in the river. I felt a pang as I thought of home.
We crossed the last rise, emerged from the trees.
The village was gone.
It was a black scar in the snow.
We rode slowly down the only street. The houses were blackened skeletons, still smoking. A bloated cow lay in the road, legs in the air. Dogs, cats, goats lay in frozen twisted shapes in the gutters, daubed with red.
The smoke made black smudges in the sky.
I saw blotches and blooms of blood flowering on walls. I saw a boy’s cap in the road, cupping something dark and gelatinous.
I saw a familiar skirt. I saw a fork, a spoon. I saw a pair of severed feet, lined up as neatly as shoes beside a doorway.
I thought of Anya and how she could use them, and I heard myself laughing.
I pressed my face against the officer’s sour back so I would not see any more.
We are too late, the officer said musingly. He was riding slowly, looking about.
Such a pity, he said, such a waste.
I thought I heard a softness in his voice.
To think—three more just like your brother, he said. That would have been amazing. Our company would have been the best in the division.
He clucked his tongue at the horse as it shied at a child’s dress blowing on the wind.
I held myself stiffly away from him all the way back to the army camp.
I told myself that my mother had escaped, of course she had, she must have scented the impending disaster, certainly at this very moment she and my father were hiding in the woods with my brothers and sisters gathered around, roasting potatoes over a fire, my mother a whirlwind of activity and foresight.
I still felt hope, I did, I held my chin like my mother always did. I told myself I would be brave like her, and resourceful, and I would do what I had to do to save them all.
I ought to skip the next part of the story, you are too young to hear it.
But I won’t.
When we returned to the soldiers’ camp, the officer offered me another bargain, a trade. Your brother’s release in exchange for the pleasure of your company, he said.
Just a little while, he said. It won’t take long.
We stood in the mud, among tents and milling horses and the jangle of harnesses and spurs. A subordinate came to take the officer’s horse; as it was led away I saw that its legs were still flecked with the soot and debris that had once been my village.
I looked at the officer whose eyes were set too close together, pinching his nose. Hair in his nostrils. I thought of my mother, her power over men, men meaning my father, the way my father jumped to do her bidding and cowered from her though she was half his size. And I thought of Anya, who could make men act like fools or grunting animals simply by rolling her eyes at them.
I knew I was stronger than Anya. I had carried her on my back, I had dragged her through the snow. She was weak, I thought, and stupid, and not even whole, and yet she had driven a townful of men to madness.
If she had that sort of power, I reasoned, then surely I did too. I looked at the officer, who was tapping his riding crop against his boots, flicking away flecks of mud, admiring them.
I thought: surely I can get the better of him.
I thought: I will drive him mad, he will do whatever I say. Because that is what women do to men.
I thought: that is what Anya did, and I am far better than her, look at my two perfect feet. Cold but lovely.
That was my reasoning. I thought it sound at the time.
I nodded and the officer took me by the arm, not companionably, he grasped me near the armpit and jerked me toward the inn where the officers had their rooms.
And in that room, which was low ceilinged and too warm, I saw how his body drooped without the stiff uniform, saw the flabby ring of flesh at his waist that matched the one on his neck. And he laid his hands on me, hands that looked like disease, with their knobby joints and yellow nails. He began pulling off my clothes and I wanted to change my mind but the door was locked and it was already too late, I was backed into a corner behind the bed, a high bed with an iron frame made of bars like a prison cell.
He pulled off my clothes, layer after layer, and it took a long time, and I was aware suddenly of how my clothes reeked of goat and ash and the tart sweat of panic, and I was momentarily ashamed. But he kept pulling and tugging and did not notice, hardly seemed to see me at all, I was a service, less to him than his horse or the subordinate who had taken it away.
It was all happening too fast; I was not having the expected effect on him but it was too late, he snapped a cord and the last of my clothing fell and pooled at my feet. I felt as if he had gone too far, as if he had gone beyond my clothes and stripped off a layer of skin, my body felt raw and sensitive all over like a fresh cut, a hangnail.
This was the moment when he was supposed to grovel at my feet, look up at me with worshipful eyes like the men in Anya’s room. Instead he muttered something about chicken bones and boosted me onto the bed.
He threw himself upon me, and I undid my hair and let it fall all around so at least he would not see my face as he did what he did. He puffed and groaned and breathed his sour breath into me, and dug out the deep places in my body and scraped and chafed against them so long I thought I would develop calluses before he was done, and as he did this I looked up at the ceiling at a crack in the plaster that seemed to be branching and spreading even as I watched it, like the crack in an egg as the chick begins to peck its way out into a harsh new world.
When he was finished he lost no time in getting back into his trousers. He put on his tunic, polished his boots with a cloth and then put them on, gazing down at them fondly. He was brisk, efficient, on his way to a fine dinner, no doubt.
I asked him when I would see my brother.
He laughed into the mirror. He was smoothing his mustache with oil.
You’ll never see your brother again, he said.
You promised, I said.
If you want a promise kept you should get it in writing, he said.
Your brother’s no better than a horse, he added, if they can’t train him they’ll take him out back and shoot him.
I leaped from the bed, landed on his back, sank my teeth into his neck. I could not inflict much, his flesh was leathery tough meat, my teeth could not pierce it.
He smashed the handle of his pistol down on my fingers and I fell from him. He raised his foot to kick, but the polished perfection of the boot made him reconsider. He did not want to soil it, after all.
He stepped around me, put on his coat, paused at the door. I expect you to leave here before nightfall, he said. And he added: Rinse the sheets before you leave. There’s water in the basin.
He opened the door, paused, and said in a fatherly tone: You should be careful in the forest at night. There are timber wolves, they are unpredictable.
Then he was gone.
I stood a long time before the mirror; it was black speckled, rippled with age, looking into it was like looking into a deep pool that sucked up most light and only gave a little back as reflection. But I could see enough. I saw how my bones stuck out like scaffolding, and the skin was sallow and rough. The officer had left bruises shaped like fingerprints all over my shoulders. There was nothing in my face that could tempt or intrigue; my hair was long but it looked only like hair, not like precious metals or sunsets or fires. Worthless merchandise.
How foolish of me to bargain with this.
How foolish to think I could move mountains just by being a woman.
I stood looking at the girl in the mirror who held her breasts in her hands and cried. Stupid girl, I thought.
I had never seen my mother cry.
Outside the sky was crowded with clouds dark as smoke, or smoke thick as clouds.
I washed and dressed and went to the stables and stole a horse because although I may have been ignorant of men, I understood animals and knew how to win their complicity. I ached between my legs and each step the horse took sent a jolt of pain a little farther up, a little deeper in.
My brother was nowhere to be seen.
So I rode away from that ugly place.
Those three old women who used to plague my village told me a story once.
I was a child then, their ancient faces frightened me.
I did not want to listen to them. I turned my face away and pretended that I was very busy thinking of other things, the way you do sometimes. But their words bored in.
The story went like this:
There once lived in the village a girl who was so spirited, so lighthearted her feet barely touched the ground. Her mother had to sew stones into the hems of her daughter’s skirts, knot clothes irons and horseshoes into her hair to prevent a strong wind from blowing her away. But the girl was irrepressible, she could run fast as a deer and all day long she flitted through the village, her bright sharp voice spangling the air around her.
Everyone in the village knew her. As a small child she had been inquisitive, appearing unexpectedly at people’s elbows to ask them questions. She pestered the blacksmith at his anvil, dodging the sparks; she floated through the clouds of flour at the baker’s, dug through the cobbler’s greasy leather. She might show up in any house, at any time of day or night, regardless of locks or manners. She would simply be there suddenly, an extra face at the dinner table. You might see her nose pressed against your window, feel her breath on your neck as you squatted on a stool milking into the bucket between your feet.
As she grew older she became taller but lost none of her lightness. Her mother often kept her inside now to work. But when she could get away she wandered through the village as before, stopping where she pleased. The villagers were used to her now; some anticipated her questions and answered them, while others good-naturedly ignored her.
She had a vitality they could not understand. They looked at her and thought she was happy, but in a way that made no sense to them.
She took to wandering the fields and forests, singing to herself, sticking weeds and flowers alike in her hair. The villagers saw her from afar; some liked to romanticize her, saying that her singing brought birds and butterflies flocking to her, perching on her shoulders and joining their voices to hers. Others said she had a low, rough voice, couldn’t sing a note, she just wandered aimlessly, dragging a stick over the ground, shamelessly idle while everyone else gathered vegetables.
But they all agreed, later, that this was when the forest spirit first saw her.
She was walking among the trees, her light feet barely rustling the dry leaves, when she reached a clearing and came face-to-face with one of the spirits. He had yellow eyes, antlers sprouting from his forehead, thick legs ending in huge hairy hooves. He wore a white shirt and a soldier’s braid-trimmed jacket above, and nothing at all below.
He was spitting through his teeth; as the wet drops fell they pattered like rain, and where they touched the ground the grass withered and died in rust-colored patches.
The girl paused and stared.
The spirit smiled lecherously and unrolled a tongue that reached to his waist.
The girl saw that he was balding, and that his nails were bitten to the quick like a nervous child’s.
She was afraid then, for she had heard the old people in the village speaking of imps and spirits, of the forest, of the river, of stone, and of the hearth. They said young spirits were harmless, stupid; it was only the older spirits who were clever and malicious.
But this spirit did nothing, merely looked her up and down, and then trotted back into the trees. The two tiny wings that grew from his shoulder blades flapped feebly as he went.
She ran home, and thought no more about the incident, except now and then, when she seemed to feel someone watching her, or when she saw a reflection not her own in the distorting bowl of a spoon.
It was months later that she heard a beat drawing her to the woods, a regular pounding that matched her own heart. She followed the sound, gliding among the trees, and came upon a young man, his shoulders nearly as broad as two men put together. He was splitting wood, in a regular rhythm, using an ax that matched his girth.
She watched as he worked, his back and shoulders so graceful yet so heavy. She saw in him a solidity that matched her lightness, and for once she could not think of a question to ask.
She returned again and again to watch him at his work. He was so practiced in his movements that he could stare back at her, lining up the chunks and letting the ax fall without ever looking.
Watching him she felt as she did when she saw the moon clearly reflected in a pool of water, or rain dimpling the surface of a river, or a young sapling sprouting from the rot of a decaying stump. It was a sense of symmetry and completeness.
She made her feelings known, without a word.
The young man came to the village to speak with her father.
The girl’s parents were pleased with his request. They had assumed no one would want to marry their daughter; she was flighty, an indifferent worker, and they had expected her to remain a light but troublesome burden the rest of their lives. The father was happy enough with her suitor, and the two laid plans and conditions and sealed it all with a firm handshake, both men testing the other’s grip.
During the months and weeks before the wedding the girl became lighter than ever. She was not permitted to be alone with her prospective husband, so she watched him from a distance, savoring the musical sway of his body. She drifted through the woods, rose to the level of the treetops, and watched him from above. She swooped and tumbled in the sky, dove to earth and rose again, climbing the air as if it were a staircase. At night she darted batlike against a backdrop of stars, all the while humming her tuneless nothings or clucking her tongue like a falling ax.
The villagers saw her skimming the treetops and muttered: Silly girl, she’ll break her neck.
And: She should be home helping her mother.
While she flew carelessly above, trouble came to the village down below. First it was flies, thick dark clouds of them. They settled everywhere, attacking with their stinging bites, feasting on anything left uncovered, burrowing into the hides of animals to lay their eggs.
And then the yard behind the girl’s home began to collect water from an unknown source. The ground became sodden, the garden plants rotted, the earth sank. Within days the yard had become a swamp, and lugubrious black frogs had taken up residence. They moved lazily, their skins as slimy-black as oil. White clusters of their eggs made a scum on the surface.
Thick clouds lumbered in, clogging the sky. For a week day was as dark as night.
These were bad omens, and the villagers eyed each other suspiciously, wondering who was to blame.
A week before the wedding, the girl woke in the night to find her window open, a sour breeze licking at her forehead. And then she saw the close-bitten fingers on the sill, two yellow eyes glowing in the dark, and a long pink tongue unrolling and creeping along the floor.
The tongue reached the foot of her bed, lifted the sheet, and burrowed underneath. She felt the rough tip as it nudged its way up her legs, creeping upward to help itself to the thing she was saving for her future husband. She tried to scream, slapped at it with her hands, leaped up in bed. She snatched up a hairbrush and struck again and again, but the pink worm seemed to be everywhere, writhing and soiling the sheets. So she shot upward, toward the ceiling, and fluttered there mothlike, seeking an escape.
The spirit let out a roar with his tender tongue. He sprang into the room, filled with a jealous rage. He had hoped to lure her into the spirit world with him, he had brought her a crown of hemlock and mistletoe, a wedding veil of spiderwebs.
Now he snatched at her as she bobbed just out of reach. She sought an exit but the window had disappeared, as if it were a wound that had healed; the door was gone and even the cracks between the floorboards had sealed themselves. The walls drew in closer, and closer, and closer, the spirit nibbled greedily at his fingers, and she covered her eyes and screamed and screamed, and the spirit leaped up and dove into her body.
If he could not have her himself, he would prevent anyone else from having her.
Now the girl wandered through the village day and night, her eyes glazed, her face strangely slack. She did not float, she staggered and crashed into fences, she clawed at windows, plucked at her own hair. She spun like a top, her skirts rising to her waist, her hair hanging loose, streaming behind her, a dark streak. She sank her teeth into her own arm, and drank.
The voice that came from her was not her own. It was deep, hoarse, a man’s voice, it came from deep within her and flowed out her mouth, spilled out over her unmoving lips.
She wallowed in mud. She rent her clothes.
Wherever she went, dogs, cats, children fled. But she was followed by chickens, a flock of them, all watching her with their pink eyes and dodging her drunken feet. Wherever she stepped, worms rose from the ground and the chickens pecked at them greedily.
The villagers recognized the signs. They barred their doors. The girl beat at their walls, calling and cursing in her harsh voice.
Her betrothed tried to restrain her and she turned on him savagely, clawing his face to the bone with her fingernails. He stumbled away, blinded by blood. Forever afterward he wore a beard, to hide the scars.
When it began to rain, the girl looked up, slaver coating her chin. She limped to the village meetinghouse to take shelter. The villagers watched from their windows; her father crept out and barred the door behind her.
The villagers met in the street, rain soaking their clothes, to decide what to do. Many had seen girls possessed by dybbuks before, but they were divided as to the identity of this invader. The future husband was quick to suggest forest spirits; he feared they were revenging themselves on him for killing so many trees.
Other villagers thought the dybbuk was the spirit of a girl who had died ten years earlier, three days before her own wedding day. Such spirits were jealous of living girls who would soon know the pleasures of marriage. These spirits were childish and petty, more lonely than malicious. They could be coaxed out of their victim’s bodies with gifts, white dresses, music, cake.
Some said the girl had been strange from the start, there was no helping her.
The villagers listened as the hoarse, choking voice rose up inside the meetinghouse. They heard pounding, crashes; they saw a tortured silhouette flashing past the windows.
They knew they would have to act quickly, or the girl would be lost to the human world forever. But they could not agree on the method: some said fire, some said prayer, some suggested a drink of lye, others wanted to sweep out her insides as one might a clogged chimney. As the rain poured down the villagers armed themselves with hoes and paring knives and prayer books. They straightened their shoulders, prepared for battle.
As they approached the door, they heard again the hoarse guttural voice, raised in anger. It bawled and faded, gibbering, arguing with itself; it rose into hysteria, and exploded. The windows glowed orange, the rain falling on the roof hissed and boiled. A section of the roof blew apart, showering shingles and sparks. A dark and howling shadow swirled up into the sky and disappeared.
Inside, the room was filled with smoke and the smell of goat. The villagers found the girl crouched on the floor, her clothes charred and her face sooty. But she stretched her arms out to them, gave them a familiar smile.
She had forced the dybbuk out of her body herself.
She had drawn in her sides and forced him out with one violent breath, as she had seen the blacksmith force air from his bellows. She had rolled and kneaded him out, as she had seen the baker knead the air bubbles out of his dough. She had plucked him from her body, as she had seen her future husband pull free his blade from a stubborn block of wood.
All the things she knew she used, to return to herself.
Everyone could see the dybbuk was gone. The proof was in the small bloody spot, the size of a pinprick, on the smallest toe of her right foot.
But afterward she was not the same.
She had lost her lightness. Her body now clung to the earth like anyone else’s. She felt a new strength, but also the kind of tiredness she had never known before: the longing to lie down and stay there, as close to the earth as possible, the desire to close her eyes and sink down, down, down.
Before she had known only lightness. And then she had known the claustrophobia, the smothering feeling of the alien spirit cramming itself into her body. And with the trespasser gone, she came to know earthly heaviness, the ties that anchored her to people and places and things that needed to be done.
She felt the heaviness when she looked at her parents’ weary faces, and when she looked into the face of her future husband and saw the scars her own fingernails had left, and a lingering fear that never went away.
She could still recall the lightness. But it required some effort.
Some villagers said that for years afterward she bore traces of the dark spirit that had inhabited her. She saw things no one else could see.
On her wedding night, her new husband drove himself into her, just as he drove his ax into logs; and her thighs fell open, like the cleft wood that fell apart from his ax in two clean white halves; and she felt a heaviness that had nothing to do with her husband’s weight on her belly. It was a new kind of happiness, a contentment, filling her like bricks, anchoring her, laying its foundations and rising up like a fortress to the sky.
And when she became pregnant she felt more secure than ever before, as if the baby anchored her.
People used to say that girl was my mother.
That was what the three old women told me.
It was only a story they liked to tell.
I rode back to my village for the second time, or to the place it had been. Perhaps it would still be there, perhaps I had led the officer to the wrong spot. Perhaps the earlier visit had been a bad dream.
I reached the place that I recognized from the shape of the hills and the narrow frozen river. The village was gone, there was only a burnt scar in the snow. Peaceful now; smoke no longer rose from the ruins.
For a long time I sifted the ashes through my fingers. I wanted to find evidence, a bowl, a pipe, a needle, a ring. Any proof that would show that people had been here.
But I found nothing. The place was picked clean, as if vultures and maggots had swept through and done their work and left.
Not a bone, not a shoelace. Only charred bricks and ashes.
As if no one had ever been there.
I spent the night there, picking up stones from the riverbank, and because there were no graves to place them on I laid them where houses had once stood.
I thought I heard the voices of the three women who had been a more permanent part of the village than the houses, I thought I heard their hisses on the wind and their keening, mourning the dead.
My hands were frozen, the fingernails a lovely blue.
Soon, I thought, the forest will stretch out its arms and spread over this place and it will be as if this clearing had never been here.
However far I had traveled, I always found myself in a forest, and in a disturbing way it seemed to be the same forest, as if I had not gotten anywhere but had only been walking in circles. That forest trailed me, fastened to my heels like my own shadow.
I tried to recall how the village had once looked, but already my memory had faded. I looked around that empty place and I began to wonder if it had ever really been there at all. Perhaps the village had only existed in my head, the way the miniature city existed inside my treasured egg.
Could a thing exist without witnesses? Without proof?
It occurred to me that there was not much difference between a real thing that existed in memory, and something that was born in the mind from the start.
The sky was now the pale expectant color that preceded sunrise. Where was the horse? I looked around and heard it scream.
I saw it in the distance, rearing and frothing. Three skinny scarecrow figures sat jammed together on the saddle. They raised their arms and shrieked, in terror or delight, as the horse reared again, panicking. Three sets of bony heels stuck out from the sides of the animal, kicked against it impatiently. It began to run, and the women clutched each other with their tattered shawls and long unbound skeins of hair streaming out behind them. I thought I could almost see their cries trailing in the cold air like ragged banners.
I thought I could even see the red of their mouths, but it must have been the first red light of the rising sun.
I knew I would not catch up to them. Yet I walked after the shrinking shape, black against the sun. They veered, and now they were driving directly toward it as if the sun were a tunnel they could enter.
I came to the top of a rise of earth and looked down, and there in a hollow on the other side of the hill I found all the proof I could have wanted.
They were stacked in a mound, piled high as a haystack, all of them, and frozen in a way that was familiar. Some were in pieces, most were not; all had the whitest skin. They were cold and hard as statues, fuzzed with frost, saliva frozen in the corners of their mouths. The blood on them was beaded red and smeared purple and crusted, clotted black.
I saw the mass of backflung heads, angled this way and that as if in conversation, and the feet laid together, some shod, some bare.
I could not have moved any of the bodies even if I had wanted to, they were all frozen together in one solid mass.
How can I explain how peaceful they looked, their eyes unblinking, perfectly silent as the sun rose and the soft light touched their faces.
Too silent.
My mother, my father. Lying side by side.
I don’t want to hear a sound out of you, I ordered them. Not a peep.
No one stirred.
Don’t move, don’t even breathe, I told them. Play dead.
I crouched near them and said: They’ll never find you now. They’re stupid that way. As long as you all stay quiet like this, they’ll never find you.
They obliged.
You’re safe here, I said, as long as you stay here and don’t ever move and don’t ever breathe, you’ll always be safe, do you understand?
They did.
I turned my back then and started walking and did not look back. I had the proof I needed, there was no more reason to stay. Solid proof that you can touch, that you can see—that’s all the proof you need to believe in something. Sometimes it is too much.
I came to a town ten times larger than the village where I grew up. The streets were paved with stones and lit by lamps at night. The people spoke differently here. I saw women with stuffed birds and fruit on their hats, and children dressed in white like angels.
I found work here with a woman who lived in a house on a cliff high above the town.
She was very tall, with red hair in crinkly waves and a white immobile face like a mask. Her eyebrows were arched so high they must have been painted on; there was a beauty mark, like brown velvet, absolutely round, perfectly centered on one cheek.
She said she liked me because I did not talk much.
When I first came to her she showed me around the vast drafty house.
Come meet my husbands, she said and led me down a long gallery.
Aren’t they beautiful? she said with a wave of her hand. All of them dead so young. Sad, isn’t it?
A row of framed portraits hung on the wall; I counted seven. Heads and shoulders, nearly life-size. They all had puffed-out chests and a kind of barnyard cockiness, in spite of their elaborate clothes and carefully manicured hair and beards. They all had eyes that met yours, that seemed to follow you as you moved.
I never wanted to marry so often, she was saying, but what could I do? They kept dying. Unlucky in love, I am.
I spent my days lighting candles, cutting the pages of books. I mended her shoes, dozens and dozens of them, high heeled and jewel toed, and I went to the roof to feed the pigeons, but most of my work revolved around hers, for she was a painter. Her hands were always smeared with colors; the portraits of her husbands she had painted herself.
She taught me to mix her paints and clean the brushes and to cut wood into frames, though she stretched the canvas on them herself.
She sometimes spent hours looking at a stone or a piece of cloth with the sun shining on it.
I learned that she was a well-respected artist, much in demand to paint portraits of the aristocracy. She traveled to far places for commissions.
I liked to watch her work, the way she could give a picture such depth that the canvas seemed merely a portal to a deep and distant world. Yet I didn’t trust it, it was all trickery, wasn’t it? It fooled the eyes. And the paintings were lies, they showed you a moment that was gone. Those husbands, who looked so hearty and red cheeked in their portraits, were all dead. It seemed a cruel deception.
Of course I did not say so.
One day she told me she wanted to paint me.
Just for practice, she said, just to keep my hand in tune.
No, I said. I pointed to a blank canvas and said: I don’t want to be caught there.
Are you afraid I’ll capture your soul? she laughed. Is that another one of your superstitions? When are you people going to come out of the dark?
She said: I’ll give you a dress, you can pretend to be someone else, you won’t even recognize yourself when it’s finished.
So I agreed, and she brought out a dress and for a moment I was thrilled. I pictured myself all sweeping skirts and dancing grace and icy grandeur. Like her.
She held it against me and I saw that it was all a sham, it was not a dress, only the front of a dress, to be draped conveniently across any posing sitter. It was unlined, unfinished inside, embroidery unraveling, threads dangling. She made me sit on a small gilt chair, and turned my face, and pinned up my hair with ornaments that even to my untrained eye looked false, with the greasy iridescence of oil on water.
But she was satisfied, she went to her easel and ordered me not to move and to fix my eyes on the distant doorway.
She was many days at it and when she was finished she showed it to me. I took one long look and did not look again.
I can see from your face that I’ve done well, she laughed. You look exactly like the portrait right now.
Looking at the portrait was not like looking in a mirror, for a mirror was only surface. The portrait showed me from the inside: she had captured the tension in my jaw from clenching my teeth, and that shameful pink drool—the birthmark at the corner of my mouth, and the hairs of my eyebrows all in disarray, and the eyes. The eyes were both fearful and calculating, the eyes of an animal deciding whether to flee or attack.
I had not known I looked like that.
My face made the fine clothes look all the more ridiculous.
Soon after she told me she had been commissioned to paint a countess. She asked me to look after her house while she was gone.
Don’t think I’m getting fond of you, she said. We understand each other, that’s all.
She looked at me shrewdly, then sent me down to the stables to summon a coachman I had not known existed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as I entered the stalls I thought I saw the coachman with his head in the manger, licking up oats alongside the horses.
Back in the studio I packed up her brushes. I heard her step and turned. She stood in the doorway in trousers and boots and a greatcoat that fell to her knees. Her face, which had always seemed painted on, now looked to be sketched in with rougher charcoal strokes. How broad her shoulders looked. Perhaps the coat was padded. She had a mustache and beard painted on.
Don’t look so disturbed, she said. I get many more commissions this way.
She took the box from me and left. I heard her boots echoing a long time. I watched from the window as the carriage rolled down the long winding road to the town, and then beyond.
I wondered which of her clothes were the charade.
The house was even larger than I’d thought. There were many locked doors.
I went down to the town, to the marketplace. I heard people gossiping about her: her wealth, her isolation, the husbands who went with her to the dark house on the hill and never returned. She loves them to death, wears them out, they said, her body is unnatural. Bluebeard, the men called her, and made obscene gestures.
The men never come out alive, people said.
She eats them up, they said.
Cuts off their things and eats them with a vodka cream sauce.
They pointed to the house, whispered as if she would overhear them.
I kept the fires burning to keep the chill out.
She was gone many weeks and returned with a new husband.
He was young and fresh and gallant, with pale hair like flax and gaudy clothes. He held himself proudly, though he was slightly shorter than her. He rubbed his hands together and looked about at rugs and lamps and the rooms so long you could not see the end of them, and there was a bit of greed in him, you could see it in his mouth.
She was dressed in her long clinging gowns again, her hair loose, her face perfect. He put his arm around her waist, caressed her neck. Over his head she gave me her shrewd look.
That night they were loud and vigorous in her bedroom.
The next day when I was alone with her in her studio I asked how she had found him, when she’d been dressed as a man.
She said: Some men like an adventurous woman. Besides, she said, nodding toward the bedroom, he is a third son and will inherit nothing.
She painted his portrait but kept it in her studio.
In a short time she announced she had been offered another commission. She could not take her husband with her. I have to preserve my reputation, she told him.
She handed him a ring of keys and told him he could enter any room in the house but one.
I trust you completely, she told him. Please honor my request.
He nodded but he was not paying attention; he had his hands on her breasts.
Then she left and we were alone in the house, he and I. We seldom spoke and he spent his days riding a black horse through the fields, hacking at the bushes with his sword and shouting like a child.
There was a night when he fell asleep in a chair in the library, a book open across his lap, and I slipped the keys from his jacket pocket.
She had never forbidden me from entering the room.
I found it, high in one of the towers at the top of a spiraling staircase. I had only a candle, it threw my shadow wild-haired on the walls. I fit the key to the lock; the door swung open. I stepped inside, cringing, expecting to spring some hideous trap but too curious to stop. All was silent, the room was empty save a bed, and on the bed lay a woman. It was a young woman, pale and beautiful and stretched out on her back, arms extended as if awaiting an embrace.
I thought suddenly of Baba’s house, and wondered if all unusual women kept young girls hidden away in secret rooms. As if they were trying to cling to a younger version of themselves.
I breathed on the woman’s face, I touched her arm. She was cool, didn’t move. I jostled her. She was not real at all; she was made of soft wax or clay and her skin, I saw now, had a hard waxy sheen. I could see that her mouth led nowhere, there was nothing beneath her eyelids. I punched her stomach, my fist drove right through her.
From a distance, though, she had been convincing. Lifelike. A work of art.
I pulled the sheets away to see more. I saw a flash of steel and quickly jumped away. There, set between the legs, were jagged metal jaws, like a monstrous bear trap.
I snatched my candle, raced away from the strange thing. Locked the door, crept down the stairs.
I considered keeping the keys, to avoid any possible accidents.
But when the husband cornered me the next day, asked me if I’d seen the keys, accused me of stealing them in his loud pompous voice, I handed them over.
There was no need to worry, I reasoned. If he kept his promise to my painter, and stayed away from the room, then there was nothing to fear. And even if he did break her trust, and make his way to the secret room, I was sure he would not be so foolish to mistake a waxen girl for a real one.
And even if he did, I thought, he would not be so unfaithful to his wife as to do the thing that men seemed always intent on doing.
This was my reasoning. I did not think he would come to any harm.
Although it was true I did not like the gleam of ownership in his eye, or the way he shouted and spit in my face and called me a country cow.
I did not think he would do anything foolish, but the very next night I was awakened by a metallic snap, followed by the most unbearable screams I had ever heard. I ran to the tower room, pounded on the door but it had locked behind him. I could hear him gasping, I shouted to him to throw the keys underneath the door, but there was no room for them to slip through even if he had.
This is unpleasant to hear, I know. It sounds like the kind of story people tell children to frighten them into good behavior.
But that’s not why I am telling it to you.
I am telling you because it is what happened. It is the truth. No other reason.
Dawn broke and pink light seeped into the studio where I stood, and then I heard a horse’s footsteps far away but coming closer. It was the painter, returning as if she had known all that had happened.
She strode in, still in her man’s clothes, looking windswept and happy. She gave me a list of errands as long as her arm and sent me to town. She had forgotten that I did not know how to read, but I knew enough to stay away from the house until nightfall.
When I returned all was quiet. She greeted me serenely, and in answer to my look she said: He failed the test, you see. It’s a pity, it’s impossible to find a man who can remain faithful these days.
She touched my shoulder with a hand that was sticky, smeared as usual. You should not feel responsible, she said. It was his own fault, he should not have gone poking into forbidden places.
He broke my trust, she said, and then she hung his portrait on the wall beside the others. I could not look at it.
I stayed with her a while longer. I loved to watch her paint but could not look her in the face. She went away again and returned with her ninth husband. When I saw him I knew I would have to leave because he was a soft mild man who walked with a limp. He looked at her with worshipful eyes and touched her gently and he helped me light the lamps in the evenings. I could not bear the thought of him ending up with his head hung on the wall with all the others.
So when she announced she was leaving, and handed him the key ring, I stole the keys from his pocket while he slept and went to the tower room and set off the trap with my candle and then I locked the door and threw the keys down a well for good measure.
Then I left. I did not want to be there when she returned to find only a candle snapped in half, instead of the disappointment she anticipated. She would know I was responsible and I could not guess what she would do.
I knew the new husband was not completely safe; I knew she could easily give him another set of keys and again disappear and let him succumb to curiosity and temptation. But I hoped he would not. Perhaps he would pass her grisly test and win her trust and they would live happily together and he would teach her gentleness and they would fill that great house with children and leave that waxen doll to rot in her tower.
So I left.
I did not like the thought of the portrait she had done of me, I had wanted to destroy it, but she had hidden it away somewhere. I did not like to think of her keeping my face.
But she had paid me well for my time with her and the money jangled inside my dress. I had heard people talking of a place, far away and across an ocean, where people stayed young forever and there was room to breathe and everything was hopeful and new and run by machines. They said the streets were paved with gold. I wanted to go there.
The streets of gold, I knew that was just a story. But the rest rang true.
I passed through villages and larger towns and as I traveled farther from home I noticed changes. The lengths of men’s beards. The sound of their voices. More iron and steel, coal instead of wood, engines and machines that moved and steamed of their own accord as if they were alive.
These things amazed me, but as I traveled farther and wonders piled on wonders, I began to anticipate them and ceased to be amazed. I think if I had seen men walking up the sides of buildings like spiders or flying through the air with dragonfly wings I would not have been surprised.
When I walked through these towns I heard people speak of a Great War and when I asked where this war was they laughed and called me a yokel. They asked where I had been hiding all this time, and stared at my hair which had never been cut and now fell past my knees, and they laughed at my wooden-soled shoes. I ran away but heard them shouting after me: The war’s over, little fool, and there will never be another.
I kept going, for this was not the place I was looking for. These people, for all their fine clothes, were as violent as all the others. Their faces were greasy and lewd. I saw a man beating a yellow horse that would not move because the cart behind it was too heavy, piled to the sky with cast-off furniture. The man beat and beat it, cursing til he ran out of breath and still the horse would not move. He beat until the horse sank to its knees, pink foam running from its nose, and only then did he stop to wipe his brow. And then the top-heavy cart tipped and a clattering shower of broken chairs and legless tables rained down upon him and buried him utterly and no one passing by on their daily business paused to help him. Or the horse.
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