If I Told You Once

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.