If I Told You Once: A Novel
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Contents
Critical Praise for
If I Told You Once
For my grandparents, Samuel and Phyllis Robbins and Max and Rose Budnitz
Ilana
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.
