If I Told You Once: A Novel (2 page)

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.