If I Told You Once

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.