If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ