If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ