If I Told You Once

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.