If I Told You Once: A Novel (10 page)

So when she announced she was leaving, and handed him the key ring, I stole the keys from his pocket while he slept and went to the tower room and set off the trap with my candle and then I locked the door and threw the keys down a well for good measure.

Then I left. I did not want to be there when she returned to find only a candle snapped in half, instead of the disappointment she anticipated. She would know I was responsible and I could not guess what she would do.

I knew the new husband was not completely safe; I knew she could easily give him another set of keys and again disappear and let him succumb to curiosity and temptation. But I hoped he would not. Perhaps he would pass her grisly test and win her trust and they would live happily together and he would teach her gentleness and they would fill that great house with children and leave that waxen doll to rot in her tower.

So I left.

I did not like the thought of the portrait she had done of me, I had wanted to destroy it, but she had hidden it away somewhere. I did not like to think of her keeping my face.

But she had paid me well for my time with her and the money jangled inside my dress. I had heard people talking of a place, far away and across an ocean, where people stayed young forever and there was room to breathe and everything was hopeful and new and run by machines. They said the streets were paved with gold. I wanted to go there.

The streets of gold, I knew that was just a story. But the rest rang true.

*   *   *

I passed through villages and larger towns and as I traveled farther from home I noticed changes. The lengths of men’s beards. The sound of their voices. More iron and steel, coal instead of wood, engines and machines that moved and steamed of their own accord as if they were alive.

These things amazed me, but as I traveled farther and wonders piled on wonders, I began to anticipate them and ceased to be amazed. I think if I had seen men walking up the sides of buildings like spiders or flying through the air with dragonfly wings I would not have been surprised.

When I walked through these towns I heard people speak of a Great War and when I asked where this war was they laughed and called me a yokel. They asked where I had been hiding all this time, and stared at my hair which had never been cut and now fell past my knees, and they laughed at my wooden-soled shoes. I ran away but heard them shouting after me: The war’s over, little fool, and there will never be another.

I kept going, for this was not the place I was looking for. These people, for all their fine clothes, were as violent as all the others. Their faces were greasy and lewd. I saw a man beating a yellow horse that would not move because the cart behind it was too heavy, piled to the sky with cast-off furniture. The man beat and beat it, cursing til he ran out of breath and still the horse would not move. He beat until the horse sank to its knees, pink foam running from its nose, and only then did he stop to wipe his brow. And then the top-heavy cart tipped and a clattering shower of broken chairs and legless tables rained down upon him and buried him utterly and no one passing by on their daily business paused to help him. Or the horse.

The towns were full of glittering surfaces and engines of convenience, but in the surrounding fields nothing had changed. On the country roads I passed women bent like harps, with burdens on their backs twice as large as themselves and babies strapped to their breasts. And at night I saw harpies circling in the sky just as they had over my village. Harpies had the bodies of hawks and the heads of women, and sometimes they borrowed the faces of the dead to frighten passersby. Once I thought I saw one wearing my mother’s face like a mask, and I quickly looked away.

*   *   *

By now my hair reached my heels and was tangled with twigs and colored thread. Sometime earlier I had spent the night in a stable among the horses, and in the morning I found that some local boys had tied bells in my hair while I slept. Tiny bells the size of thimbles that jangled faintly when I shook my head. I found many of the bells and pulled them from my hair, but there were some I could never find though I searched through my hair strand by strand. So I made music now when I walked, though it was a cheap tinkling sort, and people thought I was a gypsy.

I came to a new town one evening. The people on the streets took no notice of me as they went hurrying past, their faces bright and expectant. Children darted among their elders; women carried babies cradled in their arms or slung over their shoulders, or balanced on their hips. They were all streaming in the same direction, so I followed.

They were heading toward the large meetinghouse in the center of the town, and I realized they were going to pray together.

There were three old women collecting money at the entrance. I thought they were beggars and gave each a coin before I went in and sat with the others. Rows of benches filled the room, it became closely packed, the air warm as breath, and noisy as the people jabbered to one another and babies cried. I had never been to a prayer service like this, where men and women sat together.

The room grew dim, and the flow of voices ceased as all the people looked to the brightly lit platform at the front of the room. In the hush a man leaped on to the platform, followed by another, and they began speaking in loud strident voices.

More people joined them on the platform, men and women too, and they all seemed excited and wrought up about one thing or another, and they clasped their hands and wept. I was shocked, for they were speaking of very private personal matters, but doing so in such loud voices that everyone in the room could hear. And the people sitting around me, instead of politely turning aside and pretending not to notice, were watching intently and drinking in every word. I felt I was eavesdropping; it seemed wrong.

The people on the platform ignored us even when we laughed or gasped; they were too intent on their own troubles. They seemed detached from us, in their own brightly lit little world, and yet at the same time they seemed more real, more intensely alive than anyone I had ever seen. Their faces betrayed every thought, their bodies were eloquent with suffering.

I wondered when the praying would start.

There was one man in particular who held my attention. He paced the platform, clutching at his hair, he seemed tormented by inner demons. I gathered that he was grieving for his dead father. His suffering made sense to me. After a particularly long rant, with much arm waving and foot stamping, he paused and his eyes swept the room. I could have sworn he looked at me for a moment. His eyes were the most unnatural blue.

Much later I discovered there were tears on my face. Around me babies squalled and sucked loudly at their mothers’ breasts, men lit their pipes, restless children crawled between the benches and butted against people’s knees, but all I saw was the brightly lit platform and the young man’s exquisite agony and I wanted so badly to comfort him that I could barely sit still.

Something holy was happening here.

Time must have passed; the faces around me were slick with sweat, the air was hazy with smoke, babies lay sleeping, their faces slack. But the action on the platform continued, seemed to be building to its breaking point. I could not understand all they were saying, but I felt the tension increasing like threads being gathered up and drawn tight. The platform was crowded now, voices raised shrilly, and then there was an expectant hush, and I saw the flash of long knives.

It was some kind of ceremonial killing, I realized. A sacrifice.

The man with the blue eyes, my poor man who had already suffered so much, now had sweat running down his temples and his eyes rolled upward, the veins leaped out of his throat; he knew he was going to die, I saw, it was inevitable, he was giving himself up to the ritual.

Those seated around me leaned forward eagerly.

What grisly ritual was this?

There was a great flurry of action then, a confusion of cries and limbs and blows, the knives dove like hawks and I saw my man fall and suddenly great gouts of blood spurted everywhere. Help him, someone. I leaped out of my seat, I went flailing toward him, he was lying on the boards covered in blood, but all around me hands snatched at me and pushed me back down.

I can’t see, muttered voices behind me.

We missed the best part, they said.

Surely, I thought, these were the most barbaric people I had ever known.

And then I was even more horrified for they rose from their seats, clapping and shouting their approval. Even the children had the bloodlust; the boys were whistling, standing on benches to see better.

I was surrounded by madmen.

Feeling ill, I stood on my toes so I could see the platform over the sea of shoulders and shawl-bound heads. And I gasped for I saw the man with the brilliant eyes rise up, his clothes all spattered with blood, and he smiled and faced the crowd and bowed his thanks. He had risen from the dead, and yet he smiled as if it were all a game. I stood amazed, but no one else seemed to acknowledge the miracle, it was mine alone.

Then I was frightened. I realized the crowd pushing around me would be disappointed. They had been cheated out of their sacrifice; now they would demand that he be killed again.

But they only roared their approval, and I looked around and saw tears on the faces of some of the women; they had been as engrossed as I, their babies draped forgotten over their arms.

Then the other people on the stage came forward and bowed their heads, and I saw the tension run out of their bodies, they sagged and their faces relaxed and lost their sharpness, and suddenly they looked as ordinary as the people around me.

I had to have it explained to me that they were actors, that it was an entertainment, that it was all fancy words and foil swords and chicken’s blood.

I understood this and felt foolish, but a part of me refused to understand, a part of me clung to the sight of him opening his eyes, rising to his knees and standing and mocking death with a smile and I knew it had been something miraculous.

People poured out the doors and into the night. The sky had cleared and the stars were sharp and piercing and seemed close enough to touch. Women walked homeward pressed closer to their husbands than before; small boys made swordplay with sticks.

I paced in circles that night, wearing a path deep in the snow, and in the morning I watched the actors packing up their wagons. They were a traveling theater company, and were on their way to the next town.

I happened to see the young man, black hair falling over his forehead as he washed the blood from his clothes. He looked smaller than he had seemed on stage, but the color of his eyes had not changed. He hung the clothes from the back of one of the wagons to dry, then rubbed his hands together, flexed his fingers. He opened a black case and drew out an instrument; I later learned it was a violin.

He tucked it beneath his chin and began to play. The other actors shouted and whistled at him; and three women, they were the three beggar-women who had collected money at the doors the night before, they began to snap their fingers, and they straightened up against the humps in their spines and lifted their skirts high above their bony knees and laughing wildly they began to whirl and dance.

Then all was ready, wagons piled high and horses puffing in the cold. The actors climbed in and they set out, passing a bottle of liquor around and talking loudly. The young man jumped up onto the back of the last wagon without ceasing his playing for a moment.

The music trailed after them a long time.

And after the music faded, the wagon tracks were clear in the snow to show where they had been.

I followed after.

Only because they were heading in the same direction as me.

No other reason.

I walked as quickly as I could. Only because of the cold.

When they stopped in the next town I did too, and that night I sat in a crowded hot room that reeked of wet wool and watched their performance. I thought the luster would be gone now that I knew it was all artifice. But instead it was better than before. The young man raved and tore at his hair and I could not take my eyes off him. He was familiar, he touched something deep in me. This time I followed the story more closely, I saw how he was alone and suspicious in a world that conspired against him, how he argued with the queen his mother and cast longing looks at a lady with a thick curtain of golden hair and fluttering hands. I felt a guilty satisfaction when she died.

And at the end, when the stage erupted in noise and confusion and he fell amid flashing swords in a most graceful death, I gasped in shock though I had been expecting it all along. For agonizing moments he lay there, unmoving, and I thought this time, surely, he will not get up. He will not get up. I tried to accustom myself to the thought. It was unbearable.

But he did rise, and smile, and it was more miraculous than before.

I clapped and clapped, but it was not enough.

Afterward I walked outside and looked at the stars. My cheeks were wet again and I could not understand why I felt so happy and so sad at the same time.

People passed me on the way to their houses, eyes thoughtful and faces slack.

Women balanced babies on their hips in that universal posture. I had seen it a thousand times, but tonight it seemed noble and beautiful.

Little boys, jousting with sticks. Some things were the same everywhere.

I felt a touch on my arm.

You must have liked it very much to see it twice, he said.

Yes, I said.

Here he was. I could not stop looking at him, it was almost unbearable to have him so close, like staring at a very bright light. The blue eyes were calm, quizzical; he worked his eyebrows up and down until I laughed. He looked so young to me, I was accustomed to seeing men with beards. I looked at his jaw, the cords standing out on his neck.

His black hair hung long in his face and around his ears, his features were sharp and pale from the cold. His clothes were still gaudy with blood from the performance.