If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

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 place and it will be as if this clearing 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