Judy Budnitz - If I Told You Once

Do you like it? I whispered.

She said scornfully: Men are like cattle, easily led.

I fingered her hair. She let me. I wondered if Baba did the same thing.

When you leave Baba, will you take me with you? she said suddenly. I’ll go mad if I stay here much longer.

Her eyes traveled over my face. I felt myself flushing. I was conscious as never before of the sallowness of my skin, the narrowness of my face, the pink birthmark at the corner of my lips like a dribble of wine.

She said her name was Anya.

During the following days I visited her room often.

How I hated her whining voice.

But her body was a white smooth thing that I wanted to swallow whole. Even the blunt stubs of her legs were beautiful to me, there was something so naked and helpless about them. I split wood into smaller and smaller pieces and let the sweat run down my face to burn my eyes.

Baba watched us both and smiled.

The men continued their secret visits. As the winter dragged on they came more and more often, red eyed, distracted; they could not really see me, or Baba. They saw only the milky smooth skin, the red-gold hair that grew over the floor and climbed the walls like ivy. They looked and wiped their mouths.

Anya said scornful things to them, yet she seemed to luxuriate beneath their gazes like a cat being stroked. She kept her legs discreetly covered.

The men began coming every night. There were more than two dozen of them now. They shuffled into Anya’s room in shifts for their precious minutes. They began to come earlier in the night, some even came at dusk and lurked among the trees waiting for Baba to admit them. These men were burly with bushy beards like my father. But there was a desperation about them that made them slack mouthed and helpless. They seemed not to understand it themselves; I saw them shaking their heads over nothing, clucking their tongues.

Now when I went down to the village I heard muttering among the women. They had noticed the change in their husbands. They knew their men were visiting Baba’s house late at night, but none of them knew about the footless girl hidden there. Some women suspected Baba was offering herself to the men. That old hag? Impossible. How could they? the women asked each other. No man would touch her, they reassured themselves. But there were a few who said: She has bewitched them all.

Night after night they came.

On a night when the men were more frantic than ever, one of them refused to leave Anya’s room when his allotted time was up. Baba spoke sharply; he ignored her. She tugged his arm, but he brushed her away and swiftly knelt by the bedside, reaching out to touch Anya’s face as she recoiled in disgust.

Baba cried out angrily; the other men reluctantly dragged their friend from the room. Baba herded the men onto the doorstep, told them never to return, and turned the lock after them.

She watched from the window as they wandered back to the village, hanging their heads, sullen in the moonlight. Go to sleep, she told me. She went into Anya’s room and locked the door behind her. I lay awake thinking of her brown spotted hands touching Anya’s white ones.

The days that followed were queer silent ones.

One evening I heard the wail of a rising wind. The trees moaned and scraped against each other. A storm was brewing. I heard footsteps, glimpsed a dark figure darting among the trunks. I whirled about.

A branch snapped and I saw one of the village men approaching, his eyes cold and thoughtless. I ran to the house and he lurched behind me. Men were emerging from the wood on all sides, swaying and staggering up to the doorstep.

I slipped into the house from behind and barred the back door. I saw Baba standing in the front doorway, facing the men gathered there. Their bodies were dark and indistinct, their eyes glowing, like wandering spirits. They were demanding entrance, bellowing and snorting.

I saw Baba refusing, saw her hands brushing them away. The men’s faces fell. Like spiteful schoolboys they kicked each other, spat, began hurling small stones that flew past Baba and tocked on the floor.

Then a stone the size of a fist struck her on the temple and she fell back. I caught her under the arms and pulled her into the house. Her heavy head lay against my shoulder. The men looked shocked, suddenly ashamed, and they backed away, melting into the trees. I barred the door behind them.

I dragged Baba to the bed. There was no blood, but her breathing was shallow and a greenish bruise was rapidly forming over her temple.

In a matter of hours the bruise had deepened and spread over her entire face, as if her head were a rotten melon. In the dark hour before dawn her breathing stopped.

I wiped her mouth, pressed her lids shut. I held her head, touched the dense loaf of hair. I realized with a shock that it was not a mass of braids, or a knotted bun. Her gray hair was only the outer covering of a hard bony knob—an outgrowth of the skull itself. It was some sort of malignancy, some evil tumor, and most likely the blow had broken some membrane, freed the evil juices to seep through her head. Already her face was unrecognizable.

I watched the body settle and shrink, the skin drawing more tightly over the bones. Her body became a dry, light, tidy thing, almost childlike. She looked quite peaceful. Except for the violently discolored face.

I took the key from her pocket and went to Anya’s room. I told her Baba was gone and we made plans to leave.

But the men were back, circling the house like wild dogs.

Night fell. We heard them, they were running, circling, howling at the moon. We saw their eyes glowing green as they raised their heads, flaring their nostrils, scenting the wind.

They can smell you, I told Anya.

Don’t let them in, she said.

They circled, scratching at the walls, pounding at the door, wailing and chewing their lips.

Maybe if they could just come in and see you, they’d go home satisfied, I said.

No they wouldn’t, she said.

They waited all through the next day. They pressed their faces against the window, their eyes red and wild, their beards matted and sticky. They licked the glass.

Soon they would begin tearing the walls down.

I thought of my mother, felt my eyes darting and jumping like hers.

I went to Anya and said: I have a plan.

I helped her dress. Then I put my arms around her and tried to lift her from the bed. She was not much taller than me. But her body was impossibly heavy and limp. Her flesh was so soft in my arms, like a down mattress; I thought that if I slit her white skin, she’d spill out feathers. My knees buckled; I saw sparks, and I collapsed on the floor with her warm, flaccid, bedridden body on top of me.

Your hair, I panted.

Her abundant hair accounted for at least part of the weight. It was many meters long, and tangled and twined around the sheets, the bed frame, the oceans of lace that surrounded her like a cocoon.

I tried to free her hair, to gather it up like an armful of wheat. She lay uselessly on the floor as I tried to bind it up. Massy and bright, it slid from my fingers. I tripped over it, it was caught in my teeth.

It has to go, I said.

She screamed in protest as I went looking for scissors. She thrashed on the floor like a beached mermaid. Her hair resisted me; soon the scissors were blunted. The cries of the men outside made me frantic.

It has to be done, I said.

I fetched the ax from the shed and stood above her, her hair pinned beneath my feet; I raised the ax above my head, and as she cursed and her sideways face contorted in anger I let it fall. Again and again I chopped through the lush growth, severing it from its roots.

I caught my breath and smiled. Anya continued to heap her curses on me, even as she ran her fingers through her cropped hair savoring the new weightless freedom of her head and neck.