Free If I Told You Once: A Novel by Judy Budnitz Page B

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