Kissing the Witch (7 page)

I heard the puffs of breath as she began to climb. When she got to the top and looked in at the empty room, there was a wail like an animal in a trap, and then a sound like a hollow tree falling
in the first storm of winter.

After several minutes had passed I edged forward. It was my left foot that found her. I felt my way along her body to her face; her eyes were shut, wet with what I thought was tears until I
tasted it. I picked the thorns from her lids, as delicately as I could. Her hand came up and felt my head, the short damp hair. Can you see? I asked.

She whispered, What does it matter? The hedges may swell, the lavender may bloom, but it will all be wasteland when you’re gone.

I took her head on my chest and wept over her, salt in her wounded eyes. It was the only way I knew to clean them. I didn’t know whether they would heal, or whether she would have to learn
the world from me now. We lay there, waiting to see what we would see.

There in the dark grass I asked,

Who were you

before you bought me for a handful of radishes?

And she said, Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of a brother.

I
HAVE NEVER
been content to be nothing but a girl. And so I cannot tell you my story without that of my brother.

We were born on the same day; we shared our first breath. We grew up poor as tallow in a city you’ve never seen. The old people said if you stayed out all night you’d be found dead
of cold in the morning. Like the other children in the orphanage, we had no people of our own; we were all we had.

My brother was not like other brothers. He showed me birds and beasts in the picture books and told me their names. He gave me his second-best ice pick and showed me how to fish through a hole.
Sometimes he stayed out so late he had to throw pebbles with his blue fingers till I woke and opened the window for him to climb in.

I loved my brother, but sometimes I used to dream that when I woke up he would have been taken away without a trace. On that imagined morning, when I looked into the splinter of mirror over the
hearth I would see his face in place of mine. Snow would be impatient outside the window like a dancer flinging off her veils. The old people would call me by my brother’s name, let me tie
his skates on, and send me out to the river with all the other boys. On that day, nothing and no one would stop me from skimming through the swarm of snow bees.

The day my brother was indeed taken away, I knew it was my fault for dreaming it.

He had already changed by then, or perhaps it was me. I couldn’t be like him any more. The old people kept me indoors now, ever since my chest had started to swell as if stung. My brother
poked me and laughed with a new cold face. He pushed away the picture books and ran out to the square, skates slung over his shoulder.

The reason I know what happened is that I followed him. I waited a while till the old people would have forgotten me, then I slid the latch. Fog came to meet me at the door. First I saw nothing,
then the grey gauze shapes of houses. As I ran down the street the buildings thickened till I could believe in them. A perfect white coin slid from behind the clouds, and I wondered to see the moon
up so early in the day, but then it brightened as if catching fire and I knew it was the sun, masked in fog.

Perhaps if it had been me who was skating through the square, it would have been me the woman took away with her. At first glance, squashed in bear skin, I must have looked like a boy, or near
enough. I was standing at the corner, trying to distinguish my brother in the swirl of skaters, when she drove by with the bells tinkling on her white sleigh. Slush spattered my boots. I was near
enough to see her face, lean, knowledgeable, too cold to need beauty. I was not so far away that I couldn’t glimpse my brother’s tousled head buried in her ermine. I came that close.

I didn’t shout out. I stood like a tree stump, rooted in dirty snow. The sleigh bells faded in the distance.

That night I didn’t sleep. Ice blossomed on the windows till they grew dark.

The next morning my face in the mirror was the same as ever, the face of a girl, square with freckles like a spray of mud. When the old people asked me where my brother was gone, I said, A woman
in white furs took him away.

They slapped me across the mouth and told me not to make up stories. They said every boy comes home when he’s good and hungry.

When they asked me the same question a few days later, I said I didn’t know. They didn’t ask me again after that. I suppose they thought he had drowned in a hole in the river. They
gave me some red shoes, nearly new, but they never spoke his name.

I went down to the river with a net on a stick and caught a little fish. I left it on my brother’s bed, in case he came back, but the new boy who moved into that bed that night had eaten
it by morning. I lay awake after the others were asleep, listening for the faintest pebble, but nothing shook the window except snow and wind. I pulled a feather out of the old pillow and breathed
on it to conjure up a bird that would carry me off, but it only grew damp.

I shut my eyes and was my brother, riding along in the furs at the bottom of the sleigh in a hot sleep, dreaming only of dinner. Snow hissed under the runners, crows screamed overhead, wolves
complained in the nearby trees, but my brother lay curled up like a cat at the woman’s feet.

I woke up cursing, words I didn’t know I knew. Who was she? How dare she? Had she no brother of her own, that she had to steal mine? My face was wet, as if it had started to thaw in the
night.

I put on my new scarlet shoes that my brother had never seen and set off to find him. I looked back three times but no one followed.

That day and the next and the next I searched the city, a street at a time. I saw boys of all sorts, big and small, boys with skates and boys with clogs, boys on errands and boys out for
mischief, boys who lent me their spinning tops and boys who pinched me and boys who didn’t see me, but none of them was my brother. At night I hid in stables beside the steaming straw. An old
woman gave me a fish tail once, and a bread man let me have a stale loaf another day. When snow fell I hunkered under the eaves of an inn, smelling the fire. Afterwards I couldn’t tell the
white streets apart, or whether I had searched them before. I was walking in circles so cold I couldn’t remember my name.

In my dreams the sleigh went faster and faster till it was flying above the trees. It was not fur I was lying in but feathers, the plumage of a swan big enough to fly to the edge of the
world.

While I was asleep a girl tried to steal my shoes. I woke as she was unbuckling the second strap with nimble fingers. I seized her wrists and hit her on the nose like my brother taught me. She
spat blood, red as sunset over the straw-flecked snow. She laughed and laughed.

When I had fastened my shoes on again I let the thief come into the straw beside me. She gave out plenty of heat for her size. Her tales were tall but they warmed my ears. She showed me her
knife and said how she could get any pair of shoes if she wanted. She told me how she’d never known any home but a stable, nor eaten a bite but what her fingers filched from a stall. How when
she was grown she’d have a great house and a gleaming sleigh to carry her back and forth across the city.

I told her about my brother, to stop her boasting, because a brother was better than all these things that could be stolen. And then I remembered how I had lost him. She asked where he was and
hot tears ran down my face on to hers.

In the morning she led me back to the great square. If they were here once they’ll be here again, she said; a thief is always drawn back like a leaf to a drain. She stole a hot pastry and
broke a piece off for me before disappearing down a side street.

All that day I waited, slamming my feet up and down to warm them. Sun was such a dazzle it hurt my eyes; iced puddles winked at me as if they knew my business. I kept my eyes shut until I heard
bells coming, but it was only some boys on a homemade sled. I called out to them to see if they remembered my brother, but they answered with a snowball. It missed. I stood still and kept my eyes
shut till I thought they’d frozen over.

Much later it was dark between the houses. My skates had grown into the ground, my mittens were stuck to my coat. I wouldn’t go back to the stable tonight. I would stay there in the
emptying square until I couldn’t feel anything at all. They would find me in the morning, a new statue for the city. More like a bear cub than an ice maiden, but still, something worth
pointing at.

Sudden as thunder the sleigh came round the corner. Before I saw her pale face I knew it was the one. White fur and bells passing me, and with a lurch I had thrown myself forward and grasped the
end of the sleigh. I was skidding through the streets, slush spraying me to the hips, dragged along like a feather.

It seemed an hour before the sleigh made a sharp turn and I was thrown into a ditch. With stiff arms I wiped the snow from my face. It was clean, tasting of nothing. I had never been into the
country before. I got to my feet and peered after the sleigh. Bells hung fainter on the air. Darkness thickened between tall trees. I was lost.

So as to keep moving as long as I could, I plodded down the road. I could feel nothing below the knees; I was like that beggar girl with wooden legs I saw in the market once. Only when I caught
sight of my fingers, hanging like slaughterhouse rags, did I realize that I had lost my mittens.

Just when the dark seemed to be wrapping me round, and I was thinking of lying down in the snow, a light pricked its way through the trees. I was walking like a drunk by now; sometimes the light
disappeared or I thought I was only imagining it. But at last the path turned a corner, and I with it, and there in front of me was the biggest house I had ever seen. A lantern hung at the door,
shining on the empty sleigh.

What I did next was not like the girl I had been. I climbed the steps, stiff-kneed. When my hands failed to make any sound on the door but a feeble patting, I pulled off my shoes, their red
leather soaked almost black, and swung at the wood with their hard heels. Open up, I bellowed. Open up this minute. I have come for my brother.

When she opened the door I was distracted for a second by her face, whiter than the fur of her collar. But then I remembered, and flung my shoes at her feet. She stepped back. Take my red shoes,
I shouted, but give me back my brother.

There he was in the hall, peering round her skirt. His mouth was full of cake; his grin caught the light.

Why him? I howled like a baby. Why him and not me?

Her smile was gentler than I could ever have expected. She opened her arms as wide as they would go and said, Come in, come in.

After I had eaten my fill I asked,

Who were you

before you stole my brother?

And she said, Will I tell you my own story?

It is a tale of a spinster.

Y
OUR FACE
is no fortune, so elbowgrease must be your dowry. That’s what my mother always said to me. It was her best joke, one
she liked to repeat to passers-by.

Once she caught me asleep when I should have been carding wool, and she pricked my shame all over my face with the comb. I never idled again. What I needed ever after I worked for, or borrowed
at interest, or did without. I am as rich now as I was once poor, and half as rich as I am lonely. If I have turned to theft at last, it is because I was once robbed of the best thing I had, and
the worst of it all is that I deserved to lose it.

It all began with a boast. My mother’s mouth was too big for her stomach; she could talk up a storm at the first drop of rain. My daughter can spin anything, she would bawl out of the
window at hesitant customers; wool, cotton, hemp, flax, nothing is beyond her. Come this way to the widow’s daughter, the best spinster in this city or any.