I like to watch you come back to life, I said.
He smiled.
I could do it again if you like, he said. As many times as you want.
He clutched his heart and collapsed at my feet.
And as he lay there in the snow, spattered with blood, his head tipped back, I saw that he was like the bandit I had met in the woods, years ago, who was perhaps even now lying there buried in the snow with teeth marks on his throat like a ruby necklace.
Hey there, hey now, he said jumping up. Why are you crying now? he said. I’m all right, see?
He took my hands. His were impossibly warm.
I was looking away, trying to shake my hair forward to hide my face. I felt safe in the thicket, it was dark.
He pushed my hair back. The bells tinkled faintly.
He grasped my hands again and held them to his chest. I almost jerked them away in surprise for I could feel his heart thumping so strongly it felt like a bird trapped beneath the cloth of his shirt.
Snow was falling, again. I could see the black forest, beyond the town, creeping subtly closer.
Where are you from? he asked.
I did not know how to answer that.
Have you been in school? he asked.
From the way he asked I thought
school
was the name of a town. I shook my head.
I tried then to tell him the places I had been. It took a long time. Snow clung to his black hair and gave his jacket white epaulettes. It buried our feet. He waited until I was finished.
I think you have been to school, after all, he said finally. It sounds more difficult than the usual kind.
He took my arm then, and we went to the rooms where the actors were sleeping for the night. It was too cold to remove our clothes and I slept with my head tucked beneath his chin, where he had rested his violin. I could feel his heart beating through his shirt.
The next morning I woke with a start and sat up. I looked at the white vulnerable curve of his neck, his hand cupped beside his face. I did not like to see him with his eyes closed, so still. I touched him and felt the slow thud of his heart and was reassured.
He opened his eyes then, saw my hands pressed against his chest, and he reached up and pressed his against mine. He smiled. Then the actors came shouting and pounding the walls: it was time to leave.
We rode in the back of the last wagon, lurching and jerking from side to side, our legs dangling. He cradled the violin against his belly, plucking tiny tunes from it with his fingers. His hands were as callused as mine, but in different places.
His name was Shmuel.
He asked me where I was headed. I told him about the place across the ocean, the golden gates, the wide avenues and long warm days and the machines that swept and polished the streets of gold every day.
His eyebrows jumped. He laughed and said, yes, those are good stories, I love those stories.
They’re not just stories, I said. Are they?
He said nothing.
It is possible to go there, isn’t it?
Oh, yes, he said. I’m going there myself. My sister and I. We are going quite soon, in fact, and we will find work there and set up a home and send for our parents as soon as we can.
My heart leaped up, though I could not say why.
Where are you sailing from? he asked, and then spoke of a port city I had never heard of.
Yes, I’ll leave from there too, I said.
Have you booked a passage yet? he asked curiously.
No.
Do you have money?
Oh yes, I said.
Do you have papers? he said.
Papers?
Identification papers, he said, you can’t go without them.
I’ll get some, I said vaguely.
He opened his mouth, but said no more, and we rocked together with the motion of the wagon, it was like waves on a stormy sea.
Night after night, in town after town, I watched the play. Night after night I waited in dread, gasping and then sighing as he died and came back to life. After each performance it was a relief to see his smile, his crooked teeth, touch his warm skin and feel the blood thrumming through him.
Every night he rubbed his thumbs under my eyes, wiping away tears.
He could not understand it.
He said: How can this frighten you? This show is child’s play compared to all the things you’ve seen.
How could I explain.
We slept in side by side, or back to back as I had with Ari long ago. Until the night when he laid his head on my chest and tentatively slipped his hand under my skirt. Then I laughed so hard his head rode up and down on my breast, because I knew I was wearing such a multitude of clothing, so many layers of skirts and petticoats and underclothes that it was a maze down there and he would never find his way.
I pushed his head away and stood up, and he thought I was angry but I only wanted to help him. I began to strip it all off, as I had one time before but this time there was no shame in it and I could not do it fast enough. He stared amazed as the rough woolen clothes began to pile up on the floor. The mound rose as high as the bed and still I was struggling with buttons and clasps.
Finally I was free of it all, I could feel my hair brushing against my back and legs, and I felt wondrously light. Air touched me everywhere like a bath. Goose bumps raised up all over my skin but I was not cold, simply alert at every pore. I knelt beside him again and took his hand.
My God but you’re a tiny thing, he said. I would have never guessed. You must carry your own weight in clothing.
I was cold, I said.
He undressed then, and I saw that his body was as finely made and tightly strung as his violin; when I touched him in one place he vibrated elsewhere. I fingered the bones of his back, one by one, and as he pressed hard against me I looked into his ear as if I had never seen one before and it was perfect, whorled and many-chambered like some sea creature.
That night I felt something I had never felt before, a pulsing warmth that began low but soon swelled and swelled until it filled me entirely and crowded out all other feeling, and finally when it could not swell anymore it popped like a bubble and died back down and I felt again his hands on my back.
I thought then about the people I had seen, men and women both, and the strange things that women had driven men to do, and that men had driven women to do, all in the name of desire, and for the first time I began to understand it a bit.
Afterward when he lay beside me breathing slow and even (his eyes were closed, so I could not bear to look at him) I glanced down and saw that I was sprinkled with hair. Dark curly hairs from his chest that had stuck to my chest and belly. They looked as if they had taken root there, a new field in springtime, as if he had planted a part of himself in me and it was growing.
He raised his head then, and looked too, and smiled and said: Be fruitful and multiply.
Then he slept.
In the night I heard a trio of voices, screeching like owls and lisping like babies, and I covered my ears with my hands to block out the sound. I was afraid Shmuel would hear them but he slept deeply, with a smile on his lips.
In daylight he said: You must get the papers. You must book a passage. You have to come with us when we sail.
I said I would. I said I needed to leave him for a while, there were things I needed to do before I went so far away. I said I would meet him later, in the port city he had spoken of.
He said he would come with me. I said I had to go alone.
He did not like that, and slept that night with two handfuls of my hair wrapped around his fists.
But you see I had to try once again to find Ari. He was all that was left of my family, I wanted to bring him with me. If he was alive. And I could not bring Shmuel to search for Ari. Strangers frightened Ari, there was no knowing what he would do.
So I parted ways with the acting company the next morning. I stood by the road as their wagons creaked away and Shmuel sat in the last one angry and disheveled with dark shadows around his eyes. When he saw me watching he stretched out on his back, stiff as a corpse, contorted his face and closed his eyes and didn’t move.
That still had the power to disturb me, and I was a moment away from running after them when he broke the pose and sat up and waved to me, and pointed to his eyes as his way of warning me not to cry.
* * *
I walked into the forest which grew close on either side of the road.
It was the same forest I had known all along. I crunched along, calling Ari’s name over and over. My voice knocked against the trees, it rode along the wind.
I knew he would hear me.
You see, the forest was like a body of water. My voice was a pebble thrown in a pool, sending ripples outward. Wherever Ari was in the forest, my voice would reach him and he would be able to find me.
You think this makes no sense. But that is only because you have never been in a forest like this.
I knew he was among trees somewhere. The forest was his home. He could not survive anywhere else.
I walked and I called his name for three days, and on the evening of the third day I heard a crashing in the underbrush and a hoarse animal grunting that was dear to me.
He was approaching. My summons must have reached him.
I sat very still and waited. I did not want to startle him. I wondered suddenly if he knew what had happened to our parents, our brothers and sisters.
He burst into the clearing then and even I who had known him and slept beside him for years was surprised. He had grown enormously in the time since I had seen him, and he stood squinting in the light from the fire, pausing on bent knees as if prepared to spring. The bones of his face had thickened, and an uneven beard grew on his chin and neck. Shaggy gray hair covered his shoulders and upper back. The worst were his feet, they were bare, gray and blue and dead looking, so damaged by frostbite they were solid as hooves.
His brows were ferocious now, a thick line across his forehead.
But his eyes were the same as they had always been. He knew me, his eyes softened as he studied me intently. I saw a sadness there.
I suppose I had changed a great deal as well.
I beckoned to him then, so I could scratch his head the way I used to. He stepped closer to my fire, and I saw that he had not given up his liking for raw meat—he cradled several large wet chunks in his arms. His mouth was smeared.
Then his smell struck me, massive and musky like a bear’s.
He knelt beside me and obediently bowed his head. I began to scratch; his hair was now stiff as bristles, and as I scratched I stirred up all manner of things which burrowed in deeper. He closed his eyes contentedly.
I began to plan how I would coax Ari onto a ship (I had never seen one myself but I could imagine it), and how I would keep him quiet and fed during a long journey. It would be difficult, but it could be done. If I could explain it to him. If I could make him understand. See how quiet he was now, how serene.
Think how happy he would be in a new land, how free.
Then I happened to look down and I saw what he held in his arms. There was a large haunch, torn and bloody on one end, but it was not from any animal I knew. It still wore the remains of a trouser leg.
I sank down beside Ari and watched him. He tore into the meat, chewing contentedly. My stomach knotted suddenly, for I recognized that leg, that shiny shiny black boot. A boot still so well polished that I could see my face reflected darkly while Ari sank his teeth in the other end.
I saw among the pieces of flesh scraps of a uniform, even medals, and if I had any doubts they were quelled when I spotted the riding crop, broken in half and tangled in the debris.
I crouched a long time by the fire as Ari finished his meal. My insides fought among themselves; my gorge rose in revulsion, and yet my spirit rejoiced in sweet revenge and my heart ached with a tenacious love.
I remembered a thick bulge of flesh above a uniform collar.
Remembered how rough it was. How coarse and thick, that skin.
Even Ari seemed to be having trouble biting through the leathery flesh.
I did not know what to do.
Ari was finished, he tossed bones over his shoulder and sucked his fingers then lay down with his head against my thigh. Such a heavy head.
How could I take him with me? How could I lead him through a city, shut him up in a ship? Shmuel had told me that the promised land was gated and guarded, and you were only allowed to pass through the gates if you had the correct papers. If you did not you would be sent back.
How could I say to the guard at the gate: No, I don’t have any identification papers, but I
do
have my brother here, and he has a taste for men in uniform.
I could not take him out of the forest. The forest was his home, he could not exist outside it.
I stayed with him through the night, watching him twitch and snarl in his dreams. I remembered him as a baby, how I had held him on my hip.
In the morning when the first light broke through the trees, sending long shadows across his face, Ari arose and staggered to his feet. He gave me a long last glance, as if he understood, and then lumbered into the woods.
I heard him crashing and grunting for a long time. Then I heard nothing.
I did not admit to myself then, and do not like to admit now, that I was ashamed of him.
There was Shmuel, you see. I did not want him to think my family were monsters.
* * *
I traveled day and night and made my way to the city on the coast.
The air grew warmer the farther I went. I removed layers of clothing and rather than carry them I left them on the wayside.
In the fields the brown earth showed through the snow. The roads ran with mud.
Spring was coming. I was entering a new place and new season at the same time. Or perhaps it was always spring here. The way it was always winter where I had been.
I was feeling hopeful, you see.
Now and then I took the egg from my pocket and held it to my eye. It felt always warm, as if there were something alive within; and the scene inside sparkled and grew sharper in focus every time I looked. That miniature magical city was the one I was traveling toward; I knew I would find it in the land across the sea.