The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (13 page)

Vov hadn’t eaten tomatoes in ages—she wasn’t sure how long, since nobody had taught her to count—but she guessed it had been at least as many years as there were fruits in the jar. She sat down at the roadside and ate one. Some birds landed at her feet, ravens who mistook her, by the black of her hair, for a relative. They pecked at the seeds that spilled between her toes. She shared. They feasted. When the jar was empty, she sang them a harvest song. They alighted, all calling her name.

Hearing the squalling above, taking it for a swelling storm, Meir gathered his amply larded gut and plodded outside on gout-bloated feet. He raised a cascade of chins to the sky, squinting into the sun as the last ravens scattered. He looked out onto his fields. He leered as Vov strolled toward his house.

She nodded at the lender. She said that her husband had sent her to fetch some whetstone oil. He stopped staring. His face creased into a frown.

— Ezra knows that I don’t work on credit when there’s a drought. What will he trade for it?

— He was going to barter some pickled tomatoes.

— Give them to me. We’ll see if they’re tasty.

— They’re very tasty. I ate them already.

— You’re as dotty as folks say. If you took them for yourself, little pretty, then what do you have for me?

— Something more to your taste, maybe?

— And what’s that?

— It’s a secret.

To show the lender what she meant, she lifted her dress.

Meir was expert at judging meat on the hoof. He tweaked her breast, slapped her ass. He grunted and then, turning her around, knelt her over his doorstep. He opened his britches, grasped her shoulders, and shoved his girth against her rear. Once, twice, three times, his waves of fat washed over her back, and then she felt a slight tickle at her crotch, a trickle of warmth.

He released her. She turned over to request the oil once more. He nodded.
A deal is a deal,
he grumbled, bringing her a small canister,
even with a whore.

On her way home, Vov began to ponder. She thought in terms that would never have occurred to her the previous day, let alone in years before. If Ben’s battering had made Vov perceive her body again, negotiation with Meir proved that it wasn’t all of her. A whore’s possession, her flesh, could be bartered. Perhaps she could even use it for her own pleasure? To test this idea, she detoured off the road and knocked at handsome Chaim’s door.

Like every man, Chaim had watched Vov over the years—he was another of those who’d proposed when she was twelve—and he marveled at how the seasons since then hadn’t changed her: While his wife, Esther, was also sixteen, beneath the warp of age and stretch of children, he could barely see the pretty girl he’d once married. Yet on Vov, dumb to time, the years had no traction. Seasons took their measure only in the spectacular span of her hair.

— It’s grown so long.

— Do you like it, Chaim?

— What are you implying?

In an instant, she’d untied it. It cascaded over her shoulders. She invited Chaim under.

He was twice her height. He lifted her until their mouths met, and, as he let her down, held on to her dress. She smiled. Grasping his neck, she straddled his hips and fed him her breasts.

Chaim didn’t need to tell her that what happened next was a secret, but he said so anyway.

— Esther wouldn’t understand.

— You mean you don’t have secrets with her?

— She’s my wife. Most of our secrets are together.

— She’s lucky. Would you like to share another?

That night, Vov tried to share a secret with her husband. In the dark, she went naked to his bed. Slipping in, she sought his mouth with her lips, and slid a hand up his crotch. Nothing stirred. She wondered if he’d expired, but could hear him still wheezing. For a while she listened. Only in her sleep could she hear that he was weeping.

In the morning, he was rougher with her than he’d ever been before. He strapped her in the plow and hurled verbal filth at her. She smiled expectantly. He tore her dress from her shoulders. She shrieked delightedly. He grabbed a whip. She raised her rump to take his secret. She shut her eyes.

And felt nothing.

She looked between her knees. Saw Ezra convulsing at her feet. Was he in ecstasy without her? Vov waited until he’d stopped shuddering. She slipped out of the yoke. His body was slack.

So he was dead like her father. Vov knew that cadavers were put underground because it was dark there, a perpetual midnight, which naturally made eternal sleep easier for the deceased. She grabbed her husband’s feet. She dragged him through the dirt. She put him in the cellar, under a shelf of preserved fruit.

After that, she was more free. She visited several farms each day. The men grew accustomed to seeing her, keeping their secrets with her, renewed on hayloft or under dormer. If she was hungry, she made them ply her with dainties from their cellars, for which she’d negotiate, on most favorable terms, when they were least able to resist her. If she was horny, she made them fold and bend her according to her pleasure, driving them past exhaustion with allusions to more virile partners. She did not try to hide the blemishes left by others, the gradual ravaging of her body now that time had grasp of her—now that she was alive—and if men asked about old Ezra, whether he was blind to her secret affairs, she’d say that nothing roused him anymore.

Vov the whore had more lovers each week. Gluttonously, she accumulated more secrets. But gradually she suspected that, while the secrets were new, they weren’t especially different: She began to sense that truly everyone had the same secret, only a unique way of expressing it. For all their posturing, folks had nothing to hide.

Certainly she couldn’t disguise that she was pregnant. As her womb swelled, lovers grew wary, and refused to touch Vov, each one sure that it was his infidelity bloating her belly. Yet if men were anxious to avoid guilt by association, wives were possessed by a different inclination: The women had already reckoned that Vov had lured their husbands into adultery, and eagerly awaited a child as evidence with which to drive the harlot clear out of the country.

All of these changes were unexpected by Vov, who had so recently discovered freedom, and had no experience with consequences. With each passing day, as the child within her matured, she grew more isolated from the outside world. Like a secret, Vov was muffled in quiet. She might have suffocated had she not known that secrets were delusory, mirages spanning the distances between those who kept to themselves. Through summer and fall, she lay in bed alone, each day watching the changing seasons, while at night she dreamed of a village redeemed of secrets and their consequences. In her reveries, the redeemer was a whore.

She birthed her son in early winter. She swaddled him in her tresses of hair gone wholly silver, and nursed him on her breasts: the pink nipples that were the last tinge of her passing youth. She didn’t name him, for they’d nobody to address but each other. She simply sang him harvest songs, and taught him what she knew about women and men, to prepare him for the ordeal foreseen in her sleep.

It began the following week, when Esther paid a visit, excusing her intrusion on the grounds that new mothers need the care of a neighbor. She asked Vov to let her hold the boy. One look at him, a glimpse into his cobalt eyes, told her that Chaim was the father.

— What do you call him?

— I don’t. He’s always with me.

— Where’s Ezra? Why didn’t he name the boy after his family?

— He’s not here anymore.

— Then he knows the truth.

That afternoon, Esther posted a letter to the magistrate in the capital city, anonymously accusing Vov of adultery.

Several days later, Ben’s wife, Rachel, came to the farm, claiming she’d brought the baby a gift. While Vov unfolded a tattered blanket, Rachel looked over the child, and determined, by studying his oblong ears, that Ben had fathered him.

— Was Ezra surprised to have a son after so many years?

— He didn’t. The child’s my own.

The encounters came more regularly after that. Vov was visited by the wife of every man she’d ever known. And every woman found that the boy, by the curve of his nose or the jut of his chin or the splay of his toes, unequivocally resembled her husband.

Vov calmly observed each moment of recognition, just as she had dreamed. The magistrate in the capital city, on the contrary, could not comprehend the sudden influx of letters about her, sometimes two or three a day, anonymously accusing her of adultery.

In and of themselves, missives such as these were not rare: Wives sent them, unsigned, all the time, and the magistrate would respond by dispatching his bailiff to extract a confession from the errant woman. For the sake of consistency, a guilty plea was required. The mandatory punishment was exile for life.

But the present case was different. If the accused had simultaneously birthed a son with each of these women’s husbands, then she was a demon and couldn’t be punished. On the other hand, if she wasn’t a demon, and her children weren’t legion, then something terrible must have possessed the whole village. For the first time in decades, the magistrate left the capital city to investigate.

His bailiff rode ahead of him, reaching the region before dawn, rousing each family, herding them to Ezra’s parched farm. Men, women, children: Folks who hadn’t seen one another in years, ever since the last great harvest, were brought together. They huddled for warmth, but, curiosity smothered in secrecy, didn’t speak to one another.

At last, the magistrate arrived in his royally appointed carriage, painted scarlet and gold to match the colors of his velvet cloak. A footman laid down a platform for him, on which he stood, twisting the white threads of his beard, while the bailiff ousted Vov from her bed. He harried her into her clothes, and led her, child in arms, to the inquisition. The magistrate held up his staff and commanded her to confess.

— You shall not lie. You will tell the kingdom what you have done.

— I have given birth. To a son.

— Where is your husband?

— I don’t have one.

— You were married to Ezra the widower.

— He died two summers ago.

— Then he isn’t the father. You admit that there’s no chance.

— See for yourself. You’ll find Ezra in the cellar.

While the bailiff went to verify her claim, the magistrate turned to the assembled villagers.

— The accused has confessed to having a child out of wedlock. Who is the father?

Nobody spoke, not even a murmur. The magistrate shook his head. He bade his footman to bring him his docket, from which he withdrew a letter and read the first anonymous accusation of adultery he’d received.

Vov didn’t object to what was written. Everyone else feigned astonishment. The magistrate waited impatiently until they stopped. Then he read another letter, and a third, letting them fall to the breeze as Vov readily agreed with each. He counted off dozens more—twenty-four more irate wives, twenty-four more seduced husbands, twenty-four more illegitimate children—and released them to the wind. Nobody moved as the paper swept through the crowd. At last the bailiff returned from his errand. He confirmed that Ezra was dead.

— Then who is the father, Vov? You acknowledge every anonymous accusation, as many letters as there are families in your village, yet you have only one son.

— But don’t you see? I shared my body as a secret with every man. I took some of each inside of me. Now some of every man is in my son. All of them share him as a secret. All are his father.

— That’s abnormal, Vov. It’s abominable.

— The secrecy?

— The biology. Hand over the boy. I’m taking him with me.

— He’s my child.

— You’re bound for exile, trollop. He’ll go to the university, where they’ll slice him open to find out how this happened.

The magistrate began to walk toward Vov. Chaim stepped in front of him, and told the magistrate not to touch his son. The bailiff dragged him into the dust. Ben took his place, and repeated what Chaim had said. The bailiff removed him from the magistrate’s path. Meir blocked the way with his great girth.

The bailiff shoved him into the dirt. Each husband in the village successively stepped up, and was ousted.

As the women watched, they started asking questions: If every man had the same secret, and every woman knew it, who was deluded? None could say, nor could they be sure what else was common knowledge. Talking up seasons of sown silence, sharing the routines and rituals they’d each so assiduously hoarded, the women discovered that all their secrets, so carefully cultivated, were as similar as turnips.

By then the bailiff had cleared the last man, and had seized hold of Vov, while the magistrate, beard trembling, wrenched the baby from her hands. The child cried out. His wailing thundered across the sky, tears pouring down.

At once all the fathers rose, bolstered by their wives. Together they were much stronger. They hauled away the bailiff and ousted the magistrate. They eased the sobbing child to his mother’s breast. As the boy began to nurse, the tempest lifted. Folks looked up, into falling rain. Mother and child stood by their new family, cleansed by the roiling storm.