Something was following her. Maybe more than one something. The woman picked up her pace but her path was obscured; thorns pricked her shins and left thin scratches on her arms that turned into messages she couldn’t read. Lying on the floor of the room full of wedding dresses, I felt the rough carpet rub against my cheek and I tossed in my sleep. The woman felt a tug on the hem of her skirt, but when she turned around there was no one behind her. Just bushes and trees.
Dark clouds rolled over.
They rolled back.
I felt something pulling me forward, away, but the woman either couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t listen. She paused to look around herself, and I thought, No. Go faster. My heart broke into a run. It was stuck inside the woman’s body, though, and she was curious about the patterns in the tree bark that appeared and disappeared, changed colors. Changed shapes.
“Greta-ah-ah-ah.”
We heard the voice, and her blood froze for both of us. There was another sharp tug on her skirt. A sudden wind scattered a pile of leaves and the woman jumped. Somewhere far away my body was tossing and turning, itching to wake up. But around us issued the soft crunch of footsteps; out of the corner of my eye—or was it hers?—I saw shadows ducking in and out of view.
“Greta-ah-ah-ah.”
Closer, the voice splintered into many voices, a hollow harmony that encroached from all sides. Hairs stood up on the back of the woman’s neck, tiny follicles prickled on her cheeks. A third tug came, the waist of her skirt pulling away from the skin and snapping back into place. This time when the woman looked down, she saw a beautiful little girl with thick dark hair who took a step backward when she realized that she’d been spotted. Her hands were folded demurely behind her back.
A circle of little girls surrounded the dream woman. And though some of them were larger and some were smaller, they were clearly identical in design—they would grow into the same woman. If they were given the chance to grow.
“We’re here so you can eat us.”
“Eat us.”
“Eat our hearts.”
The dream woman spun around and I spun somehow in the other direction so we saw them in stereo, their mouths moving in tandem. Each set of small brown eyes was serene. The voice of the dream woman trembled.
“I don’t understand. I don’t want to eat your hearts. I was just out walking . . .” She trailed off as she realized that she didn’t remember how she got there or why she began strolling through the woods in the first place. I shifted around on the floor of the wedding dress room, feeling like the driver of a runaway car.
“Oh,” said the little girls. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” They stepped forward, their knees knocking together. “Well, then.” The sound echoed: well well well. “We will have to eat your heart instead.” They stepped forward and grabbed the hem of the woman’s skirt as though they were her children trying to keep from getting lost.
The first girl, the tallest, reached up and put a hand on the woman’s arm.
“Don’t worry.” She stroked the woman’s arm lovingly. “Everything will be better when we’re done.”
I awoke screaming beneath a row of white dresses with my baba Ada shaking my elbow. Her skin was pale paper, crumpled slightly and pulled back tight by the set of her mouth. For a moment I couldn’t stop my screams—the dresses brushed back and forth around me like branches and the plastic wrappings clung to my skin. Ada grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out into the center of the room, dragging a couple of wedding gowns off their hangers behind me. Standing on my own two feet, I was able to bring the room into focus. I took a few gulping breaths, feeling the hash marks I’d scratched into my throat by shrieking.
“What is it?” Ada kept hold of my shoulders and searched my face as if she would be able to see through it. On the word it, she gave me the tiniest shake, so slight I’m not sure she was aware of doing so. “What’s the matter?”
A whispering drew my attention to the doorway. There, several seamstresses leaned their heads together, sneaking occasional peeks in my direction. A sick feeling followed: they were talking about me, their eyes full of pity. I tried to straighten my spine. What I wanted more than anything was to burrow into my babenka’s arms, feel her cradle and soothe me. But the women were watching. I tried to imagine what they’d say if I told them what I’d dreamed—they’d think I was crazy.
And what would Ada think? It wasn’t so much the disruption that made me feel guilty as the fact that my dream had turned Greta somehow sinister. It populated her landscape with threats, which was the opposite of what Ada wanted. My babenka didn’t always tell me the truth. But when she chose not to, it was because she wanted to let me believe something better. Or because she needed to believe something better. She could give that to me, and I could give it to her, too.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m okay. I fell asleep.”
Ada looked at me with a terrible little wrinkle in her forehead. But then she straightened up and turned towards the doorway with a shrug that scattered the women who’d gathered there. When they’d gone, Ada picked up one of the wedding dresses that had fallen to the floor in the confusion—it draped heavily over her elbow like a lady in a pose of supplication, arms wafting hopelessly down.
“I’m going to have to press this again.” She spoke quietly, inspecting the few almost imperceptible new lines in the fabric. “Maybe you could go sit in the main room with the girls? I think you left a book with Basia.”
I nodded tightly and walked down the hall, trying to keep my footsteps quiet. Trying to be good. I’d bitten my tongue thrashing around inside the nightmare, and for the rest of the day my mouth tasted like blood. I found it sitting on my teeth at the gum line and felt myself swallowing it, my stomach filling up with iron.
I try to walk slowly and keep myself calm as I move away from the graveyard, but the weather won’t let me. The weather, and the tight fist of my heart. There are too many people on the street, all of them guarding their faces from the wind but still, somehow, seeming to watch me. When I see a bookstore I duck inside, because it looks empty. In the heat of the store, cold fingers of snow melt off my hair and drip down my neck, and I watch the sleet outside, leaning with one hand on a stack of old books with cloth covers. They smell like little museums.
I turn away from the window-paned door and start to gather myself. Or at least I try. What actually happens is that the baby sneezes, and an older man behind the counter looks up and says, “God bless you.”
I begin to cry.
“Hey now,” says the man. He’s half hidden behind piles of merchandise, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. “No need for that.”
I want to explain myself, but where to begin? Kara has begun whimpering too, and taking a ragged breath, I shush her. Brush a few drops of water off her cap where snowflakes melted. The bookstore man watches as I dry myself off, digging in my purse for a napkin that I use to wipe my eyes and blow my nose, after first dabbing Kara’s face. When it seems like the danger of my bursting into renewed tears has passed, he looks down at the open book in front of him and the sheet of paper beside it, which is filled with tabulations. He jots something down with a pencil, but then looks back up at me. I’m still there.
“Is there someone I can call for you?” he asks. I shake my head.
“Actually, if you don’t mind me using my phone in here, I can call.” I pull out my cell phone and show it to him, as if to prove I’m not lying, and he looks around us at the empty store.
“Not like there’s anyone to bother.”
He turns back to his book, flipping through the pages and skimming, now and then licking his index finger for traction. I seem to disappear, which suits me fine.
In the back of the store, behind a tall bookshelf, I find a chair—faded upholstery tacked onto unpolished cherrywood, with curling armrests like cat paws—and I sit, gratefully. Kara lies against me. A store like this would be a nice place to take a sleeping baby sometime. I could pick titles off the shelves
and read long passages in this very chair, waiting to see if the words lived up to whatever price the man had penciled into his books. An ordinary world—what must that be like?
As I arrange myself, the chair lets up puffs of dust. The cushions seem too skinny for that, but apparently they have unseen depths. Like everything.
I know what to do. Who to call. I flick through the numbers on my phone, trying not to think what a strange portal it is, a sort of witchcraft. The phone, like the chair, feels thin and insubstantial. But it can bring me all the way across the world. Take the dust of my voice to an ear so far in my past that, by rights, it should be as deaf as stone.
“Hello?” I speak immediately when the line connects.
“Hello?” Echo. Silence. “Hello?”
Her voice is so familiar, I could cry.
“Mama,” I say. “It’s me.”
8
The woods encroached on Greta’s home—through the lumber, through every window and crack. But they also belonged to her, and she to them. Her people were always killed in the manner of forest creatures; they died as they lived—struck by lightning, poisoned by a corrupted stream, lost in a field of identical birches that confounded a wanderer’s sense of direction. People in town said Greta came from nowhere, that she’d been found by a hunter bundled up on the ground and had for the most part raised herself. And for that reason or for some other, she continually slipped back into the woods on rambling walks that led her nowhere.
People also said she pulled trouble behind her wherever she went, but for a long time that was just talk, it wasn’t true. Not until she was a grown woman making choices for herself and asking for the things she wanted. Wishes are dangerous things, you see. Start asking the sky to grant you requests and you better prepare for some fallout, red rain.
When a fifth daughter had bloomed within her and faded, this was when she made the deal. The baby lasted long enough inside her to inspire a new glimmer of hope, and to bring a new type of devastation when it was born early, blue and still. Greta insisted on digging the grave herself, and taking the girl far away from her home. She was worried that the voices of the lost girls were getting too loud, and that no child would ever be able to hear past them. She was insensible to protests—deaf to Saul’s urging to stay in bed, to the midwife’s painstaking explication of the volume of blood she’d lost in labor. Greta took the small raisin of a body and wrapped it in clean blankets with the face left bare. Even close up it was difficult to tell the child wasn’t just sleeping.
Greta strapped this parcel to her chest with a long cotton shawl, leaving her hands free to carry a shovel. She allowed Saul to put an apple in her pocket, a crust of bread, and then she kissed the boys on the tops of their heads and walked into the forest, snapping small twigs beneath her feet.
She walked all day. In truth she had no notion of where she was going, what she was looking for. Occasionally she caught a hint of a song on the wind—naturally, she thought she was imagining it. But with no other guiding light to follow, she turned her ear to the sound and walked towards it. By noon she’d consumed the apple and tossed the skinny core beneath a bush. By nightfall she was curled up beneath a tree guarding the waxen infant with the curve of her body.
When the sun came up, Greta found herself in a small clearing full of light blue flowers. She couldn’t remember seeing them the night before, though of course it had been dark then, black shadows dripping down from the sky. Now she was covered in dew, her clothing wet and her hair hanging in damp strings. She blinked in the light and spent a moment rubbing color into her cheeks, cricking her back. There was a baby asleep beside her.
“I’m afraid not.”
Greta started at the voice but made an effort to retain her composure. A creature that sneaks up on you in the dead of the woods is usually only as dangerous as you make it. Keeping her body poised, she turned her neck to peer behind her. Some ten feet away, just outside the clearing, a man stood, leaning against a tree. He was bathed in shade, with only one leg peeking out into the full light. When he noticed this, the man pulled the leg back, turning his body monochromatic.
But Greta had seen the color of his suit, gray as the ashes from an old fire. Familiar.
“Do we know each other?” she asked.
“Perhaps.” The man turned so his spine lay against the tree and his weight rested on his heels. “We may have, once.”
He began to whistle, as though he had all the time in the world and this was the most ordinary interaction he could have dreamed up. Almost dull. But the sound sent a thrill through Greta’s body, her lungs constricting, heavy and cold.
“I’ve heard that song before,” she said.
“Well.” The man smiled at her, a half smile. “It’s not uncommon, is it? The kind of song you might hear at a pub.” He whistled another few bars. “Or a dance.”
A cool wind blew across the clearing, bending stalks of vegetation into sway-backed petitioners. Greta let her weight rest on one hand and listened to the familiar music rebound from rocks and trees. She hummed along, just a little. Remembering Saul’s hand in the concave of her back.
The body of her child lay tranquil beside her on its bed of flowers and grass. During the night the child’s skin had taken on a bluish hue—peaked, freezing—and, unthinking, Greta tried to warm her. Ran a finger over the small forehead, felt the cheeks with her palms. But the child didn’t stir. She just lay there, skin smudging slightly where it was touched.
Greta shivered. When she looked up, the sun had gone behind a cloud and the man was stooping right beside her. His hair was white blond, his eyes slightly lined, as if from squinting.
“Well,” he said again, nodding at the shovel. “Aren’t you going to get on with it?”
What could she do? What else was there to do? Accepting the hand the man held out to her—a clean hand, with trimmed nails and pink skin—Greta hauled herself to her feet and picked up the spade.
“I think,” the man said, “that anywhere around here will do.”
Greta’s shoulders heaved each time the shovel sliced the ground, calling forth a cold chink from the soil. She wanted a hole deep enough to muffle her own grief, if such a hole could be had. Soon she was standing in a pit up to her ankles, then her knees. The dirt grew cooler the deeper she went, a chill seeping out from the earth and into Greta’s skin. The man just watched, rocking back and forth on his heels.
“Although . . .” Sweat dripped from every inch of her skin, but still, when the stranger spoke, Greta froze. She looked up to see him wearing a thoughtful expression. “It does seem like a shame.”
Greta waited. After a minute she asked, “What does?”
“Or a waste, really.” The man began strolling around the hole, his hands folded neatly behind his back. “A beautiful girl. A terrible tragedy.”
“I don’t know.” Greta looked at the small, still child and wanted with every fiber to be able to breathe her own life into that body. But what she said was “It happens all the time.”
The man wasn’t listening.
“And of course sons are nice, lovely really, but they’re not the same for a woman. I can see you holding a little girl in your arms. I can picture it.” The man sighed. “Oh, clearly. Very clearly.”
He walked over to the baby, lying in a bed of grass where Greta had left her. The blanket was wrapped tightly around the child, folds tucked cleverly under folds so that the whole package was as smooth as a pillowcase. Crouching on his heels, the stranger picked up the baby and cradled her in his elbow. Greta sucked in a breath. But what could he do that hadn’t already been done?
“Yes,” the man said. “I wonder if we don’t have something to offer one another, you and I.” He rose back up, still holding the bundle. “After all, I hate to see you so lonely.”
He stood at the lip of Greta’s hole and looked down at her. Her shoulders tightened.
“Because you are lonely, aren’t you?” he asked. “You have a little family. A
ll those little men. But how happy can you be? With this?”
The man tilted his chin to the cold form of the baby.
“I can offer you the child you really want,” he continued. “The child you dream of. You do still dream of her, don’t you?” He smiled his thin smile again and nodded. “Often. Yes. It would be a good trade.”
In her half-dug grave, Greta’s ankles were freezing cold. She tried to call up an image of Andrzej’s face, then Fil’s, then Konrad’s. But she couldn’t.
“What do you mean, a trade?”
The man looked up into the distance as if calculating a very large number.
“I really dislike waste, you know. Can’t stand it. Everything has a use if you look for it. But most people don’t look, do they?”
Greta scowled. “You’re talking in riddles.”
“I am, aren’t I?” The stranger scratched his ear. “Please forgive me. It’s just that I get caught up in my own ideas and I forget what I have and haven’t said out loud. What I mean is very simple. You want a daughter, and you should have one. And she”—he looked now into Greta’s eyes with a frankness that seemed to fix her in place—“she should really have a daughter too. And her. And her.”
He moved the baby so that she lay with her face against his shoulder.
“I’m not sure I understand you,” said Greta. But the man was no longer paying any attention to her, caught up as he was in the details of his idea. He seemed to forget that he’d begged her forgiveness for this very sin not a moment ago.
“And the beauty of it is,” he continued, “you don’t even have to say yes. All you have to do is not tell me no. For a little while, you might think you’ve dreamed this. Oh, you’ll try to convince yourself. Or you’ll think I was a madman in the woods. You’ll think, sometimes, that you’ve caught a glimpse of me—in a window or on a busy street. But you don’t have to worry. I won’t be checking up on you.” He tugged his earlobe. “No need.”
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