Zel

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Still, Konrad steals time to ask in town after a girl with light braids and dark eyes who goes by the name of Rapunzel. And most Saturdays and every Sunday he rides as far up the mountainsides as the ice permits. With the arrival of spring, Konrad wakes before dawn to fit in a daily visit to the smith before haggling with the importers. He takes to eating the midday meal rapidly, so he can fit in a visit to the rapunzel vendor, as well, before he’s expected back at work.

  And he buys great quantities of the lettuce.

  Annette watches him. “I think you grow rabbit whiskers, young sire.”

  Konrad twitches his nose at her.

  After spring comes summer, with his birthday and Zel’s birthday. July sixth. A day sacred to Konrad. He drinks much wine and falls asleep under the stars, thinking only one thought: The universe has conspired to bring Zel into his life, and all he can do is surrender to the awesome power.

  Then comes fall. Winter. Spring again.

  Konrad stands on his bedroom balcony. He rubs his arms, though there is no chill in the air. He covers his mouth and nose with both hands and breathes his own warmth. The taste of despair coats his tongue. Spring is too cruel.

  Chapter 19Mother

  sit at the table. I think of the food I should prepare for dinner, but I do not move. I sit and look at nothing.

  I don’t have to see nothing. I have the choice of seeing whatever I want. Whomever I want. But I see nothing.

  I think of a story.

  Once upon a time there was a little girl full of all the whimsy and unspoken hopes of any little girl.

  The girl married a boy she half-fancied and waited for the children to come. She waited and waited and waited. Her mother, who had had eleven children if the stillborn ones were counted, and the girl counted them, waited with her. After a while her mother died, still young, but worn. Waiting grew bitter. Her husband, the boy-now-man, wouldn’t wait any longer. Or maybe he was tired of watching her wait. He left.

  The girl-now-woman went about her business. But she couldn’t stop herself from noticing all the babies of the world, none of whom would ever call her Mother.

  At first she tried helping. She tended the babies, to give their mothers a break. She became expert on the fiddle her mother had left her, and the little ones danced to her music. She kissed them and cuddled them and worked to make her fingers release them when their mothers came for them. She tried.

  But she couldn’t keep herself from envy. She couldn’t help despising her own body.

  The woman was a good person. She didn’t want to covet the round bellies of the women who used to be her playmates just a half-dozen years ago. She didn’t want to chew the insides of her cheeks at the sight of her own sisters pregnant. She knew she could serve God simply by living a good life; she didn’t need to be Mother to be valuable.

  Yet she needed to be Mother. She looked in other women’s flat faces and saw that they either had children or, in a few cases, didn’t. It was a simple bit of information in their eyes. No one else seemed hounded with need. But the woman needed, oh, how she needed, to be Mother. She needed it with every drop of blood, every bit of flesh, every hair, every breath of her body.

  The woman took to staying at home more and more, thereby reducing her contact with the townsfolk. She rarely saw women, children. When she did see them, she spoke kindly and they loved her as before. But she avoided them. She hoped to forget her need and hence squelch it.

  She became a seamstress and gave her handicrafted pieces to a merchant in town, who sold them for her and shared in her profits. She looked at the money the merchant placed in her hand and had nothing, no one, to spend it on. She tucked it away. At first she sewed all sorts of things, dresses for moon-faced little girls, the softest babies’ baptismal gowns. But she soon learned these things, mere things that had no white bones to snap, brought the taste of hate to her tongue. She turned instead to tablecloths. She embroidered better than anybody and gathered effusive praise, yet still the work gave little satisfaction.

  She dug a garden, modest in size and output, which met most of her needs. She ate her homegrown meals late at night, for the dark made her food smooth. She did her best to go the path alotted to her in this life.

  One day as she was carrying a large bundle of material home, a voice spoke to her. “You can have it. You know that.”

  She looked around, but only halfheartedly. There was an undeniable inevitability about this voice. She knew it came from within.

  “All you have to do is want—want hard, want long, want enough. And it is yours. Everything is yours.”

  She whispered, “And in return?”

  “Work for us.”

  But the woman didn’t want everything. She wanted one thing, one dazzling chip off the diamond of life: a daughter. Her daughter. To love and hold. To cherish.

  The cost was lowered accordingly, for even the devils have a sense of balance. She would be given a single gift, a way with plants. In return, when her daughter came of age, for surely with her gift she could find a way to get a daughter, she would explain to her the fundamental choice in life, and she would try to persuade her daughter, too, to join the side of the devils. Everything must be open, every detail made plain to her daughter. And her daughter, likewise, must be open completely in that moment, virginal and unencumbered, tied to no one but the woman herself. That was all. A simple bargain. No evil to practice. No blood to spill. Just one last hitch: Eternal damnation was hers.

  The woman thought it over. With her decent, Godfearing upbringing, she kept expecting herself to be tormented. Good people were tormented by such dilemmas; this she knew. But she wasn’t. She was almost without emotion. Her brain ruled her. She kept all senses on alert. She went to church and listened. She got on her knees and prayed. She knew she should talk to her priest. But her priest was a doltish sort, and she didn’t like his crooked teeth and wandering eye. So she talked directly to the heavens, which met her entreaties with dense, white, silent clouds. Clouds you could climb the mountain peaks to, clouds you could stand in—and she did. But still they didn’t speak. It seemed the side of good wasn’t ready to vie for her.

  If the answer didn’t come from above, perhaps it would come from below, from immediately below her feet. She became fascinated with the dead. She went to every burial. She wandered in the cemetery. She put her ear to stone and dirt. She listened hard until she was quite quite sure: No voices spoke from death’s doors.

  And she knew she doubted. She doubted all that she had been raised to believe.

  She realized she could not seek heaven’s help, for doubt itself made such help inaccessible. Cold, still, clear, reasonable doubt now ruled her. She must decide, she knew, not on the basis of a sense of right and wrong, taught to her as part of a story of some Jesus whose lucky mother had him without trying, without even the benefit of a father. No. Instead, the choice must be made on the basis of a personal judgment: How much was a daughter worth?

  Her emotions, which she had believed were as iced over as the mountain peaks she could see from her front door, the peaks whose clouds she had dared invade just the summer before, now answered, “Anything and everything.” The answer was absolute.

  Still, her brain kept working. She must think it through. What, indeed, was she giving up? If heaven did not exist, hell did not either, for one defined the other. And if she presented it all to her daughter, the whole matter of human life, and her daughter was free to make her own decision, what harm was there in that? She wasn’t bargaining away her daughter’s soul, only her own.

  Which was bargaining away nothing. For without heaven and hell, what is a soul?

  Her emotions and her brain were of one voice.

  She agreed on a late March day, as the snow began to melt. That night she stored her needles and threads, her embroidery hoop, her linens and silks, in a wooden box. She went to bed and lay looking at the ceiling.

  In the morning she was outside before dawn, picking at the half-fro
zen earth, but not in the area of her old garden. Oh, no. Now she knew just the right slope to plant a garden on, finding the most fertile soil exposed to the most sun rays without even knowing how she had gained the knowledge. She went to town and bought seeds of every type, even ones from other lands. It was a short walk to town, and the day was suddenly warmer. Farmers talked about perhaps planting early this year. The woman went home and planted that very day.

  The peas sprouted first. Then the radishes, cabbage, cauliflower. Then the lettuce. So many kinds of lettuce. The woman’s fingers now knew how to thin the seedlings as expertly as the farmers who sold their harvest in the market. She knew which would thrive best in which parts of the garden. Carrots, lima beans, potatoes. As things grew, she smiled in wonder. She interspersed flowers with the vegetables for added color. The asters came in silly profusion. The geraniums made a fine border. She never realized before how much she enjoyed flowers, perhaps because flowers were always on distant hillsides or in other people’s gardens, never in hers. But now she let them bloom and she didn’t feel frivolous—for the eye deserves its part, too. She planted vegetables from the south—zucchini and cucumbers, admiring their hairy stems and bright trumpet flowers. She planted vegetables from the New World—especially tomatoes, thinking ahead to the heat of August. People came from nearby towns to see her foreign eggplant and broccoli. Near the house the rhododendrons flourished. She wondered if this was evidence of her promised new gift or if this garden’s abundance was the product of an early, unusually warm and sunny spring. But she didn’t wonder much. Mainly she let herself rest in an inexplicable calm—a kind of contentment that she’d been denied since she had come of age. She didn’t know if she was damned or not, but for now she was at peace. Eternity didn’t matter.

  The lettuces came ready for harvesting in May. Bushy and green and tasty. A neighbor woman had her eye on the lettuces, a pregnant woman. The barren woman knew that. She saw the pregnant woman peek out her window in the house that backed onto the garden. The pregnant woman asked to buy lettuce, the kind with the small, round leaves known as rapunzel. The barren woman said none of her vegetables were for sale. The pregnant woman peeked out the window day after day. Only the wall between the garden and that house kept the pregnant woman from entering uninvited and stealing the rapunzel. The wall was beginning to crumble in one spot. The barren woman didn’t repair it.

  One night the pregnant woman sent her beery husband on an errand of thievery. He climbed the wall and stole rapunzel. The barren woman watched him from the shadow of her home. She didn’t stop him. She knew that in the house on the other side of the wall the pregnant woman was dining on her rapunzel. The pregnant woman was finding the stolen rapunzel more delicious than any other food she had tasted in her whole life, more delicious than any other food she could imagine. The barren woman closed her eyes and watched the pregnant woman eat.

  That first time she saw with her eyes closed, she was frozen to the spot. When she opened her eyes at last, she sank to the floor, weak with awe. Was this her imagination or was this another gift—a gift the devils hadn’t bothered to mention, it was so common among lost souls? For several days she didn’t sleep. She allowed herself at most to blink. When finally she fell in bed, she was relieved to find just darkness behind her eyelids.

  A week passed, and the pregnant woman craved rapunzel more each day. She nagged at her husband. And she was excellent at nagging, as well as loud at it. The barren woman heard and waited, her eyes open.

  The man hesitated, though not from scruples. He did not understand why the barren woman would not sell the lettuce in the first place. If she was going to be so stubborn, she deserved to be robbed, for she clearly grew more than she could ever eat alone. No, the source of his hesitation was the fear of being caught. For thievery was not treated lightly. The man knew that well; he had stolen before and been caught before. Never again did he want to stand in the town square, locked into the stocks. He told his wife as much. The barren woman heard and waited.

  Still his wife nagged. Her pregnancy was nearing its end. By early July the child would be here. If the man could steal a little rapunzel now and then just for another month, the cravings would end. And how likely was it he’d be caught on those few excursions into the forbidden garden? The woman with the garden was a reclusive sort. She probably went to bed early at night. She’d never catch him. And if the rapunzel was eaten quickly, there’d be no evidence of a theft anyway. The pregnant woman pleaded. The pregnant woman goaded. The pregnant woman ranted. The barren woman heard and knew the waiting was at an end.

  Hours passed. The barren woman could bear it no longer. She closed her eyes and saw.

  The man drank many beers. Then he climbed the wall in the moonlight and picked rapunzel.

  The barren woman stood behind him when he got to his feet. “Thief.”

  The man held the rapunzel tight. His face in the glow of the moon said it all: The woman was alone, and as long as she didn’t scream and no one else saw him in the garden, it was her word against his. His voice was testy: “It’s just a few leaves. What do you care?”

  The woman stepped back. She wasn’t sure why. Her feet moved of their own accord. Yet she knew she wasn’t giving up. Her senses told her that.

  The man wasn’t about to hesitate. But before his feet could move, he found his path blocked with waist-high thistles. He turned in a circle. The thistles were on all sides. They grew higher by the moment. “Help!” he called. “Help me.”

  The thistles stopped growing. They were now up to the man’s chin. They pressed against his bare arms. He writhed from the sting. She knew he wanted nothing more than to jump from his own skin.

  The barren woman watched, fascinated, breathless. “Take the rapunzel,” she said when she could speak at last. “Take it with my best wishes. And in return give me one thing. One thing, and then . . .” She paused, for she did not know the extent and limit of her powers. But she said what she hoped: “Then I will let you go home, your path clear and your hands filled with rapunzel.”

  “Name your price,” hissed the man, hunching his shoulders together, trying his best to shrink away from the crowding thistles. “Anything!”

  The barren woman saw the welts rise on his neck. She knew they were rising on his arms and legs. She was almost sorry for him. Almost, when she saw the revulsion in his eyes as he looked at her. She spoke coolly. “When your daughter is born, bring her to me. She will be mine.”

  The man blinked. The barren woman could see the effort in his eyes: He was trying to think of his round wife; he was trying to think of the child within her. He tried and tried, but the thistles stopped him. The thistles tortured him. And now they grew again. They ate at his cheeks. They would be at his eyes within seconds. “Yes!” he screamed. “The child is yours.”

  He went home, as the barren woman had promised, safely and loaded down with rapunzel.

  The barren woman went home, as well, exhausted for no reason she could fathom, for surely she had done nothing strenuous. She sat on the floor of her bedroom and thought about what had happened in the garden. What she saw with her eyes closed was still a matter to be analyzed. But the thistles were not the result of an early spring, of an unusually warm spring. The thistles did the bidding of a separate force. The woman put her left hand to her mouth and bit a small chunk from the cushion at the base of her thumb. Cold water ran down her arm. The water of her veins.

  Who would have thought it? Heaven and hell, the unbelievable, were true. Divinity was true. She had bargained away much, after all.

  But there would be an eternity to contemplate her choice. For now she should think of the immediate future. Of the child twisting in the woman’s womb. Her own child. Dare she close her eyes and try to get to know the child? Not while the babe was in that other woman, no. The barren woman would wait till the child was free.

  She slept outside that night, in her garden, near her rapunzel. Would the man keep his word? She remembered
his eyes and thought he would. Still, she had to make sure.

  In the morning the barren woman closed her eyes and saw the man putting on his shoes, telling his wife he was going to the town square to warn everyone about the witch in the house on the other side of the wall, to rally them against her, to hang her or burn her, to rid the world of the scourge that was her. He walked to the door of his house and opened it to find grapevines, thick and gnarly, blocking the doorway. He closed the door and ran to the window. The room was suddenly plunged into darkness. Grapevines blocked every window. The man and his wife clung to each other in the dark. Finally, the man called out, “I will not mention the witch to anyone.” And the vines receded.

  Every hour on the hour the barren woman closed her eyes and saw the man wherever he was, the woman wherever she was. Once the man passed his priest and hesitated. When he opened his mouth to speak, the thistle poisons revived, and his body was suddenly covered again with welts. His tongue was thick with infection. He covered his mouth and ran.

  Every hour on the hour the barren woman knew the child was hers.

  When the child was born, a girl-child, as the barren woman had known she would be, this woman took her and traveled over mountain after mountain. She kept going until she could no longer hear the wail of the woman from whose loins she had taken the babe. Then she kept going until she could no longer remember that wail. The crying woman would have other children. Of course she would. She was a breeder; one look told you that. But for the running woman, the escaping woman, this child was unique.

  She stopped at last on a small, high alm, several hours’ walk from a town. A good place to raise the child, to savor her without the interruptions of others. On her first visit to town, the people eyed her coldly. A woman alone with a child was suspect, of course. Still, they were willing to take her money, that money she had saved from her seamstress days, in return for the land on the alm and a small home.