Behold

by Barker, Clive

  The boy entered his home next door. His heart pounded, but he could say nothing to his mother. Her terror at his tale, his curse, would be too great to bear.

  He wondered if, tomorrow, he should tell the little girl—his best friend!—what he had seen. He went to sleep thinking of what he might say. The undeniable pleasure he would find in her belief.

  This is how the village lives: on and on, loving, fearing, made and unmade, the years knit one into the next.

  ***

  The years pass. The girl grows into a woman; the boy grows into a man.

  They remain the closest of friends—they have cared for one another (their parents assure them of this) since they were toddling babes. They share their secrets; they make one another laugh. When they are old enough, they share kisses. Dreams. Aspirations.

  They fall in love. Or perhaps it is more truthful to say their love only deepens as it must. To the surprise of no one, least of all the knitter, they are, in their eighteenth year, betrothed.

  Look at our boy, now grown into a good man, brawny and big. He cares about the welfare of others; he loves and is loved. He is not a leader—he’s too dreamy, too much a jokester, for that—but he is a fine craftsman; he works with wood, builds and repairs boats, as his father does. He can wrestle, brawl, but the woman loves him for his secret sweetness, his inherent stillness and peace.

  Look at our girl, grown now into a good woman, curved and lithe. She is smart, sly. She teases everyone, but never cruelly; she never minds being teased. She learns and betters her parents’ craft: how to brew beer from the grains of the fields. They send jugs of it in carts to the neighboring villages and to the city; this makes them wealthy. She daydreams too much, her parents say, but the man loves her daydreams; she returns from them bettered, cheered. She longs to see the ocean, with him.

  When they are in their nineteenth year, the man and the woman wed. On the morning of their wedding they hold hands and offer a salute to the rising sun and—after a long day of revelry and games, during which time their hands never part—they bid farewell to the sun as it sets. Then they walk, swaying with drink, to their home: a house the man has spent the last year building, one the woman has, by tradition, up until now been forbidden to enter.

  But one night, weeks ago, when the outer walls and roof of the house were complete, the woman waited until her family slept and sneaked away into the cool night. She took with her a candle, one she lit only when she had crept, her heart thumping, inside the house. In the dark she passed a knitter and did not know it. It drew its needles close to its chest and watched her from a corner of the parlor as she beheld, with fear and awe, the place she would love and live and make children. She was pleased, then. Pleased with the house; pleased with the man for making it so well. She could feel his love in the walls, in the complicated joins of the wood, everything sanded smooth.

  She thought of the children she would raise. The making of them—here, in the bedroom, in a wide feather bed. For a moment, standing above the place the bed would be, she was ashamed of herself. She should have waited, seen it new, drunk and exhausted from dancing, wearing nothing but a bride’s good fortune.

  But, she assured herself, perhaps it was better to know. She could live, and love, with the knowing.

  The knitter loomed behind her, and bumps rose on her arms and calves; she brushed them down. The knitter reached out a needle and touched its point to the end of a single strand of her hair. The woman blew out her candle and crept home to her bed.

  The next night she found the man at sunset, alone by the riverbank. She put a finger to his lips. Kissed him. Pulled him down to the ground and, for the first time, urged him into her. He gasped, which she liked. They rolled in the dirt and grass and laughed, and she felt none of the pain the old women had promised. She felt a great deal of pleasure. So many lies had been told to her; she was sure she would never tell them to her daughter. She was sure they would one day make a daughter.

  ***

  After their wedding the husband and wife take a barge downriver and stay for the first time in the city. They hold hands as they walk the streets and canals. They eat honeycakes sold from wheeled carts. They observe wrestling matches and magicians pulling coins from empty palms and mouths and ears. They see an old woman swallow fire. They wear blue ribbons around their wrists, which signal to all who meet them that they are newlyweds, and not to be robbed. They are given many free sweets, and old men bless the woman’s belly. They carry money gifted to them by their families, and with it they purchase a room in an inn overlooking the ocean. Here, on the second night of their stay, listening to the intoxicating crash of the waves, they conceive a child.

  Do knitters live in the city? Who do you suppose built such a place? The palaces, the cathedrals, the catacombs where the knitters, in the dark, add to and subtract from the piled skulls and bones?

  On the third day of our couple’s visit, they are handed a square of peppermint by a kindly woman from the rounded doorway of her candy shop; after she does so a knitter rises behind her and the woman is thereafter gone, but our couple does not see this, does not see how the neighborhood children drift inside her shop, curious, when she does not close up at dusk. The children know before anyone else what has happened, because the knitter has allowed them, for a time, to remember the woman, who sometimes gave them treats and sometimes beat them, as stormy and unpredictable as the goddess of the seas. Her absence fills them with terror—the knitter could be anywhere! It could still be here (it is)! And yet they steal her candies and her chocolate and her pots still half-full with butter frosting. The next day the building that contained her shop is gone, and all the children but one remember nothing.

  (Look at that child, sobbing, watching the waves beat the shore. She will grow old, carrying a perfect candy store within her, and the memory of a woman no one else knows. She must always carry this story, ended without resolution, and she is cursed, cursed, cursed.

  She grows up to become a poet, mocked and reviled.

  Why must she suffer so?

  Find a knitter and ask it, child.)

  The couple returns to their village. The woman knows, already, that she is pregnant.

  She does not tell her husband, or her mother. Truth be told, she hoped conception would take longer. Even though she wants a child, sometimes longs for a child, she has never before felt so serene as now: her girlhood safely packed into a trunk and stored in memory, her motherhood hovering like a distant cloud above her future. She is, now, in the cooling autumn afternoons, simply a woman, a wife; these are the new rooms through which she walks, and she finds them absorbing and pleasingly strange.

  One night, in the seaside inn, she dared to imagine herself as barren. She thrilled at the thought, and, guilty and flushed, pulled her husband to her. What harm would come from imagining such a thing in the private and humid dark? Who was there to hear?

  Only the knitters and gods, goes the old saying, and only one such creature shared the room with her and her husband.

  The man, though, is eager for a baby. A son. Yes, a daughter, too—he would like many children, as many as his wife will bear him, and in the meantime he certainly likes the making of them. He is religious, through and through; he is a good man, but not prone to questioning any of the laws and customs to which he is beholden. Why would he? They work, by and large, to his benefit. For this reason most of all he wants a son, a boy with whom to share in his good fortune, a boy to whom he may teach his craft and cede the riches of the world. Sometimes, when he has finished filling his wife, and she sleeps soft beside him, he presses his cheek to her belly and thinks, hurry now. The rest of his life, fatherhood, cannot come quickly enough.

  When the the wife and husband walk past them, hand in hand, the people of the village say: It is as if they were made for one another.

  Well.

  People say: They are lucky.

  Are they? You’ve seen the knitter. The way it has kept them close. Know that as t
he years pass it remains with them, unseen. Know that it continues to visit them—not only in moments of joy, but in the moments of loss and regret and doubt that sometimes come upon both wife and husband from, seemingly, nowhere: the sudden irrational moments of fear that befall them (as they befall all of us), the moments in which they are sure, sure, that their life has changed, passed them irrevocably by, when their backs were turned.

  The thought that comes upon each of them, from time to time:

  I have lost something. Something precious to me. But I cannot remember what it is.

  ***

  The world blooms and fades, blooms and fades.

  Much is made; much is lost.

  I must tell you something more.

  ***

  One afternoon, ten years and some months after their marriage and trip to the city by the sea, the man and the woman return from a picnic together on the shores of the river, just before sunset. This is springtime; the air is warming but not warm. They are dressed in jackets and boots. They are still in love, despite, after all this time, remaining childless.

  The fact of it saddens both of them, in different ways. To be childless is to be unlucky. The people of the village do not know how to speak to the childless. When the woman mentions her troubles, offhandedly, to her friends, all of them mothers, she feels grief in their silences. Pity. She grows angry at them—but in those evenings, after, she makes sure to draw her husband close, to try, yet again.

  She still loves him, more fiercely now than ever. Know this. Even when her blood comes, she thinks, I am not unlucky. Not with this man, this life.

  The man feels the grief even more deeply than he lets on. It staggers him, sometimes. For a long while he struggled, as the years passed and his wife’s belly remained flat, to remember his happiness. A man is judged, in this place, by the children he can make, by the strength of his sons and the beauty of his daughters. Nevertheless, he loves his wife, her quiet courage and cheer; he has always enjoyed time spent with her alone. He turns his energies to his boats, and becomes renowned along a hundred miles’ worth of river towns for the splendor and sturdiness of his barges. He and his wife grow more and more wealthy. Over the years he builds extra rooms onto their home, but this is only to pass the time. No children come to fill the spaces he has made.

  But if the sadness ever threatens to overwhelm him, he has only to look at his wife, and behold her persistent happiness in the face of their fate. He has only to see her pleasure in him. He is humbled, but as the years pass he comes to understand: He is not unlucky. Not with this woman beside him, not with this life. He could lead a childless life with no one else.

  After their picnic, they make love, in the same spot they chose that first time, when they were children. They like to revisit it, now and again. In the silence afterwards he rebraids her hair and they gossip, her warm back pressed against his knees. She falls silent as the stars begin to glow through the deep blue dusk, and husband and wife are purely and simply happy, wordless, full.

  They have been given a gift.

  Know this. Live with the knowing.

  As they walk along the dirt path home, however, they are stopped by a merchant selling metalware out of a wagon drawn by snorting mules. He is coming from the city, visiting villages upriver. They have not seen him in over a year, but he is known to them.

  What luck, he exclaims, that he has seen them! They are his favorite customers, and they will have first pick of his wares! The wife selects a new pot; the husband a hammer and chisel. The merchant rubs his beard, happy and fat.

  Then, when they have finished, he says, Ah! Wait!

  He digs in his bag and then hands them a small toy: a rearing horse, crafted from black iron. Then he produces a small iron star hanging from a necklace of fine blue silk, with a blue glass bead suspended in its center

  Here, he says. Please take this stallion, for your strong, handsome son. And this charm for your lovely little girl. Lovely like her mother, yes!

  The couple do not take these gifts. The merchant has mistaken them for another couple, and they do not wish to insult him, or admit their own sadness. The merchant will be appalled at his mistake, when he realizes. They wait for this to happen.

  Please, the merchant says.

  The husband clears his throat and says, Perhaps you have mistaken us for someone else.

  The merchant straightens, pulls back his gifts. An understanding dawns on his face, and it is horrible to behold his shock and fear.

  Of course, he says. You must forgive me.

  The merchant takes a copper teakettle from a hook and hands it to the woman without meeting her eyes: You must accept this. It is my apology, and it is not enough.

  He is formal, now, which unsettles them further.

  The woman takes the teakettle, lowers her chin in thanks. Then the merchant whips the mules and rattles away, muttering. The husband turns and sees him make a sign against evil, then hunch his shoulders against the growing dark.

  Perhaps that is when they first begin to know.

  ***

  Nevertheless, the man says, when they are home: It was only a mistake.

  A mistake, the wife agrees.

  This is a plausible explanation. The merchant travels for a living. He meets many, many villagers; he meets many children. He is an old man, and old men’s memories are fragile things—mats woven, as the saying goes, of dry grass.

  And yet the woman wonders. She cannot help but wonder. She can see the house’s two extra rooms, the ones the husband built some years ago for their guests and her weaving and books. She stands in their dark doorways and can almost hear, from inside, the cries and laughter of children. She feels a pull at her breasts.

  In the kitchen the man stares at the teakettle, turns it in his hands. He thinks of the emptiness in his life, the terrible loss he cannot help but apply to it. He remembers, for the first time in a long while, the knitter of his boyhood, unmaking the tree.

  It cannot be.

  Yet, in the middle of that night, the woman wakes, crying, from a terrible dream. A dream of a girl, a boy, their round faces and runny noses. A dream of the smell of their skin, milk and sweat and sugar and sage.

  Why? she asks her husband, who rubs her back.

  I don’t know, he says.

  Why can’t we remember?

  The man tells her the truth: We would die of sadness.

  They rise from bed. The woman draws a shawl around her shoulders. She walks with a candle from room to room, the floorboards cold beneath her feet. The man follows. The woman kneels in a room stacked high with books, all the frivolous lies and stories that have filled her childless hours.

  Which one of them lived in here? she asks, and the husband knows she is not addressing him.

  It’s as though she can see the knitter in the corner, its head cocked, watching.

  What were their names? the woman asks. At least let me remember their names.

  I’ve known, the man says. He, too, is addressing the dark. I’ve always known you would take something else.

  He kneels beside his wife, holds her shoulders. The shudders that wrack her are new to him; she has always been the brave one. They fill him with terror, and then he shakes too.

  Take us, the woman says to the dark. Take us to them.

  The man holds her and bows his head.

  The knitter regards them, their kneeling forms, their tender scalps. Can it hear their voices? Feel their terror, their agonies, their grief that has no name?

  It extends a needle, then the other. The points make infinitesimal adjustments. It makes and unmakes. Its motions are slow, considerate. They might, if someone were to witness them, be mistaken for acts of love.

  ***

  Then the husband and wife are slumbering in bed, holding tightly to one another. They dream of nothing, want for nothing.

  In the morning they will wake and remember nothing of the merchant. They will remember, rather, their lazy lovemaking by the river. A
beautiful evening, one that has somehow—for reasons to which they cannot put words—become sweeter in the intervening hours. A night like few living people ever experience. A treasure.

  A dog sleeps on the foot of the bed. The dog is new; it has been made. Its mind is filled with love and awe for the woman and the man. It would kill to protect them. For them it would fight the dragon at the heart of the world.

  It kicks its paws as it dreams.

  ***

  For a time the knitter watches them sleep.

  Then it lopes slowly from room to room within the house the man and woman have made. In the kitchen it causes to vanish three sweet rolls, a head of garlic, a speck of dust. In the parlor it removes a section of string from the wife’s oud, then a mouse, crouched and trembling. By the fireplace it takes the head of a single match.

  Then it returns to the bedroom, where it crouches for a long time, still, waiting, before jabbing out and seizing an evil spirit, a small chittering vapor only a knitter could perceive.

  I can tell you this: The spirit, the size of a lock of hair, would have, the next day, burrowed into the sleeping woman’s breast, where it would have then caused the tissue to warp and fester.

  Does the knitter feel anything, as it unmakes the spirit—begging for its life, its screams like the whistling of a teakettle?

  Does the knitter feel anything, later that night, when it rises behind the metal merchant, half-slumbering near the coals of a fire, and causes him, and his cart, and the heat of the fire, to vanish?

  Did it feel anything a year before, almost to the night, when it loomed up, invisible, behind a young girl and her brother as they waded in the shallows of the river? When it caught the stuff of the world around its needles, on either side of the children? When it pulled them with it back into the endless dark velvet of the Unmade?