id="u4d8ca4de-9159-5a95-bbca-82a036fe90e3">
JUDY BUDNITZ
If I Told You Once
For my grandparents,
Samuel and Phyllis Robbins
and
Max and Rose Budnitz
Contents
My family had lived in the same village for as long as anyone could remember. It was a place that lay buried in snow for nine months out of the year followed by three months of mud. It was the most desolate spot on earth and my family did not even realize it, because for generations they never ventured more than forty kilometers from the place. They were stubborn people.
It was a place where someone had forgotten to add the color: low gray clouds, crooked houses of weather-beaten wood, coils of smoke rising up from cookstoves and rubbish heaps. All the wives of the village cut from the same dull cloth to make clothes for their families. We ate gray bread. The men made a fermented liquor so colorless it was invisible, nothing but a raging headache stoppered in a jar.
People were simpler then. They kept their desires within reach. They had few possessions: a goat, a half-dozen chickens, a brass teapot, a cat so ugly it could kill mice merely by looking at them.
That was enough. After days cutting wood in the black forest with ice clogging their nostrils, the smell of a goat was a welcome thing.
In a place like that, the color of an egg yolk was something of a miracle.
My people were a clutching, clinging people. They had to be. What little they had, someone was always trying to snatch away.
I was born in violent times.
I am told I was a breach birth. My mother was in labor for more than thirty hours. I was her first child. All through her labor a winter storm ripped shingles from the roof. My father wanted to go for the midwife, but the violence of the storm kept him in. He could hear the evil spirits in the wind waiting to trick him, lead him in endless circles in the snow. People had been known to freeze to death just meters from their homes after getting lost on their way to the outhouse. My father paced in an agony of frustration.
In those times childbirth was the realm of midwives and women-friends. Men were forbidden to witness it, they were bad luck; they were kept out of the birthing room, often out of the house altogether. My mother writhed and moaned on the bed while my father stumped