If I Told You Once: A Novel by Judy Budnitz

the platform over the sea of shoulders and shawl-bound heads. And I gasped for I saw the man with the brilliant eyes rise up, his clothes all spattered with blood, and he smiled and faced the crowd and bowed his thanks. He had risen from the dead, and yet he smiled as if it were all a game. I stood amazed, but no one else seemed to acknowledge the miracle, it was mine alone.
    Then I was frightened. I realized the crowd pushing around me would be disappointed. They had been cheated out of their sacrifice; now they would demand that he be killed again.
    But they only roared their approval, and I looked around and saw tears on the faces of some of the women; they had been as engrossed as I, their babies draped forgotten over their arms.
    Then the other people on the stage came forward and bowed their heads, and I saw the tension run out of their bodies, they sagged and their faces relaxed and lost their sharpness, and suddenly they looked as ordinary as the people around me.
    I had to have it explained to me that they were actors, that it was an entertainment, that it was all fancy words and foil swords and chicken’s blood.
    I understood this and felt foolish, but a part of me refused to understand, a part of me clung to the sight of him opening his eyes, rising to his knees and standing and mocking death with a smile and I knew it had been something miraculous.
    People poured out the doors and into the night. The sky had cleared and the stars were sharp and piercing and seemed close enough to touch. Women walked homeward pressed closer to their husbands than before; small boys made swordplay with sticks.
    I paced in circles that night, wearing a path deep in the snow, and in the morning I watched the actors packing up their wagons. They were a traveling theater company, and were on their way to the next town.
    I happened to see the young man, black hair falling over his forehead as he washed the blood from his clothes. He looked smaller than he had seemed on stage, but the color of his eyes had not changed. He hung the clothes from the back of one of the wagons to dry, then rubbed his hands together, flexed his fingers. He opened a black case and drew out an instrument; I later learned it was a violin.
    He tucked it beneath his chin and began to play. The other actors shouted and whistled at him; and three women, they were the three beggar-women who had collected money at the doors the night before, they began to snap their fingers, and they straightened up against the humps in their spines and lifted their skirts high above their bony knees and laughing wildly they began to whirl and dance.
    Then all was ready, wagons piled high and horses puffing in the cold. The actors climbed in and they set out, passing a bottle of liquor around and talking loudly. The young man jumped up onto the back of the last wagon without ceasing his playing for a moment.
    The music trailed after them a long time.
    And after the music faded, the wagon tracks were clear in the snow to show where they had been.
    I followed after.
    Only because they were heading in the same direction as me.
    No other reason.
    I walked as quickly as I could. Only because of the cold.
    When they stopped in the next town I did too, and that night I sat in a crowded hot room that reeked of wet wool and watched their performance. I thought the luster would be gone now that I knew it was all artifice. But instead it was better than before. The young man raved and tore at his hair and I could not take my eyes off him. He was familiar, he touched something deep in me. This time I followed the story more closely, I saw how he was alone and suspicious in a world that conspired against him, how he argued with the queen his mother and cast longing looks at a lady with a thick curtain of golden hair and fluttering hands. I felt a guilty satisfaction when she died.
    And at the end, when the stage erupted in noise and confusion and he fell amid flashing swords in a most graceful