Page 19 of Spinning Silver

“Wanda,” Miryem said to me, the morning after she came back, “will you take this to Oleg’s house?

I forgave him a kopek for waiting for me, in Vysnia.

” She gave me a written receipt, but she didn’t meet my eyes as she asked.

There were red scratches across the back of her jaw and cheek, as though a branch had caught her there, or something with claws.

I said, “Yes, I will go.” I put on my shawl and took the note, but when I came to Oleg’s house, down the lane and around a corner, I stopped across the street and stood watching.

Two men were carrying away his body to the church.

I saw his face for a moment. His eyes were open and staring, and his mouth was blue.

His wife was sitting huddled near the stables.

The neighbors were converging on the house with covered dishes.

One of them stopped in front of me. I had met Varda: she had still owed a small sum when I had started collecting, and she had paid the balance off with three young, laying chickens.

She said to me sharply, “Well? What do you want in this house? The flesh of the dead?”

Kajus was coming to the house too with his wife and son, carrying a big steaming jug of krupnik. “Come now, Panova Kubilius, it is Sunday. Surely Wanda is not collecting,” he said.

“He earned a kopek off his debt for driving Miryem to Vysnia,” I answered. “I came to bring the receipt.”

“There, you see,” Kajus said to Varda, who scowled back at him and me both.

“A kopek!” she said. “One less for his poor wife to take out of her children’s mouths to fatten the Jew’s purse. Give it to me! I will take it to her, not you.”

“All right, Panova,” I said, and gave her the paper. Then I went back to Miryem and told her that Oleg was dead, outside his own stables, found lying frozen and staring blindly upwards, his horse and sledge put away.

She heard me out silently, and said nothing. I stood with her a few moments, and then because I could think of nothing else to do, I said, “I will go and feed the goats,” and she nodded.

The next day I was collecting out of town, down the east road.

Everyone had heard by then. They asked me if it was true and were sorry when I said it was.

Oleg had been a big cheerful man who would buy beer and vodka for friends in the roundhouse during winter, and he would bring a widow a load of firewood when he was driving one for himself.

Even my father, when I came home and told him, exclaimed in regret.

When they buried him on Tuesday, his widow was the only one of the mourners who came back from the churchyard with dry eyes.

Everyone spoke of it, but not as a thing that the Staryk had done. His heart had burst, they said, shaking their heads. It was sad when such a thing happened to a strong man, a big healthy man. But it was not strange to anyone that he had frozen to a block during a deep winter night.

I did not say anything about it to anyone, except to Sergey, when we stood in the road together, with the woods silent and bright in moonlight.

He was on his way to stay the night again.

Miryem hadn’t told him to stop coming, even though he couldn’t do anything to stop the Staryk.

She hadn’t stopped paying us our pennies, either.

Most of the time we were able to forget, to convince ourselves he was only coming to look after the goats.

So he kept going, and ate two meals a day in their house, and we buried the pennies by the white tree on our way home.

“Do you remember?” I asked him, and he went still. We had never spoken of what had happened to him in the wood, never.

He did not want to talk of it, I could tell, but I stood with him, my silence asking for me, and at last he said, “I was cleaning a rabbit. He rode out of the trees. He told me the woods were his and I was a thief. Then he said…” Sergey stopped, gone strange and hollow-faced, and shook his head.

He did not remember, and he did not want to remember.

“Did he ride a thing with claws on its hooves? And wear shoes with a long toe?” I asked, and Sergey nodded once.

So it was the same one: not only a Staryk, but a Staryk lord, and if he had not lied, he was lord of the whole forest. I had heard people say in the market that it went all the way to the shores of the northern sea.

A great lord of the Staryk was coming to Miryem for gold, and if she could not give it to him, I knew we would find her dead in her yard, with curled-toe boot prints around her.

And then there would be no more debt to pay.

As soon as he heard she was dead, my father would tell me I was done with payments.

He would be ready to shout away Miryem’s father, but he wouldn’t even have to.

Her mother would have eyes red with weeping, but even in her grief she would think of me.

The next time I came, she would tell me that the debt was paid, that I had done enough.

To keep working, I would have to tell my father they were paying me, and then he would take the coin.

Every day he would come home from town drunk, and take my penny, and hit me to go and get his dinner.

And it would be like that every day after, forever.

“We could tell him we were being paid, but less,” I said to Sergey, but he looked doubtful, and I understood.

Our father suspected nothing now. Why would anyone pay us, when he was sending us for free, and they did not have to?

But if we told him we were being paid, so he would let us keep going, then he would become suspicious.

He would go and demand of Miryem’s father how much we were being paid, and Panov Mandelstam would answer him honestly.

We could not ask him to lie for us. He would only look at us with distress, that we wanted to lie to our father, and be sorry he could not help us.

And once our father knew we had lied about how much we were being paid, then he would ask how much we had been paid.

And then he would know that there was money somewhere, that we had hidden.

And for hiding money from him, he would not beat us with the belt or his big hand, he would beat us with the poker, and he might not even stop once we told him where it was.

The church bells ringing for Oleg, when they buried him three days later, sounded like his sleigh bells, ringing too high in a forest of white trees.

They would find me frozen just like him, if I didn’t give the Staryk his gold, but I equally had to fear what would happen if I did.

Would he put me on his white stag behind him, and carry me away to that cold white forest, to live there alone forever with a crown of fairy silver of my own?

I had never felt sorry for the miller’s daughter before, in the story the villagers told; I’d been sorry for my father, and myself, and angry.

But who would really like it, after all, to be married to a king who’d as cheerfully have cut off your head if you didn’t spin his straw into gold?

I didn’t want to be the Staryk’s queen any more than I wanted to be his slave, or frozen into ice.

I couldn’t forget him anymore. He was in the corner of my mind all the time now, creeping farther over it every day, a little more like frost on a windowpane.

I started up in my bed, gasping every night, shivering with a chill inside me that my mother’s arms couldn’t drive away, and the memory of his silver eyes.

“Can you get him the gold?” Wanda asked me that morning, as abruptly as before.

I did not need to ask whom she meant. We were tending the goats, and my mother was in the yard, only a few feet away, so I couldn’t burst into tears even if I had wanted to; she and my father were already suspicious, watching me with a puzzled and worried look.

I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to keep my noise of protest in.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “Yes, I can get the gold.”

Wanda didn’t say anything, only stared at me with her mouth a straight hard line, and my throat tightened.

“If,” I said to her, “if something should take me from home for a time—you’ll stay on and help my father?

He’ll keep paying you. He’ll make it double,” I added, desperate suddenly.

I thought of my mother and my father alone in the village without me, but with all the anger I had brewed in every house turned against them.

For a moment I was in the clearing again, floundering in the snow with Oleg’s twisted face above me, not frozen but flushed and red and hateful.

Wanda didn’t answer me for a moment, and then she said slowly, “My father will want to keep me home.” She raised her head from the trough and looked at me sideways.

I stared at her in surprise, but I understood, of course.

She was not giving her father the money; he would never want her to stay home if she was bringing him a penny a day. She was keeping it herself.

I kept brushing the goat, thinking this over.

All this time I had thought I was bargaining with her father, not her, and all I needed to do was give him a little bit of money, more than he could get from a daughter’s work on the farm.

It had not occurred to me that she would want the money herself.

“Do you want it for a dowry?” I asked her.

“No!” she said, very fiercely.

I couldn’t understand, otherwise, why she would want to keep the money hidden.

I had paid her already twelve pennies, for her and her brother, and she still wore her old ragged dress, and her basket-woven shoes, and when I had gone to Gorek’s house, that first time, collecting, the whole farm had looked as poor as dirt.

They could have spent twelve pennies ten times over.

Slowly I asked, “What did your father do with the six kopeks he borrowed?”