Page 5 of Spinning Silver

I didn’t understand how she guessed how much each thing would be worth to someone else, when she didn’t care to keep them herself.

But little by little I learned to read the numbers she wrote down in her book when she valued the payments, and when I overheard the prices she got in the market, the two were nearly the same, every time.

I wanted to understand how she did it. But I didn’t ask.

I knew she only thought of me as a horse or an ox, something dull and silent and strong.

I felt so, around her and her family. They talked all the day it seemed to me: talked or sang or even argued.

But there was never shouting or raised hands.

They were always touching one another. Her mother would put a hand on Miryem’s cheek or her father would kiss her on the head, whenever she passed nearby.

Sometimes when I left their house at the end of the day, once I was down the road and into the fields and out of sight, I would put my hand on the back of my head, my hand that had grown big and heavy and strong, and I tried to remember the feeling of my own mother’s hand.

In my house there was only a silence like solid earth.

We had gone a little hungry all the winter, even me with my extra dinner.

I had a walk of six miles to go with it.

Now spring was here, but we were all still hungry.

When I walked home I picked up mushrooms and if I was lucky a wild turnip and whatever greens I saw.

There were not many. Most of them we could not eat.

Those went to the goats. Then in our garden I dug some of the new potatoes, which were too young to be worth eating but we ate them anyway.

I would cut off the smallest piece with an eye and bury it again.

I went inside and stirred up the coals under the pot that I had put on in the morning with our cabbage.

I put the small lumps of potatoes in with whatever else I had found.

We ate sitting around the table with our heads bent, never speaking.

Nothing grew well. The ground stayed packed hard and cold into April, and the rye grew sluggishly.

When at last Da was able to start planting beans, a week later snow fell again and killed half the plants.

That morning when I woke I thought it was still night.

But it was stone-grey outside, and snow was coming down so we could not see the neighbor’s fence.

Da started cursing and cuffed us out of bed.

We all hurried outside to bring in the goats, the five baby goats.

One of them was already dead. The rest we brought into the house with their mothers.

They brayed and chewed our blankets and nearly got into the fire, but they stayed alive.

After the snow stopped, we butchered the dead one and salted what little meat there was.

I made soup of the bones and we ate the liver and lungs. For one day we weren’t hungry.

Sergey could have eaten three times his share.

He was starting to get big himself. I thought he was hunting sometimes, even though he knew he would be hanged for poaching, or worse if he was taking them from the forest. The only animals we could take from the forest were the marked ones, the ones with some spot of black or brown.

But there were almost none like that left, and the white animals, all white, belonged to the Staryk.

I did not know what they would do to someone who hunted their animals, because nobody did it, but I knew they would do something.

You could not take anything from the Staryk that was theirs.

They came and stole from people, but they did not like it when anyone stole from them.

But sometimes Sergey came in and ate without looking up, without stopping, his full share, the same way I ate mine.

As if he knew he had eaten more than the others at the table.

So I thought he was hunting where no one else saw.

I did not tell him not to do it: he knew.

Anyway it was not the same in my house as the moneylender’s house.

I did not think the word love. Love was buried with my mother.

Sergey and Stepon were only more of the babies who made my mother sick.

They had not died, but so they had made even more work for her and now me.

They ate some of the food, and I had to spin the goats’ wool and knit and wash their clothes.

So I did not worry very much about what if the Staryk did something to Sergey.

I did think maybe I should tell him to bring me the bones to make soup, but then I thought, if we all ate, we would all be in trouble, and not worth it just for some cracked bones he had already sucked clean.

But Stepon did love Sergey. I had made Sergey take care of him, when my mother died.

I was eleven and I could spin, and Sergey was only seven years old, so Da let me.

By the time Sergey was big enough to go to the fields, he had gotten used to putting up with Stepon and didn’t push him back on me.

Stepon would follow him and keep out of the way and bring them water.

He helped with the goats, and together they could sleep warm out of the house if my father was angry, even in winter.

Sergey would cuff him sometimes but not very hard.

So Stepon came to me the day Sergey got sick.

It was not yet noon. I was working in the moneylender’s garden, cutting off the heads of their cabbages.

They were not really ready yet, but that night it had frozen a little, even though it was still early in autumn, and Miryem had said better to bring them in for what good they would be.

I kept an eye on the door. Soon it would open and the moneylender’s wife would call me inside for dinner.

That morning there had been a crust of stale bread in among the grain to go to the hens, and I had taken it myself and gnawed it up bit by bit, making it soft in my mouth with swallows of water out of the rain barrel, cold from under a crust of ice, but my belly was still pinched tight.

I was looking at the door again when Stepon cried, “Wanda!” He was leaning on the fence breathing in big gulps. “Wanda!”

When he shouted my name I jerked as though Da had come down on my back with a switch. “What is it?” I was angry with Stepon for coming. I didn’t want him there.

“Wanda, come,” he said, beckoning me. He never talked much. Sergey understood him without talking, most of the time, and when my father filled our house with his voice, he got out of it if he could. “Wanda, come.”

“Is something wrong at home?” The moneylender’s wife was standing in the doorway, with a shawl around her for the cold. “Go on, Wanda. I will tell Miryem I sent you home.”

I didn’t want to go. I guessed something had happened to Sergey, because that was why Stepon would come.

I didn’t want to give up my dinner to go help Sergey, who had never helped me.

But I couldn’t say so to the moneylender’s wife.

I got up and went silently out of the gate, and after we were down the road and into the trees I shook Stepon and said, angry, “Don’t ever come for me again.

” He was only ten, still small enough for me to shake.

But he only grabbed my hand and pulled me on.

I went with him. There was nothing else for me to do but go home and tell Da that Sergey had gotten himself into trouble, and that I wouldn’t do.

Sergey was not someone I loved, but he would not tell Da on me, and I would not tell on him.

Stepon kept trying to run. I began to catch the haste from him, so I would run a little way without thinking, and then I would stop running, and he would stop to catch his breath, and then he would start us going again.

We went the six miles in only an hour. A little way before we reached our house, he started to lead me off the road, into the forest. Then I began to be wary. “What has happened to him?” I demanded.

“He won’t get up,” Stepon said.

Sergey was at the creek where sometimes we had to go for water in the summer, if the stream closer went dry.

He was lying on his side on the bank. He did not look asleep.

His eyes were open, and when I put my finger on his lips I could feel that he was breathing, but there was nothing stirring in him.

His arms were heavy and limp when I tried to lift one.

I looked around. Half in the water next to him there was a white rabbit dead, with a string of rough twisted goat-hair around its leg.

It did not have any markings. There was frost all over the paths and ice creeping out of the edges of the creek.

So then I knew the Staryk had caught him hunting and taken his soul away.

I put his arm down again. Stepon looked at me as if he thought I would do something.

But there was nothing to do. The priest wouldn’t come to help us here so far from town, and anyway Sergey had been stealing when he knew better.

I did not think God would save you from the Staryk when it was your own fault.

I didn’t say anything. Stepon didn’t say anything, but he kept staring at me, as if he knew I could do something, until I began to feel in my own stomach that I could, too, even though I didn’t want to.

I closed my teeth together and tried not to think of anything to try, and then I tried to slap Sergey awake, and then to throw cold water in his face, even though I knew that was no good.

And it was no good. He didn’t stir. The water ran down over his face and some drops even slid into his eyes and then ran over them and came out again like tears, but he wasn’t crying, he was only lying there empty as a dead log rotted from inside.