Page 53 of Spinning Silver

I did not want to wake up, but I thought I heard Mama calling me in a voice that sounded like a bell ringing, so I opened my eyes.

The horses had snow on their backs and there was snow in the hollows of the fur coat that Panova Mandelstam had covered us with.

Everyone else had fallen asleep, too. I thought maybe I should wake them, but it was still snowing and very cold, and I thought we would probably not live until morning anyway.

It did not seem to be worth waking them up only for them to be afraid.

I was afraid, too, but then I heard a sound.

It was the ringing sound that had woken me up. It was not far away.

After a minute I made myself get out from under the fur coat.

It was very cold and I was shivering right away, but I went to the ringing sound, and in a little while I knew it was an axe, and then I stopped.

Someone was cutting wood, and I could not think who would be cutting wood in the middle of the night in the forest when it was snowing, because that was very strange.

But if they were cutting wood with an axe then they probably wanted the wood for a fire, and if they had a fire and they would let us come sit by the fire, then we would not die.

So I kept going. The ringing got louder until I saw the man cutting wood and first I thought it was Sergey, but then of course I knew it was not Sergey, it only looked like Sergey.

Then I said, “Sergey?” and he turned around, and it was Sergey, and I ran to him.

I thought for a moment maybe we were all dead and this was Heaven, like the priest talked about in church when Da took us, which he did once in a while if the priest saw him in town.

But I did not think I would be cold or hungry in Heaven.

I hoped we were not in Hell for killing Da.

“No, we are alive!” Sergey said. “Where did you come from?”

I took him by the hand and led him back to the big tree and showed him everyone else asleep. “But he is a spy,” I said, pointing at Algis. “The men in the village told him to tell them if we saw you.”

Sergey shrugged after a moment. He meant we could not leave Algis to freeze anyway, even if he was a spy, and even if he had forgotten to fill the grain bucket, and gotten us lost. I supposed that was true.

Also, if he had not gotten us lost, I would not have found Sergey, so maybe I could not be angry at Algis anymore.

We woke up the Mandelstams and Algis, and they were all very surprised to see Sergey, but of course they were glad, although Algis was afraid also, but even he was glad that there was somewhere warm to go.

Sergey went to the horses. One of them was dead, and the other one did not want to get up, but Sergey got his arms under the horse’s front legs and pushed up while Algis pulled on the reins and Panov Mandelstam and Panova Mandelstam and me all helped push from under, and finally the horse got up.

Sergey took us through the forest back to where he was chopping wood and then he kept going, and in a few steps more I could see a little firelight up ahead.

We all walked quicker once we saw it, even the horse.

There was a little house there with a chimney and a big shed with a heap of straw.

Sergey put the horse in the shed and it started eating the straw right away.

“There are oats inside,” Sergey said. “Go in.”

Wanda was inside the house, but she opened the door because she heard us.

Panova Mandelstam made a glad noise when she saw her and ran to Wanda and put her arms around her and kissed her cheeks.

I could tell that Wanda did not know what to do but she looked happy anyway, and she said, “Come in,” so we went into the house and it was very warm and there was a good smell of porridge.

There was only one chair and a log stump to sit on, but there was also a cot and a pallet on the top of the stove.

We gave Panova Mandelstam the chair and put her by the fire, and Wanda put a big blanket over her.

Panov Mandelstam sat on the stump next to her.

Algis sat down on the floor near the fire and huddled up.

Wanda told me to climb up on top of the oven and I did and I felt very warm.

“I will make tea,” Wanda said, and I wondered how she would make tea, and where the house had come from, but mostly I thought about how good it would be to drink hot tea, but I fell asleep again before it was ready.

I didn’t wake up again until it was early morning, and I heard a noise of wood rubbing against itself and felt cold air sweeping in on my head.

I picked up my head. I was still on top of the oven and Panova Mandelstam and Panov Mandelstam were sleeping on either side of me.

Wanda and Sergey were sleeping on the floor in front of the oven.

The sound was the door scraping shut. Algis was going out into the snow.

I put my head down again. Then I picked it up again and said, “Sergey!” but it was too late.

When we went outside, Algis was already gone.

He had taken the horse. Sergey had fed it oats and rubbed its legs and given it warm water to drink so it had gotten better by morning.

It was a big strong horse meant for pulling a sleigh.

With just Algis on its back I thought it would be fast. Probably if he just let the horse lead him, it would go back home to its stable.

He would tell everyone in the village where we were.

“We must try to get to Vysnia before the snow melts,” Panova Mandelstam said, while we sat around the table.

Wanda had made tea, and she was cooking porridge now for us all to eat before we left.

Sergey and Panov Mandelstam had brought in a few more stumps to sit on.

“We have food and warm coats. We will get out to the road and get someone to take us on to the city. No one will tell on us in the quarter, and there is some money in the bank. We will bribe someone to clear your names if we can. My father will know who to go to.”

“I must finish the mattress before we go,” Wanda said. She went and picked up the big blanket she had been knitting, and I saw it was not a blanket but a mattress cover. It was very pretty. There was a beautiful pattern in it of leaves.

“Wanda, this is beautiful work,” Panova Mandelstam even said, touching it. “You should bring it with you.”

But Wanda shook her head. “We need to fix the bed.”

I didn’t know why, but if she said so, then she had to. I looked at the cot and the mattress cover. “It is almost done, isn’t it?” I asked. “It is the right size.”

Wanda held up the blanket and it was the right size.

It was longer than she was. When she held up her hands over her head it still reached almost all the way to the floor.

She put it down again and I thought she looked a little scared even though I didn’t know why she would be scared because it was done, when she wanted it to be done.

“Yes,” she said. “I can finish it quickly now.”

“Wanda,” Panov Mandelstam said slowly, as if he wanted to ask a question, but Wanda shook her head fiercely, because she did not want to talk about it, and even though Panov Mandelstam liked words so much, he saw that she did not want to talk, so he stopped.

“It is all right, Wanda,” Panova Mandelstam said after a moment. “Go ahead and do what you need to do. I will make some more porridge.”

Wanda quickly sewed up two open sides of the mattress, and then she stuffed it with a big pile of wool, and then she sewed up the last bit of the mattress and put it on the cot.

The cot looked very pretty with the mattress on it.

Meanwhile Panov Mandelstam and I helped Sergey tidy up the yard and the shed.

We filled the woodbox again. It had gone empty overnight.

I didn’t know why the oven took so much wood, but now I knew why Sergey was cutting wood in the forest at night, and it was just as well he had been doing that.

Panova Mandelstam asked me to bring her a long stick, and she tied some straw around the bottom and swept the house.

The porridge was ready so we ate it. We went outside with our plates, which were just pieces of wood that Sergey had cut off a tree, and rubbed them with snow until they were clean.

We put them on a shelf inside the house.

Wanda made up another pot of porridge and put it into the ashes to cook, even though we were leaving.

She closed the door of the oven and we looked around.

The house looked nice and tidy. It was almost as big as our old house, but I liked it more.

The boards were close together and the oven was very solid and the roof was snug.

I was sorry to go away from it, and I thought Sergey and Wanda were sorry to go away too.

“Thank you for giving us shelter,” Wanda said to the house, as if it were a person. Then she picked up the basket and went outside. We all followed her out.

Minutes went slipping through my fingers with silver coins, vanishing as they changed to gold.

I was close enough to the doors now that I could hear the shovels ringing faintly in the other room, going quickly, whipped along by the same fatal deadline, but I didn’t allow myself to go and look and see how far they’d gotten.

We worked all through the night without stopping.

When the disk of the mirror began to glow with morning, I had to make myself keep changing them systematically: my head swam, nauseated, when I looked up and saw it.

There was still an entire rack left to change, and my first flinching terrified instinct was to madly turn out every last chest and try to change them all at once.

I closed my hands and eyes for a moment before I could go on.