Page 61 of Spinning Silver

After a while Panova Mandelstam came back up, and there was a girl with her, a tall strong young girl with her hair under a kerchief, carrying a big heavy tray with food on it, and she put it down on the table and then she nodded her head to Panova Mandelstam and went away.

I looked after her and I thought, that girl was me; there wasn’t even room here for me to carry things and bring things.

They already had someone in that place, too.

Stepon and Sergey went to eat right away, but I couldn’t feel hungry.

I was hungry, but there was a pain in my stomach when I looked at the food, and I said to Panova Mandelstam, “We are not any good to you here,” and I almost said, We should go, but I couldn’t, because we didn’t have anywhere to go, unless we did turn into birds and fly away.

Panova Mandelstam looked at me surprised.

“Wanda!” she said. “After all the help you have been to us? Am I to say, Oh, but what good is she to me now? ” She reached out and took my face in her hands and shook me a little back and forth.

“You are a good girl with a good heart. So much work you’ve done without a word of complaint.

Since you came into my house, I did not have to lift a hand.

Before I thought of doing a thing it was done.

I was sick, but because you were there helping, I grew well again.

And you never ask for a thing. It’s only what we press into your hands that you take. So now you must let me do it.”

“What you press in my hands is more than all I have!” I said, because it hurt to hear her saying those things that were not true, as if I had only come and helped her to be good, and not because I wanted silver, and wanted to be safe.

“Then you don’t have enough, and I have more than I need,” she said.

“Hush, sweetheart. You don’t have a mother anymore, but let me speak to you with her voice a minute.

Listen. Stepon told us what happened in your house.

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies.

That is what was in your house with you, all your life.

But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you.

You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away.

That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

And if there has been food in my house for you, then I am glad, glad with all my heart. I hope there will always be.

“Hush, don’t cry,” she said, and her thumbs were wiping tears from my face, though they were coming faster than she could take them away.

“I know you are afraid and worried. But there will be a wedding here today. It is a time to rejoice. For today we don’t let sorrow come into this house.

All right? Sit and eat, now. Rest a little while.

If you want, when you are not tired, come down and help me.

There is still work to be done, and it is happy work.

We will raise the canopy for the bride and groom, we will put food on the tables, and we will eat together and dance, and the wolf will not come in.

Tomorrow, we will think of other things. ”

I nodded without saying anything. I couldn’t say anything.

She smiled at me, and wiped more of my tears, and then she gave up trying to wipe them and just gave me a handkerchief out of her skirt and touched my cheek again and went out.

Sergey and Stepon were sitting at the table staring at the food on it.

There was soup, and bread, and eggs, and when I sat next to them, Stepon said, “I didn’t know it was magic, when you brought it home. I thought it was just food.”

I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.

In the morning Mirnatius thrust back the curtains early and set the servants scurrying before I had even sat up in bed; they brought us hot tea on a tray and warm bread with butter and jam, another plate of thick slices of ham and cheese: hearty food that was surely their best, though only a step up from peasant fare.

He made a face at it and only picked. I forced myself to eat, keeping my eyes downcast so as not to look at him in his luxuriously embroidered dressing gown, his hands and his mouth.

The fire was warm against my cheek, but my other cheek was hot also.

I kept remembering his fingers on my thigh, and my ring wouldn’t swallow up that heat.

He demanded a bath, and I had to endure that: they put it before the fire, and two serving-girls washed him while I tried not to watch their hands moving over his body, tried not to feel something like jealousy.

I wasn’t jealous over him, but over what he’d made me feel, that stirring that should have belonged to a man I would have let touch me; a man who would have wanted to touch me, who could really be my husband.

I wanted that shiver along my leg to be a gift I’d never expected; I wanted to be able to look at him in his bath and blush and be glad for it.

And instead I had to deliberately look away, because if I had my way, tonight I’d throw him down into a pit with a Staryk king, and bury them both, and marry myself off to a brutish man as old as my father.

Magreta crept in timid-brave, with her comb and brush, to do my hair; her hands on my shoulders asked a trembling question I couldn’t answer anymore.

She’d told me some time ago, in quick prosaic terms, the way between a man and a woman, when I was still young enough to think it sounded silly and to promise without hesitation never to let a man do it until we were married.

“Not that you’ll be left alone with any men, dushenka,” she’d added, belatedly, stroking my hair: she’d been passing on a speech that someone had given to her, a long time ago; a speech she’d listened to and obeyed for all her days.

Some years later on from there, when I’d been old enough to understand what marriage meant for a duke’s daughter, and why I would never be left alone with any man long enough to choose anything at all until my choices were gone, she’d told me of it all over again comfortingly, as something to be endured: not too bad, it’s only a few minutes, it won’t hurt much, and only the first time.

I had been too old to be comforted so, however.

I understood that she was lying, without knowing exactly how she was lying; perhaps it would hurt every time and perhaps it would hurt a great deal and perhaps it would go on for ages—a wide array of unpleasant possibilities.

I’d even asked her how she knew, and she’d gone pink and embarrassed and said, “Everyone knows, Irinushka, everyone knows,” and that meant she didn’t really know at all.

But she’d never told me about other possibilities, about why she’d made me promise in the first place.

Now I wondered if she’d ever been hungry this way, and how she’d stifled that hunger; what crust of bread she had pressed into her mouth to keep from swallowing up the seeds of a disaster.

I sat with her hands slowly braiding my hair and my hands were clasped in my lap, the silver of my ring lit gold by flame-reflections, like my husband’s skin, sheened with amber light as he stepped dripping wet from the bath.

He stood like a statue before the wide fireplace before me as the serving-girls wiped the droplets from him with soft cloths: a little too lovingly, which I tried not to notice.

They were both very pretty, of course, chosen to please the tsar’s eye.

But he only twitched his shoulders like a horse shivering away flies and said with sharp impatience, “My clothes.” They left off hurriedly as his own body servants from the palace shooed them away and brought him his garments, silk and velvet laid on in layers as carefully as my father’s armor, under a sharp critical commentary from him all the while, dissatisfied with this crease or that bulge.

I was already dressed. The servants bowed to Mirnatius when he dismissed them, and then turned to me as Magreta set the crown upon my newly braided hair.

They stood in silence a moment before me, looking, and then they all bowed again, lower; the two serving-girls curtseyed deep, and slipped out of the room hand in hand with their baskets of cloths and soap on their other arms, whispering to each other wistfully.

Mirnatius watched them all with more baffled indignation and then abruptly seized his book from where the satchel lay against the wall.

Without even sitting down, he roughly drew my face again in quick furious lines and turned to catch one of the servants still going back and forth emptying buckets out of the tub.

“Look at this! Is this a beautiful face?” he demanded.

The poor man was very alarmed, of course, and looked at the picture only trying to divine what answer the tsar wanted; he stared at it and said, “It’s the tsarina?” at once, and then he looked up at me, and looked back down at it, and looked helplessly at the tsar.

“Well?” Mirnatius snapped. “Is it beautiful or not?”

“Yes?” the man said faintly, in desperation.

Mirnatius ground his teeth. “ Why? What about it is beautiful? Look at it and tell me, don’t just bleat whatever you think I want to hear!”

The man swallowed, terrified, and said, “It’s a good likeness?”

“ Is it?” Mirnatius said.

“Yes? Yes, very good,” the man said, hastily more definite as Mirnatius stepped towards him. “But I am no judge, Majesty! Forgive me!” He bent his head.

“Let him go,” I said, in pity, “and ask the boyar instead.”