Page 67 of Spinning Silver

Panova Mandelstam put her hand on my head and stroked it.

I liked how it felt. But she was already thinking about something else again.

She looked around the room as if she was looking for it and being worried about it.

“Are Wanda and Sergey all right?” I asked, because it made me remember I was worried.

I was so glad about the noise being so much better that I had forgotten for a second.

“Yes, they are downstairs,” Panova Mandelstam said. She sounded funny and far away because of the wax in my ears but I could still understand her.

So then I was glad again and not worried, but she was still worried, so I asked her, “What are you looking for?”

She stood there looking around the room and then she looked at me. “Do you know, I have forgotten. Isn’t that silly?” She smiled, but she didn’t mean the smile. It was not a real smile. “Do you want to come down and have some macaroons?”

I didn’t know what a macaroon was but I thought, if anyone would go down to the noise to eat them then they must be good, and I was sorry I couldn’t help her find what she had forgotten. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try.”

She put out her hand to me and I took it and we went downstairs together.

The noise got bigger but not as much bigger as I was afraid it would.

The closer we got the more it stopped being just thumping in my teeth.

Now I could hear music and people singing words even though the wax stopped me hearing what the words were.

They sounded happy. Panova Mandelstam brought me into a big room: big and crowded with many men.

I was afraid again, because some of them were red-faced and loud and smelled of drink, but they were not angry.

They were smiling and shouting laughter and dancing all together, holding hands and making a circle although it was not really a circle because the room was not big enough so they were mostly crammed in and stepping on each other, but they didn’t seem to mind.

I thought of being upstairs and holding hands with Wanda and Sergey: that was how it felt.

Sergey was with them, and in the middle of that circle there was a young man dancing and everyone else was taking turns going into the middle and dancing with him.

We went into the next room, and it was full of women dancing, with a woman in the middle in a dress that was red and had patterns on it in shiny silver, and she had on a veil hanging all the way almost to the floor and she was laughing and very pretty.

Panova Mandelstam took me to a table next to the wall with empty chairs and there was a plate on it full of cookies that were light and sweet and like a cloud someone had baked, and she put it in front of me and gave me some other food, too, so much food: thick slices of soft meat I had never eaten before that she said was beef, and roast chicken and fish and potatoes and carrots and dumplings and little green vegetables, and a big torn hunk of yellow soft sweet bread.

I sat there and I ate and ate and everyone was happy and I was happy, too, except Panova Mandelstam was sitting next to me and she was not happy.

She kept looking around the room for whatever she was trying to find, and it was not there.

People kept coming and talking to her, and when they talked to her, she would be distracted for a little while, and forget she was looking for something, but when they went away she would remember and start looking again.

“Where is Wanda?” I asked her.

“Wanda is in the kitchen, sweetheart, she has been helping carry the food,” Panova Mandelstam said, and I saw her then when she pointed, so it was not Wanda she was looking for. She was looking at the bride, dancing in the middle again, and she was trying to smile, but she kept stopping.

Everyone started clapping all together, and the men were coming into the room with the groom in front.

Everyone started to get up from their chairs and push all the chairs and tables out to the very edges of the room, and the women in their circle were making room so the men could be there in their circle also.

One of the men took a chair no one was sitting in and put it in the middle of their circle, and the groom sat down on it, and one of the women was putting down a chair for the bride in the middle of their circle, too.

I was waiting to see what they would do, but they didn’t do anything.

They stopped, suddenly, because someone knocked on the door.

It was so noisy in the room. Everyone had been singing and laughing and talking so loud it was almost shouting, because otherwise they couldn’t hear each other, and there was music playing.

But the knock was louder than all of it.

It was so loud and hard that it came in through the wax in my ears and the two lumps of it fell out to the floor.

But the noise of the room didn’t bother me anymore without the wax because after that knock, there was no noise left.

Nobody was talking and the music had stopped.

There were two big doors in the side of the room, which went out into the courtyard, and that was where the knock had come from.

After a moment another knock came. It felt the way the music had felt upstairs coming through the house.

It thumped like that. It thumped in my bones and it made me afraid.

Then Panova Mandelstam stood up and ran across the room suddenly, pushing through everyone else, and Panov Mandelstam was pushing from out of the men, and they took hold of the doors and pulled them open.

Nobody stopped them. I wanted to say No, no, no, but I couldn’t say anything.

I wanted to hide my head, but I thought I would imagine something worse than whatever it was.

But I wouldn’t have. It was the Staryk.

Sergey and Wanda were next to me. They had come to me when they heard the knocking and now they were standing with me, and Sergey had a hand on the back of my chair.

He was so tall he could see over everyone’s heads, and I heard him draw a breath and I thought he was afraid.

I was afraid too. Everyone was scared. It was the Staryk.

There were two of them with crowns on their heads, a king and queen.

They were holding hands, too. The king was as tall as Sergey.

The queen wasn’t, but her crown was so tall it almost made up for it.

It was all gold and she was in a dress of white and gold.

They stood there in the doorway and nobody moved.

Then a man stepped forward out of the crowd. He was old and he had a white beard and white hair. He stopped in front of the Staryk and said, “I am Aron Moshel. This is my house. What do you want here?”

The Staryk had drawn back when the old man said his name, and was looking down at him.

I was afraid that the Staryk was going to do something bad to him.

I thought he might put his hand on him and touch him and the old man would fall down and be lying on the floor the way Sergey had been lying in the woods, like there was nobody left inside him.

But instead the Staryk answered him, “We are come by invitation and by true promise given, to dance at the wedding of my lady’s cousin. ”

His voice sounded like a tree creaking when it is covered with ice.

Then he turned his head towards the queen, and then Panova Mandelstam made a noise, and the queen turned her head and looked at her, and I realized, she was not a Staryk after all.

She was just a girl in a crown, and she was crying, and so was Panova Mandelstam, and then I thought, that is her daughter, and I finally remembered after all: Panova Mandelstam had a daughter.

She had a daughter and her name was Miryem.

Everyone was still quiet, and then that old man Panov Moshel said, “Then come in and be welcome and rejoice with us,” and I thought No no no again, but it was not my house, it was his house, and the Staryk came inside with Miryem.

There were two empty chairs facing onto the dancing there, and they sat down in the chairs.

Even after that nobody was talking or moving.

But Panov Moshel turned back to the musicians and said, “This is a wedding! Play! Play the hora!” very hard and fierce.

Then the musicians started to play a little, and he began to clap with them, turning to face the rest of the room and showing us all his clapping, and then little by little everyone else started to clap, too, and stamp, like they were trying to make a noise big enough to stand up to that knocking on the door.

I didn’t think anything could do that. We were only people.

But the musicians started to play louder and everyone started to sing, and the song got bigger and bigger, and everyone around us was getting up to join the people already standing.

They took hands and they all started to dance again, everybody: children who were not as big as me got up and went to dance and so did very old people: they stayed on the outside mostly clapping, but everybody else was making big circles again dancing fast, one circle of men and one circle of women.

The bride and the groom were inside the circles, like everyone was keeping them safe.

The people in the circles all went into the middle, everyone putting up their hands at the same time, and then they came back out again.

Everyone was dancing except for me and Wanda and Sergey: we were outside watching and afraid, and on the other side of the circle, the Staryk king and Miryem were just sitting there in the chairs watching also.

He was still holding her hand in his. The circle was going by us full of strange people I didn’t know, but then I saw Panova Mandelstam coming towards us, and she let go of the woman next to her to reach out, and Wanda reached back to her.