Page 92 of Spinning Silver

Sergey and I went back to Pavys three weeks later, once Papa Mandelstam was all the way better, and he and Stepon could look after the fruit trees while we were gone.

All of them were growing very well anyway.

Sergey had gone back out to the road and got the farmer who had the barn with the flowers to come and help him cut down some trees, for a share of the wood, and clear some land.

We took that wood to Vysnia and sold it in the market there and bought the seedling trees: apples and plums and sour cherries. All of them were in flower.

While Papa Mandelstam was getting better, he wrote us many letters to take: one letter for everyone who still owed him a debt.

“We have been lucky,” he said, “so now let us be generous. It was a hard winter for everyone.” I think he also thought that if we came with those letters, then everyone in town would be happy more than they would want to hang us.

We took the tsar’s letter with us, too, but after all, the tsar was far away.

We did not have to worry that they would come and get us, because nobody was spending time on hunting for us: all the work that everyone would have done in spring, they had to do now, in a big hurry, because it was already beginning to be summer.

But we were still surprised when we drove into town.

Panova Lyudmila was standing in her yard sweeping it and she called to us, “Hello, travelers! Do you need a meal on the road?” and we looked at her and then she saw who we were and shrieked and threw up her hands and some men came running, and they all stopped and stared at us and one of them said, “You aren’t dead! ” as if he thought we should have been.

“No,” I said, “we are not dead, and we have been pardoned by the tsar,” and I took out the letter and opened it and showed it to them.

There was a big noise for a while. I was glad Stepon was not with us.

The priest came and the tax collector, who took the letter and read it out loud in a big voice, and everyone in town listened to it.

The tax collector handed the letter back to me and bowed and said, “Well, we must all have a toast to your good fortune!” and they brought tables and chairs out of the inn and out of Panova Lyudmila’s house and jugs of krupnik and cider, and everyone had a drink to our health.

Kajus did not come, and neither did his son.

I was very puzzled the whole time why they thought we were dead, but I did not want to ask.

Instead I brought out the letters from Panov Mandelstam and gave them to all the people who were there, and the ones who were not, I gave to the priest, to give to them.

Then everyone was really happy, and they even drank a toast to Panov Mandelstam’s health.

After that we went to the Mandelstams’ house and packed everything into the cart.

Panova Gavelyte was the only one who was not happy to see us.

I think she had planned to tell Panova Mandelstam that the goats and the chickens were hers now and Panova Mandelstam could not have them back.

But she knew about the tsar’s letter like everyone by then so when me and Sergey came she only said, “Well, those are theirs,” and pointed to some thin sickly goats.

But I looked in her face and said, “You should be ashamed.” Then I went and took all of the right goats, ours and theirs, and we tied them to the end of the cart.

I went and got all the chickens too, and packed them into a box.

We took the furniture and the things off the shelves and packed it all carefully, and the ledger we put under the cart seat carefully covered with a blanket.

Then we were done and we could go back, but Sergey sat on the wagon seat silently and did not start driving, and I looked at him, and he said, “Do you think anyone buried him?”

I did not say anything. I did not want to think about Da.

But Sergey was already thinking about him, and then I was thinking about him also.

And I would keep thinking about him there, on the floor of the house, not buried.

And Stepon might start thinking about it too.

So Da would always be there on the floor, even once he was not anymore. “We’ll go,” I said finally.

We drove the cart out to our old house. The rye was growing.

It was full of weeds because nobody was taking care of it, but it was still tall and green.

We stopped the cart in the field so the goats and the horses could eat some of it, and then we went to the white tree.

We put our hands on it together. It was quiet.

Mama was not there anymore, and the tree outside our house did not speak to us.

But Mama did not need to talk to us out of a tree anymore, because we had Mama Mandelstam now, and she would talk for her.

There were silver flowers on the tree’s branches.

We picked six of them and we put one on Mama’s grave, and one for each of the babies.

Then we went to the house. Nobody had buried Da, but it was not that bad.

Some animals had come, and it was only some bones and ripped clothes left, and not a bad smell, because the door had been left open.

We got a sack and we put all the bones into it.

Sergey got the shovel. We carried the sack back to the white tree and we dug a grave and we buried Da there next to all the other graves, the ones he had dug, and I put a stone on top.

We didn’t take anything else from our house.

We went back to the cart and we drove all the way back to town.

It was getting late then, but we decided we would keep going.

We would stop for the night at the next town instead.

It was ten miles to go, but the road was clear, and it was a very pleasant night.

The sun was not all the way down yet. As we drove out of town, there was another cart coming, with one horse.

It was empty so the driver pulled off to the side to let us go past because we had a big load, and as we came close and passed him, I saw it was that boy Algis, Oleg’s son, sitting there on the seat.

We stopped a moment and looked at him, and he looked back at us.

We did not say anything, but then we knew that he had not told anyone where we were.

He had just gone home and he had not told anyone he had seen us at all.

We nodded to him, and Sergey shook the reins, and we went on. We went home.

The walls of the glass mountain were secure now, but even so, inside them it had been a lean summer and fall: many of the pools down below had gone dry in Chernobog’s attack, and more of the vineyards and orchards had died.

But we’d fed the children first, and then shared what there was left, and the Staryk king had told me, “They will fill again when the winter comes,” when we’d walked through the lower passageways together, to see what harm had been done.

We’d buried the dead and treated the wounded, laying them in quiet rows beneath the white trees: the king carefully took shavings of ice from the very wellspring of the stream, and laid them on their wounds, and put his hands on either side and coaxed it to grow and merge with their bodies.

Some of the great caverns had closed themselves up like turtles pulling into their shells, and had to be opened again, and in the fields below we cut back the dead vines and trees, and started cuttings from what had lived, to make ready for a new planting.

At least now I was able to find my own way around.

Either I’d learned the trick of it without realizing, or the mountain itself was grateful to me, because when I went looking for some room or cavern, the right doors and passages softly opened for me.

And amid all the work, I found more than enough to make a place for me.

The Staryk didn’t know anything of keeping records: I suppose it was only to be expected from people who didn’t take on debts and were used to entire chambers wandering off and having to be called back like cats.

But with everything in disarray, we needed something better.

I had to commandeer pen and paper from their poets just to have something to keep track of all the fields and pools and what state they were in, and how much we expected to have, to last us until the winter.

I divided up the supplies and measured out days, so none of us would go hungry before the end.

The tally of those days seemed a long one at the beginning, but every hour was filled.

By the end, they were sliding away so quickly that it took me by blank surprise the day I woke up and found the trees outside the mountain frosted with the first new snow, and I knew the king’s road stood open once again.

And I missed my mother and my father, I ached for them to know I was well, but still I stood there looking out for a long time before I rang the bell to call the servants to help me get ready.