“What is it, Josef?” my mother said.
My father was still in the doorway, looking down. I pushed aside my blankets and got up and went to his side. It wasn’t even very cold out anymore; my shawl was enough. But the path from our house had been filled in again as high as my knees, and even under the eaves, snow covered our old stone stoop thickly. A line of the cloven hoofprints came around the house from the back, and a pair of long pointed boot prints was pressed into the fresh snow before our house. In the very center of the stoop, resting lightly on the surface, was a small bag of white leather drawn shut.
My father looked round. We could see our neighbors now: all the houses had become squat white mushrooms with the tops of yellow-lit windows peering out over the snow covering their sills. There was not a soul anywhere in the road, but even as we watched, I saw movement in a window, a child’s hand rubbing a clear circle in the frozen glass. Swiftly my father bent down and took the leather bag. He brought it inside, and I closed the door behind him.
He put the bag down on the table. We all gathered around and stared at it as though it were a live coal that might at any moment set the whole house ablaze. It was made of leather, white leather, but not dyed by any ordinary method I’d ever heard of: it looked as though it had always been white, all the way through. There wasn’t a seam or stitch to be seen on its sides. Finally, when no one else moved to touch it, I tugged open the top, drawn by a white silken cord, and emptied out the coins within. Six small silver coins, thin and flat and perfectly round, slid onto the table in a little heap with a chiming like bells. Our house was full of warm firelight, but they shone coldly, as if they stood under the moon.
“It’s very kind of them to make us such a present,” my father said, dry. Of course, the Staryk would never do such a thing. Sometimes you heard stories of fairies who came with gifts. My own grandmother told a story sometimes that her grandmother had told her, that when her grandmother had been a little girl in Elkurt in the west, she had one day found a fox bleeding on the ledge of the window of her attic bedroom, torn as if by a dog. She brought it inside and tended its wound and gave it some water. It lapped it up and then said to her in a human voice, “You have saved me, and one day I will repay the favor,” and then leapt out the window again. And when she was a grown woman, with children of her own, one day she opened her kitchen door to scratching and the fox was there, and it told her, “Take all your family and any money you have in the house and go hide in the cellar.”
And she did as the fox said, and even as they hid, they heard outside a roaring of angry voices. Men came into their house, knocking over furniture and breaking things above their heads, and there was a smell of smoke thick in the air. But somehow the men did not find the cellar door, and the smoke and fire did not come down.
They crept out again that night at last and found their house and the synagogue and all their neighbors’ houses on every side burned down. They took their few remaining possessions and ran to the edge of the quarter and hired a man with a cart to drive them east, and so came to Vysnia where the duke then had opened the doors to the Jews, if they came with money.
But that was a story from another country. You did not hear stories like that about the Staryk. Here, you heard that once a strange white beast had come to a peasant’s barn with a wounded Staryk knight drooping on its back, and in fear the peasants had taken him into their house and tended his wounds. And when he woke, he took up his sword and killed them, and then dragged himself out to his steed and rode back into the woods still dripping blood, and the only way anyone knew what happened was the mother had sent her two young children to hide in the hayloft of the barn and told them not to stir out of it until the Staryk was gone again.
So we knew that the Staryk had not given us a purse of silver to be kind. I couldn’t think why they had left it, yet there it was on our table, shining like a message we couldn’t understand. And then my mother drew a sharp breath and looked at me and said, low, “They want you to turn it into gold.”
My father sat down at the table and covered his face, but I knew it was my own fault, talking in the deep woods, in a sleigh driving over the snow, about turning silver to gold. The Staryk always wanted gold.
“We’ll take the money from the vault,” my mother said. “At least we have it.”
What I said was, “I’ll go back to the city tomorrow.” But I went outside and stood in the yard of our house on the fresh-fallen snow with my hands squeezed into fists. The crust was already frozen hard and solid: it would make for good traveling, fast traveling. There were six silver coins in the bag, and I had put fourteen gold coins away, just this last visit. I could hire Oleg’s sleigh and drive back to Vysnia and take six gold coins out of my grandfather’s bank vault and give them to the Staryk, six gold coins I had worked for, and use them to buy my safety.
Wanda came out in her shawl, to go and feed the new goat we had brought home from market. Sergey hadn’t come, of course, in the storm, and it was late for her to walk home now. She looked at me and silently went into the barn, and when she came back out, she asked me abruptly, “Will you give them your gold?”
“No,” I said, speaking as much to the Staryk in the forest as to her. “No, I won’t give them a thing. They want silver turned to gold, so that’s what I’ll do.”
Chapter 6
The next morning, Miryem took the Staryk’s purse and went to Oleg’s house and asked him to take her back to Vysnia. She did not ask me to keep the books. She did not even remind me to go get the payments. Her mother saw her off at the gate and stood there a long time, holding her shawl around her shoulders, even after the sleigh was gone.
But I did not need to be reminded. I took the basket and went on my rounds. It was the sixth day of the month, so I was collecting in town today. Nobody liked to see me coming, but Kajus always smiled at me anyway, like we were friendly, even though we were not. When I had first begun to work for Miryem, he would always pay in jugs of krupnik. Miryem did not like that, because he sold the same krupnik in the market every week, hot from a kettle in winter, and everyone would buy it from him and not her. She had found a guesthouse down the road where they would buy it, when she had ten jugs to sell, but that was more trouble than she liked, and she had to pay to send it to them.
But then he had given me a bad bottle, which looked all right from the outside, but Miryem sniffed the top near the seal, and then she opened it, and a smell like rotten leaves came out. She looked at it with an angry mouth, but then she told me to put the bottle apart from the rest, in a corner of the house, and say nothing to him. He gave me two more bad bottles in a row, the next two months. After the third one, she gave me all three corks and sent me back with them to tell him three times was too many to go bad, and she would not take any more krupnik from him in payment. So now he had to pay in pennies. That time, he did not smile at me.