I asked her the price of eggs after, and bread, as though I were trying to fit them to a narrow purse, and because she didn’t know otherwise, she just brusquely told me the prices instead of inflating them twice over. Then she was annoyed when I finally counted out six pennies for a pot of hot soup with half a chicken in it, and three fresh eggs, and a soft loaf, and a bowl of honeycomb covered with a napkin. But she gave them to me grudgingly, and I carried them down the long lane to our house.
My father had come back home before me; he was feeding the fire, and he looked up worried when I shouldered my way in. He stared at my arms full of food and red wool. I put my load all down and I put the rest of the pennies and the one silver kopek into the jar next to our hearth, where there were only a couple of pennies left otherwise, and I gave him the list with the payments written on it, and then I turned to making my mother comfortable.
* * *
After that, I was the moneylender in our town. And I was a good moneylender, and a lot of people owed us money, so very soon the straw of our floor was smooth boards of golden wood, and the cracks in our fireplace were chinked with good clay and our roof was thatched fresh, and my mother had a fur cloak to sleep under or to wear, to keep her chest warm. She didn’t like it at all, and neither did my father, who went outside and wept quietly to himself the day I brought the cloak home. Odeta, the baker’s wife, had offered it to me as payment in full of her family’s debt. It was beautiful, dark and light browns; she’d brought it with her when she married, made of ermines her father had hunted in the boyar’s woods.
That part of the old story turned out to be true: you have to be cruel to be a good moneylender. But I was ready to be as merciless with our neighbors as they’d been with my father. I didn’t take firstborn children exactly, but one week late in the spring, when the roads were finally clear again, I walked out to one of the peasant farmers in the far fields, and he had nothing to pay me with, not even a spare loaf of bread. Gorek had borrowed six silver kopeks, a sum he’d never repay if he made a crop every year of the rest of his life; I didn’t believe he’d ever had more than five pennies in his hand at once. He tried to curse me out of the house at first, casually, as many of them did, but when I held my ground and told him the law would come for him, real desperation came into his voice. “I have four mouths to feed!” he said. “You can’t suck blood from a stone.”
I should have felt sorry for him, I suppose. My father would have, and my mother, but wrapped in my coldness, I only felt the danger of the moment. If I forgave him, took his excuses, next week everyone would have an excuse; I saw everything unraveling again from there.
Then his tall daughter came staggering in, a kerchief over her long yellow braids and a heavy yoke across her shoulders, carrying two buckets of water, twice as much as I could manage when I went for water to the well myself. I said, “Then your daughter will come work in my house to pay off the debt, for half a penny every day,” and I walked home pleased as a cat, and even danced a few steps to myself in the road, alone under the trees.
Her name was Wanda. She came silently to the house at dawn the next morning, worked like an ox until dinner, and left silently after; she kept her head down the entire time. She was very strong, and she took almost all the burden of the housework even in just that half day. She carried water and chopped wood, and tended the small flock of hens we now had scratching in our yard, and scrubbed the floors and our hearth and all our pots, and I was well satisfied with my solution.
After she left, for the first time in my life my mother spoke to my father in anger, in blame, as she hadn’t even when she was most cold and sick. “And you don’t care for what it does to her?” I heard her crying out to him, her voice still hoarse, as I knocked the mud from my boot heels at the gate; without the morning work to do, I had borrowed a donkey and gone all the way to the farthest villages to collect money from people who’d probably thought they’d never see anyone ever come for it again. The winter rye was in, and I had two full sacks of grain, another two of wool, and a big bag of my mother’s favorite hazelnuts that had been kept fresh all winter out in the cold, along with an old but good nutcracker made of iron, so we wouldn’t have to shell them with the hammer anymore.
“What shall I say to her?” he cried back. “What shall I say? No, you shall starve; no, you shall go cold and you will wear rags?”
“If you had the coldness to do it yourself, you could be cold enough to let her do it,” my mother said. “Our daughter, Josef!”
That night, my father tried to say something to me quietly, stumbling over the words: I’d done enough, it wasn’t my work, tomorrow I’d stay home. I didn’t look up from shelling the hazelnuts, and I didn’t answer him, holding the cold knotted under my ribs. I thought of my mother’s hoarse voice, and not the words she’d said. After a little while he trailed off. The coldness in me met him and drove him back, just as it had when he’d met it in the village, asking for what he was owed.
Chapter 2
Da would often say he was going to the moneylender. He would get money for a new plow, or to buy some pigs, or a milch cow. I did not really know what money was. Our cottage was far from town and we paid tax in sacks of grain. Da made it sound like magic, but Mama made it sound dangerous. “Don’t go, Gorek,” she would say. “There’s always trouble where there’s money owed, sooner or later.” Then Da would shout at her to mind her own business and slap her, but he wouldn’t go.
He went when I was eleven. Another baby had come and gone in the night and Mama was sick. We hadn’t needed another baby. We already had Sergey and Stepon and the four dead ones in the ground by the white tree. Da always buried the babies there even though the ground was hard to dig, because he didn’t want to spare planting ground. He could not plant anything too close to the white tree anyway. It would eat up anything around it. The rye seedlings would sprout and then one cold morning they would all be withered and the white tree would have some more white leaves on it. And he could not cut it down. It was all white, so it belonged to the Staryk. If he cut it down, they would come and kill him. So all we could plant there was the dead babies.
After Da came back in angry and sweating from burying the new dead baby, he said loudly, “Your mother needs medicine. I am going to the moneylender.” We looked at each other, me and Sergey and Stepon. They were only little, too scared to say anything, and Mama was too sick to say anything. I didn’t say anything either. Mama was still lying in the bed and there was blood and she was hot and red. She did not say anything when I talked to her. She only coughed. I wanted Da to bring back magic and make her get out of bed and be well again.
So he went. He drank up two kopeks in town and lost two gambling before he came home with the doctor. The doctor took the last two kopeks and gave me some powder to mix with hot water and give to Mama. It didn’t stop the fever. Three days later I was trying to give her some water to drink. She was coughing again. “Mama, I have some water,” I said. She did not open her eyes. She put her big hand on my head, strange and loose and heavy, and then she died. I sat with her the rest of the day until Da came home from the fields. He looked down at her silently, and then he told me, “Change the straw.” He took her body over his shoulder like potatoes and carried her out to the white tree and buried her next to the dead babies.