We took a long time finding it. We should just have kept going, but we did not think of that until after we had dug through all the snowbanks around us, and our hands were almost frozen numb. We kept looking until finally I found a hole going all the way down to the bottom of a tall snowdrift and I dug it out. There was a small dent in the side. We looked at it and it was only a pot that we had nothing to cook in. And then we both knew we should have kept going, but we did not say so out loud. Sergey took the pot and we stood up to keep going.
But then I looked at the snowdrift. Some of the snow had come off the top, and under the snow it was a wall, only as high as my waist, but a real wall that someone had built of stones. It was not very long. On the other side, it was mostly clear, except for a very big snowdrift, twice Sergey’s height. It could have only been a few trees and bushes covered in snow, but when we climbed over the wall and went close, we saw that it was really a little hut, made of stones at the bottom and sticks above. An old dead curtain of ivy hung over all of it, over the walls and windows and the hole where the door had been. Ice had frozen over the dry leaves and snow had heaped on the ice. The vines broke right away and fell down when we pushed on them.
We went inside at once, without even waiting for our eyes to be able to see. It didn’t matter what was inside; it was better than outside. But after a few moments we could see there was a table and a chair and a bed made out of wood, and an oven. The slats had rotted away from the chair and the bed, and also the mattress, but the oven was still good and solid. There was a pile of old firewood sitting next to it.
I brushed up some crumbled slats from under the bed and some straw from the mattress for kindling, and then I sat down next to the oven and began to work up a fire with a few small sticks. I knew how to do it well because sometimes we would run out of wood and our fire would die and we would have to start it new again. Sergey put down our dented pot and warmed himself up a little with stamping. Then he went out again. When he came back, I had gotten a little fire going. He had two armfuls of wet wood and a miracle: potatoes. “There is a garden,” he said. The potatoes were small, but he had dug ten of them, and there was no one to eat them but us.
I fed the fire with the old wood until it was strong. We spread the wet wood that Sergey had brought in over the top of the oven and in front of it to dry. We put the potatoes into the oven and put our pot full of snow on to melt and get hot. We sat by the oven warming ourselves until the water boiled, and then we made cups of hot water and drank them to get warm inside. Then we boiled more water and I cut up the potatoes and put them into the water to cook the rest of the way. That way we would have the potatoes to eat, and we could drink the potato-water also. It felt like it took a long time for the potatoes to cook but then they were done and we ate them, hot and steaming and burning our tongues and so good.
We didn’t think about anything all that time, and while we were eating. We were so cold and so hungry. I was used to being cold and hungry but not as bad as that. It was worse than the winter when the food ran out. So I didn’t think about anything except getting warm and getting something to eat. But then we finished eating and we were warm and when I poured cups of potato-water for us out of the pot, I thought about the pot falling on Da with all the boiling-hot kasha in it, and I shook all over my body and it wasn’t with cold.
After that I was thinking again. I didn’t think about Da, I thought about us. They hadn’t caught us, they hadn’t hanged Sergey and me. We hadn’t frozen to death in the forest. Instead we were here, in this little house all alone in the woods, and we were warm by a fire and we had found potatoes, and I knew it wasn’t right.
Sergey knew, too. “No one lives here anymore, not for a long time,” he said to me. He said it very loud, as if he wanted to be sure anyone nearby would overhear it.
I wanted to believe it. But of course no real person would ever live here. The forest belonged to the Staryk. There was no road that came here. There was no farm or field. Only a little empty house in the woods for one person to live in all alone. It had to belong to a witch, and who knew whether a witch was dead or not, and when she might come back.
“Yes” was what I said, though. “Whoever lived here is gone now. Look at the bed and the chair. They have been rotting for a long time. Anyway, we will leave soon.” Sergey nodded just as eagerly as I had.
We were still afraid of sleeping in that witch hut, but we didn’t have anywhere else to go, so there was no use thinking about it. We banked the fire and then we got up on the top of the oven where it was warm. I thought of telling Sergey that one of us should watch, but I was asleep before I could make the words with my tongue.
Chapter 12
Alone in my chamber of glass and ice, with the sun going down in my mirror, I broke the bread that Flek had left me and drank a swallow of wine. I couldn’t light a candle; she and Tsop had only looked at me puzzled when I’d told them to bring me one. I sang the prayers, thin in my ears without my father and mother singing beside me, or my grandparents. I thought of that last night in Vysnia, the house full of people and everyone so happy around Basia and Isaac. She would be celebrating tomorrow again with my grandmother and her mother, my female cousins and her friends: the Shabbat before her wedding. My throat was dry with tears when I lay down.
I had nothing to read and no one to talk to. I kept Shabbat the next day by telling myself the Torah out loud, as much as I could remember. I confess I had never been very attached to Torah. My father loved it, deeply; I think in his heart he had dreamed of being a rabbi, but his parents were poor, and he didn’t read very well; he had to struggle over words and letters, though numbers came easily. So they had apprenticed him to a moneylender instead, and the moneylender knew Panov Moshel, and his apprentice met Panov Moshel’s youngest daughter, and so went my parents’ story.
Anyway, my father had spent almost every Shabbat reading to us, the words finally made smooth to him by repetition. But I had mostly spent the time thinking of whatever work I wasn’t allowed to do, or trying to imagine away a little gnaw of hunger, or in better times, coming up with the most difficult questions I could, as a game, to make my father have to work to answer them. But the memories had stuck deeper than I realized, and when I shut my eyes and tried to hear his voice, and murmur along with it, I found I could more or less stumble my way through. I was with Joseph in Pharaoh’s prison cell by the time the sun went down again, and Shabbat was over, and my husband came back to me.
I didn’t immediately open my eyes, glad to make him wait, but he surprised me by not saying anything, so I looked up before I’d meant to and found satisfaction in his face. The change from bitter resignation was remarkable. It made my jaw tighten. I sat back from the table and asked, “Why are you pleased?”
“The river stands still once more,” he said, but at first that meant nothing to me. Then I stood up and went to the glass wall. The crack in the mountainside had been patched thickly over with bulging curves of ice, and the thin waterfall had frozen in its tracks. Even the river below was a solid shining road, no longer flowing at all. A heavy snow had fallen, so much of it that the trees of the dark forest were all blanketed beneath it.
I didn’t know why it so pleased him, to have his world frozen, but there was something terrible and ominous in that featureless glittering white. Something deliberate, in all that green and earth wiped from the world, that made me think of all our long hard winters, of the rye killed in the fields and fruit trees withering, and as he came to stand beside me, I looked at the nearly ecstatic joy upon his face and said slowly, “When it snows in your kingdom—does it also snow in mine?”