She had slept on the cot here in the hut for a little while, and I had sung over her, over my girl, sitting by the fire like all these years, and now I knew she was mine, and not just borrowed for a little while. The yarn I had found was loose enough I could pull the wool apart easily, even now with my big-knuckled hands, and I had the silver comb and brush, the comb and brush that were all Irina’s mother had left for her daughter. I combed the wool out soft and spun it over from the beginning, and coiled it into skeins, and after each one was done I put another log in the oven, and so sat spinning away the time, until Irina had woken.
But she had gone back to him now, to that monstrous creature crouching in the palace, black evil disguised as beauty. If he hurt her, if he did not listen…But what use was it to worry? I could not do anything, an old woman carried so long here and there on life’s stream and washed now to this strange shore; what could I do? I loved her and I had taken care of her as well as I could, but I could not protect her from men or fiends. I braided her hair for her again, and put the crown upon her head, and I let her go. And when she left I did what I could, which was to sit and wait and spin, until my hands grew heavy and I rested them in my lap and shut my eyes for a little while.
I woke with a start and the last log cracking. Outside there was a step, and I was afraid and lost from myself, trying to remember where I was, why was it so cold, while the steps came closer and Irina opened the door. For a single dreadful moment more I still didn’t know her—she was so strange and silver in the opening, with that wide crown on her brow and the winter outside crowding close behind her, and she seemed part of it. But it was still her face, and the moment passed. She came in and shut the door and then stopped and looked at it. “Did you do this, Magra?” she asked me.
“Do what?” I said, confused.
“The door,” Irina said. “It’s properly fastened to the wall now.”
I still didn’t understand: it hadn’t been, before? “I’ve only been spinning,” I said, and I meant to show her the yarn, but I couldn’t remember where I had put the skeins; they weren’t on the table. But it wasn’t important. I stood and went to my girl and held her hands, her cold hands; she had brought in a basket full of things for me. “You’re all right, dushenka? He didn’t hurt you?” She was safe for another moment, one more moment, and all of life was only moments, after all.
* * *
Sergey and I looked into the porridge pot together and we did not say anything. Then we turned and looked at the rest of the house. I remembered suddenly I had put my yarn away on the shelf with the spindle and the knitting needles, but now it was all in a heap on the table. Or I thought it was my yarn, but it was not. It had been wound into skeins and when I picked one up it was different, smooth and soft and much more fine. There was a silver comb lying next to them, a beautiful silver comb that looked like something a tsarina would have, with a picture on it of two deer with antlers drawing a sleigh in snowy woods.
I looked on the shelves for my yarn, but it was gone. The fine smooth yarn was the same color. When I looked very closely it was the same wool. It had only been spun differently, as if to show me what was wanted.
Sergey was looking into the fire box. It was half empty. We looked at each other. It had grown very cold again during the night, so one of us might have climbed down to put more wood on the fire. But I knew I had not done it, and I could see from Sergey’s face that he had not done it. Then Sergey said, “I will go see if I can get a squirrel or a rabbit. And I will fetch more wood while I am at it.”
There was still plenty of the wool that Sergey had washed for me. I had never spun yarn so fine as the yarn here, but now I tried to do it better. I combed the wool for a long time with the silver comb, carefully so as not to break the teeth, and when at last I began to spin, I remembered suddenly my mother telling me to make the yarn tighter. Try to go a little faster than that, Wanda. I had forgotten. I had stopped being careful how I spun after she was dead. There was no one in our house who knew better than I how it was supposed to be. I looked down at my own skirt, which was knitted roughly of my lumpy yarn. Before she died my mother would make big balls of yarn from our goats and take them to our neighbor three houses away who had a loom, and come back with cloth. But the weaver would not take my yarn, so I had always had to knit our clothes instead.
It took me a long time, hours, just to spin one ball of good yarn. Sergey came back as I was finished. He had caught a rabbit, brown and grey. I made another pot of porridge for us while he skinned it. I put all the meat and the bones into the pot to make a stew with the porridge, and some carrots. I made it as much as our pot could hold, more than the two of us would eat. Sergey saw me doing it and he did not say anything and I did not say anything, but we were both thinking the same thing: we did not want whoever was eating our porridge and spinning the yarn to be hungry. If they did not eat the porridge, who knew what they might want to eat instead.
While it was cooking I thought I would start knitting. I wanted to see how much of the bed I could cover with what I already had, so I did not waste time spinning more yarn than we needed. I knitted a strip twice the width of the bed, measuring it until it was long enough, and then I went on from there. The work did not go quickly. I tried to be careful and keep it even and smooth. But I was not used to knitting so carefully either. It was hard to remember not to make it so loose. And then in one place I made it too tight instead, and I did not notice at first until I had already knitted three rows onward and I started having to push hard to get the needles in. Then I tried to keep going and just make it better from there on, but I had made that last row so tight that I was going very slow, like trying to walk through thick mud, and finally I gave up and unraveled those three big rows and did the wrong part all over again.
Once I had finished up the first skein, I stopped and looked at how much I had made. It was a piece as long as my hand. It was so nicely spun and wound up that there was more yarn than I thought there could be. I measured the length of the bed with my hands and counted ten. I had five skeins left and the ball of yarn I had made today. So if I made only three more balls of yarn, that would be enough. I folded up my knitting carefully and I put it on the shelf and I went back to spinning.
I spun all the afternoon. It was still getting colder and colder. All around the door and windows there were little clouds of fog where the air from outside came in through the cracks, and there was starting to be frost creeping inside. Sergey could not help me, so instead he made wooden hinges to hang the door. He had found some old nails and a little rusted saw in a corner of the shed to make them. On the inside of the house, he nailed on some more branches around the edges of the doorway, making the opening smaller than the door, to block the wind. He did the same thing around each window. Then he plastered it all with straw and mud. After that the cold air could not come in and we were warm and cozy in the house. The oven and the porridge filled it with a good smell. It felt strange to be in that warm quiet place with food. It felt strange because I was already used to it. It was so easy to be used to it.
We stopped to eat after I finished spinning. “I think I can finish in three days more,” I told Sergey, while we ate the good meat porridge. We left plenty over in the pot.
“How long have we been here?” Sergey asked me.
I had to stop and count it in my head. I started from market day. I had sold the aprons in the market. I did that in the morning and then I went home and Kajus was there waiting. Even in my head, I hurried past the rest of that, but it was all still one day. Then we had run into the woods and we had kept going a long time into the night. Until we found the house. We had found the house that day. It didn’t feel as though it could all have been the same day, but it had been. “It is Monday,” I said finally. “Today is Monday. We have been here five days.”
After I said it out loud, we were both quiet over our bowls. It did not feel as though we had been in that house five days. But that was not because it felt as if we had just arrived. It felt as if we had always been here.