Then Sergey said, “Maybe they have sent word on to Vysnia, about us.”
I stopped eating and looked up at him. He meant, maybe we should not go ever. He meant we should stay here. “It would have been hard to send with all the snow,” I said slowly. I didn’t want to leave either. But also I was still afraid of this place where things came out of nowhere and someone did my spinning over for me and ate our porridge and burned our wood. And I did not see why it was all right for us to stay. It was all right for us to stay when we would freeze to death otherwise. We had to do that. And we had paid back for the food. We had fixed the chair and we would fix the bed. We had made the windows and doors tight. But that did not make it our house, that we could stay in forever. Someone had built this house and it was not us. We didn’t know who they were. We couldn’t ask them if we could stay, even if they would let us.
“We cannot leave for three days anyway,” Sergey said. “Maybe the snow will melt by then.”
“Let us see,” I said after a moment. “Maybe the knitting will not take me so long.”
But after we cleared the table I went back to the shelf where I had left my knitting and it was not there. Instead on the shelf there was half a loaf of still-fresh bread, and underneath a beautiful fine napkin there was a small ham and a round of cheese and a lump of butter, with only a little bit cut off of each. There was a big box of tea and even a jar of cherries in syrup, like Miryem had bought to eat once at the market. There was even a basket big enough to hold all of it.
I stood looking at the things so long that Sergey got worried and came to see also. We didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t something we could even make believe had happened in some real way. We could not pretend that we had just not seen all that food. We could not pretend someone had come into the house and put that food there and went away again. We had not been asleep.
Of course we wanted to eat some of that beautiful food. My mouth remembered the taste of those cherries, the thick sweet syrup like the smell of summer. We were afraid, though, even more than we had been about the oats, and the honey. It was food that did not even pretend to go with the house. And we had just eaten, so we were not even really hungry.
“We should save it for later,” I said after a moment. “We don’t need it now.”
Sergey nodded. Then he took the axe. “I will go break up some logs,” he said, and went out into the yard, even though it was dark. We needed more wood. We had not put any wood on the fire all day, but the box was almost empty.
I found the knitting lying on the cot. It felt different, and when I unfolded it, the piece was the same size as I had made, but it had all been done over from the beginning. It had a pattern in it now, a beautiful design like a raised vine with flowers that I could feel with my fingers. I had never seen anything like it except for sale in the market for money, and not so fine, either.
I unraveled some of it to try and see how the picture was made, but each line was so different, the stitches changed so much from one to another, and I couldn’t see how to remember which one was next. Then I thought, of course, it was magic. I took a stick out of the fireplace with one end charred, and I used the magic that Miryem had taught me. I started at the beginning of the vine in the first row, and I counted how many of a stitch there was in a row, and I wrote down that number, and if it was a forward stitch, I put a mark above it, and if it was a backwards stitch, I put a mark below. I had to make some other marks too, when stitches were brought together, or added. I had to make my numbers small as if I were writing in Miryem’s book. There were thirty rows all different before I came back to the first one.
But when I was done, I had the whole picture there on the floor, turned into numbers. It looked very different. I was not sure I believed it could really be the same thing. But I remembered how those little marks in Miryem’s book became silver and gold, and I took the knitting and I began to add on another row. I did not look back at the picture while I worked. I thought I had to trust the numbers. So I did, and I followed them, for all those thirty rows, and then I stopped and I looked at what I had done, and there were all the vines and leaves, just as beautiful, and I had made it. The magic had worked for me.
Sergey came back in, stamping off his feet. There was a dusting of white across his shoulders. He put his big armful of wood into the box, but it only filled it halfway. “I must go get more,” he said. “It is snowing again.”
* * *
“Are you warm enough, Stepon?” Panova Mandelstam asked me. I said I was because however warm I was, that had to be warm enough, because there was nothing to do about it if I wasn’t. I was in the best place in the sleigh, huddled between Panov and Panova Mandelstam under the blankets and furs, but I was getting colder the whole time. At first I thought I was feeling so cold because Algis was there spying on us, but that wasn’t why. It got colder and colder all that afternoon, and overhead there were dark grey clouds getting thicker and thicker. We were not halfway to Vysnia when it finally began snowing. It was only a little bit at the beginning, but then it began to come faster and faster, until we could not see what was in front of the horses’ heads. After a while Panova Mandelstam said, “Perhaps we should stop at the next village for the rest of the night. It should not be far.”
But we did not come to any houses, even though the sleigh kept going a long time. “Algis,” Panov Mandelstam said to the driver finally, “are you sure we are still on the road?”
Algis hunched a little in his coats and darted a look back at us. He didn’t say anything, but his face was scared. So he knew he had lost the road. Sometime ago, when the road had turned, the horses had gone between two trees that were not on either side of the road, they were just far apart from each other. The snow was covering the road and the bushes, so Algis had not noticed. He had just kept going. Now we were lost in the forest. The forest was very big and there were not any houses in it away from the road and the river. The Staryk killed anyone who made a house away from the river.
The horses were not going very fast anymore. They were tired and they plodded. Their big feet were digging into the new snow and they had to pull them up again each step. Soon they would stop. “What do we do?” I asked.
Algis had turned around again and was just sitting hunched over the reins. Panov Mandelstam looked at his back, and then he said, “It is all right, Stepon. We will stop somewhere there is not too much wind and get the horses under blankets and give them their grain and any grass we can find. We will stay between them and under blankets and keep warm until it is light. Once the sun comes up we can tell where we are. I am sure you can find someplace good, Algis.”