Stepon stopped and put his hands over his ears and didn’t want to go anywhere. He was trembling when I touched him. Panova Mandelstam said, “Come, it will be more quiet when we get out of the busy streets,” but he couldn’t move, so finally Sergey said, “Come on, Stepon, I’ll carry you on my back,” even though he hadn’t done that for a long time, not since Stepon was very little, and Stepon was big enough now that his legs with the boots that Panova Mandelstam gave him dangled down Sergey’s sides and hung long and kicking while Sergey walked. But he put his face down against Sergey’s back and did not look up the whole time.
It was not easy to walk. The streets had been full of snow for some time, and so that people could walk, they had pushed the snow out of the middle, into two big walls on either side of the street, with holes dug out going to the doors of each house. But the streets were not very big, and then it had snowed again just yesterday, and now the walls were bigger than our heads, and there was some snow in the road that there was no room for on the walls and it was black with dirt and half frozen and slippery under our feet. There were big houses everywhere, all pushed up against each other with no room on either side, going up so high that I felt they were leaning over, looking down at us in the street beneath them. There were people everywhere you looked. There was nowhere that didn’t have anyone in it.
We followed Panova Mandelstam. She knew where she was going. I didn’t know how. Every corner she turned looked just like the other corners. But she walked very steady and sure as though she did not have to think about which way to turn, and she was right, because we finally came to another big wall, not so big as the first one, with a door in it, and two more men with swords. Panov Mandelstam gave them a coin, too, and they let us through the door. I thought maybe now we would be leaving, but there was more city on the other side of that wall, too. Only in this part, everyone around us was a Jew.
I had never seen any Jew but Miryem’s family before, except the woman on the line and her son. Now I did not see anyone else. It was a strange feeling. I thought that when Miryem had to go to the Staryk kingdom maybe it was like this for her. All of a sudden everyone around you was the same as each other but not like you. And then I thought, but it was like that for Miryem already. It was like that for her all the time, in town. So maybe it hadn’t been so strange.
So I was thinking about Miryem, and wondering how it was for her, and that was why suddenly I realized, Panova Mandelstam had come here for Miryem. I stopped in the street. I had not asked why they had come. I had been so full of gladness to see them in the woods, and Stepon, that I had only had room for the gladness and not for any questions. But of course that was why they had come. She was looking for Miryem. But Miryem would not be here.
I had to keep walking because Panova Mandelstam was still going onward, and if we got lost, Sergey and Stepon and I would not know what to do. I didn’t know how to get back out of this city. It was like being in a house that had a thousand rooms and all the doors were the same. We went through a big noisy marketplace in a square, full of people buying and selling, and then we turned down a street into what felt like quiet after the noise of the market but was still very loud next to the forest. Soon it got even quieter and the houses began to get big and wide with big windows full of glass, and here the snow was in neater piles and stairs went up to the houses coming out of the snow. Finally we came to a very big house with an arch and a courtyard next to it, and there were horses there and people carrying things around, very busy.
Miryem’s mother stopped at the steps of that house. She had her arm in Panov Mandelstam’s arm, and he looked up at the door, and I thought that he did not want to go inside that house, but then they climbed up the stairs together, and she turned and beckoned to say, Come along, so we climbed up behind them and inside. “Rakhel!” a woman was saying; she had hair that was mostly grey and silver and white, and there was something about her face that made me think of Panova Mandelstam, and they were kissing and I thought, this was Miryem’s grandmother. Miryem’s mother had a mother, too, who was still alive. “And Josef! It has been too long. Come in, come in, take off your things,” she was saying, and kissing Panov Mandelstam’s cheeks.
I was afraid that Panova Mandelstam would ask her about Miryem right away, but she didn’t. More women came out of the kitchen and there was a big noise of greeting and talk among them. I thought at first they were just talking so fast that I couldn’t understand, but then I realized they were saying words that I didn’t understand at all, mixed up with words that I did know. It made me want suddenly to go away, to go back to that little house in the forest. Sitting at the table in Panova Mandelstam’s house, eating off Miryem’s plate, I had thought a little bit secretly in my heart, without really meaning to, that maybe I could slip into Miryem’s place, but now I felt I had not really known Miryem’s place. I had seen a part of it, but not all of it. This was Miryem’s place too, and it was not a place for me. I was not wanted here at all.
I would have left if I knew where to go. Sergey was next to me, and Stepon had come off his back and was huddled up against me with his head in my side and was pulling my apron up over his face. They would have left with me. But we didn’t know any way to go. And then I heard my own name: Panova Mandelstam had taken her mother to one side out of all the noise and talking, and she was saying something about me, about us, softly to her mother, who was listening and worried and looking over at us. I wanted to know what they were saying, to make her so worried, and I wondered what we would do if she said she did not want us here even to sleep. There was trouble with us, and she did not know us.
But she did not say that. She said something to Miryem’s mother, and then Miryem’s mother came to us with a smile that felt like it was saying everything will be all right but wasn’t sure if it would, and then she took us deeper into that big house. There was a staircase going up and we followed her to a big hallway with a carpet in the middle of it, and at the end of that hallway there was another staircase, and we climbed that one, and then there was another, wooden steps, and then we were in a small hallway that did not have a carpet, only plain wooden boards, and there were only two doors on either side of it and a door in the ceiling with a cord hanging down from it. She opened the door on the left and took us into a room that was the size of the room of the little house in the forest, that was how big that house was, that you could climb and climb up through it and then you found another whole house at the top of it, and that was how big the city was, that it had so many of these houses in it that you couldn’t tell them from each other.