But there was a window in the room in the wall across from the door, and Stepon pulled his hand away from me and ran to the window and pressed his whole face to it with a cry. I thought he was upset, but he said, “We’re birds! Wanda, Sergey, look, we’re birds,” and I went to him a little bit afraid and we looked out through the glass and Stepon was right: we were birds. We had climbed so high up in that house that we were looking down at the roofs of other houses, and looking down at the streets. From up there I could see the marketplace we had been in, only it was so small I could cover it with my hand if I put it on the window, and I could see the big wall of the city and it was only a thin little line like an orange snake going around the outside, an orange snake with snow on its back, and on the other side of it there was the forest with all the trees turned into one big dark thing, and a heavy blanket of white snow all over it that hurt my eyes to look at. There was white snow on the roofs of all the houses, too, but in the streets it was all dirty and black, but from this high even that did not look bad.
“Come, sit down and rest,” Miryem’s mother said. I had not even looked at the room, because of the window. There were three beds, real beds made out of wood, each one with a mattress, and blankets, and pillows. There was a little fireplace with no fire in it, but the room was very warm anyway, and there was a little table in front of the window and there was a chair at the little table and there were two other chairs in front of the fire. They had cushions on their seats that were only a little worn out. “I know you must be hungry. I’ll have some food brought up. I’m sorry to put you so far up, in servants’ rooms: all the other bedrooms downstairs are full of guests already. But some of them will leave tomorrow after the wedding, and then it won’t be so crowded.”
We didn’t know what to say so we didn’t say anything, and then she left us there and each of us sat down on a bed and we looked across the room at each other. I had known that Miryem’s grandfather was rich, but I had not known what rich meant before. Rich meant that this room with three beds and a table and chairs and a window filled with glass was something to say sorry for. It was even bigger than I first thought it was because when we sat down there was a big open place of the floor between us where there was nothing to cook with and no big firewood pile and no pots and no axe or broom on the walls. There was a little picture on the wall above my bed that someone had made of the town outside the window, only it was a picture of spring, with the trees green and birds in the air.
After a while Panova Mandelstam came back up, and there was a girl with her, a tall strong young girl with her hair under a kerchief, carrying a big heavy tray with food on it, and she put it down on the table and then she nodded her head to Panova Mandelstam and went away. I looked after her and I thought, that girl was me; there wasn’t even room here for me to carry things and bring things. They already had someone in that place, too.
Stepon and Sergey went to eat right away, but I couldn’t feel hungry. I was hungry, but there was a pain in my stomach when I looked at the food, and I said to Panova Mandelstam, “We are not any good to you here,” and I almost said, We should go, but I couldn’t, because we didn’t have anywhere to go, unless we did turn into birds and fly away.
Panova Mandelstam looked at me surprised. “Wanda!” she said. “After all the help you have been to us? Am I to say, Oh, but what good is she to me now?” She reached out and took my face in her hands and shook me a little back and forth. “You are a good girl with a good heart. So much work you’ve done without a word of complaint. Since you came into my house, I did not have to lift a hand. Before I thought of doing a thing it was done. I was sick, but because you were there helping, I grew well again. And you never ask for a thing. It’s only what we press into your hands that you take. So now you must let me do it.”
“What you press in my hands is more than all I have!” I said, because it hurt to hear her saying those things that were not true, as if I had only come and helped her to be good, and not because I wanted silver, and wanted to be safe.
“Then you don’t have enough, and I have more than I need,” she said. “Hush, sweetheart. You don’t have a mother anymore, but let me speak to you with her voice a minute. Listen. Stepon told us what happened in your house. There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away. And if there has been food in my house for you, then I am glad, glad with all my heart. I hope there will always be.
“Hush, don’t cry,” she said, and her thumbs were wiping tears from my face, though they were coming faster than she could take them away. “I know you are afraid and worried. But there will be a wedding here today. It is a time to rejoice. For today we don’t let sorrow come into this house. All right? Sit and eat, now. Rest a little while. If you want, when you are not tired, come down and help me. There is still work to be done, and it is happy work. We will raise the canopy for the bride and groom, we will put food on the tables, and we will eat together and dance, and the wolf will not come in. Tomorrow, we will think of other things.”
I nodded without saying anything. I couldn’t say anything. She smiled at me, and wiped more of my tears, and then she gave up trying to wipe them and just gave me a handkerchief out of her skirt and touched my cheek again and went out. Sergey and Stepon were sitting at the table staring at the food on it. There was soup, and bread, and eggs, and when I sat next to them, Stepon said, “I didn’t know it was magic, when you brought it home. I thought it was just food.”
I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.
* * *
In the morning Mirnatius thrust back the curtains early and set the servants scurrying before I had even sat up in bed; they brought us hot tea on a tray and warm bread with butter and jam, another plate of thick slices of ham and cheese: hearty food that was surely their best, though only a step up from peasant fare. He made a face at it and only picked. I forced myself to eat, keeping my eyes downcast so as not to look at him in his luxuriously embroidered dressing gown, his hands and his mouth. The fire was warm against my cheek, but my other cheek was hot also. I kept remembering his fingers on my thigh, and my ring wouldn’t swallow up that heat.
He demanded a bath, and I had to endure that: they put it before the fire, and two serving-girls washed him while I tried not to watch their hands moving over his body, tried not to feel something like jealousy. I wasn’t jealous over him, but over what he’d made me feel, that stirring that should have belonged to a man I would have let touch me; a man who would have wanted to touch me, who could really be my husband. I wanted that shiver along my leg to be a gift I’d never expected; I wanted to be able to look at him in his bath and blush and be glad for it. And instead I had to deliberately look away, because if I had my way, tonight I’d throw him down into a pit with a Staryk king, and bury them both, and marry myself off to a brutish man as old as my father.