I pulled my head back inside, but the house was getting so loud and full of people that I heard some of that same noise even when I closed the window. It came up through the fireplace and under the door. It got louder and louder and then music started playing. It was loud music and people were dancing to it. I felt it in my feet not just in my ears. I sat on the bed and covered my ears and I still felt it coming up all the way through the house.
It kept going on and on. It was all the way dark outside and I was really afraid now because why would Wanda and Sergey stay down in all that noise unless something bad made them. I had my face pressed up against my knees and my arms over my head, and then there was a knock on the door. I didn’t say to come in because I would have to take my arms from over my head, but Panova Mandelstam came inside anyway. “Stepon, are you all right?” she said. She meant it but she didn’t really mean it, I could tell. She was thinking about something else. But when I didn’t say anything back and didn’t pick my head up, she started to really mean it, and then she went and got the candle she had left on the table for us and she took out a couple of big lumps of wax from it and blew on them until they weren’t hot, and she said, “Here, Stepon, put the wax in your ears.”
I thought I would try. I took my hand away for just a little bit and took the wax. It was still warm and soft. I pushed it into my ear and it squished into the little spots and then it stopped being so warm, and the noise stopped being so loud on that side. I could still feel it in my body but I couldn’t hear it so much. So then I was very glad and I took the other lump of wax and that helped too.
Panova Mandelstam put her hand on my head and stroked it. I liked how it felt. But she was already thinking about something else again. She looked around the room as if she was looking for it and being worried about it. “Are Wanda and Sergey all right?” I asked, because it made me remember I was worried. I was so glad about the noise being so much better that I had forgotten for a second.
“Yes, they are downstairs,” Panova Mandelstam said. She sounded funny and far away because of the wax in my ears but I could still understand her.
So then I was glad again and not worried, but she was still worried, so I asked her, “What are you looking for?”
She stood there looking around the room and then she looked at me. “Do you know, I have forgotten. Isn’t that silly?” She smiled, but she didn’t mean the smile. It was not a real smile. “Do you want to come down and have some macaroons?”
I didn’t know what a macaroon was but I thought, if anyone would go down to the noise to eat them then they must be good, and I was sorry I couldn’t help her find what she had forgotten. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try.”
She put out her hand to me and I took it and we went downstairs together. The noise got bigger but not as much bigger as I was afraid it would. The closer we got the more it stopped being just thumping in my teeth. Now I could hear music and people singing words even though the wax stopped me hearing what the words were. They sounded happy. Panova Mandelstam brought me into a big room: big and crowded with many men. I was afraid again, because some of them were red-faced and loud and smelled of drink, but they were not angry. They were smiling and shouting laughter and dancing all together, holding hands and making a circle although it was not really a circle because the room was not big enough so they were mostly crammed in and stepping on each other, but they didn’t seem to mind. I thought of being upstairs and holding hands with Wanda and Sergey: that was how it felt. Sergey was with them, and in the middle of that circle there was a young man dancing and everyone else was taking turns going into the middle and dancing with him.
We went into the next room, and it was full of women dancing, with a woman in the middle in a dress that was red and had patterns on it in shiny silver, and she had on a veil hanging all the way almost to the floor and she was laughing and very pretty. Panova Mandelstam took me to a table next to the wall with empty chairs and there was a plate on it full of cookies that were light and sweet and like a cloud someone had baked, and she put it in front of me and gave me some other food, too, so much food: thick slices of soft meat I had never eaten before that she said was beef, and roast chicken and fish and potatoes and carrots and dumplings and little green vegetables, and a big torn hunk of yellow soft sweet bread. I sat there and I ate and ate and everyone was happy and I was happy, too, except Panova Mandelstam was sitting next to me and she was not happy. She kept looking around the room for whatever she was trying to find, and it was not there. People kept coming and talking to her, and when they talked to her, she would be distracted for a little while, and forget she was looking for something, but when they went away she would remember and start looking again.
“Where is Wanda?” I asked her.
“Wanda is in the kitchen, sweetheart, she has been helping carry the food,” Panova Mandelstam said, and I saw her then when she pointed, so it was not Wanda she was looking for. She was looking at the bride, dancing in the middle again, and she was trying to smile, but she kept stopping.
Everyone started clapping all together, and the men were coming into the room with the groom in front. Everyone started to get up from their chairs and push all the chairs and tables out to the very edges of the room, and the women in their circle were making room so the men could be there in their circle also. One of the men took a chair no one was sitting in and put it in the middle of their circle, and the groom sat down on it, and one of the women was putting down a chair for the bride in the middle of their circle, too. I was waiting to see what they would do, but they didn’t do anything. They stopped, suddenly, because someone knocked on the door.
It was so noisy in the room. Everyone had been singing and laughing and talking so loud it was almost shouting, because otherwise they couldn’t hear each other, and there was music playing. But the knock was louder than all of it. It was so loud and hard that it came in through the wax in my ears and the two lumps of it fell out to the floor. But the noise of the room didn’t bother me anymore without the wax because after that knock, there was no noise left. Nobody was talking and the music had stopped.
There were two big doors in the side of the room, which went out into the courtyard, and that was where the knock had come from. After a moment another knock came. It felt the way the music had felt upstairs coming through the house. It thumped like that. It thumped in my bones and it made me afraid.
Then Panova Mandelstam stood up and ran across the room suddenly, pushing through everyone else, and Panov Mandelstam was pushing from out of the men, and they took hold of the doors and pulled them open. Nobody stopped them. I wanted to say No, no, no, but I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to hide my head, but I thought I would imagine something worse than whatever it was.
But I wouldn’t have. It was the Staryk.
Sergey and Wanda were next to me. They had come to me when they heard the knocking and now they were standing with me, and Sergey had a hand on the back of my chair. He was so tall he could see over everyone’s heads, and I heard him draw a breath and I thought he was afraid. I was afraid too. Everyone was scared. It was the Staryk. There were two of them with crowns on their heads, a king and queen. They were holding hands, too. The king was as tall as Sergey. The queen wasn’t, but her crown was so tall it almost made up for it. It was all gold and she was in a dress of white and gold. They stood there in the doorway and nobody moved.