She took it in her hands and opened it and looked inside it for a long time, and then she put her apron up to cover her mouth, her lips pressed tight, and she jerked her head twice in a nod and then she folded the letter back up and held it tight, pressed against her chest, and she turned and went away into the back of the house, towards the stairs. The footman threw a dismissive look over us—we did not matter, we were not important—and he turned and left the house as quickly as he had come.
I was still standing at the table. Around me the conversation resumed, the flow resumed; When will you be in town again, How old is your eldest now, How is your husband’s business, the steady lapping waves, but I didn’t go back into the water. I pushed my chair back from the table and I went upstairs to my grandfather’s study. He was there with a few other old men, all of them talking in their deep voices; they were smoking pipes and cigars and speaking of work. They looked at me frowning: I didn’t belong there, unless I was coming to bring them more brandy and tea and food.
But my grandfather didn’t frown. He only looked at me and put his glass and his cigar aside and said, “Come,” and took me into the small room next to the study where he kept his important papers locked behind glass doors, and he shut the door behind us and looked down at me.
“I owe a debt,” I said. “And I have to find a way to pay it.”
Chapter 21
In the morning, there were red blistered marks across my palms where I had held the silver chain with Sergey and Stepon. Last night before the tsarina left, she had said to me, “How can I repay you?” I had not known what to say to her, because it was me doing that; I was repaying. Miryem had taken me out of my father’s house for six kopeks, when I was only worth three pigs to my father, who stole money from hers with lies. Her mother had put bread on my plate and love in my heart. Her father had sung blessings on that bread before he gave it to me to eat. It did not matter I did not know the words. They had given it to me even when I didn’t know what they meant by it and thought they were devils. Miryem had given me silver for my work. She had put her hand out to me and taken mine, like I was someone who could make a bargain for myself, instead of just someone stealing from my father. There had been food in her house for me.
And that Staryk wanted to take her for nothing. He made her give him gold just to live, as if she belonged to him because he was strong enough to kill her. My father was strong enough to kill me but that did not mean I belonged to him. He sold me for six kopeks, for three pigs, for a jug of krupnik. He tried to sell me again and again like I was still his no matter how many times he sold me. And that was how that Staryk thought. He wanted to keep her and make more gold out of her forever, and it did not matter what she wanted, because he was strong.
But I was strong, too. I was strong enough to make Panova Mandelstam well, and I was strong enough to learn magic, Miryem’s magic, and use it to turn three aprons into six kopeks. I was strong enough, with Sergey and Stepon, to stop my father selling me or killing me. And last night I did not know if I was strong enough to stop the Staryk, even with a silver chain, even with Sergey and Stepon, even with Miryem’s mother and father. But I had not known that I was strong enough to do any of those things until they were over and I had done them. I had to do the work first, not knowing. Afterwards, Stepon put his face in my apron and cried because he was still feeling afraid, and he asked me how I knew the tsarina would make magic and stop the Staryk from killing us, and I had to tell him that I did not know. I only knew the work had to come first.
So when the tsarina asked me how she could pay me, I did not know what to say. I did not do it for her. I did not know her. Maybe she was the tsarina, but I did not even know what her name was. One day when I was ten one of our neighbors came to the house and said the tsar was dead and when I asked what it meant they said that there would be a new tsar. So I did not really see why a tsar mattered. And now that I had seen a tsar, I did not want anything to do with one. He was terrible and full of fire. I would have told her that to repay me, she could make the tsar go away, but he had already gone out of the house with the guards who were leading the Staryk.
But Miryem’s father heard her asking me, and he saw I did not know what to say. He had a big bruise all on the side of his face, and his hands were all hurt and shaking where he had been holding tight on that silver chain with me, and he was sitting with Panova Mandelstam and they had their arms wrapped around Miryem and they were kissing her head and touching her face like she was worth more to them than silver kopeks, more to them than gold, more than everything they had. But when he saw I did not know what to do, he kissed Miryem’s forehead and he got up and he came limping over the floor to the tsarina and said to her, “This brave girl and her brothers came to the city with us because they are in trouble at home.” Then he put his hand on my shoulder and he said to me softly, “Go and sit down and rest, Wanda, I will tell her about it.”
So I went away and sat down with Sergey and Stepon and put my arms around them, and they put their arms around me. We were too far away to hear what Panov Mandelstam was saying because he said it very quietly. But he talked to the tsarina for a little time, and then he came limping over to us and told us that everything would be all right. We believed him. The tsarina was going out of the house then. She walked out those big doors into the courtyard where some more of the guards were waiting for her. Two of them reached inside and took hold of the doors and they pulled them shut. And we were inside the house without them.
There was a big mess in the room. Around the edges of the room there was still some food on the tables going bad and flies were already buzzing around it. Chairs were knocked over everywhere and coming out of the fireplace over the floor there were black scorch marks like the footprints a man leaves walking through snow in heavy boots. The big golden crown Miryem had been wearing was on the floor near the fireplace and it was all bent out of shape and almost melted. Nobody could have put it back on. But it did not matter. We looked at Miryem’s family, and they looked at us, and we all got up and Panov Mandelstam put his arm around Sergey’s back, and I put my arm around Panova Mandelstam’s, and we were a circle all together, the six of us: we were a family, and we had kept the wolf away again; for another day we had kept the wolf away.
Then we went upstairs and went to sleep. We did not clean up the mess. I slept a long time in that beautiful big quiet room up at the top of the stairs, and when I woke up there was spring outside, spring everywhere, and it felt like that spring outside was inside me, too. Even though my hands had blisters, I felt so strong that I did not even worry a little about what would happen to us. I kissed Sergey and Stepon and I went downstairs to help the other women in the house, and I did not care anymore that I did not understand what they were saying. When someone said something to me that I did not know, I only smiled at her, and she smiled at me and said, “Oh, I forget!” and told me over again what she was saying except in the words I knew.
I carried dishes to the tables: there were tables in all the rooms for people to sit and eat, not as many people as yesterday but still so many that they had tables in every room and chairs crammed tight around them. There were tables in the other dancing room, too. Somebody else had cleaned up the mess, and I could not see the black marks on the floor anymore because someone had unrolled a big carpet over the floor and brought in tables, and there was no fire in the fireplace because it was so warm that instead they had opened the windows to the air. The smell of smoke was gone.