“Leave our house?” my mother said slowly. “But we’ve lived there so long,” and then I understood also that Wanda was asking my parents to come and live with them, there on the farm the tsar had given them; she wanted them to leave our town, our house, our little narrow island in the river that was always in danger of being flooded.
“And what is there to stay for?” I said. “It’s not ours. It’s the boyar’s. Everything we’ve ever done to improve it, we’ve done for him, for nothing; we’re not even allowed to buy it if we wanted to. But with help in the house, Sergey and Wanda can clear more land and make the farm richer. Of course you should go.”
My mother stilled; they all looked at me and heard what I hadn’t said, and she reached for my hand. “Miryem!”
I swallowed hard. The words were on my lips: Go tomorrow, stay one day more, but I thought of Rebekah, thin as a sliver of blue ice. How long before she would melt away? “You should go now,” I said. “Today, before the sun goes down.”
“No,” my father said flatly, standing up: my kind, gentle father, angry at last. “Miryem, no. This Staryk—he was right! He deserves what has come to him! It is the reward of the wicked.”
“There’s a child,” I said, my throat choked and sore. My mother’s hand tightened on mine. “I gave her a name. Will I let a demon feast on her, because he was wicked?”
“Every winter they come from their kingdom of ice, to steal and murder among the innocent,” my father said after a moment, just as Irina had said, but then he asked me, as a plea: “Are there even ten righteous among them?”
I drew a breath, still afraid but half relieved, too: it made the answer so clear. “I know that there are three,” I said. I put my other hand around my mother’s and squeezed back. “I have to. You know I have to.”
I took the deformed golden crown to Isaac’s stall, where his younger brother was minding things for him, and he carefully melted the whole thing down for me into flat gold bars, and then I went out with them hidden in a sack, out to the great market in the center of the city. One after another I traded them, not caring if I made a good bargain, so long as I made a quick one. I traded for a cart, for two strong horses to pull it, for a crate full of chickens, for an axe, a saw, hammers, and nails. I bought a plow and furrows and two sharp scythes, and sacks of seed for rye and beans. Sergey and Wanda came with me; they loaded everything into the cart and piled it high. And last at the end, I bought two long hooded cloaks, exactly the same, a dull grey: those were a good bargain, their price come down far from what they’d been yesterday, on a table full of others.
It took us a long time to drive the heaped cart back to my grandfather’s house: the streets were crammed full of traffic and moving almost not at all. As we crawled along, Wanda said, “There is a wedding,” and looking down a side street towards the great cathedral I glimpsed a princess coming down the steps, wearing my Staryk dress of gold and white with a thin crown upon her head; she was smiling and triumphant, and her husband beside her equally so, among a crowd of splendid nobles. The dress fit better there than it had in my grandfather’s house. I looked for Irina: she was already at the foot of the stairs, with the tsar beside her, climbing into an open carriage. The sunlight caught on her silver crown, and he only sat leaning on an elbow, looking irritated with boredom, and no sign of the demon lurking beneath his skin. I looked quickly away.
It was beginning to be late by the time we got back, but the sun had not gone down: it was almost summer, after all. We didn’t wait to eat supper. It was our turn to be the ones leaving, saying our goodbyes to a thinning crowd. I kissed my grandfather and my grandmother at the table, and my grandfather drew me down and kissed my forehead. “You remember?” he said quietly.
“Yes,” I said. “In the street behind Amtal’s house, next to the synagogue.” He nodded.
We climbed into the cart and drove away from the house in front of everyone, waving. Sergey and my father sat up on the front seat: the horses had been expensive, but they were good, well-trained horses; it wasn’t hard to drive them. I wore the cloak and pulled the hood up over my head in the back. Even at this hour, the streets were still bustling: the eating-houses were putting tables and chairs outside in the street so people could sit in the warm air together, and we had to turn down a narrower street of only houses, where children had been called inside for supper. Halfway through the street, a moment came when there was no one there; my mother spread the second cloak over a couple of sacks of grain in the bottom, as if I was lying there asleep. Stepon took off his boots—my old ones—and tucked them poking out at the bottom. Then I slipped down off the cart.
I stood in the shadow between two houses while the cart drove down the rest of the street and turned towards the gate of the Jewish quarter. There and at the city gates, they would ask my father for the names of all the passengers, and he would put mine down with the others, and pay the toll for each with a few extra coins to speed the way. If Irina grew suspicious and sent men to look for me tomorrow, to ask if I knew where the Staryk had gone, everyone would say in all honesty that I had left the city before nightfall with my family; they would find the records in their own guards’ hands, and no one would admit to having been hasty when their hands had been greased for it.
After the cart was out of sight I kept my hood pulled low and my shoulders hunched like an old baba and went through narrow streets all the way to the synagogue, and there asked a young man going in to pray where Amtal’s house was; he pointed me to it. The cobblestones of the street behind it were old and worn soft, with deep cart-wheel grooves dug into them and many loose stones and empty pockets of mortar. The back of the house had a little narrow place cut out of it in the middle, only just wide enough for a single person to walk inside, and there were some old sacks of refuse blocking it off. But after I picked my way around them, the old sewer grating in the ground was kept clear. I pulled it up easily, and there was a ladder there waiting for me to climb down. Waiting for many people to climb down, here close to the synagogue, in case one day men came through the wall of the quarter with torches and axes, the way they had in the west where my grandmother’s grandmother had been a girl.
I let myself inside and pulled the grate back down over my head before I climbed the long way down into the thin damp puddle of the sewer tunnel. There was only the dim round circle of late sunlight over my head, getting smaller and smaller as I climbed down. I didn’t have a lantern or a torch, but I didn’t want one. A light would let someone else see me coming from a long way off. This was a road that had to be walked in the dark.
I turned to put my back to the ladder, and I put my hands out and felt over the walls until I found the little hole chipped out in the shape of a star, with six points for my fingers to pick out. I put my hand over it and started walking slowly straight into the dark, running my fingers spread wide at that height. By the time I counted ten strides, I found another star.