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.
And there was food everywhere, so much food that we could almost not find places to put food down because already every spot had food on it. When I was hungry myself, I sat down at the table and ate until I was full, and afterwards I helped again to put out more food for more people. I kept doing it. Later on in the day, Miryem and her mother came, too, and still we all worked together.
But I had just put down a pair of buckets, with water that I carried from the fountain down in the city, when I heard a noise out in the room with the tables, and then I heard Miryem asking, hard and clear, “What are you here for?” as if someone had come again to hurt us. I pushed out of the kitchen and came into the doorway and there was a guard with a sword and fine clothing in the room who said my name. He said he had a letter for me. Then I was afraid for a moment, but I was in this house, with all these people, and I thought, I was strong enough for this too; so I stepped forward and I held my hand out and I let him put the letter into it.
On that letter there was a heavy thing of wax as red as blood, pressed with a shape of a great crown. I broke it open and I looked at the words. I knew how to say them, because Miryem had taught me, so in my mouth I silently made the words with my tongue one after another, and what it said in that letter was, Be it known to any who come into Our domain of Lithvas that by Our imperial command the woman Wanda Vitkus and her brother Sergey Vitkus and her brother Stepon Vitkus are pardoned of any and all crimes of which they stand accused. Let no man’s hand be raised against them, and every one of Our people do them honor for the great and courageous service which they have done for Us and Lithvas. And they are furthermore granted by Our will permission to go into the Great Forest and therein take freehold wherever they so choose, in any untenanted property, and there claim from Our hand title to whatever land they can put into crops, or enclose for herding, in three years’ time, and they shall have it for themselves and their heirs.
And underneath those words there was a great scrawling of ink that was not a word, it was a name, Mirnatius, and then after it Tsar of Lithvas and Roson, Grand Duke of Koron, of Irkun, of Tomonyets, of Serveno, Prince of Maralia, of Roverna, of Samatonia, Lord of Markan and the Eastern Marches, and last after all that list, Lord and Master of the Great Northern Forest.
I looked at that letter and then I understood why a tsar mattered. It was magic like Miryem’s magic. That tsar, that terrible tsar, could give me this letter and now we were safe. I did not have to be afraid anymore at all. Nobody from town would look at that letter and try to hang Sergey or me. They would look at the tsar’s name on that paper and be afraid of him, even if he was far away.
But we did not even have to go back to town at all. We did not have to go back to our father’s house, where maybe he was still lying on the floor, and we did not have to go back to that farm where nothing much would grow and the tax collector came every year. That letter said that we could go into the forest and take any land that we wanted. It could be the best land we found. It could be full of big trees that we could cut down and sell for lots of money. I knew a big tree was worth a lot because the year before my mother died, there was a tree on our neighbor’s property and one year it fell down and he worked very hard and cut it up quick before the boyar’s men came to take it, and he hid two big pieces of it in the woods. Da saw it and came in and said at dinnertime what he saw and said sourly, “That’s a clever man, he will make ten kopeks off that wood.”
But Mama shook her head and said, “It’s not his property, there will be trouble,” and he slapped her and said, “What do you know,” but the next day the boyar’s men came with a big wagon and they put the pieces of the tree in it, and there was a man with them who looked at those pieces and somehow knew that some of the tree was missing, and they beat our neighbor hard until he told them where he hid the pieces, and they put the pieces in the wagon and left him on the ground bloody. He was sick for a long time because of it, and his wife had to try and sow the crops alone because he could not walk. One day that winter she came to beg for food, and Mama gave her some. Da beat her for it that night even though her belly was already getting big.
But nobody would beat us for cutting down trees, because in this letter the tsar said we could. He said they were ours. He said all that land, as much land as we could take care of, would be ours. We could have goats and chickens and we could plant rye. And we did not even have to build a house. We could go to the little house, the house that had saved us, where there was already a garden and a barn, and we could make a farm all around it. This paper said that it was all right because there was no one living in it. I thought we would go there and we would go into the house and promise to take care of it, and we would promise that if anyone who had ever lived there wanted to come back, we would give them the best bed, and all the food they wanted, and they could stay there with us as long as they wanted.
And then I thought, if anyone came to the house at all—if anyone came to the house who was hungry and in trouble—we would let them stay. There would be food in our house for them, and we would be glad. Like Panova Mandelstam. That is what that letter said. We could make a house like her house and we could feed anyone who came.
I took the letter upstairs to Sergey and Stepon. Sergey had helped with the horses and Stepon had helped him for a while also even though it was still very noisy, but then he had to go upstairs and he was still afraid, so Sergey went upstairs with him. I went upstairs and I came into the room and I showed them the letter, and they did not know how to read the letters, but they saw the big red seal, and they touched the heavy soft paper, and I told them carefully out loud what it said, and then I asked them if they wanted to do what I wanted to do, I asked if they wanted to go to the little house in the woods and make a farm there, and let anyone come to us in trouble. I did not say, We are going to do that, even though it was what I wanted. I asked them if they wanted it also.
Sergey carefully reached out and took the paper in his hands. I let him have it. He very lightly touched the shape of one of the letters on the paper with his finger just to see if it would come off. It did not come off even a little. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes.”
Stepon said, “Can we ask them to come live with us?” He meant Miryem’s family. “Can we ask them to come? And I can plant the nut, and then Mama will be there too. Then it will be all of us together, and that would be the very best thing.”
When he said it, I started to cry because he was right, it would be the very best thing, it would be so good that I had not even been able to think of it. Sergey put his arm around my shoulders, and he said to Stepon, “Yes. We will ask them to come,” and I wiped the tears away from my face, carefully, so I would not get any of them on the letter.
*
When I left my grandfather’s study, I went to my parents’ room. They were sitting by the fire together, and Wanda and her brothers had come down to them; Wanda had brought the tsar’s letter, and had given it to my father, who was looking at it surprised. “We can go and fetch the goats,” Wanda was saying, to him and my mother, “and the chickens. It is warm now. We can build more of the house by winter. We can cut down some trees. There will be room,” and as I came around and looked at the letter, where the tsar had signed himself Lord and Master of the Great Northern Forest, I understood: Irina was already stretching out her hand. She had given Wanda a farm in exchange for taking her brothers and her strong arms into the forest to clear trees and plant crops a
nd build a house and a barn, the first of many to come.
“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.
They led me onward for what felt a long way, although it couldn’t have been: it wasn’t that far a distance from the synagogue to the city walls. But the last light from the sewer grate vanished behind me very quickly, and I felt blind and smothered and loud with my breath noisy in my own ears. But I kept counting ten, and if I still didn’t find a star, I felt over the wall until I did, or I took one step back and felt around there. Once I had to take two steps back, with nothing but blank wall under my hands, and then in fear take four steps forward before I found it at last. And then the stars ended and the wall fell away from under my hand as I stumbled over a ridge of dirt in the floor and fell, putting my hands down in sticky wet. I stood back up, wiping myself off on the cloak, and groped backwards in the dark until I found the corner of the turning with my fingers, and the wall of the earthen tunnel.
“There was a tower in the wall here, before the siege,” my grandfather had told me quietly, there in his small closed-in room. “The duke’s men broke it when they cam
e in. And after, when the duke rebuilt the walls, he did not want the tower rebuilt. The foundations were solid. There was enough money for it. He chose not to. Why not?” My grandfather had spread his hands and shrugged a little, with his shoulders and his mouth. “A tower to guard the back of the city, why not? So after the walls were built again, and all the workmen had left, my brother Joshua and I went down into the sewers with rope, to search without getting lost. And we found the tunnel he had made.
“No one else knows. Only your great-uncle and me and your grandmother, and Amtal and the rabbi. Amtal keeps the grate clean. I pay him for it, I pay his rent. When he gets old, he will tell his son. We never use it: never for smuggling, never to avoid the toll. No one knows that we know. That is where they will have put him, this husband of yours, in that tower at the end of the tunnel.
“Now you must tell me, Miryem. You understand what this tunnel is. This tunnel is life. If their prisoner goes, even if you are not taken yourself, these great ones, the duke, the tsar, they will not shrug and say, ah well. They will ask how. They will look for footprints. Maybe they will block off the sewer passages. Or maybe they will follow them and find the grate. Maybe they will even come up out of it and see Amtal’s house there, and put a knife to the throat of his children, and Amtal will tell them who pays him to keep it clean.
“I say this expecting you to understand, these are not certainties. If they come here, even if Amtal has told them my name, there will be things I can do. I have a great deal of money, and I am useful to the duke. He will not hurry in a rage to destroy me, that is not the kind of man he is. And there is also the chance that they will not do any of these things. They may say, he is a magical creature, he has flown! He did not go through sewers. They may leave it all as it is.
“So I do not say, put my life, your grandmother’s life, on the scale. I say to you, here are the dangers. Some are more likely than others. Weigh them, put them all together, and you will know the cost. Then you must say, is this what you owe? Do you owe so much to this Staryk, who came and took you without your consent or ours, against the law? It is upon his head and not yours what has come of his acts. A robber who steals a knife and cuts himself cannot cry out against the woman who kept it sharp.”