Page 49 of Spinning Silver
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.
Then a man stepped forward out of the crowd. He was old and he had a white beard and white hair. He stopped in front of the Staryk and said, “I am Aron Moshel. This is my house. What do you want here?”
The Staryk had drawn back when the old man said his name, and was looking down at him. I was afraid that the Staryk was going to do something bad to him. I thought he might put his hand on him and touch him and the old man would fall down and be lying on the floor the way Sergey had been lying in the woods, like there was nobody left inside him. But instead the Staryk answered him, “We are come by invitation and by true promise given, to dance at the wedding of my lady’s cousin.”
His voice sounded like a tree creaking when it is covered with ice. Then he turned his head towards the queen, and then Panova Mandelstam made a noise, and the queen turned her head and looked at her, and I realized, she was not a Staryk after all. She was just a girl in a crown, and she was crying, and so was Panova Mandelstam, and then I thought, that is her daughter, and I finally remembered after all: Panova Mandelstam had a daughter. She had a daughter and her name was Miryem.
Everyone was still quiet, and then that old man Panov Moshel said, “Then come in and be welcome and rejoice with us,” and I thoughtNo no noagain, but it was not my house, it was his house, and the Staryk came inside with Miryem. There were two empty chairs facing onto the dancing there, and they sat down in the chairs. Even after that nobody was talking or moving. But Panov Moshel turned back to the musicians and said, “This is a wedding! Play! Play the hora!” very hard and fierce. Then the musicians started to play a little, and he began to clap with them, turning to face the rest of the room and showing us all his clapping, and then little by little everyone else started to clap, too, and stamp, like they were trying to make a noise big enough to stand up to that knocking on the door.
I didn’t think anything could do that. We were only people. But the musicians started to play louder and everyone started to sing, and the song got bigger and bigger, and everyone around us was getting up to join the people already standing. They took hands and they all started to dance again, everybody: children who were not as big as me got up and went to dance and so did very old people: they stayed on the outside mostly clapping, but everybody else was making big circles again dancing fast, one circle of men and one circle of women. The bride and the groom were inside the circles, like everyone was keeping them safe.
The people in the circles all went into the middle, everyone putting up their hands at the same time, and then they came back out again. Everyone was dancing except for me and Wanda and Sergey: we were outside watching and afraid, and on the other side of the circle, the Staryk king and Miryem were just sitting there in the chairs watching also. He was still holding her hand in his. The circle was going by us full of strange people I didn’t know, but then I saw Panova Mandelstam coming towards us, and she let go of the woman next to her to reach out, and Wanda reached back to her.
Panov Mandelstam was coming towards us in the other circle. But I didn’t want to go into a circle. I wanted to crawl under the table and keep out. But Panova Mandelstam was asking us; she wanted us to come in and help make those circles, and I was scared and I didn’t want to but Wanda got up and went in, and I couldn’t let her go alone, so when Panov Mandelstam held out his hand I took it, and I gave Sergey my hand, and we went into the dancing, too.
Then everyone in the whole house was dancing, except for the Staryk and Miryem. But the circle kept going, and then Panova Mandelstam reached out one hand to Miryem. I didn’t want her to, I didn’t want to be dancing with the Staryk and his queen even if she was Panova Mandelstam’s daughter. But she held out her hand and Miryem took it, and then she got up and was being pulled into the circle, and the Staryk king didn’t let go of her hand. He got up, too, and came dancing along with her.
Something strange happened when he started dancing. We were in two circles, but somehow after he joined the dancing there was only one circle, with all of us in it, and I was holding Wanda’s hand, even though I had never let go of Panov Mandelstam. And as we kept going, all the old people on the outside of the circle started to come into it, and they were dancing even though they were old, and the children were dancing even if they were not tall enough to reach up to our hands from the ground.
And there was room for everyone, even though we had already been crowded in. We were not inside anymore. There was no ceiling over our heads. We were outside, in a snowy clearing with white trees all around us, white trees that were just like Mama’s tree, and a big grey circle of sky over our heads that didn’t know if it was day or night. I was too busy dancing to be scared or cold. I didn’t know how to dance or how to sing the song but that didn’t matter because everyone else in the circle was helping me, and pulling me along, and what mattered was that we had decided to be there.
The bride and groom were still in the middle of the circle on their chairs. They were holding tight to each other’s hands. We danced in towards them, and then we danced out again, and then some men came out of the circle, but not to stop dancing. They came into the middle, and they bent down and took hold of the chairs and picked them up off the ground with the bride and groom still on them, and they started to carry them around together, moving them up and down, still singing that song. It was so big and loud that it did get bigger than the Staryk knocking. It was so big I felt it all through me on and on, but it didn’t scare me the way the noise had scared me before. I didn’t mind feeling it inside me now. It felt like my heart was beating with it at the same time, and I couldn’t breathe but I was happy. Everything was dancing. The trees were dancing, too, their branches swaying, and their leaves made a noise like singing.
We kept dancing, and we were going fast, but I wasn’t getting tired. The men did get tired carrying the chairs, but other men ran in to help instead of them, and they kept carrying the bride and groom around. Even Sergey went in to help once, I saw him go, and then he came back after. We all kept going, and none of us wanted to stop. We kept dancing under that grey sky, and dancing, and I thought maybe we would just be dancing forever, but the sky began to get dark.
It didn’t get darker like the sun was setting. It got darker like clouds clearing on a winter night, and first a little bit of them blew away and left a little glimpse of clear sky, and then a little more of them, and more after that, until overhead it was all just the big clear night sky, and in it all the stars were shining all above our heads, but it was not the right stars for spring; it was the winter stars, very bright and glittering in that clear sky, and all the snow beneath us and the white flowers on the trees glittered back to them. We all stopped dancing and stood there looking up at them together, and then we weren’t outside anymore, we were back inside the house, and everyone was laughing and clapping, because we had made a song. Despite the Staryk, despite winter, we had made a song.
But then there was a big loud clanging noise like a church bell, only close by, just through the door, and we all stopped laughing. It was a bell that had started to ring midnight. The day was over and so was the song. The music had stopped. The wedding was finished, and the Staryk was still there. We had made the song despite him, but it hadn’t made him go away. He was standing in the middle of the room, and he was still holding Miryem’s hand.
He turned and said to her, “Come, my lady, the dancing is done.” When he spoke, everyone all moved away from him, as far as they could get in that room. Me and Sergey wanted to move away, too, but when we tried, we stopped, because Wanda pulled back on our hands and didn’t move away.
Panova Mandelstam still had Miryem’s other hand, and she was holding it tight, and she was not moving away. She stayed there with Miryem and wouldn’t let go, and Panov Mandelstam was holding her, and Miryem did not want to let go of them either. The Staryk looked at them and he was frowning with his whole face and his eyebrows were like sharp icicles glittering. He said, “Let go, mortals, let go. A night’s dancing alone did she buy of me. You shall not keep her. She is my lady now, and belongs no more to the sunlit world.”
But Panov Mandelstam didn’t let go and Panova Mandelstam didn’t. She was staring at the Staryk, and her face was white and sick, and she didn’t say anything; but she shook her head a little. He raised his hand, and Miryem cried out, “No!” and tried to pull her own hand free from Panova Mandelstam’s, but Panova Mandelstam still wouldn’t let go, and then the doors in the side of the room flew open again, so hard that everyone near them had to jump or run out of the way. They banged into the walls with a crash.
There was another king and queen standing in the doorway. Only the queen was wearing a crown, but I knew he was a king, because it was the tsar and tsarina that we had seen that same day in the sleigh, going in the gate before us after we had waited and waited. And the tsar looked into the room at the Staryk and he laughed out loud, a laugh like a fire makes, and the Staryk went very still.
“Irina, Irina,” the tsar said, “you have kept your promise and he is here! Give me the chain!”
The tsarina opened the box and took out a silver chain and gave it to him, and he came into the room grinning his teeth bare. None of us got in his way. We were all pressed up against the walls, as far away as we could be.
But the Staryk said suddenly, fiercely, “Do you think to catch me so easily, devourer? I have never seen your face before, but I know your name,Chernobog.” He jumped forward and took hold of the chain in the middle with both his hands. Ice went suddenly shooting along its length, long sharp points of icicles growing out of it like a whole blizzard happening at once, and the ice went all the way to the tsar’s hands and climbed over them. He howled and let go of the chain. The Staryk threw it to the floor behind him with a crash, and then he struck the tsar with the back of his hand.
Da would hit me sometimes like that, or Wanda or even Sergey, and Da was very big and strong, but even when he hit just me, I only just fell down on the floor. But when the Staryk hit the tsar, it was like he was hitting a straw doll. The tsar’s feet came off the ground and even after he landed hard on the floor his whole body went sliding all the way across the floor until he smashed into the stage and some of the instruments went over with a big awful twanging sound around him.
I thought he must be dead, when he was hit like that. When Da took the poker to hit Wanda, I thought he was going to kill her if he hit her with it, but he could not hit her hard enough even with the poker to make her whole body go across the room. But the tsar was not dead. He didn’t even just lie there on the ground being glad not to be dead and trying to hide from being hit again. Instead he got back on his feet. He didn’t just stand up, he came up in a strange twisting way, and there was blood coming from his mouth and red all over his teeth, and he hissed at the Staryk, and when he hissed, the blood started to smoke and burn out of his mouth, and his eyes were red.
“Get out!” the tsarina called suddenly. “Everyone, all of you, run, get out of the house!”
It was like she had let everybody loose. Everyone started to go out of the room. Some people ran past her and out the open doors into the courtyard and some people ran back through the door to the other room where the men had been dancing and some people ran out through the kitchen door. The bride and groom ran that way hand in hand. The children were being picked up and the old people were being helped. Everyone was going.
I thought we should go, too, but Wanda wouldn’t. Miryem was trying to make Panova Mandelstam go with everyone else, but she was not going either. She was holding on to Miryem’s hand with both her hands and she was not letting go.
“Father, please! Mama, he’ll kill you!” Miryem said.
“Better we should die!” Panova Mandelstam cried to her.
“Yougo,yourun,” Panov Mandelstam was saying. He was trying to put his arm around her.
