Page 56 of Spinning Silver
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 came 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. Thenyoumust 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.”
He hadn’t waited for me to answer. He had only put his hand on my cheek, and then he had gone back out again. Now I stood there at the turning for a moment, with the dirt of the duke’s tunnel under my fingers, a road to safety that I might close forever to my own people just to save the Staryk’s. Or I might be caught myself, if there were guards down at the end, and do no one any good at all. I had already answered the question, but I would have to keep answering it with every step I took down that passage, and I wouldn’t be done until I came to the very end.
After Miryem climbed out of the cart, I took off my boots and put them there poking out under the cloak. I did not mind taking them off because it was warm, and I was sitting in a cart anyway. I was so glad to be leaving that terrible city. It was even worse than before. The streets were all crowded with people everywhere because now there was no snow and they wanted to be outside and they all wanted to talk at the same time and make noise. I lay down in the bottom of the cart next to the sacks that were pretending to be Miryem and I tried to pretend to be a sack myself, but I wasn’t a sack. I had to just lie there and cover my ears and wait until we were out. It took a long time until we came to that big city gate and Panov Mandelstam got down to pay the man at the gate some money, because that city was such a terrible place we had to pay to be let out.
But after that Sergey shook the reins and clucked to the horses just like a real driver and the horses started to walk fast, and we got away. For a little while all of us were safe. Sergey drove down the road until it turned so much that you could not see the gate when you sat up in the back of the cart and looked back. I tried when he stopped the horses and I could not see it, although I could still see smoke coming up from all the houses and all the people in there. Then Sergey gave Panov Mandelstam the reins and climbed down and looked up at me and Wanda and all of us and nodded goodbye. He was going to go around behind the wall of the city and hide and wait until Miryem came out, if she came out.
I did not like leaving Sergey behind. What if Miryem did not come out, what if the Staryk came out alone? He could kill Sergey. He could leave Sergey lying there on the ground all empty again. Or what if the tsar came out instead? That would be just as bad or maybe worse.
But Panov Mandelstam had wanted to go instead of Miryem, and then he had wanted to go with Miryem, and Miryem had said no and no to him. First she said no because the Staryk would not hurt her, and then she said no because one person alone would be more quiet if there was a guard, and then she said no because we could not trick the guards abouttwopeople missing, but all of those were not the real reasons. The real reason was that Panov Mandelstam was hurt. There were bruises all over him.
I knew because there were some purple marks that you could even see up his neck coming out of his shirt even though the Staryk had not hit him there. I knew how hard someone has to hit you so that you get bruises somewhere else. That is how hard the Staryk hit him, so I knew there were purple marks all under his clothing too, and even if I didn’t know that then I would still know he was hurt, because he limped and sometimes he put his hand on his side and breathed carefully for a little bit as if it hurt him, and he had fallen asleep twice during the day already.
Miryem did not say that, though, she said those other reasons, and finally Panov Mandelstam said, “I will wait for you outside the city then,” and Miryem also said no to that, but Panov Mandelstam was just shaking his head firmly, and he had let her say no before but he would not listen tonoanymore, and he said that she did not even know where the house was.
That was when Sergey said to Panov Mandelstam, “I will wait for her. You cannot walk quickly. I can bring her to the house.” And Panov Mandelstam was still worried, but Sergey was bigger and stronger than him already, and also not hurt, and Miryem said, “He’s right, we’ll make better time,” so it was decided that Sergey was going to wait for Miryem and meanwhile the rest of us were going to keep going so that if anyone came to the house looking for us sooner than they came back, we would all be there keeping busy and we would say that Miryem and Sergey went away already to get the goats.
Miryem said, “But we will be back long before then,” as if it was all as certain, as if all she and Sergey had to do was just walk from the city to the house, but she did not really mean that. At first I thought that she was being foolish, because she could not know if she was going to come out. But she was not being foolish; she just did not mean it. I found out because we went upstairs to our room to pack the things and Miryem came up to us and said to Sergey, “Thank you. But don’t come to the city wall. When you get off the cart, just wait in the trees near the road. I’ll find you if I can.”
So then I knew, she did not mean it. She also didn’t know if she was going to come out, and she was glad Sergey had said he would wait because she did not want her father to get hurt, and she knew Panov Mandelstam would not agree to stay in the trees. But she told Sergey to stay in the trees, and I was glad, but then Sergey looked at her and said, “I will wait for you near the wall. Maybe you will need some help.”
Then Miryem lifted her hands and said, “If I need help, I’ll need too much. If I don’t, I won’t.”
But Sergey shrugged and said, “I said I would wait,” so that was that, and he was going to be waiting near that wall that maybe a Staryk or a demon or even just men with swords would come out from. Those men with swords at the house who had taken the Staryk away were all big and strong like Sergey was, and they had swords and heavy coats that did not look like you could cut through them easily, so even if they were not as bad as a tsar or a Staryk they were bad enough. I did not want Sergey to be killed by any of them. I also didn’t want Miryem killed by any of them, but I didn’t know her so well yet and so mostly I didn’t want Panova Mandelstam to be sad, which was an important reason to me but not as important as wanting it for my own self, which was how I wanted it for Sergey.
And I was so tired of being afraid all the time. It felt like I had been afraid and afraid without stopping forever. I did not even know how afraid I had been, except that morning I had stopped being afraid of anything at all for just a little while, when Wanda came up to the room with that magic letter from the tsar and I thought everything was finished, and I did not have to be afraidever,I could stop being afraid of so many things, and it was so good and I was so happy, and now I was afraid again.
But it was not up to me. It was up to Sergey, and he was not going to wait in the trees. So I sat up in the cart when Panov Mandelstam drove it away and I saw Sergey walk away from the road into the trees, but into the trees the way he would walk to go all the way around the back of the city, that terrible city, and I watched him until I could not see him anymore. And then I lay down in the bottom of the cart next to the sacks. They did not have to be Miryem now, so Panova Mandelstam put the cloak over me instead and let me put my head on a sack as a pillow, and I put my hand in my pocket around the nut that Mama had given me and I told myself it would be all right. We would come to the house and Sergey would come back and I would plant the nut and Mama would grow and be with us and we would all be together.
The cart had gone so slowly when we were in the city crammed with all those people, but outside on the road it went very fast. It was strange to be on the road without snow. There was no snow anywhere at all. We saw lots of animals like squirrels and birds and deer and rabbits all running everywhere so happy about spring. They were eating grass and leaves and acorns and they were so excited they did not care about us, about people. Even the rabbits just looked at us from the side of the road and kept eating; they were so hungry they could not bother to be afraid. It made me happy to see them. I thought, we helped them, too. It was like Wanda had said about making our house a place where we would feed other people. We had even fed the animals.
We knew when we came close to the house because there was another house on the road that we remembered, with a big wagon wheel stuck on the front of their barn and flowers painted on the side. We had only seen the very top of the flowers before because of the snow but now the snow was gone and we could see the whole flowers. They were tall and beautiful and red and blue. The farmer of that house was standing next to the barn and just looking at the rye all green in his field, and he looked back at us and then I waved my hand and he waved back and he was smiling also.
“We will not be able to drive all the way to the house,” Panov Mandelstam said, because there was not a road, and the trees had been so close together when we were walking, but then it turned out he was wrong, or we had not remembered it right. We saw the place we had come out and it was between two big trees and there was room for the horses to go between. And then we kept going and there was still room, even if not very much room. The cart was not a very big cart and we squeezed through. It was starting to get dark, and Panova Mandelstam said, “Maybe we should stop for the night. We don’t want to miss it,” but just then Wanda said, “I see the house,” and I saw it too, and I jumped out of the back of the cart even though Panov Mandelstam could keep driving it all the way, and I ran around it and got ahead of the horses and ran all the way to the yard and the house was there waiting for us.
