Page 6 of Spinning Silver
I didn’t answer her right away. I wanted to say no. I had kept her books, all those two weeks while she was away. Me, alone. Every day I went on my rounds, every day to a different set of houses, and then I came back to the house and set dinner to cook for me and her father the moneylender, and I sat down at the table and with my hands trembling a little I carefully opened the book. The leather was so soft beneath my hands, and inside, every thin fine page was covered with letters and numbers. I turned them one after another to find the houses I had visited that day. She had a different number on the page for each house, and next to it the name of the person who lived there. I dipped my pen, and wiped the nib, and dipped it again, and I wrote very slowly and shaped every number as well as I could. And then I closed the book up again, and cleaned the pen, and put it and the ink away on the shelf. I did all that by myself.
All that summer, when the days were long and I could linger a little, Miryem had taught me how to write the numbers with a pen. She would take me outside after dinner and shape them in the dirt with a stick, over and over. But she didn’t only teach me how to put them down. She taught me how tomakethem, one new number growing out of two, and how to take one number away from another also. Not just little numbers that I could make on my hands or by counting stones, but big numbers. She taught me how to make a hundred pennies into a kopek and twenty silver kopeks into a golden zlotek, and how to break a piece of silver back into pennies again.
I was afraid at first when she began. It was five days before I picked up the stick and traced the lines she had drawn. She spoke as if it was ordinary, but I knew she was teaching me magic. I was still afraid afterwards, but I couldn’t help myself. I learned to draw the magic shapes in the dirt, and then with an old worn-out pen and ash mixed with water on a smooth flat rock, and finally with her own pen and ink on an old piece of paper, marked up to grey from all the writing that had been done and bleached away. And by the end of the winter, when she went away visiting, I could keep the books for her. I was even starting to be able to read the letters. I knew the names out loud and on each page, I would say them softly to myself and touch the letters with my finger and I could see which letters made each sound. Sometimes when I was wrong Miryem would stop me and tell me the right one. That was how much magic she had given me, and I didn’t want to share.
A year ago, Iwouldhave said no to her, to keep it to myself. But that was before I had saved Sergey from the Staryk. Now, when I came home late, he had put the dinner on for me. He and Stepon had gathered me goat-hair from the bushes and the hay, all winter long, enough so I could make a shawl to wear when I walked to town. He was my brother.
Then I almost said no anyway for fear. What if he let the secret out? It was so big that I could hardly keep it inside me anyway. Every night I went to sleep thinking of six silver kopeks tight in my fist, shining and cold. I made them out of adding pennies, one by one, as long as I could before sleep took me.
But after a moment, I said slowly, “Would his work help pay the debt sooner?”
“Yes,” Miryem said. “Every day you and he will earn two pennies. Half will go to the debt until it is paid, and I will give you half in coin. And here is the first, for today.”
She took out a round clean penny and put it shining in my hand, like a reward for thinking yes instead of no. I stared down at it, and then I closed my hand around it in a fist. “I will talk to Sergey,” I said.
But when I told him, in a whisper, in the woods, far from where Da might be to overhear, he asked, “They only want me to stay in the house? They will give memoney,just to stay in the house, and feed their goats? Why?”
I said, “They’re afraid of burglars,” but as soon as the words came, I remembered that it wasn’t true. But I couldn’t remember what the truth was.
I had to stand up and pretend to be holding the basket for the chickens, and walk around, before the memory of that morning would even come back into my head. I had gone outside and quietly eaten some of the stale bread, standing at the corner of the house where they wouldn’t see me, and neither would the chickens, and then I had gone around the corner and I had seen the footprints—
“The Staryk,” I said. The word was cold in my mouth. “The Staryk were there.”
If Miryem hadn’t given me the penny, I don’t know what we would have done. I knew my father’s debt didn’t matter anymore. No law would make me go to a house where the Staryk were coming and looking in the windows. But Sergey looked at the penny in my hand, and I looked at it, and he said, “A penny each, every day?”
“Half of it goes to the debt, for now,” I said. “One penny each day.”
“You will keep this one,” he said after a moment, “and I will keep the next.”
I didn’t say,Let us go to the white tree and ask for advice.I was like Da then. I didn’t want to hear Mama’s voice saying,Don’t go, it’ll be trouble. I knew there would be trouble. But I also knew what would happen if I stopped working. If I told Da, he would say I didn’t have to go back another minute to a house of devils, and then he would sell me in the market for two goats, to someone who wanted a wife with a strong back and no numbers in her head. I would not even be worth as much as six kopeks.
So instead I told my father that the moneylender wanted someone to help tend goats, and it would pay his debt quicker if he let Sergey go to them at night. He scowled and said to Sergey, “Be back an hour after sunrise. When will the debt be paid?”
Sergey looked at me. I opened my mouth and said, “In three years.”
I expected him to hit me, to shout I was a fool who couldn’t do my sums. But Da only growled, “Bloodsuckers and leeches,” and then he added to Sergey, “You will tell them they must give you breakfast there! We will have no more taking milk from the goats.”
So we had three years now. First there would be a penny every other day, and then a penny every day. Sergey and I clutched hands together behind the house. He said in a whisper, “What will we buy with it?”
I didn’t know how to answer him. I hadn’t thought of buying anything with the money. I only thought of having it, real in my hands. Then Sergey said, “If we spend any of it, he’ll find out. He’ll make us give it to him.”
First I thought, at least Da would not want to take me to the market. If I brought home a penny every day, he would be glad to let me keep working for the moneylender. But then I thought of him taking my pennies, of having to put each shining one into his hand. I thought of him going to town and drinking them up, gambling, never working anymore. He would be happy every day. “I won’t,” I said. My stomach burned. “I won’t let him have any of it.”
But we didn’t know what to do. Then I said, “We’ll hide it. We’ll hide it all. If we work for three years, and don’t spend it, we will have ten kopeks, each. Together that will be one zlotek. A coin of gold. And we’ll take Stepon and go away.”
Where could we go? I didn’t know. But I was sure that when we had so much money, we could go anywhere. We could do anything. And Sergey nodded; he thought so too. “Where can we hide it?” he asked.
So we went to the white tree, after all, and beneath the stone on my mother’s grave we dug a hollow and we put the penny into it, and covered it again with the stone. “Mama,” I said, “please keep it safe for us.” Then we hurried away and didn’t wait to see if anything would happen. Sergey didn’t want to hear Mama tell us not to do it, either.
That night after dinner he went to town, with a cap I tied together from rags around his head to keep his ears warm. I stood in the front yard watching him go. The Staryk road was still lingering near in the forest, shining. It wasn’t like a lamp, but like stars on a cloudy night. If you tried to look right at it, you couldn’t see it. If you looked away, it was there gleaming in the corner of your eye. Sergey had been staying away from it as much as he could. He didn’t like to go to the forest anymore. He stayed all the way on the shoulder of the village road, along the opposite edge across from the trees, even though he had to stamp through the snow there, and the road was packed hard by now. But soon he was gone into the dark.
In the morning, I could see his tracks still in the snow as I walked to town myself. I half wished he had walked in the road so I wouldn’t see them, because I was afraid that they would just stop somewhere along the way. But they didn’t. I followed them all the way to Miryem’s house, and Sergey was there at the table eating a bowl of nut-smelling hot kasha. It made my stomach hungry, too. We didn’t eat breakfast at our house anymore. There wasn’t enough food.
“Everything was quiet all night,” he said to me, and I took the basket and went out to the hens. There was a whole heel of bread in the basket, the middle of it still soft. I ate it and then I went to the hens, but they didn’t come out to meet me.
Slowly, I went closer. There were tracks all around the coop. The hoof like a deer, but big, with claws. The little window at the top, that I had closed yesterday when I left, was opened wide as if something had put its nose in. I bent down and put my hand inside the coop. The hens were there, sitting all together, crouched with their feathers all fluffed big. There were only three small eggs, and when I brought them out, one of them had a grey shell, pale whitish grey like ash in a fireplace.
I threw the grey one away into the forest as hard as I could and thought of brushing away the tracks and pretending I had not seen them. What if the moneylender told Sergey not to come again, because he had not kept away the Staryk? Maybe they would send me away, too. And if I brushed the snow clean, I would forget the tracks myself, just like I had yesterday. It would almost be as though they hadn’t been there at all. I went and got the broom that I used to sweep the yard. But it was leaning against the side of the house, and when I went to take it, I saw the boot marks. There were many of them. The Staryk had come to the back of the house, the same one with the pointed boots, and he had walked back and forth along the wall three times, right there where they slept.
