by Naomi Novik
I had to keep walking because Panova Mandelstam was still going onward, and if we got lost, Sergey and Stepon and I would not know what to do. I didn’t know how to get back out of this city. It was like being in a house that had a thousand rooms and all the doors were the same. We went through a big noisy marketplace in a square, full of people buying and selling, and then we turned down a street into what felt like quiet after the noise of the market but was still very loud next to the forest. Soon it got even quieter and the houses began to get big and wide with big windows full of glass, and here the snow was in neater piles and stairs went up to the houses coming out of the snow. Finally we came to a very big house with an arch and a courtyard next to it, and there were horses there and people carrying things around, very busy.
Miryem’s mother stopped at the steps of that house. She had her arm in Panov Mandelstam’s arm, and he looked up at the door, and I thought that he did not want to go inside that house, but then they climbed up the stairs together, and she turned and beckoned to say, Come along, so we climbed up behind them and inside. “Rakhel!” a woman was saying; she had hair that was mostly grey and silver and white, and there was something about her face that made me think of Panova Mandelstam, and they were kissing and I thought, this was Miryem’s grandmother. Miryem’s mother had a mother, too, who was still alive. “And Josef! It has been too long. Come in, come in, take off your things,” she was saying, and kissing Panov Mandelstam’s cheeks.
I was afraid that Panova Mandelstam would ask her about Miryem right away, but she didn’t. More women came out of the kitchen and there was a big noise of greeting and talk among them. I thought at first they were just talking so fast that I couldn’t understand, but then I realized they were saying words that I didn’t understand at all, mixed up with words that I did know. It made me want suddenly to go away, to go back to that little house in the forest. Sitting at the table in Panova Mandelstam’s house, eating off Miryem’s plate, I had thought a little bit secretly in my heart, without really meaning to, that maybe I could slip into Miryem’s place, but now I felt I had not really known Miryem’s place. I had seen a part of it, but not all of it. This was Miryem’s place too, and it was not a place for me. I was not wanted here at all.
I would have left if I knew where to go. Sergey was next to me, and Stepon had come off his back and was huddled up against me with his head in my side and was pulling my apron up over his face. They would have left with me. But we didn’t know any way to go. And then I heard my own name: Panova Mandelstam had taken her mother to one side out of all the noise and talking, and she was saying something about me, about us, softly to her mother, who was listening and worried and looking over at us. I wanted to know what they were saying, to make her so worried, and I wondered what we would do if she said she did not want us here even to sleep. There was trouble with us, and she did not know us.
But she did not say that. She said something to Miryem’s mother, and then Miryem’s mother came to us with a smile that felt like it was saying everything will be all right but wasn’t sure if it would, and then she took us deeper into that big house. There was a staircase going up and we followed her to a big hallway with a carpet in the middle of it, and at the end of that hallway there was another staircase, and we climbed that one, and then there was another, wooden steps, and then we were in a small hallway that did not have a carpet, only plain wooden boards, and there were only two doors on either side of it and a door in the ceiling with a cord hanging down from it. She opened the door on the left and took us into a room that was the size of the room of the little house in the forest, that was how big that house was, that you could climb and climb up through it and then you found another whole house at the top of it, and that was how big the city was, that it had so many of these houses in it that you couldn’t tell them from each other.
But there was a window in the room in the wall across from the door, and Stepon pulled his hand away from me and ran to the window and pressed his whole face to it with a cry. I thought he was upset, but he said, “We’re birds! Wanda, Sergey, look, we’re birds,” and I went to him a little bit afraid and we looked out through the glass and Stepon was right: we were birds. We had climbed so high up in that house that we were looking down at the roofs of other houses, and looking down at the streets. From up there I could see the marketplace we had been in, only it was so small I could cover it with my hand if I put it on the window, and I could see the big wall of the city and it was only a thin little line like an orange snake going around the outside, an orange snake with snow on its back, and on the other side of it there was the forest with all the trees turned into one big dark thing, and a heavy blanket of white snow all over it that hurt my eyes to look at. There was white snow on the roofs of all the houses, too, but in the streets it was all dirty and black, but from this high even that did not look bad.
“Come, sit down and rest,” Miryem’s mother said. I had not even looked at the room, because of the window. There were three beds, real beds made out of wood, each one with a mattress, and blankets, and pillows. There was a little fireplace with no fire in it, but the room was very warm anyway, and there was a little table in front of the window and there was a chair at the little table and there were two other chairs in front of the fire. They had cushions on their seats that were only a little worn out. “I know you must be hungry. I’ll have some food brought up. I’m sorry to put you so far up, in servants’ rooms: all the other bedrooms downstairs are full of guests already. But some of them will leave tomorrow after the wedding, and then it won’t be so crowded.”
We didn’t know what to say so we didn’t say anything, and then she left us there and each of us sat down on a bed and we looked across the room at each other. I had known that Miryem’s grandfather was rich, but I had not known what rich meant before. Rich meant that this room with three beds and a table and chairs and a window filled with glass was something to say sorry for. It was even bigger than I first thought it was because when we sat down there was a big open place of the floor between us where there was nothing to cook with and no big firewood pile and no pots and no axe or broom on the walls. There was a little picture on the wall above my bed that someone had made of the town outside the window, only it was a picture of spring, with the trees green and birds in the air.
After a while Panova Mandelstam came back up, and there was a girl with her, a tall strong young girl with her hair under a kerchief, carrying a big heavy tray with food on it, and she put it down on the table and then she nodded her head to Panova Mandelstam and went away. I looked after her and I thought, that girl was me; there wasn’t even room here for me to carry things and bring things. They already had someone in that place, too.
Stepon and Sergey went to eat right away, but I couldn’t feel hungry. I was hungry, but there was a pain in my stomach when I looked at the food, and I said to Panova Mandelstam, “We are not any good to you here,” and I almost said, We should go, but I couldn’t, because we didn’t have anywhere to go, unless we did turn into birds and fly away.
Panova Mandelstam looked at me surprised. “Wanda!” she said. “After all the help you have been to us? Am I to say, Oh, but what good is she to me now?” She reached out and took my face in her hands and shook me a little back and forth. “You are a good girl with a good heart. So much work you’ve done without a word of complaint. Since you came into my house, I did not have to lift a hand. Before I thought of doing a thing it was done. I was sick, but because you were there helping, I grew well again. And you never ask for a thing. It’s only what we press into your hands that you take. So now you must let me do it.”
“What you press in my hands is more than all I have!” I said, because it hurt to hear her saying those things that were not true, as if I had only come and helped her to be good, and not because I wanted silver, and wanted to be safe.
“Then you don’t have enough, and I have more than I need,” she said. “Hush, sweetheart. You don’t have a
mother anymore, but let me speak to you with her voice a minute. Listen. Stepon told us what happened in your house. There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away. And if there has been food in my house for you, then I am glad, glad with all my heart. I hope there will always be.
“Hush, don’t cry,” she said, and her thumbs were wiping tears from my face, though they were coming faster than she could take them away. “I know you are afraid and worried. But there will be a wedding here today. It is a time to rejoice. For today we don’t let sorrow come into this house. All right? Sit and eat, now. Rest a little while. If you want, when you are not tired, come down and help me. There is still work to be done, and it is happy work. We will raise the canopy for the bride and groom, we will put food on the tables, and we will eat together and dance, and the wolf will not come in. Tomorrow, we will think of other things.”
I nodded without saying anything. I couldn’t say anything. She smiled at me, and wiped more of my tears, and then she gave up trying to wipe them and just gave me a handkerchief out of her skirt and touched my cheek again and went out. Sergey and Stepon were sitting at the table staring at the food on it. There was soup, and bread, and eggs, and when I sat next to them, Stepon said, “I didn’t know it was magic, when you brought it home. I thought it was just food.”
I reached out my hands to them, suddenly: I put out my hand to Sergey on one side, and to Stepon on the other, and they put out their hands to me, and to each other, and we held tight, tight; we made a circle together, my brothers and me, around the food that we had been given, and there was no wolf in the room.
*
In the morning Mirnatius thrust back the curtains early and set the servants scurrying before I had even sat up in bed; they brought us hot tea on a tray and warm bread with butter and jam, another plate of thick slices of ham and cheese: hearty food that was surely their best, though only a step up from peasant fare. He made a face at it and only picked. I forced myself to eat, keeping my eyes downcast so as not to look at him in his luxuriously embroidered dressing gown, his hands and his mouth. The fire was warm against my cheek, but my other cheek was hot also. I kept remembering his fingers on my thigh, and my ring wouldn’t swallow up that heat.
He demanded a bath, and I had to endure that: they put it before the fire, and two serving-girls washed him while I tried not to watch their hands moving over his body, tried not to feel something like jealousy. I wasn’t jealous over him, but over what he’d made me feel, that stirring that should have belonged to a man I would have let touch me; a man who would have wanted to touch me, who could really be my husband. I wanted that shiver along my leg to be a gift I’d never expected; I wanted to be able to look at him in his bath and blush and be glad for it. And instead I had to deliberately look away, because if I had my way, tonight I’d throw him down into a pit with a Staryk king, and bury them both, and marry myself off to a brutish man as old as my father.
Magreta crept in timid-brave, with her comb and brush, to do my hair; her hands on my shoulders asked a trembling question I couldn’t answer anymore. She’d told me some time ago, in quick prosaic terms, the way between a man and a woman, when I was still young enough to think it sounded silly and to promise without hesitation never to let a man do it until we were married. “Not that you’ll be left alone with any men, dushenka,” she’d added, belatedly, stroking my hair: she’d been passing on a speech that someone had given to her, a long time ago; a speech she’d listened to and obeyed for all her days.
Some years later on from there, when I’d been old enough to understand what marriage meant for a duke’s daughter, and why I would never be left alone with any man long enough to choose anything at all until my choices were gone, she’d told me of it all over again comfortingly, as something to be endured: not too bad, it’s only a few minutes, it won’t hurt much, and only the first time. I had been too old to be comforted so, however. I understood that she was lying, without knowing exactly how she was lying; perhaps it would hurt every time and perhaps it would hurt a great deal and perhaps it would go on for ages—a wide array of unpleasant possibilities. I’d even asked her how she knew, and she’d gone pink and embarrassed and said, “Everyone knows, Irinushka, everyone knows,” and that meant she didn’t really know at all.
But she’d never told me about other possibilities, about why she’d made me promise in the first place. Now I wondered if she’d ever been hungry this way, and how she’d stifled that hunger; what crust of bread she had pressed into her mouth to keep from swallowing up the seeds of a disaster. I sat with her hands slowly braiding my hair and my hands were clasped in my lap, the silver of my ring lit gold by flame-reflections, like my husband’s skin, sheened with amber light as he stepped dripping wet from the bath.
He stood like a statue before the wide fireplace before me as the serving-girls wiped the droplets from him with soft cloths: a little too lovingly, which I tried not to notice. They were both very pretty, of course, chosen to please the tsar’s eye. But he only twitched his shoulders like a horse shivering away flies and said with sharp impatience, “My clothes.” They left off hurriedly as his own body servants from the palace shooed them away and brought him his garments, silk and velvet laid on in layers as carefully as my father’s armor, under a sharp critical commentary from him all the while, dissatisfied with this crease or that bulge.
I was already dressed. The servants bowed to Mirnatius when he dismissed them, and then turned to me as Magreta set the crown upon my newly braided hair. They stood in silence a moment before me, looking, and then they all bowed again, lower; the two serving-girls curtseyed deep, and slipped out of the room hand in hand with their baskets of cloths and soap on their other arms, whispering to each other wistfully. Mirnatius watched them all with more baffled indignation and then abruptly seized his book from where the satchel lay against the wall. Without even sitting down, he roughly drew my face again in quick furious lines and turned to catch one of the servants still going back and forth emptying buckets out of the tub. “Look at this! Is this a beautiful face?” he demanded.
The poor man was very alarmed, of course, and looked at the picture only trying to divine what answer the tsar wanted; he stared at it and said, “It’s the tsarina?” at once, and then he looked up at me, and looked back down at it, and looked helplessly at the tsar.
“Well?” Mirnatius snapped. “Is it beautiful or not?”
“Yes?” the man said faintly, in desperation.
Mirnatius ground his teeth. “Why? What about it is beautiful? Look at it and tell me, don’t just bleat whatever you think I want to hear!”
The man swallowed, terrified, and said, “It’s a good likeness?”
“Is it?” Mirnatius said.
“Yes? Yes, very good,” the man said, hastily more definite as Mirnatius stepped towards him. “But I am no judge, Majesty! Forgive me!” He bent his head.
“Let him go,” I said, in pity, “and ask the boyar instead.”
Mirnatius scowled at me, but waved the servant off, and he did take the picture to the boyar and thrust it in his hands at the door, as all our retinue crammed into the sledges and sleighs again. The boyar and his wife looked at it, and she touched it with her fingers and said, “How beautiful, Your Majesty.”
“Why?” he snapped, instantly turning on her. “Which features please you, what about it?”
She looked at him in surprise and looked back and said, “Why—none alone, I suppose, Your Majesty. But I see the tsarina’s face again when I look at it.” She smiled at him suddenly. “Perhaps I see what your eyes see,” she said, gentle and well meant, and he whirled away almost breathless with rage and threw himself into the sleigh, leaving the l
oose page still in her hands.
He drew me a dozen times more that day, one picture after another from every angle he could arrange; he seized my chin and pushed my head in one direction and another in mad frustration. I let him do it without complaint. I kept thinking, unwillingly, of his silent weeping. His book filled with pictures, and he made the servants look at them, and the boyar whose house we stopped at to break the morning. We came into Vysnia a little while after noon, and the sleigh drew up before the steps of my father’s house. We hadn’t quite stopped moving before Mirnatius leapt out; without even saying a word of greeting, he thrust the book into my own father’s hands and said, almost savagely, “Well?”
My father looked through the pictures slowly, turning the pages with his thick callused fingertip; a strange expression was coming into his face. I had climbed out, with a servant’s help, and my stepmother Galina was holding out her hands to me in greeting. We kissed cheeks, and I straightened, and my father was still lingering on the last drawing, a sketch of my face looking out at trees heavy with snow, a single curve for the sleigh’s edge and only the far side of my face visible, just eyelashes and the corner of my mouth and the line of my hair. He said, “She has a look of her mother in these,” and handed the book back to Mirnatius abruptly, his mouth pressed into a line, and turned to kiss my cheeks.
I had never slept in the grandest chamber of my father’s house. I had peeked into it a few times as a daring game, when there were no honored guests in the house and Magreta would let me. It had always seemed to me an imposing, massive room. The windowsills were carved stone, as was the one heavy imprudent balcony that looked away over the forest and the river. “It was the old duchess’s chambers,” Magreta once told me. There were tapestries on the walls: Magreta had helped mend a few, but my own sewing was not good enough to be allowed; I had done a little of the embroidery on two of the velvet pillows that littered the bed, with its funny big clawed feet that I had always liked: the last duke’s crest had been a bear, and there were half a dozen old pieces of furniture still left with the carved feet.