by Naomi Novik
But for Irina, I opened a screen to make a hidden place in the corner of the room, and then the girl came down with the blue dress, and we helped Irina to put it on there in the small dark corner. When we had finished putting it on her, we folded the screen away, and the tsar was dressed at last or nearly: he wore a coat of red velvet and a waistcoat of red embroidered in silver, and they were putting on fine shoes for him with lines of glittering red jewels sewn along the seams. He stood and turned and looked at Irina with cold displeasure, and said, “Get out,” to all of us, and I had to go. I looked back at her for a moment from the door, but she did not look afraid; she stood looking steadily back at him, my cool quiet girl with nothing showing in her face.
They came out again a little while later, and the dress wasn’t what it had been; it was wider and more full, and the blue shaded from deep strong color at the waist out to pale grey at the hem with a waterfall of petticoats spilling out beneath it, and silver embroidery tracing every edge with red jewels winking out of it at me that I had never sewn onto it. She was carrying her jewel-box in her arms, and the long sleeves had become gauze thin as a summer veil with more red jewels in twisting lines drawn over them, as though he had sprinkled drops of blood upon her, bled out of his red coat. I closed my hands on each other and dropped my eyes as they passed, not to see. I had made the dress like I had made the tablecloth, out of pain and long work, and I knew how much of both it had taken to make it. And so I knew how much that dress would have cost, that he had put her in, and I did not want to think of how it had been paid.
*
Wanda and Sergey went downstairs to help with the wedding. “Will you come, Stepon?” Sergey asked me, but I shivered, remembering all those people crammed together, in the rooms and in the streets, more people than I knew there were in the whole world. So I said, “No, no, no,” and they didn’t make me, but they went, and after a while the sun started to go down, and I started to not like being alone in the room. I was all alone with nobody, not even goats, and Wanda and Sergey were gone. What if they had really gone again? What if someone had come looking for them and they had to run away? I opened the window and stuck my head out and looked down, and when I did that I could hear noise from all the way down on the ground. There were a lot of people outside the house and some horses too, but it was dark down on the ground already, even though the sun was still coming in the window, and I couldn’t see anyone’s faces. I couldn’t see Wanda or Sergey. There was one woman with yellow hair but I wasn’t sure if it was her.
I pulled my head back inside, but the house was getting so loud and full of people that I heard some of that same noise even when I closed the window. It came up through the fireplace and under the door. It got louder and louder and then music started playing. It was loud music and people were dancing to it. I felt it in my feet not just in my ears. I sat on the bed and covered my ears and I still felt it coming up all the way through the house.
It kept going on and on. It was all the way dark outside and I was really afraid now because why would Wanda and Sergey stay down in all that noise unless something bad made them. I had my face pressed up against my knees and my arms over my head, and then there was a knock on the door. I didn’t say to come in because I would have to take my arms from over my head, but Panova Mandelstam came inside anyway. “Stepon, are you all right?” she said. She meant it but she didn’t really mean it, I could tell. She was thinking about something else. But when I didn’t say anything back and didn’t pick my head up, she started to really mean it, and then she went and got the candle she had left on the table for us and she took out a couple of big lumps of wax from it and blew on them until they weren’t hot, and she said, “Here, Stepon, put the wax in your ears.”
I thought I would try. I took my hand away for just a little bit and took the wax. It was still warm and soft. I pushed it into my ear and it squished into the little spots and then it stopped being so warm, and the noise stopped being so loud on that side. I could still feel it in my body but I couldn’t hear it so much. So then I was very glad and I took the other lump of wax and that helped too.
Panova Mandelstam put her hand on my head and stroked it. I liked how it felt. But she was already thinking about something else again. She looked around the room as if she was looking for it and being worried about it. “Are Wanda and Sergey all right?” I asked, because it made me remember I was worried. I was so glad about the noise being so much better that I had forgotten for a second.
“Yes, they are downstairs,” Panova Mandelstam said. She sounded funny and far away because of the wax in my ears but I could still understand her.
So then I was glad again and not worried, but she was still worried, so I asked her, “What are you looking for?”
She stood there looking around the room and then she looked at me. “Do you know, I have forgotten. Isn’t that silly?” She smiled, but she didn’t mean the smile. It was not a real smile. “Do you want to come down and have some macaroons?”
I didn’t know what a macaroon was but I thought, if anyone would go down to the noise to eat them then they must be good, and I was sorry I couldn’t help her find what she had forgotten. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try.”
She put out her hand to me and I took it and we went downstairs together. The noise got bigger but not as much bigger as I was afraid it would. The closer we got the more it stopped being just thumping in my teeth. Now I could hear music and people singing words even though the wax stopped me hearing what the words were. They sounded happy. Panova Mandelstam brought me into a big room: big and crowded with many men. I was afraid again, because some of them were red-faced and loud and smelled of drink, but they were not angry. They were smiling and shouting laughter and dancing all together, holding hands and making a circle although it was not really a circle because the room was not big enough so they were mostly crammed in and stepping on each other, but they didn’t seem to mind. I thought of being upstairs and holding hands with Wanda and Sergey: that was how it felt. Sergey was with them, and in the middle of that circle there was a young man dancing and everyone else was taking turns going into the middle and dancing with him.
We went into the next room, and it was full of women dancing, with a woman in the middle in a dress that was red and had patterns on it in shiny silver, and she had on a veil hanging all the way almost to the floor and she was laughing and very pretty. Panova Mandelstam took me to a table next to the wall with empty chairs and there was a plate on it full of cookies that were light and sweet and like a cloud someone had baked, and she put it in front of me and gave me some other food, too, so much food: thick slices of soft meat I had never eaten before that she said was beef, and roast chicken and fish and potatoes and carrots and dumplings and little green vegetables, and a big torn hunk of yellow soft sweet bread. I sat there and I ate and ate and everyone was happy and I was happy, too, except Panova Mandelstam was sitting next to me and she was not happy. She kept looking around the room for whatever she was trying to find, and it was not there. People kept coming and talking to her, and when they talked to her, she would be distracted for a little while, and forget she was looking for something, but when they went away she would remember and start looking again.
“Where is Wanda?” I asked her.
“Wanda is in the kitchen, sweetheart, she has been helping carry the food,” Panova Mandelstam said, and I saw her then when she pointed, so it was not Wanda she was looking for. She was looking at the bride, dancing in the middle again, and she was trying to smile, but she kept stopping.
Everyone started clapping all together, and the men were coming into the room with the groom in front. Everyone started to get up from their chairs and push all the chairs and tables out to the very edges of the room, and the women in their circle were making room so the men could be there in their circle also. One of the men took a chair no one was sitting in and put it in the middle of their circle, and the groom sat down on it, and one of the women was putt
ing down a chair for the bride in the middle of their circle, too. I was waiting to see what they would do, but they didn’t do anything. They stopped, suddenly, because someone knocked on the door.
It was so noisy in the room. Everyone had been singing and laughing and talking so loud it was almost shouting, because otherwise they couldn’t hear each other, and there was music playing. But the knock was louder than all of it. It was so loud and hard that it came in through the wax in my ears and the two lumps of it fell out to the floor. But the noise of the room didn’t bother me anymore without the wax because after that knock, there was no noise left. Nobody was talking and the music had stopped.
There were two big doors in the side of the room, which went out into the courtyard, and that was where the knock had come from. After a moment another knock came. It felt the way the music had felt upstairs coming through the house. It thumped like that. It thumped in my bones and it made me afraid.
Then Panova Mandelstam stood up and ran across the room suddenly, pushing through everyone else, and Panov Mandelstam was pushing from out of the men, and they took hold of the doors and pulled them open. Nobody stopped them. I wanted to say No, no, no, but I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to hide my head, but I thought I would imagine something worse than whatever it was.
But I wouldn’t have. It was the Staryk.
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 thought No no no again, 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.”