Наоми Новик: Spinning Silver

I stopped arguing. My mother said softly, “Two years ago, outside Minask, a band of Staryk went through the countryside to three towns, towns not much bigger than this. They burned the churches and the houses of rich men, and took all the little gold they could find. But they rode past Yazuda village, where the Jews lived, and they did not burn their houses. So the people said the Jews had made a pact with the Staryk. And now there are no Jews in Yazuda. Do you understand, Miryem? You will not speak of the Staryk coming to our house.”

That wasn’t elves or magic or absurdity. That was something I understood very well. “I’ll go to market tomorrow,” I said, after a moment, and when my mother would have spoken, I went on, “It would be strange if I didn’t. I’ll go, and sell the two new dresses I bought, and talk of the new fashions in Vysnia.”

My mother nodded after a moment, and stroked my head with her hand, and cupped my cheeks. Then we sat down together at the table and began to peel the rest of the potatoes. Outside I heard Wanda working on chopping wood, the steady thwack-whack of the axe going in even rhythm. My father came back after only a short while with an armful of green boughs, and he spent the rest of the morning by the fire whittling them and fitting them together into small grates that he nailed across our window frames.

“We have been thinking we might hire Wanda’s brother to come stay for the nights,” my mother said without looking up from her knitting, while he worked.

“It would be good to have a young man around,” my father agreed. “I worry whenever we have money in the house. Anyway, I could use the help. I am not as young as I was.”

“Maybe we could keep some goats after all,” I said. “He could look after them for us.”

That morning after she came back, Miryem said to me, “Wanda, we would like to have a young man staying here at night to help look after the house, and to take care of some goats we are going to get. Would your brother be able to come and help us?”

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 to make them, 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, I would have 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 me money, 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.