Наоми Новик - Spinning Silver

“Yes, she knows what she is about,” Kajus continued. “Trust her to find a hardworking girl to help her. You aren’t just a pretty face! Ah, here is Lukas.”

His son came back into the house, with a box of empty jugs. He was a little older than Sergey, not as tall as him or me, but his face was round, and there was meat on his bones. He did not go hungry. He looked at me, up and down, and his father said, “Lukas, give her seven pennies for the moneylender.” Lukas counted out the seven pennies into my hand. It was more than they needed to pay. “I have been doing a good business, too,” Kajus said to me, with a friendly wink. “All this cold weather! A man needs something to put heat in his belly. It must be especially bad, out on your farm,” he added. “I haven’t seen your father in town in a while.”

“Yes,” I said, wary. My father didn’t come because we didn’t have anything to spare for liquor.

“Here,” Kajus said, handing me a sealed jug, a small one, the kind he sold in the market for a few bits if you brought him back the jug. I only stared at it without taking it. I didn’t know what it was for; he had already paid me. But Kajus pressed it on me again. “A gift for your father,” he said. “You’ll bring back the jug when you have a chance.”

“Thank you, Panov Simonis,” I said, because I had to. I did not want to take my father a jug of krupnik, so he could get drunk at home and beat us, but I didn’t see any way out of it. The next time Da did come to town, Kajus would expect to be thanked, and if it came out I hadn’t given it to him, I would really get a beating then. So I put the jug in my basket.

No one else in the other houses invited me in for krupnik. Marya the dressmaker was the only one who said anything to me, besides handing me the money. “So Miryem is going to get more dresses from Vysnia, is she?” she said abruptly. She had only given me a single penny. “It seems a long way to go, and for very dear goods. Who knows if she will be able to sell anything more.”

“I don’t know if she will bring more dresses, Panova,” I said.

“Well, she will suit herself and no one else, that’s certain,” Marya said, and shut the door hard in my face.

I went back to the house and unpacked the payments. One of the borrowers had given me an old chicken that had stopped laying, ready for the pot. “Will you want it today, Panova Mandelstam?” I asked Miryem’s mother. “I can wring its neck and pluck it if you want.”

She was sewing, and when I asked her, she looked up and turned her head around the room as if she was looking for something she had lost. “Where is Miryem?” she asked me, as if she had forgotten, and then she shook her head and said, “Oh, I am being silly. She went back to Vysnia for more dresses.”

“Yes, she went to Vysnia for dresses,” I said slowly. Something about it sounded wrong to me. But of course, that was why she had gone back. Everyone else thought so.

“Well, there is enough food in the house. We will save the chicken,” Panova Mandelstam said. “Put it with the others for now, and then come back inside. It is time for dinner.”

I took the old hen to the coop and put her inside. Then I stood looking at the snow behind the house, deep-drifted and unmarked now, with the broom leaning half buried against the wall: the broom I had used to sweep away the footprints of the Staryk, who had come to the house last night, and left a purse of silver for Miryem to turn into gold. I shivered all over and went back in so I could forget again.

After dinner, I had to go. My father would already be angry that I had not been home to get his dinner yesterday, because of the storm. But I swept the floor and went to look in at the chickens and wrote down everything in the book before I left. I had slept the night on the pallet they had made for Sergey, warm and cozy in the big room with the oven and the smells of dough and stew and honey and kasha. My house did not smell like that. Miryem’s mother gave me a cup of fresh rich cow’s milk with my dinner, out of a big pail that Panova Gizis had paid with, and two pennies for two days, even though Sergey hadn’t come last night in the storm, and a bundle for my basket with some bread and butter and eggs in it. “Sergey didn’t get supper or breakfast,” she said. I put on my shawl and went, with her kindness heavy on my arm.

I went around through the forest and hid the bundle in among the roots of the white tree, and again I buried the pennies. I put one each in my pile and Sergey’s pile. Then I went on to the house. Stepon was there trying to stir a pot of porridge that had gone solid. There was a strong red mark on his face, and he was wincing when he moved. He looked up at me, unhappy. So our father had told him to get dinner last night and then hit him because he did not know how to do it. “Sit and rest,” I told him. “There’s something for later.”

I thinned the porridge with some water and cooked some cabbage. My father came in angry, shouting even while he took off his boots that I had no business staying in town because of a little snowfall, over so quickly, and the moneylender would take an extra day’s payment off the debt for keeping me. “I will tell them so,” I said, putting the cabbage on the table quickly, before he was even all the way inside the house. “Panov Simonis gave me a present for you, Da.” I put the bottle of krupnik on the table. I thought I might as well use it to avoid a beating now, since he was going to be drunk later anyway.

“What is Kajus giving me presents for?” Da said, and he sniffed the jug suspiciously when he opened it. But soon he was drinking it in big swallows, the whole thing, while he ate half the cabbage and the porridge. The rest of us ate our share quickly, without looking up.

“I will go get wood now, since I wasn’t home,” I said. Da didn’t tell me not to go. Sergey and Stepon slipped out with me, and I took them to the white tree. The bundle was still there where I had left it, and it hadn’t frozen. We shared the food, and afterwards they helped me gather wood. After that, Sergey went down the road to town. Stepon huddled together with me outside against the woodpile, helping me keep warm while we listened through the cracks to Da singing loudly.

Once he paused and shouted for me. “Stupid girl, went too far,” he said, grumbling, when I didn’t answer. “Now the fire is dying.” It was a long time before he went to bed and began to snore. Stepon and I were very cold by then. We crept into the house as quiet as we could and banked the fire, so it would not be dead before morning, and I put on the kasha to cook for breakfast. I showed Stepon how to do it so he would know next time. Then we crawled into bed and went to sleep. In the morning, my father beat me six hard wallops with his belt for having gone too far, even though the fire was all right and breakfast was ready. I think he was mostly hitting me because I hadn’t been there to hit last night. But he had a bad headache and he was hungry, so when Stepon put a big bowl of steaming kasha on the table, he stopped hitting me and sat down to eat. I wiped my face and swallowed and sat down next to him.

It was late when I reached Vysnia in Oleg’s sleigh. I slept that night in my grandfather’s house, and early the next morning I went down to the market in our quarter and asked around until I found the stall of Isaac the jeweler, the one my cousin Basia meant to marry. He was a young man with spectacles and stubby but careful fingers, handsome, with good teeth and nice brown eyes and his beard trimmed short to stay out of his work. He was bent over an anvil in miniature, hammering out a disk of silver with his tiny tools, enormously precise. I stood watching him work for maybe ten minutes before he sighed and said, “Yes?” with a faint hint of resignation, as though he’d hoped I would go away instead of troubling him to do any business. I brought out my white pouch and spilled the six silver coins onto the black cloth he worked upon.