“We must try to get to Vysnia before the snow melts,” Panova Mandelstam said, while we sat around the table. Wanda had made tea, and she was cooking porridge now for us all to eat before we left. Sergey and Panov Mandelstam had brought in a few more stumps to sit on. “We have food and warm coats. We will get out to the road and get someone to take us on to the city. No one will tell on us in the quarter, and there is some money in the bank. We will bribe someone to clear your names if we can. My father will know who to go to.”
“I must finish the mattress before we go,” Wanda said. She went and picked up the big blanket she had been knitting, and I saw it was not a blanket but a mattress cover. It was very pretty. There was a beautiful pattern in it of leaves.
“Wanda, this is beautiful work,” Panova Mandelstam even said, touching it. “You should bring it with you.”
But Wanda shook her head. “We need to fix the bed.”
I didn’t know why, but if she said so, then she had to. I looked at the cot and the mattress cover. “It is almost done, isn’t it?” I asked. “It is the right size.”
Wanda held up the blanket and it was the right size. It was longer than she was. When she held up her hands over her head it still reached almost all the way to the floor. She put it down again and I thought she looked a little scared even though I didn’t know why she would be scared because it was done, when she wanted it to be done. “Yes,” she said. “I can finish it quickly now.”
“Wanda,” Panov Mandelstam said slowly, as if he wanted to ask a question, but Wanda shook her head fiercely, because she did not want to talk about it, and even though Panov Mandelstam liked words so much, he saw that she did not want to talk, so he stopped.
“It is all right, Wanda,” Panova Mandelstam said after a moment. “Go ahead and do what you need to do. I will make some more porridge.”
Wanda quickly sewed up two open sides of the mattress, and then she stuffed it with a big pile of wool, and then she sewed up the last bit of the mattress and put it on the cot. The cot looked very pretty with the mattress on it. Meanwhile Panov Mandelstam and I helped Sergey tidy up the yard and the shed. We filled the woodbox again. It had gone empty overnight. I didn’t know why the oven took so much wood, but now I knew why Sergey was cutting wood in the forest at night, and it was just as well he had been doing that. Panova Mandelstam asked me to bring her a long stick, and she tied some straw around the bottom and swept the house.
The porridge was ready so we ate it. We went outside with our plates, which were just pieces of wood that Sergey had cut off a tree, and rubbed them with snow until they were clean. We put them on a shelf inside the house. Wanda made up another pot of porridge and put it into the ashes to cook, even though we were leaving. She closed the door of the oven and we looked around. The house looked nice and tidy. It was almost as big as our old house, but I liked it more. The boards were close together and the oven was very solid and the roof was snug. I was sorry to go away from it, and I thought Sergey and Wanda were sorry to go away too.
“Thank you for giving us shelter,” Wanda said to the house, as if it were a person. Then she picked up the basket and went outside. We all followed her out.
* * *
Minutes went slipping through my fingers with silver coins, vanishing as they changed to gold. I was close enough to the doors now that I could hear the shovels ringing faintly in the other room, going quickly, whipped along by the same fatal deadline, but I didn’t allow myself to go and look and see how far they’d gotten. We worked all through the night without stopping. When the disk of the mirror began to glow with morning, I had to make myself keep changing them systematically: my head swam, nauseated, when I looked up and saw it. There was still an entire rack left to change, and my first flinching terrified instinct was to madly turn out every last chest and try to change them all at once. I closed my hands and eyes for a moment before I could go on.
I didn’t stop to eat any breakfast. I was distantly grateful that my husband didn’t come to inspect my progress again that morning, as much as I could be grateful for anything. I felt sore as if I really were being beaten. But the horror kept me at it. I kept thinking how they would do it, what they would do. Would they put a knife in the hand of a small child and expect her to put it to her own throat, or would they kill the child themselves? Would they make her watch her mother die first, or the other way around? Would they make Flek do it? I knew that no matter what there would be no mercy to it, no kindness allowed. You couldn’t return a kindness after you were dead.
In the middle storeroom I spilled the chests out one after the other and changed them, until I finally poured out the very last one, and made all of it go to gold. I spilled the final heap off the tablecloth and staggered up. The blue of the mirror’s sky was just starting to go dim with the approach of sunset. I had perhaps an hour until my time expired. Dragging the cloth behind me, I opened the doors.
The storeroom was nearly empty. The sledge was all the way at the far opening, nearly full again, and inside the mouth of the tunnel I could see the gleam of silver packed from the surface of the ice all the way to the ceiling. Flek and Tsop were working in the last corner on the nearer side of the river, and Shofer was on the other side. I ran to them. “Go help him!” I told Flek and Tsop. They didn’t even nod; they only went to the other one where Shofer was working and joined him. I put down my cloth and shoved silver onto it with my bare hands and changed it. All that was left was a tiny pile, almost pathetic in that enormous space, only the crust of honey you would scrape from around the edges of an empty jar when you had nothing else left. But it was a big jar, and even this little scraping still had to be gold, not silver.
My hands were trembling by the time I changed the last coins. Shofer had gone and emptied another load into the tunnel, and while he had done it, Flek and Tsop had shoveled the last of the final corner into a pile by the river’s edge, so when Shofer brought the sledge back, they could load it quickly. I let them do it, and went around the room searching in every corner for any gleam of silver, any last coin left. My mirror was almost gone full dark.
But they had cleared the room. Only on one little ledge jutting from the wall, I found a single silver coin caught. The hooves of the deer clattered on the ice behind my back as Shofer turned the sledge, with only one small mound in the bottom. They had packed the tunnel so full that he had to back it up to have room to dump the last heap out onto the ice. Flek and Tsop came slowly towards me. I picked the one coin up and held it up, and between my thumb and forefinger gold swept across its face, just as the great double doors of the storeroom were thrust open, and my husband came into the room.
He had a grim anger-clenched look on his face that fell away instantly. He stopped open-mouthed, gazing on his emptied storeroom. I was shaking with weariness and reaction, but I dragged myself straight and said with hoarse defiance, “There. I have changed every coin within your storerooms to gold.”
He jerked his head to stare at me. I’d expected him to be furious; instead he looked almost—bewildered, as if he had no idea what to make of it, of me. He slowly turned his head to look: at the silver piled inside the tunnel, at Shofer standing there sagging, holding the heads of the deer on the sledge, at Flek and Tsop both wavering like willow saplings in a high wind, and at last at me again. He walked slowly across the room and took the final coin out of my fingers and looked at it, and broke it in half with his bare hands.
“It’s gold all the way through!” I snapped at him.
“Yes,” he said, blankly. “It is.” He stood there still a while longer before he lifted his head at last out of a daze. He put the two halves of the coin on the ledge and bowed to me, formal and courtly. “The task I set is accomplished. I will take you to the sunlit world, as I have promised, that you shall dance at your cousin’s wedding. Ask your questions now, my lady.”
The courtesy confused me; I’d been pulling myself together to do battle with him. I stared at him blankly instead. I couldn’t think of a single question. After a moment, I said, “Do I have time to bathe?” I was a bedraggled mess, after three days and three nights more or less entire spent staggering around changing the silver.
“Make ready as you will. You shall have as much time as you require,” he said. It didn’t seem exactly an answer, but if he was that certain, I wouldn’t argue. “Ask twice more.”
I looked at Flek and Tsop and Shofer and said, “I promised to turn all their own silver to gold for them, in exchange for their help. They accepted, and made return of themselves. Are they my bondsmen now?”
“Yes,” he said, and inclined his head to them, as if he hadn’t the slightest trouble thinking of three servants as nobility, just like that. The three of them had a bit more difficulty with it; they all started to bob low curtseys, and had to stop themselves partway down, and when Flek came back up she seemed to suddenly realize we’d finished, it was all over, and she jerked like a doll and turned around and put her hands over her face with a stifled cry somewhere between agony and relief.
I would have liked to sit down and weep myself. “Do I have time to change their silver for them now?” I asked. I wasn’t planning to come back here if I could help it.
“That you have already asked and been answered,” he said. “Ask again.”
That was annoying, when for once I had been trying to use my questions up. “What does that mean?” I demanded. “Why is it the same whether I want to go take a bath or change their silver, too?”
He frowned at me. “As you have been true, so will I be, and in no lesser degree,” he said, a bit huffily. “I will lay my hand upon the flow of time, if need be, that you shall have however much of it you seek. Go therefore and make ready however you wish, and when you are ready to depart, we shall go.”
He paused to look around the storeroom once more, while I sluggishly puzzled through what he’d said, but by the time I burst out belatedly, “You could have taken me there in time, then, no matter what!” I was saying it to an empty doorway, which cared about as much as he would have, I suppose.