His own fault, I would have said, and I did say to myself, fiercely, over and over, as I sat there with his body softening beside me like melting snow as he sank into the limp quietness of exhaustion. But I still felt sorry for him, even though I didn’t want to, as if he was conjuring sympathy out of me. I sat with my knees drawn up under my shift and my arms wrapped around them tight, trying to hold it in, until I thought maybe he was asleep. I risked a look over his shoulder: his eyes were open and dull, but the bloodshot red was fading out of them already, and he closed them and turned his face a little farther into the pillow.
Chapter 18
I was afraid that Stepon and Miryem’s mother would have a hard time walking, after we left the house, with all the snow. But the snow had frozen hard, and we stayed on top of it. Only Sergey fell through, twice, and we beat the snow off his clothes so it didn’t melt and make him cold. And it was not for a long time. We were walking for only half an hour maybe, even with him falling through the snow, when suddenly Sergey said, “I think I see the road,” and he was right. We came out of the trees and there was the river, frozen hard, and the road next to it, with sleigh tracks already in the snow.
There were houses and villages on the road all the rest of the day while we were walking. They came very close together because we were getting nearer to Vysnia, Miryem’s mother said. I didn’t understand how we could have been so close to so many houses. We had been so far from the road, so deep into the forest, when we found the little house. It was strange that we had not heard any sounds of people, and that Sergey had never seen anyone while he was going out for wood. But the houses and villages were there. I was a little afraid when we saw people, but nobody paid any attention to us. When it was getting dark, Miryem’s father told us to wait on the road, and he went ahead to the next house up ahead, a farmhouse. He came back with a basket of food, and said he had given them money to let us sleep in their barn above the animals that night. In the morning we went the rest of the way to Vysnia, and it was only a few hours walking.
I thought Vysnia would be like town only bigger, but really it was like a building. All we could see of it was a wall that went as far as you could see in either direction. It was made out of red bricks built one on top of another so high that you could not see over it, and then higher than that, too. There were no windows in the wall except little very narrow windows up at the very top, that looked so small that you would have to put the side of your face up to them and peer through with one eye. The only way through was a door at the end of the road, so big that a big sledge pulled with four horses and loaded all the way with wool could go right through it.
There was no other way to get close to the wall. A big ditch had been dug all around the bottom of the wall. It was full of snow, but we could tell it was there because the snow was lower there, and there were sharp points poking out of it: big trees that had been stripped of branches with their ends made sharp. It looked like they did not want anyone to come in, ever.
But there were many, many people waiting at the city door to come in. I had never seen so many people. They stretched out along the road like chickens walking in a line. When we got close enough to see that wall and the line of people, I drew close to Sergey, and Stepon slipped his hand into mine and tugged on it. He wouldn’t say anything until I put my head down close so he could whisper right into my ear, “Couldn’t we go back to the house?”
But Miryem’s parents did not seem to be worried. “It will be a long wait today,” Miryem’s mother said. “Someone important must be coming to see the duke. See, they are keeping the gate clear until they arrive.”
“The tsar’s coming, I heard,” a woman ahead of us in line said, turning around. She was wearing a good wool dress, brown, embroidered at the hem, with a red shawl over her head and a basket on her arm; her son was a tall silent young man with curls behind his ears like Panov Mandelstam wore, so they were Jews also.
“The tsar!” Miryem’s mother said.
The other woman nodded. “He married the duke’s daughter, last week. And back for a visit already! I hope it’s not a bad sign.”
“The poor girl must be homesick,” Miryem’s mother said. “How old is she?”
“Oh, she’s old enough to be married,” the woman said. “My sister pointed her out to me in the city last year, walking with her servants. Not much to look at, I would have said, but they say the tsar fell in love with her at first sight.”
“Well, the heart knows what it wants,” Panova Mandelstam said.
I had never heard her talk with anyone like that. I thought they must know each other, but after a while, Miryem’s mother asked, “Do you have family in the city?” and the woman said, “My sister lives there, with her husband. We have a farm in Hamsk. Where are you from?”
“From Pavys,” Miryem’s mother said. “A day’s journey. We’ve come for a wedding: my niece, Basia.”
The woman uttered a glad cry and took her by the shoulders. “My nephew Isaac!” she said. They kissed each other on the cheeks, and embraced, and then were talking of names of people I didn’t know: they were friends, as easily as that. I did not understand how they had found each other standing in that long line of all those many people. It seemed like magic.
We were waiting for a long time. I would have thought it would be easier to stand than to walk, but it wasn’t. The woman had food in her basket, and she insisted that we eat some of it, and I still had some in mine also, and we shared it all out. We brushed snow off some stumps and bigger stones along the side of the road so we could sit for a little while at least.
While we were eating a drumming began to come through the ground under us, and then a jingling sound faintly off. Men came out of the city gate and walked down the line pushing everyone even more back off the road, and when they came to us they told us in sharp voices to get up and be ready to bow. They had swords on their belts, real swords, not toys. We were still standing for a long time again waiting as the jingling got louder little by little, and then it was very suddenly there next to us. I saw black horses with gold and red, and a long low sleigh carved with big swoops and shining with gold, and a girl with a silver crown sitting in it. They went so fast that they were there just for a moment and they were gone. That big sleigh went through the door and inside the big building of the city and disappeared without even slowing down. “The tsarina, the tsarina!” I heard some people shout, but we forgot to bow, until they were gone, and then we bowed too late, but it was all right because there were still people to bow to: sledges full of bags and boxes and people, enough people to make a village of their own, all following after the tsar, like he was not really one person but all of them together, something made out of people.
After at last they were all gone, the whole tsar inside the city, the men started letting us through. All that time we had been waiting just so the tsar could get into the city without having to wait. The line was even longer behind us than in front of us. But once they began letting us come in, it only took maybe half an hour before we reached the door, even though they had kept us there for hours already. I was so tired of waiting; I only wanted to get to the door, but Stepon walked very slowly, so slowly that the people behind us began to crowd on our heels, impatient. He was looking at the door.
“What if we can’t get out again?” he said to me.
I didn’t know the answer. Then we got closer and I saw that people were not just walking through the door. The men with the swords were asking them questions and writing things down. I suddenly felt afraid. What if they asked us who we were and where we were from and why we were there? I didn’t know what I would say.
But Panova Mandelstam reached out and took my other hand that Stepon wasn’t holding and squeezed it and said softly, “Just don’t say anything,” and when we came up to the door, Panov Mandelstam spoke to a man with a sword, and then I saw him give that man a silver coin, and the man said, “All right, all right,” waving us on through.
I was so glad and easy with relief that I just kept going without thinking about it, and then I was inside the city. The wall was so big that it took twenty steps from the start of the door to the end of the door. A noise got bigger and bigger the whole way we went. Then we got to the other side and the sky was open over us, and all around us there were other buildings, like the city had swallowed them up into its belly along with us and all the other people.
Stepon stopped and put his hands over his ears and didn’t want to go anywhere. He was trembling when I touched him. Panova Mandelstam said, “Come, it will be more quiet when we get out of the busy streets,” but he couldn’t move, so finally Sergey said, “Come on, Stepon, I’ll carry you on my back,” even though he hadn’t done that for a long time, not since Stepon was very little, and Stepon was big enough now that his legs with the boots that Panova Mandelstam gave him dangled down Sergey’s sides and hung long and kicking while Sergey walked. But he put his face down against Sergey’s back and did not look up the whole time.
It was not easy to walk. The streets had been full of snow for some time, and so that people could walk, they had pushed the snow out of the middle, into two big walls on either side of the street, with holes dug out going to the doors of each house. But the streets were not very big, and then it had snowed again just yesterday, and now the walls were bigger than our heads, and there was some snow in the road that there was no room for on the walls and it was black with dirt and half frozen and slippery under our feet. There were big houses everywhere, all pushed up against each other with no room on either side, going up so high that I felt they were leaning over, looking down at us in the street beneath them. There were people everywhere you looked. There was nowhere that didn’t have anyone in it.
We followed Panova Mandelstam. She knew where she was going. I didn’t know how. Every corner she turned looked just like the other corners. But she walked very steady and sure as though she did not have to think about which way to turn, and she was right, because we finally came to another big wall, not so big as the first one, with a door in it, and two more men with swords. Panov Mandelstam gave them a coin, too, and they let us through the door. I thought maybe now we would be leaving, but there was more city on the other side of that wall, too. Only in this part, everyone around us was a Jew.