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 putting 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.