Haymaking starts after St Peter's day, at the end of June, and goes on all through July.
Four days a week, it's the master's hay. The whole village goes out to his meadows across the stream at dawn, while the dew is still on the grass, because wet grass cuts better. The men go first, in a line, with the scythes. They move together, the same swing, the same step, like one long machine made of men. The women come after them with rakes and turn the cut grass to the sun. The children carry water.
In my old world, there were masters who went out one summer morning with a scythe, mowed beside their men for a single day, and called it the happiest day of their lives.
I don't think ours has ever even thought of it.
The paper said the master's days would stay as they were. They have. Four days, the same as last year, the same as every year. The only thing the paper has changed is that now, when the steward rides past on his horse and looks at us, he looks like a man who's counting.
The other days are ours.
Our own strip of hay is at the far end of the village land, against the forest, where the grass is thin and full of sorrel. We go out there for the whole day, all of us, with bread and kvass and onions and the first cucumbers in a basket. Grandma rides on the Kuzmins' cart, because her knees won't do the walk.
My father scythes. He's nearly well now. He can swing the way he used to. Only at the end of each row, he stops for a moment with his hand on his side, as if he's checking it's still there. Then he turns round and does the next one.
My mother and Masha rake. Fedya and I carry. Water, the bread, the forks, whatever anybody shouts for. When the grass is dry, we build the stack. My father puts a tall pole in the ground, and everybody throws hay up round it, and Fedya stands on top and treads it down, round and round, higher and higher, until he's taller than the forest and shouting about it.
I'm too small to throw hay. I tread the bottom of the stack and get hay down the back of my shirt, which seems to be the main job.
The whole village is out. Every family on its own strip, spread along the edge of the forest. You can hear the scythes being sharpened all the way down the line, a thin bright ring, then another, then another.
The little ones, too small for anything else, mind the geese, and get chased by them. Girls of Masha's age go into the edge of the forest with baskets, and come out with wild strawberries, tiny and red and so sweet they hardly seem real. Masha brings me a handful in a dock leaf. I eat them one at a time and make them last.
And twice a day, the children from the houses at the end of the street carry milk to the watchman.
He's a Department man. He lives by the iron road, in a little striped hut where the lane crosses the line, and he waves a flag when the trains come. He has no cow. He buys milk from the children, a kopeck a jug. In a village where nobody has a kopeck, that's a lot of milk.
So far, that's the one good thing the iron road has done for us. It's brought a man who pays for milk.
In the afternoon, the train goes past.
You hear it first. The long hiss, coming round the end of the meadow. Every horse in the field throws up its head. One of the Kuzmins' horses bolts, with the hay cart behind it, and two boys run after it, shouting.
A few of the little ones drop their buckets and run to the edge of the field to wave. The ones who were too small to be out at the causeway, or to see what the soldiers did after. The rest of the children don't look up. Nor do I. The last time I was this close to a train, I was lying in a ditch with mud on my face.
It goes past along the bank. Green carriages, with glass. Faces behind the glass.
Nobody waves back.
Not one face. They look out at the field, at us, at the stacks and the horses and the children, and their faces don't change. Then the train goes on into the marsh, hissing, and the little ones stop waving one by one, and go back to the hay.
Fedya doesn't wave. He hasn't waved at a train since the first one.
That night, we don't go home.
It's too far, and there's another day of it tomorrow. So we sleep in the field. Everybody does, at haymaking. We lie on a heap of fresh hay at the foot of our stack, with a small fire for the mosquitoes.
It's the warmest night of the summer. The sky doesn't go dark, not properly. It goes a deep green-blue, with a few stars, and a band of pale light along the north that doesn't go out all night. The cut grass smells sweet. Somewhere on another strip, somebody is playing a pipe.
Grandma hums.
She does it without thinking, sitting with her back against the stack. An old song with no words, that goes up and down like a cradle. My father is lying on his back beside her with his hands behind his head, and Fedya has gone to sleep with his head on my father's knee. My father hasn't moved him. He's looking at the sky.
My mother is braiding Masha's hair. Masha sits in front of her in the hay with her eyes shut, and my mother's fingers go in and out of the long brown hair, slowly, over and under, the way Rodya's go in and out of the strips.
Then my father starts to hum too.
Low. Under Grandma. The same song, in a deep, slow voice I've never heard in my life. Four and a half years in this house, and I didn't know my father could sing.
Grandma doesn't stop, or look at him. She just goes on, a bit softer, so he can be heard.
I'm lying on my back in the hay between them all, and I do what Rodya taught me.
I let it in.
All of it. The pipe on the other strip. The fire. The mosquitoes. The hay. Fedya's slow breathing, and Masha's. The two voices humming, the high one and the low one. I know all of it. I know this family the way Rodya knows the stream.
And there's something new in it.
Something I don't have a name for.
Nobody is casting anything. My mother's hands are only braiding. My father is only humming. But something is there. Very small. Smaller even than the thing in the church on the day of the paper, and that was so faint I nearly missed it.
Then I see it.
A spark, over my mother's hands. No bigger than a grain of millet. It comes up out of her slowly, the way fluff comes off a dandelion, and hangs in the air over Masha's head.
At first I think it's a glow-worm. They sit in the grass by the river this time of year, like little green lamps. But this one isn't green, and it isn't in the grass. It's the colour of a candle seen through a window.
Then another comes after it. And another. Then they're coming up off my father's knee, too, and off Grandma, rising with the song, and off Masha's shut eyes, and even off Fedya, who's asleep with his mouth open. Not one each. Dozens. A slow handful at a time, like sparks off a fire that isn't burning anything.
They don't fly away. They drift up a little, and then they start to go round each other. My mother's and Masha's first, round and round, like girls holding hands at a fair. Then Grandma's join them, and my father's, slower and lower, the way he hums. Fedya's go in quick little circles on their own for a while, and then find the rest. Soon there are so many over the hay that I can't tell any more whose are whose.
Nobody looks up. My mother goes on braiding. My father goes on humming. They don't see it. Or they've never needed to.
It's warm. Not on my skin. Somewhere further in. Like warm air in a shut room, when you come in from the frost.
And then my own hum does something it has never done.
In the church, I was the one bit of grass that didn't bend. My hum didn't move a hair.
Now I think it moves. Only a little, by itself. Towards them.
And over my own chest, so small I nearly miss it, there are sparks of my own. A few. They go up, slowly, to find the others.
I lie still and watch them go round. I think about it for a long time.
Maybe the hum feels more than heat and ice. It felt something in the church, when they cheered the Tsar. It felt something by the mill, with the rusalki, and all those grandmothers behind them. And tonight it felt Grandma humming, and my father's knee, and my mother's fingers in Masha's hair.
Not magic. Something you can't put in a bucket. Love, or belonging. Whatever it is that makes a family a family, and not six people in a field.
If that's true, then it means something.
It would mean you could feel what's inside people. Not what they say. What's really there. Who means it, and who doesn't. Who loves whom.
Can it be learned? I don't know. How would it even work? I don't know that either. And how much of it is real, and how much is one small boy lying in the hay, wanting it to be?
On the shelf marked MAGIC, next to the line from the church, I put another. The hum feels what people feel for each other.
Then two question marks, side by side.
I won't be taking those off any time soon either.
Grandma's song comes to the end, and starts again from the beginning. My father keeps humming with her. Fedya is asleep on his knee. My mother ties off the end of Masha's braid with a bit of red thread and kisses the top of her head, and Masha doesn't open her eyes. She leans back against my mother's knees and stays there.
I want to keep this.
I've lost a mother and a father once already. Not because they died. Because I did.
I don't want to find out what it's like the second time.
I'm losing this life at the edges, a bit at a time, like a picture left too long in the sun. The first years are already going. One day, I know, this night will go thin too.
So I look at it hard. The green sky. The stack. The fire. The five of them, and the little lights going round above them. I look at it the way I'd learn a page for an exam, line by line, so that when it goes, at least something of it stays.
Somewhere in the middle of looking, I fall asleep.
I don't dream. I don't wake up in the night to listen for coughing, the way I always do. When I open my eyes, the sky is grey and the fire is ash, and somebody has put a coat over me.
And the hum feels different. Not bigger. Rested. The way a sore arm feels on the morning it has stopped being sore. All the small things I do with it behind fences, all summer, had left something tired in it. Now some of that is gone. Only a little. But I notice.
In August, the rye.
The women cut it with sickles, bent double in the heat, and tie it into sheaves, and the men cart it in. The master's first. Then ours. By the end of it, my mother's hands are as hard as my father's. Masha cuts her finger on a sickle and closes it herself, at the edge of the field, with one thread. At supper, she holds the finger up for everybody to see. My mother turns it to the lamp and looks at it for a long time. Then she nods, and Masha smiles, and goes back to her soup.
In September, the threshing, in the barns, with flails. Thump, thump, thump, from first light until dark, all over the village.
All summer, Masha's herbs have been hanging from the beams in the loft in bunches, upside down, drying. St John's wort. Yarrow. Chamomile. Marsh cudweed, small and grey and woolly, that my mother puts on burns and wounds. In October, Masha takes them all down and puts them in a sack and carries them to the guild.
Gavrila weighs them on the big hanging scale in the back room, one bunch at a time, sniffing each one. He sends two bunches back because they've gone bad. The rest he buys. For the hunters' packs, he says, for the winter.
He counts the copper into Masha's hand. It isn't much. It's hers.
She walks home with her fist closed round it the whole way. She lifts the board herself, and puts it in the pot herself, and doesn't say a word. Fedya watches her do it with the face he had for his three kopecks.
The steward comes at the end of October, for the autumn count.
He goes round the village with his book and his two big men and the clerk, the way he does every year. The master's share of the rye. The master's share of the hay. The hens. He counts our hens twice.
At the forge, he stops.
My father is at the anvil, mending a hoe. He doesn't stop working. The steward stands in the doorway with his book open and his gloves off, because you can't write in gloves. He looks round the forge for a long time. At the coal bin. At the heap of scrap by the door. At the bench, where there's nothing, because Gavrila takes the arrowheads away with him every time.
"You burn a lot of coal, Stepan," he says. "For a man with bad ribs."
"Hoes don't mend themselves."
"No." The steward writes something in his book. Then he shuts it and pulls his gloves back on, one finger at a time. "My man says your light's on late. Very late, some nights." He smiles. It's the second time I've ever seen him do it. "Hoes must be a lot of work."
My father hits the hoe.
The steward goes.
The bearded man goes after him. His name is Efim. He's one of the house people, and he's the one from the forge, the one my father threw against the wall. His lip has healed with a white mark through it. He doesn't look at my father on the way out. He doesn't look at anybody.
That night, at supper, nobody talks.
The bowl goes round. Cabbage, and the new bread.
It's Grandma who says it. She doesn't mean anything by it. She's an old woman, and she's worried, and she says what worried old women say.
"You should be careful, Stepan. With those evenings. If he—"
My father brings the bowl down on the table.
He doesn't throw it. He slams it down, with both hands, so hard that the cabbage jumps out over the edge and across the table and onto Fedya. The bowl cracks. I hear it go, a dry little tick, right through.
"I know," he says. Loud. Much too loud for the room. "I know, Mama. You think I don't know?"
Nobody moves.
It's over as fast as it came. I watch it go out of him, like a fire in straw. It flares up, and then there's nothing left to burn, and it just stops.
My father looks at the bowl. At the crack in it. At the cabbage on Fedya's shirt. At his own hands, still flat on the table on either side.
He takes his hands away.
"It's nothing," he says. Quietly now. "Eat."
He gets up and picks up the bowl in both hands, carefully, so it won't come apart, and takes it out to the forge.
Nobody says anything. My mother wipes the cabbage off Fedya with her apron. Grandma looks at the table. Masha looks at me, and I look at the door.
Later, lying on the stove, I hear him out there. Small sounds. Tap. Tap. He's putting a band round the bowl, a thin strip of iron, the way you mend a cracked pot so it lasts another ten years.
I've seen my father angry before. The quiet kind, mostly. One night in the spring, he shouted at Fedya. And once, in the forge, the other kind. But that was at a man who had earned it.
At the beginning of November, before the snow, Grandma counts the pot.
She tips it out on the table, the way my father did in the spring, and sorts it into heaps. Silver in one. Copper in another. Bent and worn copper that Shmelev won't take at full price, in a third. Her lips move. My father's silver from the evenings is the biggest heap. Then Masha's eggs and herbs, and Fedya's kopecks, and the yarn, and my few kopecks from Osip, all mixed in together. Nobody can tell any more which coin was whose.
"That's more money," says Grandma, "than this house has ever had."
Nobody argues.
"Is it enough?" says Fedya.
My mother doesn't answer. My father doesn't either.
I know how they'll work out the price. The green textbook, page two hundred and fourteen. Two pages after the one I recited in my head in church. They take what the master gets from a family in a year. Then they ask: how much money, lent out at six in a hundred, would bring him that much every year, for ever? That's what the land costs. A fifth of it to him, at once. The rest over forty-nine years.
I don't know what our master will say he gets from us. Nobody does. But I can do the sum the way the textbook does it, for a house like ours, on land like ours.
I do it twice, because I don't like the answer.
The pot is a good year. It's the best year this house has ever had. And it isn't enough. Not for the first share. Not for anything after it.
Grandma puts the coins back one heap at a time. My father puts the board back down and presses it flat with his boot.
The first snow comes in the middle of November, in the night, without a sound. In the morning the whole village is white and new, and the mud is gone, and Fedya and I run out in our shirts and get shouted back in.
Fedya's old felt boots come down to me this winter. They're still too big. Grandma stuffs the toes with straw, and I walk like a duck in them, and I wouldn't give them back for anything.
A few weeks later, it's St Nicholas's day.
Nobody here counts birthdays. They count saints. I was born a few days before St Nicholas's, so St Nicholas's is my day. Today, I'm five.
Masha is fourteen now, and nearly as tall as my mother. Fedya is eleven. His voice has started to crack in the middle of words, and he hates it.
Saint Nicholas. The same saint who was in my hand in the crater, in his tape. He's in the dream. He's the one I knocked for.
Grandma makes a fish pie.
Masha gives me a pair of mittens she knitted from the ends of Grandma's yarn. The thumbs are different sizes.
Fedya gives me a wolf's tooth from Gavrila's yard. He says it's an ash wolf's. It isn't. It's a dog's. I keep it anyway.
Then my father takes me out to the forge. He stands me with my back against the doorpost and lays his knife flat on top of my head, and cuts a mark in the wood.
There are other marks on that post. Masha's go nearly to the top. Fedya's are a hand lower. Near the bottom, there are two short ones, old and dark, that nobody ever talks about.
Mine is higher than both of those now.
My father puts his hand on my head, the whole of it, like a hat.
"Five," he says.
That's all. It's enough.
Rodya comes in the afternoon. Ulyana brings him to the door and won't stay, because of the baby, and leaves him on the step like a parcel. He has something under his arm.
It's a ball. A bast ball, woven out of lime strips, round and tight, the size of a big apple. When he shakes it, it rattles. There's a pebble inside.
"So I can hear where it goes," he says. "Then I can play too."
He made it himself, nearly all of it, with the kochedyk. Osip did the end, he says, because the end is hard. I can see the places where he went wrong and started again.
We play on the floor by the stove, rolling it to each other. Rodya stops it every single time. He hears it coming and puts his hands down, and there it is. I miss it twice. The second time, it goes under the bench, and he laughs so hard he falls over.
Grandma gives him the biggest piece of pie.
That night, I lie on the stove in the dark and think about the year.
Everybody in this house knows something they didn't know at Easter.
Masha knows how a wound closes, and how to help it, one thread at a time. Fedya knows what the boar eats and where it sleeps, and how to scrape a hide without being sick. My mother knows she isn't alone any more. My father knows to stop at three. Grandma knows which coins Shmelev won't take. Even Rodya knows how to weave with iron.
And every one of them has put something in the pot.
I know more than all of them put together. I know why we boil the rags, and why the willow works, and what rust is, and how they'll price the land. I know what's coming next year, page by page.
And I can show the least. A boy who freezes a drop on a dock leaf, behind a fence, for a friend who can't see it. A few kopecks for crooked strips.
The dream came back once more, in the autumn. The light went out again, the same as before. I woke up in the nothing, for one long moment before I knew where I was.
I don't count my fingers any more when I wake. I count breaths.
Fedya. Masha. My father, not careful any more. My mother. Grandma, snoring.
This thing I call the hum. I know what I want it for now. I know what it's for, in this world. To keep these breaths going, and to make anybody who tries to stop them pay.
I don't know yet what it will cost.
Nine months since the paper. Fifteen months to go.
I lie between my brother and my sister and count, and I don't get to five before I'm asleep.
The holy days start at Christmas and run for twelve days, all the way to the Blessing of the Waters. Nobody does any proper work. The boys go round the houses after dark, singing carols at the windows for pies, and the girls tell fortunes.
I'm not allowed to go with the boys. Five is too small for carols, Grandma says, and too big to carry home when you fall asleep in a snowdrift.
Fedya is allowed. On the fourth night of the holy days, he comes back early anyway, with snow down his collar and no pie.
"Old Kuzmin sent me home," he says, climbing up onto the stove.
"What did you sing?" says Grandma.
"The carol."
"Which words?"
Fedya doesn't answer. There's a verse about the steward that the big boys sing when they think nobody's listening. It doesn't rhyme, and there's a goat in it. Grandma knows exactly which words.
"Good," she says. "Now you can sit here and be bored with us."
So it's the three of us on the stove. My mother is at the table, mending Fedya's other shirt by the lamp. My father is out at the forge, though there's nothing in the forge to do. Masha has gone to the Kuzmins' with the other girls, with a candle end and a bit of wax in her apron pocket.
Grandma looks at Fedya, sulking in the corner, and at me.
"Do you want the one about Morozko?"
"I know that one," says Fedya.
"Then don't listen."
He listens.
"There was an old man," says Grandma, "and his new wife couldn't stand the sight of his daughter. So one winter she made him take the girl into the forest and leave her under a fir tree, in the snow."
"And he did?" says Fedya.
"He was more afraid of his wife than of God." Grandma's voice goes thin and dry, like snow under a boot. "And down from the tree came Morozko. Grandfather Frost. 'Are you warm, girl? Are you warm, my pretty one?' And she was freezing, her lips were blue, but she said, 'I'm warm, Grandfather. I'm warm.'"
I know this one. In my old life, they showed it on television every New Year, and my grandmother in Nizhny cried at the same place every time.
"So he wrapped her in furs and sent her home with a chest of good things," says Grandma. "Then the stepmother sent her own girl. And when Morozko asked, that one shouted at him. 'My hands are frozen! Go away, you old fool!'"
Fedya grins in the dark. "And?"
"In the morning they found her under the fir tree, stiff as a log." Grandma pulls the sheepskin up over both of us. "Mind your mouth when it's cold. That's all that story is."
Masha comes in late, with snow on her shawl and something in her fist.
Her cheeks are red from the frost, and her eyes are bright, and she goes straight to the lamp and opens her hand. It's a piece of wax. Long and thin, the length of her finger, with a bend in the middle.
"We poured it at the Kuzmins'," she says. "Into the water bucket."
The girls melt wax over a candle, ask a question in their heads, and pour it into cold water. Whatever shape it makes is the answer.
"Mine's a road," says Masha, turning it over on her palm. "They all said so. A road, with a turn in it."
"A road means far," says Grandma, from the stove. "You'll marry far away."
"Far's good," says Fedya. "Far from Masha."
Masha doesn't throw anything at him. She's looking at our mother.
My mother has put the shirt down in her lap.
"What did you ask?" she says.
Every other girl at the Kuzmins' asked who she'll marry.
"Whether I'll go," says Masha.
Nobody on the stove moves.
"Go where?" says my mother.
Masha's hand closes round the wax. "Where you went. With the guild. To heal people." She says it fast, before she can lose it. "You taught me the herbs. You taught me the threads. I closed my own finger at the rye, with one thread, and you nodded."
She stops. When she goes on, her voice is smaller.
"When Mitya had the throat sickness, I sat with him and held the cup. That's all I could do. Hold the cup." Then it's steady again. "I don't want to only hold the cup, Mama."
My mother looks at the wax for a long moment.
"The guild doesn't send girls of fourteen into the forest. Only to sweep the floor."
"It sends them at sixteen. Gavrila said so. With a paper from the master." She's been thinking about this for a long time. You can hear it. "And after the papers come next year, there won't be any master's paper. There'll only be us."
"Masha."
"A healer with a party gets silver, Mama. For every trip. Not two eggs in an apron." She doesn't look at the floorboard by the stove. She doesn't have to. "I saw Papa's face when Grandma counted the pot. I saw yours."
"A healer with a party," says my mother quietly, "gets buried in the forest by people she's known for a month. If they stop long enough to dig."
"You didn't."
"No. I came home." My mother's hands are flat on the shirt in her lap. "I had four friends on that road, Masha. Four. I came home on my own, with nothing, and owing more money than I'd ever seen. And somebody paid it."
She doesn't say who. Nobody in this house needs to be told.
"And you stayed," says Masha.
"I stayed."
"And what did staying give you?"
It's out before she can stop it. Her eyes go to the little window, black with night. Across the stream, out there in the dark, there's a painted house with glass in every window.
Then her face goes white. She's heard it too.
I wait for my mother to shout. She doesn't. She's very still, and her hands, on the shirt, are shaking. Not much. Just a little.
"It gave me you," she says.
Masha's mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
"You think I'm frightened of the forest." My mother is looking at Masha's hands now, not her face. "I am. I've seen what lives in it. But the forest isn't the worst of it." She stops, and starts again. "You'll be sixteen. A girl of sixteen, a week from anywhere, with four men she met at the guild door. No priest. No elder. No father. Nobody to run to. Only them, and whatever they decide to be when nobody's watching."
"Not all of them are like that."
"No. Not all of them." My mother's voice doesn't change. "You only need one."
She looks down at her own hands. "And the healing. Every day, because they need you. I've seen what that does to people, too. To the careless ones."
"Mama..."
My mother gets up. "It's late."
She holds out her hand. After a moment, Masha puts the wax in it.
My mother takes Grandma's old iron spoon from the shelf, the one for candle ends, and puts the wax in it, and holds it over the lamp.
The road goes soft. It sags in the middle, where the turn was. Then it runs, slowly, into the bottom of the spoon, until it's only wax again.
My mother puts the spoon back on the shelf.
Masha climbs up onto the stove and lies down with her back to all of us. My mother sits down at the table again and picks up Fedya's shirt. She doesn't sew. She just holds it.
Grandma, for once, has nothing to say.
When the holy days end, at the Blessing of the Waters, the whole village goes down to the river. The men have cut a hole in the ice in the shape of a cross. Father Ivan sings over it and dips the brass cross in three times, and the women fill their jugs. Blessed water keeps all year, Grandma says.
I stand with my hand in my father's and let it all in. For one breath, when the cross goes into the water, I think there's something. Then it's gone. One breath isn't a line on the shelf.
Then the men strip to the waist and go down into the hole, right under, three times.
Fedya goes. Nobody can stop him. He's out of his shirt before my mother has turned round, white and skinny, with every rib showing. He goes down into the black water once, and comes up with his mouth wide open and no sound coming out at all.
Then the sound comes.
He's out of that hole faster than a cat out of a bucket. My father throws a sheepskin round him, and my mother rubs him so hard he nearly comes out of his skin, and the whole village laughs, and Fedya, blue to the lips, laughs loudest.
"Once," says Grandma. "You're supposed to go three times."
"I'll go twice next year," says Fedya, through his teeth.
On the way home, we come back along our stream instead of the road. It's frozen all the way up to the mill, and the snow on it is smooth and blue.
Except at the ford.
Below the black house, behind the church, there's a place where the stream runs fast and shallow over stones. You can cross it there in summer with your trousers rolled up. The steward's men come over it every evening from the big house, because it's quicker than going round by the mill bridge.
In winter, the ice on both sides of it is thick and white. But down the middle, where the water runs fastest over the stones, there's a long dark strip where it's thin and grey. You can see the water moving under it. Black, and quick, like something breathing.
Everybody who crosses steps on the white.
I stop and look at it. Fast water freezes last, and thinnest. The ice there is never as thick as anywhere else.
Rodya is at his gate. He's heard us coming, all six of us, and Fedya's teeth still going.
"It's talking," he says, with his face turned to the ford. "Under there. It never stops."
In January, the evenings at the forge stop.
They stopped before that, really. They stopped the night the steward stood in the forge door and asked about our light. But in January, Gavrila's sack sits in the corner by the coal bin, untied, with a dozen plain arrowheads in it, and nobody touches it.
Because Efim is out there.
I see him from the forge, when I go out with my father at night to bank the fire. Across the lane, by the Kuzmins' fence, where the snow is trodden down. A dark shape with its hands in its armpits. Some nights he stamps his feet. Some nights he doesn't move at all. He comes over the ford from the big house after dark, and stands there until the lamps go out all along the street, and then he goes back.
He doesn't come any closer. He doesn't need to. He's the steward's eyes, and the steward's book is in everything.
My father banks the fire, and shuts the forge, and walks past him to our door without turning his head. Inside, he sits on the bench with his hands between his knees until Grandma tells him to come to bed.
Since November, nothing new has gone under the floor. Only Fedya's kopecks, and a few of mine.
In the middle of January, the ash wolves come back.
We hear them first. At night, from the forest behind the mill, long and low, one voice and then three and then too many to count. The dogs in every yard go mad. In the morning, the Kuzmins have two sheep fewer than they had, and there's a smell of cold fire all round their pen, and the snow by the fence is grey.
On Sunday, after church, the steward stands on the church step and says it to everybody at once. A rouble a head, from the master, for every ash wolf brought in. Two for the big one, the leader.
A rouble. People look at each other. Nobody in this village has held a whole rouble since Easter.
Gavrila's hunters go out the next morning, before light. Five of them, on skis, with the dogs. Timofey Lapin, who's twenty now and has a sword with my father's runes on it. Everybody still calls him the Lapin boy. Two men from down the river road. Two from the guild. Gavrila goes with them, with the guild's good gun across his back.
Fedya isn't allowed. He's eleven. He stands at the guild gate in the dark and watches them go until there's nothing left to watch.
They're gone three days.
On the third afternoon, Fedya and I are in the guild yard when the sledges come back.
The dogs hear them first. Then we see them, coming out of the forest along the edge of the fields, small and dark on the white, with the low sun behind them. Two sledges. The men walking beside them, slowly, the way men walk when they've been tired for a long time.
On the sledges, there are wolves.
I've never seen one whole. Only the old grey pelt on the guild floor. I smelled them once, from a sleigh, the day I was baptised. I've heard them. I've heard my mother sing about them. That's all.
They're bigger than I thought. Longer, and thinner, with long legs and long narrow heads. Their fur is grey. Not wolf grey. The grey of a fire that went out in the night, with the white ash on top and something darker underneath. Even dead, they smoke. Not much. A thin thread of it, from the back of each one, going up into the cold air and gone. Where the sledge has stopped, the snow under it has turned grey, like the snow by a chimney.
Seven of them. One much bigger than the rest, with its lip pulled back.
One of the men from the guild has his arm in a sling. One of the dogs is riding on the second sledge, too, wrapped in a coat, with blood on its side. Not Buran. Buran comes in on his own feet, last, with Gavrila's hand on his neck.
Fedya is at Timofey's elbow before the sledges have even stopped. "Where were they? How did you find them? Did you see the big one first?"
Timofey is too tired to send him away. He talks while he unties the ropes, and I stand behind Fedya and listen.
The first day, they found nothing. Only the forest in winter, the way it always is. Hare tracks everywhere, in loops and zigzags, where the hares had run about in the night. A fox's line going straight across them, neat, one foot in front of the other, like a thread pulled through cloth. Under the young aspens, the bark was eaten off as high as a man's chest.
"Elk," says Timofey. "A cow and a calf. Fresh."
Once, a whole flock of black grouse burst up out of the snow right in front of the skis, where they'd been sleeping under it. One of the river-road men fell over backwards, and the others laughed at him for an hour.
Fedya laughs too. The river-road man doesn't.
On the second morning, they found wolf tracks. Real ones. Ordinary grey wolves, five or six, in a line, each one stepping in the prints of the one in front, so at first it looks like only one wolf.
"We followed them half the morning," says Timofey. "Then they turned round."
"Turned round?"
"All of them. At the top of a ridge, at the same place, like they'd walked into a wall. Then back the way they came. Fast." He pulls a rope free. "On the other side of that ridge, the snow was grey."
After that, you don't need tracks. You follow the grey. It goes along under the trees in long smears, where the pack walked, and in every print the snow has sunk and gone dark, as if somebody pressed a hot pan into it. In the low places, where the wind can't get in, there's the smell. Cold fire. Wet ash. Like a burnt house a week after.
The den was in the old hole under the big pine, at the bottom of a gully. They saw it from a long way off, because a thin smoke was going up out of the snow there, and nobody lights a fire at the bottom of a gully in January.
"And then?" says Fedya.
Timofey looks at the man with his arm in the sling. Then at the dog in the coat.
"And then they came out," he says, and that's all he says about that.
Nobody else says anything about the fight, either. When the men talk, it's about something else, low, by the sledges.
On the second day, a long way off, across a clearing, they saw a bear. Walking between the trees. In January.
"A shatun," says one of the river-road men. "One that didn't sleep. They go mad when they don't sleep."
Timofey shakes his head. "Shatuns are thin. That one wasn't thin." He looks back at the forest. "And it had frost on its back. Thick, like a mane. When it went past, you could hear the trees crack."
"We went to look at its trail after. In case." He stops. "The prints were full of frost. Not snow. Frost, like on a window, growing up out of the bottom of every print. And the trees it went past were white on that side, all the way up. Then the trail went on a bit, and turned, and went back on itself. Into its own prints."
"Bears do that," says the river-road man. "When they want to lie up."
"Bears do that," says Timofey, "when they want to wait for whoever's behind them."
Frost grows where the air touches something colder than itself. In a hard January, inside a bear's footprint, something was a lot colder than the air. I'd like to know what. I'd like it better if I never had to find out.
Gavrila doesn't say anything. He looks at the forest too, for a long time. Then he tells them to get the wolves off the sledges before they freeze to the boards.
Fedya's eyes are as wide as I've ever seen them.
Then Timofey puts a sack down on the snow in front of Gavrila, and the sack moves.
"Last one," he says. "From the den. There were four. The other three were dead by the time we dug down to them." He shrugs. "This one was under its mother. A dog got its teeth into it before we did."
Gavrila crouches and opens the sack.
It's small. The size of a cat. It's curled up in a ball, with its nose under its tail, and its fur is soft and dark grey, like the ash from the bottom of the stove. When the cold air gets to it, it uncurls and lifts its head.
Its eyes are only half open. Blue-grey, and cloudy, the way a kitten's are. And there's a thread of smoke coming off its back. So thin you'd think you were imagining it.
There's dried blood on one ear, where the dog caught it. Where it lies in the snow, the snow goes grey.
"Kill it," says one of the river-road men. "Before it gets any bigger."
"No!"
It's Fedya. He's on his knees in the snow next to the sack before anybody can stop him.
"Don't touch it," says Gavrila.
Fedya doesn't touch it. He stays where he is, with his hands on his knees, and looks at it. The pup looks back at him with its cloudy half-eyes and opens its mouth and makes a sound. Not a howl. A thin, cracked little squeak.
"Can you tame them?" says Fedya.
Gavrila doesn't answer at once.
"Before the eyes open," he says at last, "sometimes. After the eyes open, never. In between..." He looks at the pup's half-open eyes. "Ask God. I've seen it done once. A man from the south. He'd had his for six years, and it still looked at him every morning as if it was deciding."
"I'll do it," says Fedya.
Last summer, he was going to be a hunter. In the autumn, an archer, like the men in the songs. At Christmas, he was going to be a soldier and wear a coat with buttons. Now he looks at a wolf the size of a cat, and I can see it happen in his face. The next thing.
"You'll feed it," says Gavrila. "From your hand. Only your hand. Nobody else's, ever. You'll sleep next to it. You'll never, ever let it see you're frightened. And you'll never go near it angry. Not once. Not even a little."
"Why?"
"Because it'll know." Gavrila stands up, slowly, with a hand on his knee. "They know your smell. That's what the man from the south said. I don't know if it's true. He was a liar about most things."
That's when the steward comes into the yard.
He comes to count the wolves, because the master is paying for them. He has his clerk with him, and the book. He walks along the sledges and counts, and the clerk writes. Seven. The big one, two roubles. The men stand by with their hats off and their faces tired.
Then he sees the sack.
"And that?"
"A pup," says Gavrila. "From the den."
The steward looks at it. Then at Fedya, kneeling by it in the snow.
"The master's forest," he says. "The master's money. The master's wolf." He says it the way you'd read out a list. "The master likes a hunt. A tame ash wolf would be something to show his guests." He looks at Fedya. "You. The smith's boy. You'll raise it. If it lives till the autumn, it goes up to the house."
Fedya opens his mouth.
"Yes, sir," says Gavrila, loudly, before Fedya can say anything at all.
The steward nods, and the clerk writes it in the book, and they go.
Fedya kneels in the snow with his face red to the ears. The pup squeaks at him.
"It's not his," Fedya says, very low.
"It's not yours either," says Gavrila. "Not yet. Not for a long time. Maybe never." He looks down at Fedya. "So. Are you going to feed it, or are you going to sit there being angry at it?"
Fedya shuts his eyes. He breathes in, and out. Then he opens them again, and takes his mitten off, and holds out his bare hand, flat, the way you'd hold it out to a horse.
The pup sniffs it.
Then it bites him.
He calls it Zhar.
It means the heat that's left in the coals after the fire has gone out. Grandma says it's a stupid name for a dog. Fedya says it isn't a dog.
My mother says he can't sleep in the guild's kennel with an ash wolf. My father says three nights a week. That's how most things get decided in our house these days.
So three nights a week, Fedya sleeps in the straw in Gavrila's kennel shed, with the dogs on one side of him and Zhar on the other, in a box with a sheepskin in it. The other four nights, he's at the guild before it's light, with a bowl of scraps, and his hand out.
Zhar bites him for a week.
Not hard. The bites of a puppy. But his teeth are sharp, and every time he bites, his little back smokes a bit more, and the straw round the box goes grey. Fedya's hand is all small red marks. He doesn't take it away. He keeps it there, flat, until Zhar stops biting and starts eating.
By the end of January, Zhar's eyes are open all the way. They aren't blue any more. They're dark, and when the shed is dark, they shine. A dull red, like two coals that somebody has blown on.
He follows Fedya round the yard. He doesn't follow anybody else. When Buran comes near him, he crouches and his back starts to smoke, and Buran, who's three times his size and has killed wolves, walks round him the long way.
I go to the guild every morning with Fedya. I sit on the woodpile and watch.
One morning Fedya comes in angry. It's nothing. Masha told him he smells like a kennel, which he does. He comes through the gate with a face like thunder, carrying the bowl, and he's halfway across the yard before he notices.
Zhar is in the doorway of the shed, crouched flat, with every hair on his back standing up. The smoke is coming off him in a thick grey string. His eyes are red. He isn't looking at the bowl. He's looking at Fedya.
Fedya stops dead.
Then he puts the bowl down on the snow. He stands there, very still, with his hands at his sides, and he breathes. In, and out. Slowly. I watch him make his face go flat, and his shoulders come down. It takes a long time.
The smoke gets thinner. The hair on Zhar's back goes down. After a while, he comes out of the doorway, and over to the bowl, and eats.
"He knows," Fedya says afterwards, on the woodpile next to me. His voice is shaking a little. "When I'm cross, he knows. Even if I smile at him." He rubs his face. "Even if I'm not cross at him."
I put my hand on Zhar's back that afternoon, when Fedya says I can.
He's warm. Much warmer than a dog, like a stone that's been in the sun all day. But under my hand, under the fur, he's cold too. Both at once. Like a coal you've picked out of the ashes in the morning, black on the outside, that still burns your fingers if you hold it.
I don't know what that is. I hold my hand there and try to feel it with the hum, and I can't. Only with my skin.
Zhar turns his head and looks at my hand. Then at Fedya.
Fedya nods at him, very slightly.
Zhar lets me keep it there.
In January, Rodya's tub is inside, by the stove, and the strips come in frozen and have to thaw before he can split them. So the fence is no good to us any more. We need somewhere else.
We find it behind the church, between the back wall and the graveyard, where the snow is deep and nobody comes except Father Ivan's hens. And we find a new game.
It's my idea this time. Hide and seek, except Rodya always seeks. He says that's a stupid way to play, because he doesn't seek anything, he just knows. But he plays.
I hide. He stands with his back to the church wall and counts to twenty, which takes him a long time because he likes the numbers. Then he comes and finds me.
The first week, I hide behind the woodpile by the back door, eight steps away, and do something small with the hum. Warm my fingers. Freeze a bit of snow into a bead. He comes straight to me every time, with his hands out in front of him, laughing.
The second week, I go further. Behind the corner of the bell tower. Into the graveyard, behind the first row of crosses. I count the steps. Fifteen. Twenty. He's slower. He stops and turns his head, this way and that, the way he does on the road when two carts are coming at once. But he finds me.
In the third week, I try something new. I hide behind the graveyard's far fence, thirty steps away, and I don't do anything at all. No warm fingers. No beads. I sit in the snow and keep the hum as still as I can, the way you'd hold a full cup.
He finds me anyway.
He comes along the fence with one hand on the top rail, and stops right in front of me, and grins.
"How?" I say.
"You were hiding."
"I know I was hiding. That's the game."
"No. You were hiding." He crouches down in front of me. "Really hard. Like this." He squeezes his face up tight, and his shoulders, and holds his breath until his cheeks go round. Then he lets it all out. "It's loud. When somebody hides like that, it's the loudest thing there is."
"It's my heart," I say. "And my breath. You can hear them."
"From over there? Through a fence?" He shakes his head. "It's not your heart. It's you. Wanting." He thinks about how to say it. "When you do the warm thing, it's like a door. When you hide, it's like..." He gives up. "Like a door that's shut, but you're pushing on it from the other side. I can feel you pushing."
I go home and lie on the stove and think about it until Grandma blows out the lamp.
What he feels when I warm my fingers, I understand. Or I think I do. Something moves. Energy goes from one place to another. Heat from the ground, up through my feet, into my hands. It flows, like water downhill. If you can feel heat in a stove from across a room, you could, maybe, with the right kind of skin, feel that.
But wanting isn't heat. Wanting doesn't go anywhere.
Unless it does.
The next day, we do it the other way round. Rodya hides, and I seek.
I stand against the church wall and count to twenty, and then I let it all in, the way he taught me. The wind. The hens. The bell rope knocking on the wall. Father Ivan's cough, inside the church. I wait for something new to stick out, like a stone in a shoe.
Nothing does.
I walk round the whole graveyard with my eyes half shut. Nothing. Rodya isn't doing anything. There's nothing to feel. I've got nothing to go on but my ears, and he's quieter than the snow.
So I look down.
His footprints go round the back of the church, along the wall, through the gap in the fence, and stop behind the big cross on the old deacon's grave. I follow them. He's sitting behind the cross with his knees up and his hands over his mouth.
"Found you."
He takes his hands away. "How?"
"Footprints."
His face falls. Then he's furious.
"That's eyes," he says. "That's cheating."
"It's not cheating. It's thinking."
"It's eyes." He gets up and brushes the snow off his trousers. "I was wanting you not to find me. Really hard. The whole time. Didn't you feel it?"
"No."
He stands there for a moment, with his face turned towards me. Then he starts to laugh. He laughs so hard he has to sit back down in the snow.
"Then I win," he says. "Even when I lose."
I don't have anything to say to that.
We argue about it for the rest of the winter.
Not angrily. The way you argue about whether the river is colder in the morning or at night. We do it with our hands in his tub, by his stove, while the strips thaw.
"It's heat," I say. "Moving. That's all. When I warm my hands, something goes from one place to another, and you feel it go. It flows."
"It's not heat. It's wanting. When you want something, it goes out of you. Like a draught under a door."
"Then why don't I feel it?"
"Because you don't listen. You think." He splits a strip. "You think so loud, Kolya."
I want to tell him he's wrong. I've got a whole shelf of things I know. I've got heat, and energy, and the way it can't be made from nothing and can't just disappear. I learned all of it in a lecture hall in Nizhny, in another life, with a pen in my hand.
And none of it tells me how he found me behind a fence, thirty steps away, when I wasn't doing anything.
So I say "flow" and he says "draught," and neither of us gives in. After a while, I stop noticing. When he says draught, I know what he means. When I say flow, so does he.
At the end of January, I take Rodya to the guild.
Fedya says he can come, as long as he stays by the gate and doesn't do anything stupid. Fedya says this to a boy who has never done anything stupid in his life. Rodya says thank you very seriously.
We stop inside the gate. The dogs come running, and Rodya stands still and lets them sniff him all over. Buran puts his nose in Rodya's hand and leaves it there.
Then Rodya turns his head.
Not towards the dogs. Past them. Towards the kennel shed at the back of the yard, where the door is shut.
"There's something in there," he says.
I don't feel anything. I've been in this yard every morning for two weeks. Zhar is in the shed, in his box. Fedya's in there with him.
"What's it like?"
Rodya thinks.
"Like a stove," he says slowly. "That's gone out. But doesn't want to be out." He frowns. "And it wants Fedya. A lot."
The shed door opens. Fedya comes out with the empty bowl, and Zhar comes out after him, close against his legs, with a thread of smoke off his back. He sees us at the gate and stops dead.
Rodya smiles in his direction. Not at him. A little to the left.
"Hello," he says.
Zhar crouches. The smoke on his back gets thicker. Fedya puts his hand down on the back of Zhar's neck without even looking, and after a moment, it thins again.
I didn't feel him until he was in front of me. Rodya felt him through a shut door and twenty steps of yard. And knew what he wanted.
Fedya looks at Rodya, then at Zhar, then at me. Then he looks at Rodya again, for longer, the way he looked at the hairs in the resin last summer.
He doesn't say anything. But that afternoon, when Zhar's eating, he lets Rodya put a hand on him too.
In February, two blind men come through the village.
They come at Candlemas, the feast in February when the priest blesses the candles for the year. Two old men, with a boy to lead them by the sleeve and a fiddle with a handle that you turn. They stand by the church door with their caps out and sing about saints and the Last Judgement.
Rodya sits on the church step, near them. He listens the whole time, with his face turned up.
Afterwards, by his stove, he's very quiet.
"That's where they go," he says.
"Who?"
"Blind people. When their mama and papa die. Somebody gives them a boy, and they go on the roads, and they sing." He splits a strip. "That's what Mama says I'll do. When she's gone. She says it's not so bad. You see the whole country."
He laughs a little at that.
"No you won't," I say.
"Who'll feed me? You?"
"Yes."
He thinks about it. Then he laughs again, properly this time.
"You're five," he says.
"I won't always be."
He doesn't answer. He takes a frozen strip out of the basket and holds it in both hands. There's frost on it, white and fine, like sugar.
"Can I try?" he says. "The other way. Doing it. Not feeling it."
"Try what?"
"Asking it to be soft. Like you did with the splitting."
I don't know how to teach that. I don't know if it can be taught. But I say what I said in the summer, by the fence. Feel what it's made of. Then ask, very gently.
Rodya puts his thumb on the strip.
He doesn't screw up his face this time. He doesn't hold his breath. He just goes still, and listens to it, the way he listens to the strips in the water, to find the line.
For a long time, nothing happens.
Then, under his thumb, in one small place, the frost goes clear.
Just there. A spot the size of a kopeck. The rest of the strip is still white.
Rodya takes his thumb away and runs his finger over the place. It's wet.
"Was that me?" he says. "Or was it my thumb?"
Thumbs are warm. Frost melts. Any child knows that. But I've been holding that strip too, and the frost under my fingers hasn't gone anywhere.
"I don't know," I say.
It's the truth. He hears that it's the truth. He nods, and puts the strip in the water with the others.
By February, the whole village is counting.
You can see it everywhere, once you start looking. A gentleman from the town rides out along the edge of our fields with the steward, in the snow, with two men behind them dragging a long chain. They stop, and stretch the chain out, and write something down, and ride on. Nobody knows what they're writing. Everybody has an idea.
The old women at the well say the master will keep the good meadow by the river and give us the sand.
The Kuzmins sell their second cow to Shmelev. Old Kuzmin leads her down the street himself, on a rope, with his face like a shut door. The cow keeps stopping to look back.
One morning, the woodcutters come back from the forest early, without any wood. They found tracks on the road to the cutting. Bear tracks, wider than a man's two hands, with ice inside them that the sun didn't melt. After that, nobody goes into the forest alone, and nobody says what for.
And in our house, the bowl with the iron band round it sits in the middle of the table at every meal. My father doesn't go to the forge after supper any more. He sits on the bench and looks at his hands. Some nights, after everybody is asleep, I hear the third board from the stove come up with its creak, very quietly, and Grandma's lips moving in the dark. Counting what she counted in November. As if it might have grown.
It hasn't. It's smaller. There's been no work in the forge after dark since Efim started standing by the fence. The hens don't lay in this cold. Masha's herbs went in October. And something always has to be bought: salt, flour when ours runs short, a new handle for the axe.
I knew this would happen. I knew it from a green textbook, page two hundred and fourteen, with a graph at the bottom. The graph didn't have Old Kuzmin's cow on it, looking back.
"Everybody's frightened," Masha whispers, on the stove, one night.
"Of what?" says Fedya.
"Of next year."
Nobody says anything after that. Fedya turns over, and turns back. Masha finds my hand under the sheepskin and holds it. She doesn't do that much any more. She's fourteen.
I don't take it away.