The Bear and the Nightingale(26)

Kolya snorted.

Vasya shifted in her hiding-place. “Can I help you fish?” she asked, hopefully.

“No.”

“Can I watch you fish?”

Kolya opened his mouth to refuse, and then reconsidered. If she was sitting on the riverbank, she wouldn’t be getting in trouble somewhere else. “Very well,” he said. “If you sit over there. Quietly. Don’t cast your shadow over the water.” Vasya crept meekly to the indicated spot. Kolya paid her no more attention, concentrating on the water and the feel of the line in his fingers.

An hour later, Vasya was still sitting as instructed, and Kolya had six fine fish in his basket. Perhaps his wife would forgive his disappearance, he thought, glancing at his sister and wondering how she’d managed to sit still for so long. She was looking at the water with a rapt expression that made him uneasy. What was she seeing to make her stare so? The water whispered over its bed as it always had, beds of cress swaying in the current on either bank.

There came a sharp tug on his line, and he forgot Vasya as he drew it in. But before the fish cleared the bank, the wooden hook snapped. Kolya swore. He coiled his line impatiently and replaced the hook. Preparing to cast again, he looked around. His basket was no longer in its place. He swore again, louder, and looked at Vasya. But she was sitting on a rock ten paces away.

“What happened?” she asked.

“My fish are gone! Some durak from the village must have come and…”

But Vasya was not listening. She had run to the very brink of the river.

“It’s not yours!” she shouted. “Give it back!” Kolya thought he heard an odd note in the splash of the water, as though it was making a reply. Vasya stamped her foot. “Now! Catch your own fish!” A deep groan came up from the depths, as of rocks grinding together, and then the basket came flying out of nowhere to hit Vasya in the chest and knock her backward. Instinctively, she clutched it, and turned a grin on her brother.

“Here they are!” she said. “The greedy old thing just wanted…” But she stopped short at the sight of her brother’s face. Wordless, she held out the basket.

Kolya would have liked to make for the village and leave both his basket and his peculiar sister to themselves. But he was a man and a boyar’s son, and so he stalked forward, stiff-legged, to seize his catch. He might have wished to speak; certainly his mouth worked once or twice—rather like a fish himself, Vasya thought—but then he turned on his heel without a word, and strode away.



FALL CAME AT LAST TO LAY cool fingers on the summer-dry grass; the light went from gold to gray and the clouds grew damp and soft. If Vasya still wept for her brother and sister, she did not do it where her family could see her, and she stopped asking her father every day if she was big enough to go to Moscow. But she ate her porridge with wolflike intensity and asked Dunya often if she had grown any bigger. She avoided her sewing and her stepmother both. Anna stamped and gave shrill orders, but Vasya defied them.

That summer she rambled the woods, while the light lasted and into the night. There was no Sasha now to catch her when she fled, and she fled often, despite Dunya’s scolding. But the days drew in, the weather worsened, and on the short, blustery afternoons, Vasya would sometimes sit indoors on her stool. There, she would eat her bread and talk to the domovoi.

The domovoi was small and squat and brown. He had a long beard and brilliant eyes. At night he crept out of the oven to wipe the plates and scour away the soot. He used to do mending, too, when people left it out, but Anna would shriek if she saw a stray shirt, and few of the servants would risk her anger. Before Vasya’s stepmother arrived, they had left offerings for him: a bowl of milk or a bit of bread. But Anna shrieked then, too. Dunya and the serving-maids had begun hiding their offerings in odd corners where Anna rarely came.

Vasya talked between bites, kicking her feet against the legs of her stool. The domovoi was stitching—she had furtively handed him her mending. His tiny fingers flicked fast as gnats on a summer day. Their conversation was, as always, rather one-sided.

“Where do you come from?” Vasya asked him, her mouth full. She had asked this question before, but sometimes his answer changed.

The domovoi did not look up or pause in his work. “Here,” he said.

“You mean there are more of you?” inquired the girl, peering about.

The notion seemed to disconcert the domovoi. “No.”

“But if you’re the only one, then where do you come from?”

Philosophical conversation was not the domovoi’s strong suit. His seamed brow furrowed, and there was a suggestion of hesitation in his hands. “I am here because the house is here. If the house weren’t here, I wouldn’t be, either.”

Vasilisa could not make head or tail of his answer. “So,” she tried again, “if the house is burned by Tatars, you’ll die?”

The domovoi looked as though he were struggling with an unfathomable concept. “No.”

“But you just said that—”

The domovoi intimated at this point, with a certain brusqueness in his hands, that he did not care for any more talk. Vasya had finished her bread, anyway. Puzzling to herself, she slid from her stool in a scatter of crumbs. The domovoi gave her a tight-lipped glare. Guiltily, she brushed at the crumbs, scattering them further. Finally she gave up and fled, only to trip on a loose board and carom into Anna Ivanovna, who stood in the doorway staring with her mouth half open.