Siberia Read Online Free PDF Page B

. . . Everything strange and magical entranced me. The puzzling, frightening things she sometimes said went right out of my head in a moment. But that night when we went to bed, I realized that I wanted to ask,
Do you think he’s dead?
I couldn’t say it. Big sobs came heaving up from my chest, I couldn’t stop them. The weight of what I couldn’t understand, and things I barely remembered, fell on me, and I felt so lonely and helpless, like a baby left on a doorstep.
My dadda, my dadda
. . . Mama held me in her arms, and rocked me until I was quiet.
    We made an agreement that if I was good at school and did not cheek Miss Malik, I would have Mama lessons more often, and if I was
very
good, we would grow the Lindquist kits again, as soon as it was my birthday at the end of winter. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and she’d be gone from our bed, and I’d know she was doing magic. I didn’t get up and spy on her, but I’d watch and wonder, after these nights, and try to guess what she’d done, either for us, or for someone else. Maybe she’d caused a snowfall in midwinter, so the tracks were soft and pretty again, and Madame Imrat didn’t have to be so terrified of slipping and falling. Maybe she’d cast a spell to make the Settlements Commission send an unexpected shipment of jam.
    I was very muddled. Mama knew it, because I’d ask her about the good deeds that she had ordered the Lindquists to perform. She didn’t correct me. The important thing, I realize now, was that I was practicing the skills I would need: practicing every step of the Lindquist process, with my hands and eyes and mind, over and over, until I couldn’t possibly forget.
    After school, when she’d finished her quota for the day, and we’d eaten and done our housework, we’d have a magic lesson (not every night: Mama kept those lessons feeling special). Or she’d tell me about other exciting things. Then we’d go to bed, and she’d tell me stories about our great journey, north across the snowy wastes, through the forest, over the sea: taking our treasure to the beautiful city where the sun always shines. Not now, in a while, when I was grown . . . I would fall asleep to the murmur of her voice, and dream of Miss Malik, and fairy-tale animals; and the far adventure, on the other side of growing up.
    Mama and I, alone and free in the wild, white emptiness.
    The short summers and long winters passed. Supply trucks came across the hard-packed snow, with their guards (they never came in summer, because then the wilderness was a swamp and the roads were impassable for trucks). Sometimes the bandit families who ruled the wastelands ambushed our supplies, and we went hungry. It was impossible for us to grow enough to eat, in the poor soil of our little plots. Rumors of change reached us, terrible stories of thousands on thousands of “rebels” taken out of the cities; taken to the middle of nowhere and left to freeze in their indoor clothes. But where we lived, nothing changed.
    When I was nine I moved up to the senior class. I was very proud, though it only meant moving from one end of the schoolroom hut to the other. I took my two mushy, rag-paper exercise books, my pencils, my old bread that I used for an eraser, and my precious sharpener (one of the few relics of my city toy box). I walked away from the juniors’ bench, overjoyed that I was leaving Miss Malik behind, and feeling the respectful gaze of the children. I walked past the narrow windows that would have inches-deep of ice on the inside in the winter, past the stove in the middle of the room, where the big teenagers spent the day in idleness, and up to the two rows of real desks of the senior class. The senior teacher’s name was Mr. Buryat: everyone called him Snory. He had a lung disease and couldn’t speak without making a snoring noise in his throat. He was kind. He was writing something on the battered blackboard, so I went to the senior bookshelf, which I