Except maybe that’s all they were.
“Then what did they give me?” I asked. “Can I see it?”
“I think you must see it.” Milda reached over to the package and carefully undid the twine around it. She unfolded the fabric and held it so I couldn’t see the object until she lifted it up. And when she did, my fists curled and I felt nearly ready to explode with anger.
It was a book. Just a stupid, ordinary book.
Several seconds passed in which none of us said a word. I couldn’t speak. My chest was heaving and my insides were knotted with anger.
Finally, Lukas asked to see the book, and when Milda handed it to him, he turned it over in his hands. It was thick and bound in black leather but looked heavily worn. A brass band was attached to both ends of the book with a lock on top to keep it closed.
“Do you have the key?” Milda asked while Lukas shook out the bedsheet the book was wrapped in to see if it had fallen loose.
I shook my head. I’d never seen that book before. How could I possibly know about any key?
Milda took the book in her hands again. “It’s a little damp on one side.”
“She fell in the river,” Lukas said, though that wasn’t the reason it had absorbed some moisture. He didn’t know that I’d used it as a pillow on the dewy forest soil. Nor did I care that I had. It was only a book.
Sometimes I had wondered if my father was not truly a traveling magician, that those tricks were only games to distract from his true missions, perhaps as a spy, passing coded messages to confuse our enemies. Or maybe he traded in gold and silver, hiding the wealth of Lithuania as part of his magician disguise. Or perhaps he was working on a secret plan to free Lithuania from Russia’s control. I’d dreamed up a thousand scenarios of heroism and courage. Not one of them had involved my father spending night after night away from home, all to deliver a few stupid books.
This one, at least, had to be special, or else the Cossacks wouldn’t have come after me the way they had. If Milda believed it couldn’t be traded for my parents’ return, then it was nothing to me. I was glad it was in her hands and my problem no longer.
“She doesn’t know about the books,” Lukas said, offering Milda a wink that bristled against my temper.
Milda nodded, then smiled. “Come, child.”
We followed her into a bedroom at the back of her house where a little stairway led to an upstairs loft. I started up the stairs, but she pulled me back, then knelt down and picked up the lower step, folding each plank of wood like a fan until three full stairs were open, each plank connected by a hinge. I peered into the gap she had created, but it was pitch-black until she leaned past me with a candle. Even that didn’t help much. Now all I knew was that a ladder led into that darkness, and, I feared, I was expected to go down there.
Milda led the way, followed by Lukas, and I went down last, a dozen questions already in my mind. A hundred more instantly popped into my head as soon as I turned around in the room where I now stood, for I hadn’t expected this.
Milda’s underground room was the size of our root cellar, where we stored the winter vegetables. It was equally cool, though Milda’s wasn’t damp like ours. Instead, the room was lined with shelves, and every shelf was packed with books. I’d rarely seen any books at all, and certainly never so many in one place.
I let my fingers brush along the spines of the books as I walked a circle around the room. Some were soft and smooth while others were stiff and even scratchy. They were all sizes, and there were nine or ten copies of some of the books along the row.
Milda smiled. “This is a bookstore, but a very secret bookstore. And it’s only half of my underground home. Follow me.”
She led us through a wood door into another room that was a little larger, directly beneath her home. The walls here were papered in a pattern that had long ago faded and were covered with maps and charts of letters and numbers. A small table stood in the front of the room and eight or nine stools were scattered about.
I looked over at Milda, too confused to know where to start for a question. I simply had no idea what this place was, or why it should be hidden.
Lukas answered for her. “This is Milda’s school. Obviously, you can never tell anyone about this. Or at least, you can never tell the Cossacks.”
“A secret school?” I ran my fingers over the table at the front of the room. A book was laid out there, and a small stack of chalkboard squares was in a crate beside the book with a cup of chalk sticks worn almost to stubs in the corner of the crate. Last night, my father had warned me against joining any schools, and now I understood why. It would only bring trouble.
/> Just thinking of that conversation put a stab of pain in my heart. I missed my parents. It felt like years since I had seen them. It couldn’t only have been a single day.
Milda put her hand on my shoulder. “If you’d like, you can stay here with me. You can come to this school, learn about the books.”
“No … thank you.” My chest tightened. I refused to learn from a school that taught from books that got my parents arrested. Nor could I ever learn from something that had nearly gotten me killed. I’d return to the forest alone before I opened the pages of any book.
Now Milda folded her arms, and her tone became stern. “Let’s make an agreement, then. You don’t have to go to the school, but you cannot tell anyone about it, either, or about the books you saw.”
I nodded my acceptance. Who was I going to tell, anyway? The Cossacks? We were hardly on friendly terms.
“But you also need food and shelter,” Milda added. “Try living out on the streets and by the end of summer they’ll have some reason to arrest you.”
“What will happen to my parents now?” I asked. Even the question sent shudders through me.