Ben followed up behind me. “Lukas, we have a place nearby where it’ll be safe for you to stay and recover. I’ll borrow a wagon and get Audra back to Milda’s home.”
“No!” I said. “Ben, I did a good job!”
“You were better than that,” Ben said. “And so was Lukas. But I won’t let what happened to him happen to you too.”
And so, despite my protests and frustration, it was arranged. An hour later, Lukas was settled in at the home of the same girl who had requested the book on grammar. Ben must have mentioned my interest in learning to write to her, because before we left on the wagon, she handed me a small tablet of paper and a pencil.
I tried to give it back to her. “This is too much.”
But she pushed it toward me. “For what you did, this is too little a gift. Please, take it.”
I tucked it inside a pocket of my apron for safekeeping, then settled in for the trip back to Milda’s home.
“I want to carry books again,” I said to Ben.
He glanced over at me. “It’s not safe. The Cossacks know that Lukas escaped, so they’ll be extra watchful of our usual routes.”
“And when they find nothing, they’ll go into the villages and search there,” I said. “We need a safe place for the books.”
Ben sighed. “Nowhere is safe, Audra. Not for the books, not for those who read them. And certainly nowhere is safe for a book carrier. It’s not a question of when we are caught, only how much good we can do until it happens.”
“Will you be caught one day? I can’t believe that would ever happen to you.”
Ben frowned and shook the reins of our horses to go faster. “I’m getting old and I’m not as quick as I used to be. Lukas is the next generation of book carrier, maybe you too, so your lives matter more than mine. I’ll never be caught, but this is the work I’ll be doing right up to my last day on earth.”
I stayed with Milda for another three months without a word from either Ben or Lukas. Three long months during which people came to Milda’s shop for baked goods and left with books tucked deep at the bottoms of their bags. Three months in which nothing new came in and her crowded shelves began to dwindle. Milda started offering trades on books rather than selling them, but that only slowed the problem, not solved it. She still held school, and for three months I sat in the back, watching the other students pore over the books as if nothing else existed but the words on the page.
I sat in the back … at first.
Roze was there every single day, having finished whatever book Milda had loaned to her the day before and eager for a new one. S
he invited me to sit beside her in school but I always declined. I didn’t want her to know how dim I felt trying to decipher a single word in the same time as she finished an entire page.
Gradually, I began to understand that if I wanted to read, I needed to study the books for myself, not simply watch as others did it. So after school hours, when no one was looking, I returned to the secret schoolhouse and opened the same pages. At first, they were only words, just as before. Words I could speak and think, so why was it necessary to read them? But slowly, almost without my realizing what was happening, the words came to mean more because of how they were combined with other words. Words became ideas and thoughts, and it was just as Lukas had said—those thoughts were seeds that sprouted new ideas in my mind, growing and taking me to places I’d never even known existed.
Words!
They weren’t simply a formation of letters to identify an object or an action. How could they be so little when one sentence set my heart pounding and another caused me to gasp with delight? How could they mean nothing when they lingered in my mind, followed me into my dreams, and challenged everything I’d always believed?
The Russian Empire wasn’t afraid of a country that spoke a different language. They were afraid of a country whose language denied Russia’s right to control it. The words wouldn’t lead to our independence—words themselves, their very existence, were our independence. If we surrendered our books to them, we’d surrender our minds, leaving us hollowed-out puppets, ready to be controlled.
That’s what Ben and Lukas and Milda and the kind priest and everyone else I’d met so far understood. If we lost our books, what was there left to live for?
“Did you write this, Audra?”
I turned with a start, realizing Milda had come into the secret school. It was nearly suppertime, and she was usually upstairs in the kitchen at this hour, so I hadn’t expected her. I must have been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard her approach. She was in a rather clever costume today, wearing a pair of crocheted shoes, one significantly longer than the other and stuffed with bits of fabric, and a pair of glasses with the lens in one eye particularly thick, making that eye seem almost double the size of the other. She removed those glasses now to focus on me properly. In her hands were a few papers I recognized.
“Did you write this?” she asked again.
I shrugged. “It’s only a story.”
I was attempting to write a fairy tale, adding my own thoughts to Lukas’s story of Rue. Except in many ways, Rue was simply me … or the me I wished I were. I wanted to be her, and somehow, writing about a strong character made me feel stronger too.
Milda smiled and sat down in one of the chairs near me. “Do you imagine stories in your head? Tales of adventure and danger and friendship?”
Slowly, I nodded, not sure of why she was asking such an odd question.
Milda glanced at my papers. “These characters in your story—do you hear them speak to you, a voice in your head that wishes to come alive on paper?”