But miraculously the fifth night passes, and the boy survives. As morning comes I hear the old woman make little clucking sounds, talking to the boy as if he could hear at last and shaking Ryzak out of the half-sleep he has fallen into, his head dropped forward, though his body, as he squats, is perfectly upright. The boy’s mother rises slowly to her feet, out of the place against the wall where for five days now she has been sunk in abject seclusion. Ryzak clasps his hands and utters big shouts of boisterous relief, teasing the boy, I guess, for giving them all so much worry, and he immediately comes to the middle of the room, grinning, and waves his hand at me. All his fear and resentment have vanished. He crosses to the window and lifts the bar. Bright light floods the room. It is one of those clear white days when the whole countryside is visible, glittering white under a sky of cloudless blue, and the sudden rush of cold air into the room is extraordinary. Ryzak stretches, utters another huge shout as he holds his arms wide out to the sky, and then, staggering back into the room, rolls into the pile of rushes that is his bed and immediately falls into the first real sleep he has known for nearly a week. The boy’s mother also sleeps, stretched out on the floor at his side. Only the old woman, who is tireless, continues to crow over the child, offering him tidbits from a plate, occasionally laughing to herself, even once or twice calling across to me, though what she is saying in her toothlessness I can never tell. The danger is past. We have come through. Suddenly I remember how tired I am. A great wave comes over me, and without even crawling the three feet to my bed of rushes, I allow myself to sink back under the flood of light from the window and sleep.
We are already past the worst of it. The winter solstice ahs long since come and gone, the dark of the year’s deepest place has been entered and the limit touched, the earth swings away towards the light again, and I feel my own spirits lifted as the days begin to lengthen. More and more often now periods of still bright weather open the whole country to our view, the sea glitters, the first birds return, the ice of the river on still nights can be heard grinding in the dark.
We can even begin at last to move about the house. I go down with the Child to the byre and we sit there with the animals, hearing them snuffle and snort in the half-dark, shifting, chewing, dropping the steaming heaps of dung that give the place its acrid odor, which seems almost pleasant after the stale air of the upper room, feeling their warmth as they crowd together in their stalls. They begin to be restless, scenting the spring. In two or three weeks now, when the ice has been cleared away, they will be led out into the fields again. Each day men are at work, chopping corridors through the ice, digging away the feet of frozen snow that block the narrow lanes between the huts, clearing yards to make outhouses accessible again. Even my own little house begins to reappear above the level of the snow. Soon we will be able to move back there, the Child and I, and our old life will resume. Then in a month or so we will return to our island in the swamp, to the birds, the moths, the new spring caterpillars, the vowels and consonants the Child has almost forgotten, it is so long since we rehearsed them; though now that he has spoken a word at last I know they are still to be found there at the bottom of his mind, that in some secret part of his being, deeper even than sleep, he has begun to speak to himself, and will eventually speak to me. We go down each day to the byre because the room itself has become intolerable. We exist there only on sufferance. Only because Ryzak is responsible for me.