The guide, a woman with too many buttons on her black shirt, led the Neighborhood Grandparents to the mine shaft. “We’ll go 450 feet down,” she said. “Is anyone claustrophobic?”
Not Szerykl! Rabbits love-love-love a tight space under earth, where they can sniff the damp dirt, cuddle with family, ask worms how their day is going. In fact, when Sheri told Szerykl they’d take her to a town called Wieliczka (Vee-eh-LEECH-ka) where they’d end up deep underground, Szerykl felt such a burst of higgity-ziggity she hopped into three straight cartwheels and then stuck a round-off.
“All right then,” said the guide. “Let’s start down these forty flights of stairs!”
Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, turn, repeat. Three-hundred-and-twenty stairs. At the bottom they arrived at a strange place, not at all cozy. Instead it was rocky and lit by electric lamps. Heavy steel doors led to tunnels, all held up by thick timbers.
“What sort of underearth is this?” Szerykl asked.
“It’s a salt mine,” said Sheri. “Miners started digging here some 800 years ago.”
“When I was a boy and used to complain about chores,” Michael said, “my mom would tell me to try working in a salt mine. Now I know what she meant.” He ducked low so as not to bonk his noggin.
Szerykl made a face that pretended to be surprised. “You were a boy? Did you have hair?”
“Says the magic rabbit wearing a dress she hasn’t changed in three months.”
The walls taste like salt!
“Good one!” said Szerykl. Both laughed and
high-fived. The guide disappeared around a corner, so they sped to keep up
through a tunnel where the walls looked like cauliflower. Szerykl licked them,
because she likes cauliflower, but instead they tasted like salt. Then she
hopped along the floor, and when she licked her paws, her paws also tasted like
salt.
“It’s all salt,” said Sheri. “Where we’re standing used to be under an ocean, but that was so long ago only the rocks remember. And where there’s an ocean, there’s salt. So salt surrounds us. Even the crystals on those chandeliers are salt!”
They had come to a magnificent chamber with a ceiling high as an oak tree’s topmost branches. Three magnificent chandeliers brightened the space, its walls a mix of gray and white. Along the walls stood statues of robed people, looking peaceful; some even glowed. At one end of the chamber sat an altar just like the one at the church in Baltimore near E’s Catholic school.
“Except,” said Sheri, “this church and that altar and all these statues are carved from salt.”
Szerykl thought of the white grains Sheri liked to shake onto her parsnip soup. “How can a statue get carved from salt?”
“This is rock salt,” said Sheri. “It hasn’t been pulverized yet. When it’s pulverized and refined, we call it table salt, and then I can sprinkle it on my soup. Rock salt, though, can be chiseled by sculptors just like any rock.”
The guide overheard and interrupted. “Three miners carved this whole chapel,” she said. “They needed seventy years, because they accomplished this in their spare time.”
Were the miners magicians or miracle workers? Szerykl wondered. Magic, she decided, thinking that a miracle is when the universe surprises you in some impossible way. Magic, though, comes from talent and practice.
The guide led them out of the chapel into more tunnels, through more doors, down even more stairs. They came to another chamber, smaller than the chapel and rougher, too, more like a cave. There, little bearded men pushed wagons and split logs and carried hammers. Szerykl’s ear perked up. She sang to herself the prophecy the Rabbit Prince had recited that long ago afternoon.
Under the Bunny, twitch then hop,
then to gather amber drops
from dragon, from knight, from dwarves and mice.”
“DWARVES!” she cried out. “SCORE!”
“Hey!” shrieked the guide. “Rabbits aren’t allowed in there!”
But Szerykl leapt right into the dwarves’ workspace. “Who’s got an amber bead?” she shouted in Dwarvish, which even when spoken by a magic rabbit sounds a lot like talking with rocks in your mouth. She hopped into the hand of a red dwarf and onto the shoulder of a purple dwarf and atop the hat of a green one.
But no dwarf answered. None even sneezed.
“What did I tell you?” Sheri said. “Everything. Is. Salt.”
The guide gave Szerykl a witch’s side-eye, and you know those are the worst. Szerykl felt a bashful burn in her cheeks and her tail, so she hopped back inside Sheri’s pocket and nestled among Sheri’s Kleenex, nose twitching with disappointment. She wanted the salt dwarves to be real dwarves! But that wasn’t the only reason Szerykl felt like a dope. She’d also expected that 450 feet underground she’d meet worms. She liked Gummy the Spider and the Rabbit Prince, but she missed her worm friends from back home–their dirt breath and that cute way they curled when Szerykl pawed their bellies! (Or was it their backs? Who could ever tell?)
Given how she felt, Szerykl stayed in Sheri’s pocket all the way home. There, she found Gummy the Spider in his web, slurping the juice out of a big fly. “The Rabbit Prince has a message for you,” Gummy said. “Slurp. Slurp. It has to do with where one finds dwarves.”
“Not in a salt mine,” Szerykl said.
“Because you’ve learned to read, slurp, slurp, the Rabbit Prince invites you for tea at a bookstore.”
“I’ve never visited a bookstore.”
“Exactly. But if you live in Kraków you have to visit bookstores. There’s nothing a Krakowian loves more than meeting a friend at a bookstore and sipping a hot cup of tea. Slurp, slurp.”
When the afternoon came for her meeting with the
Rabbit Prince, Szerykl snuck into Michael’s satchel just before he left for
errands. She curled up there next to a small box Michael had addressed to E across
the big sea. Szerykl knew what the Neighborhood Grandparents had put inside the
box, but it was a Christmas secret so she didn’t even tell Gummy. The queue at
the post office was long, and Michael waited outside in the cold and spitting
rain. He sighed, and Szerykl heard his heart, and she knew he sighed not
because of the rain but because E was so far away. The Neighborhood
Grandparents had been sighing a lot lately.Szerykl outside the bookstore
And through that door is where she found the prince, crouched between classics.
“May I order for you some green tea?” he asked. “Perhaps a bite of cheesecake?”
As they enjoyed their tea and cheesecake, the Rabbit Prince apologized for being late with advice regarding dwarves. “Przepraszam,” he said, which sounds like pshay-PRA-sham and which is Polish for pardon me or even a polite I’m sorry. “You’ll find dwarves all over Poland–even in the Salt Mine–but only the dwarves in Wrocław have the amber drop we need.”
“V-RO-tswahv?”
“There are hundreds of dwarves spread throughout that city. I don’t know how you’ll find the one who holds the amber drop. But you’re a magic rabbit. You’ll do it.” The Rabbit Prince nibbled cheesecake. Then, he looked at Szerykl and his ears shuddered, his black eyes grew large. “But tell me, your heart sounds out of sorts, and it isn’t because of those salty dwarves.”
Szerykl told him about how Michael and Sheri missed E. And not only her. In faraway Poland, even their grand adventure couldn’t distract them from thoughts of home–especially at Christmastime.
“They’ve made new friends,” Szerykl said. “But Sheri misses her sister. Michael misses his dad. They’ve got so many family and friends they wish they could hug. Even their dog friend, Mimsy! They watch videos of her over and over and coo. It’s a little pathetic, really. They’re not sad, exactly, or unhappy–just, sort of aware of what’s not here. I wish I could help.”
 |
| “Wesołych Świat i Szczesliwego Nowego Roku!" |
As she scampered home, Szerykl recalled how often had she watched E walk into a room and give everyone a hug. From E, Szerykl had learned that the best way to lift heavy hearts is to give love.That was how Szerykl could help the Neighborhood Grandparents. Except, she was too small to hug. Hmm.
Szerykl found the Neighborhood Grandparents reading, as usual. Szerykl hopped onto the table between them where they’d placed a small Christmas tree, decorating it with lights and red and silver bulbs.
“Przepraszam,” Szerykl said, which was polite because of the interruption.
Michael closed his book, and Sheri put aside her magazine. Szerykl raised both little forelegs (or arms, whatever), one toward each of them. And after a glance back and forth, somehow, the Neighborhood Grandparents knew what to do. They each took one of Szerykl’s paws, then each other’s hands, too. Now the three of them made a triangle in the midst of which, like a miracle, a small spark appeared and grew to a warm glow. This glow, they recognized. It was their longing for everyone they loved: sisters and parents and friends and dogs and worms. The glow warmed and comforted them, because they saw how wonderful it is to love people even when they’re far away, and better yet to have a rabbit friend who understands.
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