The Forest of Vanishing Stars

by Kristin Harmel

  When the sun rose high the next day, Yona washed the old woman’s body with frigid water from a narrow nearby river, gently, carefully, wringing out the rags into pitchers, and then poured the water into a shallow grave, the best she could do when the ground was still cold. Then she wrapped Jerusza in a white burial shroud and carefully lowered her into the earth. After she had shoveled the dirt back into Jerusza’s resting place, she stamped it down carefully, for she knew that ghosts could escape from loose earth. She hoped that Jerusza’s soul would find its way to its next home, whatever that might be, but that it would fly far from here, for though she dreaded being alone, she feared the prospect of being haunted by Jerusza even more.

  For seven days, she stayed to sit shiva, not bathing, not changing her clothing, hardly moving from her spot on the cold earth, and reciting the mourning prayers three times a day as Jerusza had taught her. When the prescribed period of mourning was done, she destroyed the earthen roof of the dugout, gathered the few things she could take with her—two bags of acorn flour, three shirts, three pairs of trousers, and a tattered wool coat Jerusza had stolen for her from a village long ago, a mug, a plate, a pot, an axe, and the knife she always carried on her ankle—and walked away without looking back, leaving Jerusza, and everything that belonged to their life together, behind her forever.

  * * *

  For two months, Yona wandered the forest alone, setting up camp in a different spot every few months, just as Jerusza had taught her, but gradually coming closer to the forest’s edge, too, flirting with danger in a way that made her heart race. What if she ventured into a village, a town? Could she choose a different life than the one Jerusza had given her? After all, who was Jerusza to choose Yona’s fate, her future? But fear held her back—fear and a memory of the explosions that had shaken the forest the summer before. Jerusza’s words still rang in her ears. The horror has just begun.

  By late April, the spring sun burned the afternoons, and Yona, accustomed now to the predictable silence of her own company, had moved into the northern depths of the forest, leaving both the mysterious swamp and her dreams of civilization behind. In the summer and autumn, one was never really alone among the trees, for that was when the creatures of the forest were most active. Each day she walked deeper into the woods, and at the coming of each twilight, she made a simple camp beneath the stars. When the nights were mild, there was no need to build a shelter; the sky was her roof, the world her walls. In the mornings, she talked in a gentle whisper to the long-billed snipes that came to drink from the clear brooks, and sometimes, if she stayed still enough, she could lock eyes with a sleek spotted lynx for a long moment before each of them went their separate ways in silent understanding.

  At night, when she closed her eyes, she reached for long-lost images of her parents in her mind until she could just make them out through the fog of time, their familiar faces hovering above a cradle. Siegfried and Alwine Jüttner. Who were they? What did they believe had become of their lost daughter? Did they still think of her, wonder about her fate?

  On a crisp morning after a heavy rain late in the month, Yona was just about to emerge from the hollowed-out oak trunk where she’d sought shelter from the storm the night before, when she heard a rustling in the trees. She had seen a flock of cranes the previous afternoon and thought they might be returning, so she held her breath and listened for their distinctive bugle calls. But the flash of color behind the trees wasn’t the muddy white of a crane, and immediately, Yona’s chest seized with fear. It was too small to be an elk or a bear. It was too small even for a fox. It took Yona a few startled seconds to recognize that the creature moving into the clearing was a slight, dark-haired child, a little girl in a threadbare dress, her hair matted, her arms and legs mud-caked, her face white as a cumulus cloud.

  Yona ducked quickly behind a tree and watched as the girl staggered closer. Yona hadn’t seen a child in years; the glimpses she caught of other humans in the forest were always of older boys or men who had ventured beyond their villages to hunt, or of the bad men Jerusza had warned her about, the ones who wore tattered uniforms, fur caps, and scowls. Yona couldn’t guess how old the child was—old enough to speak, perhaps, though certainly not old enough to be roaming the woods alone—but she could tell instantly that something was wrong. The girl’s eyes were wide as full moons, unfocused, and her legs seemed ill-suited to carrying her tiny frame as she wobbled to and fro.

  Yona took a step forward, then froze. Surely there would be a protective mother nearby. But Yona waited a minute, and then two, and no parent arrived. The girl wobbled a bit more, and then her eyes rolled back into her head, and she collapsed with a noise that sounded like both a sigh and a gasp, pitching headfirst into a jagged tree stump.

  Yona was running toward the child before she could stop herself, driven by an instinct she couldn’t name, which overrode her caution. Before she knew it, she was on her knees beside the child, lifting her up, feeling for a pulse in her tiny, limp wrist, sighing in relief at the strong tap-tap-tap from the child’s radial artery. She put a hand on the girl’s forehead and withdrew it quickly with a sharp intake of breath. The girl was burning up. Yona picked her up gently and then hesitated. What to do next? The child needed something to bring her fever down, but where were her people? Parents didn’t let children this young wander into the wilderness, for they would disappear forever there. She waited only a second more before calling out, “Hello? Anybody?”

  Two white-backed woodpeckers lifted off from a tree nearby, their startled kuik-kuiks piercing the quiet of the forest, but nothing else moved. Yona looked down once more at the little girl in her arms. Her hair was tied with a bow; her little blue sweater, though shredded to rags, had a yellow fabric star carefully stitched on. There was someone out there who cared about her. “Please!” Yona called out once more. “The child is hurt!” But her only reply was the shuffle of the branches and the faint echo of her own voice.

  There was no one out there. Finally, with the child in her arms, Yona turned and hurried toward the tree where she’d found shelter the night before, a massive oak, hundreds of years old, with a hollow in its trunk large enough to lie down in and to stand without ducking. After reassuring herself that the girl’s heart was still beating strong, Yona laid her down on a bed of leaves and dashed out to skin a long strip of bark from a willow tree. She raced to the stream a kilometer from her camp, soaked the bark in the cool water, and ran back to the shelter, where she knelt beside the girl and applied the compress to her head. “There,” she murmured, “you’ll feel better soon.” She sat back on her heels, studying the girl’s still, colorless face. “Please hold on,” she added in a whisper.

  After checking the child’s pulse once more, this time just under the hollow of her neck, Yona stood again and made her way back outside. She started a fire as she always did, with one of the Russian magnesium sticks she treasured, then she stripped some more bark from the willow, dipped her pot in the stream, and set to work boiling water for willow tea. The smoke from the fire might attract people, signaling Yona’s location, but it was a chance she had to take. Besides, if there were people in the forest, they might be the girl’s people.

  Then again, what if the girl had been running from someone? The thought made Yona’s breath catch in her throat. The girl’s clothes were shredded, her body bruised and scraped, her little frame nearly emaciated. What if it hadn’t been the forest that had hurt her? What if the forest was protecting her from the demons on the outside that Jerusza had always warned Yona about, the ones Yona wasn’t sure whether to believe in?

  As soon as the water boiled, Yona hastily poured it into a cup, added the willow bark, and extinguished the flames. Maybe no one had seen them at all. She rushed back into the hollow tree and knelt beside the girl again, but now all her senses were on high alert. She believed in her ability to protect herself—after all, so much of her childhood had centered around learning the art of fatal self-defense—but she had ne
ver thought much about protecting someone else, not even when Jerusza was near death’s door, for even then, Yona had believed in the old woman’s protective magic.

  “Wake up,” she murmured, touching the girl’s cheek, which felt a little cooler, a sign that the bark across the girl’s forehead was working to fight the fever. “Please, sweet child, wake up.”

  And then, as if God had been listening, the little girl did just that, her eyelashes fluttering, her eyes opening—they were deep, the color of a bear cub’s fur—and her mouth forming a tiny O of surprise as she registered the presence of a stranger looming over her. The girl sat upright and screamed, but the sound was barely audible and the effort of that alone seemed to exhaust her.

  Yona put a gentle hand on her arm. “You are safe here,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

  But the girl just stared at her in confusion, and Yona realized she hadn’t understood. She had spoken in Belorussian, because she knew many of the people in the towns that ringed the forest used the language, but perhaps the girl was Polish. She tried again in that language, but she was greeted by the same blank, frightened look. She tried German, then Russian, but still nothing.

  Finally, the girl spoke. “Ver bisti? Vu zenen maane eltern.”

  Surprised, Yona replied in Yiddish. “I am a friend. And I don’t know where your parents are, but I promise, I will do all I can to find them. In the meantime, I will keep you safe.”

  The girl’s mouth fell open. “You are Jewish, too?”

  Yona hesitated, Jerusza’s confused words from the summer before still fresh in her mind. You are what you were born to be. But what was that? Jerusza had steeped her in Jewish tradition, had made sure she knew Jewish law inside and out, had read to her from the Torah even before Yona could read herself. Yona believed in God and saw him everywhere, and she believed the teachings of Jewish scholars and sages, but that wasn’t enough, particularly for someone who had never set foot within a synagogue, though Jerusza insisted that God could be worshipped anywhere. “I don’t know,” she concluded helplessly.

  “But… you speak the language of the Jews.”

  “I speak many languages.”

  The girl looked confused. “Your—your eyes are funny. They’re different colors.”

  Yona blinked a few times. “Yes, I suppose they are.” No one aside from Jerusza had gotten close enough to her to notice them, not even the boy she’d met in the woods years before. It felt strange to be face-to-face with another person, and Yona felt suddenly self-conscious, though the girl was just a child. “My name is Yona,” she said after a pause. “What is yours?”

  The girl hesitated, searching Yona’s eyes. “Chana,” she said at last.

  “Well, Chana, I have made you some willow tea. If you drink it, it will make you feel better.”

  Chana regarded the cup in Yona’s hands but didn’t reach for it. “It will not hurt me?”

  “I give you my word.” Yona held out the cup, and after another second’s hesitation, the girl took it and sniffed it uncertainly. “It will bring your fever down, and it will help with the pain,” Yona added.

  The girl took a small, hesitant sip, wrinkling her nose a bit, but then she drank again. “How do you know I am in pain?”

  “You fell.” Yona tapped the center of her own forehead. “You hit your head, just here. Can you feel the bump? And you have many cuts and bruises.” She hesitated, watching the girl as she drank again. “What happened to you, Chana? What were you running from?”

  The girl’s face changed then, her eyes filling with tears. “I was running from the… the people who want to kill us.”

  “But who would want to kill you?”

  The girl looked over Yona’s shoulder, searching the woods for an invisible hunter. When her eyes returned to Yona’s face, the sadness in them nearly knocked Yona over. “The Germans,” she said. “The Germans who came to Volozhin.”

  Yona didn’t understand. For all she knew about the forest, she knew nearly nothing about the way mankind worked. Still, she knew enough to realize that if there were people out there trying to kill an innocent child, something had gone very wrong in the world. “Why?” she asked finally. “Why would anyone be trying to kill you, Chana?”

  “Because I am Jewish.” The girl’s voice was flat, sad. She touched the yellow star sewn onto her sweater. “They are trying to kill us all.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  For two days, Yona fed Chana a soothing stew made from fish bones, chanterelle mushrooms, and acorn flour, and each night, she waited until the girl was sleeping soundly before she let her own tears fall.

  If an adult had said the things the girl had, she would have believed the person was lying. But Chana, just six years old, was guileless. Her voice had stayed low and flat as she told Yona, haltingly, of the terrible things that had happened to the Jews who lived in the villages around the forest’s edge. Arrests and deportations of the strongest men. Ghettos where streets overflowed with human waste and garbage. Rampant disease, starvation, orphans with nowhere to go who froze to death in the winter, their hands still reaching for bread that would never come.

  The realization of what was happening outside the forest swept over Yona like a virus. She dry-heaved in the mornings, out of sight of the girl. And when she smiled and reassured the girl that all would be well in the end, she could taste the salt on her tongue, just like when she’d lied to Marcin in the woods all those years before.

  The Germans had done this to the child, and Yona couldn’t stop thinking of the things Jerusza had said on her deathbed. She had stolen Yona from German parents. Bad people, she had called them. Evil parents. Is this what Jerusza had meant? Could people be so cruel to their fellow man? Had Jerusza been right to do what she had done?

  “Please, will you take me to find my mother and father?” the girl asked just after dawn on the third day. She had gained some of her strength back, and she had told Yona that she’d been separated from them a week earlier, when they fled the ghetto together along with a dozen others through a tunnel they’d dug by hand. Germans had given chase, shouting words she couldn’t understand, and when gunfire rang out, she’d been so frightened that she ran without looking back. When her legs faltered beneath her and she could go no farther, she stopped and found herself completely, terrifyingly alone.

  Yona feared that the girl’s parents were dead, but she nodded and forced a smile. “We will begin looking for them today. But the forest is large, Chana. It is possible we might not be able to find them. You must prepare yourself for that.”

  “They will be looking for me, too,” Chana replied with certainty. “They are out there.”

  And so, although it went against Yona’s instincts, they began moving that day toward civilization on the northern edge of the forest, the direction from which Chana had come.

  It took them a day and a half, walking by the light of a full moon, sleeping in the day, before Yona picked up a trail. Two pairs of footprints led east, away from a riverbank, and one of the sets was too small to be a man’s. Could they belong to Chana’s mother? They were fresh, less than a day old.

  Six hours later, just as the sun was beginning to rise, they found the footsteps’ end. Set between two oaks was a poorly constructed lean-to with an inexpert roof of scattered branches that couldn’t possibly have done much to keep out either rain or sun. The second Yona spotted it, she pulled Chana behind a tree and motioned for the girl to be quiet. She had to be sure that the people who had built it would not harm them. Chana looked at her with wide eyes and nodded her understanding, but after a few minutes had passed, a woman emerged, her long brown hair falling over her shoulders like a curtain, and Chana was off like a shot. “Mami!” she cried.

  The woman turned, and Chana flew into her arms. Both of them were crying and talking at the same time, and as Yona stepped from behind the bushes, she was surprised to feel tears in her eyes. It was the sort of reunion she would never have; there was no one out there wait
ing for her.

  After the woman let Chana go, Chana turned and pointed toward Yona, and the woman’s expression changed from one of pure joy to one of guarded curiosity in an instant. “She saved me, Mami,” Yona could hear the girl say, and after a second, the woman’s face softened, and she beckoned Yona closer.

  “Is this true?” she asked, her voice deep, strong. She spoke Polish, unlike her daughter. “You saved my Chana?”

  “She was injured,” Yona replied in Yiddish, the language the woman must have been more comfortable with, for it was the one she’d taught her child. “I promised to help her find you.”

  The woman stared at her for another moment. “You speak Yiddish. You were in the ghetto, too? I have not seen you before.”

  Yona shook her head. “I am only from the forest.”

  The woman studied her for a minute more. “You know how to help people who are hurt, then? Please. My husband, he needs help. Will you come?”

  Yona nodded and, ducking her head, followed the woman toward the poorly built structure, Chana tailing behind them.

  “Thank you,” the woman added without looking at Yona. “Thank you for saving my child.”

  * * *

  Chana’s father was dying, his torso a bloodied mass, his face beaded with sweat. He lay on his back, breathing rapidly, his eyes half-open and glazed. When Chana came close, whimpering, he looked as if he did not know her, and her mother quickly pulled her back, wrapping her in a hug.