* * *
Two weeks into a frigid new year, the temperature rose by a few degrees, and what had been a blizzard of driving winds faded to a soft snowfall, the perfect weather to venture out in after nearly a month underground. Though the group still had a comfortable supply of dried chanterelles, smoked meats and fish, and berries, Yona was eager to check some of their animal snares and to show a few of the others how she fished in the winter, when the surfaces of the ponds were frozen solid. The snow was still falling enough to erase their tracks, but the day was temperate, which meant they’d be able to spend a few hours outside without freezing.
Rosalia agreed to patrol the camp’s perimeter while Aleksander offered to take Leib with him to visit the traps spread around the forest. Luba and Sulia volunteered to melt some snow and use tallow soap to wash some of the group’s clothing, while Moshe, Leon, and Oscher asked if they could come on Yona’s ice-fishing expedition.
The going was slow as they set out from the camp, trudging carefully toward a frozen marsh nearby. Oscher’s limp held them back, but Moshe lingered with him, offering his shoulder for support, while Leon walked a few paces ahead with Yona.
“We’re fortunate to know you, Yona,” Leon said after they had walked for a while in comfortable silence. He was a quiet man, a former teacher who spoke only when he had something important to say, who played his cards close to his chest. Yona respected that, respected the quiet, respected that he only used his voice when it mattered.
“I feel the same,” Yona replied. “About all of you.”
He tilted his head to study her. “This must be difficult for you. You are accustomed to being alone.”
Yona nodded, and there was more quiet between them as the snow crunched beneath the soles of their boots. She was carrying a large willow basket on her back, one that she would use to catch the fish and transport them home, and it made her feel a bit as if she had wings. She looked back and slowed her pace slightly to allow Oscher, who looked like he was struggling, to keep up. She felt a surge of concern for him. Had it been a mistake to allow him to come? Had she put him in danger? Then again, surely it would have been worse to leave him behind feeling useless.
“It is the opposite for me,” Leon said after a while, resuming their conversation. Around them, the snow continued to drift down gently through skeletal trees that had stood guard over the forest for hundreds of years. The world was silent, still, peaceful. “I am accustomed to being with people—with family, with friends, with shopkeepers, with the rabbi, with my neighbors. Here, I feel very isolated.”
Yona tried to understand this. “Does it not help to share a shelter with Moshe, Rosalia, Ruth, and the children?”
Leon sighed. “It has been nice to have the children around. They don’t know enough of the world to truly understand what is happening, which lets us pretend for a moment that we aren’t running for our lives, living underground like rabbits. But Pessia often wakes up with nightmares, and I wonder at the demons that lurk in the dreams of someone so young. The others have been a comfort, certainly, but in a way, being together just amplifies our loneliness. They have become like my family, but they aren’t really my family, are they? My real family is dead, all of them, and to feel others breathing around me at night is to be reminded of the breath that is no longer there, that will never be there.” He sighed again and looked away. “I’m afraid that the longer we spend beneath ground together, the further away my old life feels. And I’m not ready yet to let that life go.”
It was the most Yona had ever heard Leon say, and the stark words made her heart ache. “I don’t think you have to let go of your old life to have a new one,” she said after a while.
His smile was sad. “But of course we do. Are you the same person you were before you decided to join us? I don’t think you are. We have to evolve, all of us, or we wither, but it also means that we spin further away from the past each day. And, Yona, I liked my past. I miss it terribly, the life I’d built, the people I loved.”
“I’m sorry, Leon.” The words were woefully inadequate.
“It isn’t your fault, of course,” Leon said, but what if he was wrong? What if her German blood made her culpable? It was something she had been thinking a lot about lately. If Jewish blood made one Jewish, what did her German blood make her? If the legacy of miracles was part of one’s birthright, was the legacy of sins, too? “As I said,” he added, unaware of the storm sweeping through her, “we are grateful for you.”
They reached the marshy streambed in an hour, and it was, as Yona had said, frozen solid across the surface, tufts of dried grass punctuating the ice. She beckoned the others closer, and Oscher, breathing hard, gathered a pile of leaves and sat on them, wincing as he reached for his leg, rubbing it and muttering to himself.
“Are you all right?” Yona asked gently.
“Oh yes, fine, fine,” Oscher said hastily, but his face was flushed, and his breathing still hadn’t returned to normal. As Leon bent to put a hand on his shoulder, Moshe and Yona exchanged concerned looks. “Go on, Yona,” Oscher added after a few seconds. “I’m all right, really I am.”
Yona hesitated before nodding, pulling the willow baskets from her back, and bending to the ice. Soon Oscher would catch his breath, and then he’d be embarrassed by her concern. Better to focus on the fish. “The secret to catching mud loaches in the winter is simple,” she began. “You see, there’s little oxygen under the surface when it’s frozen solid, and the fish are desperate for more. When we cut a hole in the ice, even a small one, they’ll come right to us.”
As the men watched, she used her axe to chisel out a hole in the slick surface five inches in diameter. They all bent to look, and Oscher, whose breathing was finally growing steadier, frowned. “But nothing is happening,” he said.
“Wait,” she said. She set one of the baskets upright and opened a small latch in the bottom, fitting it perfectly over the hole. Then she stood and beckoned to the men. “Now look.”
The three men peered in, and she smiled as Moshe gasped. She knew exactly what they were seeing, even without looking herself, for she and Jerusza had fished countless times in the winter just like this. One by one, beckoned by the thrill of oxygen, the fat, snakelike fish were slithering from the hole, hoping for a taste of the air. But once they had left the water, the opening in the basket kept them from plunging back in, and so they flopped around the dried willow until they went still.
For the next hour, Yona collected the loaches as they stopped moving and shifted them to the larger basket as the smaller one continued to fill. When it was nearly overflowing, Yona finally moved the first basket away from the hole in the ice and watched as a final fish made a grab for the fresh air, landing on the ice and skidding away, flapping madly. She pushed the broken ice chunks back over the hole, once again enclosing the surface so no additional fish would lose their lives unnecessarily, and then she straightened to find the men staring at her. “What is it?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“We will eat well for days, all of us,” Moshe said quietly. “Yona, you’re a miracle.”
Yona averted her eyes, embarrassed. “It’s not so difficult when you know the land. But we can’t fish like this when it’s colder; the fish won’t come up. And we can’t hike without a snowfall, because our tracks would be too obvious. Today was a lucky day.”
The men murmured among themselves, and then Moshe offered to carry one of the baskets, and Leon the other. Yona nodded and handed the baskets over; then, as they began traipsing back toward the camp, tracing their own nearly vanished footprints, she fell back with Oscher and offered a shoulder to lean on. Though he refused at first, he was breathing hard after a few minutes, and when he stumbled and nearly fell, Yona placed a firm hand on his left forearm and didn’t let go, bracing him as they moved through the snowy forest. “You two go ahead,” she said to Moshe and Leon as they drew closer to the camp. Their earlier footprints were still barely visible, and she knew they
could follow them home. “Oscher and I will be right behind you.”
Leon and Moshe looked uncertain, but they hurried away, the baskets heavy on their backs.
“I’m sorry,” Oscher said a few minutes after the other men had vanished into the forest ahead. “I’m holding you back, Yona. I shouldn’t have come.”
“No, I’m glad you did. And don’t worry. There’s no rush.”
But the snow was falling harder now, the afternoon turning darker, the clouds gathering overhead, stealing the sun. Great gusts swept through the forest, and she could feel Oscher trembling beside her. Without the two men ahead of them to keep up with, his pace had slowed even further, and for the first time, Yona began to wonder what she would do if he couldn’t go on. She was fairly certain she was strong enough to hoist him on her back, but would he let her? Certainly it would wound his pride. Jerusza hadn’t wanted to be treated like an invalid, even at the end, and she suspected Oscher wouldn’t want that, either. But she couldn’t just leave him out in the cold, for in saving face, he would lose his life.
As he continued to slow, panting harder, Yona was still mentally running through her options—which must have been why it took so long to register the unfamiliar voice up ahead. Usually she was attuned to the forest, but in paying attention to Oscher, she had let her guard slip. Instantly she stopped, and with a hand across Oscher’s chest, she halted him, too. She held a finger to her mouth, and then, in the stillness, she listened.
The voice was distant, too far away for Yona to discern the words, but it was male, and it was aggressive. Perhaps it was someone out hunting. Perhaps she and Oscher could just take a roundabout route back and avoid the stranger altogether.
But then her heart sank as she heard another voice: Moshe’s, loud and worried. The stranger in the woods was barking at Moshe now, and every cell in Yona’s body was suddenly on high alert.
“Wait here,” Yona said. “Behind this tree.” After a second, she pulled her knife from her ankle holster and handed it to Oscher.
“But you’ll need this to protect yourself,” he said, his face white with fear.
“I’ll be fine.” Of course giving her weapon away made her stomach roll, but Oscher was much more defenseless than she, and if someone came for him in her absence, the knife would give him a fighting chance. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Without another word, she raced toward the sound of Moshe’s voice, her feet carrying her over the snow, her lungs bursting with panic.
She slowed her pace as the voices grew closer; if she could maintain the element of surprise, she had an advantage, even if the stranger up ahead was armed. She was close enough now to make out words, and she hesitated as the stranger’s voice came again, speaking in Belorussian.
“… no good reason to be out in the woods,” the man was saying, his tone firm, his voice deep. “I will ask one more time what you are doing here. You are not hunting Jews, are you?”
Yona crept slowly forward until she could see Moshe and Leon, standing close together, cornered by a man with a square, stubble-covered jaw, broad shoulders, and a rifle. He had the gun pointed directly at the two men, but there was something about his expression, and in the careful way he said his words, that took Yona’s panic down a notch. He had spoken his Belorussian slowly, as if it was not the language he was most comfortable with, and now she could see Moshe trying to do the same, trying to force out words in Belorussian when he’d spoken nothing but Yiddish for months now.
“No, we do not hunt Jews,” he managed to say. “We are only fishing. See here? Here we have our fish.” He gestured to the basket on his back, and the man stepped forward to look, lowering the gun slightly.
“Where did you get those?” The man was in what appeared to be a threadbare Russian military uniform, with military boots and a frayed overcoat, but the shirt and trousers looked too tight on him. Certainly his accent wasn’t Russian.
“A stream about a kilometer from here.” Moshe pointed away from the camp and away from the way he’d just come, obviously hoping to send the man in a direction that wouldn’t result in him discovering Yona and Oscher or their hidden settlement in the woods.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “There is no stream that way. Why do you lie to me?”
Something moved in the shadows behind the man, then, and in an instant, Yona’s blood ran cold. It wasn’t an animal; it was another person in the trees, another man. Why was he hiding? Who were these men? For a second she flashed back to the two Russian soldiers who’d been about to kill Leib for sport. But as she stared hard at the dark thatch of branches, her eyes adjusted, and she could just make out the form of a young woman with long, dark hair tied in a braid, crouching down and breathing hard.
Yona put her hand over her mouth as she understood what was happening. This wasn’t a man who was there to hurt them. This was a man leading a group just like hers; she was almost certain. He didn’t seem to understand that Moshe and Leon were in the same situation as he, and as he leveled his gun at them once more, Yona knew she couldn’t wait a second longer.
“Wait!” she said in Yiddish as she stepped from the bushes. The man spun toward her, fear, then anger, then confusion flickering over his face in quick succession. “Please,” she said in Yiddish. “We are like you.”
She glanced at Moshe and Leon, who were staring at her in horror, and then back at the man, who hadn’t said a word yet. As she walked close to the barrel of his gun, which was now trained directly at her, she wondered if she had made an enormous mistake. “You are Jewish, aren’t you?”
The man looked uncertain, but she was close enough now that she could read his eyes. She could see that he understood her, which made her more certain that she was correct. A Belorussian villager wouldn’t know much Yiddish, nor would a Russian partisan.
“Who are you?” the man asked, still speaking Belorussian, but his accent had slipped a bit more.
“Amkha.” It was the first word Aleksander had said to her in the forest, the Hebrew word that meant she was part of the nation of people.
The man finally lowered his weapon and stared at her. “What are you doing out here? All of you?” He gestured to Moshe and Leon, but his eyes were still on Yona. He was speaking Yiddish now, which meant he believed her—and that she’d been right. She could feel the tension draining from her body like water through her fingers. “You are from one of the ghettos?”
It was too much to explain her own background, so she merely nodded. “Our group is. You are, too?”
“Yes.” He hesitated and glanced behind him. From the shadows emerged the other man Yona had seen in the darkness, along with the woman with the long braid, who was younger than Yona had thought, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen. Behind them, Yona could see more movement, others hidden in the trees. “We have been walking for many days. We are hungry. Could you—would you share some of your fish with us? We won’t be a burden after that.”
“Of course.” Yona’s reply was instant. “How many of you are there?”
He took another step closer and studied her face. He was around thirty, with kind, gentle eyes, though his expression was still guarded. She could see him trying to decide whether he could trust her. He glanced once more at Moshe and Leon, and his face finally softened. “Eleven. Two are children. You?”
“Fifteen,” Yona said. She had chosen to trust him, too. There was something about his eyes that was gentle but resolute. She could see it now, that he hadn’t wanted to hurt Leon and Moshe, but that they had represented a threat to his people, and he would have done what he had to in order to protect them.
“How long have you been out here? Your group,” the man asked.
“Months now.” Again it was too difficult to explain to the man that her story was different, that she had always belonged to the woods.
The man blinked a few times. “You have survived all that time? Through the winter? But how? We left the Lida ghetto only two weeks ago. I thought I knew the forest well, but we—w
e are starving. I’ve never been out here in the winter, and I thought…” His voice cracked into helpless defeat.
Yona glanced at Moshe and Leon, and slowly, solemnly, Leon nodded. “Come,” Yona said. “We will show you.” Leon nodded at her once more, and she looked back at the man with the eyes that were kind, but frightened, too. She could see that now; she had mistaken fear for aggression.
He held her gaze for a moment longer before beckoning to the forest behind him. She watched as five more men, and one woman holding the hand of two little boys, emerged to join the man and young woman already standing there. Their expressions were exhausted, haunted, and their cheeks were hollow with hunger. Yona’s heart ached, especially for the two children, who were only a little older than Ruth’s girls. They looked frightened and weak, and Yona knew she had to help. She let her eyes move back to the first man, who was still staring at her, and then she turned to Moshe and Leon.
“Lead them back to our camp,” she said. “I will go get Oscher.” She looked back at the stranger and nodded. “There are enough fish for all of you to share. Leon and Moshe will show you the way. I’ll be along soon.”
And then she dashed back into the forest, her heart pounding as she wondered what she had just set in motion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By the time Yona reached the camp with Oscher nearly an hour later, introductions had already been made, and it turned out that, by coincidence, the leader of the new arrivals had known Ruth and her parents a decade earlier, when Ruth’s father had hired him to build a new roof on the family’s house.
The Forest of Vanishing Stars Page 13
