The Song of the Stork

by Stephan Collishaw

  “Daughter,” the woodcutter said, enunciating the word carefully, slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. He wrapped his arm around Yael’s shoulder and squeezed playfully, then pointing to Chasidah said, “Granddaughter.”

  The German nodded. He did not seem interested. His eyes scanned the shack and the forest beyond.

  “Partisans?” he said then, in his broken Polish. “You see partisans?”

  The woodcutter shook his head and raised his shoulders in a loose, careless shrug. For some minutes the German soldiers conferred amongst themselves. Yael stood close, examining them. Their uniforms looked worn and smelled faintly of oil. The skin on their young faces was drawn, as though they were tired and hadn’t eaten well. One of them chewed at his nails incessantly, so that they were bitten far down. Deciding the woodcutter knew nothing more, the four soldiers turned abruptly and hurried back down to the tanks.

  As she watched them pull away she released the breath she realised now she was holding. She turned to the woodcutter, but the words escaped her.

  Later that day a number of planes flew low over the woods. Russian planes, the woodcutter told her, when he came in from his work and sat at the table with a large tumbler of moonshine before him.

  Maksim did not return that day. Yael stayed on at the woodcutter’s not knowing what else she could do. Each morning she woke with renewed hope and would get up immediately and go to stand at the door and watch the sun rise. And late into the evening, long after the woodcutter had fallen into a drunken slumber and Chasidah breathed deeply, gently, in her sleep, Yael stood by the small window gazing out, hoping to see the sudden shiver of movement in the darkness, Maksim, Josef, come back for her.

  Chasidah was five months old when Yael was once more woken by the sound of tanks in the field at the foot of the lane.

  32

  During the summer and autumn the Red Army pushed forward vigorously, driving the Germans back into Poland. From the hills and forests close to the Byelorussia border, where Yael continued to hide in the woodcutter’s shack, came the sound of heavy gunfire, the ear-piercing shriek of planes, the ground-rocking thud of explosions.

  One morning the woodcutter led a pony and hay wagon up the track and piled the small amount of possessions he owned on the back of it, strapping them down tightly.

  “We’re going to have to move,” he said. “Get out of range of the fighting.”

  He lifted Yael and Chasidah up onto the back and silently they bumped down through the woods, into the lanes, to join the long lines of refugees fleeing west towards the centre of Poland. She looked back at the hut, hoping that somehow Maksim would find her.

  Yael’s clothes were little more than rags, and Chasidah squirmed almost naked on her lap. Yael had tied an old patterned scarf around her hair, like the local peasant women, and kept close to the woodcutter.

  The narrow lanes were chaotic, filled with farmers’ wagons loaded with furniture and screaming children, quiet women and elderly men. German military traffic was often blocked by the refugees leading to angry confrontations and occasional fights. The evening of the second day, they drew to a halt behind a large cart, on which furniture was piled high: tables, chairs, chests and a wardrobe. The furniture had begun to topple sideways and the driver, a prosperous peasant who had no desire to leave his furniture to the Soviets, was trying to secure it with rope. In front of his cart a German lorry had stopped, with two more behind it. The driver of the first truck got out and remonstrated with the farmer, indicating for him to move the vehicle aside. The farmer swore and pointed to the sharp ditch that fell away from the road. For some minutes the two men argued in the centre of the lane, before a soldier leaned from the cab of the German truck and whistled to the driver.

  Angrily the driver stalked away, whilst the farmer spat on the ground after him, and resumed tying his load. The engine of the lorry coughed into life and the vehicle leapt forward. The farmer shouted out, but the large metal bumper had already collided with the side of his wagon. There was a heart-stopping wail from the two ponies as the weight of the toppling furniture pulled them sideways towards the ditch. As Yael watched, the wagon tilted then seemed to halt. The farmer’s hands flew to his head. The lorry revved and moved forward, toppling the wagon off the road. It rolled down the steep slope, the furniture scattering widely, the two ponies tangled in its load.

  Later, they passed two bodies splayed out at the side of the road, bullet holes in their heads, the blood dried dark on the gravel.

  That night they slept in the wagon, at the side of the road, amongst thousands of others. The sky was clear and the stars studded the darkness like jewels. Yael lay awake, Chasidah cradled in her arms and thought of Aleksei and Maksim. She pictured their faces, recalled her dreams, and felt only blankness. She could no longer feel hope, nor dare dream, or desire anything beyond that she and Chasidah would survive the night.

  She hugged Chasidah closer to her, so that the baby’s breath tickled her cheek. The faint beat of her heart thumped against Yael’s chest. She recalled the Mayakovsky poem she had often read to Aleksei. She loved its passion, the energy and the violence of the love. She mouthed the words silently to the stars. “Besides your love / I have no ocean… Besides your love / I have no sun, / but I don’t even know where you are or with whom.” Oh Aleksei, she wept, my quiet meshúgener, my lonely stork, where are you tonight? Are you still alive? Do you still think of me? Do you know we have a child? A little stork of our own.

  Early the next morning, they found the road once more clogged ahead of them. Children screamed in the road or stared blankly, fearful. Women huddled together. The workhorses looked tired and ill fed. An old man sat weeping on the back of a wagon, his toothless gums gnashing against each other. No one paid him any attention.

  “What is it?” the woodcutter asked, climbing down from the cart.

  “They’re checking papers,” someone told him, indicating the road block. Yael climbed down from the wagon and stood close behind the woodcutter.

  “What do we do?” she muttered.

  He shook his head and raised his shoulders. “We’ll say we lost yours,” he said finally, and she could tell from his voice that he realised himself how feeble this would be. He turned and looked at her. She saw in his eyes the olive darkness of her skin, her eyes, the blackness of her hair. He shook his head and looked away. Further along the German soldiers had taken a row of people out of the line. They stood by the side of the road, their heads bowed, and from the distance of a hundred metres, Yael could read the fear on their faces. She recalled the two bodies they had seen the previous evening.

  Chasidah cried from the back of the wagon and Yael went over to it and lifted her out. Her milk had begun to run dry, she was eating too little and Chasidah had been testy and was growing thinner.

  “They will know,” Yael said. “They will see that I am a Jew.”

  The woodcutter winced and Yael glanced around, but nobody seemed to have heard her. The refugees milled about the road, faces branded with hopelessness. Yael breathed in deeply. She hugged Chasidah close to her and decided. Turning to the woodcutter she pressed his arm.

  “Thank you,” she said simply, not knowing what other words might express the things that needed to be said in times like these. The woodcutter nodded. He did not say anything as she turned and walked slowly back down the line of stationary wagons.

  That night she begged food from a house in a small village. The woman looked suspicious, but took pity on the baby. The road the next day was clogged with more traffic. German lorries filled with injured, tired soldiers, defeat writ painfully across their faces. The soles of Yael’s boots fell off on the third day and she proceeded barefoot, walking along the muddy verges, rather than on the sharp gravel of the roads. Frequently she slipped. She fashioned a sling from a shirt she found hanging from the broken window of a bombed out house and tied Chasidah close to her chest. The baby had grown quiet and lethargic and Yael worried at her slight frame. Late
that evening she walked through a village that was completely deserted. The walls were riddled with bullet holes, and one house had been burned to the ground. It smouldered still, and the acrid scent filled her nostrils. She searched one of the houses but found little food. She drew water from the well in the back garden of one of the houses and boiled it over a fire.

  A movement in one of the buildings frightened her and she rose and fled into the fields. That night she slept in a hedge, and the next morning before it had even begun to grow light, set off again.

  There were soldiers in the next village. Yael’s head was light with hunger and exhaustion. Chasidah seemed to be sleeping. Occasionally, Yael would reach down and check she was still breathing. Her heartbeat seemed light. She kissed her head and begged her to keep strong. She recognised the village, having visited it some years before with her mother. It lay about ten kilometres south of Selo on the road to Augustow. The main square, a cobbled market place surrounded now by shattered buildings, was busy with traffic. Soviet army trucks, small tanks and motorbikes. Russian soldiers, large, oil-dirty men, many from the steppes of Mongolia, dressed in ill-fitting uniforms, cheap putties wound around their legs, loitered on the street corners or sat on their trucks laughing and joking. The few locals left there scuttled around with their heads down.

  Turning the corner Yael bumped into a figure she recognised. It took her a few moments to place the narrow pinched face and the round glasses.

  “You!” he said startled.

  It was the brother of the partisan who had visited Aleksei’s farm. For a few short weeks Rivka and she had stayed together in the woods with the two boys as they searched for a partisan group to join.

  The young man took off his cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He squinted at Yael.

  “You’re alive,” he stuttered, as though this was a surprise to him. “And Rivka? Is she okay?”

  It seemed so long ago, such a different world that Yael could barely connect the two moments in time in order to frame her answer. She shook her head. The boy nodded gravely, as if this was what he had expected.

  “I met your brother,” Yael said. “He was with a partisan group.”

  The boy nodded again. “We were separated,” he explained. “I heard he was fine. You look bad,” he said then. “When was the last time you ate?”

  Yael shrugged. She felt suddenly weary. Such a desperate exhaustion she felt she could barely stand. He took her arm and led her across the square to a makeshift military hospital. Sitting her on a hard wooden chair in the entrance to what had been the town’s theatre, he spoke to the officer at the door.

  “Don’t worry,” he said a few moments later, “they will look after you.”

  He had gone before Yael thought to ask his name. She wondered that she could not remember it from the days they had spent together in the forest. A Russian doctor came over and took Chasidah from her.

  “What is her name?” he asked kindly.

  “Chasidah,” Yael answered.

  He raised his eyebrows at this, but took the baby away, carrying her with care. The hospital smelled of powerful, cheap disinfectant, and beneath that of death. She closed her eyes and when some moments later someone tapped her on the shoulder realised she had fallen to sleep.

  “Can you walk?”

  Yael nodded. She followed the nurse down the corridor and undressed as she was told in the stark, cold, tiled washroom. An elderly women helped wash her down and sprinkled her with powder. They cut short her hair and powdered that too, so that she stank.

  “Lice,” they said by way of explanation as they cleaned her roughly. She was given a rough cotton robe to wear and shown to a bunk where she lay.

  “Where is my baby?” she asked the nurse who had taken her pulse and temperature and asked her questions and listened to her lungs and ascertained that she was not carrying any infectious diseases.

  The nurse nodded towards a door at the end of the ward. “Children’s ward,” she said. “Don’t worry, they will let you know how she is.”

  As neither she nor Chasidah were sick, simply tired and malnourished, they were discharged the following day and told to report to the schoolhouse where there was a refugee camp established. There, she was told, there would be food and her papers could be sorted out.

  “Jewish?” the officer at the entrance to the schoolhouse asked her. When she assented, he pointed perfunctorily across the road past a church whose bell tower was shattered, to a low building at the end of the lane. “Jews over to your church,” he said with a sigh, as if he had continually had to clarify this issue that morning.

  Yael was a little confused and stepped out nervously onto the road, crossing to the tumbled down Catholic chapel.

  “Not there!” the Russian called irritably and pointed down the lane.

  The building was a synagogue. Despite having avoided any kind of bomb damage the inside of the building was shattered. A fire had destroyed one corner, the windows were all broken and the walls daubed with paint and dirt. The furniture that had not been stolen, or used to light the fire, had been broken to pieces. She was greeted by two young men, members of a Zionist Youth Movement who were organising the cleaning up of the building. They registered her and pointed her towards the far corner where she would be able to get some food. After that they would be appreciative of her help, they said.

  Late that night the town reverberated to heavy gunfire. A shell hit the outskirts, and through the broken windows of the synagogue they could see the glow of the flames of burning buildings and the shouts of Russian soldiers rushing back and forward. The fighting continued throughout the next day, at some points coming so close they could hear the sound of light arms fire. The two Zionists went off to fight with the Russians and Yael took over the job of organising the tidying up of the synagogue, while formulating a plan of escape should the Germans break through the Russian line.

  Yael was grateful that at least she and Chasidah had somewhere to rest and a small amount of food each day.

  By late the following day the fighting receded again. The traffic through the town continued and the air was continually shaken by the sound of low-flying Russian planes screaming overhead. By late evening more refugees poured out of the forests into the narrow streets, growing confident in the stories that the Russians had beaten back the Nazis. The synagogue was soon busy with Jews of all ages, though mainly young men and women from Koenigsberg, Vilna, Lodz, Bialystok, Warsaw.

  In November, with the weather still holding up, Yael set off along the road north, towards Selo with Chasidah.

  33

  The traffic on the road into Selo was heavy. Military vehicles competed with farm wagons loaded with returning refugees. The bridge had been blown. Soviet engineers had built a makeshift metal replacement that shuddered and swayed as the traffic passed over it. The air seemed heavy and sullen. Much of the outskirts of the small town lay in ruins. Smoke still rose in some places and everywhere was the scent of burning.

  Yael walked across the bridge clasping Chasidah tightly to her. Russian soldiers stared at her with lifeless disinterest. Locals scuttled around with their heads down, avoiding communicating with each other. Their faces were sunken with hunger, their eyes dark with bitterness. The market place was quiet; on one side a few people traded worthless goods off the pavement, on the other, in front of the police station a gallows stood from which two bodies swung slowly in the morning breeze.

  Yael caught sight of an old acquaintance, an elderly woman of some wealth for whom her father did much work. The woman’s clothes were tattered and her hair hung in loose greasy curls. Seeing Yael the woman’s mouth fell open. Yael half-raised her hand in greeting, but the woman’s eyes darted away. She turned quickly and shuffled across the broken cobbles, disappearing quickly into the shadows of a side street.

  It was not just the old synagogue that had been burned to the ground, the church had suffered much damage too. A fire had gutted the insides and th
e roof had fallen in. Each of the stained glass windows had been shattered. Every bit of glass had gone, as if someone had systematically gone round and broken every last one.

  Though few people lingered in the streets, apart from the Russian soldiers, Yael got the feeling she was being watched. She felt uncomfortable, and tried to ignore the glimmer of panic that was growing inside. She hurried across the square, her head low, avoiding the malevolent sidelong glances thrown her way. One of the vendors sitting on the corner, a man in his twenties Yael did not recognise, had spread out before him a range of items from old shoes, with soles split from their cheap leather uppers to a small seven-branched candelabra of the type found in Jewish homes. Yael paused to examine the trinkets, but the man looked up. His eyes took her in quickly. He let out a low growl, low enough that the soldiers might not hear. Quickly he gathered the stuff together into a threadbare blanket and disappeared.

  The streets leading off the square were deserted. Here as elsewhere in the town the houses were in various states of devastation. Some fortunate ones seemed untouched, the paint still bright on the undamaged woodwork, whilst next door, all that stood was the brick chimney, teetering over the blackened rubble. Turning off Pilsudski, she hurried down Blacksmith’s Street. Turning right at the familiar corner she ducked down the alleyway between Eli Koppelman’s house and Michael Leizer, the butcher’s, one-storey cottage.

  She felt her heart beating hard as she stepped out onto the back lane, the small rutted road on which her house stood. What had she expected? She wondered, pausing, trying to control her breathing. Chasidah cried in her arms and she realised she had been squeezing her tight.

  “This is Máme’s home,” she whispered to the little girl, who opened her eyes. “Where Táte and Máme…” she stopped. Corrected herself. “Zéyde and Bóbe.” Grandfather. Grandmother. “And Josef, uncle Josef lived…” she whispered. Her heart wrenched. “Oh God!” she murmured. The pain felt crushing. The desire to run across the path and fall into her mother’s arms. To hear her father’s quiet voice. To see Josef. To know their home once more. “Oh God!” she cried, tears flowing down her face, dripping onto Chasidah’s cheeks, so that the baby raised a fist to wipe at it clumsily.