The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  —

  This is the part of the story where I know you want to hear how we fell in love. I understand—don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’re always free to visit your grandfather and me, even on Saturday nights. How five years out of college you’re still living like a student, still alone in that shoebox studio. Even when you were little, it was your favorite part of every story. It used to kill me when I’d overhear you asking your mother those kinds of questions about your father, this young chubby you with long blond braids and a dreamy expression. As if with your eyes half-closed you could envision a time when your parents weren’t sneaking around your living room at night, scribbling their names into each other’s books, or storming after each other outside your old apartment, fighting over who got to keep this ceramic, fish-shaped platter your mother said she made at summer camp but that your father claimed he made at an adult ed class at the Y—a fish, he yelled, that held his nachos just right.

  And I remember after he left, you and your mother piled all of your possessions into a taxi and headed over the bridge to our apartment in Queens, where the two of you moved into her childhood bedroom, sleeping side by side on her trundle bed, surrounded by her spelling ribbons and stuffed-animal collection, as though you were living in an exhibit in the museum of her life. And I remember all the dates she’d bring back—Philip and Hugh and the one who wore his sunglasses inside—how she’d parade those men into my home with the same defiance she had in high school, only she was thirty-six then with a four-year-old daughter in the next room eating dinner with her grandparents. From the kitchen the three of us would listen to her carrying on, her voice high and clear and always drowning out the other person’s, which probably made her a good teacher during rowdy assemblies but not such a hit on those dates. There were so many nights when I’d watch her crawl into bed beside you after her date had left, her back to the wall, her bare feet wrapped around yours, holding on to your stomach so tightly it was like she feared the distance you might fall was so much greater than from the bed to the carpet.

  I want to tell you mine was a great love affair, but the truth was that the only reason your grandfather started coming into my tent at night was to protect me. There were so many things to be afraid of in the forest. Not just the soldiers but bears and snakes and wolves. Russian Communists who lived in other parts of the woods, coming by our camp, offering bullets for a night with one of the girls, sometimes taking one even if refused—men who disliked your grandfather but respected him enough, even as a boy, not to touch the one he was with. Anyway, it was almost winter—I will always remember that as the coldest season imaginable, the winter I watched hot tea freeze in a cup—and when your grandfather climbed in one night and lay beneath my blanket, his hands roaming up my shirt and into my pants long before he thought to kiss me, it didn’t feel romantic—more like a basic physical need that had little to do with me.

  We’d already seen each other naked, anyway—we all bathed around one another, there was no other choice—and even though I was thirteen years old and he was my first kiss, I wasn’t so naive as to believe your grandfather was in love with me, though for a lot of my life I did believe our relationship wasn’t so bad. We had no one but each other when we first arrived in the States, and a big part of me wondered if I had another option, if there were any other Jewish men left. We never even talked about marrying—we just did it. I think your grandfather and I both wanted to forget everything that had happened and try to be as normal as all our neighbors on Dinsmore Avenue. It was only years later when you and your mother were living with us that I had to listen to her opinions on how I would never be normal, my fuse was just too short, she’d never met a person who could go from zero to sixty so quickly. From the beginning, though, it was like that with your mother and me—even in the womb I think she was kicking me on purpose. Whenever we argued, your grandfather would walk out the door and around the block, as if your mother and I had taken up all the air in the apartment. But you would always stay. It used to drive me crazy, watching you watch us, as if our fight were being transcribed and filed away in the card catalog of your mind. But the truth was that there were moments when I’d look at you—you always resembled me more than your mother, especially when you were young, with your light hair and cheeks that went red no matter the weather—and think that you reminded me of another version of myself.

  I too might have lived in my head if, when I was a girl, I’d had a school to spend my days in and an apartment for my nights, rather than a tent and a bed of pine needles that I shared with your grandfather. But to his credit, he never once tried to pretend ours was some sweeping romance. At fifteen, he’d already had a life separate from our village, a life of organizing and combat training and falling in love with Chaya Salavsky, whom he called the most brilliant thinker from his youth group and promised to reunite with one day in Palestine, where she’d gone with his two younger brothers and most of their brigade. After the war, he said, he’d join his brothers on the collective they’d started, and every day he’d swim in the sea and eat grapefruits and lemons that grew wild from trees. You can come with me, he’d say, always an afterthought. But during those talks I’d be lying quietly beneath the blanket, trying to convince myself that if anyone in a uniform factory was going to stay alive, it was tailors like my parents. I’d heard reports on the radio that the soldiers were finding themselves ill equipped for the Russians, and since winter was coming, they’d put more people to work sewing uniforms and fixing weapons and equipment. I held on to the belief that my parents were safe for as long as I could—it would be another eight months until I knew for sure they were not.

  When your grandfather wasn’t talking about Palestine, he was talking about the war. The rules were changing every day, he said—soldiers patrolling nearby villages in grimy work clothes, passing as farmers; military planes flying so low we’d hear their engines rumbling. And the day before, Isaac had been on watch when he found a teenage boy wandering the woods, claiming he was looking for blackberries, when anyone from the area knew they weren’t growing so late in the year. It was halfway through November—I’d been in the forest two months by then. Your grandfather felt it was time to move, to scout another location in the woods to set up camp, but first he wanted to plan one more mission, and he wanted me to come. With my light hair and green eyes I could easily pass as a gentile—and anyway, your grandfather said, who would expect a girl so young?

  I didn’t want to go. In those two months I’d found a routine that made me feel almost safe: cleaning barrels and collecting spent shells from the forest floor, going to target practice after helping the other girls clean up dinner, or working with Yussel in the infirmary, where he was always concocting a new treatment out of herbs and pig fat and other loot the fighters brought back. But the forest had become home to me, the brigade a kind of family, and—I know this will make you uncomfortable, so I’ll say it very quickly—in many ways your grandfather was beginning to feel more and more like an older brother than a boyfriend, even those nights together in the tent. I think that, at thirteen, I still needed to be taken care of, to have a hand guiding me through the forest, and if your grandfather felt I was ready for a mission, I believed him. So I sat and listened the following night as he and Isaac strung together the plan in the dugout beside the kitchen, where they always held their meetings.

  The train, your grandfather told me, would carry sixty-four soldiers and two cars’ worth of supplies. At nine fifteen the following night, it would stop in Haradziec, where I’d have already laid out explosives.

  It’s a stupid idea, Isaac said, crouching low in the dugout—I was the only one short enough to stand up straight under the ceiling of blankets. Maybe she’ll go unnoticed, he said, but she’ll slow us down.

  Secretly I agreed with Isaac, but your grandfather ignored him. He had a way of dismissing people without starting an argument simply by pretending he hadn’t heard them to begin with. It’s a trait I now can’t s
tand (sometimes I feel like he’s walking around the apartment wearing earplugs), but on that night I admired it, watching him roll out a map on the dirt floor, the yellow light of the lantern flickering across his face, which was getting thinner every day. It was an old map, one I remembered from school, from when my village was still part of Belarus. Right then I didn’t know what was what. I stared at the names of towns, trying to will them to memory as your grandfather dragged a finger along our route.

  We won’t have to worry about snakes in this weather, but watch for bears, he said, passing out pistols and bullets to Isaac and me.

  I’d never pointed a gun at anyone. I’d held plenty—in the armory workshop and at target practice. Back home my father had a rifle above the fireplace, but I’d never seen him load it. I touched the slide of this one now, feeling my way to the trigger.

  A pistol’s entirely different, Isaac said, and I sensed he was right: I’d been using shotguns during practice, but these would be easier to hide. You know how to push your weight against a shotgun, remember? he continued. With this, it’ll be twice as hard to have the same accuracy.

  I wrapped my hands around the grip. Even before Isaac could criticize me, I knew my stance was wrong. My shoulders were hunched, my arms stiff. I hated the way your grandfather looked at me then, as if he suddenly recognized every risk in bringing me and was embarrassed for thinking up the plan at all.

  But he just sat beside me and said, Push the magazine all the way up until you hear a click, then pull back the slide to chamber a round—that’s the only way to know it’s loaded for sure. You probably won’t need it anyway since you’ll be with us. And remember that if you do hear something, don’t shoot. It might just be an animal.

  I nodded. I knew the rules. They’d been hammered into me since my first day there, your grandfather reciting them around the campfire every night: Don’t get cocky with your weapon. Remember what happened to three of our fighters who were loud and overconfident on a raid and were gunned down from a window (their stupidity was already forest legend by the time I’d arrived). If you kill an animal, make sure the carcass doesn’t drip blood as you carry it back to camp. Don’t forget that many of the peasants in the surrounding villages are good people, suffering as well, some even risking their own safety to protect us. If you have to rob them, take only what you absolutely need. These rules were important to your grandfather. To Isaac and some of the others, not so much, though they always did what he said.

  I didn’t know if Isaac had always been gruff or if the war had made him that way. I knew he’d seen things I hadn’t, that when he’d heard soldiers coming into his village, he’d been quick to scramble behind a barn and from there had submerged himself in a pond to hide, and that when he crawled out hours later, he found himself completely alone. It was like Isaac was running on adrenaline to stay alive, whereas with your grandfather it was something different. Even that night in the dugout, I knew he was considering morals only partly out of decency—in his heart of hearts he saw himself as a boy with a legacy. A boy who, after the war was over, would be written about in textbooks, talked about in reverent tones: Leon Moscowitz, whose rebel army not only changed the course of the war but did so ethically.

  I had never met a person so aware of his own voice, carefully stringing together sentences with the hope they would be quoted later, even as he told me to cup my hands as he passed out explosives. First a grenade, then six long sticks of dynamite.

  This part’s easy, your grandfather said. Lay the sticks flat on the tracks.

  And then what? I said.

  For God’s sake, Isaac said.

  Just before the train comes, your grandfather said calmly, hold the spoon of the grenade down with your thumb. Then twist off the pin with your other hand, and the moment you throw it, start sprinting toward the woods.

  This is ridiculous, Isaac said. She’ll get us killed. Why not stay back in the armory?

  Your grandfather stood up, as if secretly grateful Isaac was running his mouth so he had a reason to lecture. Just this week a statement went out all over the country, he said, offering farmers two sacks of grain for every one of us killed. Do you think anyone else is wasting their time with these concerns, pondering the differences between kids and teenagers, boys and girls? His eyes flicked around the dugout as though his audience was much bigger than Isaac and me.

  Then he turned to me. If anyone stops you, he said, you have to remember, even if you’re terrified, to keep the Yiddish out of your accent. Okay?

  Okay, I said.

  You could be a Dina, he said then, looking at me.

  Or maybe Henia, Isaac said. Henia from the North, visiting her family?

  He handed me a stack of clothes, all from a previous raid. Folded on top was a knit brown hat, which I slipped over my head. Your grandfather pushed it back, scrutinized my face, and said, There. Already she looks like a different girl.

  Yeah? I said, fingering the hat. What about Sonya? Sonya Gorski, I said, sounding it out, almost beginning to enjoy our game. It was like the dress-up I used to play back home, my best friend, Blanka, and me playing around in my parents’ tailor shop, darting between the tall spools of fabric and draping the scraps around each other, pretending we were classy society ladies, dressing for the opera where our handsome, imaginary boyfriends would be waiting outside on the marble steps in suits.

  —

  The following day I got ready for Haradziec. A gray wool dress and coat, leather boots, and thick brown stockings. The boots were too large but everything else fit so snugly it was as if I’d picked out the clothes myself. In my pocketbook were my pistol and a case of bullets. I clutched it under an arm as I followed your grandfather and Isaac down the dark path. These woods I knew—it was where we foraged for shells and mushrooms. We were quiet walking through, your grandfather brushing the ground with a stick to cover every footprint. Then Isaac called out to me, If the police stop you while you’re casing the station—

  I’m Henia Sawicki. Staying with my grandparents nearby.

  And if they ask what you’re doing on the tracks?

  Looking for my ring. It slipped off somewhere.

  These lies, I knew, were the easy part. But really, the entire plan was simple. We’d walk along the edge of the forest—far enough in the woods to go unnoticed, close enough to glimpse the villages through the trees. In Haradziec, I’d slip out and cross the tracks, set the explosives down, run back into the forest. Your grandfather had made it sound so effortless in the dugout, but here I worried about keeping it straight in my mind. If one wary soldier saw through my lie, that was it—I’d be shot, your grandfather and Isaac probably next, or maybe tortured until they led the soldiers to the brigade. So I was trying to remember the plan—Henia, the ring, the grandmother—while clonking along in my too-big boots, and that was when I tripped on a rock and fell to the ground, twisting my ankle so hard I couldn’t stand up. There I was, splayed in the dirt with my ankle throbbing, and even before your grandfather helped me to my feet, Isaac was already moaning about how he knew something like this would happen.

  Twenty minutes out, he said, and your grandfather snapped, Tell me, Isaac, one of us couldn’t have fallen?

  Before your grandfather could hoist himself back onto his soapbox, I started hobbling along the route, and all they could do was follow.

  Don’t be stupid, Isaac called.

  He’s right, your grandfather said, catching up with me.

  I was suddenly so angry—with your grandfather for always acting like he knew what was best, with Isaac for being so hard on me, with myself for botching the attack. For the first time since the sewers, I felt utterly hopeless and alone. I had no idea what to do, or who to ask what to do, because—and this was the first time it really became clear to me—I had no one left. The only people I had in the world were these two boys I barely knew at all, who looked so unbelievably confused right then, walking in their oversized coats, Isaac breathless and jittery, your gra
ndfather’s cap falling over his eyes. Up ahead, through a gap in the trees, I saw brown fields, the jagged steeple of a church. I kept limping down the path, and when a village came into view, I slipped out of the forest. We were still two hours from Haradziec. My ankle was swelling, my clothes covered in dirt. I pushed through town, not even sure what I was looking for. The streets were empty and so eerily quiet it was as if something terrible had happened the second before we’d arrived.

  Your grandfather and Isaac hurried behind me, whispering to get back in the forest. But I kept on, and that was when I realized this was the town I’d crawled into from the sewers. Huddled along the road were the same houses, the same barns and mill and school, only now the buildings were deserted and destroyed: broken windows, piles of bricks, rats darting up stairways leading nowhere. The war, it seemed, had finally arrived here. A few cottages were still smoldering. A man, hard-faced and dirty, dragged a skinny horse past without even looking up. This time, I knew, I was no more shit-stained than anybody else.

  Along the strip of shops was a bakery. The door was open, and when I walked inside, I saw the glass cases were smashed, the shelves bare, only half the tables standing. But as I kept on, through the kitchen and up the stairs, I saw shadows flash beneath a door. I pulled out my gun, pushed the door open with my shoulder, and strolled inside.

  The room was small enough to take in all at once: just two wooden chairs facing the fireplace with a bed and dresser in the corner, a stove, sink, and table against the wall. A mother washed dishes. She had a cinched little mouth like a balloon knot and dark hair twisted tight at her neck. A boy, eight or nine, bent over homework at the wooden table. The mother glanced at me and at my gun, and put down the pot she was drying. The boy stared. My hands wobbled as I aimed at them.

  I need something to wrap up my ankle, I told the mother. It was the first time I’d spoken, and my words sounded loose and heavy in the silent room. And boots and a coat and your warmest hat and scarf. And gloves, I added greedily as she sifted through drawers.