* * *
The convent is a winding maze of corridors that Zosia does not yet understand, so she follows the other girls, shivery in their thin starched dresses, as they shuttle from class to chore to chapel. They slow their steps only as they pass by the woodstoves, where they huddle briefly to warm themselves before rushing on. In the children’s quarters, there are just two stoves, one in the community room and one in the corridor outside their bedchamber.
Ula and Adela act bossy, as if they are the nuns and the other girls are their wards. A pale, reedy girl, Kasia—the same girl who said “hallo” to Zosia her first day and, really, the only one who talks to Zosia—complains. “Why do I have to wash again, just because Ula says so? My hands are clean.” Zosia doesn’t dare say anything. She’s noticed Ula staring at her hair and Adela crinkling her nose and fixing her eyes on Zosia’s worn-out shoes.
She tails the group as they move through the corridors, past the paintings of sad-faced saints. She peers into different rooms along the way.
In the afternoon of her fifth day in the convent, the sight of a small violin stops Zosia in her tracks. She stands, solitary, before an open doorway, breathless.
The violin, amber, with thin black streaks along its belly, rests on a desk in a classroom strewn with other instruments: an accordion, two guitars, assorted drums and triangles. Everything looks dusty and unused. Did they once hold music lessons here? Do they still?
From the threshold, Zosia stares at the violin in wonder. Her grandfather’s workshop was full of these—honey timbred and smelling of spruce and resin and glue and varnish—and there was the one with the star that her father played, head cocked and arm flying in the evening, whose strings he let her press as he moved the long bow up and down.
A few beats, and Zosia tears herself away to rejoin the others. But she memorizes her way back, and over the course of several days she inches her way through the doorway and into the room until, finally, she stands before the violin, her fingers aching to touch the taut strings and the smooth curve of its scroll. Kasia—two years a ward, orphaned, and then separated from her only sister—follows Zosia and asks her why she wants to keep visiting the violin. Zosia only shrugs. Whether she remembers or just imagines it, the violin conjures her mother holding her high in the air, dancing round and round to Gypsy rhythms, quick and exciting.
The next day during yard time, a nun called Sister Nadzieja asks Zosia to follow her inside to the classroom. Zosia fears she is in trouble, but Sister Nadzieja smiles kindly. Except for the violin, all of the instruments have been put away, and the violin looks clean, even shiny.
“I passed by here yesterday as you were admiring the violin. Would you like to try and play it?”
A bow now rests beside the violin, and Zosia sees that both are sized for a child. By way of demonstration, Sister Nadzieja lifts the violin to her chin and with a scrunched arm moves the bow steadily across the strings. The sound is round and smooth and loud. Zosia takes a step back, scared.
“When you play, the way you stand is very important. Also the way you hold the bow.” Sister Nadzieja’s words rise up as if from an underground cavern, deep and comforting, and her eyes remind Zosia of the chestnuts she and her mother found, fallen from a tree in the pasture.
Sister Nadzieja kneels down and arranges Zosia’s feet to be at shoulder’s width beneath her. She shapes her hand around the bow, her littlest finger curled up upon the screw, her first finger upon the pad. She positions the violin, tilted to the side beneath Zosia’s turned elbow, and places the rest under Zosia’s chin. Finally, holding Zosia’s hand, she guides the bow up and down along the D string.
With Nadzieja’s steady hand upon hers, the sound reverberating close to Zosia’s ear is crisp and strong. Zosia freezes midstroke, terrified of what she might be giving away. Such sound as this, rich and whole, might be for others to make, but not for her. Tears stream down her cheeks.
“That was a wonderful first try!”
Zosia had been too small to hold her father’s violin by herself, though she’d often imagined it. How she longs to run the bow across the strings again and hear its reverberating note.
“Now, once more,” Sister Nadzieja urges.
In Zosia’s thin arms even the little violin sags; the bow founders in her hand, and the sound becomes airy and uncertain. But Nadzieja stands by, supporting her arms, encouraging her to keep at it. Sister Nadzieja is a friend of Sister Alicja’s and she doesn’t seem to think there’s danger in the sound. And what it gives Zosia—standing with planted feet, the sense that her trapped-in feelings count enough to resonate beyond—is more than she has had here. Her strokes grow longer and more even.
* * *
Zosia returns to the classroom whenever she can: before breakfast and after chores. She practices everything Sister Nadzieja teaches her. Scales and arpeggios. Simple songs. Pressing her cheek, deep angled, to the violin, she plays what she hears in her head. Sister Nadzieja praises her playing and Zosia flushes with pleasure as she continues on, reaching for the sounds she remembers floating from the parlor of her Gracja home.
In time, Zosia’s notes, rounded, long, and melodious or plucked, short, and halting, come to feel safe, safer even than silence. They accumulate and order themselves in Zosia’s head, as monologues, as dialogues. As arguments. As pleas. As the simplest of prayers: for her mother to appear, to take her back.
Chapter 25
When she is on the move through the woods, Róża trains her eyes on the rippled patterns that wind gusts carve into fallen snow and on the prisms of colored light that dapple the white forest floor. She propels herself forward, rubbing her thumb against the smooth wooden handle of her trowel—the single most important tool she has, the thing keeping her alive—as she digs out shelter, digs out roots. When she makes a fire, she sees flickers of indigo, rare amid the yellow-orange flames. But when she closes her eyes, Róża sees only darkness.
She sets animal traps the way Henryk told her, yet each time she checks them, weak but hopeful, they gape empty. Misery overtakes her, as she is a failure at hunting, and she knows that what vegetation lurks under snow here is not enough to subsist on. She shivers constantly. It’s safer, and better for foraging, to move camps, but maintaining a fire conserves matches—and she has just twenty-two left. If she dies here, from hunger or cold, she will leave Shira utterly alone.
In a dugout framed by thin crossing boughs, Róża loses track of time and place. She has no sense of whether she’s slept, how long it’s been since she’s last eaten. She no longer knows how many sunsets have passed, how many knots to tie on her string.
Delirium delivers a dust storm, sand whipping at her skin, stripping the flesh from her bones. Burial by a cacophony of sound—the pounding of drums, the whirling strum of guitars, the wail of bagpipes—too loud to bear. She pounds her head against the dirt floor, hoping to make it stop.
She closes her eyes to dream-images of Shira—curled up and listening to lullabies, one hand holding her tiny imaginary bird, the other her blanket—and her dreams conjure the stitches she hid amid the blanket’s piping. Róża cannot dream of Shira without her blanket, and the dreams turn into nightmares as the sewn letters—proof of her daughter’s Jewishness, her name—transmute into thick vines that squeeze and strangle her child. How could I have been so foolish?
Róża wakes, clammy. She curls tight in her burrow, in disbelief that she is here alone, living like an animal, and that her family members, all of them, are gone from her. She cannot manage to get warm again; not now, after the sweats. The ground feels like a sheet of ice beneath her. The air is damp, and her skin could itch her into madness. If she had current news, maybe she’d learn that this horror was ending and she could get on her way, get back to Shira. But alone in the woods, she cannot know what is happening in the war.
Hastily, Róża stands up, the blustery air whipping at her scalp and hair. She chose to rest here when it was still dark, but now she sees it is an
area of forest with swaths of silver birch trees, narrow and exposed. She should move deeper in, to the thick cover of oaks and pines, but she is dizzy from hunger.
Faintness drives the urge to lie down again, to sleep—but no. She’ll die if she doesn’t find more food to eat.
Not far in the distance, a yellow pin of light. There may be a farmhouse she can raid. She may find barley, potatoes, or, if she dares to imagine, turnips.
She drags herself out at dusk, her body drawn into a comma against the wind, weaving through mist-shrouded trees toward the woods’ edge. Her thoughts jump about, disjointed. She wonders if Krystyna and Henryk fought once she was gone. She remembers one of her worst fights with Natan. She’d overheard him disparage her father while talking to a musician friend, referring to him as a “mechanic” rather than a craftsman of instruments—including the very one that Natan played. Natan could be haughty, disdainful of both her parents at times, yet they were always there, supporting him, doting on Shira, and allowing them time for their music. Her parents didn’t have prestigious jobs like his pharmacist parents, but Róża valued the way they took part in her family’s life. When she confronted Natan—perhaps he looked down on her too—he denied it, he became furious, and she became furious back. Even now she grows heated thinking about it. Whereas her agony over losing him has at times halted her in her tracks, the revival of this singular anger propels her forward, allows her to tromp past her hunger and fatigue and desperation.
She moves quickly now along a footpath, the lantern light growing brighter, until the sound of footsteps halts her. She squats low behind a large rock. A figure approaches. She can’t make out features, just a fur hat and long coat.
Perhaps she is delirious again, because Róża imagines that the figure could be Henryk. Or else a suspicious neighbor—Borys, back from dragging Piotr to the village center after all this time, turning him in! As the man gets closer, Róża’s breath grows jagged and uneven. The muscles in her face clench tight; her bowels roil. She is certain he’ll spot her prints and come after her, but he passes her by. A young farmer she’s never seen before. She hurtles back toward the center of the woods, forgetting her mission for food.
As she retreats, Róża chides herself: She must be strong; she can’t allow herself to be defeated by her fears or her punishing imagination. She leans against a sheltering tree, forcing herself to breathe in the vanilla scent of its bark—its beauty—as methodically she sharpens her trowel blade on a rock and prepares to head deeper into the woods. She must stay alive for Shira, so that she can reclaim her as she promised she would, hold her close once again. With gathered resolve, she digs around several tree trunks and finds mushrooms enough to boil into a soup.
* * *
A week later, Róża spots two women huddled where she planned to dig roots. As she takes a step back, her foot lands on a branch, causing a loud crack. The women turn and stare. Róża begins to run.
“Wait! Please.”
Hearing Yiddish, Róża stops.
As the women approach, Róża’s heart pounds in her chest. She reaches into her pocket and clutches the sharpest object she has: root clippers. But soon she sees that their expressions mirror hers; they are filled with terror and exhaustion and desperate hope.
They look related—sisters, Róża thinks—with dark hair and dark eyes, though one’s face is soft, with rounded cheeks and wide eyes, and the other is sharper, more severe.
“We saw you foraging here yesterday,” the softer-faced one says.
Róża doesn’t answer. Her hand is still clenched around the clippers.
“You’re alone?” This same one reaches into her coat pocket and presents an offering: a handful of just-dug roots. “Here.”
“Miri!” the sharper one chides.
Róża stuffs the roots into her mouth and swallows, to stay alive even if the other will now want to kill her.
But they aren’t going to kill her. They are in hiding, like her. Sisters, as Róża thought, from Warsaw before the war. The woman who gave Róża the roots—Miri—sees Róża’s worn-out boots and pulls out strips of a torn work shirt for wrapping her cold feet. And even more miraculous, she shows Róża a ripped fragment of a newspaper conveying hope: news of the Red Army’s advance in the siege of Leningrad. How much time since the paper’s printing, she doesn’t know.
Róża cannot contain her relief at being with other human beings. Women. Jews. She grills them for more recent war news. They don’t have any, but the sharper sister, Chana, declares her intention to join the resistance and fight, first chance she gets.
“I’m going to make them pay for what they did to our parents, our little brother—” She bats at her red-rimmed eyes.
Miri, looking disturbed, takes Chana’s hand.
“At least we can thank God that you and I are together.”
“I’m sorry, I cannot thank a nonexistent being.” Chana is defiant as she motions at Róża. “Maybe she has weapons?”
“Chana!”
Róża looks from one to the other. She used to be so engaged with the religious, the political. Now she hopes only to make it to Celestyn by war’s end, to get Shira.
When Miri suggests that perhaps they would do better to join a family camp, such as the large extended group they met hiding farther west, Chana snorts.
“Have you forgotten, Miri? Our family is dead—our brother. Our mother.”
All three go silent.
Róża doesn’t talk of Shira, and it is a relief. There are the dreaming hours ahead to be haunted by her loss; to see Shira’s pleading eyes, her hands outstretched.
They steer the conversation to other topics while they gather kindling. To Róża’s relief, the sisters have steel and flint and a magnifying glass for starting fires—she needn’t expend matches, at least for now. Miri tells Róża how she assisted with her father’s soap-making business and how Chana, with ambitions to attend university, took part in protests against the ghetto benches segregating Jews from other students. This, before their father’s business was shuttered and the university was closed. Before the real ghettos were formed.
Róża finds herself less weary, even a bit energized, in the sisters’ company. She wants to remain with them, yet she hesitates to share a camp. But Chana tells of the corpse they came upon last week, a man with a belt noosed around his neck, pants still down from a soldier’s “Jew test.” Róża is shaken to think how, without a scout and in her fog of hunger, she has been unaware of others—not just Jews but Germans—in the woods. How she’s been luckier than she knew.
“Might I camp with you?” Róża asks.
“Oh yes, Róża; why don’t you choose your spot first?” Miri offers.
Chana makes a dramatic sweep with her arm. “Yes, wherever you’d like.”
The three begin to laugh and cannot stop. Repeated arm sweeps set them off, again and again. Róża reaches a hand to touch her upturned lips, her creased eyes. She’d forgotten laughter.
* * *
Róża sleeps soundly for the first time since fleeing to the woods alone. She wakes feeling buoyed by the sisters’ company, Miri’s especially; still, she doesn’t know whether she can stay with them. Róża’s imperative is to head south toward Celestyn and wait by the border’s edge until it is safe to leave the woods and claim Shira. She pulls out Natan’s old compass. Seeing her, Miri looks up at the orientation of the sun.
“I need to head south,” Róża says in a low voice. She walks in place as if to make headway even now. Ice in thin patches crackles, and frosted branches snap beneath her feet. Miri does not ask her why and Róża is all the more grateful to her.
“Didn’t Jerzy, from the large encampment, tell us that there was a Jewish partisan group south of here?” Chana asks.
Miri looks worried. “Possibly.”
“Well, we can head in that direction. There’s no leaving the forest, anyway, until we can get news.”
* * *
They begin the trudge s
outhward, but Chana refuses to move camps when the temperatures are frigid. “It makes no sense, Róża! We can’t make headway in this wind, and we can’t keep digging out the frozen earth. Let’s stay here at least until the weather grows a bit milder.”
Róża concedes, but the weather does not grow milder. The winter is brutal and unending. Wood for the meager fire becomes more crucial than food.
Róża’s night terrors return more vividly than ever, with images of choking threads, shattered flowerpots, yellowing matchstick bones arranged into wings. Miri reaches for Róża and rubs her back. Chana sets water to boil, throws in some scavenged roots to make a tea. Róża’s story spills out between sobs—how Shira is in the convent orphanage for safekeeping; how Róża is desperate to get near there, ready to claim her at war’s end. How everyone else is lost: Her mother and father. Natan.
Róża thinks back to the earliest days, pregnant with Shira, when she composed a lullaby for (her) cello and (Natan’s) violin.
“Since when do you compose in six-eight time?” Natan asked, looking over the music.
“When it fits the occasion.”
“Six-eight is for berceuse.”
“Yes, Natan, I know.”
“For lulla—” And that’s when he’d rushed to take her up in his arms, hardly able to kiss her for laughing with delight. It was he who suggested the name Shira, derived from the Hebrew, meaning song.
Róża peers out at the ice-encased trees and shivers.
At dusk, while foraging for kindling and any possible edibles—nuts, stalks, the inner bark of pines—Róża and Miri find three pairs of horn-rimmed glasses, one sized for a small child, mangled in a heap. Róża can’t manage to get warm after that, despite the fire they build. Late that night, Chana thrusts a tiny graying capsule into Róża’s hand. Cyanide.
The Yellow Bird Sings Page 9
