The Forest of Vanishing Stars(10)

“What did I do? I saved you, child.” Sweat was beading on Jerusza’s forehead now, and her breathing was becoming more labored, a series of staccato swallows and hisses. “Your parents were bad people, you see.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“The way I know everything.” Jerusza’s words bit like a whip. “The forest told me. The forest, and the sky.”

“But—”

“Their names were Siegfried and Alwine Jüttner,” Jerusza continued, rolling right over Yona’s grief-stricken protest. “They lived in an apartment at Behaimstrasse 72 in Berlin.”

The apartment with the wooden bed and the warm blankets that haunted her dreams. Yona swallowed hard a few times, a thousand questions bubbling within her. The one that forced itself to the surface, though, was, “Am I meant to go back to them now? Is that why you’re telling me this?”

“No!” The old woman’s eyes flashed, and she sat up. Her torso wobbled unsteadily, like a blade of wheat in the wind, and Yona resisted the urge to reach out and steady her. She didn’t deserve that. “No!” Jerusza repeated, her voice so loud and sharp that Yona could hear a startled congress of crows lifting off outside, squawking in outrage. “You must not.”

“Then why tell me at all? And why now?”

“Because it is…” Jerusza trailed off, her words dissolving into a wet cough that wracked her body. “… knowledge that may spare your life—or another’s—someday.”

“What do you mean?” Yona leaned forward.

“We are all interconnected, Yona. You know that by now. Once fates intertwine, they are forever linked. Lives are circles spinning across the world, and when they’re meant to intersect again, they do. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

“Are you saying I will see my parents again?”

Jerusza looked away. “The universe delivers opportunities for life and death all the time. I am giving you now a chance for life, just as I did when I took you.”

“I—I don’t understand.” Yona could feel desperation closing her throat. She wanted to shake the old woman, who, even on her deathbed, was talking in smug, impenetrable riddles. “A chance for life? What are you saying, Jerusza?”

“You will know.” Jerusza drew another difficult breath, then sighed and sank back into her reeds. “You will live until the first new moon of your one hundredth year, Yona, if you do not forget the things I have taught you. You will know.”

Yona sat back and stared at her. The old woman’s prediction—so certain, so sure—would have sounded outlandish if Yona didn’t know that Jerusza’s talent was infallible. The earth spoke to Jerusza in a way that Yona had never understood, but it never lied, and neither did Jerusza. That was why Yona knew she had to ask the question that had been burning within her for years.

“Do you love me, Jerusza?” she asked in a small voice, ashamed that it mattered so much. “Please, I must know.”

Jerusza stared at her, and her expression was not one of tenderness or even regret. It was of disgust, revulsion. “Love is a wasted emotion,” she said at last, her voice fading. “It makes you weak. Have I taught you nothing? Love is for fools.”

Yona looked away before Jerusza could read the pain in her eyes. “But what if the parents you took me from loved me?”

“And so what if they did?” Jerusza’s voice had waned to a whisper. “Would you have traded the life you’ve had with me for one with evil parents, just because it came with love?”

“I don’t know,” Yona said. “You never gave me the chance to choose.” At that moment, Jerusza closed her eyes and breathed her last, and a single tear rolled down Yona’s cheek for all that was lost and could never be found.



* * *



Yona was reeling from the revelation of her origin, but still, she dutifully did the things Jerusza had asked her to do, the rituals the old woman had taught her, a combination of Jewish tradition and Slavic witchcraft as mysterious as Jerusza herself. “Baruch Atah Ahdonai, Ehlohaynu, Mehlekh Haolam, Dayan HaEhmet,” she murmured over the body of the woman who had raised her, a woman she had never really known at all. Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the universe, judge of truth. She lit candles made from beeswax and nettle and placed them above Jerusza’s head. She recited the Twenty-third Psalm and then sat beside Jerusza, the only mother she’d ever known, for a day and a night.

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.