The Forest of Vanishing Stars(12)

After checking the child’s pulse once more, this time just under the hollow of her neck, Yona stood again and made her way back outside. She started a fire as she always did, with one of the Russian magnesium sticks she treasured, then she stripped some more bark from the willow, dipped her pot in the stream, and set to work boiling water for willow tea. The smoke from the fire might attract people, signaling Yona’s location, but it was a chance she had to take. Besides, if there were people in the forest, they might be the girl’s people.

Then again, what if the girl had been running from someone? The thought made Yona’s breath catch in her throat. The girl’s clothes were shredded, her body bruised and scraped, her little frame nearly emaciated. What if it hadn’t been the forest that had hurt her? What if the forest was protecting her from the demons on the outside that Jerusza had always warned Yona about, the ones Yona wasn’t sure whether to believe in?

As soon as the water boiled, Yona hastily poured it into a cup, added the willow bark, and extinguished the flames. Maybe no one had seen them at all. She rushed back into the hollow tree and knelt beside the girl again, but now all her senses were on high alert. She believed in her ability to protect herself—after all, so much of her childhood had centered around learning the art of fatal self-defense—but she had never thought much about protecting someone else, not even when Jerusza was near death’s door, for even then, Yona had believed in the old woman’s protective magic.

“Wake up,” she murmured, touching the girl’s cheek, which felt a little cooler, a sign that the bark across the girl’s forehead was working to fight the fever. “Please, sweet child, wake up.”

And then, as if God had been listening, the little girl did just that, her eyelashes fluttering, her eyes opening—they were deep, the color of a bear cub’s fur—and her mouth forming a tiny O of surprise as she registered the presence of a stranger looming over her. The girl sat upright and screamed, but the sound was barely audible and the effort of that alone seemed to exhaust her.

Yona put a gentle hand on her arm. “You are safe here,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

But the girl just stared at her in confusion, and Yona realized she hadn’t understood. She had spoken in Belorussian, because she knew many of the people in the towns that ringed the forest used the language, but perhaps the girl was Polish. She tried again in that language, but she was greeted by the same blank, frightened look. She tried German, then Russian, but still nothing.

Finally, the girl spoke. “Ver bisti? Vu zenen maane eltern.”

Surprised, Yona replied in Yiddish. “I am a friend. And I don’t know where your parents are, but I promise, I will do all I can to find them. In the meantime, I will keep you safe.”

The girl’s mouth fell open. “You are Jewish, too?”

Yona hesitated, Jerusza’s confused words from the summer before still fresh in her mind. You are what you were born to be. But what was that? Jerusza had steeped her in Jewish tradition, had made sure she knew Jewish law inside and out, had read to her from the Torah even before Yona could read herself. Yona believed in God and saw him everywhere, and she believed the teachings of Jewish scholars and sages, but that wasn’t enough, particularly for someone who had never set foot within a synagogue, though Jerusza insisted that God could be worshipped anywhere. “I don’t know,” she concluded helplessly.

“But… you speak the language of the Jews.”

“I speak many languages.”

The girl looked confused. “Your—your eyes are funny. They’re different colors.”

Yona blinked a few times. “Yes, I suppose they are.” No one aside from Jerusza had gotten close enough to her to notice them, not even the boy she’d met in the woods years before. It felt strange to be face-to-face with another person, and Yona felt suddenly self-conscious, though the girl was just a child. “My name is Yona,” she said after a pause. “What is yours?”

The girl hesitated, searching Yona’s eyes. “Chana,” she said at last.

“Well, Chana, I have made you some willow tea. If you drink it, it will make you feel better.”

Chana regarded the cup in Yona’s hands but didn’t reach for it. “It will not hurt me?”

“I give you my word.” Yona held out the cup, and after another second’s hesitation, the girl took it and sniffed it uncertainly. “It will bring your fever down, and it will help with the pain,” Yona added.

The girl took a small, hesitant sip, wrinkling her nose a bit, but then she drank again. “How do you know I am in pain?”

“You fell.” Yona tapped the center of her own forehead. “You hit your head, just here. Can you feel the bump? And you have many cuts and bruises.” She hesitated, watching the girl as she drank again. “What happened to you, Chana? What were you running from?”

The girl’s face changed then, her eyes filling with tears. “I was running from the… the people who want to kill us.”

“But who would want to kill you?”

The girl looked over Yona’s shoulder, searching the woods for an invisible hunter. When her eyes returned to Yona’s face, the sadness in them nearly knocked Yona over. “The Germans,” she said. “The Germans who came to Volozhin.”

Yona didn’t understand. For all she knew about the forest, she knew nearly nothing about the way mankind worked. Still, she knew enough to realize that if there were people out there trying to kill an innocent child, something had gone very wrong in the world. “Why?” she asked finally. “Why would anyone be trying to kill you, Chana?”