The Forest of Vanishing Stars(17)

But it was too late for this family, who would sleep forever, becoming one with the unforgiving earth.





CHAPTER SIX




For the next month, as the summer sun ripened the forest, Yona lived in darkness, her dreams haunted by the image of Chana’s still face in the field, the tinny smell of blood. She thought about the boy she’d once met, and his long-ago warnings of book burnings in Berlin. She thought of the terrible things Isaac had told her about the ghetto in Volozhin. She spoke to Jerusza in the stillness and sometimes heard an answer in the wind. And she gazed at her own face in the small rivers that ran through the forest and wondered about the parents she’d been taken from so long ago. Would she ever see them again? It seemed impossible, for they were miles away, in a country trying to take over the continent. But on her deathbed, Jerusza had whispered, “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.” Yona had played the words through her mind a million times, wondering if they meant her orbit would once again cross with theirs. She longed for it, though she knew nothing about them, nothing about the people they were. Still, they were her family, a place to belong.

As she moved from hollowed tree to hollowed tree, finding a different place to sleep each night, she could hear the buzz of aircraft overhead sometimes, and the movement of men through the trees in the distance. Germans ventured into the forest’s edges on occasion, searching for Jews, but so far, the heart of the forest had remained safe. But would the Germans invade with their army at some point? Would they mow the trees down, take away the only shelter she had ever known? It sounded crazy, but so, too, did the systematic murder of innocent people Isaac had told her about. Perhaps the whole world had gone mad.

She had walked many kilometers in order to put as much distance as she could between herself and the way she had failed Chana’s family, and by July, she was in the southern part of the forest. One cloudy morning, she had just begun to move again for the day when she spotted a man up ahead, standing by a stream, his back to her. Quickly, she ducked behind a tree and held herself motionless, watching him.

His clothes were threadbare, a stained and torn shirt stretched over his broad back and rolled at the sleeves, his pants pushed up to his calves. He was older than Yona, she thought, but not by much. His hair was the color of river silt, and it glimmered in the sifted sunlight filtering through the trees.

He was standing completely still as he stared at the water, and Yona held her breath, studying him. He looked strong, but his waist was too narrow for his body, someone who was accustomed to plentiful food but had recently learned to live without, she guessed. But what was he doing? Studying his own reflection in the placid stream?

Her question was answered a second later when, with a grunt, he dove headfirst into the water, splashed around for a second, and then groaned. “It got away!” he called out in Yiddish, shaking the droplets from his hair as he climbed out of the water. Yona shrank farther into the trees, motionless. Judging from his language, he was Jewish, too, like Chana’s family.

“I told you,” came another masculine voice, this one farther away. Yona held her breath. There were two of them? “You can’t catch a fish with your bare hands.”

There was the sound of footsteps breaking branches, and then the second man emerged in the clearing, across the stream from the first. He looked younger, slimmer, the lines of his face more sharply drawn, his hair as black as Yona’s.

“I suppose you have a better idea?” asked the first man, again staring at the water.

“Berries?” the other man asked with a shrug. “Mushrooms?”

“We can’t feed everyone berries for the rest of their lives, and you and I can’t tell the poisonous mushrooms from the harmless ones,” the first man said. “Give me a minute, Leib. I’ll catch us something.”

“Sure, or you’ll make such a racket that you’ll attract every disgruntled Soviet partisan in the forest.”

“There’s nobody out here,” the first man grumbled. But Yona could hear the smile in his voice.

The one called Leib stood and watched, an eyebrow cocked, as the broader-shouldered man went still and silent once more. Again he pounced on something in the water, and just like the last time, he came up empty-handed, muttering to himself.

“We need a better solution, Aleksander,” Leib said, and this time, the teasing tone was gone. “They’re starving.”

As the one called Aleksander stepped once more from the shallow stream, shaking the water off, Yona could see, even from a distance, that his expression had sobered. She didn’t believe the smile he forced as he turned back to Leib. “I’ll take care of it, Leib. All will be well.”

Yona watched in silence as Leib walked away, shoulders slumped. As she turned her gaze back to Aleksander, she was surprised to hear him begin to pray softly, asking first if God was there and then telling the sky that he would give anything for a little luck, a little food. “They’re counting on me,” he concluded, his voice mournful as he looked to the water once more.

Yona wanted nothing more in that moment than to step from the trees and be the answer to his prayer, the proof that after whatever terrible things he had endured to bring him here, there was a God after all. But who was she to think she could save anyone from the darkness? She had failed with Chana’s family. She’d likely been wrong to try to help them in the first place; hadn’t Jerusza always taught her that she was better off alone? Then again, how could she ignore the pull of her heart, the part of her that couldn’t turn away from a person in need? What if Jerusza’s path hadn’t been the right one? Who was the old woman to still be pulling the strings of Yona’s life?