The Forest of Vanishing Stars(21)

“What are you doing?” Aleksander asked after a moment. “Can I help?”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked. She felt strange, shaky. “See if you can find some birch bark. I’m making you a large basket to bring your fish back to your people.”

He watched her as she began to weave together the most pliable twigs she could find, her fingers moving rapidly, expertly, for she’d done this a hundred times before. “Surely we won’t need a basket that large.”

“Are you certain?” She nodded toward the gill net. “Look.”

Aleksander turned to look at the stream, and when his eyes met Yona’s again, they were wide with surprise.

“There are already dozens of fish there.”

“Yes.” Yona allowed herself a small smile.

“But… with something so simple, I’ll be able to feed everyone, all the time.”

“Until the winter comes.”

As the smile faded from Aleksander’s eyes, Yona regretted the words. She should have let him revel in the realization that he could provide for his people after all. “It’s all right,” she said gently after a moment. “There are ways. I will teach you about foraging. About preserving your fish and meat. You can’t stay in one place too long, either.”

She could see the lump in his neck bob as he watched her. She had been weaving as they spoke, her fingers moving deftly around the sticks, fastening them together. As he handed her a long twig in silence and she wove it through the thatches, making a conic basket that would serve him well, she could see him searching for words. “Why are you helping me?” he asked as she handed the basket over. When she didn’t answer, he added, “You’re Jewish, too, aren’t you?”

It was the same thing Chana and her parents had asked, a question Yona feared she would never know the answer to. “Does it matter?”

“It is usually something people want to know.”

Yona thought about this. “But maybe it shouldn’t be. Perhaps they need only know whether you are kind, decent, capable, well-intentioned. It is within your own heart that you find God. And we all walk our own path toward him. Don’t we?”

He didn’t say anything, and in the silence, she could feel her cheeks warming. It had been a silly thought, one that showed no understanding of society or the way it worked. Surely he was thinking that she sounded like a childish fool.

But when he spoke, there was only quiet admiration in his tone. “Yona, the world you describe would be a paradise.”

“But it is not reality.”

He shook his head, but again he didn’t speak right away. Yona liked the silence, the easy feeling of space existing without words, and she appreciated him for not having to fill the void. “My parents died years ago. I am one of six brothers,” he said at last, his voice so low it was barely audible. “All dead now, except me. All of us fought in the army. Three of us returned alive. After the German invasion last year, they came for the Jews in my town, forced us into the ghetto. In November, there was word that something was coming, a mass execution. I tried to talk others into leaving with me, but only a handful came. My brothers didn’t believe me and so they stayed. We could hear the gunshots from where we hid in the woods. We were out there for days before venturing back; we lost one old woman to the cold, or perhaps to heartbreak, I don’t know. We had to return, though, because we didn’t know how to survive. When we left again a few weeks ago, because we’d heard rumors the ghetto was going to be relocated, perhaps even liquidated, I promised those who followed me that I would protect them. And maybe with your help, Yona, I can, at the least, make sure that they’re fed. But how can I—how can anyone—protect them from a world that hates them because of what’s in their blood, because of what’s in their hearts?”

Yona was startled to feel tears stinging her eyes. “I—I don’t understand how people could feel that way.”

His smile was gentle, bitter, and sad, all at the same time. “Money. Belongings. Taking from one group to pad the pockets of another.”

“But the hatred…”

“Is how they sleep at night, I suppose. If they convince themselves that we are not even worthy of the air we breathe, then it’s easier to get rid of us, isn’t it?”

The silence rolled back in, and this time it was both comfortable and full of words they didn’t need to speak aloud. When Yona looked up, Aleksander met her gaze and held it for a long time. She didn’t look away until they both heard a voice in the distance calling Aleksander’s name.

Immediately, he jumped to his feet. “It’s Leib,” he said, scanning the forest.

Yona knew, from the space between the echoes, that they still had a few minutes before the younger man appeared. She could run, hide. There was still time to disappear into the forest.

But then Aleksander looked at her with a question in his eyes, and something in her shifted. “I will stay,” she said. “I will meet him.”

“Are you certain?”

“No.” But somehow, she was. She could feel it in her heart, a deep certainty, all of a sudden, that fate had brought her here, that this was part of some greater plan she didn’t understand yet. The wind whispered in the trees. “But it is the right thing.”

Aleksander studied her for a few seconds before nodding. “I will go get him, then, tell him where we are.”