The Forest of Vanishing Stars(30)
“We have another forty-five minutes before the light is gone,” Yona replied.
Aleksander beckoned to the group, and in silence, they filled their canteens and flasks with water—they each seemed to have one—and followed, wading across the stream and walking in a line as they pressed deeper into the woods.
“You asked about the gun,” Aleksander said after a while. The sky above was turning inky, and Yona knew they’d have to stop soon. There was a clearing up ahead that she hoped would work. “We needed one. And there was a farmer near Mir who I knew kept a rifle in his salt cellar. I left the group one day and waited outside his barn until I saw him leave for the fields. I was in the cellar with the rifle in my hands when he appeared at the top of the ladder, pointing a pistol at me. ‘Who is there?’ he demanded, trying to see my face. I lifted my cap, and he stared at me for a whole minute before he said my name. He recognized me; I could hardly believe it. I had worked on his farm for a summer when I was a teenager. It’s how I knew the gun would be there.
“I asked him not to shoot me, and though he didn’t lower his gun, I somehow knew he was not going to. I held up his rifle and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I need this.’ He looked from me to it and then back at me. ‘Where are your parents?’ he asked. I told him they were dead. ‘Your brothers?’ Dead, too, I told him. He asked where I was living. The forest, I told him. Finally, he nodded, lowered his weapon, and stepped aside to let me up the ladder. I climbed up until I stood beside him. ‘You must make me a promise,’ he said. I will never forget the way he looked at me. ‘If I let you take the gun,’ he said, ‘you must promise me that you will survive and tell stories of the things you have seen. That you won’t let your family’s deaths go unavenged.’ I promised, and as I started to walk away, I turned and asked a question I needed to know the answer to. I asked him why—why he was letting me take a gun he must have needed himself. Why he was helping me at all when most of the farmers in their villages nearby would cheerfully turn me in for a bounty.”
Aleksander paused as they reached the clearing, and he and Yona looked up at the sky together. It had almost reached full dark, and this place was as good as any; there was enough space for their group, and it was hidden by broad swaths of oaks, far enough from the stream that it wouldn’t be an obvious place to look. Yona nodded at Aleksander, and he turned to the group and told them to start making camp.
“What did the farmer say?” Yona asked as she and Aleksander began stripping wide swatches of bark from trees. Behind them, in the clearing, she could hear Leib retching, his stomach upset from the rapid intake of water, but she didn’t turn.
“He said that when he and my father were boys, my father had saved his life. He didn’t explain, but he said that his parents wouldn’t let him thank my father, because he was a Jew. They wouldn’t even let him tell people that his life had been saved by Andrzej Gorodinsky. But he never forgot it and had always hoped to one day repay him.” Aleksander paused and sniffed, turning away, and Yona’s heart ached. “It was too late to repay my father, of course. But the farmer said he hoped that by helping me, he was giving my family a chance to go on.”
Yona reached out and touched his arm. “I’m sorry about your parents, Aleksander. And your brothers. There aren’t words enough to express that.”
He turned to her, holding her gaze for a long time. “Thank you. But the farmer was right. I have to keep living. I have to go on. Or every trace of us, of the Gorodinsky family, of what we were, of what we could have been, will be gone. The Germans, they don’t just wipe out our people. They wipe out our future. And I can’t bear that.”
Yona nodded. If there were words to say after that, she did not know them. It was the most she had ever spoken with another person, the most she had learned about the personal toll of what the Germans were doing, and her throat felt thick with grief. So she touched his arm again, so that he could hear the things she wasn’t saying and understand that she was with him.
By the time they had constructed three makeshift shelters of bark and leaves, and Leon and Moshe had gathered kindling to make a fire, half of the group was already asleep, including all three children and their mother. Aleksander offered to take a turn keeping watch, and Yona sat beside the fire in the deep darkness of the wood, watching as Sulia and Miriam boiled water and pulled potatoes from one of the rucksacks. She’d never felt so hollowed out, nor so full of emotion, and she wondered how it was possible to feel both at the same time.
CHAPTER TEN
The night was clear and balmy, so the group didn’t bother to build more than basic shelters before filling their bellies with watery soup and crawling off to bed. Leib took the first watch, followed by Aleksander, and when Yona rose in the morning, the sky just beginning to glisten at the edges, she lay still for a moment, watching him move in slow, steady loops around the perimeter of the camp.
He walked quietly—not as quietly as she did after spending a lifetime in the trees, but softly enough that she understood he was a fast study. By his own admission, the forest had never been his home, but he was quickly learning its mysterious ways. The thought filled Yona with a strange blend of relief and sadness—relief because it meant she could teach him enough to help his group survive the winter, sadness because it meant they wouldn’t always need her. She had been with them for less than a day, and already she felt an unexpected attachment to all of them.