The Forest of Vanishing Stars(32)

“This wasn’t the life I wanted for him,” Miriam said after a long silence. “When children are small, mothers envision all the things they will do one day, the people they will become. Never did I think, when Leib was a boy, that he would be all I had left. Never did I think that my dreams for him would narrow so. Now I dream only of seeing him survive. To imagine more feels decadent.” She paused and added, “It feels impossible.”

Yona blinked a few times so Miriam could not see the tears in her eyes. She didn’t know what to say, so she murmured, “I’m very sorry. For everything that has happened to you.”

“It must be God’s plan, though, yes? It is just that I cannot understand it.”

“I don’t understand it, either,” Yona said, and she felt a stab of guilt. One must never question God, Jerusza had always told her. It is our job on earth only to seek to understand him, never to doubt his will. But this was madness, and Yona felt like the truth of it all was just beyond her grasp.

Miriam didn’t reply, and after a moment, she returned to gathering flowers.

“How did you and Leib escape from the ghetto?” Yona asked a few minutes later.

Miriam sighed again and straightened, her eyes damp. “Leib is young, strong. That meant the Germans used him for work, for building things. One day they marched many of the other men from the ghetto out into a clearing. They made them dig a trench. And then they shot them all.” She trembled as she drew a breath. “My husband was among those murdered. But Leib, he survived—Aleksander, too—because he was part of the work detail, and the Germans needed them. But we were no longer blind after that. We knew that it would be only a matter of time until they murdered us, too. And so Leib and Aleksander—whom we knew from our village—began to talk about escape.

“One day there was a rumor that they would be moving us all to the abandoned castle on the edge of town, a place that was fortified and would be impossible to escape from. Once we were there, they could kill us anytime; there would be no way out. Word spread around the camp that there were Jews meeting in the woods. ‘Get yourself out of the ghetto, and we will find you,’ they said. And so Leib and I made a plan. He would run from his work detail. We knew that it was a risk. When I kissed him goodbye that morning, I thought it was likely I would never see him again. But the Germans were busy that day preparing to shoot another group of Jews in the clearing, and Leib managed to escape. I hid in the ghetto—beneath an outhouse—until they already believed me gone. And then I fled, twelve days later, after they had stopped looking. If Leib had given up on me, I don’t think I would have survived. But he was there in the woods, waiting, a small miracle in the face of so much loss.”

“I’m very sorry about your husband and your other children, Miriam,” Yona said after a while.

Miriam shook her head. “They are free now. And I still have Leib.” But her voice snagged on the last word and became a sob. The silence that followed was an empty space that would never be filled.



* * *



For two more days, the group stayed in the clearing. Both days, Yona took Leib to the stream with the gill net, and together they gathered hundreds of fish. As night fell on the second day, Aleksander started a fire, and Yona showed the group how to smoke-dry fish to preserve them for winter, constructing a tripodlike tented structure from three tall, sturdy branches, lashing them with vines at the top, and using twine woven from grass to hang the fish. She covered the tented branches with bark to keep the smoke in, leaving a small opening at the top, and then she showed Leon and Oscher how to build a fire fueled by broken green alder branches. Once the fire was going, they had to transfer the coals to a hollowed-out spot in the center of the tent, where they would need to tend them until at least the next day to make sure both that they continued to smoke and that they didn’t flame up. It was risky to let smoke rise in daylight, but they were deep enough in the forest that it was unlikely they’d be seen, and the thin plume that rose from a smoking tent was much less obvious than the clouds that billowed from the campfires they lit in the darkness to cook their food. Those could be seen for miles on a clear day, but not in the dark, for the night absorbed the clouds.

At night, Yona slept by herself under a canopy of leaves on the edge of the clearing, far enough from the others so she could watch them. After spending almost her whole life in the forest, her instincts were sharp enough that the slightest foreign noise would awaken her, and though Leib, Aleksander, and Rosalia maintained an armed perimeter patrol, she felt better knowing that she, too, provided a small layer of protection.

By the fourth day, though, Yona was growing uneasy. “We need to move again,” she said to Aleksander, approaching him as he made his early-morning loops around the outskirts of the camp just before sunrise, the rifle propped against his shoulder, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond. She had awoken that morning in a panic she couldn’t name, and she had barely stopped to pull her boots on before rushing outside to find him.

He stopped walking and looked down at her. “Move?”

“I can’t explain it. We’ve been here too long.”

“But it’s only been four days. We have just gotten comfortable. And there’s food here…”

“I know.”

“Why, then?”

“I can feel things sometimes, bad things that are coming.” She glanced up at him and then looked down. “I feel it now. There’s darkness moving in.”