The Forest of Vanishing Stars(36)

“Besides,” she added after a few minutes as she and Aleksander set up their own small, individual lean-tos, just beside each other, as had become their custom. He was almost always the first person she saw when she woke in the morning, and she realized she liked that very much. “We are deep enough in the forest now that no one will find you once the snow begins to fall.” On the other side of the clearing, Sulia—who usually shared a shelter with Luba and Rosalia—watched them as she lashed together her own gathered branches.

“But won’t we leave traces in the snow?” Aleksander asked. “We’ll be more obvious if they come looking.”

“You will build shelters into the earth, both for warmth and to hide. And you will move about only when the snow is falling and will cover your tracks. The nights are long and the days are gray. It’s easier to disappear in the cold.”

Aleksander didn’t say anything as he finished lashing his shelter and covering the roof with bark.

“When you speak of the winter, Yona, you never use the word we,” Aleksander said finally, turning his gaze back to her. “Are you leaving?”

She was silent for a long time, for she didn’t know the right answer. “That was always the plan, wasn’t it? That I would stay only until you didn’t need me anymore?”

Aleksander waited until she looked him in the eye. “We still need you, Yona,” he said, his voice low.

“Aleksander—”

“Please. Don’t leave.”

“You’ll survive without me.”

“But I think I would miss you far too much.” He cleared his throat. “We all would, I mean. You are one of us now. Stay—unless you don’t want to.”

She held his gaze for a long time, and in it, she saw a future she had never imagined for herself, a future filled with laughter and friendship instead of silence and loneliness. Maybe even a future filled with love. “I do,” she said softly. “I do want to.” But even as she said it, the wind whipped up, and she could hear it whispering to her, hissing a warning.

Two days later, they’d found a spot deep in the woods, a two-hour hike from the closest stream. Yona spent an additional day searching for an underground water source before digging a shallow well and returning to tell the group that they’d found their spot for the winter. No one argued.

They started with bark-covered huts for shelter, but by the second day, they were all burrowing into the earth with makeshift shovels, everyone but the children. The girls were running around the outskirts of the clearing, pretending to be wood fairies, while Daniel giggled at them from his bed of reeds. Their laughter made Yona smile, even as her muscles burned. This was what they were saving—a future of smiles for these three innocent children, maybe even for the children Pessia, Leah, and Daniel would have themselves someday. For the millionth time, Yona wondered at a world that would allow lives like theirs to be violently snuffed out.

By the end of the next week, following Yona’s instructions, the group had finished two large zemliankas and a much smaller one. Unlike the temporary huts they had been constructing over the last few months, designed to be assembled and disassembled quickly, these were solid, permanent, protected. They were dug deep into the ground, with walls made of five-inch logs, wooden floors, and underground ceilings covered in earth and supported by log beams, each with a narrow stairway to the entrance aboveground. Now, before the first snowfall, the doors to the shelters were visible, but once the forest was under a blanket of snow, they would disappear. It would take the group a few more weeks to build mud-brick stoves and chimneys for warmth, and Yona would show them how; she had done it each year of her life with Jerusza as they prepared for the winter freeze.

The group also built a smaller, separate underground bunker for food storage, which Yona was eager to start filling before the cold made gathering harder, and a small latrine. In the end, in the space of two weeks, they all had real, semipermanent homes for the first time in years.

While Leib, Aleksander, and Moshe hunted and fished, the women gathered plants and berries, and Leon and Oscher tended a large smoker, Yona ventured out each day into the forest, gathering herbs to dry. Soon the ground would be frozen solid, and nature’s medicines would be underground until the spring.

When she’d lived with Jerusza, they had done this each year, drying the plants they gathered, pulverizing some for teas and poultices and keeping others whole. But for a group of fifteen people—of all different ages—the need was greater. So Yona gathered yarrow, wormwood, chicory, and chamomile. She pulled leaves of dziurawiec for wound care, black lilac and yarrow for fevers, coltsfoot for coughs, nettle leaves for muscle weakness, rosemary for heart ailments, horsetail tips for swelling, and comfrey to treat broken bones and arthritis. By the time the air tasted like snow, she had assembled a whole arsenal of dried or mashed herbs that would take them through the winter.

On a morning early in December, Yona awoke before dawn, and, even from her nest beneath the earth, she could feel the change in the air. She pulled on her wool coat and made her way aboveground, where snowflakes were falling, clinging to the dirt for only a second or two before disappearing forever into the earth. Soon the snow would begin to stick, but for the first few minutes, it was as if the sky and the ground met, becoming one.

She tilted her head up and felt the flakes kiss her cheeks. The season’s first snowfall in the depths of the forest was always magical, and though Yona had lived through nearly two dozen winters, the thrill of it never faded. Though she knew the sugar-delicate flakes were the harbinger of coming danger, of a winter that would test the resilience of all of them, there was no denying their beauty as they drifted down gently from a silent sky.