The Forest of Vanishing Stars(41)

It was the most Yona had ever heard Leon say, and the stark words made her heart ache. “I don’t think you have to let go of your old life to have a new one,” she said after a while.

His smile was sad. “But of course we do. Are you the same person you were before you decided to join us? I don’t think you are. We have to evolve, all of us, or we wither, but it also means that we spin further away from the past each day. And, Yona, I liked my past. I miss it terribly, the life I’d built, the people I loved.”

“I’m sorry, Leon.” The words were woefully inadequate.

“It isn’t your fault, of course,” Leon said, but what if he was wrong? What if her German blood made her culpable? It was something she had been thinking a lot about lately. If Jewish blood made one Jewish, what did her German blood make her? If the legacy of miracles was part of one’s birthright, was the legacy of sins, too? “As I said,” he added, unaware of the storm sweeping through her, “we are grateful for you.”

They reached the marshy streambed in an hour, and it was, as Yona had said, frozen solid across the surface, tufts of dried grass punctuating the ice. She beckoned the others closer, and Oscher, breathing hard, gathered a pile of leaves and sat on them, wincing as he reached for his leg, rubbing it and muttering to himself.

“Are you all right?” Yona asked gently.

“Oh yes, fine, fine,” Oscher said hastily, but his face was flushed, and his breathing still hadn’t returned to normal. As Leon bent to put a hand on his shoulder, Moshe and Yona exchanged concerned looks. “Go on, Yona,” Oscher added after a few seconds. “I’m all right, really I am.”

Yona hesitated before nodding, pulling the willow baskets from her back, and bending to the ice. Soon Oscher would catch his breath, and then he’d be embarrassed by her concern. Better to focus on the fish. “The secret to catching mud loaches in the winter is simple,” she began. “You see, there’s little oxygen under the surface when it’s frozen solid, and the fish are desperate for more. When we cut a hole in the ice, even a small one, they’ll come right to us.”

As the men watched, she used her axe to chisel out a hole in the slick surface five inches in diameter. They all bent to look, and Oscher, whose breathing was finally growing steadier, frowned. “But nothing is happening,” he said.

“Wait,” she said. She set one of the baskets upright and opened a small latch in the bottom, fitting it perfectly over the hole. Then she stood and beckoned to the men. “Now look.”

The three men peered in, and she smiled as Moshe gasped. She knew exactly what they were seeing, even without looking herself, for she and Jerusza had fished countless times in the winter just like this. One by one, beckoned by the thrill of oxygen, the fat, snakelike fish were slithering from the hole, hoping for a taste of the air. But once they had left the water, the opening in the basket kept them from plunging back in, and so they flopped around the dried willow until they went still.

For the next hour, Yona collected the loaches as they stopped moving and shifted them to the larger basket as the smaller one continued to fill. When it was nearly overflowing, Yona finally moved the first basket away from the hole in the ice and watched as a final fish made a grab for the fresh air, landing on the ice and skidding away, flapping madly. She pushed the broken ice chunks back over the hole, once again enclosing the surface so no additional fish would lose their lives unnecessarily, and then she straightened to find the men staring at her. “What is it?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“We will eat well for days, all of us,” Moshe said quietly. “Yona, you’re a miracle.”

Yona averted her eyes, embarrassed. “It’s not so difficult when you know the land. But we can’t fish like this when it’s colder; the fish won’t come up. And we can’t hike without a snowfall, because our tracks would be too obvious. Today was a lucky day.”

The men murmured among themselves, and then Moshe offered to carry one of the baskets, and Leon the other. Yona nodded and handed the baskets over; then, as they began traipsing back toward the camp, tracing their own nearly vanished footprints, she fell back with Oscher and offered a shoulder to lean on. Though he refused at first, he was breathing hard after a few minutes, and when he stumbled and nearly fell, Yona placed a firm hand on his left forearm and didn’t let go, bracing him as they moved through the snowy forest. “You two go ahead,” she said to Moshe and Leon as they drew closer to the camp. Their earlier footprints were still barely visible, and she knew they could follow them home. “Oscher and I will be right behind you.”

Leon and Moshe looked uncertain, but they hurried away, the baskets heavy on their backs.

“I’m sorry,” Oscher said a few minutes after the other men had vanished into the forest ahead. “I’m holding you back, Yona. I shouldn’t have come.”

“No, I’m glad you did. And don’t worry. There’s no rush.”

But the snow was falling harder now, the afternoon turning darker, the clouds gathering overhead, stealing the sun. Great gusts swept through the forest, and she could feel Oscher trembling beside her. Without the two men ahead of them to keep up with, his pace had slowed even further, and for the first time, Yona began to wonder what she would do if he couldn’t go on. She was fairly certain she was strong enough to hoist him on her back, but would he let her? Certainly it would wound his pride. Jerusza hadn’t wanted to be treated like an invalid, even at the end, and she suspected Oscher wouldn’t want that, either. But she couldn’t just leave him out in the cold, for in saving face, he would lose his life.