The Forest of Vanishing Stars(42)

As he continued to slow, panting harder, Yona was still mentally running through her options—which must have been why it took so long to register the unfamiliar voice up ahead. Usually she was attuned to the forest, but in paying attention to Oscher, she had let her guard slip. Instantly she stopped, and with a hand across Oscher’s chest, she halted him, too. She held a finger to her mouth, and then, in the stillness, she listened.

The voice was distant, too far away for Yona to discern the words, but it was male, and it was aggressive. Perhaps it was someone out hunting. Perhaps she and Oscher could just take a roundabout route back and avoid the stranger altogether.

But then her heart sank as she heard another voice: Moshe’s, loud and worried. The stranger in the woods was barking at Moshe now, and every cell in Yona’s body was suddenly on high alert.

“Wait here,” Yona said. “Behind this tree.” After a second, she pulled her knife from her ankle holster and handed it to Oscher.

“But you’ll need this to protect yourself,” he said, his face white with fear.

“I’ll be fine.” Of course giving her weapon away made her stomach roll, but Oscher was much more defenseless than she, and if someone came for him in her absence, the knife would give him a fighting chance. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Without another word, she raced toward the sound of Moshe’s voice, her feet carrying her over the snow, her lungs bursting with panic.

She slowed her pace as the voices grew closer; if she could maintain the element of surprise, she had an advantage, even if the stranger up ahead was armed. She was close enough now to make out words, and she hesitated as the stranger’s voice came again, speaking in Belorussian.

“… no good reason to be out in the woods,” the man was saying, his tone firm, his voice deep. “I will ask one more time what you are doing here. You are not hunting Jews, are you?”

Yona crept slowly forward until she could see Moshe and Leon, standing close together, cornered by a man with a square, stubble-covered jaw, broad shoulders, and a rifle. He had the gun pointed directly at the two men, but there was something about his expression, and in the careful way he said his words, that took Yona’s panic down a notch. He had spoken his Belorussian slowly, as if it was not the language he was most comfortable with, and now she could see Moshe trying to do the same, trying to force out words in Belorussian when he’d spoken nothing but Yiddish for months now.

“No, we do not hunt Jews,” he managed to say. “We are only fishing. See here? Here we have our fish.” He gestured to the basket on his back, and the man stepped forward to look, lowering the gun slightly.

“Where did you get those?” The man was in what appeared to be a threadbare Russian military uniform, with military boots and a frayed overcoat, but the shirt and trousers looked too tight on him. Certainly his accent wasn’t Russian.

“A stream about a kilometer from here.” Moshe pointed away from the camp and away from the way he’d just come, obviously hoping to send the man in a direction that wouldn’t result in him discovering Yona and Oscher or their hidden settlement in the woods.

The man’s eyes narrowed. “There is no stream that way. Why do you lie to me?”

Something moved in the shadows behind the man, then, and in an instant, Yona’s blood ran cold. It wasn’t an animal; it was another person in the trees, another man. Why was he hiding? Who were these men? For a second she flashed back to the two Russian soldiers who’d been about to kill Leib for sport. But as she stared hard at the dark thatch of branches, her eyes adjusted, and she could just make out the form of a young woman with long, dark hair tied in a braid, crouching down and breathing hard.

Yona put her hand over her mouth as she understood what was happening. This wasn’t a man who was there to hurt them. This was a man leading a group just like hers; she was almost certain. He didn’t seem to understand that Moshe and Leon were in the same situation as he, and as he leveled his gun at them once more, Yona knew she couldn’t wait a second longer.

“Wait!” she said in Yiddish as she stepped from the bushes. The man spun toward her, fear, then anger, then confusion flickering over his face in quick succession. “Please,” she said in Yiddish. “We are like you.”

She glanced at Moshe and Leon, who were staring at her in horror, and then back at the man, who hadn’t said a word yet. As she walked close to the barrel of his gun, which was now trained directly at her, she wondered if she had made an enormous mistake. “You are Jewish, aren’t you?”

The man looked uncertain, but she was close enough now that she could read his eyes. She could see that he understood her, which made her more certain that she was correct. A Belorussian villager wouldn’t know much Yiddish, nor would a Russian partisan.

“Who are you?” the man asked, still speaking Belorussian, but his accent had slipped a bit more.

“Amkha.” It was the first word Aleksander had said to her in the forest, the Hebrew word that meant she was part of the nation of people.

The man finally lowered his weapon and stared at her. “What are you doing out here? All of you?” He gestured to Moshe and Leon, but his eyes were still on Yona. He was speaking Yiddish now, which meant he believed her—and that she’d been right. She could feel the tension draining from her body like water through her fingers. “You are from one of the ghettos?”