The Forest of Vanishing Stars(7)

“Yona, please don’t run away again,” Marcin said, taking a step forward.

But she was already gone, vanishing into the trees like a gust of wind, until it was as if she had never really been there at all.



* * *



When Yona returned to camp that afternoon, her heart was throbbing with regret. Why hadn’t she stayed longer? Had the courage to ask more?

She was so lost in her own thoughts that it took a few seconds for it to register that Jerusza was in the midst of tearing apart the hut they had called home for the last three weeks, stripping the bark from the roof, uprooting the wooden stakes with furious jerks of her hands. Yona stopped and stared. “Why—” she began.

Jerusza spun on her. “You think I wouldn’t find out about the boy? How dare you disobey me? You don’t know the world, and you haven’t the wisdom to make your own choices, you careless fool. What if he had followed you?”

“I didn’t—”

“Enough!” Jerusza cut her off, her voice a sharp knife of disappointment. “What have you done?”

Shamed into silence, Yona gathered her things and tried not to cry, but it was useless. As they trudged through the forest, away from where Marcin would be waiting for her the next day, Yona’s tears slipped and fell, silently watering the earth. “He was kind, Jerusza,” Yona said after they’d passed an hour in silence. “He didn’t mean me any harm.”

“You know nothing,” Jerusza shot back. “Men can be cruel and heartless and cold. And the mistakes we make follow us all our lives.”

“He was my friend,” Yona whispered.

“Was he? Or did he want things from you?”

Yona was confused. He had seemed to want nothing but conversation. “What things?”

Jerusza spat. “In this world, you keep your power as long as you keep your legs closed.”

Yona just blinked at her, completely lost. “I—I don’t understand.”

Jerusza stared at her in disbelief. “Come on, child. Boys want things from girls. It’s the oldest story in the book.”

And then, in a flash, Yona understood, and heat raced to her cheeks. “But it wasn’t anything like that!” She knew about the mechanics of sex—an unfortunate necessity to perpetuate the human race, Jerusza called it—but in her mind, it had nothing to do with feeling like one had common ground with another person. They had only talked, which had nothing to do with their bodies.

Then again, she had longed to draw closer to him, hadn’t she? Was that nature at work? Or was it simply desperation to have someone see that she was alive, whole?

Later, as the years passed, and she and Jerusza made their way north and then east, she thought of Marcin sometimes and wished she’d been brave enough to touch the skin of his arm, just so she’d known, if only for a second, what it felt like to connect with another human being.

But there were no more humans to be found where they were, and life lapsed into predictable monotony for a time. Each day, they foraged for food and herbs. Each night, over a small fire, they cooked what they had found. They moved at least once a month so they left hardly a trace if anyone came looking. In the late summer and autumn, they gathered and smoked food for the winter; by the time the leaves turned, they began building a shelter, dug deep into the sandy earth and supported by poles hewn from tree trunks. In the winter, they huddled together around a small fire inside their cramped dugout, emerging only to refill their meager larder with mud loaches, beetle larvae, and frozen berries as their supplies dwindled, and to shovel freshly fallen snow into pots for fresh water. Each spring, Jerusza ventured into villages to steal clothing, shoes, blankets, knives, and axes—leaving Yona behind now, with firm instructions not to move or there would be dire consequences—and on each expedition, she brought back books, which Yona inhaled ravenously, longing to imagine what life was like outside the forest. In the summers, they found their way to deserted Russian encampments left behind during the Great War and dug in the earth until they found treasures like magnesium sticks and ferro rods, which made it easy to build fires. In time, they accumulated a small sack of them, which they took with them wherever they went, for it would provide easy light and heat for years.

But something was happening, and by the time Yona had turned twenty, the world around the forest had grown angry. The earth growled, and airplanes rumbled overhead with increasing frequency, breaking the stillness of the sky. There were sometimes explosions far away, and sounds Jerusza explained were shots from soldiers’ guns, and though Yona begged Jerusza to tell her what was happening, the old woman’s answers were obfuscating. “God is angry,” she would say, fear glimmering in her eyes. Or, “We are being tested.” Whenever Yona asked more, Jerusza grabbed her by the shoulders and hissed warnings such as, “As long as you are here, Yona, you are safe. Do not forget that,” or, “The forest will protect you.” But how could Yona find protection from something she didn’t know, didn’t understand?

There were more people in the forest now, too, and that seemed to frighten the normally unflappable Jerusza. “These men, they will hurt us if they find us,” she whispered one night as they cowered in the darkness of a three-hundred-year-old hollowed oak, each of them clutching a knife, listening to heavy footsteps nearby.

“Who are they?” Yona asked.