The Forest of Vanishing Stars(88)

“I’m sorry about Aleksander,” Zus said, his voice rough as he broke the silence between them. “I know what it is to lose someone.”

“I’m not crying only for him,” Yona said, and there was something about the way that his shoulders sagged slightly in relief that made her heart beat a bit faster. “My tears are for everyone we’ve lost. All the lives that should not have been extinguished.”

Zus nodded, and they looked skyward at the same time. Yona watched as a splash of stars, an infinite galaxy far away, disappeared behind a dark cloud, and then she looked back at Zus.

“They took my wife and daughter,” he said, his voice flat. He was still looking at the space where the stars should have been. “Right in front of me. I—I could not stop it. Did Chaim tell you?”

Yona nodded. “I’m so sorry, Zus.”

She reached for his hand, and he laced his fingers through hers. After a moment of silence, she followed his gaze back to the sky.

“I’m broken, Yona,” he said, still not looking at her. “I always will be, no matter what I do, no matter how many lives I help save.”

She hesitated before moving closer and resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m broken, too. But sometimes it’s the jagged edges that allow us to fit together. Sometimes it’s the breaks that make us strong.”

Zus didn’t reply, and for a moment she was certain she’d said the wrong thing, that in trying to make him feel less alone, she had instead made him feel as if she were comparing her losses to his. But then he placed his index finger under her chin and gently tilted her face up. He studied her eyes for a few seconds, his gaze stormy, and then, wordlessly, he leaned in and kissed her, so softly that at first his lips barely touched hers. When she leaned in and kissed him back, he turned slightly, angling his body toward hers and pressing her against him.

When he finally pulled away, the light had returned to his eyes. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but there was no need for words. After a few seconds, she placed her head on his shoulder again, and he rested his head against hers, and she wondered if maybe their broken edges had been a perfect fit all along.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR




For the next month, it was as if the night had never happened, as if they hadn’t held each other in the starlight until dawn and opened their hearts for a moment to let a bit of light in. A thousand times she had replayed it in her mind and wondered if she should have pulled away in those few seconds before he kissed her. He had mentioned his wife and child, and perhaps his grief for them had clouded his judgment for a few minutes. Perhaps it had been up to her to stop him from making a mistake, up to her to stop her heart from suddenly wanting something she shouldn’t.

But she often caught him looking at her, his gaze tender and penetrating, and sometimes, when she looked up and met his eyes, it felt as if they were the only ones in the world. The feeling confused her, as did the way her skin tingled whenever he brushed against her, which had never happened with Aleksander. But she pretended nothing was wrong, for what could be gained from harping on feelings she didn’t understand, when their survival was at stake?

She focused instead on checking on little Abra, who was, blessedly, a quiet baby, and on the eight newcomers: the Rozenberg brothers, Benjamin, Maks, Michal, and Joel; Regina and Paula, who were the wives of Benjamin and Michal; and the two men who had come with them, Rubin Sobil and Harry Feinschreiber. All were young, angry, and ready to fight back, and already, their arrival had changed the mood in the camp. Now there was a restlessness to everything, a feeling of waiting.

The Germans had fallen back for now, leaving in their wake an eerie silence, a feeling that the worst was still to come. The more immediate problem, though, was that winter was fast approaching and the group’s food supply had dwindled to nearly nothing, since they’d taken so much of the preserved food with them when they fled into the swamps. There were more mouths to feed now, and much less food. They would not survive the winter with what little they had left, and when Benjamin and Maks Rozenberg brought up the idea of ambushing a German supply convoy to steal food and weapons, Yona couldn’t dismiss it, though she hated the idea of putting any of them in harm’s way.

“There is no choice,” Zus murmured one day as he sat down in the clearing with Yona, Chaim, and Rosalia. “We must eat.”

“And the villages have been bled dry,” Chaim said. In the time since they’d been back at their camp, several of them had taken turns venturing out to the towns on the edges of the forest to see what had been left behind. They were desperate to find stores of food, but instead they found bodies and burned buildings everywhere they went. The Germans had torched farms and slaughtered livestock to prevent refugees from finding any nourishment. Still, there had been some beets remaining in the ground, and Chaim and Zus had found a small underground bunker filled with potatoes, which they’d transported back to camp in big sacks. It was a start, but the food wouldn’t last the winter; they needed more.

It was Rosalia who replied. “Something must be done. They have forced us into the woods, murdered our people, taken all that we hold dear. It is time they pay.”

Yona didn’t know Rosalia’s history, what had brought her into the forest, but for the first time, she understood that something terrible had happened to her. There was a crack in Rosalia’s cool exterior now, and it made Yona shiver.