The World That We Knew(54)

You were with me when we discovered we were not hunters, but wolves, when the world was taken away from us, when they believed we were worthless, when we were sent away on trains, when the souls of our brothers and sisters rose with no place to go. You were with me every minute. You are my triumph, the one thing they could never take away.



What mattered in the forest was simple, and had nothing to do with the cruel perversions of men. A rock, a leaf, a star, a dream. Time stood still here. When a leaf fell it took forever until it landed on the forest floor. Winter would come, but not now, not yet, not in this place where if you fell asleep you dreamed for weeks. Wildflowers grew out of season; angels walked through the yellow grass and left their footprints for men to follow if they cared to see what was right in front of them, the path of the righteous, the forgiving, the faithful. Sometimes, at night, Lea would awake to see Ava dancing with the heron. He was staying later than he should. Sweeps of birds had left for warmer climates, but every day he was there, and every night they danced. Lea watched, entranced, well aware that she was seeing magic being made. Ava looked luminous as she danced barefoot, and sometimes she threw her head back and laughed with delight.

If a golem was made of clay, how was it possible for her to feel? Lea soon devised a test. She went out and gathered thorny branches and placed them on the ground beneath the bushes where they slept to see if Ava could feel pain. That night Ava curled up among the sharp branches and she didn’t cry out once.

The next night, Lea took a glass bottle, broke it, then spread the shards in the grass. That night Ava danced as if nothing was wrong.

On the third night Lea left a heap of biting red ants in Ava’s garments, but when Ava dressed she had no reaction, not an itch or a cry, nothing at all.

These tests proved that Ava felt nothing, and yet there was that look on her face when the heron bowed to her in the moment before the dance began. It was the gaze of someone who loved you, the same look Lea had seen when her mother kissed her good night, when her father was at home and there was laughter in the kitchen, when her grandmother told her stories. Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.



They were so well hidden that Ava allowed Lea the freedom to wander. She was going for water from the nearby stream when she saw a wolf, just as Bobeshi had when she was a girl, not much older than Lea was now. At first Lea thought it was a dream she had never woken from and she was likely still sleeping, curled up under the bushes. But she reached down and pinched herself, and the pinch stung and she knew she was awake, and then she was certain that what had happened to Bobeshi was now happening to her. The wolf was black with yellow eyes. It was said such creatures had been hunted to extinction in this region, that they had been shot and hung on posts, murdered one by one by royal hunting parties. But some things cannot be destroyed so easily.

Lea lifted her eyes to look into his. He had been so quiet she hadn’t heard him approach, though she should have known. There were no birds singing. The leaves refused to fall. She thought of Julien. Even if no one else believed her, he would.

She had to stay alive. She had made a promise. How to do so was the question.

Don’t run, her grandmother had told her. Do not be afraid. Be who you are, and know that he will be who he is.

How many wolves were left? Three or four? Half a dozen? Or was it just this single wolf watching her from the edge of the stream, ready to leap if she was the sort of human who had a gun, or a knife, or an eye for murder? Soon enough he saw that she was just a girl sitting by the stream. They were themselves and they knew each other and they could feel one another’s loneliness. When you are a wolf, no place is safe, no one can be trusted. Unless they are what you are. Hunted.

Lea was not as afraid as she had been in the alley. Her heart had stopped then and every breath hurt. She remembered how it felt to bite the soldier, how she had struggled with him and would have done anything to be free of him. But the wolf seemed more reasonable than the soldier.

“Hello,” Lea said. Her voice sounded hollow and pure.

The wolf came toward her.

We were wolves in the forest, chased until there was nowhere to go. When you are not considered human, you learn how to run.

He was bigger than a dog, and ragged. Lea was motionless. When he came close his breath was warm and he smelled like grass, a sweet, deep, dark scent of the woods. He was not young, and he was weary, for he had seen enough of men to last him a lifetime.



Bobeshi had been carrying a pail of water when the wolf came to her. She could have thrown it at him, instead, she had stood unmoving as Lea stood here now. Bobeshi had taken a deep breath and spoken the truth to the creature in the woods.

Brother Wolf, I am not your enemy. You are not the beast that I fear. I fear men and their bloodshed, I fear soldiers with guns, I fear those who hate for no reason, those who leave bodies behind them like fallen leaves, in the grass, in the earth, on the streets of cities that were filled with life, but are empty now. We can walk through those cities together in silence, leaving no footprints, looking for the teeth they pulled from our mouths so that we can plant them in the earth and we can grow up from the dirt despite what they did to us, hanging us by the feet until the blood runs out of our mouths, taking us into alleys, shearing our hair, leaving us naked in the rain.