She sat up, blinking into the blackness. Her eyes adjusted slowly, but she could make out only the vaguest shapes in the zemlianka, and Zus was not among them. Wrapping her blanket around herself, she pulled her boots on, then made her way toward the door, opening it quietly and stepping into the cold world outside.
The snow was drifting down gently, silent in the soft moonlight, falling only from a few scattered clouds that trekked slowly across the sky, allowing glimpses of the stars. It was still a few hours before dawn. The sky stirred while nature slept, and for a few seconds, Yona simply stood still, taking in the silence and the peace, letting the snowflakes kiss her cheeks. Then she looked down and found Zus’s footsteps just barely visible in the freshly fallen snow. Worried, she set off in the direction he’d gone, tracking his path deeper into the woods.
She walked for twenty minutes, and she was beginning to panic when she finally saw him, his back to her, his hands clenched in fists by his sides as he stared into the black depths of the forest. She exhaled in relief. As she walked toward him, he heard her and whirled around, his eyes wild and unfamiliar. He didn’t have a gun with him, but he was crouched in a defensive posture, ready to fight. “Yona?” he asked after a few seconds, straightening back up, the shadow over his face clearing, but not all the way. “What are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you.” As she walked closer, he took a step backward, away from her, and that’s when she realized he’d been crying. There were tear tracks down his cheeks, and his eyes were bloodshot. “Zus?”
“I didn’t want you to see me like this.” He took another step backward, forcing distance between them, and though she wanted to pull him into her arms, to promise him that everything would be okay, she knew that might be a lie.
“What happened, Zus?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head, and another tear fell from his left eye. He swiped it away angrily. “It’s Helena,” he said, his voice strange and strangled, and it took Yona a few seconds to realize he was speaking of his daughter. He had never said her name aloud in Yona’s presence before; even when she had gently asked about his past, he had shaken his head, pressed his lips together, and told her that he could not open that door without falling apart. It was only from Chaim that she knew the truth.
“Oh, Zus,” she murmured.
He turned his back to her, staring out into the wilderness again. Overhead, the sky watched in silence. In a few hours, it would be dawn, and the forest would be alive again, the world would be alight. But for now, it felt like just the two of them in the moonlight.
It was a long time before Zus turned back around. “She would have been six today. It should have been her birthday. But I—I couldn’t save her. How can it be that I am still alive and she has been gone from this earth for two years now?”
He began to cry again, heaving sobs this time, and Yona hesitated before stepping forward and putting a tentative hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but he didn’t pull away, so she took another step, pulling him against her. He didn’t resist, and after a moment, his arms were around her, and he was sobbing into her hair. She absorbed the tremors of his grief.
“There are no words that can tell you how sorry I am, Zus,” she whispered when finally his tears had stopped falling. “I wish I had known her.”
He took a deep breath and pushed away, creating a sudden gap between them. He looked disoriented, defensive. “But don’t you see? If I had not lost her, if I had not lost Shifra, my wife, I never would have met you. This life that I have now with you, these feelings I have…” He shook his head. “It is only possible because they are dead. How can I embrace that? Am I not betraying them?”
She blinked as he took another step backward, away from her, widening the distance. It wasn’t just sadness eating at him, it was guilt, and she was at the center of it. “Zus, I—”
“There’s nothing you can say, Yona. There’s nothing anyone can say.”
It was the first time she’d heard him sound cold toward her, and it sent a chill down her spine. She knew it was his grief speaking, but it still felt like a blow. She knew that things with Zus were different than they had been with Aleksander, that what she had with him was real and true. But was love transitory? Could it run its course, disappear at a moment’s notice? What if that was what was happening here? Could a person simply decide to turn his heart off? There was so little she understood; a lifetime of reading books deep within a lonely forest had not prepared her to open her own heart the way she had.