It was the same thing Chana and her parents had asked, a question Yona feared she would never know the answer to. “Does it matter?”
“It is usually something people want to know.”
Yona thought about this. “But maybe it shouldn’t be. Perhaps they need only know whether you are kind, decent, capable, well-intentioned. It is within your own heart that you find God. And we all walk our own path toward him. Don’t we?”
He didn’t say anything, and in the silence, she could feel her cheeks warming. It had been a silly thought, one that showed no understanding of society or the way it worked. Surely he was thinking that she sounded like a childish fool.
But when he spoke, there was only quiet admiration in his tone. “Yona, the world you describe would be a paradise.”
“But it is not reality.”
He shook his head, but again he didn’t speak right away. Yona liked the silence, the easy feeling of space existing without words, and she appreciated him for not having to fill the void. “My parents died years ago. I am one of six brothers,” he said at last, his voice so low it was barely audible. “All dead now, except me. All of us fought in the army. Three of us returned alive. After the German invasion last year, they came for the Jews in my town, forced us into the ghetto. In November, there was word that something was coming, a mass execution. I tried to talk others into leaving with me, but only a handful came. My brothers didn’t believe me and so they stayed. We could hear the gunshots from where we hid in the woods. We were out there for days before venturing back; we lost one old woman to the cold, or perhaps to heartbreak, I don’t know. We had to return, though, because we didn’t know how to survive. When we left again a few weeks ago, because we’d heard rumors the ghetto was going to be relocated, perhaps even liquidated, I promised those who followed me that I would protect them. And maybe with your help, Yona, I can, at the least, make sure that they’re fed. But how can I—how can anyone—protect them from a world that hates them because of what’s in their blood, because of what’s in their hearts?”
Yona was startled to feel tears stinging her eyes. “I—I don’t understand how people could feel that way.”
His smile was gentle, bitter, and sad, all at the same time. “Money. Belongings. Taking from one group to pad the pockets of another.”
“But the hatred…”
“Is how they sleep at night, I suppose. If they convince themselves that we are not even worthy of the air we breathe, then it’s easier to get rid of us, isn’t it?”
The silence rolled back in, and this time it was both comfortable and full of words they didn’t need to speak aloud. When Yona looked up, Aleksander met her gaze and held it for a long time. She didn’t look away until they both heard a voice in the distance calling Aleksander’s name.
Immediately, he jumped to his feet. “It’s Leib,” he said, scanning the forest.
Yona knew, from the space between the echoes, that they still had a few minutes before the younger man appeared. She could run, hide. There was still time to disappear into the forest.
But then Aleksander looked at her with a question in his eyes, and something in her shifted. “I will stay,” she said. “I will meet him.”
“Are you certain?”
“No.” But somehow, she was. She could feel it in her heart, a deep certainty, all of a sudden, that fate had brought her here, that this was part of some greater plan she didn’t understand yet. The wind whispered in the trees. “But it is the right thing.”
Aleksander studied her for a few seconds before nodding. “I will go get him, then, tell him where we are.”
Yona nodded, and though he held her gaze for a few beats more, as if waiting for her to disappear if he blinked, he eventually turned and moved into the woods.
In the silence left in his wake, Yona could hear herself breathing, could feel the stillness all around her. There was a slight lapping of the water against the banks, the fish struggling to free themselves from the net. The whisper came through the trees again, but it wasn’t Jerusza’s voice she could hear. This is your path, it said. She took a deep breath and got to her feet.
In the ten minutes before Aleksander returned with Leib, Yona had waded back into the stream and quickly, expertly collected most of the fish whose gills had become lodged in the net. She was holding the basket when they arrived in the clearing, and when Leib’s eyes went first to it instead of her, she knew instantly that he was very hungry. Up close, he looked younger than he had from a distance, perhaps only sixteen or seventeen. He was slim, long-limbed, with a nose as sharp as a crow’s beak, and a smattering of stubble on his narrow chin.