“Yes. But the most important life to protect is your own.” Jerusza flattened her palm and placed the edge of her hand across her own windpipe. “If someone comes for you, a hard blow here, if delivered correctly, can be fatal.”
Yona blinked a few times, her long lashes dusting her cheeks, which were preternaturally pale, always pale, though the sun beat down on them relentlessly. As she set the wooden wren on the ground beside her, her hands shook. “But who would come for me?”
Jerusza stared at the child with disgust. Her head was in the clouds, despite Jerusza’s teachings. “You foolish child!” she snapped. The girl shrank away from her. It was good that the girl was afraid; terrible things were coming. “Your question is the wrong one, as usual. There will come a day when you’ll be glad I have taught you what I know.”
It wasn’t an answer, but the girl wouldn’t cross her. Jerusza was strong as a mountain chamois, clever as a hooded crow, vindictive as a magpie. She had been on the earth for nearly nine decades now, and she knew the girl was frightened by her age and her wisdom. Jerusza liked it that way; the child should be clear that Jerusza was not a mother. She was a teacher, nothing more.
“But, Jerusza, I don’t know if I could take a life,” Yona said at last, her voice small. “How would I live with myself?”
Jerusza snorted. It was hard to believe the girl could still be so naive. “I’ve killed four men and a woman, child. And I live with myself just fine.”
Yona’s eyes widened, but she didn’t speak again until the light had faded from the sky and the day’s lessons had ended. “Who did you kill, Jerusza?” she whispered in the darkness as they lay on their backs on the forest floor beneath a roof of spruce bark they’d built themselves just the week before. They moved every month or two, building a new hut from the gifts the forest gave them, always leaving a crack in their hastily hewn bark ceilings to see the stars when there was no threat of rain. Tonight, the heavens were clear, and Jerusza could see the Little Dipper, the Big Dipper, and Draco, the dragon, crawling across the sky. Life changed all the time, but the stars were ever constant.
“A farmer, two soldiers, a blacksmith, and the woman who murdered my father,” Jerusza replied without looking at Yona. “All would have killed me themselves if I’d given them a chance. You must never give someone that opportunity, Yona. Forget that lesson, and you will die. Now get some rest.”
By the next full moon, Yona knew that a kick just to the right of the base of the spine could puncture a kidney. A horizontal blow with the edge of the hand to the bridge of the nose could crush the facial bones deep into the skull, causing a brain hemorrhage. A hard toe kick to the temple, once a man was down, could swiftly end a life. A quick headlock behind a seated man, combined with a sharp backward jerk, could snap a neck. A knife sliced upward, from wrist to inner elbow along the radial artery, could drain a man of his blood in minutes.
But the universe was about balance, and so for each method of death, Jerusza taught the girl a way to dispense healing, too. Bilberries could restore circulation to a failing heart or resuscitate a dying kidney. Catswort, when ground into a paste, could stop bleeding. Burdock root could remove poison from the bloodstream. Crushed elderberries could bring down a deadly fever.
Life and death. Death and life. Two things that mattered little, for in the end, souls outlived the body and became one with an infinite God. But Yona didn’t understand that, not yet. She didn’t yet know that she had been born for the sake of repairing the world, for the sake of tikkun olam, and that each mitzvah she was called to perform would lift up divine sparks of light.
* * *
If only the forest alone could sustain them, but as the girl grew, she needed clothing, milk to strengthen her bones, shoes so her feet weren’t shredded by the forest floor in the summer or frozen to ice in the winter. When Yona was young, Jerusza sometimes left her alone in the woods for a day and a night, scaring her into staying put with tales of werewolves that ate little girls, while she ventured alone into nearby towns to take the things they needed. But as the girl began to ask more questions, there was no choice but to begin taking her along, to show her the perils of the outside world, to remind her that no one could be trusted.
It was a cold winter’s night in 1931, snow drifting down from a black sky, when Jerusza pulled the wide-eyed child into a town called Grajewo in northeastern Poland. And though Jerusza had explicitly told her to remain silent, Yona couldn’t seem to keep her words in. As they crept through the darkness toward a farmhouse, the girl peppered her with questions: What is that roof made of? Why do the horses sleep in a barn and not in a field? How did they make these roads? What is that on the flag?