“Slow,” Yona said, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “We are all thirsty. But drinking too quickly will make you sick.”
He nodded, but he continued to gulp the cool liquid, and Yona returned to her own spot on the bank beside Aleksander.
“It’s getting dark,” he said.
Yona looked up at the sky, which was fading to a shade of deep blue that sometimes reminded her of Kroman Lake in the southern part of the forest, where bream, perch, and pike swam. She and Jerusza had visited twice a summer when Yona was young, and the old woman had even permitted Yona to swim once while Jerusza fished. The water had been cool, bracing, and it had moved around her in a way that felt different from the gentle, steady currents in the streams where she usually bathed. The fish they caught were plump, salty. But then the lake had become a place for villagers to look for food when the farmers’ crops struggled and the economy turned, and Jerusza had never brought her back.
“We have another forty-five minutes before the light is gone,” Yona replied.
Aleksander beckoned to the group, and in silence, they filled their canteens and flasks with water—they each seemed to have one—and followed, wading across the stream and walking in a line as they pressed deeper into the woods.
“You asked about the gun,” Aleksander said after a while. The sky above was turning inky, and Yona knew they’d have to stop soon. There was a clearing up ahead that she hoped would work. “We needed one. And there was a farmer near Mir who I knew kept a rifle in his salt cellar. I left the group one day and waited outside his barn until I saw him leave for the fields. I was in the cellar with the rifle in my hands when he appeared at the top of the ladder, pointing a pistol at me. ‘Who is there?’ he demanded, trying to see my face. I lifted my cap, and he stared at me for a whole minute before he said my name. He recognized me; I could hardly believe it. I had worked on his farm for a summer when I was a teenager. It’s how I knew the gun would be there.
“I asked him not to shoot me, and though he didn’t lower his gun, I somehow knew he was not going to. I held up his rifle and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I need this.’ He looked from me to it and then back at me. ‘Where are your parents?’ he asked. I told him they were dead. ‘Your brothers?’ Dead, too, I told him. He asked where I was living. The forest, I told him. Finally, he nodded, lowered his weapon, and stepped aside to let me up the ladder. I climbed up until I stood beside him. ‘You must make me a promise,’ he said. I will never forget the way he looked at me. ‘If I let you take the gun,’ he said, ‘you must promise me that you will survive and tell stories of the things you have seen. That you won’t let your family’s deaths go unavenged.’ I promised, and as I started to walk away, I turned and asked a question I needed to know the answer to. I asked him why—why he was letting me take a gun he must have needed himself. Why he was helping me at all when most of the farmers in their villages nearby would cheerfully turn me in for a bounty.”
Aleksander paused as they reached the clearing, and he and Yona looked up at the sky together. It had almost reached full dark, and this place was as good as any; there was enough space for their group, and it was hidden by broad swaths of oaks, far enough from the stream that it wouldn’t be an obvious place to look. Yona nodded at Aleksander, and he turned to the group and told them to start making camp.
“What did the farmer say?” Yona asked as she and Aleksander began stripping wide swatches of bark from trees. Behind them, in the clearing, she could hear Leib retching, his stomach upset from the rapid intake of water, but she didn’t turn.
“He said that when he and my father were boys, my father had saved his life. He didn’t explain, but he said that his parents wouldn’t let him thank my father, because he was a Jew. They wouldn’t even let him tell people that his life had been saved by Andrzej Gorodinsky. But he never forgot it and had always hoped to one day repay him.” Aleksander paused and sniffed, turning away, and Yona’s heart ached. “It was too late to repay my father, of course. But the farmer said he hoped that by helping me, he was giving my family a chance to go on.”
Yona reached out and touched his arm. “I’m sorry about your parents, Aleksander. And your brothers. There aren’t words enough to express that.”
He turned to her, holding her gaze for a long time. “Thank you. But the farmer was right. I have to keep living. I have to go on. Or every trace of us, of the Gorodinsky family, of what we were, of what we could have been, will be gone. The Germans, they don’t just wipe out our people. They wipe out our future. And I can’t bear that.”