“I’m very glad you are here, Yona. That we found each other.”
She turned to him. The way he was watching her made her breath catch. “You were already doing a good job, long before I arrived. Everyone is alive and well-fed.”
He smiled slightly. “I wasn’t talking about survival, Yona. I’m grateful for you.” His eyes held hers for a second more before he dropped his gaze. “For your company, I mean.”
Her cheeks warmed, and as she looked back toward the group, she had the feeling that there was deeper meaning in his words. “And I am glad for yours, Aleksander.”
The sky was light a half hour later, and the camp began to stir, the baby crying first. As Ruth pulled him to her breast, she jostled the girls, who both awoke muttering remnants of their dreams. Rosalia was awake next, then Oscher and Bina. Yona watched in silence as they all yawned and stretched, standing and wandering to the edge of the clearing, some of them taking swigs from the canteens they had filled last night, others taking turns relieving themselves in the privacy of the shadows beyond the perimeter.
By the time the sun had crested the trees, Rosalia was on guard, Aleksander had taken Moshe and Leon with him to show them how to use the gill net in the stream they’d passed the night before, the girls were cheerfully gathering berries with their mother, and Yona was teaching Sulia, Miriam, and Luba how to gather the pink Saponaria flowers that bloomed in the summer on hillsides, and how to crush the roots with small stones and mix in a bit of water to make a basic soap.
“Shouldn’t we be doing something more useful?” Sulia asked, loudly enough for her voice to carry to the others, as she bent beside Yona to yank a handful of blooms from the earth. “This feels unnecessary.”
Miriam and Luba glanced at her, but they didn’t say anything. Yona could feel her chest constricting the way it sometimes did when she knew a predator had picked up her scent. “Without soap, you will have disease and lice,” Yona replied. “We’re fortunate that it is summer now, but by autumn, these plants will wilt. Before then, I’ll teach you to make soap from hardwood ash and animal fat.”
Sulia made a small noise in the back of her throat, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Leib said you are very good at catching fish, Yona,” Miriam said after a while. She had moved beside Yona, her skirt lifted in the front to create a basket for the hundreds of flowers she had gathered. She was quiet, and a hard worker, which Yona respected. Sulia and Luba had moved farther down the hillside and were chatting with each other.
“I have been fishing all my life,” Yona replied. “Your son, he has good instincts. He will be a fine fisherman once he learns, and a good hunter, too.”
“This wasn’t the life I wanted for him,” Miriam said after a long silence. “When children are small, mothers envision all the things they will do one day, the people they will become. Never did I think, when Leib was a boy, that he would be all I had left. Never did I think that my dreams for him would narrow so. Now I dream only of seeing him survive. To imagine more feels decadent.” She paused and added, “It feels impossible.”
Yona blinked a few times so Miriam could not see the tears in her eyes. She didn’t know what to say, so she murmured, “I’m very sorry. For everything that has happened to you.”
“It must be God’s plan, though, yes? It is just that I cannot understand it.”
“I don’t understand it, either,” Yona said, and she felt a stab of guilt. One must never question God, Jerusza had always told her. It is our job on earth only to seek to understand him, never to doubt his will. But this was madness, and Yona felt like the truth of it all was just beyond her grasp.
Miriam didn’t reply, and after a moment, she returned to gathering flowers.
“How did you and Leib escape from the ghetto?” Yona asked a few minutes later.
Miriam sighed again and straightened, her eyes damp. “Leib is young, strong. That meant the Germans used him for work, for building things. One day they marched many of the other men from the ghetto out into a clearing. They made them dig a trench. And then they shot them all.” She trembled as she drew a breath. “My husband was among those murdered. But Leib, he survived—Aleksander, too—because he was part of the work detail, and the Germans needed them. But we were no longer blind after that. We knew that it would be only a matter of time until they murdered us, too. And so Leib and Aleksander—whom we knew from our village—began to talk about escape.