“One day there was a rumor that they would be moving us all to the abandoned castle on the edge of town, a place that was fortified and would be impossible to escape from. Once we were there, they could kill us anytime; there would be no way out. Word spread around the camp that there were Jews meeting in the woods. ‘Get yourself out of the ghetto, and we will find you,’ they said. And so Leib and I made a plan. He would run from his work detail. We knew that it was a risk. When I kissed him goodbye that morning, I thought it was likely I would never see him again. But the Germans were busy that day preparing to shoot another group of Jews in the clearing, and Leib managed to escape. I hid in the ghetto—beneath an outhouse—until they already believed me gone. And then I fled, twelve days later, after they had stopped looking. If Leib had given up on me, I don’t think I would have survived. But he was there in the woods, waiting, a small miracle in the face of so much loss.”
“I’m very sorry about your husband and your other children, Miriam,” Yona said after a while.
Miriam shook her head. “They are free now. And I still have Leib.” But her voice snagged on the last word and became a sob. The silence that followed was an empty space that would never be filled.
* * *
For two more days, the group stayed in the clearing. Both days, Yona took Leib to the stream with the gill net, and together they gathered hundreds of fish. As night fell on the second day, Aleksander started a fire, and Yona showed the group how to smoke-dry fish to preserve them for winter, constructing a tripodlike tented structure from three tall, sturdy branches, lashing them with vines at the top, and using twine woven from grass to hang the fish. She covered the tented branches with bark to keep the smoke in, leaving a small opening at the top, and then she showed Leon and Oscher how to build a fire fueled by broken green alder branches. Once the fire was going, they had to transfer the coals to a hollowed-out spot in the center of the tent, where they would need to tend them until at least the next day to make sure both that they continued to smoke and that they didn’t flame up. It was risky to let smoke rise in daylight, but they were deep enough in the forest that it was unlikely they’d be seen, and the thin plume that rose from a smoking tent was much less obvious than the clouds that billowed from the campfires they lit in the darkness to cook their food. Those could be seen for miles on a clear day, but not in the dark, for the night absorbed the clouds.
At night, Yona slept by herself under a canopy of leaves on the edge of the clearing, far enough from the others so she could watch them. After spending almost her whole life in the forest, her instincts were sharp enough that the slightest foreign noise would awaken her, and though Leib, Aleksander, and Rosalia maintained an armed perimeter patrol, she felt better knowing that she, too, provided a small layer of protection.
By the fourth day, though, Yona was growing uneasy. “We need to move again,” she said to Aleksander, approaching him as he made his early-morning loops around the outskirts of the camp just before sunrise, the rifle propped against his shoulder, his eyes scanning the darkness beyond. She had awoken that morning in a panic she couldn’t name, and she had barely stopped to pull her boots on before rushing outside to find him.
He stopped walking and looked down at her. “Move?”
“I can’t explain it. We’ve been here too long.”
“But it’s only been four days. We have just gotten comfortable. And there’s food here…”
“I know.”
“Why, then?”
“I can feel things sometimes, bad things that are coming.” She glanced up at him and then looked down. “I feel it now. There’s darkness moving in.”
She finally looked up again, and Aleksander studied her face in silence. His jaw, firm and square beneath his beard, flexed a few times, and she could see the cartilage in his neck bobbing as he swallowed. She had the strangest urge to reach out and place her fingers there, to feel his pulse and the rhythm of his breath, so she looked away again before he could read her eyes. “Yona?” he said softly.
She looked back at him. Her heart was still thudding with a drumbeat of danger the way it sometimes did before a raging storm. But there was something else there, too, a heat, an unsettling warmth. “Yes?”
He took a step closer. She felt the frisson between them again, the change in the air, and this time, she didn’t stop her eyes from wandering where they wanted to go. His arms. The taut muscles that ran the length of his neck. The way his broad chest strained against his threadbare shirt. When she looked back at his face, he was watching her closely, and there was something in his gaze that hadn’t been there before. She couldn’t put a name to it, but it stirred something in her belly, something she didn’t know was there.