“I feel the same,” Yona replied. “About all of you.”
He tilted his head to study her. “This must be difficult for you. You are accustomed to being alone.”
Yona nodded, and there was more quiet between them as the snow crunched beneath the soles of their boots. She was carrying a large willow basket on her back, one that she would use to catch the fish and transport them home, and it made her feel a bit as if she had wings. She looked back and slowed her pace slightly to allow Oscher, who looked like he was struggling, to keep up. She felt a surge of concern for him. Had it been a mistake to allow him to come? Had she put him in danger? Then again, surely it would have been worse to leave him behind feeling useless.
“It is the opposite for me,” Leon said after a while, resuming their conversation. Around them, the snow continued to drift down gently through skeletal trees that had stood guard over the forest for hundreds of years. The world was silent, still, peaceful. “I am accustomed to being with people—with family, with friends, with shopkeepers, with the rabbi, with my neighbors. Here, I feel very isolated.”
Yona tried to understand this. “Does it not help to share a shelter with Moshe, Rosalia, Ruth, and the children?”
Leon sighed. “It has been nice to have the children around. They don’t know enough of the world to truly understand what is happening, which lets us pretend for a moment that we aren’t running for our lives, living underground like rabbits. But Pessia often wakes up with nightmares, and I wonder at the demons that lurk in the dreams of someone so young. The others have been a comfort, certainly, but in a way, being together just amplifies our loneliness. They have become like my family, but they aren’t really my family, are they? My real family is dead, all of them, and to feel others breathing around me at night is to be reminded of the breath that is no longer there, that will never be there.” He sighed again and looked away. “I’m afraid that the longer we spend beneath ground together, the further away my old life feels. And I’m not ready yet to let that life go.”
It was the most Yona had ever heard Leon say, and the stark words made her heart ache. “I don’t think you have to let go of your old life to have a new one,” she said after a while.
His smile was sad. “But of course we do. Are you the same person you were before you decided to join us? I don’t think you are. We have to evolve, all of us, or we wither, but it also means that we spin further away from the past each day. And, Yona, I liked my past. I miss it terribly, the life I’d built, the people I loved.”
“I’m sorry, Leon.” The words were woefully inadequate.
“It isn’t your fault, of course,” Leon said, but what if he was wrong? What if her German blood made her culpable? It was something she had been thinking a lot about lately. If Jewish blood made one Jewish, what did her German blood make her? If the legacy of miracles was part of one’s birthright, was the legacy of sins, too? “As I said,” he added, unaware of the storm sweeping through her, “we are grateful for you.”
They reached the marshy streambed in an hour, and it was, as Yona had said, frozen solid across the surface, tufts of dried grass punctuating the ice. She beckoned the others closer, and Oscher, breathing hard, gathered a pile of leaves and sat on them, wincing as he reached for his leg, rubbing it and muttering to himself.
“Are you all right?” Yona asked gently.
“Oh yes, fine, fine,” Oscher said hastily, but his face was flushed, and his breathing still hadn’t returned to normal. As Leon bent to put a hand on his shoulder, Moshe and Yona exchanged concerned looks. “Go on, Yona,” Oscher added after a few seconds. “I’m all right, really I am.”
Yona hesitated before nodding, pulling the willow baskets from her back, and bending to the ice. Soon Oscher would catch his breath, and then he’d be embarrassed by her concern. Better to focus on the fish. “The secret to catching mud loaches in the winter is simple,” she began. “You see, there’s little oxygen under the surface when it’s frozen solid, and the fish are desperate for more. When we cut a hole in the ice, even a small one, they’ll come right to us.”
As the men watched, she used her axe to chisel out a hole in the slick surface five inches in diameter. They all bent to look, and Oscher, whose breathing was finally growing steadier, frowned. “But nothing is happening,” he said.
“Wait,” she said. She set one of the baskets upright and opened a small latch in the bottom, fitting it perfectly over the hole. Then she stood and beckoned to the men. “Now look.”