“Or perhaps you’re listening to the wrong person,” he said softly. “Don’t forget to listen to yourself, Yona. No one knows what’s in your heart but you.” He walked away before she could say anything else.
Yona barely slept that night, worried about the day ahead and bothered by both Aleksander’s and Zus’s words. The group was on the move just after dawn the next morning. The traces of them in the forest—their zemliankas and the ground they had lived on, and under, for months—were too significant to erase, so Yona could only pray that the group was long gone by the time a German search dog found their camp.
She led them in a circuitous route, around thick underbrush, over patches of ice, even through a half-frozen swamp, which soaked their boots and made their teeth chatter. They would need to warm their feet and dry their clothing by the fire wherever they settled that night, but it was worth the risk, for neither man nor beast could follow their trail through this. She took them in directions that made no sense, trying to think of the choices trackers would make and leading them the opposite way. Finally, just before the light slipped from the early spring sky, she led the group into a small clearing surrounded by soaring pines, which would make a good camp for the night.
They were all exhausted; they’d been lulled into a false sense of security by their long winter slumber, and none were accustomed to moving the way they had that day. Their pace had been slow, largely because of Oscher and the children, but Yona knew that they had to keep moving, that they couldn’t afford to do any less. The nightmares were always there now when she closed her eyes, shadowy soldiers lurking at the edges of her conscious thought. Danger was still too near.
They moved every two days, hunting and gathering on the days they remained in place, mending clothes, treating harsh blisters earned from all the walking, warming their frozen feet and hands by the fire at night, when it was too dark for the smoke to give them away. They were tired in a way they hadn’t been during the long winter, but they were much more well nourished, now that the earth had returned to giving up her gifts. Day by day, the forest floor grew more abundant with bulbous porcini mushrooms, the bushes with bilberries, the streams with spawning fish. Animals emerged, shaking off the winter, and walked into the rudimentary neck snares that Zus’s three cousins—Israel, George, and Wenzel—had learned to set, and most nights, the whole group had plenty to eat.
In April, they celebrated Passover with matzoh made from flour taken from a village, and though Ruth and Luba burned the unleavened bread in the makeshift mud-brick oven Yona had helped them make, it was a comfort to all of them to return to a familiar tradition. Leah, Pessia, and Chaim’s two sons asked the “Mah Nishtanah,” the four questions about the Passover celebration, and Leon and Oscher took turns telling the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. It was a night of peace that made Yona feel like a part of a family, and that made them all feel like survival might just be possible after all.
But late May brought a lice infestation in their camp, which made Yona’s blood run cold. The tiny bugs were a nuisance—they made everyone’s skin itchy and dry—but much more important, they were a danger. They often carried typhus, and if one among the group contracted the disease, they would all be exposed. Some would die. Yona knew they had to do something—and quickly.
“We need mercury,” she said softly one morning, pulling Aleksander and Zus aside as the rest of the group gathered around a small fire. It was dangerous to create smoke in daylight, but they needed to burn the lice, so they had no choice. They picked the tiny bugs from each other’s bodies, each other’s hair, even their eyebrows and lashes, and flicked them into the flames. Yona could see Ruth crying as she picked at Daniel’s curls.
“Mercury?” Zus asked, holding her gaze.
“You mean from a pharmacy?” Aleksander asked. “But that will be dangerous, Yona.”
Yona took a deep breath. “I know. But I think it’s the only way.”
The three of them looked at each other for a moment. One of them would need to venture into civilization, to steal something in a dangerous mission, and disappear back into the woods without a trace. But they had tried all the other things Yona knew how to do: holding their belongings over the flames, washing their clothes in boiling water, even wiping their bodies with their own urine in hopes that the acid would kill the lice. But the lice were stubborn, cheerfully embedding themselves in pores to wait out the various assaults, jumping from host to host and multiplying.