He had gone before she registered who it was. The image of an arm snaking in through the doorway lingered in her mind. The rustle of hens settled slowly in her ears. She sat up sharply, narrowly avoiding banging her head against a shelf. On her hands and knees she pressed her face to the crack beside the door through which light flooded.
Aleksei walked up the path towards the house. In his hands he carried eggs. He paused at the threshold and looked up into the sky, as if he had perhaps heard something. Yael saw his chest expand as he inhaled deeply. He glanced around and for a moment his eyes rested upon the hencoop and she wondered if he had seen her. He turned then and disappeared into the darkness.
Yael sat back and rested her head against the wooden wall. Her stomach was tight with hunger. Her throat burned. She needed a drink. Twice she steeled herself to crawl out through the low narrow door and go up to the farmhouse, but found at the last moment she could not.
Later she heard him moving around at the back of the house. She pressed her eye against the crack and watched as he split logs.
The mute looked as though he was in his twenties. He had dark, beautiful hair that fell against his bare shoulders and reminded her, for some reason, of her old school friend Eva’s. The day was crisp and fresh, the sky cloudless. The sun was distant though, and in the shadows it was cold. The mute worked up a sweat chopping the logs and storing them neatly against the side of the house. On the floor, by the side of the stacked logs, lay a tarpaulin, and when he had finished he pulled it across them.
For some minutes he stood outside the back of his house, leaning against the winter fuel. He wiped his chest with the shirt he had been wearing and draped it around his shoulders. From his back pocket he took out a cigarette packet and extracted one and lit it. He surveyed the short field that stretched down from the back of the house. His eyes rested again on the hencoop and Yael drew back from the slit in the wall and sat trembling on her haunches.
It was dark when finally she emerged. A light burned faintly in a downstairs window of the house. She crawled from the hencoop to the well and lowered the bucket down into the darkness. She struggled more than she had the previous night when she tried to pull it back up full. Her head throbbed and she was faint with hunger.
As soon as the sun had set, it began to grow cold and she shivered as she dipped her head to sip from the bucket. The water revived her a little. She sat with her back to the brick wall. Her head spun. Touching her forehead she found that it was hot, despite the coldness of the night. The fear she would develop the fever that had killed Rivka forced her to her feet.
Unsteadily she walked towards the farmhouse. She stepped carefully, avoiding making a noise that would raise attention. The window of the kitchen was so thick with dust, and the light that illuminated the room so faint, she had to wipe it softly in order to see inside.
He was seated at a large table in the centre of the room. He had his back to the window and was bent forward motionless. On the table before him stood a candle. Its flame flickered slightly. At his elbow a plate lay, with the leftovers of his supper: shards of an eggshell and the remains of a thick crust.
He sat in complete stillness. It was only after a few minutes, when he moved, that Yael saw he had been reading.
He stood and carried the plate towards the window. Yael dodged back. She heard his feet on the floorboards. The door creaked. She pressed herself tight against the wall. He appeared in the doorway and in his hand he carried his supper plate. He threw the crusts out into the grass and turned back, immediately closing the door behind him.
When Yael stood up, some minutes later, the candle had been extinguished. She peered through the window, but could see nobody. She found the crusts on the grass and folded them into her palm. She found too some of the brittle shards of eggshell. She put one of these against her tongue. The taste of the egg, or perhaps just its scent, flooded her mouth, so that saliva spilt out over her chapped lips.
After drinking some more water from the bucket she crawled back inside the hencoop and settled down in the straw with the bread crusts. Despite the hunger, she forced herself to bite off minute portions, making sure she lost no crumbs, and allowed the hard crust to soften on her tongue, savouring it, or crushing it gently between her teeth, so the full flavour burst out and filled her mouth. Never had bread tasted so good.
Though the crusts by no means satisfied her hunger, she slept better that night. The proximity of the hens, the straw and the shelter of the coop kept her warm. She gave into sleep easily. This time, undisturbed by vivid dreams.
The morning was a cold one and when she peeped out between the slats in the wooden panelling she could see the first thick frost had settled across the grass. A thin column of smoke rose from the chimney of the farmhouse and hung in the sky. It was early, the sun had still not risen and the light was ghostly pale. Yael wrapped her arms around herself. She tried holding one of the hens to keep her warm, but it struggled too much and pecked at her arms and she was forced to let it settle back on its perch. Returning the hen, she found an egg. Touching it, she felt its warmth. Glancing out through the slats once more, she saw no movement. A solitary crow rested on the roof tiles.
Settling back on the straw in the corner, she cradled the egg in the palm of her hand. Its shell was smooth. She held it to her lips, feeling its faint warmth, inhaling the scent. Then very carefully she tapped the full rounded end against the corner of one of the shelves. She tapped it very delicately until the shell showed the first signs of a hairline crack, then with the tips of her fingernails, she eased off a small chip of shell and sucked out the egg.
It was not the first time that she had done this. Her brother Josef had shown her how to suck an egg, piercing it with one of the tacks their father used for mending shoes, when she was no more than four. They had emptied five eggs between them, from her mother’s pantry, replacing each one seemingly intact. When their mother had discovered what had happened she had flown into a rage. Yael had watched as their father reluctantly punished Josef. Their mother did not suspect Yael had been involved and Josef did not breathe a word. She went to him afterwards as he lay smarting on his bed, but he simply turned his head so she would not see he had been crying.
The thought of it now hurt her more than was rational. She pictured the way he looked at her as he shared the illicit meal, the joy she had felt from that beautiful complicity. And how useless and rejected she had felt as he turned his tear-stained face from her. The way he had shuffled away as she tried to touch his hair the way her father did when she was hurt.
Crouching down, she eased herself out of the hencoop before Aleksei rose and was in the woods when he emerged from the house and trudged down to collect his eggs.
In the woods she found some late berries, shrivelled and touched by frost. She ate them greedily, savouring each one on her tongue for as long as she could, to eke out the moment of pleasure.
Turning back to the farm, she crawled around to the vegetable patch and broke off the leaves from some cabbage, which were bitter and almost inedible. In a compost heap she found the fresh scattered bones of a cooked chicken, and the peel of some potatoes. She ate the peel and gnawed on the bones, the fat and blood lubricating her lips and dripping down her chin.
The beggar’s breakfast filled her with enough courage to determine to approach the mute. Still the hours passed and she watched him from among the trees as he chopped more wood and then climbed up onto the roof of the house and nailed into place some loose tiles.
The sun was falling in the late afternoon when he finally got down and Yael stood up, unsteadily. She breathed in deeply and stepped forward. He did not see her until she was almost at the bottom of the path, thirty yards away. He looked up startled. Yael hesitated. She stumbled, tripping over her own feet and fell to her knees. It was only then the mute seemed to recognise her. She saw the look pass over his face.
She got up and approached him. He stood as if rooted to the spot, in his hand the hammer and tacks he had been using to repair the roof for winter. She stopped some yards from him. Her hands were clasped together tightly to stop them from shaking. For some moments they stood in silence before each other. A rooster bellowed from the roof of the hencoop and in the distance Yael heard a dog barking. She searched for the right thing to say.
“I have nowhere to go,” she said finally, simply. She could feel his eyes upon her. She could not raise her own. Each time she tried to do so, it was as though the sight of him blinded her.
He did not answer. Yael could hear the sound of his breathing, heavy, jagged intakes of breath. A ripple of fear ran across her skin, raising goose pimples. She wiped her face nervously with the back of her hand and noticed the blood and grease from the chicken smudged across it.
“Shelter me,” she pleaded, her voice small and reticent.
She heard him move. Glancing up she saw he was sweating. He stepped from one foot to the other, the hammer trembling in his hand.
“Please,” she whispered in Polish. She moved a little closer to him, so close she could smell him. He smelled warm, earthy, like an animal. Not unpleasant.
He muttered something. When she looked up again, he was shaking his head. The hammer slipped from his grasp and fell to the earth. A hard, guttural hiss escaped from his throat. He shook his head hard. Turning, he dashed into the house. For a moment Yael stood startled. As she was considering moving towards the doorway, though, he re-emerged. In his hand he held a piece of folded paper.
He thrust the sheet at her. It was crinkled and smudged and at first she could not decipher the writing. The top part she found was written in German, in an ornate gothic script. Attention! it read. She could not understand the rest, picking out only the word Juden.
The mute’s finger stabbed at the lower half of the page. Yael folded the paper down and found the text had been translated into Polish. It was badly translated and the typeset used to print it was crude and careless. She read it swiftly. Her heart quickened and she felt her face flush. The Jews were filthy vermin, it stated simply, and anybody found guilty of harbouring them, feeding them or in any way aiding them would be summarily executed.
She glanced up at Aleksei. His face was creased with worry. Fear. His hand shook as he took back the sheet of paper. He pointed to the word Juden and then at Yael. He then ran his finger across his throat and made a strange, strangulated noise. The action did not scare Yael. She pitied him and the position she had put him in. He seemed, as he stood before her in silent, wordless supplication, no more than a boy. A small, frightened child.
“Nobody would know,” she whispered. Then, emboldened, “I would hide. I wouldn’t go out.”
His eyes widened. He shook his head vigorously.
“Please,” she pleaded.
This seemed to infuriate him. He stabbed at the paper, his finger jabbing so hard it ripped through the sheet. He made several cutting motions at his throat again. He reached out and pushed her away. His touch was not aggressive, but it was firm and clear in its intent. Yael stumbled. She fell to her knees before him and raised her hands.
“I beg…”
The mute reached down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her up roughly and propelled her along the path before him. Yael tried to twist out of his grip, to turn and talk to him, but he held her too tightly.
He marched her up off the farm and pushed her out into the dirt road. When she turned to him he seemed for a moment to be at a loss as to what to do, but reaching down he picked up a stick from the side of the road and brandished it at her. His lips worked and she heard strange noises working their way up from his chest. She was not sure whether they were coughs, or a faltering roar. She was half caught between her fear of him and pity for him in his fear.
At last she withdrew. She stumbled across the road and fell down at the edge of the woods. For some minutes they faced each other on opposite sides of the road. Tears slid down her filthy face. He, on the other side, waved his stick, muttering and barking like a frightened dog.
He turned and walked slowly down the path towards his house. Occasionally he stopped to check she was not following him. Each time he raised his stick and shook it. When at last he disappeared inside the house, Yael knew he was watching from behind the dark glass.