Autumn dragged. The leaves turned crisp in the dry weather. There were days when summer reasserted itself, warm bright afternoons when it seemed it would linger forever. And then, suddenly, it was November and cold, a biting edge to the wind. They woke to frosts. The brittle, sharp expiration of winter. The first dry flakes of snow that danced in the wind and settled in corners, like scraps of paper on market day.
As the weather grew worse, the visits from the small bands of partisans grew more frequent. Often it was one of the three men who had first approached them. They were polite and always asked rather than demanding, or stealing, though it would have been easy enough for them to have opened the hencoop and help themselves, or to come in with their rifles slung over their shoulders and take the bread, the hung meat, the jar of milk, the slab of butter as they wished.
To begin with Aleksei dealt with them, briskly, giving them whatever they asked for. But Yael, hungry for news of her brother and anxious about their supplies for the winter, increasingly shooed him away and bargained with the young men herself. She found she was adept at dealing with them, flirting mildly, delighting in having somebody to talk to. She would promise meat if they were able to give her the slightest bit of information about Josef. But by the end of December she had learned little more than she had from that first conversation. Josef had deserted the Red Army and was leading a platoon of partisans in the deep woods in White Russia, or Suvalki. He had developed a reputation as a commander of daring raids and his men were said to be fiercely loyal to him.
“Is it possible to get a message through to him?” Yael begged the young partisan.
The boy shrugged. Sitting at the table in an overcoat at least three times too big for him and in boots he had stolen from a dead German soldier, he looked little more than a boy, his scarlet ears sticking out. He held a steaming cup of broth in his hands and was reluctant to draw his face from the warm steam. Yael noticed the moisture condensing on his chapped lips and caked nostrils.
“There is communication,” he said finally, “between different groups. Attempts to organise us into an army, but nobody can ever decide who is in control.” He shrugged again, as if it was all the same to him.
Yael pushed an envelope across the table. Josef’s name was written neatly on the front of it. The boy looked at it nervously.
“Look-”
“Please.” Yael reached across the table and placed a hand on his sleeve. “It’s important to me.”
Seeing the boy was unconvinced, she got up and crossed to the larder.
“It’s not that I don’t want to help,” the boy mumbled, from inside the cup. “It’s just I don’t see it getting through.”
She placed the smoked sausage in front of him. It was four inches long and two inches in diameter. Its surface crenulated and dark. She took a knife and sliced it thinly. The scent of the meat saturated the air. The boy put down the cup. Wiped at his lips carelessly as the saliva pooled in his mouth. He glanced across at Yael, who nodded.
“Have a taste,” she said.
He picked up the slice of sausage delicately between his finger and thumb and lay it on his tongue. His eyes closed and a look akin to ecstasy spread across his face. It was the kind of look on Aleksei’s face, occasionally, when they made love. For a whole minute, he willed himself not to chew. Dribble spilt from between his lips. Then his jaw moved. Slowly, carefully, he crushed the sausage between his teeth, grinding the flavour from it.
“I haven’t eaten meat for about six months,” he said, when he had finished. “And that was only scraps I peeled from some bones we found discarded.”
“Take it,” she said.
He nodded his thanks, and carefully wrapped the sausage into a filthy handkerchief, putting it in an inside pocket of his coat, as if it were a holy relic entrusted to his care. He picked up the envelope too and folded it neatly and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt, not far from the sausage.
“Thank you,” Yael said.
“There’s little chance…”
For some weeks after the young partisan left, Yael woke each morning hopeful. Often she would linger by the window, gazing out at the thickening clouds, at the slow falling snow, across the deepening drifts towards the woods. The temperature had dropped and the partisans seemed to have moved on, or dug in, because for weeks there were no more visitors to the farm.
Yael pictured her letter passing through hands, one partisan to another, travelling north, through the snow-bound woods, tucked in men’s pockets as they trekked by night, until at last it would reach Josef. She imagined him waking one morning to a shout and stumbling out from the small woodcutter’s cottage where his division of resistance fighters had taken shelter for the winter, to find a cold and exhausted partisan stopped by the watch. He would salute and the young man would take the envelope from his pocket, dog-eared now and pass it over to Josef.
‘A letter?’ Josef would mumble, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, as he always did at the breakfast table when he emerged from bed late, so caked with sleep that Yael wondered sometimes how he made it to the kitchen. And then he would see the writing. He would look up startled.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘It was passed on by a partisan.’
‘What is it Comrade?’ the watch would ask, noting the look on his face.
She could picture Josef turning the letter over, examining it like it was some miracle that had fallen into his hands.
‘It’s from Yael,’ he would whisper. ‘From my sister.’
Aleksei came up and stood behind her, wrapping his arms around her, and she leaned her head against his chest and together they gazed across the field and waited for the partisans who no longer came.
It was late February when Yael heard a soft scrape against the kitchen door. Aleksei had trekked into Selo, attempting to exchange some farming equipment for sugar and butter and bread. They had only a couple of chickens since the confiscation of the pigs. Yael knew he would not be back for a few days.
At first she thought it was an animal scratching around at the door, and fearing it was a wolf, she ensured it was tightly bolted. Standing close behind the door, she listened to the sounds of movement in the snow on the low step outside. Her heart lurched. She was always nervous when Aleksei was away. When she heard the soft knock, she almost cried out.
At first she tried to convince herself the animal had knocked something against the wood, but a few moments later the knock was repeated, a little stronger, a tight rhythmic beat, unmistakably human, almost domestic.
Yael stumbled back to the table and slumped on a stool, her eyes fixed upon the door, her pulse racing. Around the sides of the door, it was possible in places to see the light glinting where it did not fit tightly. Here, now, she saw the flicker of a shadow.
“Please,” a voice said in Polish. Hollow, desperate, like a whisper from beyond the grave.
Yael shrank to her knees and continued to stare at the door. She had almost convinced herself her ears had deceived her, when the unmistakable voice whispered its plea again. Getting up, she shot back the bolts and pulled open the door, her hands trembling as she hurried.