Aleksei stopped in the doorway. Yael saw the look of fright slither across his face. He took in the clothes and glanced at Yael, a quick, flashing glance that spoke of incomprehension and betrayal.
“Aleksei…” Yael dropped the wooden spoon with which she had been stirring a thick soup. It landed with a clatter on the wooden floorboards.
Eva stepped forward to meet Aleksei on the threshold. Yael was startled at her easy confidence.
“Hello,” she said, with a smile, in slow, well-enunciated Polish, such as one might use to a child.
Aleksei stepped back a pace, but Eva had already taken the box from his arms, and lifted it easily onto the kitchen table. She turned her back on Aleksei, as if he were of no further interest, as if there could be nothing odd in her sudden appearance in his house.
“Look Yael,” she said, delighted, “just look what he has brought, your crazy goy.” She addressed Yael in Yiddish.
Yael hurried to Aleksei and pulled him in, closing the door. She could feel him shaking.
“Her name is Eva,” Yael said softly, guiding him across to the chair and sitting him down, peeling the cold overcoat off him. “We were at school together. I found her on the doorstep last night. She was freezing. She would have died if I had left her out there. I’m sorry about the clothes, I didn’t know.” She found she was gabbling and this was upsetting him more.
Eva looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said smiling, “I didn’t introduce myself… it was just the sight of this food! You don’t know what the sight of sausage means to a young girl these days!” she joked. She held out her thin, clean, elegant hand. Instinctively, almost like a child, Aleksei held out his. He glanced up nervously, as Eva held onto it for a moment. She appraised him coolly, openly, an eyebrow rising ironically. Yael wondered that she could have remained so vivacious.
An old familiar feeling shuddered through Yael, and at once she felt as though she was back at school. She felt with painful clarity her girlish idolisation of Eva, her envy of the older girl’s beauty, her desire for acknowledgement, the bruising knowledge of her insignificance in her presence.
She turned to Eva now, gathering herself. “Those clothes, Eva, I didn’t mean them. They are special. They…”
Aleksei waved his hand, stopping her. Yael felt her heart shift a little. Aleksei stood up. He paused a moment, glancing at both girls, then turned away from the table and went through to the bedroom, where he kicked off his boots and lay on the bed, his back turned to the kitchen door.
“Is he all right?” Eva mouthed. “He looked a bit put out.”
“He’s not used to company,” Yael whispered.
She boiled some water and made some sweet tea and took it through to Aleksei, but he did not turn to her when she settled down on the edge of the bed. When she laid a hand on his shoulder, he shrugged her off. His eyes were closed firmly and he would not open them. For some time Yael sat beside him, stroking his arm softly. From the kitchen she could hear sounds of Eva bustling around, stirring the soup and then brushing the floor.
“You shouldn’t,” Yael said, coming through into the kitchen. “You need to rest, to get your strength back.”
“I feel fine,” Eva grinned.
Later that evening Yael made up a bed on the floor in the kitchen and she and Eva settled down there. Glancing through the doorway into the bedroom, she longed to be by Aleksei’s side, to feel him by her, to wrap her arms around his body and fall asleep against him, but she felt she could not do this in front of Eva. Eva’s presence had unsettled everything and she could not help but feel a sharp sense of resentment.
“It was all so sudden,” Eva murmured in the darkness as they lay side by side on the kitchen floor. “We were all convinced we were going to Plotsk, that the Germans were simply removing us from the battlefront. There was some talk of ghettos, that we were being taken to work camps, like those in Germany. Some of the men had spoken of making a break for it, of trying to overpower the guards, but then other’s argued it would be dangerous. Far better to wait until we were in Plotsk, and then see what the situation was. Think of the older ones, somebody said, they won’t be able to escape into the forests. And the little ones, somebody else said.
“When we were a few kilometres outside Selo they stopped the column. Even then there was no hint of what was to come. We were directed off the road. Some of the men began to get restless. Michael Leizer and some others started shouting. One boy, one of the Lieberwitzes I think, made a break for the forest. They shot him. That was when we began to get scared.
“I held my mother’s hand. She kept whispering, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right, there’s nothing to worry about.’ She couldn’t stop. Even when we were down in the bottom of that god-awful pit and they were digging the holes, throwing the spades at us, she kept on and on.
“I can’t even remember what I was thinking. We’re going to die, I think. Just that, over and over again, we’re going to die, while my mother kept saying, ‘It’s going to be all right, don’t worry.’ Even when they started shooting. Even after the shooting had started and people were falling down all around us, she stood there, her hand crushing mine, whispering, ‘It’s going to be fine, don’t worry, my love, it’s going to be all right.’
“Then I was down on the floor. There were bodies on top of me. I didn’t know if I had been shot. I lay there as the bodies crushed me. I was soaking wet and I didn’t realise it was blood – that I was soaked from head to toe in blood. I lay there with my eyes squeezed tight.
“Then the shooting stopped. For some time it was quiet. Totally silent. And then the breeze picked up in the tops of the trees and I heard the sound of birds again and some men muttering. I didn’t move. Not a muscle. I lay there, trying not to breathe. The men were poking around and then I heard a gun shot. Isolated shots. Like they were picking off the last of the dying.
“Later they started to throw earth over the bodies. It got dark. For hours they worked and then I started panicking that I was going to be buried alive and I didn’t know what to do, to start trying to get out or to stay there. The weight on top of me was crushing. It was hard to breathe. The blood had started to dry and it was sticky and my skin itched. I twitched my fingers and found that they were still clasped in Mama’s. I moved them, trying to pass a message to her, trying to see if she was still alive too, but there was nothing. Her hands were cold, but so were mine, and my nerves were crushed and I had pins and needles, so it was hard to tell much.
“It was late, very late, when I started to move. They had stopped shovelling. I hadn’t heard their shouts for quite a while. I lost track of time. The sky was dark though. I inched myself up, struggling to move without making a sound. It seemed like an hour or two before I managed to move more than a foot. The layer of soil was thin over the top of the bodies. As far as I could tell there was nobody around, but I couldn’t be sure the Germans hadn’t left some guards. I slid across the bodies into the undergrowth. There were others there. The forest floor seemed to be alive with Jews slithering along on their bellies like snakes.”
She stopped. Yael glanced at her face. It was expressionless. Eva gazed up at the ceiling, her hands folded across her breasts. She looked calm and collected, but under the sheet Yael could feel her body shaking, a tight, rapid vibration. Yael moved closer and stroked her forehead, smoothing her hair away from her face. Eva turned and smiled at her softly.
“My parents?” Yael whispered. “Did you see anything of them?”
“No, Yael,” Eva whispered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t.”
On that day Yael had arranged to hike with a group of friends to a lake and when they backed out she decided to go on her own. It had been a willful action, but the weather had been fine and bright and she had enjoyed the time alone. It was late afternoon, as she was returning, when she bumped into a farmer the family knew. He had looked at her as though she was a ghost. He took her arm and pulled her to the side of the track and she had been scared.
‘Go!’ he had whispered hoarsely at her. ‘They are taking everybody.’
It had meant nothing to her. She had shrugged him off, pulling her arm away. She hurried back along the path through the trees, towards the town.
When she joined the main road it was quiet. The sun was beginning to fall. By the side of the road was a suitcase. It had been dropped and the clasps had come undone and the clothes spilled out on the verge; a cream blouse, women’s underwear. A darkness stirred inside her. Further down there was another bundle. A dog was nosing at it and each time it moved a dark cloud would rise into the air above.
She recognised the woman. It was Abigail, the baker’s wife. She had a large hole where one of her eyes had been. Flies buzzed. Her whole face was crawling. Yael bent over and retched. The sound of an engine startled her. Turning around she saw an army truck driving out from the woods and down the road in her direction. Instinctively she ducked into the darkness of the trees and watched as it passed. In the back the men were drinking; their faces were hard and dark and their eyes stared blankly. One of the men cracked a joke and the others laughed mirthlessly.
It was the next day that she had run into Rivka in the forest.
After that, everything had changed.