She woke to the sound of movement. Opening her eyes she could see figures flickering in the faint pre-dawn light. One of the partisans was kicking over the smouldering embers of the fire, while others were pulling down the shelters from the trees. Yael sat up, rubbing her eyes. It was a cold morning. Her bones were stiff and her muscles ached when she moved.
“What is it?” she asked when Anna came by, close to where she had been sleeping.
Anna’s pretty face was creased with sleep and concern. “We have to move,” she said shortly, “the Nazis are moving closer. There’s a platoon just a few miles down the road. Maksim has sent scouts forward to find somewhere safer.” Anna scuttled away, gathering the disparate tribe together, gently shaking awake the elderly, taking care that the store was packed safely and entrusted to a couple of the young partisan soldiers.
By the time the sun had begun to rise they were moving, a long, silent column pushing through the deep undergrowth of the forest. A small group of the partisans stayed back and covered over the evidence of their camp. The traces of the fire were buried and leaves scattered. They took the bloody carcass of a buck that had been killed some days previously and dragged it back and forth, pulling it away in the opposite direction to that taken by the column.
“If the Germans have dogs there is no chance they would not pick up scent of us. Hopefully the smell of the buck will excite them, and it’s that trail they will follow,” Anna explained.
They walked for the rest of the morning, making quick progress, despite the thick undergrowth that clotted the heart of the deep forest. As they walked Yael glanced back over her shoulder, as Aleksei’s farm became further and further away.
“The Germans are still afraid of the forests,” another partisan explained to Yael. “They venture this deep only if they have to. The woods still belong to the partisan groups and they know it.”
By midday they had come to the edge of a lake. The water shimmered, reflecting the dull sunlight. They stopped for a while, the partisans making sure the crowd kept in the shade of the forest, in case planes should pass over.
The lake was in the hollow of a valley. The hills rose around it steeply, heavily wooded. A bird cried. The children shuffled and moaned. The quietness was profound. A large shape skimmed the tops of the trees and swooped down to the side of the lake. The stork settled in the shallows, the water rippling out from its thin legs. It stood motionless as Yael gazed down at it. Its head turned and it seemed to stare up the grass bank to where she was seated. Yael shivered.
A young partisan rose from the group and cocked his rifle. Yael glanced up, as he raised the gun to his shoulder.
“No!”
Maksim stood. He reached out and pushed down the barrel of the rifle. The young partisan frowned.
“The Germans are a long way off now, they will not hear.”
“It’s not that,” Maksim explained. “There’s no purpose in killing the stork, it’s treyf. Forbidden.”
The young partisan laughed. “Treyf? And pigs are acceptable?”
Maksim shook his head. He turned away and pulling out a packet of cigarettes from his pocket extracted one. He took his time lighting it. The smoke dissipated slowly in the clear still air.
“The stork is a tsádik,” Maksim said seriously. “In Hebrew its name is Chasidah, deriving from the word chesed meaning kindness.”
He paused again to take another drag of his cigarette. Yael gazed up at him. His voice was intense, impassioned, and his eyes glittered with energy, though every movement of his body seemed slow and considered, as if he fought to control the vigour of his being.
“If it is such a tsádik, then why is it forbidden to eat it?” another of the partisans asked. “If its essence is clean and good, surely it should be good to eat?”
“That I don’t know,” Maksim said, “but Rashi claimed its name came from the fact that it was kind to its neighbours. It’s common knowledge that the stork is the most caring of birds with its young.”
“Listen to him,” one of the older partisans laughed, “our very own forest rebbe!” But the laughter was kind, and even Maksim himself smiled.
Later, Maksim stood by the lake’s edge, smoking another cigarette. Seeing him there on his own, Yael wandered down to join him.
“Anna was telling me about you,” she said, eying him.
He glanced sideways at her, but said nothing.
“There wasn’t much she could tell,” Yael conceded, seeing his look. “She said you were a very private person.”
“Anna talks too much,” he said, but not unkindly. “If I told her anything the whole world would know within a few minutes.”
He tossed the cigarette down in the shallows of the water and for a few moments watched as it floated on the surface, its tip sizzling. “And you…” he paused and turned to look at her fully. She looked down at her feet. “Little Anna does not seem to have found out too much about you either.”
Yael turned towards the water. The sunlight danced lightly across its silky surface. Maksim seemed about to say something else. His lips opened, but then he seemed to think better of it. He ran his hand through his hair and for moments they stood in silence on the edge of the lake, listening to the sound of the water’s gentle lapping, to the murmur of voices from behind them in the forest.
“Do you think we will get through this?” Yael asked, glancing up into his dark features.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said simply. “We will.” He reached out and touched her hair. “We will.”
They continued walking in the afternoon, working their way back into the forest. At one point they had to traverse a field. Scouts went out ahead and positioned themselves in various places, then the group split up and hurried across the field in twos and threes, keeping low, trying to remain inconspicuous.
By evening they had marched about ten miles east, working their way closer to the Russian border. All the time Yael was aware they were heading further and further away from Aleksei’s farm. When they stopped that evening they began erecting their shelters among the low-slung branches of the trees so they were hidden on all sides by brambles and deep grass. Yael stood at the edge of the camp and gazed back through the trees the way they had come.
Rarely did Yael pray, beyond the ritual words offered occasionally on special feasts and holidays, it was not a custom she had been brought up with, but as she stood facing the setting sun, squinting slightly, she asked that God might allow her to make the journey back, that she might find him once again, and the peace that they had enjoyed might be restored. Placing her hand on her belly she muttered, “For the child. For our child.” But this did not stop her sense of the foolishness of it. That in the midst of war, as all around the slaughter continued, God should care about the fate of her love. She imagined her prayer as a small flicker of light rising in the late afternoon air, dissolving in the coppery reds, the violet shadows and the darkening blues of the sky. “A still small voice,” she murmured to herself, remembering the words of her father. “It was not in the thunder nor the lightening, nor in the strong wind, but in the still small voice that God was.”
When she turned back, she noticed Maksim too was stood on the edge of the camp, smoking a cigarette, gazing out through the trees, and she wondered if he was thinking of a love left miles away.
In the partisan unit everybody had their role, even the elders. Some were charged with the task of collecting firewood, keeping the fire burning, some foraged for berries and mushrooms and other edible roots. Others looked after the children, cooked. Some cleaned weapons. There was a tailor who mended clothes and a shoemaker who did his best to keep the unit well shod. Anna was in charge of arranging the domestic duties, whilst Maksim was in overall command of the small partisan unit, and of the soldiers. That night Anna asked Yael to help the women with the children.
There were seven children with the group, ranging in age from four to ten. Esther was the only girl. She was seven years old and wore a red ribbon which was threadbare and greasy from her unwashed hair, but which she insisted on keeping, and treasured, Yael discovered, as if it was the finest silk. While the boys romped, fighting imaginary battles with German troops, Yael sat with Esther in the gathering gloom and combed and plaited the young girl’s hair.
“Tell me a story,” Esther demanded, leaning back against Yael.
For some moments Yael hesitated, trying to think of something that would amuse the girl. She told her then about the great grandmother of the grafas Tiskevicius.
“When I was younger, before the war, the school I went to was small. It was held in the house of the grafas Tiskevicius. Sometimes the old man would come in and interrupt our lessons. He would tell the story about his great-grandmother.”
“Is it a love story?” The girl asked.
“Yes,” Yael smiled. “It’s a love story.”
Esther nodded, satisfied, and leaned back against her.
“Old man Tiskevicius’ great-grandfather was a soldier in Napoleon’s army. He was badly injured in the fighting in Russia and barely made it back as far as Selo before falling ill. He had a fever.”
She stroked the girl’s hair and gazed out into the growing darkness. In her mind’s eye she could see the old man stood by the window of the schoolroom, carefully stuffing his pipe. He smoked an English pipe, the type Sherlock Holmes would smoke in the comic strips.
“He was in the barn. The rest of the soldiers had left, beating their retreat back to France, but he could go no further. His leg was shot to bits. He was burning with fever and hallucinating.
“The men in the village got together and drew lots as to who was going to shoot him.”
“Shoot him? Why?” Esther looked up at her.
“Well, there was a lot of bad feeling about the French army; all the villages they had burned, the food they had stolen. But anyway, none of them wanted to do it, so they figured if they left him he would die anyway. What they didn’t know was that a young girl – the grafas’ great-grandmother – was secretly looking after the young soldier. She was a beauty and strong-headed too. A vixen, the grafas called her. She would creep out at night and bathe his wounds and lay a cool wet cloth across his forehead and take him in her arms and feed him broth.”
“How did he know all this?” Esther asked.
“She was still alive when the grafas was young. She told the story to him herself.”
Yael had never questioned the story at school. She listened to the old man raptly as the other children dozed or flicked things at each other.
“After a week the men went into the barn and found him sitting there, on the top of a haystack smoking a cigarette. There was a commotion. The soldier spoke no Polish and only a few words of German, but not enough to communicate. It was clear from the state of him and from the empty bowl the villagers found at his feet that somebody had been looking after him.
“The grafas’ great-grandmother stood forward, brazen as you like and confessed it had been her that had been feeding and caring for the soldier. Her father picked up a shovel and was advancing on the young girl, but the soldier picked himself up and threw himself between them. He rolled up his sleeves and made it clear that should her father want to fight, he was ready for it.
“The villagers put their heads together for a while and scratched their beards, but there was nothing much they could do about it, so they let him be.”
“Did they get married?”
“Yes, of course. He was a simple man. He never learned more than a handful of Polish words as long as he lived and the grafas’ great-grandmother never learned any French. As far as he could tell they were never able to talk to each other, but they were married for a good sixty years.”
After she had finished, Esther was silent for some time. “I don’t understand,” she said finally, her voice laced with irritation. “How could they be married and not speak to each other?”
“I don’t know,” Yael said quietly. “The grafas never explained.”
“Perhaps they spoke Yiddish,” Esther suggested.
“No,” Yael replied, “they didn’t speak Yiddish.”
“Then it’s a stupid story.”
The grafas’ great-grandparents’ grave was at the back of the churchyard, sheltered from the summer sun by the far-flung bough of an old yew. Yael had gone to see it once and sat before the weathered stone and thought about the story.
‘Can you marry someone if you can’t speak to them?’ She had asked her father later.
‘The question is can you speak to somebody if you’ve married them?’ Her father threw back at her, leaning over the shoe he was repairing, tacks sticking from his mouth, a small hammer tapping them into the sole with light precision.
“Are you married?” the girl asked her later.
Yael hesitated before she answered. “Yes,” she said.
“You don’t sound very sure.”
“I’m not sure where he is,” Yael said softly. “My husband.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you miss him?”
Yael gazed up through the roof of the trees.
“Yes,” she said. “Terribly.”