By the fire, warming her hands, the partisan group milling around her noisily, Yael found she was shaking. It was not that she had feared being killed, she thought, as she crouched down watching the uncontrollable dance of her fingers before her, it was fear that she was able to kill. That she should desire it. That she had never felt so powerful, so one with the world, as she had felt with the rifle aimed at the unknowing German soldier.
More than anything then, she wished to be back in the farmhouse with Aleksei. She longed with an aching painfulness for the quietness of his company, the silent sense of him beside her. With her.
“How are you feeling?” Maksim asked, squatting down next to the fire. She glanced up at his face. It was closed, blank, with no evidence of the boisterous joy of the others.
“I’m fine,” she said, pulling her eyes from his fixed gaze.
She felt his fingers on her back, tracing a gentle line down her spine that made her skin tingle.
“You did good,” he whispered.
Yael nodded. She did not look up as he shifted and rose to his feet. He stood for a few moments beside her as if he wished to say something further. He cleared his throat and it reminded her of Aleksei. She picked up a twig and poked it into the flames, watching it flare. He turned and walked away. Yael let out her breath in a long slow exhalation.
Some time later Anna joined her by the fire and talked and talked in a high, excited pitch of which Yael caught barely a word. Maksim had taken up his position again at the edge of the camp, smoking another of his cigarettes. How lonely he looked, she thought, and how sad.
By late November the winter had begun to close in. They woke frequently to frosts and the older members of the group and the children had begun to suffer. Late one evening a small group of scouts returned with news that they had discovered an old zemlyanka, a hideout in the woods, constructed by some other partisan group which had clearly moved on.
“Can we be sure it’s secure?”
“It seems undisturbed. There are no signs the Germans know of its existence.”
The dugout was fifteen miles to the north, deep in the forest close to the border, wild country, where the Germans remained close to the towns and on the roads. Bears, boar and elk roamed the deep forests, along with hungry wolf packs and partisans of every political persuasion.
An icy, slanting rain fell as the partisan group moved through the woods. The elderly found it difficult moving through the thick mud and Maksim worried continually about the wide trail they were leaving, a clear sign post to any German patrols that might pass through. He left a couple of men behind to try to cover over tracks, by dragging branches across the footprints, but all they could hope for really was that the snow might set in soon and cover it all over for a few months.
The dugout was invisible to the unknowing eye. The scouts themselves admitted they had found it by accident chasing a hare for dinner. Its entrance was hidden beneath the thick tangle of branches of a large fallen fir tree and it was necessary to crawl on hands and knees to the narrow hole in the ground. There were murmurs of protest from some of the elderly.
“It’s like going down into the grave!”
“Think of it more,” Maksim cajoled them gently, “as if you were a rabbit going down into its burrow. The snow will set in soon,” he added. “There is no way we will all survive a winter out in the open.”
The burrow was much larger than the tight entrance suggested. After a few feet it opened out into a passage, which it was possible to walk in, though bent almost double, running down a slight slope for twenty metres. This passage opened out into a large room around the walls of which crude bunks had been erected. The lower bunks were little more than earth mounds, covered with old planks, while the upper ones were constructed from timber cut from the forest. In the centre of the zemlyanka was a small wood-burning stove, its long, rusty pipe rising up through the low roof and out into the woods. There were two or three other pipes that provided access to clean air.
Despite its size the dugout was still cramped when the whole company had pressed down into it. It was dry and warm though, and a relief from the driving rain. Here, as in the previous camp, Anna quickly set up an ordered system, allocating responsibilities to several of the partisans, and to the elder people. Almost immediately work began enlarging the structure. While three of the young partisans dug a new room against the back wall, the others formed a chain and carried the loose earth up and out of the dugout. The earth was carried in sheets two miles west and scattered in various places, so there would be no sign of the work close to the hideaway. Wood was also cut at some distance away and worked into the correct lengths and shapes before being brought back to form the struts and braces and lining for the new room.
Yael worked hard with the others, relishing the physical work. As the weeks passed, she began to really feel the swell of her womb. The baby was growing. It developed as the new centre of her gravity, as though this baby growing inside her was the core of her being, the source of her strength and balance. In the evening she lay in her bunk, on her back, stroking the barely perceptible bulge, focusing her energy on it, speaking to it, silently, willing it to be strong.
By December the rain had turned to ice, sharp pellets that stung the skin as the wind whipped against the partisans. Whilst most of the group had retreated into the dugout, like animals hibernating for the winter, Yael went out with the partisans. She no longer desired to take the rifle, preferring to act as medic. She had learned some nursing skills from Meyer, and Anna taught her how to make a splint and to tear up a shirt for bandaging.
They continued to make raids on villages, stationing themselves on each of the main roads and at various points between the houses, alert and ready to run. They would always ask politely first, knocking on the door of the shopkeeper, introducing themselves as partisans struggling for the liberation of Poland. It was evident from their appearance, though, that they were Jews and first visits were rarely met with sympathy. It was only when the mood turned ugly that the rifles appeared. Things always turned politer then. Maksim would be addressed as Pan and the shopkeeper and his neighbour would assure them they sympathised with the partisans.
Yael felt a degree of sympathy for the villagers, who would be in trouble whatever their reaction. If the Germans discovered they were feeding Jews they would execute the men in the village. When, during one raid, the shopkeeper abused Maksim, telling him the Germans were right to have dealt with them so harshly, the partisans took him out and stood him against the back wall of his shop and shot him.
Standing by, Yael was horrified. When Maksim turned away from the crumpled body, his eyes caught hers, and she saw the pain in them and a dark, terrible emptiness. He brushed past her, but she caught his arm. For a moment he paused and she heard his heavy breathing. She pressed her forehead against his shoulder, and stroked the rough stubble on his chin. Trying to offer some comfort, no matter how small. The war was leading them all further and further away from themselves.
“You shouldn’t come out with us,” he said to her that evening. They were on sentry duty, and walked continually back and forth to keep warm. “You need to take care of yourself.” He paused, and turning, laid a hand gently on her stomach. Yael felt her heart flutter. She looked away embarrassed.
“My mother is dead, my father is dead. I have no one left. What does it matter what happens now? What is there left?”
“Our children,” he whispered passionately, his face close to hers. “Our future.”
“What future is possible?” she said urgently, taking hold of his arms, and looking at him in the dim light of the moon. “They have ripped our world apart. It no longer exists. What can we do when this all finishes? If this ever finishes? We cannot go back to the shtetl. It’s gone. It’s all gone.”
Maksim opened his mouth to answer, but then after a few moments just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know how to answer that. All I know is that we must survive. We must not let them win.”
“Exactly!” Yael said, her voice rich with triumph. “That is all that is left for us. To fight to make sure they do not win. There is no longer any meaning to our lives beyond that.”
Maksim stepped back from her, shaking his head. He took out a cigarette and then offered Yael one. She hesitated a moment, then reached out and took one. She had never smoked a cigarette before and did not even know how to hold it. It felt surprisingly light and insubstantial in her fingers. She imitated the way she had seen Eva holding the cigarette, and placed it delicately between her lips. Maksim, watching her, smiled.
“Your first?”
Yael nodded, but gave him a look that challenged him to make fun of her. He flicked the flint of his lighter and the dancing flame illuminated his face. He held it to the end of her cigarette.
“Inhale gently,” he told her.
She did as he said and got a throat full of the smoke. It stung her, the bitter, acrid taste filling her mouth and making her choke. Taking it out she coughed, then cursed herself for looking a fool. Maksim didn’t laugh though. He lit his own and inhaled the smoke deeply, then breathed it out in a long, slow exhalation.
“Will you go back Russia,” Yael asked, “when all this is finished, if ever it is?”
“Back into Stalin’s arms?” he chuckled. “To them we are the bezrodnye. Rootless. However much we may try, however many centuries we may live there, no matter that our writers should enrich their language, our composers their musical tradition, our children’s blood feed the dark soil of the fatherland, we shall never belong in their eyes.”
He shrugged and then looked at her. For some moments he held her gaze. She was taken aback by the intimacy of the moment.
“I was arrested before the war,” he said. “Do you know what my crime was? Translating and publishing the work of decadent writers. I was accused of ‘cosmopolitanism’ – indifference to the fatherland and to the national tradition and to the national culture.”
He shook his head and looked away. She saw the muscles tighten his jaw. Sensing there was more he was holding back from telling her, she reached out and touched his arm.
“What happened?”
“There was…” he looked at her. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me.”
“Why? What is the good? It does nothing to linger over these things now.”
“Sometimes that’s all I feel we can do, hang onto these bitter memories, let them feed our hatred, how else can we go out and do what we did today?”
He hesitated. “There was a young woman I knew, before the war.”
Yael nodded, but Maksim did not want to carry on.
“I was in love,” was all he would say and shook his head, as if dispelling the thought. A clear image played across Yael’s mind of Maksim stepping down from a train and of a woman running forward to greet him, falling into his arms. A silly romantic picture. Irrationally it filled her with sadness.
“She was very lucky,” Yael whispered and again regretted speaking her thoughts.
Maksim stepped forward a pace. He lifted her chin. Yael closed her eyes; she felt his face close to hers. His lips were soft and she felt a pulse of excitement, of happiness, swell through her, as she responded to his kiss. And then she pulled away. Aleksei’s face filling her mind. In the dim light Maksim looked at her.
“The father…” she said. “The father of my child, he isn’t dead.”
Maksim continued to look at her. He was stood no more than a pace away. Yael felt a desperate urge to reach out and touch him. To have him take her face in his hands again and kiss her.
“The father?” he said. “What happened to him?”
Yael shook her head. “He’s alive still,” was all she could say.
“Do you know where?”
Yael nodded. “Towards Selo.”
Maksim nodded. He stepped back. Yael felt a small wrench in her heart. I’m lonely, she wanted to say. Hold me, she wanted to scream. She wanted to feel his arms around her. To smell his skin close against hers. She wanted to feel the closeness of another human being, the comfort of an embrace.
“It’s late,” he said. “You should get some sleep.”
She heard the sound of footsteps in the brush behind her. Anna emerged into the clearing, rifle slung across her shoulder.
“Yes,” Yael whispered, and ducked back through the branches of the trees, avoiding the look Anna shot at her.