The traffic on the road into Selo was heavy. Military vehicles competed with farm wagons loaded with returning refugees. The bridge had been blown. Soviet engineers had built a makeshift metal replacement that shuddered and swayed as the traffic passed over it. The air seemed heavy and sullen. Much of the outskirts of the small town lay in ruins. Smoke still rose in some places and everywhere was the scent of burning.
Yael walked across the bridge clasping Chasidah tightly to her. Russian soldiers stared at her with lifeless disinterest. Locals scuttled around with their heads down, avoiding communicating with each other. Their faces were sunken with hunger, their eyes dark with bitterness. The market place was quiet; on one side a few people traded worthless goods off the pavement, on the other, in front of the police station a gallows stood from which two bodies swung slowly in the morning breeze.
Yael caught sight of an old acquaintance, an elderly woman of some wealth for whom her father did much work. The woman’s clothes were tattered and her hair hung in loose greasy curls. Seeing Yael the woman’s mouth fell open. Yael half-raised her hand in greeting, but the woman’s eyes darted away. She turned quickly and shuffled across the broken cobbles, disappearing quickly into the shadows of a side street.
It was not just the old synagogue that had been burned to the ground, the church had suffered much damage too. A fire had gutted the insides and the roof had fallen in. Each of the stained glass windows had been shattered. Every bit of glass had gone, as if someone had systematically gone round and broken every last one.
Though few people lingered in the streets, apart from the Russian soldiers, Yael got the feeling she was being watched. She felt uncomfortable, and tried to ignore the glimmer of panic that was growing inside. She hurried across the square, her head low, avoiding the malevolent sidelong glances thrown her way. One of the vendors sitting on the corner, a man in his twenties Yael did not recognise, had spread out before him a range of items from old shoes, with soles split from their cheap leather uppers to a small seven-branched candelabra of the type found in Jewish homes. Yael paused to examine the trinkets, but the man looked up. His eyes took her in quickly. He let out a low growl, low enough that the soldiers might not hear. Quickly he gathered the stuff together into a threadbare blanket and disappeared.
The streets leading off the square were deserted. Here as elsewhere in the town the houses were in various states of devastation. Some fortunate ones seemed untouched, the paint still bright on the undamaged woodwork, whilst next door, all that stood was the brick chimney, teetering over the blackened rubble. Turning off Pilsudski, she hurried down Blacksmith’s Street. Turning right at the familiar corner she ducked down the alleyway between Eli Koppelman’s house and Michael Leizer, the butcher’s, one-storey cottage.
She felt her heart beating hard as she stepped out onto the back lane, the small rutted road on which her house stood. What had she expected? She wondered, pausing, trying to control her breathing. Chasidah cried in her arms and she realised she had been squeezing her tight.
“This is Máme’s home,” she whispered to the little girl, who opened her eyes. “Where Táte and Máme…” she stopped. Corrected herself. “Zéyde and Bóbe.” Grandfather. Grandmother. “And Josef, uncle Josef lived…” she whispered. Her heart wrenched. “Oh God!” she murmured. The pain felt crushing. The desire to run across the path and fall into her mother’s arms. To hear her father’s quiet voice. To see Josef. To know their home once more. “Oh God!” she cried, tears flowing down her face, dripping onto Chasidah’s cheeks, so that the baby raised a fist to wipe at it clumsily.
There was a movement in the window and Yael jumped. “Josef!” she cried. She dashed forward. The road was dry, but the ruts were deep and she stumbled and fell and had to twist to stop the baby hitting the earth. When she sat up she saw the face in the window again peering out at her. A small, dark face. A woman with crude features, low sunken eyes and prominent cheekbones. A man appeared around the corner of the house and looked down at her. He too was small and dark. His clothes were tattered, and he was unshaven.
“Get out of here!” he growled. “Get out you stinking Zyd!” He picked up a stone and made to throw it at her. Yael cried and sheltered the baby in her arms.
“No!” she pleaded. “It’s okay, I’m going.”
She clambered to her feet and turned down the lane towards the fields. As she went, she glanced back and saw he had come out into the lane behind her. She noticed the shoes, good shoes, leather brogues with fine stitching. Her father’s shoes she was sure. The trousers too.
On the lip of the hill, at the edge of the meadow it was possible to look over the rooftops of the small town and see the extent of the devastation. The meadow itself had been churned up by the caterpillar tracks of tanks; an armoured vehicle lay half-submerged in the pond, its metal sides split open. Yael crossed the hill and hurried across the fields.
What surprised her as she walked around Czeslaw’s farm, where she and Rivka had hidden for some weeks, was how close the distances were, and how short the walk. She recalled it had taken her days to make this journey before. It was beginning to grow dark as she mounted the hill towards the woods. She was tired and Chasidah was moaning, tired of being carried. Yael glanced up at the sky, trying to ascertain how long she had before darkness fell. The idea of walking through the forest alone in the dark did not appeal to her, but she was desperate now to make the journey, the last few kilometres that would take her back to Aleksei.
“Just a little bit, now,” she whispered to the baby. “Just a little while and you will see your father.”
Chasidah’s eyes opened and Yael paused. Her little girl’s eyes were large and blue. Yael marvelled at them. At the continual seriousness of her small face. Even when she sat her on her knee and laughed and joked with her, the baby frowned in response. Yael stroked the soft flesh of her cheek gently.
“Yes, my little one,” she whispered. “Your father.”
The word sounded strange on her lips. She tried to imagine how he would respond. She tried to imagine what would happen when he opened the door and saw the two of them there. She could not. It had been over a year since she had left through the open window into the night. She had dreamed of this moment for so long she could barely believe, as she set off once more, pushing through the branches of the trees, she would be back at the farmhouse just after nightfall.
She walked quickly. The baby was quiet, as though she understood the urgency of the situation. There was little other noise beyond the sound of Yael’s feet in the undergrowth and her heavy breathing.
The sun had dipped over the horizon as she stepped out of the wood onto the lane at the head of his field. The sky was tinted pink and gold and the air was sharp and clear. The farmhouse was shrouded in the shadow of the low valley.
“We’re there,” she cried softly to Chasidah. “Here are his fields. Here is the house!”
She crossed the track, breaking into a run and stumbled down the path towards the farmhouse. Halfway down she stopped, her heart beating hard, and her breath coming in shallow gasps. No light shone in the window. He will be in the kitchen, she thought, and the memory of how she had first seen him, head bent over the table of that small room, the book open before him, filled her heart with love so sharp it felt as though she had been stabbed.
“Aleksei!” she called as she reached the corner of the farmhouse.
“Aleksei!”
She stumbled and fell, grazing her knees. Chasidah cried out. The door of the house creaked and banged and Yael jumped back to her feet, ignoring the sharp sting of her cut legs. Soothing Chasidah, with one hand, she hurried round the corner.
“Aleksei!”
A fox sprinted across the field towards the hencoop. Yael shuddered and turned back to the door. It stood ajar. She crossed to it. Should she knock or just push in?
“Aleksei?”
She hesitated a moment by the familiar wooden door. The darkness was falling fast and heavy. The moment, caught between day and night, was silent. She reached for the door, but felt suddenly afraid. She clasped Chasidah to her, struck momentarily with doubt. What if he did not want her? What if he did not believe the child was his? What if he had forgotten all about her? If he had been glad to be rid of her?
She paused, her hand suspended above the door. When she allowed it to fall, the timid knock echoed lightly in the small room.
“Aleksei?” she whispered. “Are you there?”
Her voice was so faint she could barely hear it herself. When she glanced down, Chasidah’s eyes were wide open, as if she too were on tenterhooks, waiting to see how he would respond. She pressed open the door. The kitchen was in darkness. Yael glanced around. There was no sign of movement in the fields. The forest on the hill was black now, devoured by the night. She stepped forward.
The kitchen was empty. The tiled stove cold. The fox had pulled open a bag of grain which had spilt out across the floor.
“Aleksei?” she called quietly into the darkened room. The house was empty. In the bedroom, the books had been pulled from the shelves. One of the windows had broken. The air was cold and damp. Nobody had been living there for some time.
Yael sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress was damp; mould had begun to grow around its edges. She untied Chasidah and set her on her knee. For a long time they sat in silence, listening to the night, the brush of a gentle breeze in the trees, the cry of a fox, the silence of absences: his cough, his movements, the sound of the leaves of a book being turned slowly.
There, on the edge of the bed all the absences fell upon her. All the worlds that had been taken. All the lives that had gone. The stories ripped from books half-told. The poems strangled in throats. The towns unpeopled. Histories unwritten. The clothes that would no longer be worn by their proper owners, houses silent and falling into ruin, books that would lie unread. Bending down she picked up a volume from the floor. The pages were damp and one ripped as she opened it. Pushkin.
“Oh God,” she cried. “Oh God how could it all just go?”
Yael woke early. Chasidah dozed still, beside her on the mattress. For some moments she could not be sure what it was that had awoken her. Sunlight streamed through the dirty window of the farmhouse falling heavily across the jumbled backs of the books that remained on the shelves. Chasidah suckled in her sleep. As Yael reached across to stroke the baby’s cheek, she heard it again and sat up, straining her ears. It was distant and hard to grasp. The soft breeze carried it back and forth, so that as she strained, it came to her in gentle waves.
Her eyes were blurred with sleep, so when she peered out through the dirty panes, the hill up to the road seemed misty. She opened the window and hung out. The sound was clearer then. Singing. Children singing, together, as though it was a school choir. Picking up Chasidah, Yael ran from the farmhouse and dashed around to the front. They were walking along the lane, about twenty children, with three or four adults, one at the front, the rest at the rear. The words of the song carried down the slope, and it was clear now, and Yael could make them out. Ani máymin.
“Ani maymin b’emuno shleymo b’viyas hamoshíakh; v’af al pi she’yismaméya, im kol ze, akháke ley b’khol yeym she’yovey. I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Moshiach; and even though he may tarry, nevertheless, I wait each day for his coming.”
It was a well-known song. The prayer was one that Jews recited as part of their morning prayers. The lightness of the children’s voices as they marched along the road in the light of the newly risen sun filled Yael’s heart with unexpected but painful joy. She found herself following the song, mouthing the words silently, tears salting her lips.
Already the party had passed, moving along the road, away from Selo towards Grodno.
“Wait!” Yael called.
She raced up the field, slipping in the grass, which was wet with dew. The baby cried in her arms and Yael shushed her breathlessly as she stumbled forward. The party looked startled as she appeared. She recognised the look of instinctive wariness on their faces.
“Don’t stop,” she said in Yiddish. “Don’t stop singing.”
Silently they stared at her as she struggled up onto the road, Chasidah bawling in her arms. She took up the song herself, half-laughing, half-crying, her voice hopelessly out of tune. A child, a girl of about eight years, smiled then hearing the song sung so badly. Kindly she broke into song, taking up from where Yael was singing. The others joined in. The young girl held out her hand and Yael took it.