A Child Called Happiness

by Stephan Collishaw

  Or perhaps, Yael thought, I’ve grown. She lifted her head and surveyed her own body. She too had grown thinner, but her body did not bear the same marks of sickness Rivka’s did.

  Her skin, she noted, was healthy-looking still, tight against her flesh. Her hair was thick, in fact uncomfortably so. She was tempted to take Rivka’s knife and chop it off. It lay matted and itchy against the back of her neck.

  Her skin was broken by an endless pattern of dried scabs where she had scratched at bites. She had begun to get used to the continual torment of the lice. Rivka had taken a cigarette lighter one day and forced Yael to undress. She had run the flame slowly up each seam. The lice crackled as they fried.

  The night was cold and by morning a thick mist had gathered close to the earth. Yael shivered through the dark hours, her body pulled close against Rivka’s, which seemed hot. She was, Yael realised, running a temperature. As the light began to seep through the brambles, Rivka began to shake. Her forehead was burning and her clothes were damp, not only with the cold mist, but with sweat.

  “Rivka,” Yael whispered into her ear.

  The older woman muttered and turned, but did not open her eyes.

  “We need to go back to the farm,” Yael said.

  But Rivka did not respond. Yael tried to lift her, but was unable to do so. Pushing out of the brambles she wandered around for a while and finally found a small stream. She cupped her hands and drank some water and then looked around for something to carry water back for Rivka, but there was nothing.

  In the end she took off her blouse, from beneath the man’s jacket. She coiled the blouse and dipped it in the water until it was soaked. She carried it back and twisted it gently above Rivka’s lips. The water ran from her lips down her face, dirty. She held a corner of the cold wet cloth against Rivka’s fevered forehead.

  For the rest of the day she sat like that, moving occasionally to bathe the blouse in the stream. There were berries in the brambles and she picked and ate them. She tried to get Rivka to eat, but she was unwilling.

  As night fell, Rivka seemed to improve. She opened her eyes and half sat up, leaning against Yael.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Yael said, stroking her skin with the damp cool cloth of her blouse. “You’ll be better soon.”

  “Yes.” Rivka smiled weakly and tried to pull herself up higher. She ate some berries Yael crushed between her lips and drank some water from the twisted wet blouse on her tongue.

  When Yael woke the next morning, Rivka felt cooler by her side. She reached across and touched the skin of her forehead with the back of her fingers. The temperature had definitely gone. She sat up.

  “Rivka,” she whispered, and shook her softly.

  Her body was stiff.

  “Rivka?” Yael called, her throat constricting.

  Rivka’s eyes were closed. When Yael turned her over, she found blood congealed at the corner of her mouth and in the rim of her nostrils. She looked astonishingly calm and it struck Yael, as she gazed at her in disbelief, that it had been a long time since she had seen her face look so calm.

  For the rest of morning she sat silently beside Rivka’s body, holding her cold hand. A hard lump pressed at her throat but she did not cry.

  Later she covered the body with a thick layer of leaves and fronds of fern that were dark green and succulent. She laid them deeply, until there was no hint a body was there. Then she crawled out from the brambles and turned back towards Czeslaw’s farm.

  2

  Standing at the edge of the fields, shaded by the thick branches of the fir trees, Yael stood gazing down on the farm. The yard was thick with German military vehicles and soldiers milled around the barn and the house. Camouflaged tents were erected around the edge of the field. She heard shouts and the sound of laughter. The farmer mingled with the soldiers, passing around bottles. Smoke from a fire rose steadily into the cool still air. She and Rivka had left just in time.

  Yael turned and pushed back through the branches into the wood. She wandered aimlessly. She had no idea where she might turn. For some time she sat on the rotting trunk of a fallen tree, head in hands. She considered going back to the shtetl, but knew that would be madness. From her pocket she took Rivka’s handgun. She ran her fingers along the cold metal barrel, turned it and placed the muzzle of it against the soft skin between her eyes. She could just rest her finger now against the thin trigger and that would be it, she thought. She felt an icy shiver across her skin. She put it away quickly.

  Getting up, she wandered away from the farm.

  “Oh Josef,” she muttered to herself, thinking of her brother who she had not seen in a year now. “Where are you?”

  From the position of the pale risen sun, she orientated herself and began to make her way northeast in the direction of the Russian front. She had little idea how far the Germans had managed to press the Soviets back. Perhaps they had already won the war, she thought. Perhaps the Russians had admitted defeat.

  But she pictured Josef in Red Army uniform on the back of his horse. Never, she thought. He would never admit defeat. There would be more like him.

  A couple of miles north, the forest ended suddenly. A dirt road wound down into a low valley. In the centre of the small valley stood a dilapidated farmhouse, with tumbling outbuildings leaned against it. She recognised where she was, though she had only seen the farm once, from the back of a cart that had brought her from the train station in Grodno.

  The farm belonged to Aleksei, the idiot. ‘He’s not crazy,’ she remembered her father saying as they bumped along the road, after their trip to Warsaw.

  ‘He just doesn’t like company.’

  ‘He doesn’t speak,’ her mother had said, as if that fact alone was enough to prove his madness.

  ‘And that makes him a meshúgener?’ her father had retorted. ‘Then give me more of them! Give me a whole shtetl of meshúgener! I could live in such a place.’

  Every village had somebody that was crazy. The odd ones. In Selo they had Able. Able had the mind of a child, though his beard was long and his hair beginning to grey. He was a simple and pleasant man who begged for sweets outside the shop and cried when the boys from the town made fun of him. One of Yael’s sweetest memories of her brother was the time he had chased off Marek Wolniewicz and his friends who had been tormenting Able. He had gone to the shop and bought some boiled sweets which Able had received with pitiful joy. The thought of it now stabbed her heart with a small pain of longing for the company of her brother.

  And then there was Aleksei. His father died when he was a teenager. The story in the village was that he had never spoken, that he had some medical problem that rendered him mute, but there were some who thought differently.

  ‘He spoke as child,’ Myra Koppelman asserted. ‘I remember visiting his poor mother when he was a toddler and he talked all right then. It was her dying in the way she did that stopped his mouth.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ her husband Eli Koppelman argued. ‘He never spoke a word in his life. He isn’t able. He has a problem. Doctor Sonenson told me.’

  ‘Sonenson? What does he know?’

  Everybody had assumed that when his father died some relative would come and take the teenager, or that he would be sent to live in one of the hostels, but he had refused to move from the farm. He carried on working there, eking out a subsistence from his fields, occasionally trading vegetables or a pig for some goods he could not produce himself. He kept to himself and rarely came to the village, preferring to deal with the couple of nearby farmers he trusted.

  She settled down in the woods, not far from the farm and waited for darkness.

  For Marija

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Annette Green and Lauren Parsons for the acuity of their editorial suggestions and their general warm support. I would also like to thank the many friends in Zimbabwe who offered their friendship and opened their homes, not
ing, particularly Clara and Yvonne for the laughter and for teaching me to sing Shona songs.

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