The Forest of Vanishing Stars

by Kristin Harmel

  “Who… you?” he managed to ask Yona. He struggled to sit, but Yona put a firm hand on his shoulder and eased him back down.

  “My name is Yona,” she said. “I brought your daughter back to you. And I will try to help you.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds and then closed his eyes. “I am already dead.”

  “You are still alive. And I will do all I can to keep you that way.” Yona spoke with a confidence she didn’t feel, but she had to. It was the only way she could convince herself that she might be able to save him. She looked skyward and wished Jerusza were here to help her, for the old woman would know just what to do. Then again, the mere fact that Yona was here would have gone against everything Jerusza stood for. She would have told Yona that she was putting herself in danger. And Yona knew this, knew that the longer she stayed, the higher the risk was for her. But she couldn’t simply abandon this family.

  “This is a gunshot wound, yes?” she asked gently after examining the gaping hole in the man’s abdomen. She had seen dead animals left behind this way by careless hunters.

  He seemed not to hear her over his own labored breathing. But Chana’s mother, who was hovering nearby, said in a raspy whisper, “Yes. They shot him.”

  “All right.” Yona was struggling to sound as if she was in control rather than terrified. “Do you know the burdock plant?” Chana was crying, her face hidden in the threadbare folds of her mother’s dress.

  “Yes, I know it,” Chana’s mother said.

  “You and Chana must bring me some as soon as you can.”

  Chana and her mother set off into the forest at a jog, and Yona realized too late that she had forgotten to warn them to be quiet. Then again, she and Chana had encountered no other signs of man on their trek here, and there was no indication that anyone was watching other than the creatures of the forest. She quickly scanned the area around her for something she could use to help Chana’s father while she waited for Chana and her mother to return, and her gaze came to rest on some tiny white flowers growing thirty yards away. Achillea millefolium, yarrow. Her heart thudding, she dashed over to grab a handful of the buds. Racing to the stream, she chose a large stick and crushed the plant into a paste, adding a bit of water. Then, the rough mixture in her hands, she hurried back to Chana’s father.

  Inside the listing lean-to, his breathing had grown even more labored. As Yona knelt beside him, he didn’t even look at her. “This will hurt,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  He grunted and writhed in pain as she turned him gently over to make sure the bullet had gone through him instead of lodging in his body. It had; there was a clean, circular hole in his lower back where the bullet had departed. She spread the paste around the outer perimeter of the exit wound, and then she turned him back over to spread it all around the jagged edges of his shredded abdomen, too, wincing at his screams. “It is going to get worse before it gets better,” she murmured once he had again fallen back into a state of semiconsciousness. “But it will be your only chance to survive.”

  By the time Chana and her mother returned, pink burrs and leafy greens clutched in their hands, he was fast asleep, his chest rising and falling under Yona’s palm as she watched the blood around his wound finally begin to clot, beginning the slow work of knitting his body back together.

  “Isaac is still alive?” Chana’s mother asked, staring at Yona with a blend of fear and respect. “What do we do now?”

  “Now,” Yona replied, “we pray.”

  * * *

  Yona waited until the blood had stopped oozing from Isaac’s gut before rubbing a mixture made from the leaves, stems, and flowers of the burdock plant on his wound to disinfect it. She gently turned him over, and he groaned in his sleep as she spread it on his lower back, too.

  It was two days before he awoke, clear-eyed, and asked for Esta, his wife.

  “Will my husband live?” Esta asked in a whisper as she slipped past Yona and into the hut. Yona had given it a roof and walls of spruce bark supported by pine poles, which would withstand the wind and better blend into the trees. They would need to stay here for a week, at least, before Chana’s wounded father would be able to walk on his own again.

  “I think so,” Yona said, but as she locked eyes with the other woman, an understanding passed between them. The words were not a promise, but Yona had done her best.

  It was enough, though, and eight days later, Isaac, who had worked in a Jewish bank before the Germans forced it out of business, was walking around, albeit with difficulty, laughing with Chana, whose face had been transformed by relief.

  The mirth in his smile didn’t reach his eyes, though, and Yona could see pain there, pain and fear. The way they were all living now, focusing on his healing, was just a suspension of reality. They hadn’t gone far enough into the forest to evade those who might be after them.

  “Chana told me some things about the ghetto in your town,” Yona said quietly as she examined Isaac’s wounds on the eleventh day, while Esta and Chana waited outside. “Are they true?”

  He winced as she rubbed a fresh paste around the large gash in his torso, which was still very much at risk of becoming infected. He didn’t speak for a moment, and when he did, his words were heavy with sadness. “The Soviets came first, three years ago, and took away our right to practice our religion, any religion. That broke my heart, for the yeshiva was such a central part of our lives, of our town. It had stood for over a hundred years, since 1803—and the godless Soviets, they turned it into a bar. We thought it could not get any worse than that.” He drew a trembling breath. “We were wrong.

  “Last summer, the Germans came,” he continued, his voice flattening into a monotone. “A month after they arrived, they moved all the Jews of our town into a tiny ghetto, in horrible conditions. We received no more than a piece of bread each day. And then they began to murder us, at random.”

  He went silent again, and Yona tried to hold back tears. “I—I don’t understand.”

  Isaac’s shrug was heavy, and he avoided Yona’s gaze as he went on. “In October, they killed three hundred Jews for sport. It was no secret. They wanted us to know, to be afraid. They wanted us aware that, to them, our lives held no value, that we lived or died at their whim. But then the killing ceased for a while, and we thought perhaps they have had their fill of our blood. Perhaps we are safe now. Perhaps they wish only to demean us, to humiliate us, to keep us in squalor, which is all terrible, Yona, but at least we were alive.

  “Then, just a few weeks ago, I received word, through a Belorussian policeman I have known my whole life, that there was a large Aktion planned. There were plans to kill more of us, thousands, maybe all of us. I told my wife, and she did not believe me. I wanted us to run, to try to escape with our daughter, because to stay seemed to be waiting only for death, now or later. Still, Esta said, ‘It is not true. How could they kill thousands of us anyhow? Where would they put us? What good would it do?’ Then, one day just two weeks ago, I was walking home from a job cleaning the toilets of the Germans when I passed a young mother carrying an infant; she was being teased by a German soldier. I did not know all the words he was saying, for he spoke his language, and it was clear she did not understand, either. He reached for her baby, a little girl, and the mother pulled away, but he reached in to tickle the child, who giggled. I will never forget the sound of that laugh, Yona, for it changed everything. It made the mother relax. It made her think the man was kind. So she reluctantly let him take the baby, who could not have been more than six months old, and, with a laugh of his own, he grasped the baby by her feet and swung her into the wall of the building beside them, smashing her tiny skull.”

  Yona let out a small moan of disbelief.

  “The sound of the mother’s scream will never leave me,” Isaac concluded, finally looking at Yona. “The German’s face never changed as he turned, shot the mother right between the eyes, and strolled away.” He took a deep breath. “I took my wife and my child a
nd slipped into the forest that night through a tunnel that had been dug beneath the wall. We joined an escape that had already been planned. Eleven of us made the attempt, and we were spotted; they fired upon us, and most of the others fell. Perhaps they thought they got all of us, for they didn’t follow. And now, here we are.”

  Isaac seemed to know that there were no words to say after that, for he closed his eyes and settled back against the reed bed Yona had built to make him comfortable. After fifteen minutes had passed, his breathing lengthened, and Yona knew he had fallen asleep, the pain of recounting his terrible story exhausting him. But even after he had found peace in slumber, she could not move. She knew that Isaac’s words had been true, but how was it possible? Even after years of being told by Jerusza that mankind was not to be trusted, the words shook her to the core. She had preferred always to believe in the things she had seen in the villages: the laughter, the hugs, the togetherness, the love. But had Jerusza been right about this, too?

  For two nights, Yona could hardly sleep, for she could hear Isaac’s voice in her head, and she could see the things he had told her unfolding in startling clarity each time she began to dream. On her fourteenth morning with the family, she awoke with a sense of foreboding deep in the pit of her belly. Something was lurking in the darkness, something just beyond their reach, and they were no longer safe here.

  “We need to move today,” Yona said as the family sat down around the remains of the previous night’s fire to have a small breakfast of acorn coffee and berries. Isaac was improving by the day, and Yona was confident that he could keep up a slow pace through the forest if she and Esta helped support him. “I can feel it in my bones. It’s time.”

  Isaac nodded in solemn agreement, but Esta’s back stiffened and she glanced at her husband in disbelief before turning to Yona. “We are perfectly safe here. And my husband is not well enough to travel.”

  “I am, Esta,” he protested. “I must be. Yona is right.”

  “Because she feels it in her bones? That is nonsense. No one is after us anymore. What do they care? Three Jews who escaped through their sieve, no matter. We are safe now.”

  “I don’t think you are,” Yona said after a long silence. She hadn’t thought much about the future and how long she would stay with the family, but she knew she couldn’t just desert them. We are all interconnected, Jerusza had said on her deathbed. Once fates intertwine, they are forever linked. “We are too close to where you came from. We must move deeper into the forest. We can go slowly, but we need to begin.”

  “We?” Esta repeated, her tone suddenly so bitter that Isaac flinched, his gaze flicking from his wife to Yona and back again in confusion. “You have helped us, Yona, but you are not one of us. How can we trust you?”

  “Esta, my dear, Yona saved my life,” Isaac protested. “She brought Chana back to us. She has given us two miracles. How can you doubt her?”

  Esta’s mouth was set in a firm line. She turned to her husband. “Didn’t we trust that the Germans would let us live, too? And yet they have already killed my mother and yours, for no reason at all. We’d be dead, too, if we had stayed. No, Isaac, we trust no one but ourselves from now on. We made that promise. And she is not like us.”

  Yona blinked a few times. The words wounded her, though of course they were true. How foolish she had been to imagine a world in which she could protect them, a world in which loneliness would be a distant memory. But they needed her now, at least for a little while, for they didn’t know the woods like she did. She opened her mouth to say that, but Isaac spoke first.

  “Esta, please, don’t disrespect her. Yona can show us where to go, where to hide. She can help us with what to eat until we know what to do on our own.”

  Chana’s eyes were wide with fear as she watched her parents trade verbal barbs.

  Esta’s eyes raked Yona over once, and then, her jaw tightening, she turned again to her husband. “No. I will not make the mistake of trusting the wrong person again.” She looked at Yona, her eyes alight with anger, before turning back to her husband. “Anyhow, you think I don’t see it, Isaac? The way you whisper to each other while she’s dressing your wounds?”

  “I was telling her about the atrocities against our people,” Isaac shot back. “Hardly words of seduction, Esta.”

  “She’s a lonely woman in the woods. She has helped us, and we are grateful, but now we must go. It is our fate, not hers.”

  Yona’s heart pounded as she looked back and forth between husband and wife, both furious. “Please, let me help you.” She stood, and though she wasn’t sure why she was begging them, she continued. “I—I have come to care for Chana. For all of you. Please, we must go south.”

  “I’m sorry, Yona,” Esta said stiffly. “But I must protect my family.”

  “From a woman who has shown us nothing but kindness?” Isaac asked, his voice finally rising.

  “Mami?” Chana ventured, but Esta ignored her.

  “We will survive without her,” Esta said. “We do not need her anymore.”

  “I—” Yona began.

  “Thank you for all you’ve done to help us,” Esta said as Isaac sighed and sat back down, muttering to himself. It was clear that Esta had won, but at what cost? “You can leave whenever you like, Yona. You must be eager to return to whatever it was you were doing before we interrupted you.”

  Yona stared at her for a long time. She could see a dozen futures unfolding for the family, none of them good. She couldn’t leave them defenseless. “I will stay as long as you are here.”

  “Then we will go,” Esta said abruptly. “Chana, help me pack our things.”

  “Please, you are making a mistake.” Yona waited until Esta met her gaze. “The forest can be cruel if you don’t know it, and—”

  “Thank you for your concern, Yona.” Esta looked away. “We will leave in an hour. We appreciate all you’ve done, but we can take care of ourselves.”

  * * *

  Yona tried once more to talk Esta out of her decision, but it was clear the woman had made up her mind, driven by a deep distrust that Yona couldn’t undo. She didn’t understand Esta’s decision, and she didn’t know how to reverse it—nor did she have any idea if it was even her right to try. As Esta had said, whatever happened next was their fate, not hers. And so, as the family packed up—Isaac shooting her uneasy glances, Chana crying, and Esta avoiding her gaze altogether—Yona forced herself to walk away, beyond the clearing, so she couldn’t beg them to stay any more than she already had, and so she wouldn’t have to watch them go.

  “Do we have to leave, Mami?” she heard Chana ask. “Can’t Yona come with us?”

  “Yona needs to remain here, my darling,” Esta replied. “She is not one of us. Your father and I will keep you safe.”

  For a long time after their footsteps had faded, Yona wondered whether she should go after them, persuade them to stay with her for a little while more, perhaps even just give the girl one last hug goodbye.

  But fate is part chance and part choice, and Yona understood that Esta had chosen a path for her family that didn’t include her. Indecision paralyzed her for so long that by the time she stood, her heart aching, the family was long gone.

  Yona spent the next four days telling herself that she’d made the right choice, although at night she dreamed of Chana’s soul coming loose from her body, lifting up like an incandescent butterfly into a dark night, and she awoke each morning with a sense of foreboding. On the fifth day, reluctantly, she began moving east, in the same direction the family had gone, though she knew she wouldn’t see them again. The forest was too vast.

  It was midmorning when she heard three distant gunshots, each snapping the stillness of the forest, and when she doubled back in the direction of the terrible sounds, and found the family’s bodies in a clearing, she knew she’d made a tremendous mistake. She watched from the shadows as two German soldiers walked away with Isaac’s shoes, laughing and patting each other on the back. And th
en, when they were gone and the forest was still again, she slipped from the darkness and gently turned Chana over so that the girl’s empty eyes looked up at the sky. She lay motionless between her mother and father, all three of them in a row. They’d been executed, at point-blank range, a single shot to the back of each one’s head.

  Yona let the tears fall as she stared down at the child’s destroyed face. She hadn’t been directly responsible for Chana’s death, but she had failed her, hadn’t she? She had let Chana and her family go out into the wilderness, knowing the dangers, and because she had done nothing, they had died. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the little girl. “I promise I won’t make the same mistake again.”

  But it was too late for this family, who would sleep forever, becoming one with the unforgiving earth.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For the next month, as the summer sun ripened the forest, Yona lived in darkness, her dreams haunted by the image of Chana’s still face in the field, the tinny smell of blood. She thought about the boy she’d once met, and his long-ago warnings of book burnings in Berlin. She thought of the terrible things Isaac had told her about the ghetto in Volozhin. She spoke to Jerusza in the stillness and sometimes heard an answer in the wind. And she gazed at her own face in the small rivers that ran through the forest and wondered about the parents she’d been taken from so long ago. Would she ever see them again? It seemed impossible, for they were miles away, in a country trying to take over the continent. But on her deathbed, Jerusza had whispered, “Lives are circles spinning across the world, and when they’re meant to intersect again, they do. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.” Yona had played the words through her mind a million times, wondering if they meant her orbit would once again cross with theirs. She longed for it, though she knew nothing about them, nothing about the people they were. Still, they were her family, a place to belong.