The Light of the Midnight Stars

by Rena Rossner

  “Sarah,” Eema says. “Please drink something. You look pale.”

  And I do. I take a cup of river water from her and I drink. All the fight has gone out of me. All the fire. I am a husk of a girl now, fiercely alone in her sorrow.

  Angels don’t walk into fiery furnaces. They walk among us only briefly before they return their souls to heaven. Angels shine their light down on us from the stars above. They blaze too bright for this world.

  Eema knows she tends to the corpses of our souls. Hannah won’t eat or drink. Father still sits shiva for his mother, for his students, for his community—alone. With no men to answer amen to his Kaddish. Only Levana shines bright. She blazes like a star here in the forest, her soul still filled with the hope of thousands of stars. I hope that she will never live to see everything she ever loved going up in smoke and flame. I hope she wishes on a star and it stays constant for her. It is not a prayer I offer the sky. I don’t have words inside me to praise God right now. It is more like a wish I send, buoyed only by my own despair.

  My eyes still flit from tree to tree. Searching for fur and fire. I can still hear his voice in my head. I can still feel the touch of his lips against mine.

  I promise, Sarah—I promise that I am your angel, your Guvriel and no one else’s. I will go into the fiery furnace if I have to so that we can be together. What is time in the grand scheme of the universe? Nothing. I would wait for you until the end of time.

  Hannah

  Everything is ash.

  The tree of life is the heart of the world. The Holy One, Blessed Be He has a single tree and it has twelve diagonal boundaries. They continually spread forever and ever—they are the arms of the world and wherever we are in the world, we are held in their embrace.

  —The Book of the Solomonars, page 47, verses 12–14

  Once upon a time, a man and his family emerged from a forest and came upon a town. In the forest there was a tree that had been there longer than anyone could remember, and a cave under the tree that was said to contain the heart of the world. That is how the man knew he should stop and make a new home. Because where a linden tree grows there is peace, truth, justice—and protection against dark magic. The man’s name was Ivan and his wife’s name was Elena, and they had three daughters, Anna, Stanna, and Laptitza.

  This is their story.

  Stanna

  Papa goes out early one morning and comes back with light in his eyes. Funny. It reminds me how we used to say “May his lamp shine” when someone looked like that, or when we wanted to bless him with long life. But now it feels like that comes from some kind of folktale.

  I saw Papa sneak away every night from the camp we made in the forest, every few days another camp, to hunt, and to scout—at least, that’s what Mama said he was doing when I asked about it in the morning. I wondered where he went and what he did, but to go after him would be to disobey my parents, and I would never do anything like that. Still, it’s been cold at night, especially now that we don’t light fires. Anna is afraid of them, and though I don’t like to admit it—I think I am too.

  We stopped here last night, not far from a line of forest that looked as though it promised a river. Papa went out and when he came back, there was light in his eyes.

  “We’ve reached the borders of Wallachia,” he says to Mama. “I’ve found us a home and a job. I’ll be tending to the fields on a large farm near a town not far from here. Curtea, they call it—Curtea de Argeş. The owner of the cabin passed away. The house is vacant. We’ll need to clean it up, but it’s ours. They say there’s a new ruler here, the Voivode Basarab, that he’s fair and just. They say he welcomes people of all faiths. It’s a place to start again. What say you?”

  Mama holds back tears. “Come, girls, help me pack up.”

  As we make our way through the edge of the forest and emerge out into a field that abuts a large river, we squint at the bright sun that lights everything before us like a picture. Perfect and pastoral. We can see the town of Curtea beyond it.

  “Blessed is He who has delivered us to this day,” Papa says in Hungarian, arms outstretched to the sky. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard my father pray—the words sound foreign on his lips.

  There’s a key under a window eave that opens the padlocked door.

  The house is large, with two big rooms—one with a grand hearth, and the other with a stone oven. There is a barn out back and a silo for grain, and even the remains of a small garden. Though we are bone-tired, Mama finds a birch broom and begins to sweep away the cobwebs. She orders us to beat the mattresses and take all the bed linen down to the river. Even Anna helps, and of course, sweet Laptitza—what would we do without her helpful ways? Anna is, of course, still convalescing, but she does her best. She is weak, but Mama says a new start will make her strong.

  Hours later, having cleaned and scrubbed, swept and scoured, Papa comes back with a load of firewood and lights the hearth for warmth, though I see how Anna cowers from its scent. My stomach turns, but I squelch it down. It’s the warmest we’ve been in weeks. We must find a way to begin again.

  Soon, we collapse onto the pine-stuffed mattresses, grateful for a place to rest our heads that isn’t the forest floor. It’s been three weeks since I’ve felt a mattress beneath me and, despite the emptiness I feel, my body can’t help but relax, my eyelids can’t help but drift closed.

  I dream of foxes frolicking in a nearby meadow and there is no Black Mist to taint the sky. I wake up, my heart beating fast in my chest, but I see only my sisters beside me.

  The next day, the first thing I want to do is go back into the woods that border our property. I want to find that meadow. I want to wait and see if the fox will come. I will go there every day if that’s what it takes. Anna is the only one of us who is still despondent, and Laptitza is eager to join me but Mama fears to let her go, even though we trekked through endless kilometers of forests on our way here. I somehow manage to convince them both—Anna to come, and Mama to trust me. It feels good to finally have her approval.

  “Watch the sun, girls. Be back while there is still light in the sky. We don’t want to tempt the spirits of the dead.” I see Anna flinch.

  I take her hand in mine and squeeze it.

  Mama is not yet convinced the house is free of the spirits that once inhabited it. But that feels like an old superstition. Something from a religion we no longer follow.

  I don’t understand why mother keeps speaking of it. Anna is just starting to come back to us—there is a tiny bit of light dancing tenuously on her face, as though it isn’t sure it belongs there, and in an instant it’s extinguished.

  “Oh, Mama,” Anna says, squeezing my hand back. “Those are superstitions.” She tilts her chin up to the light that shines from the window and I’m so proud of how hard she’s trying I could cry. But I don’t. I must be strong. For her. For Papa. For Mama and Laptitza.

  “Listen to your mother, girls” is all that Papa has to say as he looks up from the wood he’s whittling. It hurts me to see him like this—diminished—doing something with his hands rather than poring over tomes like he used to.

  “Yes, Papa,” I say as I usher my sisters out the door.

  I know that Anna’s blistered feet match her blistered heart. I’ve heard her nightmares and her dreams—I’ve been by her side when she wakes up screaming, choking at imaginary smoke and clawing at her cloak as though it is burning her alive. I curl up beside her on those nights and hold her, soothe her, try with all my might to drain the pain she feels. But I know I can’t. Some pain runs too deep. The forest changed us all, but I’m not sure there was enough of Anna left to change.

  As we stroll through this new forest, I think about all the endless kilometers of branches we walked through. They say that there are many kinds of forests, with different types of trees and foliage, magical forests, haunted forests, forests with secrets, and we saw them—so many of them—but when you’re trudging through the snow with only a shattered hear
t to guide you, and you don’t know where you’re going, and the only hope you have is that the place you reach will be better than the place you’re fleeing from—all forests look the same. Even enchanted ones. I’m sure that Anna never even noticed the change.

  Laptitza straggles behind us, then quickly catches up and takes Anna’s other hand. How have we come to this? Three sisters who used to bicker about every little thing—formed and reformed by the flames that took away everything we once held dear.

  For a while, it felt as if Laptitza was the log in the pile upon which everything was balanced. If something were to have removed her from the bottom of the woodpile, everyone and everything around her would have come tumbling down. It was a lot of weight for a thirteen-year-old to bear. I’m trying to ease that burden. Trying to look forward to the future. Yet here I am taking them back into the forest with me, because all I want is to look back.

  I remember the moment we passed into the borders of Wallachia. It wasn’t a line per se, or a border, just a sense in the air that something had changed. It feels the same now—like we’re crossing some kind of invisible line. The air is different—like a threat has been removed. Like the forest’s taken a breath. I wondered if it was part of the forest’s song—the shirah. I wanted to turn to and tell Guvriel… but he wasn’t there.

  If you believe in something hard enough, you can make it come true. That’s what I keep telling myself. No one will chase us here, no one is after us. There is nothing left for us to hide anymore.

  Only that… I desperately wanted to be found. Perhaps a fox will appear to me if I will it. I know I’ll never stop watching and waiting, hoping to hear the one sound that means he’s found me.

  We’re lost in our own thoughts and the soft sounds of the forest, but when we get to the largest birch we’ve ever seen, Anna pauses. “Here,” she says, confirming the sensation I’d felt in my gut, but couldn’t name, “this is the perfect spot.”

  She bends down and starts digging by the roots of the large tree. When she’s finished, she gets up and dusts off her hands. She places the silver candlesticks that Jakob gave her on their wedding night in the hole and then covers it with loose earth. “I will plant strawberry seeds,” she says, sprinkling them on top of the silver, “together with Jakob’s candlesticks. Perhaps they will grow here, and we can come harvest them. And when we eat them I will remember him.”

  Her eyes are shining and wet.

  I’m in shock, because I brought Guvriel’s tallit out here with me, planning on finding a place to hide it, but I hadn’t said a word about it. I start to think that maybe my sisters are closer to me than I ever thought before. That maybe I was always looking to pick a fight and find the things that separated us, while staying blind to all the things that bound us together.

  “Anna!” I say. “I didn’t… You don’t have to…”

  “It’s better this way. A fresh start. Papa has forbidden us to light candles in windows anymore.”

  I look down at my feet and take out the package I brought. Anna nods, almost as if she anticipated this.

  I place the tallit I was making for Guvriel in a hole beside the one she dug.

  Anna puts a hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to.”

  “I think this is where it belongs. I brought it with me today to find a place for it here. It felt like the right thing to do.” I look up at her. “Papa says we will no longer have to cower like a sheep here. We have left these parts of ourselves far behind.”

  My tears wet the white wool as I whisper a prayer—“Protect me, God, for I put my faith in thee” and cover it with loose earth.

  I look to Laptitza. Her face looks white as milk in the moonlight, her soft copper hair falling around her face. She bends down and takes The Book of the Solomonars out of her pocket.

  Anna gasps. “Does Papa know you have it?” she asks.

  “No—Mama stuffed it in my bag before we fled, but maybe it’s better this way.”

  “I don’t think Papa would want it in the house if he knew,” I say.

  “Go ahead,” Anna says.

  Laptitza digs a shallow rectangular hole that looks like a small grave, then gently rests the book inside. I think I see three tears drop onto the book—they look like little glinting stars—but I can’t be sure. It’s dark and getting darker. She covers the hole she made with earth, kisses her fingers, then presses her palm down to the earth—the way we used to kiss every holy book we opened, or closed.

  Anna waves her hands three times over all the little mounds of earth, the same way Mama always used to do before she lit candles. “With this we leave our past behind us. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, may the earth consume the past. May these items strengthen the roots of this tree as we put down roots in this new land.”

  “Amen,” I say.

  “Amen,” Laptitza echoes.

  “Blessed is the true judge,” Anna says, because that is what we would have said, once upon a time, had we gone to a funeral in our old town. And I know that Anna’s words are not for the candlesticks she put in the ground, but for the funeral she never got to attend.

  I take my sisters’ hands in mine and we make our way out of the forest.

  Suddenly, a fox streaks out of the trees. I take a sharp breath and stop; my heart beats fast. Maybe… maybe… maybe…

  But it winds its way through the tombstones and disappears into the forest, and of course my sisters have no idea that it means anything to me at all—only that I appeared to have been startled. All three of us exhale, hands held tighter, and keep walking.

  Every few steps, I see Laptitza look back, but I squeeze my younger sister’s hand in reassurance. “There’s nothing to see there,” I whisper. “Just three mounds of earth beneath the boughs of a lonely tree. Nothing more.”

  We are safe here. For now.

  We arrive home and get ready for bed. I see Laptitza looking out the window at the forest, then at the sky. I watch her until she falls asleep. When I hear Anna’s light snoring, I get out of bed and go to the window, wondering what Laptitza was looking at. And then I see it too, and it strikes fear into my heart. There is a trail of golden stars, shimmering in the moonlight, running all the way from the forest to our front door.

  We ran so far and yet the light still follows us.

  Anna

  10 Shevat 5122

  I’ve started a new log. A new book, for this new life.

  The rawness inside me is still there, behind a thin veil, but today I can breathe for the first time in weeks, and so today seems as good a day as any to start. I am not the person I was. None of us are. We were born again in the forest. Made into a new kind of creature—one that survived.

  My name is Anna Simion and I am ready to leave my past behind me.

  11 Shevat 5122

  When I woke this morning in my new bed, in our new home, I felt a tug on my ankle. I woke in a panic, thinking my ankles were bound, I was trapped, I smelled smoke… but it was only a strawberry plant that had sent out a runner and curled itself around my ankle as if to keep me there in bed, or here in Curtea. A plump ripe berry sat below my ankle bone. I reached down to touch it and everything crumbled to ash in my hand.

  My fingers touched my lips, and I tasted ash on them too—fine and gray and powdery.

  Everything is strange and different. I can’t separate dream from reality. Did I ever get married? Was I once able to heal with a touch?

  I followed Papa out to the fields today. I was afraid to touch anything in fear that it too would turn to ash, but I longed to feel the softness of the earth and the cushion of green beneath my feet. I hoped the scent of growing things might mask the acrid smoke that still fills my nostrils.

  We walked side by side along the road that skirts our field, and saw a man driving a horse and cart approaching us.

  “Good morning,” the man said. “And welcome.”

  Papa put his hat in his hands, and I saw his bare head for the first time.

  “You a
re a Jew?” the man asked.

  “No,” Papa said, “just a poor humble farmer. You must be mistaking me for someone else. Good day, sir.” Papa kept on walking and I followed him.

  This is all my fault. No matter how many times I go over the events of the past, I come to the same conclusion. I have brought about my family’s destruction. If I hadn’t fallen in love with Jakob, if I hadn’t insisted on waiting for him, on marrying him… our life would still be as it was. My sister would be married to her beloved. I might have found happiness with one of the baker’s sons, or with someone else entirely. But I chose love, and it destroyed my family. It destroyed an entire community. Let no one say that love is not the most powerful force in the world. It is stronger than hate. Love is fire. Raw and devastating in its power.

  We continued to walk past the place where the forest meets our field. The strawberries I planted with my sisters earlier have begun to bloom. They are thriving. I don’t remark on how fast they have grown. There is no point to the lists I used to make. I only have observations now. There are no answers. I have brought misfortune upon us all. That is all there is to say.

  “A blessing,” Papa says of the strawberries. “This new land is already rewarding us.”

  I wish he was right. He doesn’t know that I planted the seeds. That I can make anything grow—anything but my heart.

  We heard the sounds of hooves in the distance, the ground thundering beneath our feet. My eyes met his and I saw that the father I once knew wasn’t there. There was no light in his eyes, no spark of resistance. He took my hand and we ran to the darkest part of the forest to hide.