“Plans?”
They were sitting at the kitchen table, Yael stitching some old trousers of Aleksei’s that had split, while Eva stared absently out through the window at the heavy layer of cloud that shrouded the sky, promising more snow. It would soon be March.
“I mean,” said Yael, searching for words, reaching for some language that would express the confused emotions that whirled around her mind. “I mean, how long are you thinking of staying here?”
Eva glanced sharply at Yael. Her lips tightened and Yael noticed the narrowing of her eyes.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You were talking of the partisans… I thought…”
Eva stood up and walked slowly around the table, stopping by the window, her back to Yael.
“I see,” she said, choosing Yiddish.
Often when they spoke, they used Polish. Yael did not like talking in front of Aleksei in a language he did not understand. Eva seemed oblivious to this courtesy and would often slip back into the colloquial language of their childhood.
“What do you mean, ‘you see’?” said Yael.
Eva turned from the window.
“It’s fine,” Eva said, her voice laced with contempt. “As soon as the weather improves, I will be out of your hair. I’m not going to spend my time cooped up in this hovel. I’m going to join a partisan group and fight.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you here,” Yael whispered, shamed.
Eva laughed unkindly. “I don’t care! You think I’m a threat to your little home?”
She pronounced the word with such contempt that Yael felt a rush of embarrassment. She stood up and faced the older girl. Eva cocked back her head and looked down her nose at Yael.
“Why are you so cruel?” Yael whispered. She had wanted to confront Eva, but the voice that emerged was timid.
“Me? I am the cruel one?”
“Why do you behave like this?”
“You are a disgrace!” Eva sneered. She stormed across the room and grabbed a coat. “I’m going. You happy? That’s what you wanted, no? Nu, va! There you go – I’d be better off with that family in their hole in the ground, at least there I would have some self-respect.”
“Eva.”
Eva took off her skirt and grabbed the mended trousers from the table. She pulled these on and slipped her feet into boots.
“Don’t be silly, Eva.”
Grabbing a scarf and a hat, which she pushed forcibly down over her hair, Eva just grunted. She pulled open the door.
“Eva, come back!”
Eva threw a crude comment over her shoulder as she stomped away from the house.
Yael felt a sudden rush of fury at the young woman. She picked up a small log and threw it out after her. Eva turned and the wood hit her on the forehead. She yelped in pain. A thin trickle of blood ran down her face. Wildly, they stared at each other, their breath curdling in the frosty air. Yael was shocked at her own temper. The ferocity with which she felt when protecting Aleksei and the life they had together. Eva turned and slowly walked away in the direction of the edge of the forest.
“Eva!”
“May you rot in hell!”
Her voice drifted back across the snow. Yael fell to her knees on the doorstep, a sob rising in her chest. She watched until the figure disappeared between the trees.
“Eva,” she cried. Her voice echoed back from the forest wall, bringing Aleksei running from the front field where he had been mending a fence.
“She’s gone,” Yael wailed, as he stooped down and grabbed her. “Go after her, Aleksei, go fetch her back.”
But Aleksei lifted her from the doorstep and carried her inside. She pushed against him, struggling to be free of his arms, but he held tight to her. He carried her through to the bedroom and laid her gently on the bed. When she struggled to get up, crying, the tears choking back her words, he shook his head and held his fingers against her lips.
“We can’t just let her go,” Yael cried.
But Aleksei held her there, until finally her sobbing had stopped and her body had ceased to shake. She lay quietly as he sat beside her and stroked her hair. They did not move for the whole afternoon and soon the sun had set. Aleksei brought her bread cut thick and clumsily, and a sliver of cheese. She ate it hungrily. He lay beside her then and took her in his arms and she buried her face in his chest.
“I am evil,” Yael whispered in the darkness.
But Aleksei had no words for her.
20
The stork brings spring upon its tail, the saying goes - Bocian na ogonie jaskółkę przynosi. It was mid-March when one landed in the field, and stood there almost motionless as Yael gazed through the window. She recalled her father telling her that when the storks flew down to Africa for the winter, they took the longer route down across Palestine, rather than crossing the Mediterranean. The journey was longer, but it was easier for the stork because of the way it flew. Its large wings were clumsy and heavy to flap, which made crossing the sea, with its turbulent wind currents, difficult, whereas flying down across the land, the bird barely had to move, riding the warm air.
She imagined this bird now having wintered in Jaffa, in the marshy plains of Palestine, along the reed beds of the Nile. An exotic, far-off world, beyond belief on this little farm, penned in by winter and war.
The bird was tall, a metre high with long, thin legs, a white head, neck and body and black wing feathers. Around each eye was a small patch of dark skin. Suddenly, as Yael watched, its neck twitched and then jabbed forward towards the earth, rising a moment or two later, with a small rodent trembling in its beak.
As Aleksei made his way outside, he paused by her side for a moment to see what she was looking at. Seeing the stork, he smiled and wrapped his arm around her. Bending slightly, he pointed up to the top of a wooden pole before the house. On the top of it were the crumbling remains of a nest.
“Do you think they will nest there this year?” Yael asked.
Aleksei smiled.
Since Eva had gone, Yael had slept badly. Each night she was troubled by dreams of the young woman lost in dark forests, ensnared by German soldiers. She dreamt of the pit in the woods, of creeping between dead bodies, of movement stiffened by the congealed blood that coated her. Often she would wake with a cry and Aleksei would sit up to find her wide-eyed, hair lank with sweat, trembling.
The stork began work repairing the nest at the top of the large pole by the house, bringing twigs and small branches from the forest. Later he brought moss and grass and even old newspaper found blowing around outside the house to line the nest. The nest was an old one, and it had grown over the years to almost two metres in diameter. Several other storks had taken up residence in the close vicinity and Yael fondly watched them establishing their homes with such care. It cheered her to think it was only humans that were fighting this war, that the birds and the wild animals could continue to exist as they always had. Life continued to go on.
“Oh that I really was vermin,” she said to Aleksei one evening as they sat in darkness by the stove, watching the flames of the furnace glittering through the slightly opened door. “I wish I was a rat, scuttling about in the forest, free to live as I wished.”
By the end of March the stork was established on its nest. From the direction of the road another stork swooped slowly down out of the sky. The bright morning sunlight caught its white underbelly, the wide span of its black wings, illuminated its startling red beak. The male in the nest crouched down and began shaking its head, spreading out its six-foot wingspan. The newly arrived settled down on the edge of the nest, its wings still spread wide, imitating its nodding – first from side to side, then perceptibly up and down. Their beaks clattered loudly.
Yael, watching, felt a wave of joy sparkle down her spine. She shivered. The stork cannot sing, her father had told her once, in fact they are more or less mute.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You listen to them, they can’t
sing. All they can manage upon occasion is a hiss.’
‘Why is that?’ Yael had asked.
But her father was only able to shake his head. ‘I’m not a scientist,’ he grumbled pleasantly, ruffling her hair, ‘that’s how God made them, even the females!’ He laughed. ‘It was a blessing,’ he added.
‘My little stork,’ he called her. ‘My quiet one.’
Yael imagined being a stork. Imagined opening wide her wings and dropping down off that large nest, allowing the wind to gather beneath her wings, sailing up over the trees, over the top of the forest, following rivers, down across the continent, stopping briefly in the Ukraine and feasting on its rich harvest, over the cupolas and spires of Sofia, settling among the minarets of Istanbul. Poking around in the foothills of Hermon, wading in the shallows of Galilee.
Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork.
She dreamt that night she found Eva in the depths of the forest, with wings like a stork. She sailed through the morning air and settled on the edge of a nest, where another was waiting for her, bobbing its head, up and down, clacking its beak. It was Josef, she realised later, this stork in the nest. Yael called out from the grass below them, but they sailed off across the forest, leaving her there, alone.
As May passed into June and the weather grew hotter, Yael began to worry less about Eva. As long as the good weather held, she would be able to survive in the woods, Yael considered. She was probably better off, safer perhaps in the woods than in the farmhouse. She slept better, and once more felt the quiet comfort of the familiar rituals, the closely circumscribed life. She began reading to Aleksei in the evening again, settling on Pushkin.
“It’s like my past is unravelling before me,” Yael said to Aleksei, laying aside the book one evening.
Aleksei looked up from the fire, his eyes questioning.
“I have nothing to do here and cannot imagine what might come. It’s like the future and present have been taken from me, and I’m left only with memories. Sometimes I can picture them, as clear and tangible as if they were here – or rather, I was there. I feel I could reach out and touch them.
“Some mornings I wake, and before I open my eyes, I imagine I am back in my bed at home and Josef is close by and I can hear my father walking around and mother is cooking some porridge for breakfast. I can smell it. Occasionally I close my eyes and picture Josef and can hear his voice exactly. Exactly. Is it possible that it’s gone?”
Aleksei held out his hand to her.
“But is it possible that it could be taken away so quickly? That a whole world could be erased like a mistake in a school book, and that nobody will protest? Is it possible to do that?”
Aleksei bowed his head.
“But what will they do?” Yael continued. “The barber was Jewish, the factory owner. Zalman Lunski who owned the only truck to take the farmer’s produce to Plotsk. How will they do anything with no Jews?”
Aleksei got up and poured water into the blackened kettle that he placed onto the stove. It sizzled as the flames licked the moisture along the bottom. Yael watched his quiet movements, studied the broad slope of his back, the muscles in his arms, the dark long hair that fell down across his cheeks.
“Why don’t you talk?” she said. “What happened, Aleksei, that stopped you from speaking?”
He paused, hand above the kettle as though about to remove it, though it was a long way from boiling. He half turned, but then stopped. His fingers tightened and then relaxed. He reached up and tucked the hair back off his face and walked across the kitchen to fetch two cups; new ones he had brought back from Selo on his last visit. They were made from fine china, with a flowered pattern in pink and green worming its way around the rim. Like the ones the Leizer family had.
The female stork on the nest had laid her eggs and the two birds made regular trips out across the fields to find food. From the window Yael watched them, marvelling at the care shown by the large birds for their clattering young.
‘That was how they gained their name in Hebrew,’ her father had told her. ‘Chasidah. From chesed. It means kindness.’
“Nothing bad will happen to us now,” Yael whispered to Aleksei in the darkness one night. “You know the saying? Lightening does not strike the nest of a stork. Gdzie bocian na gnieździe, tam piorun nie uderzy. They will keep us safe, our family of storks.”
The next day the Germans came.
21
Aleksei woke first. A thin grey light seeped through the curtains. A dog barked, but that was not what woke him. He shook Yael, who mumbled and turned over. Pushing her again, he took her shoulder and shook her fiercely.
“What is it?” she murmured, drawing herself up from a deep well of sleep. Aleksei indicated for her to listen. “It’s only a dog,” she said after a moment and collapsed back onto the old mattress, rolling in close against his side where it was warmer.
Aleksei swung his legs over the side of the bed and ran a hand through his hair. An engine was running somewhere, up on the road at the top of the path. Yael groaned and reached out a hand to restrain him.
“It’s too early.”
The bang on the door startled them both. Yael sat up sharply, her eyes widening, suddenly awake. Half standing, Aleksei seemed unsure which way to turn. At that moment, behind them, there was a sharp tap on the glass of the window. A small, soft shriek escaped Yael’s lips. She dropped back onto the mattress pulling the sheet across her.
Aleksei bent down and grabbed her arm. He pulled her up and out of the bed. Pushing aside the clothes in the wardrobe, he inched open the false partition and roughly pushed Yael through. The darkness enfolded her. She stood bolt upright, her heart pounding and her body shaking so much she feared the whole wardrobe would start rattling.
“Hey!” a voice called from the doorway.
Yael heard Aleksei’s feet slap across the floorboards, the struggled noises he made when afraid, attempts at speech. Boots clumped across the kitchen and into the bedroom. Their voices were so close, Yael felt she was stood among them. She heard the creak of the bed and someone’s voice, squeezed, as they bent double, checking beneath it. The door of the wardrobe clicked open and she heard the sound of heavy breathing, the swish of clothes on hangers, fingernails scratching against the thin plywood. A stream of light split the darkness of her compartment, falling upon her hand. Yael trembled, felt her skin dampen with a cold sweat. Her head spun dizzily. The fingers scraped against her compartment and she heard a muttering not more than a foot away.
“Nix!”
“Nothing at all?”
“Just old clothes.”
“And these books?”
“His books?”
“They’re all in Russian.”
There was a moment’s silence. Yael’s breathing came in shallow gulps. She closed her eyes, but nervously they sprang open again, fixed upon the dark wood no more than a few inches before her eyes. She tried to shift her feet but could not without making a noise. When she had been pressed into the space, she had not had time to arrange herself in a comfortable position and already she was finding it difficult to stand. Her legs had started to ache.
“You are a Bolshevik? A communist?” It was barked in German first, then, hesitantly in Polish with a strong accent. “Communist?”
She heard his muttering, the guttural gurgles, the coughs and throat clearing. Heard his feet shifting.
“Well?”
“Answer the Commander!”
A hollow stamp vibrated the floorboards. The German soldiers laughed. Through the half-inch narrow gap Yael caught a glimpse of him stood in the middle of the room. His long night shirt flapped open, revealing his broad chest, his arm raised in a Nazi salute. His dark hair was wild about his head, thrown back, his eyes staring, bright with fear. In a tight semi-circle the soldiers stood around him, submachine guns slung on leather straps across their should
ers, pointed at his waist.
The soldiers settled themselves down in the kitchen. From her hiding place Yael heard the sounds of the engines of their lorries as they drove down the field, the shouted commands, the sound of feet crunching around the house. A small squad of Einsatzkommandos set up camp on the farm. A number of tents were erected on the back field. Later in the morning Yael heard the sound of a pig squealing manically, a blood-curdling sound. At midday the breeze blew in the scent of wood smoke through the house, and a little later pork frying. Aleksei ducked in and out of the house, carrying drinks, doing odd jobs, busying himself. Occasionally when he felt himself unobserved he crept into the bedroom and stood by the wardrobe. His silent desperation permeated the air.
In the narrow space Yael shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She attempted to squat down, but the compartment was not wide enough and her hips caught against the sides. She leant one way and then the other but after an hour or two she felt her legs could stand it no longer. Sharp pains shot up from her calf muscles. Her thighs ached. Panic overtook her and she found she could not breathe. As wide as she opened her mouth she did not seem able to get air into her lungs. Perspiration soaked her clothes. Her body seemed to whirl in the air. Her head fell forward and cracked against the wood. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream.
Aleksei squeezed a glass through the back of the wardrobe, easing open the partition a couple of inches. Yael drank the water quickly, but soon after found her bladder was full. For an hour she nursed it, the increasing pain forcing out any other feeling. Finally unable to hold it any longer, she allowed her muscles to relax a little, felt the warm trickle down her leg, soaking her nightdress, pooling under her feet. She cried then. Silently. Painfully. Cried from the very depth of her being.
Darkness began to fall. By then numbness had overtaken Yael. She did not cry. Nor did she particularly think. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, counted occasionally. She tried to rouse herself at one point, to collect her thoughts, but after a few moments she gave up and allowed the blankness to envelop her once more. She went through periods when she thought she could stand the pain and the tiredness no longer, when she felt she must surely faint, but she didn’t and then the point would pass, her mind would drift and time would continue.
The Song of the Stork Page 9