The train, your grandfather told me, would carry sixty-four soldiers and two cars’ worth of supplies. At nine-fifteen the following night, it would stop in Haradziec, where I’d have already laid out explosives.
It’s a stupid idea, Isaac said, crouching low in the dugout—I was the only one short enough to stand up straight under the ceiling of blankets. Maybe she’ll go unnoticed, he said, but she’ll slow us down.
Secretly I agreed with Isaac, but your grandfather ignored him. He had a way of dismissing people without angering them, simply by pretending he hadn’t heard them to begin with—a trait I appreciated then and now can’t stand: sometimes I feel like he’s walking around the apartment wearing earplugs. But that night I admired it, watching him roll out a map on the dirt floor, the yellow light of the lantern flickering across his face, which was getting thinner every day. It was an old map, one I remembered from school, when my village was still part of Belarus. Right then I didn’t know what was what. I stared at the names of towns, trying to will them to memory as your grandfather dragged a finger along our route.
We won’t have to worry about snakes in this weather but watch for bears, he said, passing out pistols and bullets to Isaac and me.
I’d never pointed a gun at anyone. I’d held plenty: in the armory workshop and at target practice, and back home my father had a rifle above the fireplace but I’d never seen him load it. I touched the slide of this one now, feeling my way to the trigger.
A pistol’s entirely different, Isaac said, and I sensed he was right: I’d been using shotguns during practice, but these would be easier to hide. You know how to push your weight against a shotgun, remember? he continued. With this, it’ll be twice as hard to have the same accuracy.
I wrapped my hands around the grip. Even before Isaac could criticize me, I knew my stance was wrong. My shoulders were hunched, my arms stiff. I hated the way your grandfather looked at me then, as if he suddenly recognized every risk in bringing me and was embarrassed for thinking the plan up at all.
But he just sat beside me and said, Push the magazine all the way up until you hear a click, then pull back the slide to chamber a round—that’s the only way to know it’s loaded for sure. You probably won’t need it anyway since you’ll be with us. And remember that if you do hear something, don’t shoot. It might just be an animal.
I nodded. I knew the rules. They’d been hammered into me since my first day there, your grandfather reciting them around the campfire every night: Don’t get cocky with your weapon. Remember what happened to three of our fighters who were loud and overconfident on a raid and were gunned down from a window, their stupidity already forest legend by the time I’d arrived. If you kill an animal, make sure the carcass doesn’t drip blood as you carry it back to camp: never leave a trail. Don’t forget that many of the peasants in the surrounding villages are good people, suffering as well, some even risking their own safety to protect us. If you have to rob them, take only what you absolutely need.
These rules were important to your grandfather. To Isaac and some of the others, not so much, though they always listened. I didn’t know if Isaac had always been gruff or if the war had made him that way. I knew he’d seen things I hadn’t, that when he’d heard soldiers coming into his village, he’d been quick to scramble behind a barn and from there had submerged himself in a river to hide, and when he crawled out hours later, he found himself completely alone.
It was like Isaac was running on adrenaline to stay alive, whereas with your grandfather it was something different. Even that night in the dugout, I knew he was considering morals only partly out of decency—mostly he saw himself, in his heart of hearts, as a boy with a legacy. A boy who, after the war was over, would be written about in textbooks, talked about in reverent tones: Leon Moscowitz, whose rebel army not only changed the course of the war but did so ethically.
I had never met a person so aware of his own voice, carefully stringing together sentences with the hope they would be quoted later, even as he told me to cup my hands as he passed out explosives. First a grenade, then six long sticks of dynamite.
This part’s easy, your grandfather said. Lay the sticks flat on the tracks.
And then what? I said.
For God’s sake, Isaac said.
Just before the train comes, your grandfather said calmly, hold the spoon of the grenade down with your thumb. Then twist off the pin with your other hand, and the moment you throw it, start sprinting toward the woods.
This is ridiculous, Isaac said. She’ll get us killed. Why not stay back in the armory? he said, and right away your grandfather stood up, as if secretly grateful Isaac was running his mouth so he had a reason to lecture. Just this week a statement went out all over the country, he said, offering farmers two sacks of grain for every one of us killed. Do you think anyone else is wasting their time with these concerns, pondering the differences between kids and teenagers, girls and boys? he said, his eyes flicking around the dugout as though his audience were much bigger than Isaac and me.
Then your grandfather turned to me. If anyone stops you, he said, you have to remember, even if you’re terrified, to keep the Yiddish out of your accent. Okay?
Okay, I said.
You could be a Dina, he said then, looking at me.
Or maybe Henia, Isaac said. Henia from the north, visiting her family?
He handed me a stack of clothes, all from a previous raid. Folded on top was a knit brown hat, which I slipped over my head. Your grandfather pushed it back, scrutinized my face and said, There. Already she looks like a different girl.
Yeah? I said, fingering the hat. What about Sonya? Sonya Gorski, I said, sounding it out, almost beginning to enjoy our game. It was like the dress-up I used to play back home, my best friend Blanka and me goofing off in my parents’ tailor shop, darting between the tall spools of fabric and draping the scraps around each other, pretending we were classy society ladies dressing for the opera, where our handsome, imaginary boyfriends would be waiting outside on the marble steps in suits.
THE FOLLOWING day I got ready for Haradziec. A gray wool dress and coat, leather boots and thick brown stockings. The boots were too large but everything else fit so snugly it was as if I’d picked out the clothes myself. In my pocketbook were my pistol and a case of bullets. I clutched it under an arm as I followed your grandfather and Isaac down the dark, mulchy path. These woods I knew—it was where we foraged for shells and mushrooms. We were quiet walking through, your grandfather brushing the ground with a stick to cover every footprint. Then Isaac called out to me, If the police stop you while you’re casing the station—
I’m Henia Sawicki. Staying with my grandparents nearby.
And if they ask what you’re doing on the tracks?
Looking for my ring. It slipped off somewhere.
These lies, I knew, were the easy part. But really, the entire plan was simple. We’d walk along the edge of the forest—far enough in the woods to go unnoticed, close enough to glimpse the villages through the trees. In Haradziec, I’d slip out and cross the tracks, set the explosives down, run back into the forest. Your grandfather had made it sound so effortless in the dugout, but here I worried about keeping it straight in my mind. If one wary soldier saw through my lie, that was it—I’d be shot, your grandfather and Isaac probably next, or maybe tortured in an attempt to be led to the brigade. So I was trying to remember the plan—Henia, the ring, the grandmother—while clonking around in my too-big boots, and that was when I tripped on a rock and fell to the ground, twisting my ankle so hard I couldn’t stand up. There I was, splayed in the dirt with my ankle throbbing, and even before your grandfather helped me to my feet, Isaac was already moaning about how he knew something like this would happen.
Twenty minutes out, he said, and your grandfather snapped, Tell me, Isaac, one of us couldn’t have fallen?
Before your grandfather could hoist himself back onto his soapbox, I started hobbling along the route and all they could
do was follow.
Don’t be stupid, Isaac called.
He’s right, your grandfather said.
I was suddenly so angry: with your grandfather for always acting like he knew what was best, with Isaac for being so hard on me, with myself for botching the attack. For the first time since the sewers, I felt utterly hopeless and alone. I had no idea what to do, or who to ask what to do, because—and this was the first time it really became clear to me—I had no one left. The only people I had in the world were these two boys I barely knew at all, who looked so unbelievably confused right then, walking in their oversized coats, Isaac breathless and spastic, your grandfather’s cap falling over his eyes. Up ahead, through a gap in the trees, I saw straw roofs, the jagged steeple of a church. I kept limping down the path, and when an entire village came into view, I slipped out of the forest. We were still two hours from Haradziec. My ankle was swelling, my clothes were covered in dirt, and I pushed through town, not even sure what I was looking for. The streets were empty and so eerily quiet it was as if something terrible had happened the second before we’d arrived.
Your grandfather and Isaac hurried behind me, whispering to get back in the forest. But I kept on, and that was when I realized this was the town I’d crawled into from the sewers. Huddled along the road were the same houses, the same barns and mill and school, only now the buildings were deserted and destroyed: broken windows, piles of bricks, rats darting up stairways leading nowhere. The war, it seemed, had finally arrived here. A few cottages were still smoldering. A man, hard-faced and dirty, dragged a skinny horse past without even looking up. This time, I knew, I was no more shit-stained than anybody else.
Along the strip of shops was a bakery. The door was open, and when I walked inside, the glass cases were smashed, the shelves bare, only half the tables standing. But as I moved through the kitchen and up the stairs, I saw shadows flash beneath a door. I pulled out my gun, pushed the door open with my shoulder and strolled inside.
The room was small enough to take in all at once: just two wooden chairs facing the fireplace with a bed and dresser in the corner; a stove, sink and table against the wall. A mother washed dishes. She had a cinched little mouth like a balloon knot and dark hair twisted tight at her neck. A boy, eight or nine, bent over homework at the wooden table. The mother glanced at me and at my gun and put down the pot she was drying. The boy stared. My hands wobbled as I aimed at them.
I need something to wrap up my ankle, I told the mother. It was the first time I’d spoken and my words sounded loose and clunky in the silent room. And boots and a coat and your warmest hat and scarf. And gloves, I added greedily as she sifted through drawers.
She handed over the clothes and I peeled off my dirty ones. I didn’t even have my tights off when the mother yanked the boy’s head toward her chest, and it took me a second to realize I’d gotten so used to bathing around everyone in the forest that it hadn’t seemed strange to strip down in front of this family.
Henia, Isaac hissed from the doorway, where he and your grandfather were standing. Let’s go.
But I couldn’t, not yet. As I sat at the table and tied a clean sock around my ankle, bruised and puffy but possibly only sprained, I looked at the math problems the boy had printed out neatly on lined white paper, and imagined, for just a second, what it would be like to have homework again. Not that I’d even liked math—it had been my worst subject, the one my father had to spend close to an hour correcting every evening. But to be at a table again with my mother, to have classwork and meals and chores—I had wished for my family every day in the forest, but never before had what I’d lost been flaunted so vividly in front of me, and I was filled with a sudden rage at this boy. This kid who had so little, whose father could be dead or at war or just not around, whose school was certainly shut down and whose mother was probably trying to keep up some semblance of routine by making him practice math in the middle of this chaos, and at that moment I resented them both.
What was for dinner? I asked them.
Soup, the mother said.
What kind?
Potato.
Fill three bowls for me.
It’s gone, the mother said. She held up the empty pot she’d just dried.
What do you have? I said.
She handed over a potato and three turnips.
I pocketed the food as I walked the length of the room, opening cupboards, rifling through drawers, feeling under sweaters and pants for a hidden stash of something.
I need your money, I said.
We don’t have any, the mother said.
Why should I believe you? I opened their closet, overturned pillows, shook out blankets.
I promise you, the mother said, looking at me pleadingly. It was already stolen. Everything was.
You’ll be sorry, I said, if you don’t give me your money. It took me two tries to pull back the slide, but it didn’t matter, I realized, when I was the only one holding a weapon. I grabbed the boy, circled an arm around him and pressed the gun to his cheek. He was shaking, and his fine brown hair was damp with sweat. He felt like such a child next to me, his skinny arms tight at his side, his breath coming out in short, hot gasps.
The mother was blinking quickly, and she kept looking at her son, then back at me. A sound came out of the boy’s throat, squeaky and remote, and I pressed the pistol more firmly against his skin. The mother closed her eyes. Then she crawled under the bed, ran her hand along the bottom of the mattress and pulled out a thin stack of bills. It was a small amount, enough for maybe two weeks’ worth of food.
Give it to me, I said.
We’ll starve, she said. Leave us something. Please.
Give it to me, I said again, and when she did, I let go of the boy. I waited for him to run to his mother’s arms, but it was like his feet were nailed to the floor. The room was so quiet I could hear a horse’s hooves clicking past outside. I walked backwards with the pistol still cocked, out to the stairs where Isaac and your grandfather were waiting.
They wouldn’t talk to me as we made our way through the bakery and out the door, where the cold air chilled me through my new coat. We were halfway down the road when your grandfather caught up with me and said, That family did nothing to you.
He grabbed my shoulders and shook me, like a box my voice might fall out of. How could you take everything they had?
But I kept walking. I don’t know how to explain it except that I was struck by a haziness where I could hear his words but they suddenly meant nothing to me—I will always mark that as the moment I stopped listening to your grandfather, and also as the day Isaac started looking at me with a curious, cautious respect. We were back in town, the same route we took in, and as we passed that row of gutted shops, I caught my reflection in a broken window. There I was, thirteen years old and stumbling around in someone else’s boots, looking more hideous than I could have imagined. I hadn’t been in front of a mirror since back home with my parents, I realized, and in that time I had become an ugly girl. My hair was greasy and knotted and so beaten by the elements it was a shade lighter. Black circles rimmed my eyes, scabs dotted my chin and forehead and lips, my teeth had gone as rotten and brown as tree roots. In only a couple months I had become a Medusa, a monster, a creature from the forests of a fairy tale.
I still see glimpses of that ugliness now. At the salon, when the hairdresser finishes my blowout and spins me around to face the mirror. Or sometimes on the subway, when the person across from me gets up and I’m shocked to see that same terrifying beast staring back at me in the scratched, blurred glass. But I want you to know it wasn’t that way for everyone. Your grandfather did the same things, lost the same things, watched that same boy doing math at the table—and responded by patiently sitting with your mother the entire time she was growing up, helping her with algebra and history and even with spelling, though it pained him to sound out words in a language he barely knew. I’d watch the two of them hunched over her homework at the kitchen table and
wish I was the kind of person who could be grateful I was still in the world to join them, rather than always standing a few feet from everybody else, slouched in a doorway.
Your grandfather, once the biggest loudmouth I knew, became a quiet, almost invisible man in America, stumbling over his English, bashful in public, shy to ask directions on the street after hearing some teenagers singsonging his accent. He was rejected for every job he tried to get, an immigrant without even a junior high school education. I was the one who found work first, in a clothing factory if you can believe it, back in a hot room sewing in zippers and finishing seams. Your grandfather was humiliated that he could provide for the brigade but not for his own family, humiliated when he finally did find a job, making deliveries for a beer distributor, just another tired man dozing on his subway ride to work.
Still, he found small parts of his life to genuinely appreciate: growing tomatoes on the patio, listening to the radio after dinner, taking the train to the city on weekends. And yet none of those things I could ever teach myself to love. Your mother and I may not have the easiest time together, but I’ll admit when she’s right. And though it pains me to say it, she told me something once that I know is true: I never stopped thinking people wanted to hurt me, even when they no longer did, and that rage would rumble through me during even the nicest times. Walking in the park with your grandfather on the first real day of spring, eating at a good restaurant on our honeymoon in Atlantic City, on vacation in Israel, almost forty years ago, when we could finally afford to go. Finally your mother met that side of her family, finally your grandfather visited his parents’ graves, finally he saw his brothers, middle-aged by then, with wives and children and grandchildren. I remember sitting in your great-uncle Natan’s backyard in Ramat Gan, drinking orange soda and picking at a plate of grapes, and right away your grandfather started asking about Chaya Salavsky. I hadn’t heard his voice climb so high since his speeches in the dugout. Did they still see her, what was she up to, he assumed after all these years she’d married?
The UnAmericans: Stories Page 7