A Boy in Winter

by Rachel Seiffert

  The ink dries on the pages, and he folds them; he addresses an envelope and seals them inside it. And then, spent after the long day and all its revelations, after all he’s revealed to Dorle—so much that she will pass on to others too, Pohl is sure of it—he sits a long while, head bent, hands folded in his lap, holding that quiet inside him.

  —

  In Osip’s yard, the wind blows damp at Yasia’s skirts. In the workshop, it smells sweet of her mother’s apples. Up under the rafters, Yasia finds all is still and dim and silent.

  She stands there, on the top rung of the ladder.

  “Me,” she whispers into the shadows. And then: “Food.”

  Unsure if she is heard, or if there is no one there now to hear her, she lays what she has brought on the floorboards before she climbs downstairs.

  Only long after she lights the lamps does Yasia hear the two boys moving. After she has fed the horse and watered him, and found Osip’s tinderbox, setting a blaze in the small stove to warm the pot from the mayor’s housekeeper.

  The animal flicks its ears, and Yasia lifts her head at the first low creaking of the floorboards above.

  She has spent all day in the mayor’s kitchens. In the back of her mind, all through her day’s work, the idea of them nagged at her: those two boys hiding. If Osip would find them, and if she would be blamed for them. What was she doing, taking in strangers at such a time?

  But although she worried, Yasia could not return to check on the boys or to move them on again. She could not look for Mykola either: the town was too full of soldiers. She and the housekeeper heard them passing outside so often, the woman would not hear of her leaving; even after Yasia had finished with the apples, they sat tight together in the kitchen, listening for the next lot, and then the next lot of Germans, waiting for the streets to be quiet enough for Yasia to slip back to Osip’s yard gate. She couldn’t tell if the men were patrolling, or if they were searching Jews out of hiding, but most were heading for the north side of the town, just as the truck-loads that woke her this morning. It felt to Yasia as though they must be gathering there, out by the factory and the barrack block, and she did not like so many soldiers near to Mykola. She still does not like it.

  The yard is in its usual mess. The cart is on all four wheels again in the workshop, but it leans on them strangely, and Osip is sleeping. Yasia found him in his bed, but still fully dressed, and from the depth of his slumbers, and the half-finished repairs, Yasia thought he’d spent the day drinking with the timber man: another wasted day the soldiers have to answer for.

  The dark and quiet, and the marsh wind blowing outside the workshop door, added to her solitude, her lonely wish for Mykola. If only he could return home with her when she goes again.

  So when Yasia hears the boys, she is almost glad of them.

  Glancing upward through the gaps in the planks, she sees the older one slipping overhead to where she left the food for them; and then his young face, pale in the gloom of the loft entry, as he stoops over to pick up the morsels.

  The boy sees her too, how she sits and watches him. He stops where he is, still half bent over, and then they both blink a moment.

  “He did not come?” Yasia confirms, in a whisper, pointing to Osip’s back door.

  The boy shakes his head, and then he signals: only once; Osip came only one time, and he stayed down there by the cart.

  “No one else? All was quiet?” Yasia asks him softly.

  And he nods to her: they were safe enough in their small conspiracy.

  He has the food she left him in his palms, and he lifts it a little as though in acknowledgement. But it looks like far too little to Yasia, especially now she has eaten. The sight of it embarrasses her—nowhere near enough to feed the both of them.

  “Wait there,” she says.

  She has eggs and flour to take home; paprika too, from the housekeeper’s store, and best of all: two long yellow-white slabs of butter. Yasia wants to keep one whole, unspoiled, to present to her mother, but she digs her knife into the other, spreading two hunks of bread for the boys, and then, as an afterthought, another for herself.

  Yasia climbs the ladder with the bread in her apron pocket—not all the way, just far enough to reach the slices up to the older one. But once he has retreated, she stays where she is.

  The boy sits down with his brother, and Yasia watches them. Leaning against the ladder’s slope, against the lip of the entry, chewing her bread as they chew theirs, she whispers: “Did you sleep?” And then: “Did you hear the patrols?”

  The older one nods in the gloom, and she dips her head in sympathy.

  The lamplight seeps up through the gaps in the floorboards, and Yasia’s eyes adjust to the shadows. She sees how the older one takes large mouthfuls, chewing and swallowing. There is ugliness in his eating, ungainly—unselfconscious too, like a small child; he divides the food and swallows his portion hungrily.

  On the floor behind him, on the stalk-strewn planks, the younger one crouches, at play with something. He accepts the bread his brother passes, cut into chunks for him with a clasp knife from his jerkin pocket, but he is drowsy, sleep-tousled. Yasia thinks the older one must have kept him still and silent all the day long, let him sleep as long as possible. But that is all to the good, else Osip might have heard them; he might have sent them packing, and she’d have had to answer for it.

  And now the curfew is in force again.

  “The soldiers haven’t gone yet,” Yasia cautions.

  She saw more coming through the town streets when she was returning here from the boarding house; far too many to risk putting the boys out. So she tells them: “You can both stay up here for tonight.”

  They will be company. Even if they will be a worry for her; for their family as well.

  “Won’t your family be looking for you?” Yasia whispers, as the thought occurs to her.

  The older one gives her a half-shrug, half-shake-of-the-head, as he turns to attend to his brother, holding out more bread to him. She was only asking, only showing concern, but he offers nothing in return, his face still turned away from her.

  “Until the morning, then,” she tells him, short. Yasia is used by now to the townspeople’s surliness, even if it irks her. She won’t pry further. She shifts her attention to the small boy instead: easier to watch him than talk to his brother.

  Crouching and shuffling as he takes his mouthfuls, he ignores the older one’s hushed instructions to sit down, sit still beside him. This little one has been sleeping the day away, which means he will be awake half the night, and he will be difficult to keep quiet; Yasia knows how little ones are. But at least he plays quietly for now, wrapped up in some whispering game of his own invention.

  The lamplight falls on the small forms he plays with: wooden blocks with whittled edges, which he digs from his pockets to place on the boards before him. Yasia sees a house-shaped piece among them, with a steep-pitched roof, or perhaps it is a barn. There are shapes that look like people, almost; ones that look like goats too, or maybe farm dogs; and some others that she can’t make out.

  In between bites, the small one groups them, and then he leans in to his brother; the two of them whisper to each other, soft—Yasia can’t hear what about, she is just too far away to understand them. But she sees how alike they are—and pretty too, as boys go—with their dark eyes and their brown curls and their milk-white faces; in all their milk-white and soft brown fineness. The two boys point to the small forms off and on, nodding and smiling, as though sharing the game now between them.

  Osip gave her mending this morning; Yasia promised to be done with it before she set off home again, in return for staying here. But when she looks down the ladder, she doesn’t want to sit and stitch alone down there.

  The older one glances up briefly as she returns with a basin of eggs and the lamp to work by. He has finished eating, and is sitting splay-legged with some of his brother’s toys before him, picking each up in turn with his fine finge
rs, as though checking them over.

  Yasia knocks the eggs against the bowl rim, breaking the shells, and then she begins to peel them, her eyes still on the boys and on the forms that occupy them, and she sees there are more now. A few are neat and painted; they look shop-bought, from somewhere in the town, or sent from Kiev perhaps. But Yasia sees it is the others that the older boy checks over. These are wooden as well, but rougher around the edges; they look home-made to her, or makeshift, and the boy adds a notch here and there, shaping the tops with his knife blade. And then, while the small one watches, the older one produces another from his jerkin—he must have made it for him.

  Yasia has an egg peeled and ready for each of them, and she holds them out for the small one to come and take from her, clicking to him rather than calling, until he lifts his head from his brother’s work.

  The small one edges towards her shyly, reaching for the food. One hand still full of his new toy, he has to give it to Yasia to make room, and she takes it from him gently, pressing an egg into each of his palms in exchange. Such fine little digits; she likes to see them gripped like that, to see all the neatness of his small child’s movements. An egg makes a good warm fistful, she thinks, watching his fingers closing around the soft ovals as he returns to his brother’s side.

  The small boy slips onto his brother’s knee to eat and, watching him there, Yasia feels the emptiness of her own lap. Nothing but her own hands to rest there—and even they have nothing to hold in them.

  Come the morning, she tells herself: come the morning, she will be with Mykola, she will put her arms about him, even if just for a short while. But for now, she watches as the boys eat and play at the same time.

  They sit before her—not too near, not too far away—with their toys ranged around them. And in the lamplight, Yasia can see the rougher forms all have drawings or carvings on the sides of them: some are taller, some more rounded, but on all are scratchings and etchings. The one the small boy gave her for safekeeping is patterned as well: opening her palm, she sees the blade-marks scored across its surfaces. Turning it to catch the light, she sees these are outlines of leaf and twig and trunk: it is a tree the older one has carved—perhaps all of them are. Yasia looks up to check and, sure enough, the older one has made marks on every one: he has made a forest of sorts for his brother to play with. Or perhaps it is an orchard for his little wooden people.

  It seems a strange toy for a town child, and Yasia regards the older one, at watch over his brother’s play. But his face is hard to read. He is milk-white and soft brown, but so hard to get the measure of.

  The small one has made a tight group of the trees now; there are enough to add up to a good grove—far more than could fit in both their pockets—so Yasia thinks the older one must have spent some of the long day’s hiding in whittling more for him.

  This thought has her wary.

  “Where did you get the wood from?” she asks, lifting her chin, clicking her fingers at the older one and pointing; first at the forms and then downwards, to Osip’s workshop and the wood stacks below them.

  “You went down there?”

  The boy shrugs at her question, hardly glancing in her direction. It might be an apology, but Yasia isn’t certain; it might just be surly.

  “I said to be careful,” she tells him, curt.

  He shouldn’t be here at all, so he shouldn’t go down the ladder to search through Osip’s offcuts.

  “I let you stay here,” Yasia reminds him. “So you should listen to me.”

  She points across the yard to Osip’s door again.

  “He is my father’s cousin.” Yasia asserts kinship, authority of some kind. “What if he’d seen you?”

  But still the boy says nothing in response, glancing in his brother’s direction instead, putting an arm in front of him—a pointed gesture—as though to shield the younger one from their dispute.

  And then Yasia sees how the small one crouches there, contented, taking bites, then lifting and placing the toys before him; keeping up that under-his-breath whispering. An argument would only upset him; it might lead to crying. It might end up waking Osip, just across the yard; the older boy does well to remind her. Yasia tells herself, grudgingly, that he is careful, after all. No one heard; no one saw him.

  They both fall silent.

  She sets to Osip’s shirts then, cleaning her fingers of eggshells, putting the basin to one side; pulling the lamp closer, taking to his buttons and cuffs with needle and thread, while the brothers retreat to the straw on the far side of the roof space. Bent over her mending, Yasia can hear their whispering, but not what they say to one another. It might be a game, or it might just be a story they tell each other about their trees and people. In any case, Yasia thinks the young one will be wakeful for a while still—both the boys will—but they keep their voices low enough, so she doesn’t hush them.

  She sits up there with them for most of the evening, cross-legged by the lamp with her repairs, her mind wandering as the stove-warmth fills the attic space—to Myko, and tomorrow morning: where best to go and find him. When the boys are gone. As soon as she has seen them on their way, she can go to the barrack block; better to seek him out first, before the day is lost to working. She has to see Myko before she turns for home again.

  Yasia finds herself dozing, her back against a straw bale, legs pulled under her skirts. She wakes and works, wakes and works, and then nods off again.

  It is the small one who wakes her properly. Crying out: she hears him.

  Yasia sits up sharply, eyes open, finding herself half in darkness; Osip’s shirts still on her lap, needle and buttons lost, scattered across the planks. The lamp is no longer at her side, it is over by the boys—under the rafters, where the small one cries again.

  A child’s noise, calling out for comfort, for his mother, and Yasia stumbles to her feet as she hears it.

  The older boy is quick to stop him shouting. Yasia sees how he presses a hand across his mouth, and he pulls him close too, to try to soothe him. One rough arm about his shoulders, he rocks and he hushes, rocks and hushes. And then he starts up his whispering.

  Yasia is closer now, so she can hear him. But she is still confused by the dark and being woken, and the words he speaks sound odd to her; the small one’s whimpered replies too. Yasia nears them, and she tries to make out what they are saying—what caused him to shout out?—but it is a strange tongue they speak with one another: murmured and furtive, like a secret they keep between them.

  No townsfolk speak like that, none that she knows; Yasia feels she has taken in strangers.

  And then this idea sets off a ticking fear inside her.

  Are they Jew children?

  The boys keep up their murmuring.

  Outside it is so quiet now, Yasia doesn’t even hear the wind any longer. She strains her ears for sounds of Osip waking, or of patrols—for sounds of anything at all—while the fear ticks on and on inside her, tightening her throat, sending her thoughts falling, one over the next.

  If there is no one out there to hear her, no one to see her, she could put the boys out into the lane; send them off down the alleyways and be rid of them. But then the older one glances up at her.

  Yasia feels a sudden flare across her cheekbones. He saw her looking; perhaps he saw what she was thinking. She glares at the boy, half to cover her shame, half to make sure he stays silent; and she puts a finger to her lips in warning, still listening for sounds, for signs that they have been heard.

  But she cannot put the two of them out, Yasia knows this. And not only because one of them is small and that would be shameful. The whole town is shut down around them, waiting for the soldiers to go again; the neighbours will wake at any noise in the yard, they are bound to look outside, and she cannot have anyone hearing, anyone seeing them leaving. What can she do but let the boys stay on until morning?

  Yasia sees that the older one has already drawn the same conclusion. It is there in his eyes: a surprising defiance.<
br />
  But the small one has calmed a little beside him. He sits blinking at Yasia from the shelter of his brother’s arms, and then at the rafters all around them in the lamplight, settling back into his surroundings; and so the older one turns away from her.

  He lies his brother down again, keeping his back to Yasia, as though still defying her to put them out of here. She sees it in the set of his boy’s shoulders—stiff and insolent in his stubbornness. But he is gentle with his brother, for all his awkwardness, smoothing the child’s curls off his forehead, murmuring softly as he tucks the straw like a nest around him. And while Yasia watches him blanketing and covering, inexpert but careful, tender as any mother would, it occurs to her: their Jew mother must have been taken. She must be in the factory, and the older boy knows this.

  The thought doesn’t help her. Nor does the feeling that this older one sees right through her.

  Yasia keeps watch on him, while he lies the small one on his side, pushing the lamp a little closer, so his brother can see his toys again. Piece by piece, the older one gathers all of them together just beside him; and he keeps on his murmuring story all the while too, touching the trees gently with his fingertips as he speaks, ordering them on the planks, opening out the grove, neatening some of the others into two short rows.

  The smaller one is still wakeful, but he is settling now in the straw, soothed by his brother’s whispers; and Yasia hopes his eyes will soon be closing. She hopes the older one will stop that whispering too, hush that strange tongue of theirs; she would hush it if she could.

  Only when the young one’s breathing calms enough for sleeping does the older boy quieten. He lets his story tail off then.

  The lull that follows eases Yasia’s fears a little, as does the sight of the small child’s sleeping features. But she stays watchful as she picks up the lamp and retreats to the trapdoor.

  She will put the boys out tomorrow. The older one saw that in her face, Yasia is sure of it. But for now he pays her no regard. He doesn’t even lift his head as she reaches the ladder, ready to climb down. He stays where he is: half attending to his almost-sleeping brother, half carrying on with his ordering of the wooden shapes before him. His mouth no longer forming words, but his eyes intent as he crouches over them; his face bright with thought, it seems to Yasia. As though he is still telling his story, only to himself this time.