When the day begins fading, Yankel finds himself among birches, in amongst their pale trunks, uncertain of his bearings; unable to find his notches. The horse slows and he does not know which way to drive it onwards, only that the animal’s coat is streaked with damp, and its head hangs low to the ground. Yankel thinks of the failing light, and how he must go on searching; even now, when he doesn’t know which way to turn. But his fingers are cold and curled into the coarse mane, and he has been looking for so long, he doesn’t trust his senses when it comes:
The smell of stove-wood burning and something cooking over it.
Smoke from a chimney; a thin column rising above the far trees. And then people, finally, the first he has seen in days.
Yankel slides from the horse’s back, crashing through the fallen leaves; and there, just ahead of him, is a couple: bent under baskets of stove-wood, and slowing to stare at him.
“Come, please!”
—
Stooped with concern, they crouch over the girl. The man tugs the shawl back from her forehead, and her plaits are dark with sweat and damp, wide cheeks pale against the leafy ground.
It took so long to get them to follow him, it took so long to find Momik and the girl again, and now Yankel can’t understand what they say to one another. They speak in hurried whispers, but he hopes they see the girl’s marsh features; that they will take her in now and help her—and Momik too—because the light is failing. He lifts his brother, thinking how close he came to leaving him. Yankel holds him, thinking if he and Momik can sleep now, if they can just eat something and sleep a day or two in the warmth somewhere. But when Yankel steps forward to ask, the couple are already lifting the girl between them.
They leave their stove-wood bundles, hoisting her onto the horse’s back, lying her along his neck, and then the woman holds her there while the man leads the animal. Yankel has to follow them, bent under the weight of his brother, under the weight of all the days spent walking. Do they mean to go without him?
They don’t take him the way they came, pressing ahead, leading the horse on and on through the darkening branches. Yankel sees no cart ruts, no track they might be following; they say nothing of where they are taking the girl.
Faltering among the tree roots, he loses sight of them: Yankel has to look where he is treading; he has to look ahead too, to keep track of them, if he is not to be alone out here when night comes. He hoists Momik higher, but even then he can’t go fast enough to catch them up, and he can’t stop to tie Momik to his back for fear of losing them entirely.
Yankel cries out. But they don’t hear him. They start to call out themselves now, but Yankel can’t see why or who they call to. He can only blunder behind them, following the noise they make.
The couple have taken the girl to a clearing, crossing it far ahead of him; when Yankel gets out from among the trees he catches sight of them under the last of the evening light—and that it is a small hut they head for, half hidden in the branches on the far side. The couple call out, again and again, even before they get to it, their shrill noise carrying, alarming across the clearing, driving Yankel into a run now.
Roused by their cries, a woman comes from the doorway; she rushes at them through the falling dusk. Yankel sees how she pulls the girl’s shawl back from her face too—and that as soon as the woman sees her, she points them onwards.
A clanging sounds out, metal on metal, as Yankel ducks into the trees again after them. He glances over his shoulder: it is the woman sounding out a call, like a warning, ladle against a pot lid, and then bit by bit, her ringing is answered by another, and another, further ahead, beyond the darkening trunks.
Momik slips in his arms; Yankel can’t carry his brother much further, his hands and shoulders cramped and aching. But he can follow the sound, even when the couple pass out of sight again between the branches. And the ringing does not stop, even as the path rises; it rises and turns again as they pass out from the trees and into meadowland.
Low enclosures are dotted here; Yankel sees a new one each time he lifts his head to look. They come first to one house and then another—always more of them—and then villagers begin emerging from the low doors as they pass. Farmers, cautious and frowning; mothers holding their children. Some follow with their eyes, others follow behind them, this halting procession; Yankel feels them catching him up, and then he sees them overtaking, his arms sore and weakening, his legs folding under him. The villagers turn to look at him, and then they turn away again, leaving him and Momik behind themselves.
The ringing dies away as they come to the far meadows, nearing the edge of the settlement, and the quiet leaves Yankel all the more uncertain. All the trees here are bare, the trunks are black and wet, and now a sleety rain is falling. It chills his face and his fingers, shrouding the path from view, the girl and the couple too, even the villagers who follow them.
Until there, up in the pasture, is an old man.
His head bent low against the weather, Yankel sees he is bringing in his cows, walking stiff beside the oldest of his animals, dun and wide-hipped, mother to the others. Clicking and whistling, he keeps the small herd moving, their legs muddied up to their udders, almost, their hooves sinking in the soft ground; and when he lifts his face, the girl raises a hand to him.
She is pulled from the horse by many village arms, and the old man stands where he is, his cows stand with him in the sleet, watching the girl as she is carried towards him through the long grass, already yellowed with the cold. Stubble grows thick and white, feathery under his chin, and his face is lined and creased, but his cheekbones are wide, his eyes set deep in their sockets, just like the girl’s, and they uncloud as he takes her in.
“Yasia?”
There is a welcome there, Yankel sees it as he approaches, how the man puts out both his hands to her. But there is confusion as well, his old eyes blinking, disconcerted: he sees how weak she is, the girl’s legs barely holding her as she is lowered to stand before him. Who comes to the marshes at such a time, and in such a way? It can only mean bad news. The old man’s gaze shifts to Yankel and to Momik too; these brothers who are not her brothers, and who have come to a stop behind her.
“They are yours also?” one of the villagers asks, and the old man looks at them, doubtful.
The girl turns to look at Yankel. Eyes fevered in confusion, as though she can’t remember any longer. How they got here. How she got here with them.
The villagers’ eyes are on him, and Yankel wills them all to see it: how Momik sleeps too quietly, he must be taken care of. He has carried him this far, and as soon as Momik is strong again, he will carry him further. Surely they must see that.
9
The snows are deep that winter, and they hold for weeks. The sodden landscape freezing over, turning grey-white and still, as far as the horizon.
Yasia saw it as soon as she was well enough to sit up and look out through the window: how the small scattering of houses was held by drifts as high as the eaves, closed in by the cold. It was a relief to be closed off.
“My sister’s daughter.”
Uncle pointed at Yasia when his neighbours called for their milk those first mornings. He was careful to point her out to all those who had not seen their arrival, who had only heard it, or heard about it.
The villagers stamped the mud and slush from their boots, stepping over the threshold. They stood and stared at Yasia, wrapped in blankets at one end of his long and single room, and then at the two boys.
“From my sister’s district.” Yasia’s uncle nodded tersely in the boys’ direction.
This was just about all Yasia heard him say about them, and it was not a lie: that was not his way. Yasia saw his marsh pride would not allow him to lie to his neighbours.
“It is safer they stay here. For the meantime,” Uncle told them, gesturing at the children first, weak with fever, and then at the sleet that was turning to snow and settling on everything.
The snow kept on falling,
and it seemed reason enough for them to stay here. It seemed to put off his neighbours’ questions, too, because the villagers kept on coming. Yasia saw them, as if through a veil; how they let Uncle fill their pails and jugs, as always, carrying their milk off along the village paths. And so the news spread, and her uncle’s word was accepted, for the meanwhile in any case, because soon no one stared any longer.
—
Far from everything, Yasia slept and slept, even after the fever left her. Even after the two boys were well enough to stand and walk again, her legs were still weak, arms too heavy to lift. Any light made her eyes ache: the morning sun on the snow outside, and the lamps Uncle lit in the afternoons.
He brought her soup in a bowl from the stove, sitting her up to drink it; drawing up a stool to sit with her until she’d finished.
“You must eat now.”
Uncle did the same for the boys, in his bachelor way. He was unused to children, but Yasia saw his rough care for them, especially the younger one. The first to get well again, the boy climbed out from the blankets long before his brother could; standing and shivering while Uncle set a blaze in the stove each morning. Uncle found him an over-shirt from another village child, cutting it down to size, pulling it over his head so the boy would be warmer; and he tried to glean the small one’s name from his timid murmurings, guessing at Marek and Maksim and Mirko. His brother was still too ill to confirm which, so Uncle took to calling the small boy any one of these, because he lifted his head to all of them, his eyes following Uncle around the room, shy at his gruffness, and curious. As soon as he got strong enough to stand, he followed Uncle outside, standing at the threshold in his stockinged feet to watch him cross the yard.
Uncle cut strips of leather to replace the boy’s broken laces, binding his soles in hide strips, so the snow and cold wouldn’t get in through the holes. He did the same for the older one too—both the boys’ good shoes had been walked half to ruins on the way here.
But Uncle also went outside alone sometimes, to meet with his neighbours: Yasia saw him, standing out beyond the byre, on the snow-covered track there. At the meeting of the ways, where all the village men gathered whenever there were village matters to discuss. Such a group they made, and such a long time they talked there, despite the cold. Just far enough from the house that she couldn’t hear them; their backs turned, as though they didn’t want her eyes on them either.
As soon as she was stronger, Yasia was careful to make herself useful.
—
Rising in the quiet before dawn, in the deep quiet of the snows, she pulls on her skirts and her apron in the half dark, pulling at the older one’s elbow, putting out his shoes where he will easily find them.
Now she is well again, they share one bed, one bracken-stuffed mattress on the floor between the three of them, sleeping together behind the curtaining blanket Uncle tacked across the ceiling when they first came. Uncle’s own bed is on the other side of the long room, closer to the stove, where he pulls it each winter now he is older, and they are careful not to wake him, or the younger one; they leave them slumbering.
The older boy walks beside Yasia to the byre as day is breaking. Still sleep-dulled, both of them, they don’t speak any more than they need to, but Yasia sees how well the boy attends to his tasks, clearing the stalls, forking the hay into the mangers. He has never offered his name, even when Yasia has asked for it; the boy has still never offered her more than a word or two, and there is no talking to someone who is silent. But all the while she is milking, he lifts the full pails without once being told, emptying them into the churns before carefully returning them.
Uncle taught him to do all this while Yasia could do nothing but sleep. By the time she was well enough to work again, the boy could milk cows—the docile ones anyway—skim the cream, and sharpen the axes her uncle uses for firewood. So this is what he does now every morning, working alongside her in the stalls first, and then on the whetstone. Yasia sees his industry, and his satisfaction: the way he sharpens until the axe blades can slice a cornstalk from the straw bales, while she sweeps and kneels and scrubs the pails. She presses her cheek into the cows’ warm flanks as she milks them, looking out into the darkness lifting beyond the doorway of the byre, gazing at the icicles that have grown all winter, all along the lintel there, as the boy works on behind her. And over the weeks that this continues, Yasia gets accustomed to the quiet between them.
Uncle comes after sun-up, stiff and slow along the frozen path they have trodden through the snow from the house to the cows, and when he steps in through the doorway, the older boy stands up to receive the day’s instructions.
Uncle calls him “you there” and “boy,” but the child shows no sign of wanting it any other way. He splits firewood now like he was born to it, making sure there is stove-wood stacked high and dry under the lean-to, and kindling in the basket. Uncle takes him to the forest, too, with the other menfolk, when more logs need to be felled and fetched to heat the houses, or make repairs. And when it turns out that wood is what the boy does best, Uncle takes him from one village house to the next, all through the winter dark and the frost, teaching the boy to shape the shingles while he makes good the neighbours’ walls.
The boy has to be taught all this: he is no farmer’s son; Yasia thinks her uncle will have understood as much. But if any more words have passed between them, she doesn’t know. She isn’t sure she wants to, either. Yasia only hopes her uncle sees that the boy is as useful as she is—more so.
—
When she watches him carry Uncle’s axe at his side, shouldering timber, Yasia thinks how he carried his brother all the way here; he kept on going, even when she had to stop. The boy is the one who got her here through the marshes.
But when he is in the house now, his eyes are always elsewhere, turned outside, on the snowdrifts and the bare trees, as though he looks beyond them. As if he would be gone from here, if he could only brave the cold; if only he could carry his brother through it.
In the afternoons, when the light goes, his brother takes out the wooden houses, and the small trees he carved for him. The child arranges them across the mattress in the lamplight, playing and murmuring stories; he lifts one to look at it closely, or sometimes to show Yasia. But she never sees the older one touch them any longer.
He sits at the window, his eyes on the horizon, even after the dark comes, and then she wonders: if he will be gone one morning when she wakes up. If he would leave his brother here, even; strike out alone for somewhere beyond the marshes. Yasia doesn’t know what he looks for out there, but she tries to read his features.
—
Twice, Uncle takes the older one to meet with the elders, out in the snow, at the meeting of the tracks.
He leaves the boy standing to one side, while he steps among the menfolk, and it is clear from their glances, sidelong and cautious, that he and his brother are discussed there. It is clear from his closed face that the boy doesn’t like it.
But Yasia cannot tell if anything is decided; how long they can stay here. She doesn’t know who has the say here.
—
The small one is left to her in the meantime. Yasia has the weight of him leaning against her at the stove-side, the tug of his small fists at her skirts as she kneads and sews. When Uncle is home, the small one watches him intently; when his brother is there, it is his brother he still prefers—but Yasia has his fineness to herself in the daytime hours.
On days when the women and children go to gather kindling, he walks beside her out to the forests, running ahead of her where the trees grow thickest, and there is little snow underfoot to slow him. His cheeks redden as he grows stronger, and she sees his first smiles too, as he bends and gathers with the other village children, squatting with Yasia and the village mothers while she binds his small armfuls of twigs and branches into bundles. The women sing the village songs while they work, and the boy hums the same tunes as Yasia carries him home again on her shoulders, his chee
k resting sleepy against her shawled head.
The village men they pass nod to her, and they nod to the boy in silent acknowledgement; all the village knows him.
They know the older boy too. His quiet ways, his closed face. But Yasia sees him sometimes in the afternoons, returning from the forest at the same time as they do, and how he never gives more than a half-nod to anyone in passing; to her either.
Yasia wishes he would give more than that.
Because for all that he works hard in the daytime, at night, in the dark behind their curtain, he often lies wakeful: she feels him, from where she lies on the other side of the small one.
Yasia doesn’t dare guess at what he thinks of then. What he remembers.
Thoughts come at her, too—regardless—of Myko and of soldiers—too raw to speak out loud. Yasia feels they seek her out, in the watches of the night, and they leave her too sore for sleeping. She knows how it hurts to think back, and how hard it is not to.
—
Here, at least, there is no one to run from. Only the partisans.
The women beat their pot lids in warning, as soon as one of the fighters is sighted coming in from the forests. Yasia has come to know this sound, always followed by the slam of doors and shutters, while the mothers hide their children, and the men lie still in the byres and the feed bins.
The fighters come demanding: food and clothes and blankets. They come late one afternoon, when the sun is already red and setting, and they fire their rifles in the air, at the meeting of the tracks. Yasia sees them in the well-trodden snow there; she keeps watch on them through the gaps in the shingles, crouched in the dark space behind the manger, where they all crawl to hide themselves.
Uncle sits hunched beside her, beside the brothers, while the men stand outside with their rifles, waiting and waiting.
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