The Forest of Vanishing Stars(4)
Jerusza had been teaching Yona all the languages she knew since she had taken her, and the child could speak fluent Yiddish, Polish, Belorussian, Russian, and German, as well as snippets of French and English. One must know the words of one’s enemies, Jerusza always told her, and she was gratified by the fear she could see in Yona’s eyes.
But she had more to teach, so on their forays into towns, she began to steal books, too. She taught the child to read, to understand science, to work with numbers. She insisted that Yona know the Torah and the Talmud, but she also brought her the Christian Bible and even the Muslim Quran, for God was everywhere, and the search for him was endless. It had consumed Jerusza’s whole life, and it had brought her to that dark street corner in Berlin in the summer of 1922, where she’d been compelled to steal this child, who had become such a thorn in her side.
And though Yona irritated her more often than not, even Jerusza had to admit that the girl was bright, sensitive, intuitive. She drank the books down like cool water and listened with rapt attention whenever Jerusza deigned to impart her secrets. By the time Yona was fourteen, she knew more about the world than most men who’d been educated in universities. More important, she knew the mysteries of the forest, all the ways to survive.
As the girl’s eyes opened to the world, Jerusza insisted upon only two things: One, Yona must always obey her. And two, she must always stay hidden in the forest, away from those who might hurt her.
Sometimes Yona asked why. Who would want to hurt her? What would they try to do?
But Jerusza never answered, for the truth was, she wasn’t sure. She knew only that in the early-morning hours of July 6, 1922, as she hurried with a two-year-old child into the forest, she heard a voice from the sky, sharp and clear. One day, the voice said, her past will return—and it will alter the course of many lives, perhaps even taking hers. The only safe place is the forest.
It was the same voice that had told her to take the girl in the first place, the voice that had always whispered to Jerusza in the trees. Jerusza had spent most of her life thinking the voice belonged to God. But now, in the twilight of her life, she was no longer sure. What if the voice in her head belonged to her alone? What if it was the legacy of her mother’s madness, a spark of insanity rather than a higher calling?
But each time those questions bubbled to the surface, Jerusza pushed them away. The voice from above had spoken, and who knew what fate awaited her if she failed to listen?
CHAPTER THREE
It was two years later, and 150 kilometers south, when Yona finally dared disobey Jerusza’s orders.
By then she and Jerusza were deep in the Bia?owie?a Forest, the Forest of the White Tower, and though autumn was teetering on the edge of winter, the ground was still thick with mushrooms, the days punctuated by hammering woodpeckers and plodding elk, the stillness of the nights broken by the howls of roaming wolf packs. It was a magical place, and Yona, who had grown to love birds, had trouble focusing with all the white storks and streaked bitterns soaring overhead. She imagined lifting off into the sky herself, seeing for miles, having the ability to simply fly away from here, to go wherever she wanted. But that was just a dream.
It was a late October day, the air sharp and cold, and Yona was out gathering acorns in a large basket. She and Jerusza would store them for the long winter ahead; they would leach, dry, and grind most of them for flour, but they’d also roast some in honey from the hives Jerusza had a knack for finding within the walls of crumbling trees. She was so distracted by the sudden ja-ja-ja of a rare aquatic warbler overhead that she had her guard down. The man was only a hundred meters from her when she spotted him, and with a gasp, she shrank back into the willows.
He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t heard her move. Yona had grown accustomed to rustling with the trees, so calmly in sync with them that her movements flowed with the wind. She reached instinctively for the knife she always kept strapped to her ankle, the one Jerusza insisted she sharpen each week, just in case, and her heart raced as she stared.
The man wasn’t as old as she’d thought at first glance. In fact, he was barely more than a boy, perhaps a year or two older than she. His hair was as white blond as hers was ebony, his skin as tanned as a cowhide. His shoulders were broad, and he walked with an assuredness that told her he knew the forest.
But where had he come from? She and Jerusza had been camped here for three weeks, and they hadn’t seen any sign of other people. Did he live in the trees, too? Her heart thudded against her rib cage as she allowed herself to taste the possibility of a kindred spirit, just for a second. The ache it created in her chest was a symphony of longing and loneliness and fear, and it made her reckless. Slowly, before she’d had a chance to think it all the way through, she took her hand off the hilt of her knife, straightened, and stepped from her hiding place in the trees.
“Hello,” she said, but he didn’t turn, and she realized that she hadn’t actually said it aloud, though her lips had traced the word in the air. The second time, she summoned her breath, and when she repeated the greeting, it came out too sharply, and the young man spun around to stare at her.
“Hello,” he said after a few seconds. His voice was deep, his eyes wide with curiosity. She wondered what he was seeing. She knew from occasionally glimpsing her reflection in gurgling streams that her eyes—each a different color—were large for her face, her nose long, her cheekbones high, her lips a rosebud bow. Her skin was impossibly white, though she spent her life outside, and her hair was a curtain of black smoke, tumbling to her waist. She had sprouted like a weed since her sixteenth birthday in July, and her legs were now as long and gangly as a fawn’s. It was the first time in her life she’d been conscious of her body, which, until now, had been merely utilitarian.