A Boy in Winter Read online

  The horse is in the stall in his workshop corner. Osip has untied the sacks, lifting them off the animal’s back. But he won’t let Yasia do more now.

  “No time for that.”

  He still won’t say much, or let her ask questions; he only tells Yasia, low, that she can see about the horse, about the apples, later.

  “We have to see about the lie of the land first.”

  One blunt finger pressed to his mouth in warning, he leads her out into the yard again; ducking through the crumbling brickwork in the wall behind his workshop, winding ahead of her through the narrow alleys between the houses.

  Osip keeps far from any main streets, just in case, avoiding the few lanes they cross, cutting past and even across the neighbouring courtyards; Yasia has to trot to keep pace with him between the chicken sheds and piles of stove-wood, until they get to the right one.

  Rough-hewn timbers are stacked shoulder high behind a small house, and Osip leads Yasia between them to the back door, warning: “You have to know who is safe now. But the timber man is a good neighbour.”

  And then he pulls her into the timber man’s kitchen, dark and warm and thick with tobacco smoke. The place is thick with people.

  Yasia has to press herself through wet wool jackets and low-voiced exchanges. No one is outside; still no one dares. Yasia thinks half the neighbourhood must be crowded inside here, and in their mutterings, she hears that all their talk is of the soldiers.

  “They came through the whole town this morning.”

  “Who could see that coming?”

  “I knew nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Until those bastards woke me.”

  They don’t say who was taken, but Yasia feels their alarm as she weaves between them, seeing the way they lean into one another, all their mutterings urgent. She thinks the whole town must have woken when the soldiers came, peering fearful through their shutters, the gaps between their curtains. Then Osip takes her by the shoulders and pulls her to a stop at the table.

  A woman sits at the head of it: the timber man’s wife, it must be. Her arms full, her lap dripping children, she has a baby bound to her in its swaddling, a girl on her knee, and another smaller one, just old enough to stand, half-climbing up to join them.

  “Osip! Here you are!” The woman holds out a hand. “Sit, why don’t you? And you,” she tells Yasia too, “sit with us,” spilling her eldest off her lap to stand a moment.

  She pours each of them a cup from the jug before her, and while stools are pulled up, while room is made at the table, Yasia’s shawl is tugged back from her forehead.

  “What a day to have a visitor!”

  “She picked a fine time.”

  The townsmen speak to Osip, not to her, but this is how it always is with the people here.

  There are many faces Yasia knows around the table—by sight, if not by name—from market days. But there are many more she doesn’t, and she feels herself flushing. She is never too sure of townsmen; they never look, they only stare, that’s what her mother says about them. So Yasia pulls her shawl about herself, covering over her plaits again, just as her mother would, and then she shifts a little closer to Osip’s bulk.

  He is a cousin of sorts, on her mother’s side, so Osip isn’t really a townsman, or not a born one in any case, and while he does the talking, Yasia knows she can just sit quiet beside him. All the talk of soldiers has made her uncomfortable; the thought of them coming here and taking; and she keeps her gaze low, away from the staring faces, her eyes straying to the children: that lap-full of daughters at the head of the table.

  One is still reaching, still waiting for a pause in her mother’s talk and gesture, stubby fingers stretching out for her mother’s embraces, and Yasia thinks the girl wants this talk to stop as much as she does.

  “Have you come for wood?” The wife turns to Osip, pushing away her daughter. “You can’t have! You can’t have, not after this morning. Stay,” she urges.

  “Just for a short while.” Osip signals to her husband. “I just want to hear the latest. Before I go about my business.”

  “But who on earth can think of working?”

  “Not me. I will not lift a finger,” one man asserts. “Not while those bastards are still in the town here.”

  But he says this last a little too loudly, because the timber man’s daughter starts crying at the angry sound of him. Her mother pulls her closer, lifting the baby to make room for her, only this one cries in turn; it does not want to be lifted. So then the wailing gets all the louder, and all the talk is interrupted, while the baby is taken from its mother’s arms to be quietened.

  “Just wait, child.”

  Wet mouth wide in protest, it is passed hand to hand until it reaches Yasia.

  “You hold her,” she is told. “You stop her crying.”

  Townspeople never ask, they always order. Yasia has to push herself back from the table. But although she resents being pushed around like this, the small heft pressed into her lap smells of sleep and stove, just like her brothers, and it fits against her just as they do.

  The voices pick up again around her. But Yasia thinks the townsmen can just go on with their soldier talk without her; she doesn’t mind it so much now she feels the weight to be cradled, the small fingers gripped around her own ones. By the time the child has settled, and Yasia turns her thoughts back to the table, she finds the talk has turned to the people the Germans came for.

  “They took my neighbour. Poor fool. And he said that they wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, mine too, mine too. But he had it coming. He was always too sure of himself.”

  “That’s what the Germans say about all of them.”

  “So did they take all our yids?” a man at the stove asks. “Or only some of them?”

  Yasia knows little of Jews; nothing to speak of. There are none who farm with her father, or in Mykola’s village either. All she’s learned has been from folk tales, or overheard from townsfolk—but Yasia lifts her head to listen, because why would the Germans come after them?

  “My neighbour was sleeping when the soldiers started.”

  “He would have done better to be ready for them. They should have been ready, no? All of them.”

  Townsmen are nodding now; Yasia sees them, all around the table.

  “My neighbour did so well for himself. Always. Too well when we had Stalin.”

  She has heard this last before. And not only about the Jews. It has come from her father’s mouth about the Farm Chairman, and also from Myko’s grandfather about his nearest neighbours—after they’d packed their cart and fled eastward. They always knew which way to point their faces. Such hard-bitten complaints; Yasia has heard so many since the Soviets left. Once the Communists fled or lost their standing, ten years of hard feelings no longer had to be bitten back, and so Yasia listens to the back and forth, all the time thinking how the Farm Chairman bent with the wind, he bent wherever he saw advantage, so perhaps there is something in what the townsfolk say about the yids too.

  “That one was in the Komsomol—remember?”

  “And then on the town council.”

  “Yes, that’s right, that’s right. I’d forgotten that about him.”

  “So, then,” the man at the stove interrupts them. “Was it only those Jews the Germans came for?”

  Yasia turns to look, along with others at the table, because that’s the second time he’s cut in, and it was loud enough this time to have the room falling quiet.

  “What do you care?” A woman next to Osip breaks the silence.

  “I’m just saying.” The man at the stove puts his palms out, acting the innocent, while Osip’s table-neighbour points a finger.

  “Well, you always say too much,” she tells him. “You hear me?”

  “But I’m just asking,” the stove man counters. “Just wondering where the Germans will take them. What use do they have for so many yids now?”

  “What do I care?” the woman’s answer comes sharply. “They
are only Jews. Why should we care about that?”

  This last receives more nods, all around the kitchen: a murmured chorus of agreement.

  Then: “No, no, we should all be mindful.”

  This is the timber man’s wife.

  “What use do the Germans have for any of us?” She halts the arguing. “Why did they come to our town in the first place? That’s what we should all be asking ourselves.”

  She has them all quiet again—all thinking—Yasia can see that; how the woman’s neighbours wait for her to go on.

  “They came for a family just across the lane there.” The wife gestures, and then she pulls her arms around her daughters, saying the noise was so close it woke her. “So loud, the soldiers. They were so loud, I tell you. I thought they were downstairs. Inside my house.” She pauses.

  It still has her shaking; Yasia can see the tight way she holds her children, and the relief in her face that she was not taken, or her husband.

  “We are all on their lists now, you know that.”

  The woman looks in turn at all the faces at her table, at half the neighbourhood gathered in her kitchen, Yasia included; and the way she does this, slow and deliberate, keeps them all hushed and listening to her.

  “So who is next?” she demands. “After the zhyds, I mean. That’s what we should ask now.”

  This is too much for some.

  “Don’t talk so loud,” her husband tells her.

  “Don’t talk so much,” the woman is told too, by another sitting opposite.

  All the assembled glance about themselves: at one another first, then at the doorway, the windows. No one wants the Germans hearing.

  “There are still Germans everywhere this morning,” Osip reminds them all, low and frowning, hands wrapped around his mug.

  And then the whispers start again.

  “Are they still looking? The soldiers?”

  “They must be.”

  “But they won’t take us, the Germans. They’re not going to do that.”

  “No, no. It’s only the yids they want. The yids still hiding.”

  The people turn back to the Jews again; easier to talk about Jews than one another.

  “Yes, it’s only the Jews they’re after. The Germans can’t abide them.”

  But sitting quiet among them, holding the timber man’s daughter, Yasia feels the girl’s mother must be right, surely. She is on a list too, after all; and her father and mother and brothers. And so is Mykola.

  —

  Come to the new registration office: both families had got the order, so they all walked into the town one morning. Everyone in the district queued and queued there, in the September sun on the main square; sent from line to line until they got the right one, because the Germans insisted: everyone should be on the correct list.

  The Germans had brought in army clerks to complete the task, to sit at desks ranked across the flagstones in the sun, inking the people onto their index cards.

  The Jews stood in their own queue, Yasia remembers, and they each got a white armband to wear, even the children. So you could see who was a yid, then—and just how many there were.

  Did you know there were so many?

  I always said so.

  Yasia stood with the people from the villages, listening to their murmurings; she stood there for hours, dutiful, with her mother and father and all her brothers, waiting to be catalogued and counted. Name and age, occupation? Any religion, young Fräulein? Any illnesses? Your origins? They even brought in translators from Kiev; the new authorities were diligent about completing their census.

  Her mother’s entry took the longest: sounding out her maiden name, and the name of the village she was born to, so small and sodden, the marsh smallholding where she spent her girlhood. Yasia’s mama lived far from the town then, far from everything, before she married onto the drier land. Yasia’s uncle still grazed his handful of cows on the boggy ground, growing what he could to feed himself, little more. Small wonder he has no wife, no children: Yasia’s father often laughed about him, when he came up in conversation. He laughed about her uncle’s solid face and slow way of talking, and his plough that was already old in Egypt. Yasia knew her mother didn’t like this; she knew too, that she shared her mother’s grey-green marsh eyes, her mother’s broad marsh features, and she felt it in the German clerk’s glances, noting the width of her mother’s hips and cheekbones, and then her own ones. On market days, townsfolk buying their apples often took Yasia for a marsh girl, instead of the farmer’s daughter she knew she was.

  But then there they were, all together on the same list: all her family under the same name—her father’s father’s, who’d farmed their good land before him. It had come as a relief somehow to see them all set down there.

  Yasia had caught sight of Myko around noon, standing in one of the furthest queues, with his grandfather beside him, and all the other men from his village; men he often stood with in those September days. All of them restless, faces dark, eyes sharp, heads bent together in talking: of what had befallen them, of what could be done until their farms were rebuilt, until a new crop was raised and reaped. How were they to house themselves, their families? How was it possible to feed and clothe them through the coming winter months?

  Myko had come home only later, when the sun was long gone and Yasia had put all the younger ones to bed—she’d been watching for him such a long while. His tread slow across the yard, his eyes no longer so hard: she saw they had been washed soft, washed blank with alcohol. But Mykola had a good meal inside him. And a new armband too. Not white like the yids’; it was blue and yellow, the colours of her country, and he took it from his pocket to show her. Myko told her he’d be wearing it until he got his uniform, and when she was slow to understand, he pulled out the police auxiliary card that came with the cloth, stamped by his new paymasters: the new German authorities.

  “As good as drafted! Again, my son!”

  His mother wrung her hands and scolded, when he came into the house and held the new card out to her.

  “Have you learned nothing, my child?”

  His grandfather shook his head, refusing to listen, refusing even to look at him, while Mykola told of the wages he’d be earning them.

  “For the rebuilding. And winter fodder. I’ll be paid in Reichsmarks for the seed we’ll need in springtime.”

  All their seed stock had gone up in flames, along with their hayricks and the village buildings. But still Grandfather would hear none of it.

  “Better you had gone to the partisans.”

  He would sooner Myko had gone to the marshes, even if it meant living like an outlaw—and fighting again, like a soldier.

  “You’d be fighting for us, at least. Not for Germans. They are foreigners, boy, and they tell us—us!—how we should and shouldn’t live.”

  Myko’s mother and sister were quieter, but just as insistent: “Tell them to keep their Reichsmarks.”

  “And their ration cards.”

  “Yes, so we can keep you here.”

  “Do that for us, please, Mykola.”

  On and on it went. Until Yasia’s father told them all bluntly: “My harvest this year will not feed both our families.” Their families weren’t even joined yet, need he remind them? “You want your boy to marry my daughter?”

  He was loud too, not just curt, asking Myko’s grandfather: “How can I give my child to someone who can’t keep her?”

  And then there were so many tears shed that evening, Yasia doesn’t like to remember.

  —

  On her lap, the child twists against her, and Yasia hears the same low rumbling talk is still going on around her.

  “The partisans will see them off.”

  “You think so? And when, though? I don’t see any outlaws here this morning.”

  “No, I won’t go out there.”

  “Me either. Not until the yids are gone—and all the soldiers.”

  Then Osip stands up.

  “Da
mn the Germans.”

  “Damn the Germans,” he says it another time, raising his voice to be heard—and the girl on Yasia’s lap sets to crying in earnest.

  Osip signals to her: give the child back to its mother, he has heard enough here: “I have work to get on with. Don’t we all have work to do this morning?”

  The timber man nods, taking his cue, getting to his feet while Yasia rises.

  “Are you going out there?”

  “You can’t be! What are you thinking?”

  “He can’t be thinking straight.”

  The neighbours call out in scorn and concern as Osip takes his leave of them, and Yasia lifts the baby. Passed hand to hand, the child cries all the louder, but Yasia is glad to be leaving—and to have the size of Osip beside her as she turns her back on his calling neighbours.

  “You just watch yourselves. Careful.”

  “Better watch out the Germans don’t take you.”

  —

  Ephraim’s back aches from all the standing, but he cannot move to ease it. His shoulders, always so stooped over his workbench, over the frames and lenses, are stiff and painful, and yet the guards still watch them so closely, he can do little more than shift his weight from one foot to the other. But he has Rosa’s small hand in his hand, and this is something. This is something.

  He knows Miryam will have told the girl to hold it—she will have seen the pain he is in—but still he is glad of his daughter’s touch. He and Miryam have been hand in hand like this with their young daughter a good hour now, he thinks, although he has stopped looking at the time; he has tried to stop himself thinking about it.

  Yankel will come. He will see sense. Ephraim tells himself this to ease his aches. He will bring Momik with him. One suitcase of belongings, winter clothing, food for three days’ travel, just as they did this morning.

  Miryam laid out their clothes last night. Three shirts for him, three dresses for her.

  “We can wear them one over the other, Ephraim; you will see.”