A Boy in Winter Read online

A woman assures her children: “Soon we’ll be driven away.”

  But the man puts her straight: “Soon we’ll be driven onto trains.”

  He speaks with such blunt assurance, Ephraim sees people all around begin to blink at one another: perhaps this loud man knows more and better, after all?

  Ephraim wonders about the guards: are they listening? They must hear all of this, if he can.

  He turns his head, just a little, not too much, but the people in front of him have shifted as they whispered, and still more have been pressed in to join them, so he cannot see the policemen any longer. Still, he thinks: all this nervous speculation, the policemen could put an end to it. They could just tell us when and where we will be taken, if they know. If they had a mind to.

  “We’ll be assigned jobs there,” someone insists, still persisting, still preferring the ghetto rumour.

  But the interrupting man scoffs: “You want jobs now? In a ghetto?” He even laughs a little—“No. Oh no, no”—as though the very idea is risible.

  Ephraim sees how people in the crowd try to ignore him; they turn away from his voice again, and continue with their whispers.

  “We will be put to work.”

  “Yes, that’s what I have heard.”

  “Yes, they will take us to Poland and make us work.”

  But the man in the centre responds: “They will take us to Poland and make us into soap.”

  This last produces such hisses, such intakes of breath. Heads turn back to him, all over the room: a sudden ripple of movement. Arms are raised as people turn to face the man in shock and accusation, lifting their palms in dismay, despite the guards, despite themselves.

  “Quiet over there!”

  The guards shout them down again; they pound at the metal doors even louder.

  “Quiet, now! How many more times?”

  But even after the guards have stopped their pounding, and the painful ringing in his ears has subsided, Ephraim still feels the anger in the crowd around him.

  He hears people hard by, muttering:

  “How can he say that?”

  “How can he talk that way?”

  They cannot keep quiet now; they must speak their shock to one another, as soon as they feel it is safe enough to do so.

  “He should hold his mouth.”

  “You should hold your mouth, sir.”

  “There are women and children here.”

  One woman, her son pressed to her side, is bold enough to turn on him. “Shame on you,” she hisses. “Scaremonger.”

  But the man is unrepentant. And he will not keep quiet either.

  “Should I not say?” he declaims. “Why should I not say what we all know to be the case?”

  He is certain, and he is loud. And then he is met—they all are—with another and even louder barrage from the doorway.

  “Silence here, you filthy Jews!”

  Ephraim is left with the ringing that follows it, and the ache, too, in his back and shoulders. He is left to wonder who is right here.

  Was he right to bring his wife and daughter? Or was Yankel the wiser, defying the order, keeping beyond these four walls?

  Ephraim glances at Miryam, at Rosa, as soon as the pain allows this. His girl is leaning against her mother, and her eyes are blank and closing, as though she was woken by the guards but is now almost back dozing. Ephraim thinks: at least his daughter will not have heard the argument; at least she will not have felt all the fear that was unleashed there. He must worry, but she won’t have to.

  Miryam sees him looking. They exchange the briefest of nods, quiet looks; understanding.

  You heard him? Ephraim mouths. And then he mutters. “How can the man say such things?”

  He still finds the thought too appalling; this whole day and all this waiting. All these rumours.

  “How does it help us to hear that? To imagine the grave awaits us?”

  And then, a little quieter: “I ask you.”

  And after that comes silence.

  —

  In the quiet of Osip’s workshop, Yasia cuts an apple into quarters, paring away the core, feeding it to the horse, leaning against his warmth in the stall.

  Her mother’s sacks are stowed now, and Yasia is alone again. Around her stand Osip’s workbenches, scattered with curled wood shavings and half-finished joinery: a cabinet, minus half its shelving; a cart brought here for mending, propped against the far wall, listing on its axle. “I have so much work to do,” Osip sighed before he left her here.

  Yasia watched him go—he and the timber man, setting out into the yard with a pair of joists shouldered between them. Osip told her he had to make use of the short working day the Germans have allowed them; the few hours before dark were all he had to make his deliveries. But he said for her to stay put.

  “By tonight, please God, the soldiers will all be gone again. And all the Jews with them.”

  Osip called it an ugly business, and he warned her to stay clear of it.

  “You can sell your apples tomorrow, child,” he told her, letting the gate fall shut behind him.

  But she hasn’t come here for that. Or not only. Yasia wants to see Mykola.

  She hardly slept last night, leaving well before her father woke, with just her mother to see her off. Yasia knows her papa will have raged when she wasn’t there to feed and dress her brothers; that he may still be sore at her when she returns, and she doesn’t want to have risked that for nothing. So she arranges the fruit in the basket—stalk up, bruises down—just as her mother taught her, and then she hooks the handle over her arm, ignoring Osip’s counsel, stowing the knife in her apron pocket. She does everything just as she would on market days, and tells herself: if any soldiers pass her, they’ll hardly look twice at a girl come to trade here.

  Still, she walks the long way round to be safer, making her way through the alleyways, as best as she can, to the shop-lined market street, stopping by the water trough—one of her mama’s familiar spots. Thinking just to linger here a short while, Yasia slices the browning faces off an apple quarter to reveal the pale flesh better, and then she places the cut fruit, clean and pleasing, in the centre of the basket. But no one comes to buy from her.

  No patrols pass, but there are no customers either, and the few shop owners who have opened peer at Yasia through their windows, before withdrawing. What is a farm girl doing alone here—and today of all days? Yasia feels their questioning glances; she is uncertain herself now.

  She never told her mama—or not out loud—that she wanted to seek Myko out. But she knew her mother understood; Yasia thought her mama even approved. Why else did she not send a brother or two for company? Why else did her mama rise early to plait Yasia’s hair for her?

  Her mama wove the two long twists around her forehead, as she always did on feast days, pinching her cheeks in the glass so they would look rosy, as much as to say Yasia should pinch her cheeks, look her best and most beautiful, before she sets out to find Mykola.

  And the thought of seeing him has the heat in her cheeks rising, it gives Yasia a sharp tug, deep inside her. But it is so many weeks since she saw him, even longer since they spoke to one another. The last time was that drunken evening, so full of arguing, when Myko sat between her father and his grandfather at the table, and her mama wept because of all the shouting.

  That was when her papa talked of Yasia not being allowed to marry any longer.

  “There will be no wedding, I warn you, until the boy can feed and clothe a family.”

  “Don’t say that! Why must you say that?”

  “I’m only saying it because it’s true. Who in their right mind promises his daughter into poverty? We’ve lived a poor life long enough, I tell you.”

  “And so that is what you think of us?” Myko’s grandfather stood up at the table. “You think my boy is not fit to be your son-in-law?”

  Yasia had never seen him so angry.

  “Mykola will be ten times the man you are, ten times the husban
d,” Grandfather insisted. “I see the way you bow and scrape to invaders! You shame your wife there, and your daughter. You bring shame on all of us. Who says I want to see my grandson married into a family like yours?”

  But Yasia’s father would hear no such insults, not under his own roof.

  “Who is bowing?” he demanded. He saw no one scraping before the Germans. “Look around you. All I see is that my land is mine again. I see new barns and houses, and new roads being laid here. Everywhere, the Germans are building. And we can farm now, just as we want to. That’s all I know.”

  Yasia’s papa turned to Myko, sitting beside him at the table, telling him there was no shame in what he was doing.

  “You earn your Reichsmarks. You wear that armband. You’re paying your family’s way, boy.”

  But that had Grandfather white-lipped and raging, and Mykola’s mother leaning into her handkerchief and crying; and Yasia wretched as they did all their crying and raging over him.

  It was only Mykola who did no shouting that evening; he said so little, it scared her.

  But he still came for her later. He saved all his talk for when it was just the two of them in the orchard grass.

  Myko sat down close beside her, on the night-cool ground beneath the branches, and he was still quiet at first, still drunk as well, his eyes a little bleary. But he did not put his hands inside her dress: he spoke to her instead.

  “Just listen, please,” he said, low and insistent. “No crying, no shouting. You promise, yes?” And then, when she didn’t answer: “No arguing like your papa. Like my grandfather. Those two old fools. What do they know? I can’t listen any longer.”

  Myko knew he’d shocked her, talking like that, even if he said it all softly. But he offered no apology, he only leaned his head closer, turning so he could look at her, and his face was so close to hers then, almost touching, and his eyes were still swimming a little, in and out of focus, but when he fixed them on her, they were strange and bright and urgent.

  “Your papa thinks all is well now, just because things are going well for him. And my grandfather. My grandfather.” Myko paused and squinted, as though wincing about the old man. “He thinks pride can replace the roof beams, maybe. Pride can fill the seed stores and the bowls on the table.”

  Myko shook his head over the pair of them, each as wrong as the other. And then he shrugged and waved a hand, as though brushing them aside, away into the night air.

  “They can shout all they like.” He smiled.

  Strange to hear him drunken and brushing off their elders; strange to watch him smile and shrug, and yet still be so serious.

  “Who has time for old men and their arguments?” he asked. “Not me. Not us.”

  Myko pulled Yasia into his lap as he said this, pressing his forehead to her own one. And he told her he couldn’t be waiting until the old men had sorted out their differences.

  “I can’t just be sitting by now. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Yasia couldn’t answer. She wasn’t sure about this; she didn’t know if she could ever be sure about anything with the Germans here. But she thought Myko understood that, because he looked at her so intently while he was waiting—and then he just smiled at her anyway, his face close and warm, breath mingling with her own. He told her: “You’ll see. In time, you’ll see it too. I know you will.”

  Myko was certain. Yasia felt it in the way he held her, and in the way he leaned in to tell her: “We had the Soviets, remember? Well, now we have new masters. And your father, he might think well of them. But it will be just the same—just the same—under this new lot, I am telling you.”

  He said he’d learned that much this past year.

  “First they will make their promises. But it won’t be too long before they break them all. That’s how it works, believe me. No one takes a land out of kindness. Just to take what they can, see?”

  Myko kept his eyes on her, all the while he was talking, as though he wanted to be certain she was following.

  “You are listening to me?”

  He had no need to ask. It was more words than Myko had spoken in all the weeks since his return, and Yasia listened to everything he told her. Because he held her so close to him. And because they had lain here so many nights too, as husbands and wives do, since he came back from being a soldier.

  Yasia was still mindful of the evening’s argument: How can Mykola marry her if he has no means to keep a family? But she saw too that he’d learned far more while he was gone from them than either of their families were aware of. He was taken away a boy and had come back thinking like this; perhaps he knew more and better than all of them.

  And though Myko did not speak of marriage that night in the orchard, not in so many words, he sat with his face close to hers, and he said: “I’ve seen how it works, Yasia. The Germans are bastards; occupiers always are. But they will go again—they can only last for so long.” Hadn’t they seen that with the Russians? And wasn’t everyone glad to see the back of them?

  Myko told her: “The Germans are only here to take what they can get, so the way I see it, we don’t have to trust in their promises, do we? We just have to live to see them gone again.”

  He’d managed that before, Yasia thought: he’d braved the Germans when he cut his losses and ran from the Red Army, and then he’d walked back through all they’d burned and broken. Myko had seen more harm than anyone she knew, and he’d come back alive to her.

  But still it was hard to hear him talk this way. Hard not to shout too, when Mykola told her he’d be leaving for the town as soon as possible: “I need to start earning.”

  Yasia had to bite her tongue all the while he spoke to her, because she thought of the ring, not yet on her finger, and she knew she’d have to bide her time and wait still: Myko would be staying in the new police barracks for the winter, and even beyond that.

  “The SS will get townsmen clearing the ground for it,” he told her. “Soon enough it will be built and ready.”

  That meant, soon enough, he would no longer sit at her family table. Yasia could have cried out at the unfairness.

  “But it won’t be like this always,” Myko promised, keeping on with his talk and with his soothing. “Just for as long as is needed.” Just until they could farm again.

  He would not go east where there was fighting; Myko swore he would never go back to doing a soldier’s job. He’d patrol the town streets mostly, or in villages, and most of the auxiliaries were village boys, so he’d be with Ukrainians just the same as him giving the orders.

  “There are other police here, too, from Germany,” he told her, so there might be times—now and again—when it would be them he’d have to answer to.

  It was this last part that gave him pause. Because he sat back against the straw after he’d told her—but not as though he’d finished with his talking; more like this had set off a whole new train of thought. Perhaps he was thinking of his grandfather: what the old man had said about bowing and scraping to invaders. Yasia wondered if Myko saw shame there, even if her father said there was nothing to be ashamed of.

  It seemed to her that so much was different now, not just Mykola. And it was so much more difficult to find a way through. What could she do but wait, while he thought it out for himself?

  “I don’t have to like it,” Myko said finally. Matter-of-fact, conclusive.

  And then Yasia thought she wouldn’t have to either. She didn’t have to like any of this. It made her feel a little easier.

  —

  The police barracks are at the edge of town where the fields start, and the orchards, and while Yasia has passed it before, on her way out to her uncle’s in the marshes, she’s always been in the dray-back with her brothers, her mother has always been at the reins when they’ve made that journey, and Yasia isn’t quite sure how to get there through the town streets.

  She has to skirt through the lanes and alleys, avoiding patrols as Osip cautioned; missing her mother, and the cro
wding of her brothers around her. Yasia comes to dead ends a good few times, forced to retrace her steps, weary and irritable too now with hunger; she has had nothing to eat since she left the farm this morning, only one or two of her mother’s apples, and she peers at the windows she passes, hoping to happen upon one of the town’s richer kitchens, with cooks and larders, where she can trade fruit against something warming. But all the windows are shuttered still.

  Yasia has to stop once entirely, thinking she hears a patrol. She holds still at the corner, unsure she has the right to be here under the curfew. Or of how soldiers might look at her, out on her own as she is. Why so far from home, girl? The market street is the other way. But it is only a gang of labourers who pass by: a score of men with picks and adzes, on their way back from a day’s digging or levelling, and two police guards following, and this has Yasia thinking they could have been working on the new police quarters, so at least she is nearing the town’s far boundary.

  The fog lifts a little as she walks on, and before long Yasia sees the factory chimney, the old brick kiln, and she tells herself that soon, soon, she will be at the barracks Mykola stays in.

  But when she comes to what she feels must be the turning, she finds she cannot go further. This time her way is blocked by soldiers.

  So they haven’t left the town yet.

  Or taken the Jews, like Osip said they would: all that is still to come.

  Wooden barriers have been erected at the corner: two heavy trestles with poles between them. And beyond them are so many men in uniform, she can barely see the road ahead. Grey tunics and darker ones mingling, the soldiers stand about, broad-legged and slouching, on the road to the old brick factory, and not at all as she imagines soldiers should; they look more like farm labourers, the way they stand and smoke and talk, leaning against the house walls, as though they’ve finished a full day’s harvest.

  A police guard—four or five men in boots and tunics—are standing at the barriers. Strange to see policemen doing a soldier’s job; Yasia doesn’t like it, or the crowd of uniforms behind them. There are far too many soldiers between here and the barracks Myko stays in; she cannot go to find him.