A man walked past with his young daughter and she stared. The father took one look at me, yanked her arm and hurried down the road. I knew not to spend another minute standing there in the daylight, so I crossed the road and entered the forest. It was cold and dim, and when I leaned against a tree trunk, exhaustion came right at me.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when I heard footsteps. I opened my eyes and stared up — into the barrel of a gun. I swallowed, hard, refusing to make eye contact. That much I knew. I looked at the sticks and pinecones littering the forest floor and thought up a story. I was lost, searching for mushrooms, and could he help me find my way back? But how to explain the smell, or my work uniform, and before I opened my mouth, a boy put down the gun and said my name.
How odd that the first word I heard in the forest was my own name, and for a minute I wondered if that night in the sewers had made me crazy. Then I looked up. I know how you see your grandfather, sweet and smiling, always insisting that we put on a movie after dinner and then dozing on the sofa halfway through. Your chess partner, your theater date, the man who checks out the minute your mother and I start up. You wouldn’t have recognized him. His long, bony face splotchy from the sun, his light brown beard growing in sparse, threadbare patches — he was only fifteen — and his straight hair obviously hacked off with a knife. But even with that terrible haircut, even with a rifle over one shoulder and paper sacks swinging from the other, he still looked like the same Leon Moscowitz I’d grown up with.
It was one of the great miracles of my life, finding someone from home, right there, in the middle of the woods. But I won’t lie and say he was the person I’d wanted to see. I barely knew him back in our village. He was two grades above me and had struck me as bigheaded and bossy, one of those boys who always raised his hand in class. I hadn’t been the shiny student he was but had been a good girl, a rule-follower — and your grandfather had not only seemed the opposite, it was like he saw anyone not challenging every point made in class as a weakling. His whole family was like that. His father had been a professor, and the one time I’d gone to his house to make a delivery from my parents’ tailor shop, I remember how dark and dusty it was, books pulled from the shelves and strewn on the floor in a way that must have made them feel intellectual though to me it just looked sloppy, brown drapes so thick you immediately forgot about the sun outside. That past year your grandfather had stopped coming to school one day, but I wasn’t surprised — so many were fleeing by then that I hadn’t spent much time wondering where the Moscowitzes had gone to hide.
You look like shit, Raya, he told me then.
I know, I said.
No, he said, eyeing me more closely. You have actual shit on you.
I came from the sewers, I said, and he nodded, as if I wasn’t the first he knew who had, then said, And your family?
Back home. In the uniform factory.
Your grandfather nodded again. He reached into a paper sack, but when he handed me a loaf of bread, it was so heavy I almost dropped it.
When’s the last time you ate? he said, and I had no idea. I didn’t know what time it was, or even where I was. As I followed your grandfather through the brush, he talked. His family had escaped to a city in the north that past winter, he said — this was all happening in September — where he and his three younger brothers had trained with a youth group. The entire family had gone from there to Palestine, but he had met a plumber, Yosef Zanivyer, who’d seen something special in him (I couldn’t help but roll my eyes that even then, in these silent, deserted woods, your grandfather had to let me know how fabulous he was) and asked him to stay. Yosef was the plumber who’d engineered the sewer route I’d just come through, he said. For the past few months, your grandfather and his group had been roaming a labyrinth of tunnels, committing them to memory for an evacuation and supply route they’d use to smuggle weapons and food into the forest.
He led me through a zigzag of uncleared scrub and over so many marshes and creeks I couldn’t count, until finally we reached the densest part, a cluster of trees so tall and thick it suddenly felt like evening — an area protected enough by branches, he told me, that no military plane could spot us from the air. He took my hand and we elbowed our way around trees and bushes until an entire village emerged. There were blanket tents held up by logs, what looked like an infirmary, a makeshift kitchen surrounding a fire pit. About forty people, all teenagers, almost all boys, unbathed and bedraggled, were at work in different stations. Everybody was speaking Yiddish and the whole scene was so stunning I didn’t know what to look at first. But your grandfather just kept leading me forward, as nonchalant as if he were giving a tour of our school back home.
This is Yussel, he said, pointing to a squat, suntanned boy. He was a medical student and runs the infirmary here. And this is the kitchen — here he handed me a potato, still hot from the fire — and this is where we run drills after dinner. He waved to a bigger kid, this one fifteen or sixteen, oafish and freckled with red, flyaway hair, the parts of a gun spread out on his lap. That’s Isaac from Antopol, he told me.
Isaac, your grandfather said, meet Raya. We grew up together.
I’m trying to concentrate, Isaac grunted without even shooting me a sideways look, and your grandfather shrugged and said, He’ll grow on you.
Then your grandfather stopped. Can you cook?
Not really. My mother cooks. I could barely say it.
What can you do, then?
I thought about it. I can do ballet, I said. I can play the flute, and that was when your grandfather started laughing. Wow, he said, throwing his hands in the air, thank God you’re here, and I wanted to smack him.
But your parents are tailors, right? he said. So I’m guessing you can sew, and I can’t tell you how much it meant to me right then that there, in the middle of the forest, someone knew this basic fact about my family.
Yeah, I can sew.
Good, he said. We already have a tailor, but if you’re quick with your fingers, you can go in the armory.
So that afternoon I went to work, learning how to repair broken rifles and pistols, how to mend cracked stocks and replace the worn and rusted parts. He was right: all my years helping my parents sew on buttons and rip out seams made the job come easy. I was grateful I was good at it, and for many hours I sat alone, a little relieved Isaac was such a grump that I could work in silence. Your grandfather was running around, stopping at every station. It seemed obvious he was the leader, which I learned for certain that night at dinner, when five new boys arrived at the campfire.
They were young, your grandfather’s age, and had just come back from a mission. Your grandfather crouched beside me and explained. Everyone here was part of a brigade, he said, called the Yiddish Underground. He’d started it back with his youth group, doing combat training in basements around the city. In the beginning, they’d slipped into nearby villages and robbed peasants for food and tools and blankets. But every day the war seemed to be getting worse, he said, and now the brigade was traveling farther to carry out attacks. They torched cottages and stole guns. When they ran out of bullets, they sneaked into cities with empty shotguns and long, straight branches, which, from a distance, could pass as rifles. They chopped down telephone poles, attacked supply depots, burned bridges to disrupt military routes — and that night, the five boys at the campfire had just returned from dislodging two hundred meters of rail line.