And? Your grandfather said then, turning to one of the boys.
And the conductor stopped the train, the boy said, spearing a sausage from the fire. And I walked right on and shot four soldiers in the dining car. They didn’t even have time to put down their forks.
Your grandfather clapped the boy’s shoulder like a proud parent, and I just sat there swallowing.
I told the other passengers to tell the police the Yiddish Underground was responsible, the boy continued, and your grandfather nodded. Everyone on the train was so scared, the boy said, and I just kept saying it as I walked through the cars, taking all of this, he said, gesturing at the suitcases and sacks of vegetables and bread by his feet.
Perfect, your grandfather said, and when he flicked on his radio, everyone put down their food to listen. He tuned through static until an announcer came on with word of the day’s casualties. But when the announcer described the ambush, he said it was the work of Russian guerilla fighters, communists camping out in the woods. The Yiddish Underground wasn’t mentioned at all. All around us were these kids, huddled together in stolen coats, waiting for their commander to speak. Your grandfather cleared his throat. He’d looked his age for that second, wide-eyed and serious and more than a little frightened, and I’d had a flash of that same boy in the schoolyard, the market, walking his younger brothers down Pinsker Street. I’d known that whatever he said, inside your grandfather felt as lost as every one of his fighters. But he stood up. He switched off the radio and said the only way they couldn’t ignore us was to plan bigger. We have to let them know, he said, that there’s a secret army they can’t touch, soldiers fighting back with weapons taken from them, then retreating deep into the forest to plan their next attack.
THIS IS the part of the story where I know you want to hear how we fell in love. I understand — don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’re always free to visit your grandfather and me, even on Saturday nights. How five years out of college you’re still living like a student, still alone in that shoebox studio. Even when you were little, it was your favorite part of every story. It used to kill me when I’d overhear you asking your mother those kinds of questions about your father, this young chubby you with long blond braids and a dreamy expression, as if with your eyes half-closed you could envision a time your parents weren’t sneaking around your living room at night, scribbling their names into each other’s books, or storming after each other outside your old apartment, fighting over who got to keep this ceramic fish-shaped platter your mother said she made at summer camp but which your father claimed he made at an Adult Ed class at the Y — a fish, he yelled, that held his nachos just right.
And I remember after he left, you and your mother piled all of your possessions into a taxi and headed over the bridge to our apartment in Queens, where the two of you moved into her childhood bedroom, sleeping side by side on her trundle bed, surrounded by her spelling ribbons and stuffed-animal collection, as though you were living in a permanent exhibit in the museum of her life. And I remember all the dates she’d bring back, Philip and Hugh and the one who wore his sunglasses inside, how she’d parade those men into my home with the same defiance she had in high school, only she was thirty-six then with a four-year-old daughter eating dinner with her grandparents in the next room. From the kitchen the three of us would listen to her carrying on, her voice high and clear and always drowning out the other person’s, which probably made her a good teacher during rowdy assemblies but not such a hit on those dates. There were so many nights when I’d watch her crawl into bed beside you after her date had left, her back to the wall, her bare feet wrapped around yours, holding on to your stomach so tightly it was like she feared the distance you might fall was so much greater than from the bed to the carpet.
I want to tell you mine was a great love affair, but the truth was that the only reason your grandfather started coming into my tent at night was to protect me. There were so many things to be afraid of in the forest. Not just the soldiers but bears and snakes and wolves. Russian communists who lived in other parts of the woods, coming by our camp, offering bullets for a night with one of the girls, sometimes taking one even if refused — men who disliked your grandfather but respected him enough, even as a boy, not to touch the one he was with. Anyway, it was almost winter — I will always remember that as the coldest season imaginable, the winter I watched hot tea freeze in a cup — and when your grandfather climbed inside one night and lay beneath my blanket, his hands roaming up my shirt and into my pants long before he thought to kiss me, it didn’t feel romantic — more like a basic physical need that had little to do with me.
We’d already seen each other naked, anyway — we all bathed around each other, there was no other choice — and even though I was thirteen years old and he was my first kiss, I wasn’t so naïve to believe your grandfather was in love with me, though for a lot of my life I did believe our relationship wasn’t so bad. We had no one but each other when we first arrived in the States, and a big part of me wondered if I had another option. We never even talked about marrying — we just did it. I think your grandfather and I both wanted to forget everything that had happened and try to be as normal as all our neighbors on Dinsmore Avenue. It was only years later when you and your mother were living with us that I had to listen to her opinions on how I would never be normal, my fuse was just too short, she’d never met a person who could go from zero to sixty so quickly. From the beginning it was like that with your mother and me: even in the womb I think she was kicking me on purpose. Whenever we argued, your grandfather would walk out the door and around the block, as if your mother and I had taken up all the air in the apartment. But you would always stay. It used to drive me crazy, watching you watch us, as if our fight were being transcribed and filed away in the Dewey decimal system of your mind. But the truth was that there were moments when I’d look at you — you always resembled me more than your mother, especially when you were young, with your light hair and cheeks that went red no matter what the weather — and think that you reminded me of an alternate version of myself.
I too might have lived in my head if, when I was a girl, I’d had a school to spend my days in and an apartment for my nights, rather than a tent and a bed of pine needles that I shared with your grandfather. But to his credit, he never once tried to pretend ours was some sweeping romance. At fifteen, he’d already had a life separate from our village, a life of organizing and combat training and falling in love with Chaya Salavsky, whom he called the most brilliant thinker from his youth group and promised to reunite with one day in Palestine, where she had gone with his three younger brothers and most of their brigade. After the war, he said, he’d join his brothers on the collective they’d started, and every day he’d swim in the sea and eat grapefruits and lemons that grew wild from trees. You can come with me, he’d say, always an afterthought, but during those talks I’d be lying quietly beneath the blanket, trying to convince myself that if anyone in a uniform factory was going to stay alive it was tailors like my parents. I’d heard reports on the radio that the soldiers were finding themselves ill equipped for the Russians, and since winter was coming, they’d put more people to work sewing uniforms and fixing weapons and equipment. I held on to the belief that my parents were safe for as long as I could — it would be another eight months until I knew for sure they were not.
When your grandfather wasn’t talking about Palestine he was talking about the war. The rules were changing every day, he said — soldiers patrolling nearby villages in grimy work clothes, passing as farmers; military planes flying so low we’d hear their engines rumbling. And the day before, Isaac had been on watch when he found a teenage boy wandering the woods, claiming he was looking for blackberries, when anyone from the area knew they weren’t growing so late in the year — it was halfway through November, I’d been in the forest two months by then. Your grandfather felt it was time to move, to scout another location in the woods to set up camp, but first he wanted to plan one more mission, and he wanted me to come. With my light hair and green eyes I could easily pass through town unnoticed — and anyway, your grandfather said, who would suspect a girl so young?