I didn’t want to go. In those two months I’d found a routine that made me feel almost safe: cleaning barrels and collecting spent shells from the forest floor, going to target practice after helping the other girls clean up dinner, or working with Yussel in the infirmary, where he was always concocting a new treatment out of herbs and pig fat and other loot the fighters brought back. But the forest had become home to me, the brigade a kind of family, and — I know this will make you uncomfortable, so I’ll say it very quickly — in many ways your grandfather was beginning to feel more and more like an older brother than a boyfriend, even those nights together in the tent. I think that, at thirteen, I still needed to be taken care of, to have a hand guiding me through the forest, and if your grandfather felt I was ready for a mission, I believed him. So I sat and listened the following night as he and Isaac strung together the plan in the dugout beside the kitchen, where they always held their meetings.
The train, your grandfather told me, would carry sixty-four soldiers and two cars’ worth of supplies. At nine-fifteen the following night, it would stop in Haradziec, where I’d have already laid out explosives.
It’s a stupid idea, Isaac said, crouching low in the dugout — I was the only one short enough to stand up straight under the ceiling of blankets. Maybe she’ll go unnoticed, he said, but she’ll slow us down.
Secretly I agreed with Isaac, but your grandfather ignored him. He had a way of dismissing people without angering them, simply by pretending he hadn’t heard them to begin with — a trait I appreciated then and now can’t stand: sometimes I feel like he’s walking around the apartment wearing earplugs. But that night I admired it, watching him roll out a map on the dirt floor, the yellow light of the lantern flickering across his face, which was getting thinner every day. It was an old map, one I remembered from school, when my village was still part of Belarus. Right then I didn’t know what was what. I stared at the names of towns, trying to will them to memory as your grandfather dragged a finger along our route.
We won’t have to worry about snakes in this weather but watch for bears, he said, passing out pistols and bullets to Isaac and me.
I’d never pointed a gun at anyone. I’d held plenty: in the armory workshop and at target practice, and back home my father had a rifle above the fireplace but I’d never seen him load it. I touched the slide of this one now, feeling my way to the trigger.
A pistol’s entirely different, Isaac said, and I sensed he was right: I’d been using shotguns during practice, but these would be easier to hide. You know how to push your weight against a shotgun, remember? he continued. With this, it’ll be twice as hard to have the same accuracy.
I wrapped my hands around the grip. Even before Isaac could criticize me, I knew my stance was wrong. My shoulders were hunched, my arms stiff. I hated the way your grandfather looked at me then, as if he suddenly recognized every risk in bringing me and was embarrassed for thinking the plan up at all.
But he just sat beside me and said, Push the magazine all the way up until you hear a click, then pull back the slide to chamber a round — that’s the only way to know it’s loaded for sure. You probably won’t need it anyway since you’ll be with us. And remember that if you do hear something, don’t shoot. It might just be an animal.
I nodded. I knew the rules. They’d been hammered into me since my first day there, your grandfather reciting them around the campfire every night: Don’t get cocky with your weapon. Remember what happened to three of our fighters who were loud and overconfident on a raid and were gunned down from a window, their stupidity already forest legend by the time I’d arrived. If you kill an animal, make sure the carcass doesn’t drip blood as you carry it back to camp: never leave a trail. Don’t forget that many of the peasants in the surrounding villages are good people, suffering as well, some even risking their own safety to protect us. If you have to rob them, take only what you absolutely need.
These rules were important to your grandfather. To Isaac and some of the others, not so much, though they always listened. I didn’t know if Isaac had always been gruff or if the war had made him that way. I knew he’d seen things I hadn’t, that when he’d heard soldiers coming into his village, he’d been quick to scramble behind a barn and from there had submerged himself in a river to hide, and when he crawled out hours later, he found himself completely alone.
It was like Isaac was running on adrenaline to stay alive, whereas with your grandfather it was something different. Even that night in the dugout, I knew he was considering morals only partly out of decency — mostly he saw himself, in his heart of hearts, as a boy with a legacy. A boy who, after the war was over, would be written about in textbooks, talked about in reverent tones: Leon Moscowitz, whose rebel army not only changed the course of the war but did so ethically.
I had never met a person so aware of his own voice, carefully stringing together sentences with the hope they would be quoted later, even as he told me to cup my hands as he passed out explosives. First a grenade, then six long sticks of dynamite.
This part’s easy, your grandfather said. Lay the sticks flat on the tracks.
And then what? I said.
For God’s sake, Isaac said.
Just before the train comes, your grandfather said calmly, hold the spoon of the grenade down with your thumb. Then twist off the pin with your other hand, and the moment you throw it, start sprinting toward the woods.
This is ridiculous, Isaac said. She’ll get us killed. Why not stay back in the armory? he said, and right away your grandfather stood up, as if secretly grateful Isaac was running his mouth so he had a reason to lecture. Just this week a statement went out all over the country, he said, offering farmers two sacks of grain for every one of us killed. Do you think anyone else is wasting their time with these concerns, pondering the differences between kids and teenagers, girls and boys? he said, his eyes flicking around the dugout as though his audience were much bigger than Isaac and me.
Then your grandfather turned to me. If anyone stops you, he said, you have to remember, even if you’re terrified, to keep the Yiddish out of your accent. Okay?
Okay, I said.
You could be a Dina, he said then, looking at me.
Or maybe Henia, Isaac said. Henia from the north, visiting her family?
He handed me a stack of clothes, all from a previous raid. Folded on top was a knit brown hat, which I slipped over my head. Your grandfather pushed it back, scrutinized my face and said, There. Already she looks like a different girl.
Yeah? I said, fingering the hat. What about Sonya? Sonya Gorski, I said, sounding it out, almost beginning to enjoy our game. It was like the dress-up I used to play back home, my best friend Blanka and me goofing off in my parents’ tailor shop, darting between the tall spools of fabric and draping the scraps around each other, pretending we were classy society ladies dressing for the opera, where our handsome, imaginary boyfriends would be waiting outside on the marble steps in suits.