THE FOLLOWING day I got ready for Haradziec. A gray wool dress and coat, leather boots and thick brown stockings. The boots were too large but everything else fit so snugly it was as if I’d picked out the clothes myself. In my pocketbook were my pistol and a case of bullets. I clutched it under an arm as I followed your grandfather and Isaac down the dark, mulchy path. These woods I knew — it was where we foraged for shells and mushrooms. We were quiet walking through, your grandfather brushing the ground with a stick to cover every footprint. Then Isaac called out to me, If the police stop you while you’re casing the station—
I’m Henia Sawicki. Staying with my grandparents nearby.
And if they ask what you’re doing on the tracks?
Looking for my ring. It slipped off somewhere.
These lies, I knew, were the easy part. But really, the entire plan was simple. We’d walk along the edge of the forest — far enough in the woods to go unnoticed, close enough to glimpse the villages through the trees. In Haradziec, I’d slip out and cross the tracks, set the explosives down, run back into the forest. Your grandfather had made it sound so effortless in the dugout, but here I worried about keeping it straight in my mind. If one wary soldier saw through my lie, that was it — I’d be shot, your grandfather and Isaac probably next, or maybe tortured in an attempt to be led to the brigade. So I was trying to remember the plan — Henia, the ring, the grandmother — while clonking around in my too-big boots, and that was when I tripped on a rock and fell to the ground, twisting my ankle so hard I couldn’t stand up. There I was, splayed in the dirt with my ankle throbbing, and even before your grandfather helped me to my feet, Isaac was already moaning about how he knew something like this would happen.
Twenty minutes out, he said, and your grandfather snapped, Tell me, Isaac, one of us couldn’t have fallen?
Before your grandfather could hoist himself back onto his soapbox, I started hobbling along the route and all they could do was follow.
Don’t be stupid, Isaac called.
He’s right, your grandfather said.
I was suddenly so angry: with your grandfather for always acting like he knew what was best, with Isaac for being so hard on me, with myself for botching the attack. For the first time since the sewers, I felt utterly hopeless and alone. I had no idea what to do, or who to ask what to do, because — and this was the first time it really became clear to me — I had no one left. The only people I had in the world were these two boys I barely knew at all, who looked so unbelievably confused right then, walking in their oversized coats, Isaac breathless and spastic, your grandfather’s cap falling over his eyes. Up ahead, through a gap in the trees, I saw straw roofs, the jagged steeple of a church. I kept limping down the path, and when an entire village came into view, I slipped out of the forest. We were still two hours from Haradziec. My ankle was swelling, my clothes were covered in dirt, and I pushed through town, not even sure what I was looking for. The streets were empty and so eerily quiet it was as if something terrible had happened the second before we’d arrived.
Your grandfather and Isaac hurried behind me, whispering to get back in the forest. But I kept on, and that was when I realized this was the town I’d crawled into from the sewers. Huddled along the road were the same houses, the same barns and mill and school, only now the buildings were deserted and destroyed: broken windows, piles of bricks, rats darting up stairways leading nowhere. The war, it seemed, had finally arrived here. A few cottages were still smoldering. A man, hard-faced and dirty, dragged a skinny horse past without even looking up. This time, I knew, I was no more shit-stained than anybody else.
Along the strip of shops was a bakery. The door was open, and when I walked inside, the glass cases were smashed, the shelves bare, only half the tables standing. But as I moved through the kitchen and up the stairs, I saw shadows flash beneath a door. I pulled out my gun, pushed the door open with my shoulder and strolled inside.
The room was small enough to take in all at once: just two wooden chairs facing the fireplace with a bed and dresser in the corner; a stove, sink and table against the wall. A mother washed dishes. She had a cinched little mouth like a balloon knot and dark hair twisted tight at her neck. A boy, eight or nine, bent over homework at the wooden table. The mother glanced at me and at my gun and put down the pot she was drying. The boy stared. My hands wobbled as I aimed at them.
I need something to wrap up my ankle, I told the mother. It was the first time I’d spoken and my words sounded loose and clunky in the silent room. And boots and a coat and your warmest hat and scarf. And gloves, I added greedily as she sifted through drawers.
She handed over the clothes and I peeled off my dirty ones. I didn’t even have my tights off when the mother yanked the boy’s head toward her chest, and it took me a second to realize I’d gotten so used to bathing around everyone in the forest that it hadn’t seemed strange to strip down in front of this family.
Henia, Isaac hissed from the doorway, where he and your grandfather were standing. Let’s go.
But I couldn’t, not yet. As I sat at the table and tied a clean sock around my ankle, bruised and puffy but possibly only sprained, I looked at the math problems the boy had printed out neatly on lined white paper, and imagined, for just a second, what it would be like to have homework again. Not that I’d even liked math — it had been my worst subject, the one my father had to spend close to an hour correcting every evening. But to be at a table again with my mother, to have classwork and meals and chores — I had wished for my family every day in the forest, but never before had what I’d lost been flaunted so vividly in front of me, and I was filled with a sudden rage at this boy. This kid who had so little, whose father could be dead or at war or just not around, whose school was certainly shut down and whose mother was probably trying to keep up some semblance of routine by making him practice math in the middle of this chaos, and at that moment I resented them both.
What was for dinner? I asked them.
Soup, the mother said.
What kind?
Potato.
Fill three bowls for me.
It’s gone, the mother said. She held up the empty pot she’d just dried.
What do you have? I said.
She handed over a potato and three turnips.
I pocketed the food as I walked the length of the room, opening cupboards, rifling through drawers, feeling under sweaters and pants for a hidden stash of something.
I need your money, I said.
We don’t have any, the mother said.
Why should I believe you? I opened their closet, overturned pillows, shook out blankets.
I promise you, the mother said, looking at me pleadingly. It was already stolen. Everything was.
You’ll be sorry, I said, if you don’t give me your money. It took me two tries to pull back the slide, but it didn’t matter, I realized, when I was the only one holding a weapon. I grabbed the boy, circled an arm around him and pressed the gun to his cheek. He was shaking, and his fine brown hair was damp with sweat. He felt like such a child next to me, his skinny arms tight at his side, his breath coming out in short, hot gasps.
The mother was blinking quickly, and she kept looking at her son, then back at me. A sound came out of the boy’s throat, squeaky and remote, and I pressed the pistol more firmly against his skin. The mother closed her eyes. Then she crawled under the bed, ran her hand along the bottom of the mattress and pulled out a thin stack of bills. It was a small amount, enough for maybe two weeks’ worth of food.