The Yellow Bird Sings Read online

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  For my parents

  Part 1

  The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. The bird chirps all the musical parts save percussion, because the barn rabbits obligingly thump their back feet like bass drums, like snares. The lines for violin and cello are the most elaborately composed. Rich and liquid smooth, except when fear turns the notes gruff and choppy.

  Music helps the flowers bloom. When the daisies grow abundant, the bird weaves a garland for the girl to wear on her head like a princess—though no one can see. She must hide from everyone in the village: soldiers, the farmhouse boys, the neighbors too. The lady with squinty eyes and blocky shoes just dragged a boy down the street and returned, smug and straight-backed, cradling a sack of sugar like a baby.

  When giants tromp past, the bird holes up in a knot in the rafter, silent and still. Tending the garden must wait. The girl, music trapped inside, buries herself under hay. She imagines her mother whispering their nightly story or whisper-singing her favorite lullaby. She holds tight to her blanket and tries to fall asleep, sniffing in vain for the faded scent of home.

  Chapter 1

  Poland

  Summer 1941

  A brooding heat permeates the tight space of the barn loft, no larger than three strides by four. The boards are rough-hewn and splintery and the rafters run at sharp slants, making the pitch too low for Róża to stand anywhere but in the center. Silken webs wad the corners and thin shards of sunlight bleed through cracks. Otherwise it is dark.

  Kneeling, Róża pats down a dense pad of hay for Shira to lie on. She positions her by the wall across from the ladder, then covers her with more hay. Róża makes a spot for herself in front of her daughter, angled so she can keep her eyes on the door. Her heart still hammers in her chest.

  Not an hour ago Henryk’s wife, Krystyna, barreled in to corner a chicken and discovered them crouching behind a hay cart. Róża swallowed a startled gasp and tightened her hold on Shira. Krystyna’s eyes darted to the wall hung with tools—trowels and spades, shovels, a pitchfork—then she slowly backed out. A few moments later Henryk stepped in. His expression was deeply troubled, but his hands held two potatoes each.

  “We have boys of our own. We’ll all be killed.”

  The dirt-packed floor shuddered beneath Róża’s feet. There were prizes for denunciations: a bag of sugar per Jew. Her mind raced with what currency she could offer: yeast and salt from the bakery. Coins. Three of her grandmother’s rubies sewn into the hem of a coat. If necessary, her wedding ring.

  Had she misjudged them? Henryk frequented their bakery before the war. He had been friendly, maybe even a little flirtatious, when Róża worked at the counter. Sometimes he brought his son Piotr and each would eat a jam-filled cookie in one bite, smiling and batting away the powdered sugar that clung to their lips. They were grateful to her family; her uncle Jakob, a medical doctor, tended to Piotr when he came down with rubella. Róża believed they’d help, at least at the start.

  “I beg you, just for a night or two.”

  “No more.”

  Henryk cleared equipment from the loft and forked up hay. Róża followed closely as Shira scampered up the ladder.

  Now they lie here, still and silent. Róża asks herself, Where will we go next? Not back to Gracja. Not after what happened to Natan, shot dead after a week’s hard labor, and her parents, herded out of their apartment onto cattle trucks. And not to the woods, where her cousin Leyb has gone, with no guarantee of food or shelter. Come winter, with the forest’s frigid temperatures, Shira could not survive it.

  So where? Róża scours her mind but finds no answer. Tonight’s contingency is Henryk’s root cellar, to the side of the farmhouse, if vacating the barn becomes necessary.

  The loft boards are hard on Róża’s back and buttocks, and a splinter of hay stabs at her neck, yet she holds still until Shira drifts to sleep; then she shifts position, ever so slightly, in a slow, soundless motion.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Henryk places a water bucket and two clean rags inside the barn door. Róża and Shira pad silently down the ladder. After they drink their fill, Róża submerges her arms in the water, the coolness loosening her whole being.

  She wipes Shira clean first, taking the dirt and grime from her cheeks and neck with slow, gentle turns of the cloth. Patiently, indulgently, she swabs Shira’s hands—cupped tight as if cradling something, a habit started after her father didn’t return—moving the cloth quickly between each of Shira’s fingers, then sponging her wrists and upper arms. She sends Shira flitting up to the loft and begins on herself, unbuttoning her shirt to reach her chest, her back, and the space under her arms. The water trickles down her sides; Róża catches it with the cloth and carries it upward along her body, taking care to rub away her odor. She sponges until she senses a slight shift outside the barn. Henryk? He lingered after delivering the bucket, she thinks, and is now watching her through a crack in the lower barn wall. Her breath grows shallow. She looks down at her exposed breasts, her taut stomach, her jutting hips. Her first instinct is to turn away, but she holds herself still. They will be fed here tonight. Sheltered. She douses the cloth again and continues on, the feel of Henryk’s eyes watching her, seeing her.

  * * *

  Later in the day, Róża peers through a gap in the loft boards and glimpses Krystyna inside the farmhouse, agitated, arguing with Henryk. She is shaking her head, hard, causing the baby, Łukasz, to slip sideways down her hip. Róża sinks low to the loft floor.

  Henryk enters the barn and begins forking hay out in large piles, blocking the sight line from the neighboring fields and the road.

  The farmhouse, white with carved shutters painted a cheery blue, is smaller than the barn and does not fully occlude the view from the road, especially where it curves. The tavern must be somewhere close by because already Róża can hear carousing.

  At nightfall Róża shows Shira how to wrap her finger in the clean corner of a rag to make a toothbrush and how to relieve herself in a bucket filled with straw that Henryk will afterward mix with the animals’ hay and waste.

  Henryk brings a different bucket with food in it. Boiled cabbage and turnips. “Krystyna sent this for you. Just for tonight. She’s very frightened.”

  Róża nods, grateful.

  Back beneath hay, Róża presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. Spots of yellow and black bloom there, spreading like spilled dye. They chase away images of Natan and her parents.

  Eventually, she opens her eyes to find Shira watching, enchanted, as two rabbits hop sideways on a hay bale and scurry about. If Shira misses her bedtime rituals from home—a drawn bath, warm milk with nutmeg and honey, snuggles from her grandparents—she doesn’t show it. On her leg, her fingers tap out the rhythm to some elabor
ate melody only she hears in her head.

  Krystyna enters an hour later, stern and stiff postured, her lips pulled into a straight line. But she’s brought more water and a bit of bread. Róża can neither thank Krystyna nor admonish Shira before her girl flits down the loft ladder and, with a dramatic bow, offers Krystyna a small rectangle of woven hay she’s made. Krystyna’s face softens. Her eyes grow kind. Shira scrambles back to the loft and into Róża’s arms.

  Chapter 2

  Shira practices being invisible. She hunches her shoulders, sucks in her stomach, slinks like a cat. Her mother practices, too, burying herself deep in the hay and beckoning Shira, with a wave of her hand, to settle into her lap and be still. Or with a finger to her lips, she instructs her to stay silent.

  The floorboards are rough and the hay is sharp and scratchy. Shira does not understand why they can’t go home—why they ever left home—where together her mother and father tucked her into bed as if in a soft, downy nest and where music and the scent of her grandmother’s baking wafted through the air.

  There, Shira could patter down the hall and join the company, watching as they unclasped the cases of their instruments. Nestled in her grandfather’s lap, breathing in his workshop smells of sawdust and lacquer, she bounced and tapped to the ripple of notes from her mama’s cello, her tata’s violin.

  At first, in the tuning and warm-up, everything sounded off-kilter and sad. But then they struck up their songs and the music carried them all, until Shira no longer felt herself settled against her grandfather but in an altogether different place of pure, shared beauty. Vibrant, soulful melodies. Fiery, stomping rhythms. It didn’t matter how loud things got—there wasn’t a neighbor in the building who didn’t relish their playing. Shira could even hum if she wanted to. But here, her mother is insistent: they need to be silent, to hide. So she coils herself tight like a spring and holds herself in.

  Shira strives to mute the sound of every movement—her footfalls, her breath. The anticipated stream of her pee, she has learned to mete out in a near-silent trickle. And she knows to cover over and so erase any sign of her existence—a series of vanishing moments—before she retreats beneath piles of hay.

  Yet even as Shira wills herself to silence, her body defies her with a sudden sneeze, an involuntary swallow, the loud crack of her hip from being still too long. A calf muscle cramps. An itch needs a scratch. Her bowels press. The most carefully planned movement causes the hay to rustle or a floorboard to whine. Shira looks over at her mother apologetically. Worried, her mother stares back.

  Shira rehearses the plan to move, if need be, from the barn to the root cellar—a ziemianka with the stork’s nest above it, at the side of the farmhouse—where she is to wait for her mother on the floor behind the barrels, unmoving (no matter the cold or damp) for however long it takes: neck straight, not crooked, or else she’ll get sore. She also rehearses what her mother told her over and over about her sounds, how they can be no louder than a whisper except when she says that it is safe, very late at night, to speak pianissimo rather than piano pianissimo. If her mother wakes her suddenly, she is not to raise her voice. She must control her breathing: no heaving sighs. Absolutely no sneezes.

  Whenever Shira so much as shifts her weight, the floorboard creaks and the air grows thick and humid, hard to breathe. But then her yellow bird skitters out of her hands and scuttles through a hole in the loft boards. He darts about, looking for danger, and returns with his bright feathers ruffled by the wind. Shira searches his bead-black eyes and finds reassurance: Her sounds went unheard.

  She settles back into the hay and tries again to be still until notes, snippets of song, and soon whole passages take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder. A story told with strings and woodwinds: a glacial night, a flickering fire, sounds like black water beneath bright ice, basses and timpani and a violin’s yearnings, and, finally, a crescendo, the frozen earth cracking—

  Her mother waves an arm, her forehead furrowed. Shira realizes she is tapping again.

  Chapter 3

  Time blurs and swells in the barn. The day’s hiding is indistinguishable from the night’s, and the tick of each silent minute feels like an eternity in the shadowy darkness. Yet Róża continues with the sleep-time routine she started for Shira when they first ran from Gracja, when they kept to the outskirts of villages, crossing fields and meadows on their way to Henryk’s barn.

  First they peer at the photographs in the card fold: Natan at university in an image grainy and dark; Róża’s parents, soft eyed despite their stiff, formal postures; and Shira in her ankle-length dress. Róża wishes she could have grabbed other photographs, better ones of Natan and of their extended family. But these were in reach.

  In whispers, Shira asks Róża to tell her about each one.

  “This is your papa the day he earned his pharmacology degree; this is your bobe and zayde at Aunt Syl and Uncle Jakob’s wedding; this is you at cousin Gavriel’s bar mitzvah.”

  Then Róża tells the story of a little girl who, with the help of her bright yellow bird, tends an enchanted garden. The little girl is five years old, the same age as Shira. The garden must be kept silent—only birdsong is safe—yet there is a princess who can’t stop sneezing and giants who must never hear them. There are adventures and threats averted by the little girl’s quick thinking; and each time, the story ends with the girl and her mother curled together in a soft heap of daisy petals for a good night’s sleep.

  Afterward, Róża whisper-sings a lullaby about chicks waiting for their mother to return home with glasses of tea to drink. She leaves out the Cucuricoo that starts off the lullaby and prays Shira won’t utter it aloud. Then she folds her large fingers over Shira’s small ones—a hugging of hands, a good-night squeeze—and settles Shira to sleep with her blanket.

  Only tonight, addled from hunger, inactivity, and the fading purple light, Róża nods off in the middle of telling the story. She jolts awake, clarity renewed, when she hears the sound of someone entering the barn. Henryk. He carries the night air and the scent of alcohol up the ladder, into the loft.

  Róża guesses it is after midnight. The farmhouse is unlit: Krystyna and the boys must be sleeping. Shira sits cross-legged in the very center of the loft, wide-awake, pretending to play with her bird, trying to decipher Henryk’s whisperings of war news he just heard in the tavern.

  Henryk’s eyes dart in Shira’s direction. “When does she sleep?”

  Róża prods Shira to a place by the wall farthest from the ladder. “I need you to lie here. Yes, with your face toward the wall, no turning—here’s your blanket—and I promise I will finish our story first thing in the morning.” Róża feels Shira bristle at the false brightness in her voice.

  “But Mama—”

  “No questions now. Shh.”

  * * *

  Róża stays silent and unmoving as Henryk fumbles her pants down and pushes his way inside her. Dry and tight, she feels as if she is ripping. His weight is heavy upon her. His thrusts grow faster, deeper, the pounding harder and harder. Hay cuts into her back as he presses her into the floorboards, his salt and sweat and breath in her nose.

  His sounds, the sound of them—the battering of a porch door in a rainstorm—could give everything away. Yet Róża can do nothing but wait for it to be over. Henryk feels up her shirt and finds her nipple; he twists, squeezing it hard. Róża locks her eyes on a crack in the loft wall, a shard of moonlight. Henryk continues to push. A final grunt and the hot wet fill of him inside, before he collapses on top of her, one hand still in her hair.

  When Róża dares to look Shira’s way, she recognizes at once, from the uneven movement of her girl’s breath, that she is still awake.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, their second day in the barn, Róża is up and frantic about vacating—where will they go?—when Henryk steps in. She straightens, crosses her arms around her middle.

  “You c
an stay a bit longer,” Henryk says.

  Róża drops like a puddle into the hay. “Thank you.”

  Later, she watches as a neighbor saunters over with a plate of sugar cookies and interrupts Henryk chiding his older boys, Piotr and Jurek. He’d told them to stay away from the well pump, but they’d fiddled with it and it broke. Now he’s warning them—keep out of the barn.

  “Did you get a horse?” the neighbor asks, cookies aloft, eyes squinting.

  “Huh?”

  “A horse in your barn?” Tall piles of hay still block the sight line from the neighboring fields to the front face of the barn.

  “Oh that. No, I’ve just been moving equipment around, that’s all.”

  When another neighbor approaches, Krystyna—her eyes only once flitting upward toward the loft—carries little Łukasz to the group to be exclaimed over. What instinct to protect Róża and Shira has come to bear in her? Róża wonders. And what instinct to betray might arise as instantly?

  Róża pulls away from the wall crack before she witnesses any of them eating the cookies.

  * * *

  The day unfolds: Krystyna brings a jar of water and two pieces of bread; later, Henryk removes their waste pail. Despite these kindnesses, Róża is certain that, at any moment, one or the other will demand they leave—and she racks her brain, trying to think of where she and Shira might go next. There is a house she knows, next village over, where she once delivered a sękacz for a merchant’s wedding. The cake—forty eggs’ worth—was tall like a tree and difficult to carry; and the house stood out because it, too, was very tall. She tries to remember: How near was the house to its neighbors? And did she ever hear news that the merchant’s wife had children? If so, they may have less luck there.…