The Yellow Bird Sings Read online

  At bedtime, her mother doesn’t seem at all tired, so Shira tries to stay awake, but her belly is full and her eyelids heavy, and with the funny thought of her yellow bird hopping across the lines of a new musical composition, chirping out its melody, Shira falls asleep.

  * * *

  Krystyna comes into the barn at dawn. “Is Shira awake?”

  “Not yet,” Róża whispers. “Last night’s meal has kept her sleeping soundly.”

  “Good. My sister was here yesterday. Everything is set. She will come for her late tonight. We can’t risk waiting.”

  Róża cannot speak for the tight lump in her throat.

  “This is for you.” Krystyna holds a card with an address printed on it. “When the war is over—when it is safe—you will go and get Shira.”

  Róża grasps the card, which reads, “Siostry Felicjanki, ul. Poniatowskiego 33, Celestyn”; yet she holds it away at arm’s distance. She’s not sure she can go through with this.

  “Róża, it is her best chance.”

  She looks away.

  “What is the plan for you?” Krystyna asks.

  “My cousin Leyb fled to the woods. I will try to find him.” Since news of the burned-down barn in the adjacent village, Róża has given up on her plan to try with the merchant’s wife. And returning to Gracja isn’t an option, as Henryk just heard the Gracja ghetto has been sealed and subjected to several Aktionen.

  “Are you sure the woods—”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Chapter 21

  Róża tugs the shred of blanket, once pink but now a hay-coated dull gray, from Shira’s sleeping grasp and settles herself, needle and thread in hand, in the shaft of light that beams in through the largest crack in the loft wall. There she stitches letter after tiny letter, spelling out Shira’s name in the blanket’s ragged, already bumpy seam.

  With each yank of thread, Róża’s thoughts dart between her mother and her little girl, between unspeakable sorrow and fear. Her mother is the one who taught Róża to sew. Late afternoons nestled on the plush sitting room sofa, she guided Róża’s small hand with her own thick one, patiently and encouragingly, the faint scent of celeriac upon her breath. Róża remembers bow-tie cookies baking in the kitchen, the rhythmic whoosh-whooshing of a wood plane emanating from her father’s workshop, an orchestra’s recording the constant background.

  When would Róża ever sit with Shira like that, in comfort, with abundant food and music, teaching her daughter the things she knows?

  Róża pauses in her sewing to reach for the one thing she has of her mother’s: the metal frosting tip, small enough to fit on Róża’s finger like a thimble. She’s kept it in her own pocket since that day in the closet.

  Always, her mother tucked raspberry jam or fresh cherries into the center of her cakes, and drew grand, elegant designs with her frosting. As a child, Róża would stare up at the finished cakes in wonder.

  “They’re beautiful, Mama.”

  Her mother beamed. “There is a saying I believe in, that ‘beauty will save the world.’”

  Why hadn’t Róża shared this with Shira? She vows that she will when Shira wakes.

  From within the farmhouse, Łukasz squeals. Along the lane, hooves echo in the distance. In the loft, Shira sleeps on, one hand sticking out from the hay, loosely cupped. Róża’s choked breath comes out as a shudder.

  Róża wipes her stinging eyes and coaxes the needle into position with continued, painstaking care. She must be precise, tucking the stitches beneath the piping so that they don’t protrude in any way, so that they are hidden. When she finishes, the name sewn into the blanket’s edge is invisible. Nearly.

  * * *

  Henryk comes in next with what looks like a bucket of earth. He pulls out a variety of leaves and roots and explains which are edible, which poisonous.

  “Some different things will grow in the deep woods, but you can follow basic rules: Avoid plants that have finely toothed, narrow-pointed leaves like these. You mustn’t eat white berries. The mushrooms that have a slightly green cap are the most dangerous—be careful. Also, do you know anything about tracks?”

  “No, I—”

  “Others’ tracks and your own—you’ll need to watch for them. Don’t strike the ground with your heel. Step and pull back, so it seems you are traveling in the opposite direction. If your prints are very noticeable, wear socks over your boots. I brought you a few warm things.”

  He kisses her tenderly, stopping only when Shira wakes and turns their way.

  * * *

  Shira stares at patterns in the hay, and soon she’s imagining: weaving a basket for a hot-air balloon, constructing a hay ladder to the moon, laying down a roadway out of the barn. If she were to set the stalks down end to end, would they take her as far as the meadow? Would they take her all the way home? She extends a single strand toward the silvery spiderweb slung in the low corner between a rafter and the loft wall. She doesn’t poke at its intricate threads, doesn’t cause the small black spider to scurry and build a new home.

  Her mother’s whisperings—“Shall I tell you more of The Snow Maiden, I don’t think I explained the whole story; or would you rather I read to you a bit?”—have a false ring, so Shira overrides them with a noise: a squeaky single-note chirp, louder than she intended.

  As soon as the chirp leaves Shira’s mouth, she regrets it. Her mother rears at her, pale and puffy faced. Worse than a harsh scolding is the dented look in her eyes.

  Shira retreats, contrite. Hardly moving, she changes into the new dress Henryk brought her. She wants to stand up and twirl, see how the skirt swings in the air, but she stays down, still and silent, clutching her blanket. There are new bumps at the blanket’s seam. Shira doesn’t ask her mother about them. She’ll ask later, when her mother is happy again.

  Henryk comes into the barn in broad daylight. He perches on the loft ladder and speaks to Róża in low tones, his words muffled by his bearded lips.

  After he leaves Shira asks, “Does Pan Wiśniewski want to marry you?” He looks at her mother the way Tata did.

  “What? Hush yourself!”

  * * *

  Shira decides to move her treasures to new hiding spots. She takes the pottery shards from the nook made by the crosstie and rafter and stows them inside a little pouch that her mother sewed her when they first arrived here and that Shira decorated with puffs of rabbit fur. The two ceramic bits she’d hidden together along the back wall of the loft she separates, hiding one on top of the crossbeam and the other behind the highest rung of the ladder, beneath hay. She opens the atlas to Africa—she is excited by the notion of an Ivory Coast—and stows some of her treasures in a corner she imagines deep inside the caves near Mount Nimba, some at the water’s edge.

  Her mother has bad poops in the basin. Shira pushes her face deeper in the atlas to escape the smell. She traces a finger along the arced coastline, imagining herself an explorer.

  * * *

  That evening, Shira waits for darkness, for her mother to tell their nightly story about the little girl in the silent flower garden. But her mother tells a different story: a story of how the little girl goes to a new garden where she can make noise, can laugh and shout, can fill up the space with her whole self rather than live scrunched like a flower in a too-small pot.

  Shira scooches out of her mother’s grasp. Amid the fake bright notes in her mother’s voice she hears an underlying chord: heartbreak.

  She stares hard at her mother, whose forced smile does not match her anguished eyes. Something is wrong. Shira wishes for the little girl in the story to compose perfect harmonies that the bird will sing—

  “I need you to go to a safer place, Shira; just for a while,” her mother says.

  “No! Please! I won’t make noise, not ever again. I’m sorry, Mamusia.”

  Her mother reaches for her hand but squeezes it too tight. Shira swallows back tears and pulls her hand away, covering herself over with hay.
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  Why did I ever have to chirp like that? Shira promises herself to be silent and still, to do what her mother wants of her: to disappear.

  She lies unmoving, like a stone. Music storms inside her in movements dark and gloomy, but she shows no outward signs: no tapping fingers, no bobbing feet. She doesn’t scratch her itches. She holds back every sneeze. She doesn’t even whisper to her little bird, who is viciously pecking at his left foot, trying to make himself like the other, outside birds.

  Eventually she pleads, using her quietest voice, “Tell our story, Mama. Does the bird bring seeds from the poppy fields?”

  Her mama’s face looks sunken and tired; new lines etch her forehead. She seems not to have heard Shira’s question. When she finally speaks, she tells the story of how, with the daisies from their garden, the little girl and her mother weave a magical flower chain that can expand to any length, connecting them.

  “However far apart they wander, they can always feel each other if they tug on the chain.”

  “But they are always together!”

  Tears spring to Shira’s eyes. She continues the protest in her mind: The mama and her little girl could never really be connected by a chain of daisies! It would break apart; it would tangle and they would trip. She should know this—the mama and her girl have to stay together! But Shira does not dare protest aloud. Not when quiet might fix things.

  Her mother doesn’t continue with the story, and Shira doesn’t ask her to. Silently, Shira shapes bits of hay into new nests. Her bird hops past these and nestles low in the cup of her hands.

  Eventually Shira settles into the hay to sleep, but her mother is fidgety. Her breath sounds heavy and ragged.

  “Mama?”

  “I’ve had to make a different plan for you.”

  “No, Mama, please! Give me another chance! I didn’t mean to be loud before.”

  “You’ve done nothing wrong, Shira. It is just that there is a better place.”

  “But—”

  “We can’t stay here any longer. And this new place is going to be good for you. You’ll be with other children, you’ll have space to run and play.”

  A single moment in which Shira wants to go to the better place, even apart from her mother, until her fear overrides it—

  “Please, Mama. Not without you!”

  Shira clings to her mother, digs her fingers into her flesh as Róża lifts Shira out of the hay and carries her down the ladder. It creaks noisily, yet despite the noise, her mother does not stop until she reaches the ground with Shira still hanging on, frantic.

  Will there be giants?

  An unfamiliar woman steps through the barn door, bringing gusts of cold air with her. Shira can’t make out her features, bundled as she is against winter, just her pale blue eyes that sweep the barn and come to rest on Shira.

  “Mama, no!”

  “Only for a little while, my darling—”

  Shira begins to cry. Her mother kneels down so that they are level. Shira raises her palms, waiting for her mother to fold her large fingers around them, but instead her mother thrusts her blanket into her hands.

  “Be sure to keep this with you. I’ve stitched the letters of your name—”

  Shira buries herself in her mother, eyes squeezed tight, fingers clenched around her.

  Kisses wet her cheeks. Shira opens her eyes. Her mother is still kneeling there, unwrapping Shira’s fingers from her arms.

  Shira breathes in her mother’s sharp, grassy scent. She looks at the ladder leading to the barn loft.

  “Mama?”

  “I love you with all my heart,” her mother says, her face going liquid like melted snow sliding from an eave.

  * * *

  Everything happens so quickly after that. The lady whisks Shira out of the barn and down the lane past rows of sleeping houses. The air is frigid. It burns Shira’s eyes as, panicked, she struggles to look around her. Where is she taking me?

  The darkness outside is different from the dark of the barn—the moonlight reflects brightly off the snow, causing a blinding glow—and Shira has to blink several times to see anything at all.

  “Come, sweet,” the lady coaxes. Her voice is gentle, but her grip is tight. She leads Shira off the lane to a footpath, thick with snow. Shira twists to look back, to see the barn, but the lady tugs her forward and along, uphill, then down. Shira can hardly catch her breath. A sharp, cramping pain seizes her side and she feels overcome with nausea. She hasn’t taken more than a few steps in months, and this air is freezing her tongue and tearing at her lungs. She wants to stop. She wants to scream and kick, to make a commotion, but her training in silence stifles her. Snow saturates her shoes, and her toes ache with cold as she is dragged on and on. Tears that well up freeze, icy, on her eyelashes.

  “It’s not far now—just down this pathway.”

  As she is led farther away from the barn, Shira searches the tree branches for birds, for her bird, but she sees only dark shadows. Her mother’s words—“I need you to go to a safer place”—ring in her head. There is no safe place without her mother! Shira feels her feet slipping beneath her as the lady tugs on and talks her out of the only life she knows:

  “You are to call yourself Zosia—a good Catholic name—from now on. Do you understand? You are not to be Shira, not to anyone.”

  Shira bites at her salty lips. No, she protests in her head, my name is not Zosia!

  Shira knows that she is supposed to hide, but she wants to be Shira still, and she wants to be with her mother! She lifts her blanket to the moonlight, searching for the letters her mother stitched.

  “I need you to listen to what I’m telling you. From now on, your parents are named Agnieszka and Bolesław. You have never before set foot in Gracja. That you have hidden in Bielsk, in a farmer’s barn—you must forget every detail of it. Zosia?”

  The lady’s eyes are like big blue marbles; worry lives in the lines around her mouth.

  Shira feels a stabbing in her heart. She has only ever known her parents as Mama and Tata. Why is this lady calling them strange names? She tries to wrench her hand away—she wants to run back to the barn, she wants to be with her mother—but the lady’s clasp on her is too tight.

  The path narrows and the woods thicken. Protruding tree roots batter Shira’s toes and trip up her feet. Shira sputters out words: “Where … are you … taking me? I want … to go back!” All she can see are trees until she spots a lit-up house, a carriage parked beside it, tucked at the bottom of a wooded hill.

  “Here now,” the lady says. “Come in the house.”

  In the front hallway, the lady is tucking papers into different pockets of her coat, all the while muttering how Zosia cannot possibly pass, not with her hair; they’ll need cover, darkness above all, as she has no bleach here. Shira doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she is awed by the brightness and warmth of the house. Unlike what she could see of Krystyna and Henryk’s, there are pretty paintings on the walls, books scattered in piles, and, most incredibly, a small stack of sheet music. Shira stares at it, her breath still heaving.

  “You like music?”

  Shira gives a single scared nod.

  It had been through the stir of notes—from her mother’s cello, her father’s violin—that Shira could know her parents’ truest feelings. And her dear grandfather’s, from the symphonies he listened to, hunched at his workbench amid chisels and planers, wood pieces and string.

  The lady leads Shira into the kitchen. On the table sits a plate of cookies. Shira eats one cookie and puts another in her pocket for her mother. The lady is explaining that her name is Maryla and that she must teach Shira the Lord’s Prayer, what people call the “Our Father,” right away.

  Shira does not dare repeat the words. She makes no sound at all. But as her eyes adjust to the lantern light, Shira recognizes Maryla—she’s the one who circled the barn, arm in arm with Krystyna. Shira feels a wave of relief: Maryla will take Shira back to the barn, back to her mothe
r. Or she will bring her mother here!

  There is a bath basin by the stove into which Maryla pours hot kettle water into cold. “This should warm things up. Quick, hop in.” Shira allows Maryla to pull off her dress and shoes and place her into the basin. The soothing warmth causes her to shiver. She wriggles her battered toes, sore despite the larger-sized shoes Henryk gave her. She dunks her head and splashes about like an eel. She stills, letting Maryla delouse her and scrub her clean. The music is jaunty, like a dance; perhaps she will try to write it out later on her music paper.

  Afterward, when dried and bundled up, she lets Maryla walk her outside. Shira seeks out the direction of the barn and tugs Maryla with all her strength.

  “We have to go get my mother!”

  “No, Zosia.” Maryla drags Shira to the carriage. Pressed close, Shira’s nostrils fill with Maryla’s unfamiliar, citrusy scent. She tries once again to wriggle out of Maryla’s grasp.

  “I need you to get in this minute. We have to move while it’s still dark.” Maryla hands Shira her blanket.

  The back of the carriage is strewn with yellow straw. Maryla hoists Shira in. She opens a flask and brings it to Shira’s lips. “Now please, take a drink. It’s chocolaty, and it will help you sleep.”

  Shira takes a swig of the thick, syrupy liquid, sweet on her tongue and warm in the low of her belly. Maryla presses Shira’s shoulders until she is lying entirely flat and covers her over. “No sitting up,” she says, before climbing up front.

  As the carriage lurches forward, Shira is jostled hard against the floor. The thick straw muffles her cries.

  Shira turns her head every which way without moving her body. All she can see through the straw are the black-painted sides of the carriage. Why did I wish, even for a moment, to leave the barn? She cries anew, thinking of the contorted expression on her mother’s face as she bade her to go.