The Yellow Bird Sings Read online

  Her eyes sting and burn, and she squeezes them shut as the carriage ride grows steady and rhythmic. Helpless, she tries to do what she’s seen her mother do: mouth silent prayers, over and over. Please. God. But she feels herself growing thick tongued and logy. Despite her terror, the repetitious movement of the carriage lulls her. She wants it all to be a dream; she wants to fall asleep and wake lying beneath the hay beside her mother.

  Instead, she will wake in a cast-iron bed amid several rows of beds. And the life she’s known—tales of an enchanted garden, the whisper-hum of a lullaby as she falls asleep, the soft folding of her mother’s hand over hers—will be replaced by a cold hush, barren white walls, a single dark carving of a man, arms stretched, head hung in sorrow. She will no longer be Shira. The name chalked on a slate by her bedside will be “Zosia.”

  Chapter 22

  Krystyna and Henryk step into the barn. Krystyna holds a wrapped-up food package; Henryk, his own thickest pair of socks. Róża is anguished, crying. Krystyna pulls her close. “I will be praying for you both.” She smells faintly of onions.

  Róża straightens up, nodding her gratitude, looking from Krystyna to Henryk through her tears. Henryk’s eyes meet hers quickly, before he bows his head and looks away. “Goodbye,” he says formally.

  They press their goods on her and walk out.

  * * *

  Róża pulls Natan’s fur hat over her ears and steps into the muck boots that stand like sentries at the corner of the barn. She layers a spare barn coat over her own woolen one and stuffs its oversize pockets with the few possessions she has: the card fold of photographs, her mother’s frosting tip, Natan’s compass and broken watch, a mess of yarn and thread. The card with the address of Siostry Felicjanki printed on it, she hides temporarily inside the booted cuff of her pant leg. She hates to take more, but she grabs a canteen and matches, Henryk’s root clippers, a trowel, and two blunt knives that she stuffs into the spare socks so they won’t chink. Finally, she reaches for a small pot she can use to make a fire in. She places Krystyna’s food package inside and loops its handle over her arm.

  Gripping the compass, she pushes open the barn door. A gust of freezing wind tears at her skin. Along the lane, thin scarves of smoke drift from the chimneys of dark houses. Róża blinks at the snow’s moonlit reflection, wary of her eyes. Is someone afoot or standing by a window, looking out? There’s been a swirl of action here tonight. She raises the collars of her double coats to shield her face. Like everything from the barn, the coats smell of damp hay and Henryk. She walks briskly, then breaks into a run, away from the village, in the direction of the woods.

  With every step, Róża fights the sting in her thighs, the roiling bile in her stomach, the biting cold at her nose and cheeks and fingertips. She pushes on despite the pain and atrophy, despite her acute desire to stop and rest. She tries to outrun her loss.

  * * *

  When Maryla had stepped into the barn, all Róża wanted was to call off the plan, to send Maryla away and find a different hiding place for her and Shira, together. But it was no good, the two of them on the run in freezing temperatures with no promise of shelter. She had to get Shira to safety. So she’d struggled to keep steady, to meet Shira’s gaze, but then Shira put out her hands—for Róża to fold her large fingers over Shira’s small ones, their good-night ritual—and when that didn’t work, Shira grasped Róża’s arms, dug in her nails.

  “Oh, Shira—”

  The imprint of Shira’s fingers still pressed upon her arms; the shrill tone of Shira’s voice rang on in her ears. Shira had clung to her and Róża had pried her off. Finger by tiny finger. Róża felt flayed, a layer of her own self ripped and taken—

  * * *

  Róża’s legs give out at the northern edge of the woods, where, still, she knows she could be spotted. She needs a place to hide.

  At the forest’s perimeter, Róża finds a large fallen tree limb, its branches thick with pine needles. If she can build up its sides, it can serve, just temporarily until she can find something better. She gulps water, unpacks Krystyna’s package, and takes two greedy bites of onion bread, then sets to work creating a burrow packed tight with pine needles. She pulls branches over it in all but one corner that she keeps open for the firepot. Finally she climbs in, breathing heavily, staring up through the branches at the blue-black sky.

  Sometime in the night she wakes. Icy bits of leaf and bark have blown in through the gaps of pine branches and pebbled between her teeth. She grinds and swallows. The ground is hard beneath her shoulders and buttocks, and every part of her aches with stiffness and cold. Except her toes: Róża cannot feel them at all. She transfers the address card to her pocket and heaves off her boots, pulling on Henryk’s socks, tucking her numbed feet, one at a time, into the crook of her bent knees.

  She wakes again because of a sound—an animal call. She shifts her weight, sweeps the top branches away, and sits upright. She wonders what might be near: bats, boars, a wolf? She listens intently to hear beyond the gusting wind. A bird?

  She lies back down in her shelter and tries again to sleep, but her mind floods with memories of Shira. The timbre of her voice. The oily smell of her hair, the warm dough of her cheek. The weight of her arms, her legs, draped in sleep.

  Despite her longing, there is a flash of relief—she doesn’t have to feed Shira or warm her or concoct tales of magical flowers or musical birds—before a punishing guilt, as her head swirls with all that might have gone wrong with Shira’s transport to the nuns. She hauls the mass of branches over her like a door closing shut. Inside her burrow, she curls herself in a tight ball and averts her eyes from the accusing stars.

  Part 2

  The little girl does not dare cry out. If there are giants in this new garden, she doesn’t want them to hear her. The yellow bird sings her music, and the enchanted flowers grow. Still, the girl remains silent. Her mother told her that an invisible daisy chain would connect them always, and she tries to feel its gentle tug. But deep down the girl knows: Until she is with her mother, wrapped in her arms, she will remain lost.

  Chapter 23

  The morning light is just breaking when a young nun in long brown robes stands over Zosia and makes the sign of the cross above her forehead. Zosia jerks awake with a start, staring first at the nun—her starched headdress like horns—then at the rows of beds, white sheets pulled pin tight. Frantic, Zosia kicks against the bedcovers that trap her, stiff and coarse and smelling of lye. With one hand, she clutches her tattered blanket, and with the other, she cups her fingers into a nest.

  A single small window, pitched too high for Zosia to see out of, is trimmed with dark wood, stark against the unadorned white walls. The room’s chill air feels sharp in Zosia’s chest, without the warmth of her mother. Whether from cold or fear, Zosia begins to tremble. The nun gently presses her hand on Zosia’s chest like a weight on a fluttering slip of paper, a steadying force, and after several flaps, a shudder, a flinch, Zosia’s body gradually acquiesces.

  “There, there. Don’t be scared. My name is Sister Alicja.” Sister Alicja looks from the slate to the girl. “And you must be Zosia.”

  Zosia involuntarily blinks as if to will away the name—not her own, not given by her mother. She pulls her blanket closer.

  “Zosia, yes,” Sister Alicja repeats, as if the name is merely something to agree upon. Her round face is shiny and clean. After a few moments, she holds up a small brown dress and a white sleeveless smock. “Come, put these on.”

  As Zosia stands, she shoves her hand into her pocket, clinging to the crumbled bits of cookie she’d taken for her mother. She doesn’t want to change dresses, no matter how filthy hers is, but Sister Alicja tugs her out of the old and into the new, quickly, eyes averted all the while.

  “Here’s a roll to eat. While the other children are in the refectory, we’ll do something about that hair of yours.”

  Zosia puts a hand to her hair. Maryla didn’t rebraid it after her bath an
d now it is tangled.

  Sister Alicja guides her to a nearby bathroom. A single bulb casts a dim yellow circle on two toilet stalls and a large trough sink. Stiff washcloths and towels in neatly folded squares line the rough shelving above. Sister Alicja reaches for a towel.

  Zosia struggles as the back of her head is pressed against the sink’s cold porcelain rim and a liquid—so sharp odored and pungent that Zosia’s nostrils burn just to breathe it—is poured into her hair. She wriggles and rears up, but Sister Alicja presses her back down, gently but firmly. “Now, now.” Wrapping a towel around Zosia’s shoulders, she guides her to a sitting position and produces a second roll for her to eat. “We’ll need to wait a bit for it to work.”

  Sister Alicja runs freezing water to the very edge of Zosia’s hairline and the base of her neck. Zosia stares up at a crack in the white ceiling plaster to keep from screaming; she shivers as the water soaks her collar and trickles down her back.

  “We don’t have hot water for this. I’m sorry.”

  After a few more rinses, Sister Alicja dries Zosia’s hair with a towel. Zosia’s nose burns, and the back of her dress is damp. Her eyes fix on Sister Alicja’s headdress, the tuck of her skin beneath the white rising rim, the fall of black veil. It looks to Zosia as if Sister Alicja has no hair at all.

  With a few final pats, Sister Alicja removes the towel from Zosia’s head.

  “That’s plenty light.”

  Zosia grabs a clump and pulls it forward so she can look at it. She’d thought the washing was to get her hair cleaner, but now she sees it was to change its color: it is near white. She gasps, shocked.

  Sister Alicja puts her steady hands on Zosia’s shoulders and speaks kindly.

  “It’s just hair. It will be better this way. But wait…” She presses Zosia back into a sitting position with her head tilted back and dabs at Zosia’s eyebrows with a bleach-soaked towel. “I need you to keep still a bit longer, eyes closed. It’s no use if your eyebrows are dark, is it?”

  A few minutes later, the nun takes another appraising look, her smile pursed. With a quick nod, she wipes any residue of bleach from Zosia’s eyebrows, then rotates Zosia and, section by section, brushes through her knotty, now-strawlike hair and dries it again with a towel.

  Zosia’s eyes sting with tears. She does not understand why Sister Alicja is doing this. But before she can ask, Sister Alicja guides Zosia down a dark corridor, past thick columns and vaulted archways, strange and intimidating. Zosia startles as, with each footfall, Sister Alicja’s stiff-heeled shoes sound loudly upon the wood floor. She looks for windows, a door—a way to escape—but finds herself stopped by the shock of noise everywhere around her. Footsteps and singing. Bells marking off the hour. So much sound after so much silence.

  Outside in the courtyard, Zosia hears the shrieks of boys, one tagging another, then running off; the singsong patter of girls, counting as they jump; the sharp-edged admonishments of nuns, instructing and cajoling. She thinks back to Henryk’s boys at play—the sounds that brought no danger. She remembers her own chirp reverberating in the barn—the sound that had cost her everything.

  Zosia stands motionless, still fighting back tears, her eyes searching for hiding places in the stone walls, behind the hedges. The children are lanky and fair. Not one has thick dark hair like her mother has. Like she had.

  As soon as they spot her, the children swarm her at once and stare. Zosia shifts soundlessly from foot to foot, unaccustomed to being looked at. A lone girl greets her with “Hallo,” but Zosia’s voice chokes. Words, to Zosia, are like glass beads around her neck. If one were to break loose, they would all clatter to the floor and scatter, shatter the quiet that kept her and her mother alive, entwined beneath hay.

  * * *

  At lunch, when Zosia brings the spoon to her mouth, her lips don’t open with a smack, her teeth don’t click as she chews, her throat makes no gulping sounds as she swallows. Her hips never once shift upon the hard refectory bench, her starched sleeves don’t rustle against the napkin in her lap. She is meant to hide here in plain sight; this much she knows, even if she does not know why. There is a din in the room: the chatter and slurping of the other children, the quick slap-slap of the nuns’ soles upon the floor, and the solemn utterance of prayer. Zosia makes no sound at all and keeps her eyes on her food. It is more than she is used to. Soup, tinged orange with carrots, and a mound of potatoes on the side.

  She eats greedily at first but slows, thinking of her mother: all the times she didn’t eat while, outside with Krystyna, Zosia gobbled bread and butter and eggs.

  In the afternoon, Sister Alicja ushers Zosia past murky portraits of people with golden halos. “This is Saint Francis of Assisi, and that is Saint Elizabeth of Hungary,” and on into the chapel. Every other part of the convent is bare and dingy, reeking of bleach, the same as her hair. But the chapel is wondrous, arched and gleaming. Sunlight floods through high windows, and candles flicker on a table at the front, giving off a waxy scent. All around is a radiating calm.

  Alicja guides Zosia into a row behind several other children and gestures for her to copy them as they set down the cushions for kneeling and reach for the hymnals lining the bench backs. Zosia sinks into the hushed stillness, the quiet here expectant, not at all like the oppressed silence of the barn. She feels shaky, confused. Once on her knees in her row, she drops beneath the pew entirely, curls tight, and cries silently.

  She tries to soothe herself by filling her head with her mother’s voice—the only sound that comforted her in danger. The particular lilt and catch when she whisper-sang about the hen who brought glasses of tea to her chicks. Cucuricoo! Di mom iz nisht do … Her mother would speak to her in many languages. Polish. Russian. German. Ukrainian. But always, she sang in Yiddish, in notes lyrical and haunting.

  A loud burst of real singing interrupts Zosia’s reverie. She twists around to see a group of nuns standing in two lines at the back of the church. Zosia doesn’t know the language of the song, but her heart delights at the joyous interweaving of voices, some deep and resonant, others high and bell-like. She stops crying and sits up. The sound is miraculous, like the broke-open sky—the sky they sat under, she and her mother, in the hills and the pastures, before all the walking stopped. Before the rafters and roofs trapped them in. Before her mother sent her away.

  Chapter 24

  Winter 1943

  Róża heads for the deepest forest, praying that the bitter cold will keep patrolling soldiers nearer to the perimeter. As a distraction from her hunger, she invents a story to remember the convent location, a story about a brave prince named Józef, who at thirty-three crosses a long bridge while looking up at the heavens. She thinks how Shira would like this story—with the clues for ul. Poniatowskiego 33, Celestyn, contained within it—and how she would have questions about the ways Józef was brave, and what the heavens looked like, and what his family did to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. The actual address card, too dangerous to be loose, she has sewn invisibly into the waistband of her pants. She trains her eyes on the crystallized tree branches, a glittering wonderland despite a world gone wrong.

  In this vast primeval wood, trees lean in every direction. Bare trunks rise out of the thick undergrowth; others lie crosswise on the floor, lined with snow. Fallen boughs are everywhere. Róża skirts patches of bramble as she hauls loose branches to the mouth of a recessed rock cave. She burrows inside and attempts to fashion a bow using a thin but sturdy stick and long threads from Henryk’s jacket. At first, the contraption reminds her of a violin bow, Natan’s, until she cuts the tip sharp enough to kill a small animal.

  She attends to the sounds of the woods. It is far from silent here, her own presence marked by the shrieks of birds and the warning kuks of squirrels. She notices patterns in the wind; for a long time she tracks the movement of a grouse.

  She worries that fire—which she needs desperately for keeping warm—will expose her in hiding, whether by flame or by smoke. At
first, she builds a small blaze inside her pot, tindering it with the driest layers of tree bark so as to minimize the smoke. But the idea of making soup in the pot, even if just hot water and some roots, anything to heat her insides, drives her to attempt a small ground fire. In a thicketed area she mounds dead pine branches, dumps the burning embers from the pot on top, and prays the open blaze will go unnoticed. She cleans the pot, adds water and two handfuls of birch root, and sets it upon the fire.

  When she walks about, she rolls her feet so as to leave the scantest trace. She forages the forest floor for acorns, mushrooms, and wild garlic, rare to find, beneath the snow, and breaks through the ice blanketing the swamplands to fill her canteen. Weak with hunger, she remains hidden during daylight and moves only at nightfall, after dark.

  Róża uses twine to refasten the curling-away soles of Henryk’s boots. Without them, she knows, she will die here in the woods. She darns the holes in her mittens and pulls Natan’s fur hat over her wind-bitten ears, looking skyward to assess the moon. Before setting out, she ties a knot into a length of thread to mark her survival of another day.

  Near dawn on her third day in the woods, she eats a meal of boiled birch bark. With no one to save for and scrimp, she devours every last stringy bite. When she burrows down again for another day’s rest, Róża rubs herself warm in a refusal to give in, curl up, and die. She listens for the pulse of music within her: a melody, big and spacious, to carry her outside of her solitary anguish. In the way that other people share the stars—looking up at the exact moment, they see the same night sky—she and Shira have this: The soar of violins mixing with cellos. The flight of notes, like wingbeats, that transport them together, beyond the confines of a forest burrow, a convent wall.