The UnAmericans: Stories (9 page)

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep when I heard footsteps. I opened my eyes and stared up—into the barrel of a gun. I swallowed, hard, refusing to make eye contact. That much I knew. I looked at the sticks and pinecones littering the forest floor and thought up a story. I was lost, searching for mushrooms, and could he help me find my way back? But how to explain the smell, or my work uniform, and before I opened my mouth, a boy put down the gun and said my name.

How odd that the first word I heard in the forest was my own name, and for a minute I wondered if that night in the sewers had made me crazy. Then I looked up. I know how you see your grandfather, sweet and smiling, always insisting that we put on a movie after dinner and then dozing on the sofa halfway through. Your chess partner, your theater date, the man who checks out the minute your mother and I start up. You wouldn’t have recognized him. His long, bony face splotchy from the sun, his light brown beard growing in sparse, threadbare patches—he was only fifteen—and his straight hair obviously hacked off with a knife. But even with that terrible haircut, even with a rifle over one shoulder and paper sacks swinging from the other, he still looked like the same Leon Moscowitz I’d grown up with.

It was one of the great miracles of my life, finding someone from home, right there, in the middle of the woods. But I won’t lie and say he was the person I’d wanted to see. I barely knew him back in our village. He was two grades above me and had struck me as bigheaded and bossy, one of those boys who always raised his hand in class. I hadn’t been the shiny student he was but had been a good girl, a rule-follower—and your grandfather had not only seemed the opposite, it was like he saw anyone
not
challenging every point made in class as a weakling. His whole family was like that. His father had been a professor, and the one time I’d gone to his house to make a delivery from my parents’ tailor shop, I remember how dark and dusty it was, books pulled from the shelves and strewn on the floor in a way that must have made them feel intellectual though to me it just looked sloppy, brown drapes so thick you immediately forgot about the sun outside. That past year your grandfather had stopped coming to school one day, but I wasn’t surprised—so many were fleeing by then that I hadn’t spent much time wondering where the Moscowitzes had gone to hide.

You look like shit, Raya, he told me then.

I know, I said.

No, he said, eyeing me more closely. You have actual shit on you.

I came from the sewers, I said, and he nodded, as if I wasn’t the first he knew who had, then said, And your family?

Back home. In the uniform factory.

Your grandfather nodded again. He reached into a paper sack, but when he handed me a loaf of bread, it was so heavy I almost dropped it.

When’s the last time you ate? he said, and I had no idea. I didn’t know what time it was, or even where I was. As I followed your grandfather through the brush, he talked. His family had escaped to a city in the north that past winter, he said—this was all happening in September—where he and his three younger brothers had trained with a youth group. The entire family had gone from there to Palestine, but he had met a plumber, Yosef Zanivyer, who’d seen something special in him (I couldn’t help but roll my eyes that even then, in these silent, deserted woods, your grandfather had to let me know how fabulous he was) and asked him to stay. Yosef was the plumber who’d engineered the sewer route I’d just come through, he said. For the past few months, your grandfather and his group had been roaming a labyrinth of tunnels, committing them to memory for an evacuation and supply route they’d use to smuggle weapons and food into the forest.

He led me through a zigzag of uncleared scrub and over so many marshes and creeks I couldn’t count, until finally we reached the densest part, a cluster of trees so tall and thick it suddenly felt like evening—an area protected enough by branches, he told me, that no military plane could spot us from the air. He took my hand and we elbowed our way around trees and bushes until an entire village emerged. There were blanket tents held up by logs, what looked like an infirmary, a makeshift kitchen surrounding a fire pit. About forty people, all teenagers, almost all boys, unbathed and bedraggled, were at work in different stations. Everybody was speaking Yiddish and the whole scene was so stunning I didn’t know what to look at first. But your grandfather just kept leading me forward, as nonchalant as if he were giving a tour of our school back home.

This is Yussel, he said, pointing to a squat, suntanned boy. He was a medical student and runs the infirmary here. And this is the kitchen—here he handed me a potato, still hot from the fire—and this is where we run drills after dinner. He waved to a bigger kid, this one fifteen or sixteen, oafish and freckled with red, flyaway hair, the parts of a gun spread out on his lap. That’s Isaac from Antopol, he told me.

Isaac, your grandfather said, meet Raya. We grew up together.

I’m trying to concentrate, Isaac grunted without even shooting me a sideways look, and your grandfather shrugged and said, He’ll grow on you.

Then your grandfather stopped. Can you cook?

Not really. My mother cooks. I could barely say it.

What can you do, then?

I thought about it. I can do ballet, I said. I can play the flute, and that was when your grandfather started laughing. Wow, he said, throwing his hands in the air, thank God you’re here, and I wanted to smack him.

But your parents are tailors, right? he said. So I’m guessing you can sew, and I can’t tell you how much it meant to me right then that there, in the middle of the forest, someone knew this basic fact about my family.

Yeah, I can sew.

Good, he said. We already have a tailor, but if you’re quick with your fingers, you can go in the armory.

So that afternoon I went to work, learning how to repair broken rifles and pistols, how to mend cracked stocks and replace the worn and rusted parts. He was right: all my years helping my parents sew on buttons and rip out seams made the job come easy. I was grateful I was good at it, and for many hours I sat alone, a little relieved Isaac was such a grump that I could work in silence. Your grandfather was running around, stopping at every station. It seemed obvious he was the leader, which I learned for certain that night at dinner, when five new boys arrived at the campfire.

They were young, your grandfather’s age, and had just come back from a mission. Your grandfather crouched beside me and explained. Everyone here was part of a brigade, he said, called the Yiddish Underground. He’d started it back with his youth group, doing combat training in basements around the city. In the beginning, they’d slipped into nearby villages and robbed peasants for food and tools and blankets. But every day the war seemed to be getting worse, he said, and now the brigade was traveling farther to carry out attacks. They torched cottages and stole guns. When they ran out of bullets, they sneaked into cities with empty shotguns and long, straight branches, which, from a distance, could pass as rifles. They chopped down telephone poles, attacked supply depots, burned bridges to disrupt military routes—and that night, the five boys at the campfire had just returned from dislodging two hundred meters of rail line.

And? Your grandfather said then, turning to one of the boys.

And the conductor stopped the train, the boy said, spearing a sausage from the fire. And I walked right on and shot four soldiers in the dining car. They didn’t even have time to put down their forks.

Your grandfather clapped the boy’s shoulder like a proud parent, and I just sat there swallowing.

I told the other passengers to tell the police the Yiddish Underground was responsible, the boy continued, and your grandfather nodded. Everyone on the train was so scared, the boy said, and I just kept saying it as I walked through the cars, taking all of this, he said, gesturing at the suitcases and sacks of vegetables and bread by his feet.

Perfect, your grandfather said, and when he flicked on his radio, everyone put down their food to listen. He tuned through static until an announcer came on with word of the day’s casualties. But when the announcer described the ambush, he said it was the work of Russian guerilla fighters, communists camping out in the woods. The Yiddish Underground wasn’t mentioned at all. All around us were these kids, huddled together in stolen coats, waiting for their commander to speak. Your grandfather cleared his throat. He’d looked his age for that second, wide-eyed and serious and more than a little frightened, and I’d had a flash of that same boy in the schoolyard, the market, walking his younger brothers down Pinsker Street. I’d known that whatever he said, inside your grandfather felt as lost as every one of his fighters. But he stood up. He switched off the radio and said the only way they couldn’t ignore us was to plan bigger. We have to let them know, he said, that there’s a secret army they can’t touch, soldiers fighting back with weapons taken from them, then retreating deep into the forest to plan their next attack.

T
HIS IS
the part of the story where I know you want to hear how we fell in love. I understand—don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’re always free to visit your grandfather and me, even on Saturday nights. How five years out of college you’re still living like a student, still alone in that shoebox studio. Even when you were little, it was your favorite part of every story. It used to kill me when I’d overhear you asking your mother those kinds of questions about your father, this young chubby you with long blond braids and a dreamy expression, as if with your eyes half-closed you could envision a time your parents weren’t sneaking around your living room at night, scribbling their names into each other’s books, or storming after each other outside your old apartment, fighting over who got to keep this ceramic fish-shaped platter your mother said she made at summer camp but which your father claimed he made at an Adult Ed class at the Y—a fish, he yelled, that held his nachos just right.

And I remember after he left, you and your mother piled all of your possessions into a taxi and headed over the bridge to our apartment in Queens, where the two of you moved into her childhood bedroom, sleeping side by side on her trundle bed, surrounded by her spelling ribbons and stuffed-animal collection, as though you were living in a permanent exhibit in the museum of her life. And I remember all the dates she’d bring back, Philip and Hugh and the one who wore his sunglasses inside, how she’d parade those men into my home with the same defiance she had in high school, only she was thirty-six then with a four-year-old daughter eating dinner with her grandparents in the next room. From the kitchen the three of us would listen to her carrying on, her voice high and clear and always drowning out the other person’s, which probably made her a good teacher during rowdy assemblies but not such a hit on those dates. There were so many nights when I’d watch her crawl into bed beside you after her date had left, her back to the wall, her bare feet wrapped around yours, holding on to your stomach so tightly it was like she feared the distance you might fall was so much greater than from the bed to the carpet.

I want to tell you mine was a great love affair, but the truth was that the only reason your grandfather started coming into my tent at night was to protect me. There were so many things to be afraid of in the forest. Not just the soldiers but bears and snakes and wolves. Russian communists who lived in other parts of the woods, coming by our camp, offering bullets for a night with one of the girls, sometimes taking one even if refused—men who disliked your grandfather but respected him enough, even as a boy, not to touch the one he was with. Anyway, it was almost winter—I will always remember that as the coldest season imaginable, the winter I watched hot tea freeze in a cup—and when your grandfather climbed inside one night and lay beneath my blanket, his hands roaming up my shirt and into my pants long before he thought to kiss me, it didn’t feel romantic—more like a basic physical need that had little to do with me.

We’d already seen each other naked, anyway—we all bathed around each other, there was no other choice—and even though I was thirteen years old and he was my first kiss, I wasn’t so naïve to believe your grandfather was in love with me, though for a lot of my life I did believe our relationship wasn’t so bad. We had no one but each other when we first arrived in the States, and a big part of me wondered if I had another option. We never even talked about marrying—we just did it. I think your grandfather and I both wanted to forget everything that had happened and try to be as normal as all our neighbors on Dinsmore Avenue. It was only years later when you and your mother were living with us that I had to listen to her opinions on how I would never be normal, my fuse was just too short, she’d never met a person who could go from zero to sixty so quickly. From the beginning it was like that with your mother and me: even in the womb I think she was kicking me on purpose. Whenever we argued, your grandfather would walk out the door and around the block, as if your mother and I had taken up all the air in the apartment. But you would always stay. It used to drive me crazy, watching you watch
us
, as if our fight were being transcribed and filed away in the Dewey decimal system of your mind. But the truth was that there were moments when I’d look at you—you always resembled me more than your mother, especially when you were young, with your light hair and cheeks that went red no matter what the weather—and think that you reminded me of an alternate version of myself.