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  "Who else has one?"

  "Just me."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "I found it in the forest."

  Srulik examined the broken glass.

  "You have it to wrap it rags so it won't cut you."

  "I don't have any rags," Srulik said.

  "Cut some from your shirt."

  Srulik took a piece of jagged glass and cut off part of his shirt sleeve.

  The sun had set. The black line of the forest in the distance was now a row of trees. They sat down to eat in the fading light instead of waiting to reach the forest. Srulik had never eaten a raw egg before. Yosele showed him how to make two small holes at either end with a toothpick and to suck it out through one.

  "Why don't you use your knife?" Srulik asked.

  "The blade's broken. Look." Yosele opened the knife.

  No one mentioned the boy who had been caught. "What will happen to him?" Srulik wanted to know.

  "He'll be beaten and handed over to the Germans for money or vodka," Itsik said.

  "And then?"

  "No one who was caught has ever come back to tell us."

  "Don't talk so much," Shleymi scolded them.

  They went on eating in silence. When they were done, they put the leftover vegetables in their pockets and bags and set out again. It was dark, but the darkness was different from the ghetto's. The land loomed around them, as flat as the palm of a hand, and the vast sky overhead was strewn with stars. Just as they entered the forest, a big orange moon came up. Srulik remembered moons like that from Blonie. In the ghetto, he had never seen one. They were almost in the forest now. "Where are we going?" Srulik asked.

  "Into the forest to sleep."

  He was scared. He had gone to the forest with his older brothers during the day to gather mushrooms and pick blueberries, but at night it was a scary place. They passed the tree line and kept walking.

  "Hold hands," Avrum said.

  Srulik gave one hand to Yosele and the other to Itsik. They came to a place where they stopped and lay down. For a few minutes there was low conversation. Srulik lay with his eyes shut. Then he opened them wide. The forest was talking. He listened. Was it the same forest as the big one near Blonie? The moon was hidden behind the treetops. Here and there a patch of sky shone brightly through the darkness. Stars glittered. The silhouettes of the branches were outlined against the sky. Srulik heard a strange sound, like someone groaning or breathing. He gave a start.

  "What's that?" he whispered.

  Yosele, lying beside him, whispered back, "An owl."

  "Aren't you afraid to be here at night?"

  "Don't you see, Srulik?" Yosele said. "If not for the forest, the farmers would have caught us long ago. It's this darkness that keeps them from finding us and handing us over to the Germans the way they'll hand over Leybele. It protects us. That's why I like it. The darkness keeps us alive. Do you see now?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you still afraid?"

  "Yes," Srulik admitted.

  "You'll get used to it. I was afraid too."

  "How did you meet the other boys?"

  "I heard them talking. Their Polish sounded Jewish, so I went to them. At first Shleymi didn't want to take me."

  Srulik suddenly realized why Shleymi had told him not to talk to Poles. "Do I talk Polish like a Jew too?" he asked.

  "No. Neither does Avrum. But some of us have Yiddish accents. Like Shleymi."

  "And why shouldn't I go swimming or take my pants off?"

  "Because you're circumcised."

  "Aren't the Poles?"

  Yosele laughed. "No. Only the Jews."

  Yosele was from Warsaw. His mother, he told Srulik, made a living in the ghetto by sewing and selling the blue stars of David that Jews had to wear on their sleeves. With the money she made, he had bought potatoes and bread on the Polish side of the wall and smuggled them to the Jewish side. It was hard, dangerous work. Twice he had been caught. Each time he was beaten and the food was taken from him. Before being taken to the hospital with typhus, his mother said to him,"Yosele, cross to the Polish side and don't come back."

  "And you've been in the forest ever since then?" Srulik asked.

  "No. At first I hung around the villages. Until I was almost caught."

  "Couldn't we be caught in the forest, too?"

  "No one goes very deep into it. Except for the partisans. "

  "Who are they?"

  "Poles who fight the Germans. They don't want any part of us, though. You have to watch out for the forester, too. He turns Jews in."

  "Are all the Poles bad?"

  Yosele thought. "No. Once I knocked on a door and they gave me food without any questions."

  "Are we deep in the forest now?"

  "Not yet. In the dark it's safe here too. In the morning we'll go deeper."

  The next morning, Yosele awoke him. Srulik was surprised to open his eyes and see trees and branches instead of walls and a ceiling. Then he remembered where he was. He was hungry and thirsty.

  "Come," Yosele said. "We're going to our hideout."

  Avrum led them through the trees to a brook. They stopped to drink, scooping water with their hands or lapping it while lying on their stomachs. Srulik stuck his head in the water. It felt good flowing over him. He opened his mouth and drank.

  They took out their vegetables. Avrum put the basket of eggs in the middle. When they finished eating, they stored everything in a hollow tree trunk and went to look for berries—wild strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and red and black currants. They also picked white and black mulberries from the trees and little green nuts whose shells were still soft.

  Srulik found some mushrooms. They were the kind he had gathered with his brother in the forest near Blonie. His new friends were afraid to eat them.

  "Srulik," Avrum said, "you'll die from them."

  He ate them anyway, and his friends learned.

  Late that afternoon, Avrum led them back to their hideout. They drank from the brook and ate more vegetables and eggs.

  "How can Avrum always find the way?" Srulik asked.

  "Partly by the moss and partly ... I don't really know," Itsik said.

  "What's moss?"

  Itsik showed him some growing on the tree trunks. "You see," he said, "it only grows on one side of the tree. And no matter how many trees you look at, it's always the same side. It helps you to find your way back."

  Srulik didn't understand.

  "How?"

  "By following it in the opposite direction."

  Although this made no sense to him either, he didn't ask again. He would try to figure it out for himself.

  "Do you have any more farmer's cheese?" he asked.

  Itsik laughed. "No. We finished that long ago. We'll steal some more when we can."

  The next night Srulik slept near Yosele again. They talked quietly before falling asleep.

  "You know something?" Yosele whispered. "Trees have souls."

  "Who told you?"

  "Leybele. He said their souls go places at night."

  "Was he your friend?"

  "Yes."

  "Are the souls of trees good or bad?"

  "They must be good. No tree ever harmed anyone."

  Srulik thought about that. "Do you think it hurts a tree to break its branches?" he asked.

  "Maybe no more than clipping your fingernails," said Yosele.

  "My mother always threw the clippings from my fingernails into the oven," Srulik told him. "First she mixed them with feathers."

  "So did mine. Without the feathers. You know why?"

  "Why?"

  "So that your soul won't look for them on Judgment Day."

  "What's Judgment Day?"

  "The end of the world. When all the dead rise."

  "Everyone?"

  "That's what my grandpa says. I'll see my mother again. And she won't be sick anymore."

  Srulik sighed. "I wish I knew what happened to my mother."

>   "What about your father?"

  He told Yosele of the time they tried escaping the ghetto and the German soldiers appeared on motorcycles.

  "I can't remember my father," Yosele said. "He died when I was little. We lived with my grandfather. He was a bookseller."

  "Can you read?"

  "Yes. Can you?"

  "No."

  When he was little, Srulik had gone to Hebrew school. All they had learned there were the Hebrew letters. The Polish letters were different.

  "What did your father do?" Yosele asked.

  "He was a baker. Sometimes he took me to his bakery to sleep on top of the oven. In the morning he woke me and gave me the first hot rolls to eat."

  Srulik's mouth watered, thinking of those rolls.

  "Do you have brothers?" he asked Yosele.

  "No."

  "I have two. And two sisters."

  "Where are they?"

  "I don't know. Maybe they're dead. They were probably caught in some roundup."

  "What's a roundup?" Yosele asked.

  "That's when the Jewish police and the German soldiers take the Jews to trains for resettlement."

  "Where?"

  "In the sky," Srulik said.

  "Who told you?"

  "Yoyneh the shoemaker."

  Yosele thought about that. "I'm glad my mother's dead," he said at last.

  4. Baked Birds

  The next day Avrum and Itsik went to hunt birds with a slingshot. They returned at noon with a slew of birds, tied by the feet and slung over their shoulders. The biggest of them was the size of a chicken. Avrum said it was called a woodcock. Srulik was disappointed to be told that he would have to wait until evening for the birds to be cooked and eaten.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Because the smoke from the fire could be seen."

  When it grew dark, they built a low wall of branches around the site of the fire to keep the flames from being seen. Shleymi and Avrum cleaned the birds, cutting off their heads, with Yosele's pocketknife and a piece of jagged glass. Mud was brought from the stream bank and each bird was coated with it. When the fire had burned down to hot coals, the mud-coated birds were put in it to bake while they all waited.

  "Give me my knife," Yosele said to Shleymi.

  Shleymi stuck it in his pocket. "It's mine now," he said.

  "Let him have it," Srulik said.

  Shleymi gave Srulik a push. The boys all jumped to their feet. Avrum took command, and Shleymi returned the knife grudgingly.

  They took the smaller mud-birds from the fire first. The bigger ones had to bake a while longer. The mud had hardened and turned to clay. They rolled it on the ground to cool it and then cracked it with stones and peeled it off. The feathers came with it, leaving the birds ready to eat.

  When they went to sleep that night, Srulik and Yosele lay down side by side as usual. Srulik was still mad at being pushed by Shleymi.

  "Shleymi was king around here until Avrum came along," Yosele told him.

  "Is Avrum stronger?"

  "I don't know. But he never gets lost in the forest."

  "Boy, that was good," Srulik said, licking his lips. "When will they hunt some more?"

  "Not for a while."

  "Why not?"

  "Avrum's afraid the fire will give us away."

  Srulik sighed with disappointment. "Too bad," he said.

  "You know," Yosele told him, "in the beginning, when I was all by myself, I was so hungry that I ate everything. I even ate snails. They're disgusting, but I didn't bite into them. I just swallowed them as fast as I could."

  "I could never do that," Srulik said disgustedly.

  "When you're hungry enough, you can do anything. Once I found a rabbit in a trap. I didn't have this knife, so I cut it up with a piece of glass. And I didn't have any matches, so I ate it raw."

  "You didn't die from it?"

  "You can see I didn't."

  In the morning Srulik awoke with a start. What he had heard wasn't a dream. It was real. There were shots, coming from nearby and echoing all around him. Then there were shouts and orders being given in German.

  He jumped up and ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction. After a while, when there was no longer anything around him but silence, he stopped.

  He didn't know where he was. He tried remembering what he had been told about moss growing only on one side of trees, but he had no idea how this might help him to find the other boys. All he could think of doing was to shout.

  "Yosele! Avrum!"

  His own voice echoing through the forest scared him. Someone was coming. Srulik hid. It was Shleymi. He jumped from his hiding place, happy to see him.

  "Shout like that again and we'll be caught for sure," Shleymi said. "I knew you couldn't be trusted."

  "Where is everyone?" Srulik asked worriedly.

  "Instead of hiding, they all ran off like dopes."

  "You also ran off like a dope," Srulik said.

  "You'd better watch it," Shleymi threatened. "There's no one here but the two of us."

  Srulik said nothing. After a while he asked, "Where do we go now?"

  "I want to find the stream," Shleymi said.

  "Can you?"

  "That's enough out of you."

  Suddenly, Shleymi stopped in his tracks. Someone was lying between two trees. It was a grown man. They tensed, ready to turn and run. But the man didn't move.

  His head lay in a puddle of congealed blood.

  "He's dead," Srulik whispered.

  The dead man's arm extended forward. Something lay by its hand. Shleymi bent to look at it. It was a pair of glasses. He knelt by the man's side.

  "Let's go," Srulik said.

  "You go," said Shleymi.

  Srulik walked away. Feeling sick, he sat on the ground and watched as Shleymi went through the dead man's pants pockets and pulled papers and objects out of them. Then he turned the man on his back and stuck his hand in the man's jacket pocket. Finished, he straightened up. "Srulik?" he called softly.

  He doesn't see me, Srulik thought. He didn't answer or budge. Shleymi called again. When there was no response, he began to look for Srulik, carefully poking at the undergrowth. But he was walking the wrong way. Something in Srulik wanted to run after him. He opened his mouth to speak. But nothing came out. It was better to be alone than with Shleymi.

  Toward evening the sky clouded over and cast its pall over the forest.

  Srulik decided to sleep in a tree. He climbed a big oak and found a comfortable spot in the cleft of two big branches. Yet he couldn't fall asleep. Would he find the other boys? And how would he manage in the forest if he didn't? He reached for his butterfly pin. But the butterfly had spent too much time in his pocket and hardly glowed.

  In the morning he decided to look for Poles—the good ones that gave you food when you knocked on their door. He walked for a long time. He was thirsty. When he came to a puddle of rainwater, he bent down to drink. Little bugs were crawling in it. He shut his eyes and drank anyway.

  Suddenly he found himself in a familiar place. He looked around him. There was the tree with the hollow trunk! He felt as happy as if he had come home from a long journey. He ran to drink from the brook and poked through the ashes of the fire until he found a little bird cased in mud. There were still some vegetables and eggs in the tree trunk. He decided to stay put and wait.

  He slept in the tree that night, too. The next morning he performed an experiment, walking carefully away from the brook while watching the moss on the trees. Then he stopped and walked back the other way. Now he understood how to tell directions from the moss. He left the brook again, stopping to look back now and then. From time to time he halted to pick berries. A snail was crawling on a bush, its two horns groping in front of it. No, that was one thing he never would eat. He reached a blackberry bush, turned around, and managed to find his way back. He wished Yosele were there to tell about it.

  Slipping down from his tree to the ground on the mor
ning of the third day, Srulik knew he had lost the boys for good. He drank from the brook, ate the last two eggs in the tree trunk, and walked off without turning back. His eyes strained to make out a patch of clear light that would tell him where the forest ended. But he saw none and in the end he grew tired and sat helplessly on the ground.

  Someone was coming. He crawled into a bush to hide. From it he saw a man in an official-looking cap and green jacket walking toward him with a rifle on his shoulder. It must be the forester who turns Jews over to the Germans, he thought. Perhaps the man was on his way home. Did foresters live in forests or villages? Srulik decided to follow him. The forester walked along a narrow path for a long while. Eventually Srulik spied some light between the trees. He waited until the forester was gone and stepped back out into the world.

  The path grew wider, winding through fields until it reached a village. Srulik knocked on the door of the first house he came to. A woman opened it. He looked at her without a word. She looked at him. "Come on in," she said after a while.

  She asked no questions, just as Yosele had said. It was as if she knew exactly who he was. She sat him at a table and gave him a big slice of bread and a glass of milk. He wolfed it all down. He couldn't remember when he had last seen fresh bread and milk. A small child was playing in the corner with some pieces of wood. The woman sat beside the child with some food. She called him "Jurek" and fed him with a spoon.

  "Who's there?" a man's voice asked.

  "A boy," said the woman.

  Her husband entered the room and regarded Srulik thoughtfully.

  "Would you like to stay and work on the farm?" he asked after a long silence.

  "Yes," Srulik said.

  "Finish eating and I'll give you something to do."

  Srulik finished eating. The farmer returned, wearing his coat and boots. He led Srulik outside and took him to a storeroom full of differently sized and colored bottles.

  "Arrange all the bottles on the shelves by size and color," he said. "Do a good job."

  Srulik nodded.

  The farmer left. "I'm shutting the door so that no one bothers you," he said.

  Srulik set to work. Suddenly he heard a key turn in the lock. Alarmed, he went to the door and put his eye to a crack between its wooden planks. At first he saw nothing. Then he spied the farmer pushing a motorcycle. The man mounted it, started it up, and drove off. Srulik tried opening the door. It was locked. He tried breaking it but couldn't. Panicky, he ran around the room like an animal caught in a trap, screaming and knocking bottles off their shelves.