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id, "no one who is wanting me." She looked at Avenger but spoke to them all. "I do not want to be sent on. Take me. Take me."

Josef remembered how he had used those exact words when he had been driftwood, and his eyes burned with unshed tears. He put his arm around her and, inadvertantly his hand touched the boy's.

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He forced himself not to shrink from the contact. "We will take charge of her," he said to the others. "We are her family now."

So she stayed and they found her a gun which she handled badly, and a knife, which she used as if cutting apart a chicken. But she was fearless nonetheless, and cheerful, having no past to haunt her.

Often when they were very deep in the woods, she would sing quietly, for song lyrics, at least, she could remember. One Josef thought particularly beautiful, a Yiddish lullabye. He learned it easily, having a way with languages:

Shlof zhe mire shoyn, Yankele....

Sleep, Yankele, my darling little baby, Shut your big black eyes, A big boy with all his teeth-Should his mother still sing him lullabies?

"You will have many big, beautiful, dark-eyed boys," Josef said to her one evening after she sang that song.

"And you will stay away from them," she answered back, but she touched his hand and smiled when she said it, to take away the sting. He wondered how she had known about him. He did not ask.

They had agreed not to go back to Chelmno because it was useless, after all, and too dangerous.

Instead they joined the others in raids on tracks and depots once again, and they were over a year in the great track of the Polish forests, emerging every few weeks to blitz one small target or another, then fading back again through the trees and traveling miles away through the trackless woods. They lost very few fighters, except to influenza and occasional despair, though they sent many through the underground routes towards freedom.

But one day Holz-Wadel came to Josef privately.

"Rebbe and I," he began slowly, "we have been talking." That I

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meant, Josef knew, that Rebbe had done the talking and Ho the listening. But he said nothing.

"We are thinking that tl enough." He gestured around him, to the forest, but Josef did not mean the trees. "We think that tracks and depot and tracks are good, and of importance. But after what w that field, this is nothing. We counted, you know. One 3

thousand a day. There can not be that many Jews in Pol, Josef nodded, still silent.

"What do you plan to do about it?"

He had planned nothing, of course, but now his brain rei ideas. They could go to Vilna and help
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spirit children ghetto, They could join the underground of guardians v people from Cracow, from Lodz. But a voice inside of him, rescue one, they kill one thousand. Still-one is enough." H

bered the bitter taste of Ksiqñniczka's mouth on his. An~

if a fire had descended suddenly in his brain, he underst(

Rebbe and Holz-Wadel wanted. And he understood wh and his followers had cared more about making a powe than life itself. He wondered only that he had been so slov He gathered them together under a large oak tree, away other partisans. The oak was old and gnarled and he leane(

against it, borrowing from its strength. The woodcutt shoulder to shoulder, clustered around Holz-Wadel. Stan apart was Rebbe, arms folded over his massive chest. K, and Avenger were arm in arm, her red hair now braided well below her shoulders. He had the start of a fine b golden feathers, on his chin and cheeks.

Josef told them his plan. It was simple. It was direi deadly. He held out his hand. "Will you come?"

One by one by one they had nodded and taken his haj for the boy who bit his lip. "First, there is something to he said.

"What?" Josef asked, his voice smooth, but there waE

chill in his chest and belly, as if announcing the coming of Ksi~iniczka smiled shyly and taking the boy's hand, sl it up to her breast. "We wish to be married," she said. The they grasped Josef's hand.

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Three days later, the marriage was held under a canopy of sticks and leaves threaded through with vines. The woodcutters and Rebbe and Josef stood at the corners of the chuppa to give the bride away.

One of the partisans, a real rabbi who had somehow managed to keep his white fringed tallis through the months of living in the woods, said the words over the couple as he remembered
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them, for he had no prayer book. Those who had no head coverings wore makeshift hats of wood. The few women converted petticoats into headscarves. One even tatted a bridal veil from the tassels of the rabbi's tallis.

The bride was given the marriage name of Eve. "Because," the rabbi said, "you are the first woman to be married here in the woods and because Ksi#niczka is not a Jewish name." The groom offered his own real name: Aron Mandlestein.

There was no singing; it would have been too dangerous. But when the rabbi pronounced them husband and wife in the sight of

God and the groom kissed his bride shyly but with growing enthusiasm, a murmur ran around the ragtag forest congregation.

"Mazel toy, " they all whispered, and Holz-Wadel explained to Josef that it meant "good luck."

'Mazel toy, " Josef whispered, too, though his eyes had begun to fog with tears and he turned away from the sight of all that happi-ness.

Then men with men and women with women-and the bride with the groom-they began to dance to no music at all around the clearing, the only sound their feet shuffling through the fallen leaves.

Josef stood apart, leaning against a tree, remembering Paris, Vienna, Berlin. Remembering Alan.

Remembering life as it used to be and could never be again.

The nine of them left in the morning, tracking back towards Chelmno, returning out of life to death. It was late November 1943.

The woods were grey with the end of fall. Few birds sang. Then very early in the morning, the sky threatening rain, they came at last to the thinning-out of the forest less than a kilometer from the

Chelmno fields. They did not know that in the year since they had been gone, the camp had been disbanded, then reinstated. That in the year since they had rescued Ksiqiniczka from the pit, transports to Chelmno out of the Lodz ghetto had resumed at an accelerated 172

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rate. That crematoria had been built in the fields to facilitate problem of dealing with dead bodies as well as to aid in the recl,, tion of dental gold. That the numbers of guards had multiplic And even if they had known, they would have come back.

They stopped by the Narew to wash, the men first and ther girl, not so much to bathe but to prepare themselves for the i ing fight. They dipped their hands into the water and anoi their heads with it. Rebbe washed his hands over and over over again, muttering Hebrew prayers.

Then the men climbe and turned away to let Ksi~iniczka take her turn.

She slid down the embankment and was just bending ovi wash her face when the machine guns split the grey air with chatter.

Holz-Wadel fell first, face down into the hard-packed e

Rebbe fell on top of him. Aron-Avenger-was next and he rn~

funny sound as he went down, part gasp, part cry. Ash and R(

threw themselves to the ground and tried to crawl towards hirr the bullets hit them simultaneously, shattering both their hea thoroughly, they no longer looked human.

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Josef had been standing somewhat apart from them and s(

had a moment to try and flee to the Narew. He never saw happened to the rest. A bullet caught him in the leg as he turnei he went down the embankment, tumbling toward the rive: Ksiq~niczka who was still bent over. He knocked them both ini cold water.

She screamed out Aaron's name and tried to scramble up tc but Josef grabbed on to her and held her down, partially to ke(

from her death but also because at the moment all thoughts es~

him and he was simply too terrified to let go. The pull of the caught them and they floated entwined in one another's downstream, chilled to the bone but otherwise unscathed.

After several meandering turns, they managed to haul them out of the river and climb the embankment. Ksi~iniczka had t

Josef after her, for his right shin had been shattered. Alteri dragging him and cursing him, she got him into the woods.

They clung together that night for warmth, not love, and we morning for the others. But mostly for Aron.

She bound up Josef's leg and made a splint for it, using the Briar Rose

she still had because it had been in a sheath held fast by her belt.

Neither of them had managed to keep their guns.

Somehow they made it back through the woods over days or weeks, Josef was never to be sure.

He was feverish much of the time.

His memories of the trip back remained forever phantasmagoric.

The one thing he could clearly recall was lying on his back, staring up through the canopy of trees, and thinking that the stars were until the first ones hit his face and he realized it was snow.

Two weeks after they found a group of partisans, the fever gone and his leg mending, but crookedly, Josef looked around for Ksiqiniczka, but could not see her anywhere. As had become usual for him, he panicked when she was not close by, and he asked some of the women if they knew where she was. They pointed to one of the paths and he limped down it, looking for her.

She was kneeling in a small clearing, and at first he thought she was weeping. But she was not.

She was vomiting quietly and efficiently into a small hole she had dug.

When he touched her shoulder, she turned around, simulta-eously wiping her mouth with her sleeve.

"Are you ill?" he asked.

I am with child," she said. "And I will not let it die."

So they forged papers for her in the name of Eva Potocki, and Josef gave her his stepfather's ring and his passport photograph in case she needed further corroboration. She would be a Polish princess traveling incognito, he told her.

She smiled. "And I shall never forget the dark prince who kissed me awake."

Since he never heard from her again, Josef convinced himself on good days that she had made it to America and had come, once or twice, to Paris in the hopes of finding him in a small cafe. But on the bad days, when his leg ached with the wet and the cold, when he dreamed of Aron dying with his mouth spewing blood in an arc like a devil's rainbow, Josef was sure she was dead and the baby with her.

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HOME AGAIN

We say to flbbing children: "Don't tell fairy tales!" Yet children's fibs, like old wives' tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.

-Angela Carter: The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book

Perhaps we are born knowing the tales for our grandmothers and all their ancestral kin continually run in our blood repeating them endlessly, and the shock they give us when we first hear them is not of surprise but of recognition.

-P.L. Travers: About the Sleeping Beauty

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"Then he came at last to a tower room. It had a tin ceiling and a covered with latticework. In the middle of the room was a four-poster damask curtains hanging ftom each corner. And on that bed lay beautiful young woman the prince had ever seen. "

"How beautiful was she?" Shana asked. The picture she was was of a princess who looked remarkably like Shana.

"More beautiful than the sun. More beautiful than the moon.

hair as clean and shining as a river."

"Can she have blonde hair, Gemma?" Shana asked. She loo own drawing where the blonde princess lay, stiff as a piece of co a large bed.

"If you like, my darling your princess can be blonde.

"Can my princess have dark hair, Gemma?" asked Sylvia. Sh taken the yellow crayon and refused to give it over.

"Dark indeed," said Gemma.

Little Becca was vigorously coloring her own picture. The red cra in her hand had already deflned the princess's hair and body and, spilling of blood, had waterfalled onto the octagon that was the

"And then what happened, Gemma?" Shana said. "Tell th part. I like the kissing part.

"Me, too, " added Sylvia.

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Becca did not look up from her drawing which was now completely red.

It was as if she had not heard her sisters.

"He was so struck by the princess's beauty . Gemma began.

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"And her blonde hair, " said Shana.

"Black, " said Sylvia.

"Blonde, " said Shana.

Their argument threatened to overcome the story's end.

"That he put his mouth on hers, " whispered Becca to her reddened page.

nen she stood and climbed onto her grandmother's lap, put her chubby little arms around her grandmother's neck, and kissed her right on the mouth, strawberry and peanut-butter sandwich and all. Gemma kissed her back as if the taste didn't matter, CHAPTER

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Becca and Magda had listened, almost without moving, recitation. His voice had a wonderful flow to it, and even th things he had to say were beautifully said. The fire had burne twice and twice the plump housekeeper had come in, sile stoke it up again. She had brought in lunch as well, whi barely touched, and then later a tea which only Potocki ha more-Becca suspected-to soothe his throat from the telli from any need to ' eat.

Becca had excused herself only once during the story, to bathroom, an elegant marble-floored powder room appoi chintz and china. She had stayed in there longer than ne trying to take in all the details of the narration, trying to be with the idea of a grandfather who was a war hero, t understand that Gemma-her Gemma-had died and bee rected by a kiss of life given by a man who had probab kissed a woman before-or since. She thought suddenly, o Merlin Brooks telling her that she had no sense of the ironic.