The Song of the Stork Read online

  ‘At once tightly written and suspenseful, Collishaw’s historical novel is a darkly compassionate fable of human endurance in absolute extremity.’

  Stevie Davies

  ‘An elegantly crafted, beautifully written novel about love, survival and hope against all the odds – The Song of the Stork is a reading experience to savour.’

  William Ryan

  ‘The subtle melody of The Song of the Stork caught my soul with its first notes and didn’t leave me until the very last ones. Stephan Collishaw takes your hand and leads you into a world of tragic beauty, inspiring strength and delicate kindness in the midst of horror and through this journey he reminds you of the sound of hope.’

  Aistė Diržiūtė

  ‘The Song of The Stork is a harrowing novel about a Jewish girl abandoned in World War 2 and forced to fend for herself in a landscape crawling with sexual ambiguity and brutal violence. It’s a dark jewel that holds up for examination the proximity of terror and savagery to innocence and love. Yet The Song of The Stork is as much about the future as the past. Stephan Collishaw warns us how the times we live in might end up: with an oafish peasantry drunk on Brexit chasing children through the woods, just because their parents voted Remain.’

  Guy Kennaway

  ‘…a masterly work of condensed fiction that synthesises the art of a great writer with the knowledge of a keen researcher who has become immersed in the first-hand sources of the period… A beautiful book that will go down as one of the classics of the literature of the anti-Nazi partisans in the forests around Vilna during the Holocaust.’

  Dovid Katz

  ‘…tense, vivid, effortlessly real… a novel of dramatic width and ambition.’

  Julie Myerson, The Guardian

  ‘Wonderful… that rare novel which no-one, having once read, will be able to forget.’

  Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Haunting… has an extraordinary ring of authenticity… fascinating.’

  Washington Times

  ‘It has energy and it has assurance, and the story is really powerful. Collishaw has a great gift for showing the dailiness of terrible times.’

  Helen Dunmore

  ‘Collishaw’s latest evokes Hemingway’s war-torn landscapes with spare language and haunting imagery… a sensuous tale of survival… an intensely moving account of this war and the scars it has left.’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Gripping… A haunting and ultimately uplifting tale of love, friendship and betrayal.’

  Waterstones Books Quarterly

  ‘Collishaw is impressive in his descriptions of war… The struggle of a man to return from such horrors and try to live as a loving husband and father is described by him in heartbreaking detail. This is a compulsive read.’

  Sue McNab, Nottingham Evening Post

  ‘The bittersweet love story at the core of this tale… really strikes the deepest chord… a captivating read.’

  Kathryn Moore, Yorkshire Post

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Stephan Collishaw 2017

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850791-9-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850791-8-4

  Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.

  Cover design by Anna Morrison www.annamorrison.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Stephan Collishaw was brought up on a Nottingham council estate and failed all of his O’Levels. His first novel The Last Girl (2003) was chosen by the Independent on Sunday as one of its Novels of the Year. In 2004 Stephan was selected as one of the British Council’s twenty best young British novelists. His brother is the renowned artist, Mat Collishaw. After a ten-year writing hiatus, The Song of the Stork is Stephan’s highly anticipated third novel. Stephan now works as a teacher in Nottingham, having also lived and worked abroad in Lithuania and Mallorca, where his son Lukas was born.

  Follow Stephan on Twitter

  @scollishaw

  For Marija

  1

  They left the barn as soon as it was dark. Rivka had stood by the door watching as the light faded, moving from one foot to the other, anxious. When, finally, the shadows were deep enough, they slipped out, ears straining for sounds, stepping bare foot on the gravel, fear numbing the pain of the sharp stones that bit into the soft flesh of the soles of their feet.

  The turned earth of the harvested fields was cool and soft after the gravel, but it was heavy going and they were tired before they had crossed halfway towards the forest that lipped the hilltop. Rivka coughed continuously into her sleeve, fearing the sound would travel back across the field.

  They sank down when they reached the forest’s edge. The moon had just risen and the field shone, illuminated. Rivka’s face looked drawn.

  “You’re bleeding,” Yael whispered, and reaching out wiped the streak of dark blood from her lips with the cuff of her sleeve.

  “I must have bitten my lip,” Rivka said.

  “But look at your jacket,” Yael pointed at the dark stain in the crook of her arm, into which Rivka had been coughing.

  “Come on, we must move.”

  Rivka hauled herself up and turned towards the darkness of the woods.

  “We must move as fast as we can.”

  Yael followed behind Rivka, arms in front, shielding her face against the supple pine branches that snapped back ferociously as Rivka pushed through them.

  They covered no more than a couple of miles that night. Exhausted, they found a deep patch of undergrowth and wriggled into the centre of it, the brambles scratching at their faces, bloodying the backs of their hands and calves. Rivka fell asleep almost immediately. For some time, Yael watched her. Her body was emaciated, her cheeks sunken, the skin around her eyes loose and dark. Dried blood flecked her pale lips. Her hands looked like the hands of an old woman. Her breathing was fast, feverish. Her chest rose in a shallow, rapid rhythm. Yael sank down beside her, pulling her close. Covered their bodies with twigs and bracken. Rivka seemed to have shrunk. She was no longer the larger-than-life young woman Yael had first seen on the stage of the House of Culture in Selo, part of the young Yiddish theatre group.

  Or perhaps, Yael thought, I’ve grown. She lifted her head and surveyed her own body. She too had grown thinner, but her body did not bear the same marks of sickness Rivka’s did. Her skin, she noted, was healthy-looking still, tight against her flesh. Her hair was thick, in fact uncomfortably so. She was tempted to take Rivka’s knife and chop it off. It lay matted and itchy against the back of her neck.

  Her skin was broken by an endless pattern of dried scabs where she had scratched at bites. She had begun to get used to the continual torment of the lice. Rivka had taken a cigarette lighter one day and forced Yael to undress. She had run the flame slowly up each seam. The lice crackled as they fried.

  The night was cold and by morning a thick mist had gathered close to
the earth. Yael shivered through the dark hours, her body pulled close against Rivka’s, which seemed hot. She was, Yael realised, running a temperature. As the light began to seep through the brambles, Rivka began to shake. Her forehead was burning and her clothes were damp, not only with the cold mist, but with sweat.

  “Rivka,” Yael whispered into her ear.

  The older woman muttered and turned, but did not open her eyes.

  “We need to go back to the farm,” Yael said.

  But Rivka did not respond. Yael tried to lift her, but was unable to do so. Pushing out of the brambles she wandered around for a while and finally found a small stream. She cupped her hands and drank some water and then looked around for something to carry water back for Rivka, but there was nothing. In the end she took off her blouse, from beneath the man’s jacket. She coiled the blouse and dipped it in the water until it was soaked. She carried it back and twisted it gently above Rivka’s lips. The water ran from her lips down her face, dirty. She held a corner of the cold wet cloth against Rivka’s fevered forehead.

  For the rest of the day she sat like that, moving occasionally to bathe the blouse in the stream. There were berries in the brambles and she picked and ate them. She tried to get Rivka to eat, but she was unwilling.

  As night fell, Rivka seemed to improve. She opened her eyes and half sat up, leaning against Yael.

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Yael said, stroking her skin with the damp cool cloth of her blouse. “You’ll be better soon.”

  “Yes.” Rivka smiled weakly and tried to pull herself up higher. She ate some berries Yael crushed between her lips and drank some water from the twisted wet blouse on her tongue.

  When Yael woke the next morning, Rivka felt cooler by her side. She reached across and touched the skin of her forehead with the back of her fingers. The temperature had definitely gone. She sat up.

  “Rivka,” she whispered, and shook her softly.

  Her body was stiff.

  “Rivka?” Yael called, her throat constricting.

  Rivka’s eyes were closed. When Yael turned her over, she found blood congealed at the corner of her mouth and in the rim of her nostrils. She looked astonishingly calm and it struck Yael, as she gazed at her in disbelief, that it had been a long time since she had seen her face look so calm.

  For the rest of morning she sat silently beside Rivka’s body, holding her cold hand. A hard lump pressed at her throat but she did not cry.

  Later she covered the body with a thick layer of leaves and fronds of fern that were dark green and succulent. She laid them deeply, until there was no hint a body was there. Then she crawled out from the brambles and turned back towards Czeslaw’s farm.

  2

  Standing at the edge of the fields, shaded by the thick branches of the fir trees, Yael stood gazing down on the farm. The yard was thick with German military vehicles and soldiers milled around the barn and the house. Camouflaged tents were erected around the edge of the field. She heard shouts and the sound of laughter. The farmer mingled with the soldiers, passing around bottles. Smoke from a fire rose steadily into the cool still air. She and Rivka had left just in time.

  Yael turned and pushed back through the branches into the wood. She wandered aimlessly. She had no idea where she might turn. For some time she sat on the rotting trunk of a fallen tree, head in hands. She considered going back to the shtetl, but knew that would be madness. From her pocket she took Rivka’s handgun. She ran her fingers along the cold metal barrel, turned it and placed the muzzle of it against the soft skin between her eyes. She could just rest her finger now against the thin trigger and that would be it, she thought. She felt an icy shiver across her skin. She put it away quickly.

  Getting up, she wandered away from the farm.

  “Oh Josef,” she muttered to herself, thinking of her brother who she had not seen in a year now. “Where are you?”

  From the position of the pale risen sun, she orientated herself and began to make her way north-east in the direction of the Russian front. She had little idea how far the Germans had managed to press the Soviets back. Perhaps they had already won the war, she thought. Perhaps the Russians had admitted defeat.

  But she pictured Josef in Red Army uniform on the back of his horse. Never, she thought. He would never admit defeat. There would be more like him.

  A couple of miles north, the forest ended suddenly. A dirt road wound down into a low valley. In the centre of the small valley stood a dilapidated farmhouse, with tumbling outbuildings leaned against it. She recognised where she was, though she had only seen the farm once, from the back of a cart that had brought her from the train station in Grodno.

  The farm belonged to Aleksei, the idiot. ‘He’s not crazy,’ she remembered her father saying as they bumped along the road, after their trip to Warsaw. ‘He just doesn’t like company.’

  ‘He doesn’t speak,’ her mother had said, as if that fact alone was enough to prove his madness.

  ‘And that makes him a meshúgener?’ her father had retorted. ‘Then give me more of them! Give me a whole shtetl of meshúgener! I could live in such a place.’

  Every village had somebody that was crazy. The odd ones. In Selo they had Able. Able had the mind of a child, though his beard was long and his hair beginning to grey. He was a simple and pleasant man who begged for sweets outside the shop and cried when the boys from the town made fun of him. One of Yael’s sweetest memories of her brother was the time he had chased off Marek Wolniewicz and his friends who had been tormenting Able. He had gone to the shop and bought some boiled sweets which Able had received with pitiful joy. The thought of it now stabbed her heart with a small pain of longing for the company of her brother.

  And then there was Aleksei. His father died when he was a teenager. The story in the village was that he had never spoken, that he had some medical problem that rendered him mute, but there were some who thought differently.

  ‘He spoke as child,’ Myra Koppelman asserted. ‘I remember visiting his poor mother when he was a toddler and he talked all right then. It was her dying in the way she did that stopped his mouth.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ her husband Eli Koppelman argued. ‘He never spoke a word in his life. He isn’t able. He has a problem. Doctor Sonenson told me.’

  ‘Sonenson? What does he know?’

  Everybody had assumed that when his father died some relative would come and take the teenager, or that he would be sent to live in one of the hostels, but he had refused to move from the farm. He carried on working there, eking out a subsistence from his fields, occasionally trading vegetables or a pig for some goods he could not produce himself. He kept to himself and rarely came to the village, preferring to deal with the couple of nearby farmers he trusted.

  She settled down in the woods, not far from the farm and waited for darkness.

  3

  There were no lights burning in the windows of the small farm at the foot of the hill. The valley walls seemed to move in with the setting of the sun, so that it grew darker and more secluded. It was only as the day ended, as darkness wound its fingers through the woods, that she began to feel utterly alone.

  The fear gripped her. For an hour she crouched, frozen to the spot. She dared not move back into the depths of the woods, which were now pitch black and alive with the noise of animals and birds rooting in the undergrowth, nor step out into the brittle light of the rising moon onto the dirt path for fear she would be seen.

  The tears she had not been able to shed when Rivka died came now, suddenly, and for some time refused to stop. But they were not just for Rivka, nor indeed for any of the dead. They were also for herself. Nobody knows where I am she thought, and then, almost immediately, there is nobody left to know who I am. To know I am gone. And then the thought of Josef gave her a renewed sense of determination. He would come back. He will rescue me.

  The very image of Josef riding down these co
untry lanes, at the head of a battalion of Soviet soldiers, filled her with strength. I’m all he has left, she thought. I must keep myself safe for him. The idea of Josef returning to the village to find the whole family gone broke her heart. She had to find a way through this.

  She stood up, her legs stiff from having squatted for so long. Slowly she eased herself through the last straggle of tree trunks and paused in the deep grass on the verge of the dirt road. The road curved away behind the woods and on towards Selo, passing as it did, Czeslaw’s farm, then up, to where the road topped the hill heading from Grodno, a town barely larger than Selo, but with a station from which trains ran directly to Vilna and Warsaw and Minsk. The valley was deserted.

  She stepped out into the moonlight. Crossing the road and the field quickly, she made her way to the farmhouse. The grass was high and the earth uneven. She walked with care, moving slowly, stopping often to listen and to examine the farmhouse for signs of life. There was little evidence anybody lived in the farm. No light. No smoke curling from the chimney.

  Perhaps he is gone, she thought. Perhaps he has fled north to Russia. Or perhaps, like others, he has welcomed the Germans and gone to live in the town, believing it to be safer under their protection.

  Perhaps he is dead, she thought too, crouching in the long grass, the seed-heavy heads motionless above her. She strained to see the details of the dark windows, to catch a glimpse of movement behind the dusty glass. She recalled the face of Rivka, her white lips, the hollowness of her face, as if death had sucked away her flesh as well as her spirit.

  The evening silence was broken by a shout. A sharp shriek that seemed to echo around her. From the corner of her eye she caught a movement. She flattened down against the earth, her heart hammering. Glancing up a few moments later she could see nothing. Holding her breath, she listened intently. The grass whispered. Then she heard it again, in the distance now, towards the bank of trees rising up on the west of the valley and she saw the owl silhouetted against the last traces of sunset. She slowly released her breath. Struggling to calm her racing heart.