naked, twisted and torn. There were souls that had turned black with horror who now perched in the trees, trembling and stunned by what some men were capable of, unable to move on from the spot where they had been murdered, incapable of entering the World to Come. They had been tortured, separated from those they loved, made to dig their own graves, castrated, humiliated, with the gold removed from their teeth, gassed at a rate of six thousand a day in Auschwitz. The Destruction hung across the world in darkness, in a cloud. When Lea dreamed of her mother, Hanni was shoeless, her hair shorn. But her eyes were shining. Like Rachel in the Torah, who wept with grief over the loss of her children, Hanni wept in these dreams. She was without words, without a mouth, without a body, beneath the dirt, none of which stopped her love.
You were with me when we discovered we were not hunters, but wolves, when the world was taken away from us, when they believed we were worthless, when we were sent away on trains, when the souls of our brothers and sisters rose with no place to go. You were with me every minute. You are my triumph, the one thing they could never take away.
What mattered in the forest was simple, and had nothing to do with the cruel perversions of men. A rock, a leaf, a star, a dream. Time stood still here. When a leaf fell it took forever until it landed on the forest floor. Winter would come, but not now, not yet, not in this place where if you fell asleep you dreamed for weeks. Wildflowers grew out of season; angels walked through the yellow grass and left their footprints for men to follow if they cared to see what was right in front of them, the path of the righteous, the forgiving, the faithful. Sometimes, at night, Lea would awake to see Ava dancing with the heron. He was staying later than he should. Sweeps of birds had left for warmer climates, but every day he was there, and every night they danced. Lea watched, entranced, well aware that she was seeing magic being made. Ava looked luminous as she danced barefoot, and sometimes she threw her head back and laughed with delight.
If a golem was made of clay, how was it possible for her to feel? Lea soon devised a test. She went out and gathered thorny branches and placed them on the ground beneath the bushes where they slept to see if Ava could feel pain. That night Ava curled up among the sharp branches and she didn’t cry out once.
The next night, Lea took a glass bottle, broke it, then spread the shards in the grass. That night Ava danced as if nothing was wrong.
On the third night Lea left a heap of biting red ants in Ava’s garments, but when Ava dressed she had no reaction, not an itch or a cry, nothing at all.
These tests proved that Ava felt nothing, and yet there was that look on her face when the heron bowed to her in the moment before the dance began. It was the gaze of someone who loved you, the same look Lea had seen when her mother kissed her good night, when her father was at home and there was laughter in the kitchen, when her grandmother told her stories. Once upon a time something happened that you never could have imagined, a spell was broken, a girl was saved, a rose grew out of a tooth buried deep in the ground, love was everywhere, and people who had been taken away continued to walk with you, in dreams and in the waking world.
They were so well hidden that Ava allowed Lea the freedom to wander. She was going for water from the nearby stream when she saw a wolf, just as Bobeshi had when she was a girl, not much older than Lea was now. At first Lea thought it was a dream she had never woken from and she was likely still sleeping, curled up under the bushes. But she reached down and pinched herself, and the pinch stung and she knew she was awake, and then she was certain that what had happened to Bobeshi was now happening to her. The wolf was black with yellow eyes. It was said such creatures had been hunted to extinction in this region, that they had been