“Don’t shoot.”

Perhaps it was the shock of hearing him speak, or perhaps it was the way he looked almost like a film star with his straight nose, his blond hair, and his blue eyes that caught her off guard. Or perhaps it was that, after months and months of Yiddish, she wasn’t used to hearing German outside of school. Or maybe it was the way that the sunset behind her made those crystal blue eyes of his seem like they were bleeding along with the cut on the side of his head.

Why didn’t you shoot him, Hesya? He would not hesitate to shoot you.

Shooting you would be the kindest thing he could do to you.

“Thank you,” he said when a minute had gone by and she didn’t put a bullet through him. His whole body relaxing back against the tree. “Thank you.”

“How do you know I’m not going to kill you?” she asked him, her finger tightening around the trigger.

“You have a kind face,” he said. Naum had said the same thing to her when she’d first arrived in the camp somewhere deep in the Naliboki Forest, starving and frightened with her sister Sarah. She hated the words on his lips as much as she had loved them on Naum’s. A kind face is enough to get by with right now, she had thought. He has one too.

“Do I?” She tried to make her voice go hard, narrowing her eyes, tightening her lips in a growl.

“You learned German in school,” he said. Said, but did not ask. He was eying her closely, his eyes taking in the heavy dark coat that was actually Naum’s and the thick boots that she’d taken from Sarah when she was dying for, they had always shared shoes. “You’re probably not used to carrying a gun.”

Does anyone ever grow used to carrying a gun? Naum hadn’t, though he pretended otherwise. Every night when he put his away in the zemlyanka she watched as a weight seemed to lift from his shoulders. Thou shalt not kill.

“It’s all right,” the blue-eyed man said, nodding at her. He had dimples when he smiled, and his teeth were perfectly straight. He really looked like one of the actors in a film, the perfect hero, too beautiful to be anything but good. “I won’t hurt you. I can’t.” He knocked his hand against his leg. “Fell down. I think it’s broken.” He laughed as though sharing a joke with her. “Hans always said I was a clumsy fool, but I don’t think it was ever so bad as to break my own leg in the woods.”

Her hand wasn’t shaking. Her arm was growing tired, holding Naum’s pistol out the way she was, but her hand was not shaking. There was something hypnotising about watching him talk, watching him smile at her as though he weren’t a snake. If she truly were a rat, he would unhinge his jaw and swallow her whole like the snake in her science classroom back in Minsk. How strange to think they weren’t so far from home. It felt a world away, a lifetime. He is wounded, a voice whispered in the back of her head, He can’t put up a fair fight.

What does it matter if he can’t put up a fair fight? He would kill me, kill us all.

Are you judge, jury, and executioner, then?

God shows mercy even to those who do not deserve it, consoling the afflicted and raising up the oppressed.

She was back in the synagogue in Minsk. The rabbi was wrapped in white. Her throat was dry, and the main sin she could think of was telling her mother that it was Sarah who had used her lipstick and then mashed it in the tube by accident when it was Hesya who had done it. Next year will I atone for murder? God, have you abandoned us so that they murder us in droves? She knew about those trains to nowhere. That was why she’d fled to the woods.

“I tried hopping for a while,” he was saying. “Hopping up and down like a rabbit. I thought I could hop all the way back to camp, but I think I ended up spraining the ankle that wasn’t broken.” He kept smiling at her as though inviting her to join in the mockery of his predicament. “I suppose I deserve it, going off on my own like this. My captain won’t be pleased by it. I had my orders.” A shadow crossed his face. “But I suppose I’ll figure that out when I get back to camp.”

“You think you’re going back to your camp?” she asked. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears—low, husky, powerful. Her heart was hammering in her ribs. Her heart hadn’t hammered like this since she’d fled Minsk after her parents had disappeared. Her heart hadn’t hammered like this even the first time Naum had kissed her, and she’d thought it would beat right out of her chest then.

“Well,” he paused. “I suppose I could be going back to your camp. Which, in turn, would probably also not please my captain. Though it would be easier to explain being captured by a Soviet partisan than having broken one ankle and sprained the other.”

So he doesn’t even know what I am? Just because there’s no star on my breast?

She could laugh, except it wasn’t remotely funny. If anything, it made her want to scream, or yell, or maybe sink to the ground and burst into tears. All of this and for what?

“If your camp is too far away, you may have to help me.”

Slow to anger, generous in kindness and truth.

She wondered what Lev would say if she brought a lost, injured Wehrmacht soldier back to camp when she shouldn’t have been out in the first place, when she shouldn’t even have Naum’s pistol, or be wearing Naum’s coat. A dead Nazi keeps us safe. Why did you let him live?

What has he done though?

How do you know he hasn’t done everything that the rest have? He wears their uniform; he supports them in their imprisonments and tortures and murders. How can you let him live?

He is injured.

“I suppose you could also leave me here,” he said hopefully. “Go off back where you came from. I wouldn’t know how to find you so I couldn’t bring them to you, and you could just…” He looked hopefully at her.

She didn’t move. Or rather—her hand did not move. She was trembling a little bit in Naum’s coat. His coat was warmer than hers which was why she’d taken it. He wouldn’t be needing it any time soon, not when everyone agreed that he should be inside, that he should rest until the fever passed. A fever had been the beginning of the end for Sarah. She prayed that it would not be so for Naum. Not least because she wasn’t sure, and yet she was sure, that life burgeoned within her. It had been a long while since she’d bled.

There is a path there that is bloodless.

Is it justice, justice you shall pursue?

Is it mercy?

Or is it lenience where there should only be the unyielding righteousness of God?

“It would make for a good story, me having to hop back to camp. Hans would—” That shadow crossed his face again. “Well, he would have found it quite a joke. He was shot down a few months ago. Sometimes I forget that he’s dead.”

None of her family except her sister had made it into the woods. Sometimes it hit her like a bullet to the heart, knowing that they weren’t just gone, they were gone. She was not so naive as to think her parents survived, that her grandfather sat at his piano, that her aunt in Warsaw and her uncle in Lodz were going about their day while she stood in the woods in Naum’s coat holding Naum’s gun and staring at this beautiful monster as he kept trying to get her to—to what? Pity him?

There was no pity left in her heart for herself. She had wept it all away. Why should she pity him?

“He flew planes,” he said, tilting his head back, looking off in the distance. “He was shot down over Britain. My mother wrote to tell me. She told me to be careful.” He let out a hollow laugh. “I told her I would be. She told me she’d never forgive me if I died too. My sister was going to marry Hans. They pretended they weren’t, but before we both enlisted, they said they’d do it after the war.”

Sarah was going to marry Chaim the butcher who we never would have met if it weren’t for your war.

Not that it mattered.

Sarah had always been the angry child, the elder who rebelled against their parents constantly, getting into trouble. Hesya had always been quiet, good. She’d played piano duets with her grandfather. She made the best challah. Rage hadn’t been a familiar emotion to her except recently. Rage was better than fear. She felt she could do something with rage. She was enraged now.

He is barely more than a boy, her mind whispered to her twitching finger. He isn’t going to hurt you. You have him captured. Put him in prison. Make him work.

Lev would just shoot him if she tried to bring him back to camp. Lev didn’t believe in letting Nazis live.

You could let him go. But if she were going to let him go, surely she’d have already lowered her gun and retreated into the trees.

He seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Go on, put the gun down. You’d have fired it already if you truly meant to shoot me and I’m in no state to hunt you down and capture you. Let us part as equals and no one will be any the wiser.”

Equals. He truly didn’t realize she was a Jew. Wasn’t the whole point that she could never be his equal? That she was just a rat, an infestation to be exterminated? That she didn’t deserve life, family, happiness—any of it. He and his—they’d stolen it from her, stolen the wedding she should have had with Naum, the family who should have been invited. Her child would never know them.  Her child would be born in the dirt, hunted before it had even taken breath and this man wanted her to pity his sisters and mothers who would mourn him, wanted her to believe he meant it when he said they even could part as equals?

“Well?”

A low, humorless laugh escaped her lips as her finger tightened on the trigger and a crack wove its way through the trees. The sun finished setting behind her as the light fully left his clear blue eyes and his body fell limp against the tree.

Hesya stared at him. He seemed smaller now that he was dead. She should regret it, shouldn’t she? Murder was a sin, a violation, and yet it had just taken the twitch of a finger.

How easy it had been.

Was it that easy for them, too?

She wondered if he’d regret her corpse if he’d gotten to his pistol first.

Somehow, she doubted it.

She turned away, made her way back to the trees.

No, she didn’t regret it. He wouldn’t bring them back, couldn’t guarantee that Naum would survive his fever, that her child would survive the forest.

But maybe, one day, she might pity his mother the loss of him.