The Way Back Read online

  Also by Gavriel Savit

  Anna and the Swallow Man

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Gavriel Savit

  Cover art copyright © 2020 by Leo Nickolls

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Savit, Gavriel, author.

  Title: The way back / Gavriel Savit.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | Audience: Ages 12 & up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: A historical fantasy that follows Eastern European teens Yehuda Leib and Bluma on a journey through the Far Country, a Jewish land of the dead.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019048811 | ISBN 978-1-9848-9462-5 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-9848-9463-2 (library binding) | ISBN 978-1-9848-9464-9 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Jews—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. | Dead—Fiction. | Voyages and travels—Fiction. | Fantasy. Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S28 Way 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781984894649

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Gavriel Savit

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Two from Tupik

  Chapter Two: Crossing Over

  Chapter Three: Ripples

  Chapter Four: Into the Darkness

  Chapter Five: Rules of Acquisition

  Chapter Six: The Swarming

  Chapter Seven: Zubinsk

  Chapter Eight: Great Souls

  Chapter Nine: The Flight and the Fall

  Chapter Ten: The Next Mourning

  Chapter Eleven: Onward and Inward

  Chapter Twelve: Strange Navigation

  Chapter Thirteen: Three Questions

  Chapter Fourteen: Dantalion

  Chapter Fifteen: The Retreat

  Chapter Sixteen: The Advance

  Chapter Seventeen: To War

  Chapter Eighteen: The Gilgul

  Chapter Nineteen: Back

  The Dantalion: Prophet Margins

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For all of my ancestors and all of my descendants,

  Whether they be living today

  Or not

  On a bright summer day in the year eighteen hundred and twelve (by the gentile reckoning), a girl left her mother’s house—the little house where she had been born—and went to the brambles on the far side of the forest to gather the small summer strawberries that grow in the shade.

  These were the best kind of berries, tiny and soft, and the girl crouched in the bushes, staining her lips and fingertips red: one for her mouth, one for her apron, and so on and on.

  At first the girl was sure that she must be imagining things. She was far from the village here, far from the road, and she alone knew of the berry bush.

  Surely no one else would come to this place.

  But she was not imagining things.

  The column burst out into the clearing like a ball from a musket: men in orderly rows, stepping in time, their buttons and bayonets shining in the sun, and more and more and more men—the young lady had never seen so very many. Now horses came as well, and taller men in splendid uniforms astride them. Mules and wagons and great bronze cannons thundered past the girl in the brambles, and feet and hooves and studded wheels churned the grass into a muddy slaw.

  The girl was not foolish; she kept hidden and did not draw attention to herself. But when one particular man reached the clearing, she could not help but rise up to get a better look.

  Even in the heat of the summer sun, he wore his long, pale blue coat. The gray stallion beneath him moved dexterously at his urging, as if it were a part of him, and as he loped out into the clearing, it quickly became clear that the entirety of the column—all the men and horses and cannons and shot, all of it—was simply an extension of his body.

  This, of course, was the great war emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

  He had come to take the Russian Empire.

  He had come to take the world.

  An officer on a dappled charger came cantering up to his elbow, and the emperor turned his head. It was in this moment that he caught sight of the girl in the bushes.

  His eyes bore into hers, and she locked her lips tight, unwilling to let even the lightest breath pass between them.

  The officer was speaking.

  The emperor did not look away.

  And then he turned back toward the horizon, answered his officer, and spurred on his horse.

  And that was that.

  The girl made her way home. The sun sank behind the advancing troops.

  The year wore on. Battles were fought. Men were killed. The leaves changed color and fell. Napoleon retreated and, in due course, was overthrown.

  Soon thereafter, the girl was led beneath a wedding canopy, where she traded the name of her father for the name of her husband, and from that day on, she lived in his house, cleaned his mess, boiled his chicken soup, and waited for him to return home at night.

  But something odd happened: one day, the girl looked into the mirror and found that the face staring back at her was no longer her own. She had loosened, wrinkled, worried herself into something that no longer resembled her at all. Only her lips remained the same—locked in a light, tight frown.

  That evening, her husband did not come home.

  It was not long before she knew that he would not be returning at all.

  The frown deepened.

  Before the week was out, the lady who had been a girl took her son, Zalman, and moved far away from the village of her birth to a place where no one knew, and where no one would whisper: all the way to a tiny, out-of-the-way shtetl called Tupik.

  She took a small room in the attic of the baker’s house and apprenticed her boy in the bakery on the ground floor.

  The baker died. The bakery passed to the lady’s son, Zalman.

  She remained in the attic.

  And as if in a chrysalis of silence, the lady in the attic turned into an old woman. Before long, as she was eldest, the women of Tupik began to call upon her to attend the births of children, and for more than a generation, every boy and girl born into the shtetl of Tupik was caught by the old woman’s hands.

 
But only two of them made any lasting impression on her.

  The first was a scrawny boy, born before his time into a blustery, rain-soaked evening. When his tiny eyes blinked open, bright and clear and icy blue, they focused perfectly into hers.

  She had seen that expression before: once, as a girl, long ago, crouched in the brambles, fingers stained, fear in her heart, sweetness on her lips.

  Eight days later, breaking with her custom, the old woman went to the synagogue to hear what name the boy would be given.

  It was Yehuda Leib.

  And that evening, the child of her son, Zalman, was born—a girl named Bluma—and as the baby emerged, pink and squalling, the old woman found herself filled with a sense of unutterable gladness.

  But when she looked down at her granddaughter’s face, another feeling stole into her heart: a sort of guilt, of pity and compassion.

  There, as if reflected in a little mottled mirror, was her very own mouth, locked in a light, tight frown.

  * * *

  —

  Yehuda Leib’s mother, Shulamis, woke before dawn, dragging her clacking bones up from the warm bed hours before it was reasonable. It was unpleasant, but if she wanted a chance of collecting enough odd jobs to afford a bit of food for the evening, she would have to start early.

  Her back ached.

  Tupik was leaning forward in anticipation this morning, silent and still in the gloaming. The gray clapboard houses huddled over the muddy streets as if to steal the rising steam of the passing people’s breath, and at the outskirts of town, the tall pines seemed to bend inward over the roofs as if to better see what might transpire.

  Perhaps it was the growing cold, perhaps the thick gray slab of cloud covering over the sky, but whatever the cause, everything felt weighted down—coiled.

  Waiting.

  In the corner of the little front room, Shulamis’s son, Yehuda Leib, pretended to sleep in a twisting of sheets.

  She glanced down at the pan by the cooling embers of the fire.

  Half a potato. This was all the food left in the house. Even the saltcellar was empty.

  With a sigh, stomach moaning, Shulamis rose from the hearth, took Yehuda Leib’s warm red scarf from the chair by the door, and tucked it into the crook of his arm. She’d made the scarf with her own two hands, stitch by stitch, the thread passing between her ruddy, cold-stiffened fingers night after night until finally it was done.

  Truth be told, there was as much worry as wool in it.

  “You’ll be good today?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Yehuda Leib flatly, his eyelids clamped shut, as if he still might manage to convince her that he was sleeping.

  “You won’t make any trouble?”

  “It’s never me who makes the trouble, Mama.”

  Shulamis frowned, as if she just might believe this. “Of course not.” And then, crossing to the door, “There’s a little potato left in the pan,” and, halfway through the door, “Don’t forget your scarf.”

  It was only moments later, the sound of Shulamis’s squelching feet fading down the muddy road, that the front door yawned open again to admit a bright-eyed boy into the morning.

  A boy with no red scarf.

  It was itchy. And it choked him.

  Yehuda Leib couldn’t stand being constrained.

  The sun was rising.

  Few mothers in Tupik could see Yehuda Leib coming down the street without feeling the urge to protect their children from the ill influence that seemed to mass around the boy like a crowd of flies. And this was not entirely unjust. Yehuda Leib’s name was rarely heard in the synagogue or marketplace without an attendant sigh—always brawling, climbing, running—and if a quick glance over the shoulder showed that neither the boy nor his mother was near, the sigh was very likely to be followed up with the remark that of course, everyone knows what his father was like.

  But if everyone knew that Yehuda Leib had a tendency to do what he wanted—often with some lightly destructive results—there were few, perhaps none, in Tupik who really understood the extent of his capabilities.

  Little escaped the notice of his keen blue eyes.

  This morning, for example, he was careful not to waste time lounging in bed once his mother made her way out into the world. Judging by the particular glimmer of the light, he could tell who was likely to be awake, who was on his way to morning prayer at the synagogue, who was making her way to the marketplace. Not only could he therefore say which kitchens and larders were likely to go unattended, but he could also guess which routes he might safely take to get into them without being seen—and, consequently, blamed once he’d acquired what he’d gone for.

  Not that he was prone to lifting enough to be noticed—on either the taking or the receiving end, for his mother would never approve of his appropriations—but all the same his face and reputation were familiar enough in town that he knew it was best to avoid notice if he could.

  Was it honest? No. But the more he was able to thicken their stores of milk and flour and salt, the easier his mother could sleep the next night.

  And besides—as everyone knows—a boy cannot grow on half a potato a day. Not even an ordinary boy.

  And Yehuda Leib was not ordinary.

  This morning, Yehuda Leib managed a decent haul in the brief window of time safe for grazing, and by the time he climbed out of a certain second-floor window and turned his feet toward the synagogue, the pockets of his worn black coat were well laden with the scraps and leavings of a handful of houses: a hunk of cheese, a crust of bread, a half-eaten apple. Even his mittens were full: salt to replenish the dwindling supply in his mother’s cellar.

  Perhaps he was a nuisance, perhaps a petty thief, but for all the mischief he made, no one in Tupik saw things as clearly as Yehuda Leib.

  * * *

  —

  It was Yehuda Leib’s aim each day to position himself on the steps of the study hall opposite the synagogue’s front doors well before the morning service concluded. Once the worshippers began to mill about the threshold, the day’s schmoozing would start in earnest, and if he slung the brim of his cap low over his bright, keen eyes, huddling into the corner where the railing met the wall, their chat would flow freely: who had what errands to run, who was traveling, who sick in bed. This talk was indispensable to Yehuda Leib if he was to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention throughout the day, and if he was in his place on time, the talkers rarely took any notice of him.

  This was why, today, it was so strange that they did.

  Things started out normally enough, the droning hum of prayer within the synagogue dwindling and coming to an end. The doors were thrown open, and the most industrious of the worshippers squelched off to get their morning’s work under way, leaving the schmoozers to gather around Yankl, a lanky old schlepper who had gotten in late from Zubinsk the night before.

  Zubinsk was the closest thing to a real place anywhere in the vicinity of Tupik. Nestled at the edge of the wide forest in which Tupik was located, it could be reached in the better part of a day’s travel, barring any complications on the road.

  But as everyone knew, complications had a way of cropping up: wagon axles broke, donkeys sprained their ankles, men lost their way.

  The grandmothers of Tupik had troves of tales hours deep about the malevolent demons of the forest: how they hid in the darkness between the overhanging boughs and dropped down upon your head when you stopped for a drink of water; how they tempted men off the path with the flicker of false fire and the aroma of roasting meat; how, if you were foolish enough to stop for a nap, they would sneak in through your ears and steal everything away—your thoughts, your memories, your very substance—until there was nothing left behind but the papery husk of you.

  One could never be careful enough.

  Men like Yankl, then, who made
their living transporting goods between Tupik and Zubinsk, had a way of collecting charms and protections about them. Once, Yehuda Leib had heard Yankl cataloging his arsenal: the hunk of iron at the bottom of his heavy pack, the faded bracelet of thin red thread around his wrist, the amulets carefully inked onto small squares of parchment, rolled tight, and stashed in all the pockets of his clothing.

  It was, in fact, about a new talisman that Yankl spoke as he came out of the synagogue door this morning: an old, hard slice of bread with a small bite taken out of one corner.

  Someone asked how on earth he thought a piece of bread would keep away the demons, and at the sound of this word, Yankl spat superstitiously over his shoulder.

  “This is no ordinary slice of bread,” he said, raising a finger instructively. “This is bread from which the holy Rebbe of Zubinsk has eaten.”

  This pronouncement was met with a chorus of appreciation. If the stories of the demons were numberless and dark, the stories of the Rebbe were just as numerous and just as bright—his wisdom, his wonders: they said he could see straight into you and pluck out the sorrow like a rotting apple.

  A voice spoke from the knot of gossips. “And how are the wedding preparations going, Yankl?”

  “The whole town is in an uproar,” said the schlepper. “It’s as if they’ve declared a new holiday!”

  Two days hence, just before the beginning of Chanukah, the holy Rebbe of Zubinsk was to marry off his final granddaughter, the youngest of five. It was going to be a massive celebration, and for weeks the rumors had been building: so many wagons full of fine food had arrived, and twice as many musicians; the bride’s dress had been made specially for her in Kiev; the groom’s family was bringing a famous wedding jester all the way from Vilna.