Gingerbread

‘Fresh!’ exclaims Grandfather, and gives a shrill, throaty cheer when he spots the tracks. ‘Roe deer. Do you see the two toes?’

He nods, even though he doesn’t. How Grandfather knows such things if he never goes to the forests, the boy cannot tell. These are the things a woodcutter might know, or a hunter or a trapper, not the things of a man pottering in his towering tenement flat. He wants to ask, but when he looks up he sees that a glassy look, as frozen as the world, is in Grandfather’s eyes. His face is haloed by the fog of his breath, and through those grey reefs he stares down the vale.

The boy’s eyes follow.

At the bottom of the pasture, nestled against another rag of woodland, there hunches a house. It is a small thing – a girl might call it dainty – but it is old and sunken and the coal shed squatting out front is collapsed, crowned with more snow and specks of black peeking through. Most of the windows aren’t glass at all, just wooden boards nailed together. There’s a chimneystack, just reaching through the snow, with bits of broken brick lying around and a wood pigeon perching on top.

‘This is it, isn’t it, papa?’

Grandfather says, ‘Did your mama ever bring you here?’

‘I think … but not like this.’

‘No?’

Sometimes, memories are like dreams. He remembers the house, but not the valley; the walls of stone, but not the ruin. In his head, it is summer. There is a cloth spread out in a wild garden ringed by forest, with the spectre of a house behind – but warm and welcoming, not frigid and alone like this thing feels. But then, he supposes, things must feel different after a death. The world is different to him, now that mama is gone, and so must be the house.

‘Are we going down?’

Grandfather sinks to his haunches. He doesn’t say a word, simply rocks on his jackboot heels, and when he draws himself back up he is changed: unwavering, resolute. He cups a hand around the back of the boy’s neck. The boy tingles. His face bursts into a grin but, when he looks up, Grandfather is still staring at the ruin, as if he can see things in the tumbledown stone and colonnades of ice that the boy cannot.

Up close, the house is more afraid than it is frightening. Like the trees, it has the face of a man. Frost along its open roof is a fringe, and the boarded windows are eyes gouged out. The door, an anguished maw, has slipped from its hinges but is fixed into place by hard-packed ice. On seeing it, Grandfather’s face is carved in the same sad lines as it was on the night he came to Yuri’s – and the boy wonders if making him come here at all is breaking that promise he made to look after him, and love him, for all time and no matter what.

‘Come on then, Vika,’ Grandfather says, in a whisper meant only for the urn. ‘We’re home, if home this truly is.’

He heads for the door, but walks in an odd, circuitous way, first parallel to the house, then turning sharply to approach the stone. The boy scurries to join him, plunging into snow as deep as his waist, but Grandfather turns and stops him with a word. ‘Watch out. There was a garden wall.’

‘Where?’

‘Right where you’re standing. It was to keep the pigs in.’

‘Papa, how do you …’

Grandfather heaves his way to the house door. It isn’t even locked, just warped and stuck in the frame. He sets the urn down, packing the snow tightly so it doesn’t sink, and puts his shoulder to the wood. The door caves in and a tide of snow falls into the house.

Together they stand, watching the dust of ages settle in the dark passage.

‘Don’t you want to go in, papa?’

But Grandfather just looks at the black forest on the borders of the dell, the mountains in the canopy where snow and ice have crafted jagged peaks. ‘Well, boy, I’d rather be in four walls than out there.’

Grandfather takes the first step, but the boy isn’t so sure. Out here it smells clean and free, but there is something different coming from the house. It smells of dust and dark and being old.

It is only when Grandfather disappears that the boy dares to follow. First, he stands on the step and pokes his nose over the threshold. He can hear Grandfather shifting inside. There are pools of light up ahead, spilled no doubt through windows on the forested side of the house, and he sees Grandfather’s shadow flit across them. For an instant it is pitch-black; then the light returns, as Grandfather moves on.

‘Papa?’ His voice echoes, lonely as he was all day yesterday. ‘Papa?’

He creeps on. It is not, he decides, so very bad. The first step is the hardest. After that, all you’ve got to do is be brave. You’ve got to stop thinking about the smell, stop imagining all the ghosts that might live in a place like this. You’ve got to remember: you promised to look after your papa, and how can you look after him if he ventures on alone?

He reaches the doorway at the end of the hall and peeps through. Once upon a time, this was a living room. There is still an armchair in front of a big cold hearth, and a mirror on the wall covered in dust and what looks like wood-pigeon muck. On the farthest wall one of the windows is boarded up, and the other is encased in ice. Grandfather has already shuffled through another door. He can hear the old man kicking his boots in frustration.

It doesn’t feel good, going into the room. There is little carpet left, only rags around the skirting board where mice haven’t chewed it away. He can see the big wet prints left behind by Grandfather’s boots. In the middle of the room the old man must have stomped in circles, circling the armchair and then striding away.

The room on the other side is a kitchen, and that’s where Grandfather is crouched, rummaging through a cupboard. Mama sits on the countertop in her urn, and Grandfather keeps calling out to her, assuring her that he’s not really left her alone. ‘Vika,’ he says. ‘Vika, why do you drag me back here?’

The boy shuffles into the door between the living room and kitchen. It is lighter in here, because more light can pour through the backdoor. The glass is coated in ice, but it is less thick on this side of the house and, if you squint, you can even make out what used to be a garden, with a chicken coop and rabbit hutch and vegetable patch with a low stone wall.

Grandfather is down on his knees, buried in a cupboard under the sink. There are things scattered around his knees: old gloves, the handle of a trowel, a terracotta plot, a clod of earth.

‘What are you looking for?’

Grandfather rears up with a sudden flourish: in his hands a single-headed, dark axe. His gnarled fingers are so tight around the handle that they look as knotted as the wood.

‘Papa!’

The old man’s eyes are raw, but he is smiling, his mouth full of gaps. ‘We’ll need kindling.’

‘Kindling?’

‘To kindle a fire.’

‘How do you kindle a fire?’

‘You do it,’ says Grandfather, putting his shoulder to the backdoor, ‘with kindling.’

Grandfather has to strain to force the door, but then it crunches and gives way. Outside, the snow is piled high, and Grandfather’s hands are too big to reach through. Now it is the boy’s turn to show Grandfather how. He reaches through the crack, shovelling enough snow away that they can both squeeze out, into a garden bound by winter. It is bigger than it seemed from inside, bordered on three sides by walls of forest.

‘Do you remember it, boy?’

The memory is only faint, but the boy nods. ‘Mama brought me, with a picnic.’

Grandfather whispers, ‘She never told me.’

‘Do you remember it, papa?’

‘Oh, better than I ought. But I was a young man, then, and should have known better. Your mama was born in those four walls. Did you know that?’

The boy looks back. It is only a house, he tells himself, in the same way that those maps on Yuri’s floor are real maps. It is like a story written down but screwed up and cast away when its teller can’t find the words: out of shape, words and bricks heaped up without sense or form. It can hardly be a place where mama once lived.

‘Here?’

‘She was smaller than you when we left. I always hoped she wouldn’t remember, but once something’s in your head, you don’t shed it so easily.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Because, boy, there are things in the forest, things not fit for a baby girl.’

From the tone of his voice, he does not mean to go on. He takes one big stride, then another, and in his wake the boy follows.

Although the snow is thick on top of what used to be a vegetable patch, under the trees it is only light dust. They tramp beneath the boughs and, only a few yards in, Grandfather stomps his jackboot down. The frost is like a layer of hard sugar, and it cracks under his heel.

He begins by stripping tiny twigs and dead bark from the trunk of a black alder. A little further in, an oak has long ago been uprooted and now lies dead on the forest floor, slowly rotting away. Mosses grow across its surface, like a bison’s winter hide, but Grandfather scrapes a patch away and exposes the dead wood underneath. The axe sinks easily into the first layers, and chips of cold wet trunk shower down. The smell is cold and stagnant, and billows up in great clouds to make the boy sneeze.

‘See,’ says Grandfather. He has chipped deep into the trunk, where the wood is dry and flaking. ‘You can start a fire with this more easily than a match.’

The boy peers closely. ‘But how do you know?’

‘Don’t you think your old papa might know how to start a fire?’

‘I’ve seen you start a fire, papa. You turn the gas and strike a match.’

‘Boy, that’s barely a fire at all. Those are fires for poor old men in their tenements. I wasn’t always so very old.’

The boy replies, ‘But I’m not old, and I don’t know about fires.’

‘I wasn’t the same kind of boy as you,’ grins Grandfather. ‘I was a little bit … wilder.’

Kindling, it turns out, is twigs and flakes of trunk and even bits of bird nest that the boy finds hidden away in a hole in the dead tree. With hands and pockets full, they go back into the house.

Grandfather says there hasn’t been a fire here for years. He drops down at the hearth, props the axe against the stone, and piles the kindling in a dark mound.

The boy hugs the wall at the edge of the room. His eyes linger on the hunched figure of Grandfather, then flit to the threadbare chair, the crumbling stairs. Perhaps it should not take so very much imagination to see pictures on the walls, the windows opened up, a proper banister and bedroom above. Yet, when he tries to see mama here, the cobwebs in the corners fight back, and the idea of a baby crawling on these floors is preposterous. Only a baby animal could live here, some wild thing out of the forests.

Terrifying, to think of the long ago years before you were real; more terrifying even than to think of the things mama misses, now she is gone.

In the hearth, Grandfather has no matches. Yet, he has sculpted a model out of the twigs and pieces of nest that imitates fire exactly, licking up in the shapes of flame. His head is low, and his lips move in a whisper. Then, as if from nowhere, there is light. It spirits from Grandfather’s lips and dances along the strands of nest. Tiny tendrils of red rush forth, spreading a fiery web.

‘Papa!’

Grandfather turns, his face lit from behind by the stirring orange. ‘It’s been a long time, boy …’

Into the orange orb Grandfather piles the rest of his kindling. Soon, the glow is stronger. These, he explains, are embers. How they appeared, the boy does not know – for Grandfather is just an old man from a tenement, and surely he does not know sorceries and enchantments. The rest, the boy understands. To turn those embers into roaring fire you have to add scraps of cloth axed from the old armchair, and even a piece of floorboard. Then, when the fire darts and spits and dances in the grate, you can put a pot in and melt down snow.

If you melt snow, you get water. And if you boil up water, you can use it to soften the frozen ground so that the axe can dig down. In this way, Grandfather excavates a tiny crater in the roots of a black oak. Once he is done, he unwraps mama’s urn. When the boy peeps in, he is expecting to see the bits of mama left behind, the bone of a finger with baba’s ring still on it, a lock of hair or a piece of heart, but instead it is only grey dust. Gently, Grandfather upturns the urn and piles her in the hole.

‘Go on then,’ says Grandfather. ‘Say goodbye.’

The boy looks at the pile of dust. Then he looks at Grandfather. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Not to me, you little …’ Grandfather cuffs him, gently, around his shoulder. ‘Did you think I was leaving you behind? Say goodbye to your mama.’

His eyes fall back on the dust. ‘I won’t see her again.’

‘No,’ whispers Grandfather, ‘not like this.’

‘But papa, we can come for …’

Grandfather cuts him off. ‘Goodbye, Vika.’

Now a chill wind blows up through the alders and the peak of the little pile of dust is caught and spirited away. When Grandfather sees it he drops to his knees to cover mama’s dust with dirt. Once that is packed down – the boy helps pat it flat – he smears the snow back over. The sky is heavy and, as soon as it starts falling again, there’ll be no mark that mama was ever here.

‘Is it a grave?’

‘No, not a grave.’

‘Then what?’

Grandfather’s eyes are wet. ‘It was summer when your Grandma … I didn’t come here, boy, though she begged me to. It was your mama who scattered her in these trees. This forest, that’s what your baba is now. And it’s what your mama is too.’

He nods.

‘It all goes back to the ground. Then it gets eaten up. And then there’s trees and flowers.’

‘And nettles and thistles?’

Grandfather nods. ‘All the bad stuff too, but don’t forget the good. There are wolves in this forest that ate rabbits in this forest that ate grasses that grew on your Grandma.’

The old man feels the boy’s hands, tells him they are frozen, that they’ll have to get warm before frostbite eats every finger. This is a thing to set the little boy thrilling, because to lose a finger in the forest would be a very great adventure.

As they turn back to the house, the boy cannot help seeing the look in his Grandfather’s eyes. It is not one he has seen before. He has seen him angry, and he has seen him sad, but fear has a way of making the eyes crease – and fear is what he sees now. His hand falls from Grandfather’s own, and as the old man tramps inside, the boy looks back at the tree that will drink up mama, and the still dark beneath the branches.

If Grandfather is right, then the wilderness is baba – and soon the wilderness will be mama too. But, if it is really so, then there is nothing to fear in those long darknesses between the trees. It would be like in the story of Baba Yaga, and you would be kind to the branches and they would throw up walls of thorn to protect you from any bad thing in the world.

Then he remembers: there are other stories too, ones he does not know, ones it seems Grandfather will not tell. There are stories of this ruined house, and baba and mama. There are the stories scrawled along the tenement hall, of soldiers and kings and the wars of the long ago. And there is the tale mama never knew, of why, until this day, Grandfather has never returned to the forest and stopped telling his tales. Perhaps, in those fables, the forest is a wicked thing, and boys and girls would be better off staying in Baba Yaga’s hen feet hut than running desperately for their papa through the chestnuts and pines.

Grandfather’s shape hunches through the door and along the narrow kitchen. Beyond him, the fire burns strong. The old man steps into the light, rounds the corner – and then, for a moment, though the boy can still hear the familiar click of his jackboot heels, he is gone. As the footfalls fade, the boy finds himself torn between mama’s tree and the echo of Grandfather’s jackboots. By the time he scrabbles back into the ruin, Grandfather is hunched over the fire, fingers splayed to drink in its warmth.

He joins him, feeling the lap of the flames. ‘Mama must have liked it, papa, to want to come back here.’

‘I suppose she liked it well enough.’

‘So why didn’t you live here? Why did you live in the tenement?’

‘Stories, stories,’ mutters Grandfather. ‘Haven’t you had enough excitement for one night?’

As the flames flurry up, Grandfather brings a piece of crumpled newspaper out of his greatcoat pocket. When he sets it down, the scrunched-up paper slackens and unfurls. There, in the light of the fire, the boy sees the nine remaining hunks of mama’s gingerbread.

‘Can I?’

‘Of course.’

The boy reaches out and takes one of the hunks.

‘I’ll want a corner.’

‘You can have a whole one, papa.’

Grandfather closes the newspaper bundle. ‘No,’ he says. ‘They have to last.’

He turns the gingerbread over in his mouth, until it is wet and sticky and stuck in the crannies between his teeth.

After some time, the flames lose their strength. In the hearth’s heart, the branches glow orange, but fire no longer licks up the chimneybreast, and the hiss and crackle has ebbed away. It does not matter, for the heat still radiates out. The boy curls in his eiderdown, and skims the surface of sleep, always the thought of mama hovering near, the reassuring presence of Grandfather, just beyond the line of his vision.

He must fall asleep, because the next thing he feels are bony fingers in his hair. He does not start. The heat has lulled him, and he opens his eyes to feel Grandfather near.

‘Are you ready, boy?’

‘Ready, papa?’

‘To go back to the tenement.’

The boy hurtles up. ‘Please, papa. We haven’t …’

‘I can’t stay here, boy. Not in the forest.’

‘But why not in the forest?’

‘Why doesn’t matter,’ breathes Grandfather. ‘Stop asking why. Why, why, why! I already kept my promise, boy. I did what I told her I’d do. Your mama loves this place. She’s fine out …’

A shrill cry, one to pierce every room in the ruin: ‘She isn’t fine, papa! She’s dead.’

If there was another anger bubbling out of Grandfather, the boy has shocked it back into place. Now he stands, merely numb.

‘She’ll be fine, boy. She doesn’t feel the cold, not where she is. She isn’t alone. She has …’ He seems to hold himself, weighing up the words. ‘… all of the trees.’

‘Papa, just a little more.’

Grandfather lifts his hands, as if in submission.

‘Maybe you can tell us a story, papa? One for me and for mama.’

Grandfather says, ‘Something to help the long night pass …’

‘One more story, and then we can go.’

Grandfather breaks from whatever dream was holding him. ‘I have a story,’ he says, taking in the timbers and stones, the pools of orange and pools of black. ‘But settle down, boy, for this tale is too long in the telling.’

The boy nods.

This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.

On hearing the familiar words, the tension rushes out of the boy. He wriggles back into the eiderdown, bathed by the dying fire. Up close, Grandfather wraps his arms around his legs.

And now, he whispers, we start our tale. Long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world, in a land not so very far away, on the earth in front of the sky, on a plain place like on a wether, seven versts aside, came the war to end all wars.

Now, war, as we know, is a most terrible thing. For a long time, war had been talked of between kings and in courts, but in the little town where our story begins, war was a faraway thing, fought by champions and knights, and not for the grocers and farmers and carpenters who lived in the town, kind and careful, without any thought for killing.

Yet, war … war changes everything. In the east, there was a great emperor, the Winter King, who lived in his Winter Palace and ruled his empire with an iron fist. And, in the west, there was a clever man, a calculating king who had fought in wars before, and been locked away, and risen to rule with a party of fierce companions, who all hated each other but hated others most of all. And, caught between these two evil kings, soon there was whispering in our little town that war … war itself would seek them out.

The boy is rapt. It is, he decides, unlike the stories of before, those of Baba Yaga, of Dimian the peasant, of the Little Briar Rose. There is wickedness in those stories, but there are certainly no wars.

But, before we find ourselves at war this night, Grandfather goes on, this is not a story of the war, not of the evil Winter King, nor the calculating King in the West. This is the story of a little boy, much the same as you, and the stories he heard of the ghosts in the woods …

That little boy was smaller than you when the kings made war. He was four or he was five, and he lived, like you, in a town on the edge of the forest. And do you know how big the forest was?

‘The woods are wide and the woods are wild, and the woods are the world forever and ever,’ whispers the boy, as if repeating an ancient rite.

For a little while, the wars of the Winter King were only stories to that little boy. For him the world was only his house and the streets and the finger of forest that cut into his town. It was many months before the war found him, but when it found him it changed his world.

For the King in the West had broken a promise, and turned against the Winter King, who he had sworn was his friend. Angry as the end of all things, the Winter King rushed to meet the King in the West in pitched battle, and in the morning, when the boy awoke, his streets were filled with tanks and soldiers and new sounds, and languages he could not understand. He watched from his window and saw soldiers a-marching, and he knew they were a different kind of man to his papa and brothers. These were men raised in a world where they had never before known the sun, or the summer. They were soldiers from winter itself.

And so it happened that the town changed. His papa became a clerk, working for those same soldiers who took his grain and commandeered his horse and took their pigs off for slaughter. He kept their stores and wrote in a ledger book every time they ate the sausages that should have been his. Some of the men in town hated his papa for serving the soldiers, and perhaps he even hated his papa little bit too.

‘Were the soldiers very terrible, papa?’

Well, sometimes they were terrible, and sometimes they were kind. Mostly they were just soldiers, and took their delights as soldiers sometimes will. But that little boy’s papa made friends with those soldiers and, in that way, stood guard over his little boy for two whole years.

Well, one day, things changed, as things often will. Because the King in the West was bitter that the Winter King had brought his soldiers to town, and so the armies of the King in the West marched and laid siege. And the King in the West had soldiers reared on hate, and the Winter King’s soldiers were scared, and turned tail and ran. The new soldiers wore brown shirts and spoke a language more terrible yet, and they came in their thousands with murder on their minds.

‘Murder, papa?’

Yes, says Grandfather, and for a moment his voice loses its sing-song lilt, and it might be that he is not even telling a story at all. That little boy saw it for himself. For the King in the West had made a plan that certain mamas and papas and boys and girls must wear golden stars, and then the soldiers would know whom they should kill. Those mamas and papas and boys and girls were sent to live in a different part of the town. For a little while they were kept there. They had to make uniforms and cobble boots, and when they didn’t work hard enough, a soldier would come and say: the King in the West has called your name! Now you won’t know night from day! And that person would be taken away, and then that person might never be seen again.