Gingerbread

The boy holds himself tight. It is only movement that he sees. Perhaps it is the same for this forest ghoul. If the boy does not move, he will remain invisible in his icy tomb.

‘I can see you.’

He has to be lying. His body is held rigid, refusing to take breath. The ice from the bearskin hat is creeping down his face.

‘I can see you, boy …’

At last, he exhales. Two great gulps, and a horrible pain explodes in his chest; he has swallowed air so frigid that veins of ice are spreading across his insides, groping from organ to organ like happened with mama.

The forest shade’s hands grapple with the door. Now the ice relents. The shadow forces the bough into the tiny crack and, with a sound like shattering pipes, the door flies open.

The bright white of snow behind him is blinding. It takes long seconds for the boy’s eyes to become accustomed to the glare. Slowly the silhouette gains features: a flat, crooked nose; eyes like sunken canker scars.

‘Come on, boy, get yourself out of there. I’ll have to start a fire.’

‘Papa?’

‘You shouldn’t have run off like that. There’s things in these forests.’

It feels as if his insides are coming apart, like a patchwork blanket with a loose thread that, once teased, begins unravelling and cannot be stopped. The sensation tingles up and down his arms, the wormy bits that make up his innards wriggling, uncontrolled. It is, he knows, a feeling of pure relief. He bobs in it, as if still cupped in the ice-cold waters of his dream.

‘Is it really you, papa?’

‘Who else would it be?’

The boy says, ‘Well, there’s things in these forests …’

‘I just told you.’

‘I thought you were a … thing.’

He allows himself to be manhandled out, to stand in the ditch alongside his papa. He knows it is morning only by the smell in the air, of the top dusting of frost constantly thawing and freezing over again.

‘Why did you run?’ Grandfather is inspecting the car, using the branch to fight the worst of the snow off the windscreen. If he is angry, the boy cannot tell. He moves awkwardly, constantly leaving one leg behind.

‘I thought …’

‘You thought what?’

‘You wouldn’t wake up.’

‘I haven’t slept so deep in … What is it, boy?’

‘You didn’t even snore. You always snore in the tenement.’

‘You wanted to go back to school, didn’t you?’

‘Only if you want me to, papa.’

‘Well, what do you want?’

He doesn’t say: mama. Instead, he says, ‘I only want to make you better.’

‘Better?’

But even the boy does not know what he means.

‘I’d be better if I had my hat, little one.’

The boy, alarmed at how he had forgotten, goes to whip the hat off his head.

‘Careful!’ Grandfather barks. ‘It’s frozen to your brow.’

‘I think it’s blistering.’

‘You’ll have to tease it off. You can do it later.’

‘Maybe I can go to school, papa.’

‘We’ll have to bring this car back to life first.’

Grandfather sends the boy to unearth stones and, in a clearing in the woodland, they build a ring inside which they can harrow the earth. After that, it does not take him long to summon up a fire. The boy watches as the baby flames dance, maturing into darting oranges and reds.

While the fire beds down, roasting the rocks that keep it hemmed in, the boy and Grandfather tramp back to the ruin, dragging out the cast-iron pot from the hearth.

Grandfather asks, ‘Are you sure you want to leave her?’

Shamefaced, the boy nods.

Once Grandfather is satisfied, they take the pot to their new cauldron in the forest. It nestles in the flames until it, too, is roasting, and then they pile handfuls of snow inside.

It takes hours of new snow-melt to excavate the car – but, at last, the thaw is complete. While the boy sets about dousing the fire in the wood, Grandfather bathes the frozen key in scalding water and turns it in the ignition. Like the Little Briar Rose being revived by a kiss, the car comes back to life.

It is another hour before they are stuttering back through the trees. The car is ailing as mama once was beneath them, but Grandfather doesn’t hear, or, if he does, he doesn’t care. They gutter around a turn in the trail and join the ribbon of black that snakes its way into town.

As the trees fade around them, the boy looks at Grandfather. Perhaps it is only the weariness in his eyes, but he thinks he sees heartache there, the same as the day mama disappeared.

‘Papa, what is it?’

‘It’s nothing, boy. You were right. You … have to go to school.’

‘It’s what mama would want.’

‘She always was wiser than her papa.’

‘Then what is it, papa? What’s wrong?’

Grandfather takes his eyes off the road; the car slews in ice and he wrests it back with birdlike arms.

‘It’s only … I don’t want to go back to the tenement, boy. It’s dead there. At least the forest’s alive. It grows. It changes.’

‘You never wanted to go to the forest, not until I made you.’

When Grandfather exhales, it might be a grin or it might be a grimace. ‘Might be I should never have made that promise to your mama. But, you see, I’ve seen it now, those old woodlands. Older than me. It’s only now it feels … right to be there.’

The boy thinks he understands. It is a kind of homesickness – because, no matter how long he lived in the tenement, it is the forest that Grandfather thinks of as home.

A strange thought erupts in him, one that must be given voice. ‘That little boy in the story, papa … the one in the war with the Winter King …’

‘Yes, boy?’

The boy loses his nerve. ‘It was only a story, wasn’t it?’

‘Well,’ says Grandfather, ‘there’s a little bit of truth in every fable.’

‘Even Baba Yaga eating little boys and girls?’

Grandfather pales, as white as the snow, and in that instant he really is the forest shade the boy thought sent to catch him. ‘Even that, boy,’ he whispers, dead words to kill the conversation.

Plague oaks and black pines hurtle past.

What Grandfather does when the boy is at school is a riddle he cannot solve. The boy watches the car stutter back along the road, and wonders at the yawning emptiness ahead. Turning to the schoolhouse, he thinks: we should have stayed in the forest. At least, then, papa had cattails to cook and kindling to muster. At least the trees are alive, not like the tenement walls. It must get very weary to be so very old.

It is daybreak and there are children milling in the schoolyard. He stands on the edge of them, shivering – for he has left his eiderdown in the car, and his clothes still cling to him, soaked in forest frost.

Yuri is already here, prowling the corners of the schoolyard with his head in the clouds. The boy means to go and play with him, but before he gets there the schoolyard starts flocking, up the steps and into the schoolhouse. Yuri has already gone through the doors by the time the boy gets there. He pauses, because to go through them now would be a very strange thing. He can see children milling beyond and the caretaker, a young man they say is as simple as the most insensible child, is moving his broom as if to sweep them on their way.

He steps through the doors, to a wave of dry heat, quite unlike Grandfather’s fires.

Almost instantly the caretaker’s eyes fall on him. ‘You can take off that hat.’

The boy goes to lift the bearskin from his head. Too late, he remembers the ice binding it to him. He pulls and the crystals tear at his skin.

‘Jesus, boy, what happened to your head?’

He lifts his fingers to trace the raised skin where he wore the halo. Occasionally his fingers find tiny outcrops of ice still sprouting from the blisters, but they perish and melt at his touch.

‘You little bastards don’t look after yourselves. What kind of mother sends her boy to class looking like that?’

With the bearskin hat still in his hands, he hurries down the corridor. It is only a small schoolhouse, with not even a single stair. The tiniest children are in two rooms around a bend in the hall, but everyone else is gathered in the three rooms that flank the corridor. In the middle is the library with its open walls, where you can go and choose a storybook or have injections when the nurse comes to visit. At the very end of the corridor, boys and girls are scrambling for pegs to hang their coats, and then cantering for the best seats in the assembly hall.

The boy is halfway along the corridor when Mr Navitski’s eyes fall on him. At first his brow furrows, eyebrows creeping up to meet the point of his black fur, but then his eyes soften and he has a look less like bewilderment, and more like … The boy knows this look well. It is a look of: your mama’s gone and you must be hungry.

As the rest of class scramble to sit cross-legged in the assembly hall, Mr Navitski picks a way through. ‘We all wondered when you’d be back.’

‘Am I late?’

‘No, you’re not late, but you are … Maybe you’d like to wash up before assembly?’

The boy peers through Mr Navitski’s legs, to see the headmistress already pontificating to the gathered school. ‘Will I be in trouble for missing it?’

‘No, you won’t be in trouble. Better you … Look, I’ll help.’

Mr Navitski doesn’t seem to want to take him by the hand, but takes him by the hand nonetheless. There is a little bathroom just by the assembly hall, and together they go in. The water in the taps will take forever to warm up, so Mr Navitski fills a sink with cold and lathers up a cake of hard soap.

‘How long have you been wearing this shirt?’

The boy shrugs, because something tells him he should not mention the forest.

‘We’ll find you a new one, from lost property.’

‘Can I keep this one?’

‘You mustn’t wear it to class, but we’ll keep it safe for you.’

Mr Navitski’s hand strays from the boy’s shirt to his hair, where he begins to tease out pieces of twig. When his hand brushes the blisters, the boy recoils. ‘What happened here?’

‘It was the ice.’

‘Ice?’

‘I was wearing my papa’s hat, and it iced to me.’

‘You’re in his tenement now, aren’t you? Doesn’t he have the heating turned up?’

This the boy knows not to answer.

‘When was the last time you had a proper meal?’

The boy remembers cattail mash, washed down with pine-needle tea. ‘It was last night.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘I have some leftovers my wife packed away for me. I’ll have them warmed through.’

After he has rinsed his face and hands and even his arms up to the elbows, Mr Navitski finds a brush and tugs the tangles out of his hair. By the time they are finished the assembly is over, and it is time for class.

‘You’ll have some catching up to do.’

‘I know.’

‘Come on, then. We’re learning about the war.’

‘The wars of winter?’

Uncertainly, Mr Navitski says, ‘Well, when the whole world was at war …’

‘Was it when the Winter King fought the King in the West? And there were some men who had to wear stars, and went into the forests and lived there and ate cattail roots and pine-needle tea, all so the soldiers didn’t catch them?’

A smile curls in the corner of Mr Navitski’s lips. ‘You mean the Bielskis, and people like them. They were Jewish partisans. They broke out of the ghettos and went into the wilderness, into the pushcha itself, and built a whole civilization there, and the Germans just couldn’t find them. There were Russian partisans too. They went into the pushcha and found ways to fight back. Oh,’ he beams – because some stories thrill grown men as much as little boys – ‘men were crawling all through the pushcha during the wars.’

‘When all the world was the Russias?’

‘Well, one might say that …’

‘And they might still be out there, even if they’re gone, because the trees drink them up and everything that ever died turns into trees, doesn’t it?’

This time, Mr Navitski hesitates before replying. He nods only vaguely, his brow creases again, and he shepherds the boy into class to join children who look at him differently, oddly – because, now that mama is gone, he is not really like them at all.

It turns out that the project is what our families did in the war. In turn, the boys and girls will tell about their own families, and what happened to them in that long-ago time. One girl tells how her Grandfather was a soldier and got put in a prison and had to spend the whole war there, learning ways to escape. Only, when he escaped, he found he was hundreds of miles from home and somehow had to get back. In those days there were no motor cars, and the trains were filled with wicked soldiers, so lots of people had to walk. Like those men in Grandfather’s story, they had to live wild in hedgerows and forests, and some of them looked like cavemen and others more beastly still.

Yuri’s project is a pile of crumpled notepaper and a map, like the one on his bedroom floor, which shows all the Russias and the countries along its side, places like Latvia and Lithuania, a big scribble called Ukraine and after that the tiny Belarus, coloured in with trees.

‘Aren’t you telling about your papa?’

‘No,’ scowls Yuri, scoring another tree into his map.

‘Why no?’

‘Because,’ he says, poking a pencil in Mr Navitski’s direction, ‘he said not to do my papa, because, in the war, the police were no good. But how can a police be no good? Police are there to help.’

Yuri lifts his map and cups it around his mouth. ‘I’m sorry about your mama.’

It is an incredible thing to hear. Such a little thing, but the boy’s lips start to tremble, his hands hot and slippery as a fever.

‘What’s it like, living with your papa?’

Any words the boy might have would come out like sobs, so he swallows them.

‘What did your papa do in the war?’

‘Is it the wars of winter?’ the boy finally says.

Yuri considers it. ‘I think so. In the pictures, it’s awfully cold.’

It is dark by end of day. Outside, mothers cluck around the gates and, as the boy ventures out, he feels Mr Navitski’s eyes boring into his back. He stops to watch, because even Yuri, with a sleeve encrusted in spittle and bits of dinner, has a mama to run to. In the gloom at the end of the schoolyard, Yuri’s mother scolds him, strikes him once around the ear and takes his hand to lead him away.

Grandfather is waiting on the other side of the road, prowling up and down by the car like a man in a cage. The boy takes flight, not stopping to look as he barrels over the road to find him.

‘Papa!’

Grandfather looks up. ‘I didn’t know when this all ends,’ he says, with what must be deep relief.

‘Have you been waiting?’

‘A little.’

‘I’m sorry, papa. Are you cold?’

He beams, ‘Well, they don’t let you build cookfires in the middle of the street, do they? Jump in. It’s getting dark.’

The boy’s eyes drift to the skies. Clouds have gathered, but a half moon still shines. ‘It’s dark already, papa.’

‘Not this,’ Grandfather grins. ‘I mean real dark. These people don’t know real dark, do they? But we do. Your papa and you know about real dark. Woodland dark.’

The boy slides up front, and the car complains bitterly as Grandfather rolls it into the traffic.

‘Where did you get that shirt?’

It is only now that he realizes he is still wearing the shirt Mr Navitski found for him.

‘I’m sorry, papa.’

‘Why sorry?’

Grandfather slows the car down to a halt, even though they are in the middle of a road, approaching an intersection where dark tenements huddle together.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t ever say sorry, boy.’

After that they drive in silence. The boy wants to ask: what did you do today, papa? Were you lonely on your own? Did you talk to Madam Yakavenka or go to the shop and talk to the woman at the counter? Did you get a bread from the bakery or are you filled up with cattail? But he says nothing. He wipes at the condensation forming on the windows with his sleeve, and tries to make out by streetlights where he might be, how close to home.

It is only when he wipes the window clear for a fifth time that he realizes they are leaving the town. The streetlights have grown infrequent, and in rags the trees grow more misshapen, not tamed by human hands like the ones that sprout from concrete along the city streets.

‘Aren’t we going back to the tenement, papa?’

‘But what’s at the tenement?’

‘Well, nothing …’

‘So why would we want to go back?’

This time, the way into the wild is familiar. They draw off from the main road, into the caverns of ice, and stutter on until they have reached the old resting spot.

‘Are you warm enough in that shirt?’

The boy shakes his head.

‘There’s the eiderdown just there. But I found you a coat. There’s a cellar, under your baba’s house. There’s a trapdoor outside, near the kitchen door.’

‘I have a coat at the tenement, papa. It’s the one mama got me.’

‘This one’s warmer.’

‘But it isn’t mine, is it?’

Grandfather stalks off, up and over the dead fire, loping like a hunchback into the trees.

‘It’s in the family,’ he says.

Before they reach the ruin, the boy can see smoke curling out of the chimneystack. He can see the chimneystack too, no longer a crumbled mound of bricks but now excavated and piled high, churning clouds out into the night with the same relentlessness as the factories through which they have come. From the top of the hill, he can smell the woodsmoke.

Grandfather leads him down the dell and stops to lift a simple latch on the wooden door, no longer slumped and smashed into place, but hanging – if awkwardly – from hinges once again. When he opens the door, winter tries to rush in, but waves from the hearthfire try to rush out. A battle is fought in the open doorway, and through that prickly frontier the boy and Grandfather go.

‘Papa,’ the boy begins, begging a smile, ‘what happened?’

Grandfather shrugs, as if to hide the smile that is flourishing in the corners of his lips. ‘I found some … bits and pieces. This old house, it remembers me, boy.’

In the living room there are rugs. They do not extend quite to the edges as a carpet might, but they are deep and soft under his feet, and run all the way to the hearth, where a fire surges and rolls. Ranged around the hearth are two armchairs with a little table between. All of the brambles that once clawed in to take back the house have been hacked and bundled up, and now hang on strings above the hearth, drying out for future kindling.

In the hearth sits the cast-iron pot, and in the cast-iron pot spits and crackles a bird. Cattail roots bob, white strands trailing like Baba Yaga’s hair, in the surface of the broiling snow-melt. Its smells lift, mingle with the woodsmoke, and reach out to tempt the boy.

He peers in the pot. ‘What is it, papa?’

‘It’s like a chicken.’

‘But what is it?’

‘A grouse.’

The boy looks again, breathing in deep aromas of wild grass and wet bark. ‘There are two birds here.’

‘One’s a starling.’

‘A starling?’

‘It’s been such a long time since I ate a starling. Shall we say goodnight to your mama, boy?’

The boy follows Grandfather through the kitchen. Here, too, everything has changed. One of the smashed windows is covered with boards, and all of the pots are stacked in piles. A bowl by the tin sink is filled with cattail roots and acorns and other roots the boy does not know, all of them ugly as unborn children. In another bowl sits a handful of nuts, and in another still dry, sprawling mushrooms that look as if someone has rolled and stretched them out.

‘Jew’s ears,’ says Grandfather, teasing one between thumb and forefinger.

‘Jew’s ears?’

‘Just don’t let your baba hear you call them that.’

Soaking up the heat of the hearthfire, the boy has forgotten how cold the winter night can get, and once outside he starts to shiver. Grandfather tells him to take a deep breath, they’ll only be a minute, and pads to the bottom of the garden. As he follows him, he looks back at the house. Grandfather has excavated the snow from the walls, and in the crater he can see the cellar trapdoor, hard wood and iron clasp.

‘See,’ says Grandfather, staring at the roots of mama’s tree. ‘I told you he’d be back. He’s done his schooling and now it’s time for dinner. I’m making him a bird. He won’t have tasted anything like it.’

While Grandfather is talking to whatever’s left of mama, the boy imagines her working her way up the roots, into the trunk of the tree. In the spring, perhaps there will be leaves, and in the way the veins of those leaves spread out and bring colour to the leaf, there will be an image of mama. In autumn the leaves will fall down and rot, and the tree will drink them up again, and that is how mama can live forever and always.

Back inside, it is time for dinner to be served up. Grandfather even has dishes, and into each he spoons some bird and heap of roots. The boy sees, now, that there are pine needles in the broth, and chestnuts too, collected under trees planted by some ancient forester as a gift to the future. In the bottom of his bowl he finds a Jew’s ear and turns it between his teeth. It is tough as the rubber bands Yuri chews on at school, but its juices run hot and thick down his chin.

‘How do you like your real food?’

It is not like the dinners mama might make, but it is every bit as good.

‘It’s been an age since I ate like this, boy.’

‘But when did you eat like this, papa?’

‘Why, when I was young.’

‘When were you young, papa?’

‘In the long ago.’

There was not such joy in Grandfather’s voice last night. There was not such sparkle in his eyes the night before. He wonders: what has changed? It must be the house that now looks so homely. It must be the woods out back and the snow that hugs them, the hearth with its proud cookfire, and the very trees themselves. Why would his papa refuse to come to the forests, when the forests make him so happy?

‘What did you do during the wars, papa?’

Grandfather sets his wooden spoon down. The juices of grouse and starling, whose rangy skeletons now sit picked clean on his plate, glisten in his whiskers. ‘Why would you ask such a thing?’

‘It’s … for school,’ he says, though in truth it is for everything else as well. ‘Was it like in the wars of winter? Mr Navitski says there really were people living wild in the woods … Maybe there really was a baby. Maybe there really was a little boy who helped rescue it from the forest. And maybe …’

Grandfather’s owlish eyes are on him.

‘… maybe it was baba, papa? Maybe it was this very same house?’

‘And what do you think?’

‘You told me there was a bit of the true in every story.’

‘Well,’ says Grandfather, ‘maybe you’d like another tale?’

The boy’s eyes turn up. ‘Yes, please, papa.’

There comes a sound from Grandfather’s belly. It is a sound that says: settle down, boy, for we’re safe and warm, while the world is white and wild, and this tale will be long in the telling.

This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening.

The boy’s mouth follows the familiar words, surging ahead even before Grandfather has finished them.

The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread. And now, he beams, 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, there was endless, endless war.

The wars of winter had raged for a hundred long years, and time and again, our little town had fallen, first to the Winter King, then to the King in the West, then to the Winter King again. But the King in the West was strongest, and soon the little town became his dominion once and for all. The soldiers of the Winter King were frightened, but they could never give up. Do you know where they went?