In the afternoon it is history. This means real stories of things that really happened, and when Mr Navitski explains that, one day, everything that happens in the world will be a history, it thrills the boy – because this means he himself might one day be the hero of a story. He looks at Yuri sitting at the next desk along and wonders: could Yuri be the hero of a story too? He is, he decides, more like the hero’s little brother, or the stable-hand who helps the hero onto his horse before he rides off into battle.
On the board, in crumbling white chalk, Mr Navitski writes down dates. ‘Who can tell me,’ he begins, ‘what country they were born in?’
Hands fly up. The boy ventures his too late, and isn’t asked, even though he’s known the answer all along. This kingdom of theirs is called Belarus.
‘And who can tell me,’ Mr Navitski goes on, ‘what country their mamas and papas were born in?’
More hands shoot up. Some cry out without being asked: Belarus! Because the answer is obvious, and the prize will go to whoever gets there most swiftly.
But Mr Navitski shakes his head. ‘Trick question!’ he beams. ‘This country wasn’t always Belarus, was it?’
Yuri shakes his head so fiercely it draws Mr Navitski’s eye. ‘What country was it, Yuri?’
Yuri can only shake his head again, admitting that he doesn’t know.
‘Well, Yuri’s half got it right. Because once, not so very long ago – though long ago might mean a different thing to you little things – Belarus wasn’t truly a country at all. In just a few short years, it was part of many other countries and had different names: Poland, Germany, a great, sprawling land called the Soviet Union. And before that it was part of the Russias. Who knows what the Russias are?’
Though Yuri throws his hand up, this time Mr Navitski knows not to ask.
‘It’s an empire,’ says the boy.
‘Well, half-right again … Russia was a nation, with emperors called tsars, and it stretched all the way from the farthest east to the forests where we live today. What’s special about those forests?’
Now there is silence, all across the class.
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he says. ‘Once, all of the world was covered in forests. But, slowly, over the years, those forests were driven back – by people just like us. They chopped them down to make timber, and burned them back to make farms. But this little corner of the world where we live is very special. Because half our country is covered in forests that have never been chopped or cut back. The oaks in those forests are hundreds of years old. They’ve grown wizened and wise. And those forests have seen it all: the Russias, and Poland, and Germany, emperors and kings and too many wars. Those trees would tell some stories, if only they could speak!
‘And the truly amazing thing about Belarus is that, no matter how many times an empire came and made us their own, no matter how many soldiers and armies tramped through this little country and carved it up … not once, in the whole of history, have those forests ever been conquered. Those forests will always be, and have always been, ruled by no man or beast. And that makes them the wildest, most free place on Earth …’
The boy looks down. Yuri has been desperately drawing trees on his piece of paper. In between, he scrawls words: wild … free … Belarus. He presses down hard, promptly breaks the tip of his pencil, and looks up with aggrieved eyes – but the boy just keeps on staring at the page.
At the end of the day, Grandfather is waiting. As the boy hurries to meet him, something settles in his stomach: a promise has been fulfilled.
‘Mama?’ he asks, before he even says hello.
‘She’s …’
The boy pulls back from Grandfather’s touch, shrinking at eyes that glimmer with such goodness.
‘… waiting for you,’ Grandfather goes on. ‘She made you her kapusta.’
To get back to the tenement, they have to take another bus. This time, it feels better to sit next to Grandfather, which is foolish because the difference is only a few short hours. Now he can ask Grandfather questions, and Grandfather will answer: how long have you lived in the tenement? How old are you, papa, and what was it like so long ago? And, most important of all, what kind of story will it be tonight, papa, when we have our story?
The tenement is filled with the smells of spice and smoked kielbasa, that rubbery sausage on whose tips the boy remembers suckling, like a piglet, when he was very small.
He leaves Grandfather at the door, where the old man bends to remove his black jackboots, and gambols through the steam to collide with mama in the kitchen. He is too strong, and mama flails back, catching herself on the countertop.
‘Easy, little man!’
She smothers him with kisses. When he pulls his arms from around her neck, he sees that she is wearing a kind of white handkerchief across her head. It gives her the air of a pirate, or a pilot downed in a desert.
‘What is it?’
‘I have a special job for you. But not until after dinner …’
‘Papa’s going to tell us a story.’
As he says it, Grandfather appears through the reefs of steam to join them in the kitchen.
‘After we eat,’ says mama. ‘Now, go and clean up!’
Dinner is the soup of kapusta with slices of sausage, thin and flavoursome on top, thick like porridge at the bottom. It is for chewing and slurping, all from the same bowl. After dinner, the boy is to help mama with the washing up, but Grandfather wrestles her out of the way, so instead he helps his papa instead. As they work, Grandfather seems in a haze, quite as thick as the steam that still envelops them. It is, the boy decides, the rhythm of the work, working a kind of enchantment.
When they are finished, he finds mama in the corner room with the gas fire burning. It is too warm in here, but he doesn’t say a thing.
‘Come here, little man.’
She is in the rocking chair where Grandfather sleeps, and on a pile of newspapers at her side is a pair of silver scissors, a comb, a glass of the burgundy juice that the hospital told her she has to drink.
‘I’ll need your help.’
She hands him the scissors, and unknots the handkerchief that has been hiding her head. The boy can see now, the patches where the locks have been left on the pillow. In places there is hardly any hair at all, in others a tract of downy fluff like a baby might have. From a certain angle, however, she is still the same mama, with her long blonde-grey locks framing her face.
She puts the scissors in his hands and lifts him onto her lap, which is a place he isn’t supposed to sit anymore, not since the last operation. Showing him how to hold them steady, she runs her fingers in her hair and takes the first strands between finger and thumb.
‘Just slide it on, and get as close as you can. See?’
The boy is tentative about making the first cut, but after that it gets easier. Blonde and grey rain down. Mama cuts his hair, and now the boy cuts hers too. As he takes the strands, Grandfather appears behind him, kneading his hands on a washing-up rag.
‘Vika …’
‘Shhhh, papa,’ whispers mama. ‘You’ll break his thinking.’
There is another chair by the fire, a simple wooden thing. Grandfather settles in it, obscuring the pitiful blue flames.
‘What about our story, papa?’
Grandfather says, ‘A story, is it?’
Though he is concentrating on cutting the next lock, the boy sees his mama give Grandfather a questing look.
‘What kind of a story would you like?’ asks mama.
The boy pauses, too lost in thought to see the scratches he has lain into the papery skin of mama’s scalp, too spoilt to see the way he has beaten back what is left of her hair like a forester managing a fire.
‘One of the old stories, papa,’ says mama. ‘Like you used to tell me.’
This pleases the boy. The scissors dangle.
‘Vika, I don’t tell such stories.’
‘Please, papa. For your little boy.’
There
is a pained look in Grandfather’s eyes, though what can be so painful about a simple story the boy cannot tell.
‘There are other stories.’
‘I used to like the woodland tales. Some of them, they’re not so very gruesome, are they?’
Mama draws back from the boy, letting him stop his cutting.
‘Your papa used to have so many stories. Of heroes getting their swords and their stirrups, back when all of the world was wild. He’d tell them to your mama when she was just a little girl. Until … you stopped telling those stories, didn’t you?’
‘Peasant stories,’ whispers Grandfather.
The boy beams, ‘I’d like a peasant story, papa.’
Grandfather looks like a man trapped. His wonderful blue eyes dart, but there is no escape from the boy’s smile and mama’s eyes.
‘Go on, papa. It’s only a tale.’
Seemingly in spite of himself, Grandfather nods.
When he speaks, his voice has an old, feathery texture that must work a magic on mama, because she softens under the boy, and when he looks she is beaming. The boy nestles down, half his work not yet done, and listens.
This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.
His eyes look past the boy, at mama. Silently, she implores him to go on.
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, there lived a peasant with his wife and they had twins alike as the snow – a son and a daughter.
Now, it happened that the wife died of frost and the papa mourned sincere for a very long time. One year passed of crying, and two years, and three years more, and the papa decided: I must find a new mother for my boy and my girl. And so he married again, and had children by his second wife.
But a stepmother can think of old children like thistles in the wheat, and it happened that she became envious of the boy and the girl and used them harshly. They were beaten like donkeys and she gave them scarcely enough to eat. So it went until one day she wondered: what would life be like were I to be rid of them forever?
Grandfather pauses, with the simpering gas fire fluttering behind.
Do you know what it is to let a wicked thought enter that heart? he says, with sing-song voice and a single finger pointing to the boy’s breast. That thought can take hold and poison even the very good things in you. So it was for the stepmother. So she brought the boy and the girl to her and one day said: here is a basket, you must fill it with fruits and take it to my Grandma in the woods. There, she lives in a hut on hen’s feet.
So, the boy and girl set out. They found nuts and berries along the way and, with their flaking leather knapsack filled with wild, wild fare, they entered the darkest wood.
There is a look shimmering in Grandfather’s eyes that the boy can only describe as wonder. There are forests banking all edges of the city, rolling on into wilderness kingdoms of which the boy has only ever heard tell: the place called Poland, the northern realm of Latvia – and, in the east, the Russias, which once were the whole world.
On they went, the boy and the girl, and at once they found the hut with hen’s feet. It was a most lamentable thing, and on its head was a rooster’s ruff, with dark sad eyes. Izboushka! they cried. Izboushka! Turn your back to the forest and your front to us! The hen feet shuffled, the hut did as they commanded, and there in the little thatch door stood a witch woman, Baba Yaga, who was truly not a Grandma at all. The children were afraid, but they held to each other as children do, and said: our stepmother sends us to help you, Grandma, and we have brought fruit from our journey. And Baba Yaga, who was as old as the forest and older than that, said: well, I have had children before and I shall have children again, and if you work well I shall reward you, and if you do not I shall eat you up.
The boy watches as Grandfather says the final words. His throat constricts, and for an instant it seems that he has to choke them out.
That night, the boy and the girl were set to weaving in the dark of the hen feet hut. And as they wove, the boy cried: we shall be eaten. And as they wove, the girl said: we shall only be eaten if we do not work hard. If we work hard, we shall be rewarded. But a voice halloed them in the dark, and the voice came from a knot in the wall, for in the wall were the skulls of creatures of the forest, and one of those skulls was the skull of a little boy.
Ho, said the skull, but you are mistaken. Your reward will be to be eaten, because for Baba Yaga to be eaten is a great reward. Heed me, for I was once a boy who got lost in the woods and toiled in Baba Yaga’s hut.
But what can we do, asked the girl, but work hard and be rewarded?
You must run, said the skull, and take this ribbon. Be kind to the trees of the forest, for they will help if they can.
Well, the boy and the girl waited until dead of night, when Baba Yaga was abroad. And though the girl wanted to run, the boy was too afraid. So the girl said: I will run and find our papa and we will come back to help. And she ran.
But Baba Yaga knew a spiteful pine and the pine’s branches whispered to its needles who whispered to a crow who brought Baba Yaga down. And Baba Yaga gave chase on her broom. At once, the girl remembered the skull’s words. Be kind to the forest, and the forest will be kind to you. So she took the ribbon and tied it to a birch. And the birch was so filled with goodness that the trees of the forest, all but the spiteful pine, grew tangled and would not let Baba Yaga pass.
So the girl found her papa and told him what had come to pass, and the papa took his axe into the forest, but because the forest was kind it let him pass. And at last they came to Baba Yaga’s hut, but of the boy there was no sign. Now there was only another skull in the wall of the hen’s feet hut, one to sit next to the other little boy. For the boy had been eaten up and now was part of Baba Yaga forever and more.
And from that day until this, two boys can be heard talking at night in the dead of the forest.
‘Is it true?’ marvels the boy.
Oh, says Grandfather. I know it is true, for one was there who told me of it.
The boy beams. It is the way a story is always signed off, a thing he has heard every time mama tells him a story. He looks around, to see if mama has loved the story as much as him, but he sees, instead, that her face is webbed in strange patterns, that her eyes are sore and red, that some monster has hacked away at her beautiful hair to leave her scarred, ugly, naked as Grandfather’s pate.
‘Come on, boy,’ says Grandfather, lumbering to his feet. ‘I’ll make you a hot milk.’
Grandfather’s hands find his shoulders, try to drag him from mama’s knee. All around him, locks of blonde and grey shower down. His little hands reach out to catch them, but they slip away.
‘It’s okay,’ says mama, ‘I’ll finish it. Don’t cry, now.’
In the kitchen, the boy frets over a pan of milk that won’t stop scalding. He can hear Grandfather and mama, and mama has lost all of her words. Then he hears the footsteps and closing of a door that tells him mama has gone to her bedroom.
Grandfather finds him wrestling with the pan, and gently sets it down. ‘She wants to see you.’
A fist forces its way up the boy’s throat. Though they have been with Grandfather only weeks, it is a law as old as time itself, one of the rules whipped up when the world was young, the forests were just tiny green shoots, and Baba Yaga only a babe: you must not go through mama’s bedroom door, not after bedtime.
Grandfather ushers him down the hall and leaves him at the door.
At first, the boy does not want to go through. His hand dances on the handle and he is about to turn away, crawl into his bunk.
Then mama’s voice itself summons him through. ‘Don’t be afraid. It was only a few little tears.’
It is a small room, with a bed with
red patchwork and a cabinet with a lamp. On one wall there is a dresser, and around that more photographs of the kind he has seen in the hallway. In these photographs there are no soldiers, nor men in jackboots with rifles on their shoulders, but only the same woman, over and over again. It is, the boy knows, his own baba, who once was married to Grandfather.
Mama is on the bed but not in the covers. She has a shawl on her shoulders, the same one in which she used to wrap the boy when he was but small, and the knotted handkerchief is back on her head. Even so, it cannot disguise the fact that somebody has shorn off the last of her locks.
The boy hovers in the open door.
‘Why were you crying, mama?’
Mama makes room for him on the bed. At first, he is uncertain; the room is a storm of different smells, alien even to the rest of the tenement. Only when he sees the pained expression on mama’s face does he hurry over and scramble onto the covers. She folds an arm around him and he is surprised to find that she feels the same, even though she looks so different.
‘It was only the story,’ she says. ‘Papa used to tell me all kinds of stories when I was a girl. Stories of the woodland and the wild, the kind of stories he’d heard from his papa, and his papa before him. Then, one day, when your mama wasn’t so very much older than you, he stopped telling those stories. He wouldn’t take us to the forest anymore. He wouldn’t talk about the wolves and the stags, and I never knew why. I used to love hearing about my papa’s time in the wilds, but from that day on he barely left the city. It was … nice to hear him that way again. That’s all.’
The boy isn’t certain he understands, but to say as much would be to betray mama, so he only nods. ‘Papa has lots of stories of the forests, doesn’t he?’
‘They’re all there, waiting, still inside him.’
‘Do you think he’ll tell me them, mama?’
‘I hope so. But your papa, he’s a … very old man, little thing. There are some stories he doesn’t want to tell. Some he shouldn’t …’
Mama means to go on, but there come footsteps from beyond the door. They hover, and they turn, and they click – as if Grandfather has put his old jackboots back on and is meandering up and down the hall. Mama waits for him to drift away once more.
Gingerbread Page 2
