Grandfather reclines, with a bed of reeds for a pillow.
‘What about this?’ the boy says, lifting the knapsack. ‘Maybe this has a story, papa? Maybe you can tell me how you got it …’
He has been wondering on it since the night he brought it into the ruin. Every photograph must have a story, and every trinket too. He fingers the foreign lettering and wonders what journeys it must have been on.
Grandfather surveys him, with just one eye. ‘No, boy,’ he utters. ‘That comes later, with winter’s return.’
As if driven by the boy’s question, Grandfather gives up his bed in the reeds and stands. Without further word, he turns, tramping through the long grass until he reaches the shallow rise where the trees begin.
‘Papa, where are you …’
Grandfather waves back, forcing the boy down. ‘Rest, boy. I’ll be back soon. I have to …’
He does not finish the sentence, at least not before he levers himself over the ridge and back beneath the branches. The boy tells himself he will be back soon, that he is just going to make toilet, but as he arranges the reeds to make a pillow for himself, he feels the gnawing ache which means: you are lying, even to yourself. Grandfather has been roaming more and more, ever since the snows were banished and went east, into that land of Perpetual Winter, to terrorize that frozen city called Gulag. Some nights, the boy has woken in the ruin and not seen his papa until long after dawn. Tonight, it might be he is hunting, or foraging, but when the boy creeps after him, following the jackboot heels, he knows it is neither of those things. Grandfather is simply stalking amongst the trees, telling tales to them instead of the boy.
Back by the fire, he lays his head in the reeds. If Grandfather needs the trees, then Grandfather should have them. It is, he knows, exactly what he promised mama.
‘Wake up.’ The voice pulls at him, lifts him up, sets him on its knee and runs its fingers through his hair. He is at home – not the tenement, but that place he shared with only his mama, the place near school where he sat on the window ledge and watched the bigger boys traipsing to their classes, and wondered what it would be like when he too was old enough to march through the schoolhouse gates.
‘Are you there, little one? Are you listening?’
He bounces on her knee. ‘I’m listening, mama. I always listen. I’m a …’
‘You’re my best boy.’
‘I love you, don’t I, mama?’
‘I know you do, little one. And I love you too. And … you love your papa, don’t you?’
The boy knows what he must say, knows that he actually feels it too … but why, then, does he hesitate before saying it? ‘Of course I do, mama.’
‘Then listen to me and remember. He needs to know it, and he needs to know it now. Tell him.’
‘Why, mama?’
‘Promise me.’
The boy looks up. Mama’s face is furry around its edges; he can see eyes, a nose, the line of her jaw out of the corner of his eyes, but every time he fixes on them they slip away, blurred and indistinct.
‘I promise,’ he whispers.
‘And you must promise me one more thing.’
‘What is it, mama?’
‘Wake up, little one.’
‘But I don’t …’
‘Wake up now. He’s coming out of the woods.’
A great jolt, and he is awake. His head lolls back, and through the indistinct dark he sees a figure emerge from the forest. For a moment it hangs there, something the forest has remembered and conjured up, but then it lumbers forth. The ghost walks with a familiar lope. Its arms dangle, swinging back and forth. Its jackboots click.
Smoke still curls from the fire. He waves his hands to part it, but the smoke must get in his eyes, for they start to water. By the time he has kneaded the stinging away, the ghost is upon him. It sinks down and, with arms like branches, bears him up, over the fire. The glow still left in the embers lights them from below and in those oranges and reds he sees his papa’s face.
‘Papa, you’re back!’
‘How long have I been gone?’
‘I don’t know, papa. I was sleeping.’
He looks for a sign of the sun’s first light on the horizon across the marshlands, but dawn must still be very far away; the moon, a phantom, hangs over distant aspens.
‘Were you hunting?’
Grandfather mutters a no, and takes a great stride, over the fire to where the first bulrushes grow. His legs force them apart, jackboots sinking into soft moss and earth.
In his arms, the boy sways. He feels as if he is caught in the branches of some toppling tree, a mad axe-man underneath. Grandfather takes another stride, and the boy feels the tops of the reeds tickling his skin.
‘Where are we going, papa?’
‘I think it’s over there,’ Grandfather whispers. ‘On the other side.’
‘All the way over?’
‘All the way.’
‘What is, papa?’
‘The place I camped, when I first came home. An abandoned town, right there in the trees. Just like the camps I’d been in, but everyone gone. I thought: I could live in a camp like that, if everyone was gone. Just me and the trees. No other prisoners. No wardens. No wolves. Just aspen and birch. Not even a babe in the woods …’
There is a growl in Grandfather’s voice, but the last words untie the knot forming in the boy’s throat, because it means it is only a fable.
He clings to the old man’s shoulders. ‘Is it a story, papa?’
‘No, boy,’ utters Grandfather. ‘It isn’t a bastard bedtime story.’
He buries his head in Grandfather’s shoulder, chokes the water coming back to his eyes. It cannot be smoke from the fire, because they have gone some distance now, and he can hear Grandfather’s boots stirring up marsh water, the suck and pull as he lifts every step. He must be crying, then, but Grandfather must not know. Tears would upset him, and he has promised never to upset him.
Onwards, they walk.
At times the waters reach his papa’s waist and seem to tug at his legs, but always the boy is held high, above the stagnation. At other times the waters reach only to his papa’s ankles or knees, and the reeds grow so tall that neither man nor boy can see the moonlit horizon. An hour passes, and they reach a rise of land whose shores the waters do not touch. Here, there is no dead wood to conjure a fire, but Grandfather coaxes one out of scraps of nest and grass. Out of the nest come three brown speckled eggs, and Grandfather opens them in the flames. In one is a tiny bird, curled up and bald; its flesh glistens and turns gold, perfect for his papa to swallow whole.
Once sated, they move on, the boy flung high on Grandfather’s shoulder, dangling there so that he can see the old shore receding. A tiny point of light marks the place where their campfire gutters out.
On this side of the island, the air is heavy with marshland smells. Grandfather seems to be nosing his way, more like an animal of the forest than a man from the city. But, the boy thinks, he has been more like that animal every day since mama died. The hunting and foraging. The roaming in the woodland. That day when the family wandered in the trees and, like a startled fox, the old man dared not go near. In his heart, he knows it is the way Grandfather looks after him – for how else to survive in the wilderness without feasting on the flesh of some other woodland creature? – but sometimes there is a clarity in the old man’s eyes that betrays a darker ideal. What if, the boy wonders, Grandfather cannot leave the forest, not because the trees throw up walls of thorn to bar his passing, but because he loves it?
Soon, the ground does not pull so heavily at Grandfather’s boots, and the reeds do not seem to grow nearly so tall. The boy feels the rush of air beneath him and, in great strides Grandfather – weightless after so long wading in the mire – bears him to the forest floor once again.
In the roots of a tall aspen his papa lays him down, but it is a long time before he wants to open his eyes. The ground is hard underneath him and, when he does pee
p back into the world, he understands that the earth itself is an unending lattice of roots, that the aspens around him are part of one singular tree whose roots have given birth to a forest of different trunks. All of the trees are the same, tall and straight, and there is moonlight enough tumbling through their branches to dapple the earth on which they stand.
Grandfather stalks off, jackboots clicking on the carpet of roots, returning with the axe in his hand and a bundle of kindling under one arm. Finding the place for a fire is difficult, for there is always a danger that the roots themselves will take flame, so he follows his papa deeper into the forest. The air in the aspens has a sweetness that offsets the stagnation of the marshes, and soon they find a brook whose waters run clear. When the boy drops his head to drink, he startles a hare in the undergrowth on the opposite bank. The hare takes flight, leaps once into the air, and then drops dead. Hardly able to understand, the boy looks over his shoulder to see Grandfather with a tiny stone in his hand, another just released to fell the running creature.
‘I’ll show you how later,’ he says. ‘Go and fetch him and we’ll cook him up.’
The boy crosses the brook, feeling the cold water gurgling through his toes, and climbs up the other bank to push through budding bracken.
On the other side of the ferns he stops, looks back between the fronds. His papa is working in a circle, collecting fallen catkins for tinder. He has his head down, and moves so slowly, so deliberately, that he seems to fade into the trees. If the boy squints, his papa is gone, gone to the forest.
He shakes the sad feeling away, tramps on to lift the dead hare. Hare is tougher than rabbit, but this one was young; its flesh will be tender, its greases clear.
He is so focused on looking into the dead hare’s eyes that he does not, at first, notice the barrows in the trees. Only when he drops the dead hare to his side to carry it back to Grandfather does he see them, a succession of strange mounds in the spaces between the trunks. The barrows are tall, their peaks almost as tall as the tip of his head and, upon their crests, strings of saplings rise. Other mounds are naked, save for the roots of the aspens around. Those roots have snaked their way up the sides of each mound, coiled together at their peaks, and in that way encased the earth below in a tangled vine shell.
‘Papa!’
There comes a rustling, the click of jackboot heels on roots hard as city streets. The fronds scissor and come apart, and through them lopes Grandfather.
‘Did you fetch him, boy?’
‘But look, papa …’
Grandfather steps to the boy’s side. For the first time, the boy sees flowers growing up the sides of the barrows, white and blue diamonds in the corners where roots are not strangling the surface.
‘Are they graves, papa?’
Grandfather says nothing, steps closer instead.
‘Why did you bring me here, papa? I don’t like it here …’
He lets the dead hare drop and sits down with the bracken as his nest. As his papa picks a path between the first strange mounds, he finds himself reaching out again for the dead thing. He puts it in his lap and pets its ears so that they lie pinned back to its body. Every time his fingers run off, the ears spring back up, so he pets them harder, and harder, and harder.
‘They’re not graves, boy.’
The words startle him back to the present, and he lets the dead hare go limp in his lap. The old man is three banks into the barrows, standing halfway up a mound. The slopes of each are steep, but the roots snaking up their sides give plentiful footholes, and into these Grandfather’s jackboots slip.
‘What are they, papa?’
‘It’s houses, boy.’
‘Houses?’
‘This was where they lived.’
‘Who?’
‘Partisans.’
‘Is it a story?’
‘The woods have taken them back, boy, but they dug their houses in the forest floor, and lifted walls and built up roofs of timber and earth …’
‘How do you know?’
At once, Grandfather rises, almost to the very top of the mound. His jackboots hover over the peak, but then softly come to rest, again, two steps down. ‘Well, boy, I’ll tell you how I know …’
This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.
The boy clings to the dead hare. On the mound, Grandfather’s body moves, as if in a dance.
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, a poor man escaped from the land of Perpetual Winter, and left behind the cruelties of that frozen city called Gulag.
Well, the man was far from home and he had many adventures, on his way back to his babe in the woods. And at last he came to those forests near his home. And he thought: these are the same forests that gave birth to my darling, for it is in these briars and hawthorn that she first came into the world. These forests looked after her people. Perhaps she is somewhere here, still, and, if she has not been enslaved by some great Russian bear, she may yet be my wife …
‘Wait!’ says the boy, his fingers still teasing the cadaverous hare.
‘What is it, boy?’
‘This isn’t the tale.’
‘Not the tale?’
‘In our tale, the man only just went to Perpetual Winter.’
‘So?’
‘So you’ve missed out the adventures. What was it like in the frozen city of Gulag, papa? How did he escape? How did he get home?’
Grandfather’s eyes darken. He stops his dance. The boy isn’t certain but he thinks he hears, beneath the jackboot heels, another clicking, as of firewood drying and popping over the hearth.
‘Those tales are not for the telling,’ says the old man.
Before the boy can argue, his voice slips into that strange, feathery tone and he continues.
Well, the man came through the woods and, all at once, he came upon a marsh. And he said: there were not marshes in the forests I remember. Perhaps, if I cross this marsh, I will see trees I know and trees who know me. Then the trees will remember and help me on my way, for the trees have been kindest to me, in all my voyages through Perpetual Winter. It was the trees themselves who helped me escape that frozen city of Gulag. I would rather a tree for a friend than any person in the world, except of course my babe in the woods.
Well, the man crossed the marshes, but soon a terrible rainstorm came. And the man thought: would that I had stayed in the woods, for the woods would have sheltered me from this storm. And, with that thought in mind, he made for the nearest bank, which was two miles clear from the marshland in which he waded.
When he got there, he was cold and wet, but the cold and wet did not make fear in this man, for he had been through Perpetual Winter. He had learned the magicks to start fire from wet wood, and set about building a camp to warm him in the Long Night. And he was happy, again, to be under aspen and birch.
Well, when he lit the fire, he found he was in the woods and yet not in the woods, for in the woods a town had been built out of timber and earth. And it had houses and wells and larders and pens for keeping pigs. And, though almost all of the houses were empty, there he found an old man and his pig.
Ho, said the runaway.
Ho, said the old man, and Ho! said his pig. Name yourself, stranger.
I will not name myself, for too long I have had no name. I come from the east, from that land called Perpetual Winter, where stirs the great frozen city called Gulag. I am on my way home to my babe in the woods.
You have come to my town, and I am the only one left, for they say the wars are finished and men can go home.
But if the wars are finished and men can go home, why do you stay in the woods?
I stay because I have lived too long under aspen and birch. Since the
wars began I have lived here, to hide from the King in the West, and though they say he is dead, the forests are my home and the trees my companions. And, when the time comes that I too shall die, I will take off my shirt and take off my shoes and walk into wilder forests yet. There the trees will drink of my dead body and my friend the oak shall wear my face for all time to come.
Well, the runaway thought about what the Old Man of the Forest said. And day turned into night many times before he had his answer. For he too had lived a long time in forests just like this, and like the Old Man of the Forest, he too thought the trees his friends.
I have thought, old man, about what you said, and I too would make my home forever under aspen and birch. But I left a woman waiting, and if she still waits for me, in that little house on yonder side of these forests, I must go to her and make her my wife. I must forget about forests and stop living wild, for, once upon a time, I was a kind human being and I can be a human again.
Then go! said the Old Man of the Forest. Because, if you do not want the woodland, the woodland does not want you.
All at once, the Old Man of the Forest shed his skin. And his face peeled back and his hands grew claws, and his eyes grew dark, and as his skin flayed off there arose a great mane of fur. And he sank to his haunches and, now, he revealed himself a wolf. And it might have been that he was about to sink his teeth into the runaway, but instead he sunk his teeth into the pig and, with snout slathered in blood, turned tail and went to the wild.
I am no fell beast, thought the runaway, but I am still wild. If I stay in the forest much longer, I too will be the wolf. Needs must I leave.
So the runaway crossed the marshes and found trees he remembered. And the trees sang to him and their branches pointed the way. And that was how he became human again. That was how he found his babe in the woods.
The boy stands, palming the dead hare to the ground. As he advances, the barrows look different, almost inviting. Up ahead, his papa lifts a foot and inches closer to the top of the mound. Under his jackboots the roots complain, groaning like ancient floorboards.
‘Is it true, papa?’
Gingerbread Page 14
