And yet, his thoughts keep drifting back to the little girl. ‘What would you think, papa, if I went to play at baba’s house?’
The old man eyes him, poking more deer into his jaws. ‘It isn’t baba’s house anymore. They have the house, but we have the forest.’
Before sleep, there is more meat than the boy can remember, more meat than he can keep down. It is rich and red and tastes of the woodland, and his papa explains: you must eat it with the blood still pink, because then it will nourish you, for the goodness does not drip away like fat and sizzle in the cookfire. The boy takes as much of it as he can and crawls into the gingerbread house at once sated and sick.
Somewhere, out there, fox and lynx dine on what is left of the carcass, and a thousand other woodland beasts are summoned from far and wide.
Come morning, the fire dances high and his papa is gone. His trail, that one deep trench that follows wherever he goes, disappears in the direction of last night’s pines.
The boy is warming himself on half-cooked broth when he sees three little mounds of snow on the far side of the fire. On the peak of each sits a bundle. He cannot see properly through rising smoke, so he sets the crushed tin can down and skirts the fire. And there, nestled in blankets of tissue now frozen solid with frost, sit three biscuit babies the same as the one in the gingerbread house.
He rushes forward, reins himself down, approaches cautiously. The biscuit babies have different decorations, different nightcaps and pyjamas. One is missing its raisin eye. Another has a mouth open in surprise, made from a sugared cherry. At first, the boy does not dare pick them up. He has himself set snares like this, only – instead of using gingerbread babies – for him it is bits of squirrel, or the heart of a stoat, anything to tempt a famished fox into the trap. He circles at a distance, feeling the sugar and encrusted honey calling out to him.
‘Well, are you just going to stare?’
He reels around, searching every thicket of shrinking bracken. The morning light is wan, and the smoke in the camp obscures his vision – but there, standing between the three beds of snow, is Elenya. The dog Mishka hovers at her side, collar ruffed up against the cold.
‘Well, aren’t you going to say thank you?’
It takes the boy a moment to process what is going on. His shock turns to shame: that, somehow, Elenya has found the gingerbread house; that, somehow, she has crept upon him just as ably as he could creep upon her. This girl is not supposed to know about tracking. He scrabbles around, but there is no hiding the campfire, the house of branches and snow built up against the oak.
‘Well, you could talk the other day! I don’t see why you’d pretend not to talk now.’
The boy utters, ‘I’m not pretending.’
‘Then I think you should say thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘I brought you more, didn’t I?’
‘More?’
‘More gingerbread babies. My mother bakes them, but I can’t bear to eat them. They’re too precious.’
Mishka shuffles forward, snout pushed out to smell the biscuits.
‘Is this it, then? This is where you live?’
The boy fancies he can hear the snap of a branch underfoot, the soft thump of a deadweight foot.
‘You can’t be here!’ he whispers, his voice somehow filling the forest.
‘I knew you lived near, but I hardly thought it would be like this! What are you, some sort of wolf-boy?’
‘A wolf-boy?’
‘A boy raised by wolves. I heard they had one in Russia.’
‘But this isn’t Russia.’
‘Russia isn’t so bad. My daddy took me once, when he was thinking about moving. They have forests there like you wouldn’t believe. My daddy’s a woodsman.’
‘A woodsman?’
‘He does logging. Chopping down woods. I wish he’d hurry up and chop down this one. Then we wouldn’t have to live here …’
She is at the door of the gingerbread house now, reaching out to part the pine branches and sneak a look within.
In three simple bounds, the boy barrels over the campsite, throws himself between Elenya and the branches. ‘You’ve got to go!’
For a reason the boy cannot fathom, Elenya has a delighted grin upon her face. One of her pigtails drops out of her hood and she flicks it away. ‘Go? But I’ve only just come!’
‘My papa’s going to …’
‘Don’t you want to play?’
‘But if my papa …’
Elenya seizes her chance and shoots through the pine branches, into the gingerbread house. For a moment, the boy feels trapped, even though it is he who is without. Then, because there is nothing else to do, he follows her in. Mishka comes soon after, forcing her snout between the branches of the pine.
Inside, Elenya stands in the middle of the roots that make up the floor. In one corner lies the pile of soft branches that make up his bed – and, above that, a ledge for the biscuit baby.
Elenya beams. ‘So, you couldn’t bear to eat him either!’ She lifts the baby down, cups it in her hands. ‘What shall we do with him?’
‘Please,’ the boy whispers, ‘you’ve got to …’
‘I know! We’ll make a guillotine and off with his head!’
The girl sweeps around, as if to leave the den. It is only as she hovers on the threshold that she stops and takes in where she is standing. ‘Do you really live here?’
The boy seizes his chance. ‘I don’t live here. It’s … a den. A secret place.’
‘You do so live here. I can see your bed.’
‘It’s a hideaway.’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘I have a proper house. I do. And a mama and …’
Shaking her head, Elenya goes back through the pines. The boy, boxed in by Mishka, cannot follow. He tries to squirm past, but the dog’s tail begins to beat, and she nudges him with her muzzle, expecting a game. By the time he has forced his way past, Elenya is already gone. He can hear her footfall, but in the whole world there is nothing else.
He emerges, squinting, into soft winter light. His head is low, but he sees her absurd pink boots standing at the edge of the fire. Something has made her stop dead, but all the boy can see is the wavering of the flames. Somehow they burn more vividly than only moments ago.
Between the girl’s feet, something shines. It is the head of the axe, glimmering with snow-melt. The handle stands up proudly, as if tempting her to take it.
His eyes track up, to see her eyes wide open. He thinks she must be staring at the axe, the perfect guillotine for her gingerbread man, but instead she is staring over the fire. He follows her gaze. Through the flames, he looks more haggard than he should – but there is his papa, hunkered down like a witch over her cauldron, half-propped up on his staff, hair stained in greys by the smoke curling out of the pot.
‘Papa …’
On the other side of the fire, the old man looks up. There is a flicker of recognition, and then the bark of his face softens; his eyes light up. ‘Who is she, boy?’
He hasn’t even looked at her. He drags himself around the fire, until his face emerges from the parting smoke.
‘It’s the little girl, papa. From baba’s house.’
Elenya turns, her pink boots ringing off the axe’s blade. ‘Baba’s house?’ she breathes.
‘Elenya,’ the boy ventures. ‘This is my papa.’
‘But that’s just the wild man from the woods! The one who hunted that deer! You … made me follow him!’
The boy stammers, ‘I didn’t make you.’
‘And he was telling that horrible story. Why didn’t you tell?’
‘It’s … only my papa. He’s … brought me camping.’
It is difficult for Elenya to tear her eyes from this wild man, but she tears them back to the gingerbread house. ‘That was a rotten trick,’ she says, and summons Mishka near.
The way his Grandfather holds himself, Elenya is almost as tall. The old man comes
forward a few more paces; he seems so shrunken inside his greatcoat, like a tree stunted in a storm. ‘You shouldn’t be here, girl.’
Still, he does not look at her. He falls, instead, to the fire, sprinkling stripped bark into its heart, kicking up more stones to keep it hemmed in. Then his fingers are in the folds of his clothes. He produces dead things: a tiny songbird, a frozen shrew. He has handfuls of acorns, and the webbing of his fingers is stained with the juice of wild berries.
Elenya darts a look at the boy. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
His papa utters, ‘Tell her, boy.’
‘Please, Elenya. You have to go.’
Before Elenya can reply, the old man’s voice rises up. ‘You shouldn’t go wandering in wilds you don’t know. They have a way about them, don’t they, boy?’
Shamefaced, the boy nods.
‘They’ll turn you round and twist you up. Then you’ll never find your way back home.’ For the first time, the old man looks directly at her. ‘Didn’t your mama and papa ever tell you not to stray from the track?’
‘I can find my way home perfectly well! Mishka will show me.’
A smile plays in the creases of the old man’s face. ‘That dog couldn’t tell where it was without street signs to show it.’
‘Well, I have a trail.’
‘Breadcrumbs?’
‘Yellow snow … Mishka’s been marking her scent.’
The old man’s head revolves, to stare through the canopy. ‘Then you’d best run back to your mama. When this one breaks, it’ll cloak us all. You wouldn’t think you were so clever in the winter wilds at night, girl.’
For the first time, it seems as if Elenya has no response. Her gaze turns back to the boy. ‘Well, maybe I will go home.’
‘Elenya, I …’
Elenya sweeps across the campsite and snatches up the biscuit babies still perched on their mounds. She is almost at the line of the trees when Mishka springs up to follow, showering snow from her hind paws onto the cookfire. Behind it, the old man mutters some half-oath, and stoops to build it back up.
‘Elenya,’ the boy begins, ‘I’ll show the way.’
The boy is halfway across the clearing when Elenya looks back.
‘I know the way. It isn’t just wolf-boys who can live in the woods.’
‘I told you! I don’t live in the woods!’
‘I found my way here, little wolf-boy.’
She steps into the snow dark under the branches; only a few steps and she is almost invisible.
‘You’ll get lost!’
The boy scurries to the tree line, but before he can go under the branches, his papa barks out. ‘Let her go.’
‘But, papa,’ he says, swinging back round, eyes big and pleading beneath brows sparkling in frost. ‘She’ll get lost.’
‘She should have thought of that, before she went wandering in the wild.’
‘I want to go for her, papa.’
He did not mean it to sound so defiant. He did not mean it to propel his papa up and over the clearing. The boy freezes. He thinks his papa is going to barrel past him, or else snatch him up like he used to in the days of the tenement, but instead he heaves himself into position and drops down in front, sending the staff spinning as he falls. Now he must use the boy’s shoulders to keep balance. His twig-like fingers are brittle and clasp the boy tight.
‘She isn’t for you to think about. She isn’t for you to worry. Out here, you have to look after yourself.’
‘And each other,’ the boy whispers.
‘Each other.’
He says, ‘But papa, she came here to find me.’
‘And how did she come?’
‘Maybe she followed.’
‘Might be you left her a trail?’
The boy thinks: all she’d have to do is find the furrow left by your dead leg. But he doesn’t say it. He simply shakes his head.
He does not know why he cares. He knows he should not. He knows the world is his papa and only his papa. It has been that way ever since mama died. But seeing her try to build fires, holding her babies of biscuit, watching the dog Mishka trotting at her side: these are the things of which his last days have been built. He wants to go to baba’s house and knock on the door and ask her if she might want to play. He wants to creep up to her bedroom window and hold his Russian horse. He wants to sit at a table with a knife and fork and have her mama bring him a dinner of kapusta or potato babka, or even the kalduny, no matter how gristly the insides.
He is used to silences, but this one feels as if it has gone on too long.
‘Are you lonely, boy?’
The boy must shake his head, because he must not let his papa know: I want the girl, papa; I want a friend. I want Yuri and school and …
‘Do you want to go back to the city?’
He whispers, ‘It’s not fair, papa.’
‘Do you want to leave me here? On my own?’
‘You have the trees,’ he says, able to control the bleating in his voice but not the tears in his eyes. ‘You always say you have the trees.’
‘If you go to that girl, they’ll come into the wilds and they’ll find you there, in your house made of bark. A little boy, living in a house of bark, and they’ll think I’m …’
A new fear ignites in the boy. The fire flurries up, and the boy himself flurries up with it. He wrenches himself from the old man’s arms, whirls around in front of the gingerbread house. ‘They won’t think anything, papa! They’ll know! I’m looking after you!
‘How could you look after me, boy, if you let them take you away?’
The boy is silent. He sees it now. If men came to these wilds, they would take his papa for a monster. They wouldn’t know about mama, or the roots, or how she lived a whole summer in the branches. They wouldn’t know about the fall and the partisans and the ghosts in the trees. They wouldn’t know how much his papa cared for him, teaching about sorceries and fires and of all the things you can catch and kill and eat. They’d want to scrub him, like Navitski used to scrub him, and dress him up and take him away. They’d want to take his papa too, no doubt. Only – his papa can’t leave the forest. He tried once, and the wilds wouldn’t let him. The boy would be in the city and his papa would be gone to the forest, with nobody to build his fires when he forgets.
‘Elenya knows where we live now,’ he whispers.
‘Well?’ the old man asks. ‘What are we going to do about that?’
There is something glimmering in his papa’s eyes, enough to unnerve the boy.
‘She wouldn’t tell, papa.’
‘How do you know she wouldn’t tell?’
‘She’s a good girl.’
The old man considers it, taking up his staff to stoke the fire.
‘No,’ he whispers. ‘She’ll tell.’
‘Then what shall we do, papa?’
His papa is right. That girl was brazen enough to march into their camp; any girl like that will be brazen enough to tell tales. He shifts, awkwardly, from foot to foot.
His papa drops his staff, wraps his skeletal arms around his knees. He sits there, bird-like, eyes lost to the fire. Then he looks up. His words, when they come, are a kind of keening. ‘You’ll stop her. Won’t you, boy? You’ll stop her, for your papa.’
The old man shows him how to carry fire. On nights like this, it keeps both winter and wild things at bay.
The cattail pond has a different look, lit in spidery shadows by the torch in his hand. The snows on its bank are like ridges of lava; the trees of charcoal, the icicles of tar. There are no tracks to show where Elenya and Mishka walked. He stops momentarily, struggling to get his bearings. He has seen the forests at night, but they do not only change with the seasons, they shift and change with the coming of every dusk.
He looks over his shoulder. The outline that looms in the snow dark is not just another tree bent out of shape: it is his papa, and here his papa will leave him. He lifts a single finger to his wound-like mouth, and flicks it out,
as if to send the boy on his way. The boy tries to pick his path, but it is not until he hears his papa’s sibilant whisper that he is propelled on his way. ‘I’ll be here, boy.’
‘Yes, papa.’
When he is certain of his bearings he comes past the cattail pond, down to the fringe of the forest and the roots of mama’s tree. The house is dark, not a single window lit up. It is an easy thing to go into the garden. The only thing that is watching him is the fairybook wolf from the knocker on the door, and its fangs are even less fierce than Mishka’s.
The lawn is hidden beneath snow packed hard, and in its centre there sits a figure of snow. There was no room to make a snowman when the boy lived in the tenement, but if there had been, this is not the kind he would make. Elenya must have gone out of her way to make him appear bent over, crooked. She has used a branch for a walking stick and piled boulder upon boulder to make a raggedy, segmented body like that of a millipede. His eyes are sunken cavities in which black coals sit. He wears no clothes, and his mouth is an open wound, a gash as might have been made with an axe.
He circles it, sweeping the torch up and down. When he has seen enough, he plants the torch in the snow and crosses the garden, eyes drifting up to the black hole of Elenya’s window.
He reaches down to roll up a ball of snow, then brings his fist back and lets it fly. His first attempt falls short, looping up below Elenya’s window, but with each attempt he gets nearer. At last, one lands squarely on the window pane. Perhaps it stirs her, but no lights flare. He has to try again, and again after that, until a cord is pulled and the eyes of the house open up. In stark silhouette, he can see the gaping face of the little Russian horse.
The curtains peel back and Elenya’s wearied face appears in a triangle of light. The boy feels a rush of relief that she made it out of the forest; then his nerves harden and he remembers why he is here.
‘Where are you?’
The boy steps back, almost as far as the crooked snowman.
‘I know it’s you, little wolf-boy. Don’t you think I’d know you’d come?’
Gingerbread Page 22
