Gingerbread

by Robert Dinsdale

  Then the boy tracks her footsteps back across the room, out into the hall.

  The door closes. Elenya exhales, so loud that the boy believes it must be meant to summon her mother back. Yet nobody comes.

  ‘Where are you?’

  The boy reveals himself, Russian horse venturing first. As he uncurls, he sees Elenya beaming, a smile that stretches her face into something quite unreal.

  ‘I thought we were done for!’ she whispers. ‘Good thinking!’

  The boy wasn’t thinking at all. It was instinct that drove him into his burrow.

  ‘You don’t know what they’d have done if they found you. That’s why my daddy took this stupid job. They thought I’d behave if they brought me somewhere more … boring.’

  Her mother can still be heard through the walls, clearing her throat as she settles back to sleep.

  ‘How long have you been living … out there?’ she says, turning to the glass. After hours of holding back, the skies have opened. Snowflakes, as big as the boy’s fist, sail directly towards them, smearing themselves across the window pane. There they gather, or slip, or harden like barnacles.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy replies. ‘How long have you been living in my house?’

  ‘You keep calling it your house. How is it your house? Isn’t this my bedroom? Isn’t this my bed?’

  ‘It was after my mama died,’ the boy begins. ‘This used to be her house, when she was just a little girl, and I made my papa come to put her ashes in the tree, and he begged me not to, but I made him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, once we were here, he just wouldn’t take me back to the city. And you came and you made it yours and now … there’s nowhere to go.’ The boy turns. The slippers must have come off under the bed, for he realizes that he can feel the stroke of the carpet strands on the soles of his feet. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he says.

  ‘Back out there?’

  Elenya stares at the window pane, now almost totally obscured.

  ‘Thank you for my little Russian horse.’

  He opens the door. In the hallway, there is only darkness. By feel, he finds his way to the top of the stair. He can sense something moving down there: only Mishka, scolded and too afraid to venture back up. He takes the first step, but before he has taken the second, he feels Elenya’s hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Please,’ she whispers, mindful of her mother. ‘You’ll freeze out there …’

  ‘I won’t. It isn’t even winter yet. Not the real winter.’

  He hurries down the stairs, back along the living room, and into the narrow spaces of the now chill kitchen. He can hear Elenya behind him, Mishka whimpering that something is amiss, but he will not look round.

  ‘Stop!’ she calls out, whisper as loud as a shout.

  He turns. In her hands is the oversized coat with the scarlet hood that she wore every time he saw her wandering the forest.

  ‘I thought you wanted me to come with you. I thought you wanted to play.’

  He came here thinking the same thing. To take her down to the cattail pond, to that place between the trees where his papa has planted his roots, grown wizened and old. But now he has the Russian horse in his hands. She has cared for it, kept it company, put it with her gingerbread babies and petted it every night. He could not ask her to go to the forest, not with the horse’s wooden heart thundering between his palms.

  He shakes his head, stutters, ‘I have to go to my papa.’

  ‘Well, when will we …’

  ‘Don’t come into the forest, Elenya. Not without Mishka. Not without me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘And don’t tell. Please don’t tell …’

  Elenya’s eyes drift upwards, to her sleeping mother and father. ‘Take it,’ she says, holding out the coat.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To keep out the winter, on the way back to your house.’

  Yes, the boy thinks, a coat like that really could ward off winter. Better than cattail root and acorn mash. Better than squirrel, hare and starling. Better even than a hot milk.

  He steps into it, forcing the Russian horse down one sleeve and through the tight cuff at the other end. When he is done, he can feel the girl’s hands, clasping tightly around each arm. The coat is too big by far. He could fit into it three times over, but its pockets are deep as his knapsack ever was, and already the warmth holds him. He shuffles along the kitchen, feeling like a giant.

  He opens the door, to feel the full force of winter.

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  The boy looks back, the snow flurrying at his hind. ‘Next time my papa’s gone a-hunting. Next time he’s on a roam.’

  ‘I can come to your den …’

  ‘No!’ the boy cries out. Then he conquers himself; he calms. ‘I’ll come for you. I’ll build a snowman in the garden. Then you’ll know I’m waiting in the trees.’

  He tramps past the crooked, segmented snowman. On the edge of the forest, he turns over his shoulder. The door is still open, but Elenya and Mishka are mere silhouettes, half-obscured by whirling snow. He lifts a hand to wave. The silhouettes do the same, retreating behind a closing door.

  The boy goes under mama’s branches. He clings to the Russian horse and finds, once again, the old path, the one that snakes down to the emperor oak and the gingerbread house which will always be his home. He is not yet at the cattail pond when he hears the familiar footfall. He stops and the noises stop; he starts and they start again. Yet there is no doubting what he has heard. That tread is so distinct that it can be nothing else: the snap where the point of a staff drives into the forest floor, the click of one jackboot heel, the slow ache, scoring a trench behind.

  Eyes glimmer at him from the snow dark.

  ‘Papa,’ he says, heart hammering like a rabbit caught but not yet dead. ‘You frightened me.’

  The old man lurches to the path, stooping beneath a branch heavy with frost. ‘You’re on your own,’ he rasps.

  ‘I thought you were waiting at the cattail pond.’

  ‘Don’t you know how long you’ve been?’

  The boy stammers, ‘I’m sorry, papa. I tried to be faster.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  The boy is suddenly aware of his new scarlet coat. It smothers him like shame. He draws his hands into the sleeves, better to hide the little Russian horse, but his papa’s eyes have found it already.

  ‘She wouldn’t come.’

  He mutters, ‘She wouldn’t come.’

  ‘I tried. She was going to come, and then her mama was awake and she wouldn’t.’

  These words seem to have a soothing effect on the old man. His eyes brighten, catching better the light captured in the ice all around. He drags himself to the boy, so close that the mists of their breath mingle in the air.

  ‘She’ll come, papa. I just need more time …’

  ‘More time?’

  ‘To make her want a game. To make her want to play.’

  ‘She gave you a coat.’

  The boy nods, head sinking low.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To keep me warm.’

  This time, it is the old man’s turn to nod. ‘She wanted to play when she came to our camp, didn’t she, boy?’

  He feels the words needling him, like clawing pine. ‘I suppose, papa.’

  ‘So why doesn’t she want to play now?’

  There are some moments when you have to lie, but in this moment the truth is enough. ‘She’s afraid, papa.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘You frightened her. It’s …’ Now the lies resurface. Once, the idea of lying to his papa was a worse thing than mama’s death. Yet, as the words take form in his throat, he does not care. So have the seasons changed. ‘… going to take her some time, before she’ll come into the woods again. But she won’t tell, papa. I promise she won’t. Maybe I can … take her a present? I can make her a horse out of wood and leave it on the step.’

  His papa seems to be
considering the lie, turning it between his mandibles and testing it for points of weakness. He lifts his chin and turns to lurch onwards, towards the cattail pond. The fog of his breath whips behind him, coiled like a serpent around his neck.

  The boy stands firm. His feet square. His own roots growing, down into frost and ice, down into earth where dead men lie and nourish the trees.

  ‘What would you have said to her, papa, if she came into the forest?’

  Ignorant of him, the old man lurches on. Behind him, the branches close.

  ‘It’s only talking, isn’t it, papa? It’s only to tell her not to say anything.’

  The old man’s voice whispers in the trees. ‘The fire will be dead by now, boy.’

  That is all that it takes for the roots he has planted to shrivel and die, the stems to shrink and retreat inside his body.

  ‘Yes, papa,’ he whispers, and lifts his feet to follow him on.

  When his papa goes foraging, or tries to set snares, the boy takes himself down to Elenya’s house. It is easy to tell where his papa goes roaming, because the forest itself gives him up; the trail cries out to even the most useless tracker, and he means to tell Elenya: when you see a trench in the forest, my papa is near. If you turn and the trench appears, my papa has been between the trees. If you wake and look down from the window and see a trench in the night’s fresh snow, my papa has been in the garden, studying the house like a cast-out dog. These are the sounds that herald my papa’s approach: a breath full of winter; the click of one heel; the long slow scrape of death dragged behind.

  Some mornings, Elenya climbs into the black truck with her father and disappears up the glade. On other mornings, she does not have to go anywhere at all, and for two days straight they can play together in the forest. In this way, the boy remembers days. He remembers weeks. And he remembers the feeling of a Friday afternoon, the interminable wait for the schoolhouse bell to ring and release him, Yuri, and all of the other children for two joyful, empty days at home.

  They are called ‘weekends’, these two glorious days when he can be a little boy again, forget his papa lurching through the trees and play with Elenya down by the cattail pond. On most of their trips, Mishka comes too – but no hunting can be done with that loud, cumbersome beast snorting her way through the forest. Instead, the boy shows her how to build a den, one of stripped pine branches and dead wood, a gingerbread house in miniature. In here, they hide together from the curling snow. The boy shows her the things he collects: stones polished smooth, feathers of beautiful hue, a pigeon’s skull perfectly preserved and plucked clean. She pretends to recoil, but takes each of the dead things and lines them up with the same delicacy as her gingerbread babies.

  ‘You’re a wild little wolf-boy,’ she beams.

  And then, because now it is a joke, ‘I’m a wild little wolf-boy!’ he returns. He barks, and Mishka barks too.

  Those weekends flicker by, and soon the weeks between are a torment more tortuous than even the cold. He can stand snow and ice, he can stand an empty stomach, but the one thing he cannot bear is the aching loneliness of Monday mornings.

  ‘I have an idea,’ Elenya declares one day, as dusk’s cold hand tempts her back towards home. ‘You should come back to my house.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘Your baba’s house,’ Elenya corrects. ‘We’ll tell my mama and papa you’re a friend from school. If I bring a friend, they’ll think I’m … fitting in.’

  A thousand thoughts collide: can it work? Will it work?

  ‘You’ll have to get scrubbed first. I can hardly tell them I’m taming a wild little wolf-boy. I’ll say Navitski made you sit with me in class and I decided …’

  The boy’s hand on her wrist and he whispers, ‘Navitski?’

  Elenya whips her wrist free; gentle as she is, hardly a second goes by when she doesn’t tell him how much he needs scrubbing. ‘That’s my teacher. He’s …’

  ‘… my teacher too!’

  ‘I didn’t think little wolf-boys went to school?’

  The boy would rather not talk about this. He would rather be showing her about how to eat a nettle, or where to find a dray. If you smash open a dray, you can find a squirrel. He might lead you to his hoard, and there you’ll find enough winter treats to gnaw on all the day.

  ‘I used to. I wasn’t always so … wild.’

  ‘Your papa was.’

  ‘No,’ says the boy. ‘He wasn’t.’

  Elenya stops. ‘What? Are you crying, little wolf-boy?’

  He drags stiff rabbit pelt across his eyes. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it …’ She pauses. ‘Do you know, I wish you’d just tell me your name.’

  He wishes it too, but the word will not come up his throat. ‘Can I really come?’

  Elenya nods. ‘Next weekend.’

  It is an eternity away. Until then, five nights of forest and darkness. ‘Maybe … tonight?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck, little wolf-boy. It’ll take you all week to get scrubbed up.’

  Sometimes his papa does not return to the gingerbread house at all. At first, the idea of a night alone with only the trees petrifies him, and he crawls inside the gingerbread house to bask in Elenya’s scarlet coat and lie awake the long night through. He listens out for the tread of bison or deer, the foxes that come into camp when his papa does not curl by the fire, to ferret for whatever bones and scraps the boy himself has not devoured – but of all the sounds of the forest, the only one that stirs him is the click and soft thump as his papa returns to camp.

  Tonight, he is dreaming of Elenya when he hears that trench being carved in the forest floor. The shadowy blackness that follows is his papa eclipsing the campfire. Soon, the fire has been fed; more crackling tells him the flames are flurrying up to repel the snow.

  He peeps his head through the pine-needle doors.

  ‘Come here, boy.’

  His papa is not even facing him, so how he knows he has emerged the boy cannot tell. Even so, he steps out of the gingerbread house, to a welcome wave of heat. Forgetting for a moment, he scuttles to the fireside, sinks beside his papa, and opens his arms to receive the flames. Sometimes, a strong fire is more invigorating than a strong meal.

  ‘Papa,’ he begins, ‘where have you been?’

  ‘I went to the marshes.’

  ‘All that way, papa?’

  The old man snorts.

  ‘Did you go … across?’

  ‘The trees were calling me, boy.’

  ‘From the other side?’

  ‘From the other side.’

  The boy remembers those trees, older and older again, the very same trees into which the Old Man of the Forest disappeared in the tale. He does not want to know how old the forests are beyond the aspens where the partisans lived. He does not want to voyage there, beneath branches where the ragged wolves roam, where there might yet be other papas who have turned wild and taken their little boys off to live among the trees.

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

  ‘Oh papa, please, not a tale, not tonight …’

  Well, the old man goes on, not registering the way the boy shrinks back, Aabel and the man who had once been a boy had fled the cabin in the woods, for there men turned monster. And in his jackboots ran Aabel, and in his leather moccasins ran the man who had once been a boy. And it was not long before they heard cries in the night behind them. These were the cries of men, and such cries they had not heard since the day they escaped through the jaws of that great frozen city called Gulag.

  Well, Aabel stopped to help the man who had once been a boy along a ridge, where the black pine trees held them tight. And Aabel said: they are coming and they are hungry.

  And the man who had once been a boy said: they have eaten Lom, and now they have a taste for the flesh of a man.

  But they will not find us, for the trees are on our side.
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  Well, Aabel remembered a tale from his boyhood, and the tale was of Baba Yaga and her house with hen’s feet. And in that tale, a little girl tied a ribbon around a tree, and that tree raised up walls of thorn to keep the witch away. But Aabel said: we have no ribbons to tie around these trees, and without it we are gone.

  No, said the man who had once been a boy, for I too remember a tale from when I was a boy. And in that tale, men lived wild in the woods, even though soldiers from the King in the West were sent to murder them. So we will be like those men, and trust in the trees.

  Well, they ran, and were chased, and they ran and were chased, and they ran and were chased again. But the black pines crowded them, and would let no light shine through, and though the monstrous men from Gulag pounded after them, the forest floor covered their trails and hid them from view. And the black pines shifted and sent their pursuers along different paths, into parts of the woodland more dense.

  Well, it happened that Aabel and the man who had once been a boy came to the edge of the woodland, and all about them were white heaths of snow. But not a flake fell from the sky. And Aabel said: they will follow us, where there are no trees to guard us.

  And the man who had once been a boy said: but we cannot turn back.

  And so they ran, and they were chased, and they ran and they were chased, and they ran and they were chased again. And soon, when they looked back, they could see the men who had once been their companions come from the forest.

  They are stronger because they have eaten, said Aabel.

  Eaten the flesh of man, said the man who had once been a boy.

  The boy wants to hear no more. This is not like the story of Baba Yaga. She would feast on boys and girls too, but she lived in a house on hen’s feet, and she rode on a broomstick, and she did not feel so very real …

  ‘Papa,’ he bursts in, ‘is it true?’

  But his papa’s voice rumbles on, heedless of the question.

  Well, Aabel was weak and the man who had once been a boy was weak, and as day turned to night, as Perpetual Winter closed his fist, they turned and saw the monsters almost upon them.

  Where are the trees? cried Aabel.