Gingerbread

by Robert Dinsdale

  He is, he decides, as wild a thing as his papa. It doesn’t matter that the dirt has sloughed off, that the thistles have been teased from his hair. The boy he is looking at now – that is not the same boy who lived in a tenement with a bedroom of his own. This is a boy who deserves only the forest, the endless trees, the marshes and the aspens beyond.

  ‘I know,’ says Elenya. ‘First, we’ll brush this hair.’

  He feels Elenya’s fingers in his hair, her comb, her brush. His hair, still somehow curled, grows longer and more defined: first past his neck, then his shoulders.

  ‘Didn’t your papa ever cut your hair?’

  The boy shakes his head.

  ‘It’s nice hair, Alek. Long and thick, like a girl’s.’

  Elenya piles up the rabbit-skin pelts and ferrets in a trunk. Inside there are dresses and cardigans, things she decries too bad for the boy – but beneath is a blouse that might fit, and beneath that a pair of culottes that will pass for shorts. The boy barely moves as she dresses him, letting her lift and position his arms and legs as she might a doll.

  These new clothes itch. He has to look at them in the reflection, and when he does, he does not see a smartly dressed boy, but a wolf in girl’s clothing. She has tied back his hair with a band, and it stretches his face into something of a snarl. He turns, instinctively reaching out to wrap himself in the eiderdown from her bed.

  ‘Oh, eiderdowns. I’d forgotten how much you like eiderdowns.’

  The boy feels better, curled inside it, but she tugs it from him all the same.

  ‘Time for you to eat something more than dirt, Alek. Come on, I’m making a breakfast fit for a king …’

  The eggs are rich and yellow, and quite unlike the eggs of summer, which he roasted on stones or fed to his papa, soft and raw. It takes the boy a mouthful before he registers: these are chicken’s eggs, bought from a market. Next to them are sticks of toasted bread, heavy with melted butter. Elenya calls them soldiers. Like so many others, the word thunders back into the boy. Soldiers, he remembers, are not just the wicked men from his papa’s fables. They are pieces of bread too.

  As they eat, the smells stir Mishka from her basket. Excited as she is to see Elenya, she is more excited to see the boy. Soon, she is in his face, covering him with her tongue, drawing in his strange scent of pungent forest and fragrant soap. Elenya tries to drive her off, but this morning Mishka will not be denied. Only the boy’s hands, running through her shaggy scruff, will quell her. At last, she rolls in front of the wood-burner, exposing her tummy for hands to tickle. When they are not forthcoming, she rolls back and – as if to prove a point – whips a soldier from the boy’s plate.

  ‘Mishka!’ Elenya cries, driving her off.

  But the boy can only beam.

  He devours the egg and soldiers so quickly that Elenya must offer him more. He says: another egg and toast, and I remember … bacon. Hot bacon, with streaks of fat, and cheese and biscuits and cake. Suddenly, all of those things are flurrying at him like a snowfall. Elenya rushes back into the kitchen, and while she is gone he sets to rolling with Mishka. By the time she has returned, Mishka has pinned him down, straddling him with all four paws and subjecting him to the worst assault with wet nose and tongue.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’

  Not Elenya’s voice. Her father. He tries to squirm from beneath the playful dog, but Mishka is too embroiled in the game to stop slobbering until Elenya’s father barks again. By then, there is the clatter of footsteps. Wiping the slobber from his face, the boy sees two great tree trunks of legs descending the stairs.

  ‘Papa,’ says Elenya. ‘This is … Alek. He’s my friend. From school.’

  She speaks each fragment as if she is daring her father to contradict her. Then there can be a fight, and then Elenya can win – for what other explanation is there, what better way to prove she has a friend and is fitting in at school than this boy now squirming on the living room carpet?

  Elenya takes his hand, wrestles him upright. When he stands, he sees Elenya’s father up close for the first time. Absurdly, he is wearing no shirt, only a pair of pyjama bottoms. His chest is covered in hair coiled up like fur. At the bottom of the stairs, he kneads his eyes.

  ‘Elenya,’ he says, more softly now, ‘did your mother know you’d invited a friend?’

  ‘I’m sure I told her, papa.’

  ‘When did he …’

  ‘Oh, his papa dropped him off. He was on his way over the border. He’s coming back for him tonight. It’s for business.’

  Each fragment is another dare. Wearily, her father turns to tramp back up the stairs.

  ‘Papa!’ she calls. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello? His name’s Alek.’

  ‘I’ll say hello when I’m dressed,’ he mutters darkly.

  One tramping foot, and then another; as he slips out of sight, Elenya spins on her heel wearing an absurd grin. ‘He likes you!’

  It doesn’t seem that way to the boy. He finds that he has been shaking all along. The thought of another man, another papa, is as treacherous as being here, with four walls bearing down.

  ‘Alek,’ Elenya says, coming to his side. ‘Calm down. It’s only my papa.’

  The boy takes deep breaths, but the only thing that properly calms him is to run his fingers in Mishka’s long fur. ‘What if they ask me? Where I’m from. Who I am.’

  ‘You’ll leave it to me,’ says Elenya. ‘And follow my lead …’

  Dressed in corded jacket and jeans, Elenya’s father is not nearly as terrifying as the boy first thought. Nor is her mama a terror, as she sweeps down the stairs and cries out a welcome, at the same time shooting Elenya a succession of serrated looks. There will, she declares, be a big breakfast and disappears into the kitchen, only to reappear an instant later.

  ‘You made him breakfast?’

  ‘Mama, he was hungry.’

  ‘Did your father know you’d invited a friend?’

  Elenya says, ‘I’m sure I told him, mama.’

  ‘And is he staying all day?’

  ‘Yes, mama.’

  Her father reappears from the front door, shaking snow from his collar. ‘You forgot about our tree, of course.’

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘Our tree, Elenya. We were going to collect our tree.’

  The boy’s eyes beg explanation. Elenya mutters, ‘For Christmas. When we were in Brest we used to buy one, but now daddy says that buying a tree’s for peasants. We’ve got trees all around, so we’re going to chop one down.’

  ‘Chop one down?’

  He is aghast. It would, he decides, be like taking an axe to a person’s legs.

  Elenya’s father, busy unbuckling his boots, must register the terror in the boy’s tone, for he strides over, his meaty hands open wide. ‘It’s our first Christmas here, Alek. Why buy a tree somebody else has chopped down, when we have the forest?’

  He thinks to say: but you can’t go into the forest! Yet his throat is dry, his tongue sliced in two just the same as his papa’s. He sidles closer to Elenya’s side; here, Mishka forms a barrier of fur and flesh between him and her father. Even so, he wants to take her hand and hide behind her. It is, he remembers, exactly like that very first day at the schoolhouse, when mama had to leave him behind.

  ‘The trees from Brest were better, daddy. Those trees, out there, they’re …’

  ‘Wild?’

  ‘Horrible,’ spits Elenya.

  ‘Our Elenya’s too much of a princess, Alek,’ chimes in her mother, swooping back into the living room with a steaming mug for her father. ‘We came here to get away from all that, Elenya.’

  ‘We came here to get away from everything,’ Elenya says – and, for the first time, the boy senses real bile in her voice.

  When her father drinks, the sound is like his papa’s jackboot sinking into marsh water and drawing back up.

  ‘What about you, Alek?’

  He trembles, wordless.

  ‘What about him, pap
a?’

  ‘Well, won’t Alek have a Christmas tree this year?’

  ‘Not from that old forest.’

  Another slurp, with music like the marsh.

  ‘The forest’s the place for a Christmas tree. Ded Moroz himself lives in that forest. Did you know that, Alek?’

  ‘Well,’ interjects Elenya. ‘I’m sure there are wild men living out there, but hardly Ded Moroz.’

  Her father appears defeated. ‘I suppose we haven’t seen him yet,’ he says as he stands. ‘Maybe it’s just a story. But you’re not too old for stories yet, Elenya. Just remember that.’

  Her father is crossing the room, bound for the kitchen and the better companionship of her mother, when the boy feels suddenly emboldened.

  ‘I know lots of stories from the forest!’

  The boy sees a thwarted look ghost across Elenya’s face.

  Before he has gone to the kitchen, her father turns around. ‘So you do have a voice!’

  Now he loses it again.

  ‘What stories do you know, Alek?’

  He whispers, ‘Baba Yaga …’

  ‘Well,’ says Elenya’s father. ‘That was a forest. Who knows if it was this one? I haven’t seen any witch-women out in the wood, or huts with hen’s feet. Have you, Elenya?’

  She shakes her head, only once, her jaw set rigid.

  Now, the boy feels thwarted as well. His face burns, as if he has crept too close to his papa’s fire.

  ‘I know other stories,’ he says. ‘There were partisans in the forest and the soldiers went to catch them, and sometimes they took mamas and papas and boys and girls and fed them to the trees.’

  Her father is silent. For a reason the boy cannot divine, he looks shocked, saddened even.

  ‘It was the wars of winter,’ ventures the boy.

  ‘There were terrible wars, Alek, but that was long ago.’ He crosses the room. In the window, where Mishka reclines like a wolfskin rug, there sits a case of books. When he crouches, he is tall as the boy but many times broader. He fingers the spines and plucks one out. Then he comes back to the boy, tries to press the book into his hands. Now that he is close again, the boy shrinks back. Instead, he must present it to Elenya.

  ‘This old thing,’ she mutters. ‘This is for babies.’

  ‘Folk tales aren’t for babies, Elenya. They’re for us all.’

  He looks at the boy, half-hidden behind Elenya’s back. ‘It isn’t history, Alek, but some of these stories are quite as bloody. Folk tales are just another way of telling history. They come from before the time when there was writing and books. Just families, in houses like this, staring into that outer dark and telling tales about what happened out there.’

  ‘But there were still forests,’ whispers the boy.

  ‘And always will be,’ he replies.

  As her father tramps away, he lays his meaty hand on Elenya’s head, half to stroke her, half to clout. ‘You could learn something from him, Elenya. If you were so studious, we might have stayed in Brest.’

  Outside, there is a strange quality in the winter light. The sun, seemingly lower than the canopy, gropes over the treetops. Where it pierces the branches, it cascades to the ground. As it advances, it illuminates first the gaping maw of a badger’s sett; then the emperor oak with a ragged collection of sticks stacked up in its roots; then the open bones from a rabbit’s breast, gnawed clean and cast down for the woodland scavengers to come.

  This isn’t the tale this isn’t the tale I’m the tale I’m the tale …

  Smeared against the ground, a wild man unfolds and finds himself alone.

  In the bedroom, it is better. Here he does not have to tell lies or pretend. Elenya drops the book onto the bed and opens it up. Words and line drawings glimmer out. She traces them with her finger, but to the boy the symbols are inscrutable. He would rather read the etching in bark, the veins of a leaf; those things tell stories as well.

  ‘Here’s Baba Yaga,’ says Elenya, her finger landing on the image of a wizened forest witch whose hair is curled around pine cones and acorn. ‘And here’s the bit where she eats the little boy.’ She grins dementedly.

  ‘Does it say about the wars of winter? What about the Winter King?’

  ‘There are no wars of winter. There isn’t a Winter King. Not in these stories.’

  The boy crawls to the lip of the bed, balances his head on the covers, and scrutinizes the page. Elenya, busy turning the leaves, bats his head away as she might Mishka.

  ‘They’re in my papa’s stories.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why aren’t they in the book?’

  ‘Maybe they’re different stories.’

  ‘The book has Baba Yaga.’

  ‘Every book has Baba Yaga.’ She hesitates. ‘I don’t like your papa’s stories. What was he telling, when he was hunting the deer?’

  ‘It was how the man escaped from Gulag to find his babe in the woods, and the other men started to starve and turned into monsters to eat each other.’

  The way he remembers it sends a chill more precise than the winter into his veins.

  ‘He told me another, afterwards. About how they ran away from the men and then the trees sent wolves to protect them.’

  Elenya folds the book closed. ‘I think your papa’s gone wild in the head. Those aren’t real stories at all. If they were, I’d have heard them. Didn’t your mama ever tell you fairytales?’

  ‘Not ones like my papa …’

  ‘Then maybe they’re not proper tales at all. A tale has to have a hero.’

  ‘It has a hero. It’s the man who once was a boy.’

  ‘And it has to have a villain.’

  He thinks: it could be the Winter King, but once the Winter King was good. He thinks: it could be the wise men, but the wise men only do what they think the Winter King needs. Maybe it’s the great frozen city of Gulag, but a villain has to be a man, not a place.

  ‘I’m bored of tales,’ declares Elenya, slamming the book. ‘Don’t you ever get bored of tales, Alek?’

  They used to thrill him. He remembers first coming to the tenement, gazing at his papa’s face etched in lines and thinking: hiding inside are so many stories. Yet the ones he listens to now are like the insects that crawl into his clothes at night; they stay with him, cannot be rooted out.

  ‘What about a … game?’

  It seems that Elenya has been waiting for those very words. She leaps to attention, cartwheels to the furthest side of the window, and opens a big drawer. Inside, countless board games are piled. The boy can even remember how to play; there are pieces and dice and you take turns, and at the end there is a winner and a loser.

  At last, she selects a box. The front depicts a forest more shadowy than the one revealing itself in the window light. A trail meanders between oaks and along it goes a girl, with a scarlet cloak and her hood fastened with a single silver clasp. From one hand there hangs a basket, piled with apples and pears.

  ‘One of us is Red Riding Hood,’ declares Elenya, revealing the disordered mess inside the box. ‘The other is a wolf. We’ll have to share the woodcutter out. It’s meant for three players.’

  The boy inches to the very edge of the bed, a precipice quite as frightening as any treetop.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We roll a dice and Red Riding Hood tries to get to Grandma’s house, and the wolf tries to eat her, and the woodcutter tries to kill the wolf.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He chops off his head!’ Elenya declares, mimicking the motion. ‘He has an axe.’

  ‘My papa has an axe.’

  ‘I remember.’

  The boy slides from the bed, to sit cross-legged at the edge of the board. It is an elaborate thing, though worn around the edges where it has been folded up inside the box. There are pop-up trees – he recognizes chestnut and alder – and fringes of black pine in every corner. A trail snakes all around the board, ending finally at a pop-up cottage in the centre.

  ‘Wh
o do you want to be?’

  The boy is silent, still staring at the board.

  ‘You be the wolf. I’ll …’

  ‘I don’t want to be the wolf!’

  ‘So you want to be the girl?’

  The boy nods, sharply.

  ‘Alek, you can’t be the girl.’

  ‘Then I won’t be anything.’

  Elenya gives a dramatic rolling of her eyes and hands him a tin figure. ‘I suppose this makes me the wolf. But don’t think I’m going easy on you. If I catch you, it’ll be little boy or girl, or whatever you are, for dinner – and don’t think I’ll let some woodcutter stop me … Well, go on! You get a three-turn head-start.’

  The game begins. After three rolls of the dice, Elenya takes her first turn. After three more, the woodcutter begins. After much wrangling, the boy is permitted to play the woodcutter too – because, really, the woodcutter and Red Riding Hood are on the same side. Soon, the boy is high on his knees, excited enough to shout out with every roll. Elenya quells him with her eyes, but it must be a good thing to see the boy beaming, for she returns every one.

  ‘I’m going to catch you,’ she says, reaching over the board to jab a finger in his armpit, taking delight as he wriggles back.

  ‘You’re not! I’m nearly at the …’

  A voice cuts him off, reverberating around the house.

  ‘Elenya! Are you getting ready?’

  Her father’s voice, big enough to shake the very walls. Elenya scrambles up. It is only as the boy tracks her to the door that he realizes the day has dawned. The sunlight, still weak, is spilling over the tops of the clouds, and what filters through has woken a ghostly world. With Elenya at the door, his eyes turn to the window, and the garden beneath. Mishka is out, running her snout over every new ridge of fallen snow. The boy sees the paw prints she has left behind.

  They are not the only tracks in the virgin snow.

  He flings a look over his shoulder, but Elenya is gone, out into the hall to bicker with her father. He turns back. Mishka has lit on it now, the very same tracks that cause his breast to tighten.

  A single deep trench crosses the garden. It stops, circles the snowman, then crosses the expanse to reach the border of the house itself. There the snow is churned up in a deep crater. Somebody has lingered.