His heart hammers, but he finds he cannot look away. His eyes search for pockets in the darkness, the gaps between the trees where some creature of dead wood and thorn might be lurking. It is useless; every shadow has a face, every trunk the visage of a man.
‘Alek …’
Elenya has come back into the room, only to find the boy huddled at the window.
‘Look,’ he whispers.
Elenya’s eyes drift down, but they find only the dog. Following some strange canine instinct, Mishka looks up and returns the stare with a shrill bark.
‘They’re going to get the Christmas tree. They want us to …’
Before Elenya can reply, he hears the tread of heavy footsteps and knows that her father has come into the room. Even so, he does not turn around. His eyes continue to hunt out the darknesses, tracking the turning of the trench.
‘Alek,’ Elenya’s father booms, ‘how would you like a trip into the forest?’
‘I’ve told you, papa!’ Elenya shrieks. ‘Alek’s staying here with …’
The boy turns, ghostly pale.
‘What is it, Alek?’
‘Can’t you see he’s afraid?’ Elenya retorts, planting herself between the boy and her father. Her eyes light on the book of folk tales and she whips it aloft. ‘You’re the one who gave him this thing! Now he thinks there’s Baba Yaga and ogres and witches in the trees.’
‘Alek, they’re only stories.’
He thinks: but are they? There’s a wild man down there. He isn’t a story. He’s my papa.
‘Let us stay,’ Elenya begins. ‘We’ll just play. There won’t be any trouble.’
‘You’re not supposed to be on your own.’
‘I’m on my own almost all of the time!’
At last, her father relents. ‘I thought you might want to help us pick a tree …’
‘Oh, trees,’ Elenya mutters. ‘I see a thousand trees every day.’
The boy listens to the heavy tread as her father goes back down the stairs. After he has gone, he turns back to the window. To his horror: a new trench, carved into the garden. This time, it barely reaches the snowman before it stops, circles around, and blazes a new trail back to the forest.
‘Elenya, you have to stop them.’
‘Oh, let them go! What do we need with …’
This time, at the window, Elenya sees the trench. ‘Is it him?’
The boy nods, feeling as if it is he who has a knife at her throat. ‘It’s my papa.’
‘He’s come looking for you.’
The boy doesn’t say: no, no Elenya, he’s come looking for you …
From downstairs, he hears the opening of a door, can even feel the flurry of cold air that steals swiftly within, like fingers taking his scruff to drag him away. That cold hand is the hand of his papa. His papa is the woods and his papa is the wild, and his papa is the world forever and ever.
For a moment the figures below are obscured, too close to the house as they emerge. Then he sees Elenya’s father, wrapped up in black with his hair flying free. Next, her mother, scarf wound tightly around her head. They stop on the threshold, and the boy realizes they must be locking the door. He looks again into the snow dark beneath the trees. He sees nothing. He sees nothing again. Then, a whisper of movement, as indistinct as a starling settling on a branch to disturb the snow. He stares, and it is only as Elenya’s parents begin to cross the garden, with Mishka on their heels, that he knows he is right: it is his papa beneath the trees, watching as the family approach.
He opens his mouth. Wants to cry out. But his breath is frozen as his papa at night, and the words do not come.
Elenya’s parents go under the trees, swallowed up by the snow dark.
‘Alek, where is he? I can’t …’
He says, ‘Get down from the window.’
‘He isn’t there, Alek. I’d see him if he …’
He grabs her by the shoulders, wrenches her down. ‘I said, get down!’
She reels back, rolling over the corner of the bed to lie, winded, on the floorboards at its side. When she looks up, her eyes are accusing, as if it is the boy who is the wilderness, and not his papa come to the house.
‘This is my house!’ she cries. ‘You can’t do that in my house!’
‘No,’ says the boy, vaulting over her to get to the door. ‘It’s my house, Elenya. It’s where I lived. It’s where my mama was born.’
She scrambles to catch him, before he ventures onto the landing. ‘What if my father finds him, waiting out there?’
The boy says, ‘What if my papa finds him?’
There is yet time to head him off, drive him away from the house. Before he goes, he snatches up his rabbit-skin pelt, hanging it over the strange clothes she has made him wear. Then he takes off, down the stairs, into the prickling heat of the living room. Through the kitchen and to the backdoor – but it holds fast, locked, and his hands cannot force it.
Not knowing what else to do, he thunders back. Elenya is standing on the cusp of the living room.
‘I need the key. You have to let me out.’
‘Alek …’
‘If I go now, he’ll never know I was here.’
‘Why shouldn’t he know? What’s he going to do?’
‘You don’t understand. He thinks you’ll …’
Her face makes him stop. Her eyes, directed at some place over his shoulder, sparkle with knowing. Slowly he turns. Along the barrel of the kitchen, past the counters and tin sink … a shape is pressed to the glass, and that shape is his papa.
He goes slowly, because his papa will only see him when a movement catches his eye. It is the same way that he hunts; his eyes grown weak, the dimming of the world. Through the glass, he can hear the wheezing of the old man, as strained as it was in those days in the bunker. A breath like winter itself rises up and pastes itself across the pane, obscuring him further. Now, he is only some ghost, his edges furred.
Then, his eyes are drawn to the door handle at the end of the kitchen. It trembles. It turns. The door holds fast, and then there is stillness.
‘Get me the key, Elenya.’
‘I don’t have a key!’
‘Then …’
A second more, and the handle turns again. The door resists, bucking in its frame. The handle stops, springs back into position. Then thunder, and the door quakes; thunder, and its hinges groan.
‘Boy?’
He does not reply.
‘Boy, are you there?’
He lifts his foot to go into the kitchen but realizes, too late, that it is a terrible mistake. Lifting his foot means he must put it back down and, as soon as he does, the handle twists again, up and down, up and down, each time more fiercely than the last.
‘Boy, let me in …’
Silence.
‘Open the door, boy! I’ll blow it down if I …’
Elenya takes him by the arm, hauls him back to the living room.
‘You could go by the front door …’
Here there is a key dangling from a nail. She leaps to snatch it down. Once, twice, three times – and it is in her hands. As she fumbles with the lock, the boy looks back down the barrel of the kitchen. In the frosted glass, his papa still moves. He thinks he sees an arm brought back, the flash of the axe’s blade.
The front door swings open, and winter hauls him out. On the threshold, he takes Elenya by the wrist. ‘Tell them … my papa came and picked me up.’
‘Alek, why is he so angry?’
The boy says, ‘I’ve got to go.’
He does not make his goodbyes. He steps into the snow and, dazzled momentarily by the winter light, hurries along the edge of the house.
When he steals around the corner, he sees his papa pressed against the backdoor, still bawling into the wood. Sometimes it is words – boy! – and sometimes it is just sound. He holds himself just far enough away that the old man could not claw out and grasp him.
‘Papa, I’m here.’
The old ma
n turns. He seems perplexed, as if he cannot understand how the boy has spirited himself through timber and stone.
‘I thought they’d caught you,’ sobs the old man.
It is not what he was expecting. He hovers, silently.
‘Come on,’ says his papa. ‘We haven’t firewood to last another night.’
His papa turns, to carve a new trail back into the forest. As the boy follows, he sees another shape in the frosted glass. Elenya, it seems, has crept along the kitchen to keep watch. As he reaches the edge of the tree line, he keeps looking back at her indistinguishable face.
Before they reach the branches of mama’s tree, his papa looks down. ‘You … what happened to you?’
‘What, papa?’
‘You changed.’
‘It’s only clothes. From Elenya.’
‘It isn’t clothes. It’s …’
There is terror on the old man’s face. Something, alive and stirring behind his eyes. ‘She changed you,’ he utters.
The boy finds himself hauled aloft. An instant later, he is cast down into the snow. Before he can stand again, his papa is bustling him forward. No longer does he have a hand on him, but the staff works just as well; he directs him forward, herding him like a dog might a goat. His feet, for too long warmed by radiators and floorboards, find scant purchase on the hard-packed snow, and he tumbles again.
In that way, with looks cast constantly over his shoulder, they go between the trees. Behind them, he sees Elenya’s face framed in the kitchen glass. He looks again and she is gone. He looks again and she is back in her bedroom window. Her face is drawn. She can see everything, from on high: the boy, harried like prey; his papa, bearing down.
‘Quick, boy,’ the old man says softly. ‘We haven’t much time.’
‘What, papa?’ he says, panicked as a hare. ‘What should I do? Please, papa …’
‘Take them off.’
‘Take what …’
‘The clothes, boy! Quickly now!’
The rabbit-skin pelts come off in a second; then the blouse. Underneath the culottes he is wearing only the rags of his underwear, the same things he wore in the tenement in the long ago. Naked but for those rags, he trembles. He does not want to look, but his eyes are drawn upwards. Elenya can see. She has seen him naked, scrubbed every corner of his body, but now she sees him flayed.
‘She put you in her bath.’
‘It was to clean me, papa.’
‘Look what she’s done to you,’ he breathes, bereft of all hope.
He looks about to collapse in an angular heap of legs and bones. If he did, he would look like any storm-fallen tree. The boy goes to him, thinking to feel the beating of his heart, but the old man recoils, as if he cannot bear to be touched.
‘Get it off,’ says the old man.
‘What, papa?’
‘The house, the girl, the stink. Get it off, boy! Please, please, get it off …’
He is already near naked. The only thing that coats him are the snowflakes that settle on his bare flesh.
‘Papa, I …’
The old man drops, scooping up forest mulch in his taloned hands. He lurches at the boy, and though the boy wants to beat a retreat, the forest holds him fast. Then his papa’s hands are on him, smearing the earth onto his skin.
He closes his eyes, head thrown back. When he opens them, Elenya’s eyes are staring straight into his. She has pressed her face against the window glass like a spectre. Disbelieving. Despairing.
‘She put you in a bath,’ the old man snipes. ‘But this is your bath. You’re mine, not theirs. Didn’t I look after you? Didn’t I do what your mama asked?’
‘Yes, papa. Yes, papa.’
‘Then bathe in it,’ he says: half beg, half command. ‘If you like your baths so much, you should have one.’
It is a second before realization dawns. He thinks his papa is going to come for him, crown him with more earth, scrape the lichen from the trees and knead it into him. Yet his papa simply watches.
‘You’re a big boy, aren’t you? You want to be a big boy.’
‘Papa …’
‘Well, you can bathe yourself.’
The boy sinks to the ground, with his clothes strewn around. Tentatively, he scrapes up the muck of rotten forest leaves, the disintegrated mulch of pine. He presses a fistful to his chest. ‘It was only a bath, papa,’ he sobs, forcing fox dirt back into his hair.
‘So is this,’ rasps the old man.
He is scouring his breast with another fistful when a sound in the forest stops him. He wrenches his head around, but all he can see is an amorphous mess of black, brown and the dirty white between the trees. Dropping the mulch in his fingers, he rubs away the tears. Now, though, his eyes sting and stream. As he lumbers to his feet, it is all he can do to keep himself from crying out.
‘Who said you could stand?’
‘Papa, I didn’t mean to upset you. I …’
There it is, again – not just a sound in the trees, but a voice. Voices. Elenya’s mama, her papa, coming back to the house.
The boy whirls around. Another shape in the darkness: Mishka. She resolves from the gloom, tongue lolling. In seconds she is on the boy, covering him with her tongue. Seconds later, she is gone again, lying winded and spread-eagled in the roots of an ash, as his papa looms above him, fist drawn back.
‘Papa, she’s only …’
Mishka turns her head towards the boy and the old man hanging above. The boy thinks she might be about to bare her teeth, leap for his papa’s neck, but instead her eyes betray something like fear, something like total and utter obedience, and she turns to disappear.
‘On your feet,’ the old man whispers.
Like Mishka, the boy obeys.
‘Which way are they coming?’
The boy does not know.
‘Which way!?’
‘They went that way, papa,’ he says, lifting a hand.
The old man herds him on, directing him with the staff. At a halting pace, they move between oaks, pines, oak again. Sounds whirl and attack in strange, insidious ways: one minute, voices on their left; the next, on their right, ahead, behind.
‘Not this way, papa!’ the boy shrieks. He lifts a hand, points at impressions in the forest earth. There he sees the snaking paw prints of Mishka the dog. He crouches, snuffles after them. Soon he can see bootprints.
‘They came this way, papa.’
In the same instant, the voices reach a clarity like never before. No longer are they just strings of sound. There are words, questions, sentences.
‘Papa, quick! They’re coming this way!’
The old man is slow, his eyes on the footprints.
‘They’re coming back!’
The boy lopes between the alders. Only yards from the trail, they stop, look back. As the old man catches up with him, the boy can see the trench he has carved, cutting straight across the tracks Elenya’s mother and father left behind.
It is a moment before they appear. They are lumbering because they are dragging a tree behind them, a baby pine barely nine feet tall. Its springy branches drag in the dirt. The dog Mishka appears at their side. For some reason, the dog is subdued. It goes to Elenya’s mother, pushes her with its muzzle, tail beating only softly as she begs to be fussed over.
Then they lumber on, tree trailing behind.
His papa beside him, rattle in his breast. ‘You did good, boy.’
The boy squirms from his touch.
‘The tree,’ the old man whispers. ‘Where are they taking her?’
‘It’s Christmas, papa. Don’t you remember? Ded Moroz. It’s a tree for the house.’
He looks up, only to find his papa’s mouth contorted in the most unimaginable smile. Across that face are written both the good man he was, tending to his dying daughter in a tenement flat, and the beast, the creature, the forest he is now.
It is no wonder he is wearing such an expression, thinks the boy. A tree of this great wilderness sitting
inside Elenya’s house is as inscrutable a thing as his papa going back to the city, as impossible a thing as the boy seeing those streets ever again.
He wants to drag himself back to Elenya’s house, but when morning comes the fire is dead and he knows not where his papa has gone. It should be perfect, he should feel safe creeping back to the garden to wait for her in the trees, but the look in her eyes still haunts him; he cannot risk her seeing that again.
Once the fire has been invoked, he scours the snares and roasts what miserable dead things he can find. Some distance into the forest, he finds his papa’s trail. Uncertain whether it is a trench he carved last night, or a trench from some past night, he follows. Soon he knows exactly where it is going, for these are channels he has followed once before; his papa is bound for the edge of the marshes, there to gaze into the aspens beyond, that reach of the wilderness into which the Old Man of the Forest disappeared.
He watches his papa’s trail wend its way through the trees, and thinks: there was no Old Man of the Forest in Elenya’s book. Where do papa’s fables come from, if they’re not make-believe?
He does not venture further, but retraces his own footsteps back to the gingerbread house. It would be safe to visit Elenya now, but perhaps she ought not to see him after all.
He comes into the camp to see the pine-needle doors pushed apart and, lying in the snow on the edge of the fire, one of her gingerbread babies, peering up lost and forlorn.
He hurtles forward, vaulting the remnants of the fire. He is about to go through the pine-needle doors when something catches his eye, moving in the darkness. He stops, listens out for the familiar click and pull of his papa’s gait. Then, at last, he sees the two eyes watching him. At first, he takes them for Mishka – but it is only a fox, come to scavenge in their camp.
Before he dares go through the doors, he plucks up the gingerbread baby from its snowy bed, half-frozen and half-stale.
He claws through the doors. There, Elenya sits. She stands to receive him, breathing out the deepest sigh of relief, but he will not step into her arms. Instead, he casts down the gingerbread baby. It catches on the branches, and off comes its head.
‘What was it? A sign?’
Gingerbread Page 27
