The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Jake found that he was searching for words of advice, and reminded himself that he didn’t need anyone’s dependency. Garrick was not his responsibility. That was not what he was here for. He nodded to show he understood, and waited for Garrick to go on.

  Garrick was deep into his reminiscence. ‘I remember the summer after we made the rope swing, I wanted to do something else, and we built this pulley, you know, like an aerial runway–she made me do the design, then I built it. And it worked. That was so cool. I’d designed it, I’d built it, and it worked. She was never like, “Be careful, you’ll hurt yourself.” She was always like, “You can do it.” And–it was the same summer–she showed me how to make a shelter in the trees, a real waterproof shelter, not a kid’s den. She learned all that kind of stuff in the war.’ He looked across at Jake, and made a face, mocking his own enthusiasm. ‘I know it wasn’t like that, but when I was a kid, when I was nine, ten, she made it sound exciting, she made it into a game, you know, hiding in the forest, blowing up train lines, escaping.’

  ‘You liked hearing about that?’ Jake said.

  ‘I thought it was cool. We didn’t play Star Wars, me and my mates, we played fighting the fascists. My father liked the fighting bit because it was what boys were supposed to do–you know, wars and guns and things. He was scared shitless I was going to grow up gay.’ He laughed, but it had a bitter edge. ‘He didn’t know who we were fighting, of course.’

  Sophia Yevanova’s quiet propaganda against the philosophy of the father–her tales of wartime courage and the villainy of the Nazis would have protected Nick from the full force of his father’s beliefs. ‘She’s a brave woman,’ Jake said.

  Garrick nodded. ‘She was. She is. She shouldn’t have to fight any more.’

  But illness was one opponent that courage couldn’t always defeat.

  Faith was driving too fast as she left Shawbridge, and when she pulled out into the main road, a van she hadn’t seen had to swerve, the horn sounding, the driver mouthing an obscenity at her as he shot past. She made herself slow down. Her heart was still pounding. Helen had always said that Daniel had a temper, but she’d never suggested that kind of controlled menace. Faith could remember the way the muscles in his arms had tensed with the implied threat of violence.

  When she got back to her house, she took the box out of the boot, the papers crammed in anyhow, and put it on the table in the front room, then she shut the door on it. She couldn’t look at the papers now. She was still shaky with reaction. She didn’t want to admit it even to herself, but he had frightened her. He had suddenly become a stranger, and she hadn’t known what he might be capable of.

  Yesterday’s paper was folded in the magazine rack. She picked it up and turned the pages. Helen’s death was still attracting some interest, though it was no longer on the front page. The police had released Nicholas Garrick-Smith, and their enquiries were ‘ongoing’. There was a comment from ‘husband Daniel Kovacs, thirty-eight,’ expressing hopes that the police would soon track down the ‘animal’ who had done this to his wife.

  Daniel was portrayed as a grieving husband. The estrangement between him and Helen wasn’t mentioned. Faith wondered if grief could excuse his behaviour. But he hadn’t been acting under the impetus of grief, he had been acting under the impetus of anger, of long pent-up rage. This was the man who had charge of Finn and Hannah, the two children she cared about as much as she had cared about their mother, the children she had promised Helen she would look after.

  She could still see Daniel’s face, cold with anger. If she felt afraid at the prospect of confronting him again, what did this mean for the children? She had to find a way to talk to them. It didn’t help that Finn hadn’t wanted to talk to her the day she’d gone round. And he’d whisked Hannah away from her, fast, so that Hannah couldn’t talk to Faith either.

  She sat very still, her coffee halfway to her mouth. Daniel had never been a suspect in Helen’s murder because he had been at home with the children the night she had died. The police had questioned him and were apparently satisfied with that. But who could have corroborated that alibi? Only Finn and Hannah. She pictured Hannah sitting on the carpet in the front room of that dismal house at Longsight, playing with the modelling clay. She’s coming back on Thursday, Hannah had said. And later: This is my mummy. And this is her car. And this is the telephone. And this is me…And then Finn had whisked her away.

  She could feel a coldness creeping over her as she realized the implications of what she was thinking. Finn loved his father and craved his approval. If Finn had lied to protect him…Would Daniel have asked that of his son?

  Daniel had loved Helen as long as she was the woman he wanted her to be–the wife, the mother, the woman whose life was her home and her family. But Helen had changed, and Daniel hadn’t liked that. Then she had left him and Daniel had tried to punish her by taking away her children.

  And her life? Did he hate her that much?

  She didn’t know what to do. The police had already investigated Daniel. They must think he had a strong alibi because they knew about the rows and the antagonism between him and Helen–she’d talked about it herself when they interviewed her. She could contact the police with her suspicions–but she was the estranged wife’s best friend. They would see her as biased. And if they took her concerns seriously? They would go after Daniel by the shortest route available–Finn. She didn’t like to think about what it would do to Finn if he was forced to betray his father.

  Tell me what to do.

  She had whispered it aloud as if she was asking Helen.

  But Helen was dead, Faith was barred from the children, and it looked as though she was going to be excluded from the funeral as well. She wanted a memorial to Helen. She wanted to acknowledge Helen’s death. Daniel couldn’t stop her from attending whatever service he arranged, but Faith couldn’t risk provoking any kind of scene–Daniel knew that.

  She could have her own memorial. She looked at the clock. It was after three, but there was still enough daylight, just. She grabbed her coat and went into the garden, where she picked up the odd green stone she had found all those years ago. She got into the car and drove east out of Glossop, taking the twisting road across the Pennines, the aptly named Snake Pass. The road climbed up past the dark edges of millstone grit to the high moors. The land was bleak and dead on the tops, with sparse grasses and peat bogs.

  As she dropped down the other side, the land became greener, gentler, and soon she was driving past the cold glitter of the first dam. The sun was low in the sky as she turned off along the minor road that skirted the reservoir. Before long, she was driving through trees and the sun, hanging red above the water, flickered through them, dazzling her eyes with flashes of dark and then light.

  The trees were denser here. The road forked, one route heading further along the valley, the other heading deeper into the woods, below the turreted walls of the dam. There was a gate across the road with a red sign: PRIVATE ROAD, NO ENTRY EXCEPT FOR ACCESS. The car bumped and lurched over the unmade surface. Then she was on the other side of the water and the trees thinned out.

  It was like coming into a different world. The water of the dam was placid beside her, and the low stone walls that must be the remains of the drowned village were warm in the light of the setting sun. She drove slowly now past the isolated cottages, until she came to gateposts, high and massive, guarding a rutted drive. The Old Hall looked dark and forbidding apart from a red post box in the wall that struck a reassuringly mundane note.

  This was the place where Helen had died. She pulled in, forcing the car high up on to the verge. The road was narrow. She picked up the stone from the seat beside her, and got out of the car. She walked slowly up the steep drive. When she looked back, she found she was looking down on the roofs of the few stone cottages that had survived the flooding.

  What should I do?

  Silence.

  The house loomed above her. It was high, with tall chimneys and
a gabled roof. The guttering sagged and the walls were stained with water. The windows looked back at her, dark and empty. It was a lonelier place to die than the bleak moor she’d envisaged.

  She didn’t go up to the door. She could see the black-and-yellow police tape flapping on the handles. There was a sense of brooding darkness in the emptiness and the isolation that chilled her. She felt as though it would be dangerous to step any closer. It wasn’t physical danger. She wasn’t hysterical enough to think that some murderous madman lurked behind the empty windows, waiting for his next victim. It was the danger of contamination, as though, if she got too close, she would take the darkness with her.

  She walked back to the gate and crossed the road. The water was opaque steel as the sun sank below the hills. She called up an image of Helen sitting on the rocks above Conies Dale. The breeze was blowing her hair into a tangle of curls that gleamed auburn in the sunlight. She was looking out across the moors, and she was laughing.

  Faith held that image in her mind, and threw the stone into the water, sending the reflection of the hills dancing across the surface. She stayed by the wall as she watched the sun set over the dams.

  14

  The plane climbed through the dull morning light, the blur of speed slowing into clarity as the landscape stretched out in a panorama below. The view faded into a swirl of mist, and they were among the clouds, then they burst through into blue skies and bright sunshine. The buzzer sounded and the cabin crew leapt into action, to keep their fifty charges fed and docile through the short hop from Warsaw to Minsk.

  Jake stretched out as far as the seat restriction would allow him, and took stock. The plane was tiny, an elegant dart with swept-back wings. The pilot’s voice came over the PA, his English so heavily accented that Jake couldn’t tell if he was welcoming them on board or warning them they were about to plummet to earth.

  He smiled his thanks at the pretty woman who served him breakfast–a strange cold pancake filled with what tasted like–and possibly even was–sweetened cottage cheese. He ate without paying too much attention, thinking about the visit ahead of him.

  He wanted to see the Kurapaty Forest, he wanted to walk the streets of Minsk, trying to find any traces of the old city. He wanted to find the places where Sophia Yevanova would have walked as a young girl. He wondered if he could find the place where the NKVD building would have stood, the building that she had hurried past, her coat clutched around her against the cold, the mist rising from the grating into the frosted air.

  He wanted to spend time browsing the archive material that Adam Zuygev had promised to find for him: Sophia Yevanova’s past, the stories of her family. He wanted to visit Zialony Luh, the village where her father had sent her, where she and her cousin had listened to the sound of gunshots in the night.

  He wanted to find out what had happened to Raina. Sophia Yevanova had evaded his questions about her cousin. Had Raina survived the war? Or had she, like half the population of Minsk, died? And those who survived felt the guilt. He’d seen enough of this in his research with the refugees. The survivors felt guilty for the mere fact of their survival. He wondered if the perpetrators felt any guilt, or if they had been too busy trying to save themselves, and then trying to justify what they had done.

  And he wanted to find out about Marek Lange, find out what he had been doing in Minsk, standing there so proudly in the uniform of his country.

  He plugged his laptop into the socket by his seat, and got out his cassette recorder. He could use the down time of the flight to transcribe yesterday’s interview with Sophia Yevanova. The stories she told him were of a past over sixty years old. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that they were closer than that, just outside the range of his vision or concealed in an unperceived pattern that might become suddenly, horribly, visible. Sophia Yevanova had asked him the question herself: Where is the past? Where does it go?

  Wasn’t that what he was going to Minsk to find out? He put on his headphones and pressed ‘play’. As he flew over the plains of central Europe, Sophia Yevanova’s voice carried him to the east, to the Kurapaty Forest:

  It was towards the end of the winter, I remember, when Raina and I, we went into the forest. We were hungry and we were searching for food. It was cold, and the sun was low. We could hear the shooting, but we were used to it. We heard it so often, it was one of the sounds of the forest. It was getting dark so we turned for home, and then we realized that the shooting had stopped. You know how it is with sound. Sometimes you don’t notice it until it stops. And that made us afraid.

  Then we heard something else. It was strange, like crying, but muffled and weak. We searched, and we found him. He was a boy, no older than we were, leaning back against a tree. He had been shot and there was blood all over him, soaked into his shirt, and he was crying.

  We went over to him–we were looking all the time for the soldiers. And I took his hand and he gripped mine tightly. And his eyes opened. But then we heard a truck. Raina grabbed my arm and pulled me away. He tried to hold on to me but he was too weak. She pulled me behind the bushes, and they came, the men, the NKVD men. They saw the boy, and they dragged him away by his feet. They threw him into the back of the truck and drove off…

  Jake pressed ‘pause’ and let the images settle in his mind: the wounded boy, the soldiers with their casual brutality, and the two children hiding among the trees, watching, terrified. After Sophia had spoken, she had sat in silence, and hadn’t objected when he poured her a glass of water from the jug that stood on the table beside her chair. She had drunk it almost as if she was no longer aware of his presence, then she had sat up and, without any comment, recommenced her story.

  They tried to hide what they were doing. They put fences around the killing places, but the children–particularly the boys–cannot be kept away by such barriers. The children saw, and they told what they saw. The soldiers dug the pits in the early part of the day, and then the trucks came. All the time, we heard them. And the men shouting, dogs barking, and sometimes there would be screams that faded away to silence.

  They lined them up in front of the grave pits, and they shot them through the head, from the side, so the bullet went through two people. Even with death, with killing, they were economical. And the ones who had been shot fell into the pit, this is what the boys said. Then when they had shot one batch, they threw earth into the pit, made it level and brought out the next to die. On and on. The boys said that the ground was stained with blood.

  You must understand that, for some of us, the fascists came as liberators, at first.

  Jake switched off the tape and leaned back in his seat. He was too cramped to stretch out fully, and his back was beginning to ache. He kept his mind on his plans for the book to distract him from the discomfort. He needed a starting place, and he needed to decide where it should end. He knew his audience–no matter how terrible the story he had to tell, he had to end on a note of optimism, of a better future to come.

  Belarus was a place of despair, a country whose ghosts reached out from the shadows of a past it could not forget. For the people of Belarus, 1945 hadn’t brought the liberation that Western Europe had enjoyed. They had been caught in the coils of an oppressive regime before the Nazi invasion, and had been returned to that regime at the end of the war. Prosperity had come eventually, flowered briefly, and then the country had sunk again under the burden of Chernobyl, dictatorship and poverty.

  His optimism had to focus not on a time or a place, but on a person. He could end at the point when Sophia Yevanova knew she was safe in England with her son, and though the young partisan who had fathered her child had not survived the war, at least his son lived. But for those who had been left behind, what had it all been for?

  His audience didn’t need to have that message thrust at them. From their point of view, Sophia’s arrival and the birth of her son would mark the beginning of a new hope. That was the place to end his book. And the beginning? He would start in the Kurapaty
Forest, today, with the memorial under the trees, and the crosses, disappearing into the forest shade.

  He felt the slight vibration as the engine note changed. The past vanished, and he was back in his cramped seat. He gazed out of the window as the plane dropped through the cloud layer that thinned to a wispy mist, and the landscape appeared beneath him. Forest. Vast tracts of forest, marshland, rivers; a land that was flat as far as his eyes could see, covered with a mosaic of trees and wasteland, crisscrossed with rivers. Here and there, he could see small villages. Zialony Luh must have been just such a one. He could see roads, but they were mostly empty, and a railway–he watched a train apparently motionless on the line, falling away as the plane floated ahead and left it far behind.

  The landscape tilted and filled Jake’s window as the plane banked and turned. They were coming down, lower and lower, and he could see no sign of the city, no buildings, no roads. Lower and lower, and they were skimming the treetops. The sense of speed returned. Then the runway markers were blurring past underneath him as the plane touched down. The engines howled, reversing their thrust and Jake felt the deceleration push him out of his seat. Then they were taxiing to a halt at the terminal.

  He had arrived. He was in Belarus, the country that had lost a quarter of its population in the last war, the country where Sophia Yevanova had been born.

  But it wasn’t her words that came into his mind. It was the words of a fairy tale he had seen just a few days before: Once upon a time, deep in the dark forest where the bears roamed and the wolves hunted, there lived an evil witch…

  He was in the country of Kurapaty.

  On Sunday night, Faith had dreamed she was trying to escape through some kind of maze, and something dark and dangerous was close on her heels. It was as if the image of the Old Hall had stayed in her mind and become mixed up with the scene at Daniel’s. When her alarm went off on Monday morning, she felt leaden-eyed with fatigue.