The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  He remembered his plan to ask Adam about Marek Lange–to see what the archives might reveal about that family. He hadn’t forgotten his intention to try to pin down Lange’s origins, and this looked like a good starting point. But first of all, he wanted to find out exactly what Lange had been doing in Minsk. He took out the photograph of the young man in uniform and showed it to Adam, who looked at it with raised eyebrows. ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  ‘I know who it is,’ Jake said, ‘but I don’t know what it is. I was told it was taken in Minsk, but I don’t know if it’s possible to tell.’

  ‘You English should learn your languages better,’ Adam said. ‘The picture tells you, almost. Yes, this was taken in Minsk. I have seen pictures of this building before. Look at the writing on the door–it tells you all you need to know.’

  Jake took the photograph back and looked more closely. The initials HK were all he could see, and, yes, something that could be a B. He shook his head to indicate to Adam that he was no wiser.

  Adam laughed quietly. ‘The sign–it tells you that this building is the headquarters of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.’

  He looked at Jake as though he expected him to understand the significance of what he had said. Jake shrugged. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said.

  ‘This is a soldier of the Commissariat, wearing their uniform,’ Adam said. ‘And the sign–’ He wrote the symbols down and pushed the paper across to Jake:

  Cyrillic. Of course! Shit, it was obvious…

  He thought about Marek Lange looking out of the window, and heard his voice: It is wrong. I know! He remembered Faith, her head bent over the photograph, her face intent. He brought me up. He’s more like my father. And he remembered Sophia Yevanova sitting upright in her chair, her eyes staring into the past as she talked about the mist rising from the ground one icy winter night, the breath of prisoners crammed into the cellars awaiting their deaths.

  And the strange symbols spelled out their message as he looked at them, under Adam’s attentive gaze.

  NKVD.

  At the time the photograph was taken, Marek Lange had been in Minsk, as a soldier of the NKVD.

  15

  Faith spent the morning clearing the backlog of work from her desk. She rearranged all her meetings, organized the new schedule for the postgraduate seminars, and arranged cover for Helen’s teaching. That was a task she had dreaded, but in the end, it was like everything else, routine. The wheels of working life had slotted back into the groove. After lunch, she phoned to arrange an appointment with Antoni Yevanov.

  ‘He’s in meetings all afternoon,’ Trish said.

  ‘Tomorrow, then. It’s important. It’s about the paper for Bonn.’

  ‘Are you having problems?’

  Faith didn’t want to discuss it. ‘I need to talk to Professor Yevanov.’

  Trish promised to try and fit her in, and Faith put the phone down. She leaned back in her chair and massaged the back of her neck. Now she had a moment of quiet, she could no longer block out the thing she had been working to avoid: Daniel’s face, cold with anger as he told her to get out of the house and stay away from the children. It wasn’t the anger that had disturbed her—it was the intent she had seen in his eyes when he gripped her arm. He was capable of violence.

  But even after the events of the day before, she found it hard to believe that Daniel Kovacs, the man she had known for over a decade, was capable of brutal, calculated murder. She needed to talk to Finn, to establish a line of contact.

  And she’d thought of a way she could reach him. She checked the time. It was just after three. She saved Helen’s files on to a disk and put it into her bag. She was about to switch her computer off, then–telling herself she was being paranoid—she changed the password giving access to her data. She packed her things together and headed for the car park.

  Finn’s school was on the other side of the town, on the Huddersfield Road. She’d timed her arrival well. As she approached it, she began to see groups of teenagers coming out of the gates, girls with their skirts hiked up to a fashionable length, their sleeves casually pushed back, their shirts open at the neck. They wore their uniform with cool aplomb, unlike the boys, who mostly looked young and scruffy.

  Faith drove slowly past the groups ambling along the pavement. She pulled in further down the road where she could keep an eye on the gate. It was hard to see through the throngs of children who now came pouring out, reminding her of the crowds in the city centre on Saturday night. They pushed, shouted, chased, occasionally shoving past her car, ignoring the adult usurper in their domain. She stayed where she was, watching. A couple of times, she thought she saw Finn, but it was always another dark-haired boy. She was beginning to think that she must have missed him, when she saw him coming out of the newsagents on the other side of the road.

  He was with a group of boys who clustered together on the grass verge. He had his father’s build, a shorter, stocky figure, standing slightly apart from his friends. His arms were wrapped round his chest, and he was staring into the distance, a worried frown creasing his face. She wound down the window and called to him. ‘Finn?’

  He looked round, puzzled. He didn’t see her until one of his companions nudged him and pointed at her. He started to smile in recognition, then chewed his lip and hesitated. She got out of the car and he came slowly towards her. ‘Hi,’ he said. He looked round for his friends who were melting away into the background. ‘What d’you want?’ He sounded a bit wary, but she could detect no hostility in his voice. Daniel obviously hadn’t said anything to him about the events of the day before.

  ‘I was just passing and I saw you,’ she said.

  He pulled a packet of sweets out of his pocket and held it out to her. ‘Want one?’

  Faith inspected the contents with their jumble of pinks, yellows and purples, almost fluorescent in their brightness. ‘No thanks. I don’t want to start glowing in the dark. What are they?’

  He pushed the bag into his pocket. He was starting to smile now. ‘Okay, I’ll have something green, if you’re buying.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Exactly how stupid do you think I am?’

  His grin widened, and he looked like the Finn she knew. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

  She feigned a swipe at him with her bag, and he ducked, laughing. For a moment, it was like it always used to be. ‘How’s it going?’ she said.

  He came and stood beside her, leaning against the car. His face was serious again. ‘I dunno. It’s just…you know.’

  ‘I don’t think I do.’ She watched the other children drifting away down the road outside the school playground, shouting, pushing, fighting. ‘My mum hasn’t died.’

  ‘What about your dad?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Wow.’ He thought about this. ‘That’s tough.’

  ‘Not really. I never knew him, so I don’t miss him. It’s my granddad I’d miss.’

  ‘Yeah? I wouldn’t miss mine.’ He gave her a quick glance. His eyes were nearly level with hers. ‘Faith…’ he began, then stopped.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  She waited, but he stayed quiet. ‘Listen, Finn, if there’s anything you need to talk about, you can talk to me, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know.’ He was looking at the ground, pushing at the grass with his shoe. He looked so troubled that she wanted to press him, to try to persuade him to tell her what it was that was worrying him. She wanted to tell him that she would keep it to herself, that anything he told her would be just between the two of them. But suppose he told her that his father had left the house the night his mother died…she couldn’t make that promise.

  ‘If I want…’ he began. ‘Can I have your number? Your mobile? I haven’t got that.’

  ‘Of course.’ She got out her purse and gave him her card with all her numbers on. ‘Just c
all me if you need anything.’

  He took it and studied it. ‘Does this mean you won’t be coming round any more?’

  She wondered how to answer that. ‘I will. Of course I will. But I think your dad needs a bit of time.’

  ‘He’s pissed off with you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. He is.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Lots of things, Finn. I think it’s because he was angry with your mum, and I was her friend…’

  He nodded as if this made sense. ‘She phoned,’ he said abruptly.

  She…‘Your mum?’ Faith could feel her heart beating faster.

  ‘Yeah.’ He glanced at her, then looked down at the ground. ‘They argued. They always…I wanted to ask Dad why they always had to fight, but one of his mates came round so I couldn’t.’ He shrugged angrily. ‘I could have talked to her,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t.’

  Guilt. He felt guilty because he hadn’t talked to his mother and it had been his last chance. He was watching her with an oddly speculative gaze, as if he was trying to gauge her reaction to his words. ‘You weren’t to know,’ she said. ‘How could you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The boy looked and sounded so like his father that it unnerved her. He glanced towards his friends, who were lurking protectively in the background. He wanted to go back to them.

  ‘How’s Hannah?’ she said. ‘Is she okay?’

  He didn’t meet her eye. ‘She’s all right.’

  ‘Tell her I’ll come and see her as soon as I can.’

  ‘Yeah. Okay. I’ve got to go.’

  She touched his arm briefly. It was all she could do. She couldn’t hug him in front of his friends. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘If you need me…’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  She watched him as he walked away across the road.

  As she drove home, her mind unpicked the conversation with Finn. She had one cause for relief. He hadn’t been the only witness to his father’s presence in the house that evening. Someone else had been there, some friend of Daniel’s who had dropped in for a drink.

  But there was still the problem of Hannah. It had disturbed Faith the way the child had insisted that her mother would be back. Could a six-year-old encompass the idea of death? She didn’t think that Daniel had the remotest idea of how to deal with this. There seemed to be no way to get to Hannah past her father’s vigilance, no way that didn’t run the risk of subjecting the children to a display of his anger. Time. Maybe Daniel would relent in time.

  When she got home, she made herself a sandwich, and forced herself to think about work, about the project she had so blithely taken on for Antoni Yevanov. She decided to spend the evening sorting out the stuff that she’d collected from Helen’s–she’d put it off for too long as it was.

  She went through to the front room and started work. A lot of it was simple–Faith soon had the papers in two piles, one, a large one, for disposal and one, much smaller, for checking. It was all old stuff. There was very little that was worth keeping. Her hands felt dry from the dust that seemed to accumulate on old papers.

  At the bottom of the last box was a folder. It looked recent–it was clean, and the writing on it wasn’t faded. It was labelled, in Helen’s handwriting, ‘Family’. Faith wiped her hands on her jeans and opened it. At first, she thought there was nothing inside it, but when she lifted the flap, she found a thin sheaf of letters. She looked at the first one:

  Dear Ms Kovacs

  Thank you for your enquiry. I am pleased that you are interested in my collection, but I am afraid you will have to be more specific about what you wish to find. My archive is very large. It is not catalogued and I can’t allow indiscriminate searches through it.

  If you can give me more information, I will try to help you.

  Yours truly

  G. Litkin

  Gennady Litkin, the man who had put together the Litkin Archive. Faith rubbed her hand across her forehead, frowning. Helen had never mentioned being in correspondence with Litkin. She looked at the next letter.

  Dear Ms Kovacs

  I have some records from pre-war Lithuania. They may be of some use to you in a general way, if not in relation to your family. If you can give me a clearer idea of the focus of your research, I will be able to answer your questions more closely.

  I have some photographs of Vilnius in 1940, and I have political pamphlets. I also have some personal papers relating to the last war, and other miscellany, if this would be of interest.

  Now Faith understood Helen’s interest in the Litkin Archive. As she had suspected when she saw the material Helen had collected, she had been trying to find substitutes for the papers that Daniel had burned. She read Litkin’s letter again. If he’d been trying to interest Helen in the archive, he couldn’t have found a better way…some personal papers…Helen had been obsessed with old papers. She collected memorabilia, the artefacts of the past. She got excited over tea stains on letters, pencilled notes in the margins of books, scribbled diaries of the minutiae of existence. She wouldn’t have been able to resist the lure.

  Dear Ms Kovacs

  You are correct that this is an area that is little researched. This is one of the reasons I began my archive.

  I have items I can make available that may give your children information about their cultural background at some time in the future. As to your request to look at the papers, I will need to think about this. I have to be careful about allowing access to my library. Not all researchers are benign.

  Faith was frowning as she stared at the letter. Helen, with her work falling seriously behind, had been prepared to spend time negotiating with Litkin for access to papers because they may have had some faint relevance to her children. It didn’t make sense. There must have been something else. Helen had talked to Faith about her next project, about hunting round for ideas that would engage her interest and attract funding. The unarchived Litkin collection would have been a good place to start.

  There was another letter, dated a few weeks later:

  I have papers relating to the period you mention. There is a wartime diary that you may find illuminating, and some linked correspondence. I should perhaps caution you, given your family connections, that not all stories that come from that place and that time are happy ones. Lithuania was invaded first by the USSR before the Nazis drove the communists out, and this led to some unfortunate alliances. But you must judge for yourself.

  In response to your other query, the only materials I have are a set of workers’ records from a nineteenth-century mining company. Perhaps we could talk on the telephone about this.

  Faith could feel her legs starting to cramp. She stood up and stretched, then took the folder to the table where she could read the rest of the correspondence in comfort. The records from the mining company were Helen’s ostensible reason for visiting the archive, and the Lithuanian stuff was–presumably–for Hannah and Finn. Whatever else it was Helen had been looking for, the correspondence ended here. She and Litkin may have continued their discussion by phone, but the next letter was from a firm of solicitors:

  Dear Mrs Kovacs

  We regret to inform you that access to the papers of the late Gennady Litkin cannot be granted under the conditions you outline, as you did not obtain written authority from Mr Litkin prior to his death. The estate is currently being wound up, and you will need to get permission from the court-appointed executors.

  The letter went on to name them, the first one being, as Faith already knew, Antoni Yevanov. She felt as though she had gone round a large circle and come back to the beginning.

  The Beginning

  This is the story of the storm in the forest.

  The year made patterns. Spring would come, the fruit trees would blossom, the rain would fall and the forest would blur into green. The skies would be blue at the start of the endless summer when the river was warm and the fields were busy and the days were long. And then before Eva realized it, the fields were golden and then they were
bare, and winter came again as the world closed down for its long silence.

  But now, the patterns were broken. In the winter of 1938, Mama became ill. Eva still went to school, but she looked after Mama and Marek. She prepared the food and cooked it. She watched the stores and mended the clothes, she swept the house and washed the pots. The January snows came and went. Marek brought her a red hair-ribbon for her birthday. ‘Because you are pretty, little one.’

  She was thirteen. She tied the ribbon in a butterfly bow at the side of her head and wrapped Mama’s lace shawl round her shoulders. She tilted the dresser mirror, trying to see her reflection. Her hair curled round her face. Under the draping lace, her shoulders looked white and slender, and her neck arched above.

  She stepped back, and the woman in the glass became a child in a heavy skirt and boots with grubby hands, an incongruous shawl draped round her. She let it slip off, holding it as if she was going to drop it on the floor, then she folded it carefully, burying her face in its softness, breathing in the scent of lavender.

  Times were hard. The police had come for Papa, and had taken him away. And there was fear throughout the village. Across the border, far away in the west, something dreadful was coming, and Eva woke in the night sometimes, with the memory of stealthy feet in their relentless pursuit echoing through her dreams. Marek’s face was grim when he and the men from the village talked, their differences forgotten.

  He tried to keep his worries secret from her and from Mama. Mama, coughing in the night and flushed and feverish in the day, was unaware, but Eva knew. ‘What?’ she said to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Too much work.’ He gave her a ghost of his usual grin. ‘Without Papa, it’s hard. And we are short of money. Nothing we haven’t dealt with before, little one.’

  But it was more than that, she knew it.

  Marek started talking to Mama about her family. Mama had a sister, Zoya, Eva’s aunt, who lived in Minsk. ‘Maybe you and Eva should go to Zoya,’ he said.