The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

‘Because I found these–’ Katya pointed to a pile of envelopes on the table. ‘They were all stuffed into this bottom drawer here.’

  Faith looked at her mother, then began to sift through them.

  There were unopened letters going back weeks, months–junk mail: Mark Lange–Winner. Your guaranteed prize certificate is enclosed!; Christmas cards; letters from the bank: Private and Confidential; letters…She opened one. It was from the agency that supplied Doreen: overdue account…And another that was the same: overdue account. It looked as if they hadn’t been paid for weeks. That would explain Doreen’s absence.

  She unfolded one of the bank statements. It was from three months ago, and showed that Grandpapa had an overdraft of £8,000. There were several letters dated after that statement threatening sanctions. No wonder the agency bill hadn’t been paid…

  ‘It’s a mess,’ Katya said. ‘God knows what else I’m going to find.’ She wiped the dust off her hands with a tissue and looked round the study with its dim light and dark furniture. ‘When I was a child, I always thought this room was the place where he kept his secrets. He was always in here, night after night. I never used to see him. Even before my mother left…’

  That is enough, little one. Faith could see the study door closing inexorably, leaving her outside. His secrets. The things he had seen, the things he knew, the things that made him cry out at the light. The open cupboards, the papers piled up on the table were a violation of his long-guarded privacy. ‘This stuff is old,’ she said, running her fingers through the dust that lay on the tops of the boxes. ‘There’s no need to go through all of these.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I intend doing just that until I find the deeds to the house and his share certificates.’

  ‘His solicitor will have them. Or the bank. There’s no need for all this.’

  ‘He kept everything here,’ Katya said.

  Faith ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Okay. I’ll give you a hand. But once we find those, then we leave it, okay?’

  Katya started to say something, then she sighed angrily. ‘It depends on what we find,’ she said. ‘That pile on the left is the stuff I’ve sorted. It’s all finance and insurance. All the rest needs going through.’

  Faith started turning over the jumble of papers on the table. ‘Is there anything about his family?’

  ‘What would there be? He got out in the clothes he was wearing.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to them?’ To Stanislau and Krishna. And to Eva.

  ‘Don’t ask me. He’s never talked about it to me.’

  Faith moved from box to box, giving the contents of each a quick glance. It was going to take weeks to go through it all thoroughly. Most of what she could see seemed to relate to Grandpapa’s work. Records of his business, none of his family, like the photographs he had burned.

  Slipped down the side of one box was a thin book of grey card, tied with a ribbon. It had faded lettering on the cover. Wedding. She’d never seen it before. She picked it up and turned the pages slowly. She recognized Grandpapa at once. The fair-haired young man from the photograph looked back at her, only this time the suppressed smile was gone. His face was expressionless. This was the grandfather she knew–age had taken away the upright bearing, but the cold severity of his face had changed very little over the years.

  The bride was wearing a dress with a calf-length skirt and a hat that was wreathed with flowers. She was small and pretty with dark curls that hung round her shoulders, and in all the photographs her smile shone out. She smiled at the camera, she smiled up at her new husband. Her face glowed with happiness.

  Faith became aware that Katya was looking over her shoulder. ‘I never knew he’d kept this,’ she said. ‘He told me she’d taken it, that it was lost. I thought I’d taken all the photographs of her that there were.’

  Faith turned the pages. The only other people in the photographs were a middle-aged couple. ‘Are they my great-grandparents?’ she said.

  ‘No. They didn’t come to the wedding. It was a registry office–they didn’t recognize it. As far as they were concerned, she was condemning herself to a state of mortal sin. They were staunch Roman Catholics.’

  ‘Was she Catholic too?’

  Katya nodded. ‘She went against the church to marry him–they were Irish Catholics. You didn’t rebel lightly against that system, not in those days. She must have really loved him.’

  Faith looked at the picture again. Her grandmother, Deirdre O’Halloran. She looked glad, looked like a woman who had made a choice she was happy with, but Grandpapa looked…nothing.

  ‘Why did they split up?’ It was only a few short years after this picture was taken that the couple had separated.

  Katya’s fingers touched the photograph of her mother’s face. ‘It was so long ago. Every time I think of her, I see her on her own. I can remember the evenings–my mother would be sitting in there with her books and her sewing, and he would be in here, working, night after night. She was always alone. She must have been lonely. I know she wanted more children, but I don’t think he did.’ She shrugged. ‘He didn’t have time for the one he’d got.’ She’d evaded the question.

  ‘She looks like you,’ Faith said.

  ‘Oh, she’s much prettier than I ever was.’ Katya’s voice was brisk.

  The awkward conversation died to silence. Faith looked at the clock on the wall that was measuring out the time in slow ticks. It was after six, and the night was dark outside the windows. She thought about Grandpapa sitting in the front room, staring into the pitch black of the garden.

  ‘I’d better get back to the hospital,’ Faith said. ‘I want to sit with him for a while. Are you coming?’

  Katya looked at the chaos around them. ‘I’ll keep going with this lot for a while.’

  ‘Okay. Where are you staying? Why don’t you come to my place? I’ve got a spare room.’

  ‘There’s no need. I’ve booked myself into the Malmaison. It’s closer. I’ll come straight here first thing in the morning. You come along when you can.’ Katya’s voice was brisk.

  ‘I’ve got a meeting at ten thirty. Why don’t you come to the hospital? I’ll go there straight after–around twelve.’

  Katya studied her fingers, scratching a speck of dirt from her fingernail. ‘I’ll have to deal with all of this–’ she said, gesturing round the room. ‘I haven’t got much time. I’ve got to go back tomorrow night. I have to get back to work.’

  Faith shook her head. ‘So when are you going to visit him?’

  ‘They told me that he wasn’t conscious.’ Katya wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘Someone has to sort this mess out. There’s no point in sitting beside his bed when he won’t even know I’m there.’

  ‘Of course he’ll know,’ Faith said. ‘He needs people sitting with him, talking to him…Katya, you have to see him. He’s your father, for Christ’s sake.’

  Her mother’s voice was suddenly cold. ‘He was never a father to me. He came and took me from my grandparents after my mother died, and sent me away to school. I was only seven, I didn’t understand what had happened, and he sent me away. He never came to see me. And when I did come home, he shipped me off to nannies and holiday schemes, I needed him, but he didn’t care. He kept me fed and he kept clothes on my back and that was it. And when you were born–I was only sixteen–suddenly he was the perfect grandfather. But he’s never been a father to me.’

  Faith’s mind went back to her own childhood. Katya had left her when she was small, had gone in search of her own life. The words And what kind of mother were you? stopped against her tongue.

  But it wasn’t that simple. People learned good parenting from their own parents, and Grandpapa, for whatever reason, had not been a good father to his own child. Something had happened to him that left him unable to care. Katya had never been a mother to Faith because no one had shown her how.

  The two women faced each other in inarticulate silence, then Katya turned away. ‘You’re the one he want
s to see. I’ll be much more useful here.’

  20

  Jake was due to leave Minsk early on Friday. He spent Thursday collecting material for the article he’d been commissioned to write, the one that was, in theory, going to cover the costs of his trip. He went into the city and took pictures–the war monuments, the slender obelisk that celebrated the achievements of the Belarusians, the eternal flame, the strange dancing figures that lined the sidewalk along Masherova. He took pictures along the Svisloc, showing the walkways and the parkland, the fairground, the trees.

  And, with truth in mind, he took pictures of the battered trams and buses, the cracked pavements, the ragged old men and women who swept those pavements with besoms, the beggars and their barefooted children.

  That evening, he had dinner with Adam at the Russian restaurant on Skaryny where they’d first met. ‘So, how have your researches gone?’ Adam said, stirring sugar into his coffee. ‘It’s been a short visit. Have you found everything you need?’

  Jake shook his head. ‘I could stay here for a month,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got what I need for now. I’ll come back for the rest.’ To his surprise, he realized that he wanted to.

  ‘You know I will help you.’ Adam looked out of the window. ‘We’re forgotten here. We need the world to remember us, and we need to find our way out into it.’

  ‘I don’t think my book will do that,’ Jake said. ‘It’s all in the past.’

  Adam shrugged. ‘I think we live in the past,’ he said. His gesture encompassed the city with its monuments and memorials. ‘No matter. I think I may have found your family,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘My…you mean the Lange family.’

  Adam nodded. ‘There is a record of a Stanislau Lange who was an officer in one of the local militias after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. As far as I can tell, he operated on the Polish border of that time, around Baranoviche. And then the family moved to Minsk, in 1941. That fits in with your own research, no?’

  It seemed that the Lange men, at least, had a record of collaboration with the Soviets.

  Adam was looking at him. ‘You are finding this unpalatable?’ he said. ‘You are reading it with the wrong eyes. Byelorussia had been split in two. The Poles were not kind to the Belarusians whose territory they were given. This man–maybe he was a patriot. He may have felt that his loyalty belonged to the Soviets rather than the Poles.’

  ‘Okay.’ Adam had a point. The twenty-twenty hindsight of his 21st-century perspective was perhaps not the most useful here. ‘When can you let me know?’

  ‘The bureaucracy here is slow,’ Adam said. ‘I have to get permission to access the archives, and then I have to get permission to take copies–I can’t say.’

  ‘Can you fax documents through?’

  Adam smiled. ‘We are not entirely stuck in the past. Yes, I can fax, if I have permission to copy the material.’ He called the waiter over. ‘We need vodka,’ he said. ‘This is a farewell. Did you visit the museum?’

  Jake nodded. ‘It was…’ He couldn’t find the words. ‘What happened to them?’ he said. ‘To the people who did that?’ In his mind, he could still see the face of the officer placing a noose round the neck of a child, the obscene concentration in his expression. ‘The killing, the death camp…Maly Trostenets?’

  ‘Some were taken by the Red Army. Some got away. The man who commanded one unit of the Security Police in Minsk fled to the west. Karlis Ozols was his name. He was an excellent chess player–he became the Australian chess champion.’ Adam raised an eyebrow. ‘God has a sense of humour. Another, a platoon commander in the Schutzmannschaft, Antonas Gecevicius, changed his name to Gecas and escaped to Britain. He was still there not so many years ago.’

  Jake nodded. It wasn’t over. Those pictures, frozen in time, were living memories for the people who had done it.

  They spent the rest of the evening talking about the legacies of the war.

  When Jake got back to his room, he wasn’t tired. He was adept at living out of a briefcase and had done what packing he needed to do. He switched on his laptop and started putting his article together. He found himself falling into the house style of the magazine easily enough, the cool cynicism that was appropriate for monuments to The People and the glories of The State. He could throw the article together in a couple of hours.

  But the monuments were all that was left.

  The dead had their graves and the living tried to forget.

  Faith left work at lunchtime to go to the hospital. Grandpapa had been moved from intensive care on to a ward that consisted of a long corridor with four-bed units opening off it. It didn’t have the sense of subdued urgency she’d felt in the ITU. She tried to tell herself that this move must mean he was improving, but the ward was full of old people. Some, like Grandpapa, were comatose, others wandered vaguely, apparently lost in a world that only they could see. It felt like a place where people were taken to die.

  She sat down beside his bed and took his hand. ‘It’s me. It’s Faith,’ she said. Her voice sounded loud against the background noise of the hospital. It was a place where no one spoke, apart from the interminable television at the far end of the room. He wasn’t lying in that deathly stillness any more. Instead, he shifted restlessly on the bed, his lips moving in an urgent monologue that was impossible to decipher.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is he in pain?’ Faith asked one of the nurses.

  The nurse shook her head. ‘There’s something worrying him,’ she said. ‘He won’t settle.’ She raised her voice. ‘Are you all right, Marek? You’ve got a visitor.’ She watched him for a minute, then straightened up. ‘He needs to rest.’

  Faith leaned over the bed. ‘Grandpapa,’ she said. ‘I’m here. What is it?’

  His eyes focused on her: ‘…the light…you must…’ His voice was slurred and tailed away into incoherent mumbling, but his hand reached out towards her, urgently.

  ‘Does he know I’m here?’ she asked.

  The nurse straightened the sheet. ‘Yes, he’s probably very aware, but he can’t communicate. Talk to him. Let him know you’re trying to understand.’

  Faith watched him as his head turned on the pillow and his eyes sought something he couldn’t find. She took his hands and tried to keep them still, but he pushed her away. After a while, he sank into an exhausted sleep.

  Faith sat and watched his face. On Tuesday, before he collapsed, he’d been frightened of something. What was it he’d said when she found him in the dark hallway? The light…The light had disturbed him, and later, he’d kept watch on the garden. I think I have left it behind, and all the time…It is better if I die, too.

  ‘He looks so small…’

  Faith jumped. Katya was standing behind her, looking down at the bed. She leaned over and brushed her lips against her father’s cheek. ‘It’s Katya, Papa,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you’re ill.’ She looked at him for a moment longer, as if she was expecting some kind of answer, then she straightened up. ‘I wanted to see you before I go back,’ she said. ‘You weren’t answering your phone.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Faith said evasively. She hadn’t answered the phone because she didn’t know what to say to her mother.

  ‘How is he?’ Katya was studying her father, her expression unreadable.

  ‘There’s something…’ Faith told her about his restless urgency, his inability to rest. ‘Something’s worrying him.’ Worrying him to death.

  Katya frowned. ‘We need to talk.’ She held up her hand. ‘Not things we can talk about here,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you in that café place across the road. Don’t be too long.’ Her heels tapped briskly as she left the room.

  Faith lingered by Grandpapa’s bed. She needed to talk to Katya, and she had a meeting in an hour, but she was reluctant to go. ‘I don’t want to leave him,’ she said to the nurse. ‘What if…?’

  ‘He’s stable,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll call you if there’s any change.’

  She made sure,
again, that they had the number of her phone. ‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse said. ‘We’ll call you.’ But Faith couldn’t shake off the idea that in the chaos of the busy ward, the needs of an old man might easily be forgotten.

  By the time she got to the café, Katya was sitting at a table, an empty cup in front of her. ‘Coffee?’ she said as Faith came across.

  Faith pulled out a chair and sat down. Katya ordered more coffee and busied herself with rearranging the table. By unspoken agreement, their last conversation wasn’t mentioned.

  ‘I wanted to see you because I’ve got to go back today,’ Katya said. She met Faith’s gaze and shifted defensively. ‘I have to. They want me back at my desk tomorrow morning. I’ve been going through Marek’s papers, and there are some things I need to tell you.’ Faith listened in silence as her mother explained what she had found. Grandpapa’s financial affairs were in a mess. ‘As far as I can tell, he’s been living off his state pension. He’s got a massive overdraft. I’m trying to sort it out. But it’s worse than that. He took out a mortgage on the house. He hasn’t been paying that, either. I think it might have to be sold.’

  Faith rubbed her hand across her forehead as she tried to take in what her mother was telling her. ‘He won’t want to leave the house.’ He would hate that and would resist it to his last breath. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened to his money.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ The coffee arrived. Katya picked up her cup–she always took coffee black–and sipped. She pulled a face and put the cup down. ‘It’s impossible to get decent coffee in this country.’ Her voice was brisk and businesslike as she went on. ‘One of us will have to get power of attorney–I’m not sure how it works if Marek is too ill to give consent. We have to move fast. He’s going to need to go somewhere when he comes out of hospital and I don’t know where else the money for that can come from.’

  Katya was right. He couldn’t live alone again, but Faith couldn’t imagine him living in a care home, taken away from his garden, his solitude destroyed. If he survived the stroke, that alone would kill him. She prevaricated. ‘Let’s wait and see what happens.’