The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Katya studied the surface of the table, tracing the grain of the wood with a manicured finger. ‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. There are papers at the house–you’ll need to go through them before it’s sold. I’m…’ She seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to go on. ‘I’m worried about what you might find.’

  Faith looked at her blankly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why do you think he never talks about his family, or about the war?’

  Because he wants to forget was on the edge of Faith’s tongue, but he had not forgotten and he had not wanted to forget. Someone who wanted to forget would not have collected–and kept–all those cuttings.

  ‘There’s all the mystery about his past–he doesn’t want us to be able to check back.’ She didn’t look at Faith, but gave her attention to stirring her coffee. ‘There’s something he doesn’t want anyone to know. And I think that if he’s kept it secret all this time, then it’s better if it stays a secret.’ Katya paused as if she was trying to choose her words. ‘I know where some of the money went. He’s given a fortune to the Red Cross over the years, and to charities in the old Iron Curtain countries, for reconstruction and education and all that sort of stuff.’

  ‘What kind of secret?’ Faith’s lips felt stiff, as though she didn’t want to speak.

  ‘Do I have to spell it out? Something in the war. People did dreadful things then, it was…just the way it was. And then they went as far away as they could and tried to forget about it.’

  A whole series of random bits and pieces that had been cluttering Faith’s mind, apparently unrelated, now fell into place. It was like seeing a picture in a series of formless blobs, and once she had seen it, she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen it before. It would explain Grandpapa’s unhappiness, and his guilt. It would explain why Jake Denbigh, a man with an avowed interest in war crimes, had appeared on the scene, asking questions. It would explain his restless search as he lay ill. She thought about the names in the cuttings on his desk–Karlis Ozols, Antonas Gecas.

  ‘How long have you believed this?’ she said. Her voice, cool and steady, surprised her.

  ‘Always,’ Katya said. ‘As long as I can remember. My grandparents told me when they thought I was old enough.’

  ‘How would they have known?’ They hardly knew him. They hadn’t come to the wedding. They were horrified by their daughter’s choice.

  ‘My mother must have told them.’

  ‘But she didn’t tell you?’

  Katya shook her head. ‘I was far too young. But she must have found out. Maybe he told her. It explains why she left him–she found out.’

  ‘There’s no mystery about that. The marriage wasn’t working,’ Faith remembered the bleak picture that Katya had painted, the laughing Irish woman from the photograph sitting alone night after night in that empty house, her husband shut away in his study.

  Katya shook her head. ‘You don’t understand about Catholics,’ she said. ‘Or not that kind of Catholicism. She was brought up in one of the most fundamentalist traditions there was. It was a tradition that told her she was risking eternal damnation by living with a man she hadn’t truly married. She loved him enough to do that. Only a Catholic marriage service would have counted in the eyes of her Church. I think she must have hoped to bring him round to the idea eventually. But having made her decision it would have been more sinful for her to go rather than stay. So what did she find out that drove her away?’

  ‘And you’ve never talked to him about it?’

  Katya gave her a cool look. ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I would have asked him. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  ‘I made you see him as a father–I left you with him. When was I supposed to tell you? When you were a child? When you were in your teens and going through that “You’ve stolen my identity” phase? There seemed no reason why it would come to light, so why should you ever have to know? Whatever he did, it was nothing to do with you.’

  Faith thought about the cuttings she’d read, about the eye-witness accounts she’d found among Helen’s documents, about the records she’d seen. She thought of the public hangings, the mass killings, women and children shot in cold blood, people driven into buildings that were then set alight, women raped, children starved, beaten and tortured.

  And she thought of the man she had known all her life, the man who brought her up, who told her stories, who supported her, the man who understood the cycle of the seasons, the man who loved roses. He was a flawed man, she knew that. He had been a ruthless businessman, an implacable opponent, an inadequate father and husband, but she still couldn’t find any space in that picture for a man who would murder and rape.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ she said.

  Katya sighed. ‘I know you don’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t thought you might find out anyway. Well, I’ve told you now. The rest is up to you.’ She offered Faith a cigarette.

  Faith shook her head. ‘If we’re finally sharing secrets, maybe it’s time for you to tell me who my father was.’

  Katya froze, then said, ‘I don’t see that there’s any point, not now. I want some more coffee.’ She looked round for the waiter. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘I won’t know until you tell me,’ Faith said. They were a family with too many secrets, Grandpapa with the war he would never discuss, Katya with the lover she had never named. Faith wasn’t letting her off the hook this time. There was a tense silence as each one waited for the other to speak.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’ The words seemed to be jerked out of Katya in an angry rush. ‘It was when I was at school. We used to go out in the evenings, some of us. We weren’t supposed to, but we did. We weren’t supposed to go anywhere near boys, or drink, or anything like that. Anyway, there was a student party. I met him there. His name was Mike. I drank too much, and it all got out of hand. A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant. I didn’t know how to get in touch with him–I didn’t even know his surname. I had to leave school, of course, and come home. I thought Marek would be angry, but he just dealt with it the way he dealt with everything.’ Katya’s jaw snapped shut. Maybe she had hoped her father would be angry, that he would care enough to be angry.

  Faith looked across the table at her mother. She was dressed casually in grey trousers and a cream jersey. The trousers were beautifully tailored and the jersey was flawless cashmere. Her face was lightly but perfectly made up. She was thin to the point of emaciation. She always watched her diet like a hawk. From Faith’s earliest memory of her, Katya had been the epitome of control. Out of all her imaginings, the story Katya had told her was the last thing she had expected.

  She understood, now, why her mother had never told her. The sixteen-year-old Faith, the Faith who wanted to know, the Faith who had invented the debonair and dashing dream-father would have made her mother pay for that bit of honesty. Now she had to come to terms with the fact that her father was a student who had had casual sex with a drunken schoolgirl and had never bothered to find out if there had been any consequences.

  She helped herself to one of Katya’s cigarettes and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs until she felt the slight dizziness of the nicotine hit. ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she said into her mother’s silence.

  ‘I didn’t want…’ Katya began.

  A man came through the door and looked round. ‘Taxi for Lange,’ he announced.

  For a moment, Katya looked guilty. ‘I do have to go. My train…’

  Faith nodded. ‘I know.’ She realized now that there would never be any reconciliation between father and daughter.

  Hesitantly, Katya touched Faith’s arm. ‘Look after yourself.’

  ‘Of course. You too.’

  Faith watched her mother’s taxi drive away. She could feel a sense of pity for her mother that she had never felt before. Katya had grown up
with a father who was unable to show that he loved her. And she had grown up believing that her father’s past carried a monstrous secret.

  Now Faith had to decide what she was going to do. Something was haunting her grandfather. Something that made him collect old newspaper cuttings, something that made him give all his money away, something that wouldn’t let him rest, perhaps something that wouldn’t let him die. She needed to help him find a resolution.

  The Return

  This is the story of a promise.

  Minsk approached its second winter under the grip of the fascist occupiers. The Nazi advance pressed towards the east. Moscow would fall, was the whisper on the streets. Stalingrad had fallen. And then the advance slowed and stopped. But deep in occupied territory, Minsk was enslaved.

  It was December. The damaged city had carried on as the occupiers tried to subdue it. The executions, the deportations, the reprisal killings were just parts of the battle to survive. Zoya had been deported to work in Germany. Eva took work as a nurse at the local hospital, and had been allowed to stay.

  Everyone was hungry. Even the soldiers now shared the democracy of hunger. Only the officers looked sleek, but their eyes were haunted too, as the stories began to trickle through of what was happening at the front. The tide of the war was about to turn.

  Eva worked. She was quiet, she scrubbed floors, she washed bloodstained bandages and soiled sheets. She washed the bedpans and cleaned the latrines. This was the work she was good for. And because she was quiet and inconspicuous, the orderlies used to take pity on her and trade food from the hospital kitchen for tobacco or the cheap vodka that was easy enough for anyone to get. Eva was glad enough for the eggs and the milk that came her way. Mama was ill and getting sicker. She coughed in the night, and tried to hide the blood on her handkerchiefs from Eva, and Eva pretended not to see.

  She screwed up her courage and spoke to one of the doctors. He was a distant, busy man, but she had observed that he wasn’t unkind. He listened as Eva told him about Mama’s sickness. He shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to be done,’ he said. ‘Not here. Not now.’

  If Mama was her despair, Marek was her secret hope. Since the first note, she had heard from him twice. He was still alive, still fighting. It’s hard but we are hurting them, he said in his second note. Don’t give up. Eva, who went silently through the streets from the hospital to the apartment, from the apartment around the city in the endless search for food, began to carry notes herself, spreading the network of resistance throughout the city. If she was caught, they would kill her, but the small, trudging figure attracted no attention from the patrols. Eva had learned about invisibility in the forest and she passed through the occupied streets, a shadow among shadows.

  The new year was about to begin. A child running past her on the frozen street held out his hand to her and they skated together briefly over a patch of ice, then the child ran on.

  This was the third note from Marek, but this time, it was different.

  It isn’t safe for you in the city any more. I will be at the gate with the bear on Thursday evening at six. Meet me there and I will tell you what to do.

  Marek was coming into the city. Marek was going to risk the patrols and the informers, because he thought she was in danger. She wanted to tell him to stay away, but she had no way of contacting him. It isn’t safe for you in the city any more. It wasn’t safe for anyone, anywhere. She wasn’t safe, Mama wasn’t safe, Papa had gone, and Marek lived with danger every day.

  Don’t come. Don’t come. She projected the message, but at the same time the thought of seeing her brother again filled her with a sense of lightness, as though Marek’s presence would make everything come right.

  21

  Jake’s plane got in at ten in the morning. It was raining as he drove back up the motorway. The traffic was heavy and he got stuck behind a line of cars, the wheels of the heavy lorries spraying dirty water across his windscreen. It made him think of the country he’d just left with its landscape of empty roads, flat marshlands and dense forest.

  It was after two when he got into Manchester. He hesitated. He felt tired and travel stained, and he’d planned to go straight home, but instead he found himself taking the road that led to the Yevanov house. He couldn’t forget what Miss Yevanova had said to him when she agreed to tell him about the Kurapaty Forest: I may be ashes next time we meet.

  And when he saw her, he was shocked at her deterioration in the few days that he had been away. The skin of her face looked more tightly drawn, the shadows under her eyes were darker and he noticed a tremor in the hand she extended to him.

  ‘Mr Denbigh, how quickly you have returned. It’s good of you to call,’ she said. Her voice was almost a whisper. She went through with the ritual summoning of tea, but this time Mrs Barker served, checking Jake’s preferences with a swift glance and raised eyebrow, placing Miss Yevanova’s cup so that she could lift it with the smallest amount of movement. The nurse then withdrew discretely. Miss Yevanova had distanced herself from the whole process.

  Jake wanted to say something to indicate his concern, but he knew that the only way she could bear to deal with her increasing debility was to ignore it. ‘I just got back,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you about it.’

  She smiled. That had pleased her. He studied the icon on the wall behind her. It was a jewel lifted from its setting–a bit like Sophia Yevanova herself.

  She was watching him and he nodded in the direction of the painting. ‘I’ve seen where it came from now,’ he told her.

  She looked at him and shook her head. ‘Minsk is dead,’ she said. ‘They built a memento mori on its corpse.’ She lifted her cup with some difficulty. He kept his eyes on the icon until she had negotiated it back on to the table. ‘And where else did you go?’ she said. ‘The forests and the Pripyet Marshes can be very beautiful–or they were when I was a child. Now, who knows?’

  ‘I believe they still are,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t have enough time. I went to Kurapaty.’

  ‘You know, of course, the Kurapaty Forest that stands now is not the forest that was there before the war?’ she said. ‘It was cut down. They replanted it–but the trees must be mature by now.’

  He hadn’t realized that. He hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘And the village, Zialony Luh?’ He could hear a slight tremor in her voice. She was trying to keep this conversation light and casual, but she was finding it hard.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing there.’

  She picked up the embroidery that was stretched on the hoop beside her, again carefully placed for easy reach. He watched her as she ran her fingers across the design, almost as if she were having trouble seeing it. ‘And in Kurapaty? Was there anything there?’ she asked.

  ‘In the forest? There’s a memorial, and crosses under the trees. I could see the places where the ground had sunk, the places where the burial pits had been.’ He described his drive from the city, the walk through the trees with the taxi driver. He told her about the rows of crosses disappearing into the shadows. There was no point in trying to soften it. He had seen only the distant aftermath. She had been there.

  She pushed her needle through the fabric. She seemed more herself now, the concentration on her work calming her. He could see that the tremor in her hands had lessened. ‘Since we last talked, I have been thinking about it,’ she admitted. ‘I sometimes think it must still be there, still waiting. I think that somewhere those trucks are still running through the night, those sounds still echoing in the trees. Sometimes in the night, I am afraid I will open my eyes and find myself back there.’ Her dark eyes fixed on his face. ‘Where is the past, Mr Denbigh? How can things like that ever be ended?’

  He didn’t know what to say. He thought about the frozen moments he had seen in the museum: the crying child, the grieving mother, the girl hanging in her eternal agony. Were those moments truly finished, or did they still exist somewhere in the place where the past had gon
e? ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just know we can’t get back to it.’

  She kept her eyes on him, as if she was expecting him to say more, then she sighed. ‘What else did you see?’

  He told her about the museum. ‘There were photographs of the occupation,’ he said. ‘They were…bad. But I don’t need to tell you that. And there were artefacts from the death camp at Maly Trostenets–photos of some of the victims, the gallows. I’d never heard of it before–I don’t think many people have. I’d like to write something about that.’

  He looked across at her. She was sitting very still and her face was a white triangle above her dark shawl. ‘Of course.’ Her voice was little more than a whisper and her breathing was laboured.

  She needed help. He was at her side at once. ‘Let me…’ She raised her hand in refusal as the door opened, and Mrs Barker came in.

  ‘The professor is home,’ she said to Miss Yevanova. Her voice was calm, but she spoke quickly. ‘He will come and see you in a few minutes.’ She caught Jake’s eye, and gestured with her head that it was time for him to leave.

  He stepped back. ‘I’ll tell you the rest next time,’ he said, trying to keep up her pretence that all was well, trying not to make it sound as though he were saying goodbye.

  She didn’t reply, and he left the room quickly, leaving Mrs Barker to see to her. As he closed the door behind him, he became aware of Antoni Yevanov watching him from the doorway of another room.

  ‘You’re back, Mr Denbigh.’ Yevanov didn’t make this sound like a matter for celebration.

  ‘Miss Yevanova seems tired,’ Jake said. Yevanov’s first comment didn’t seem to warrant any kind of response.

  The other man came across the hall towards Jake. His face was cold. ‘I am sure that in some way my mother feels obligated towards you…’ He held up his hand as Jake was about to speak. ‘Please, I have no interest in the details. Whatever that obligation is, you must consider it discharged. I would prefer it if you didn’t visit her again.’