by Carla Banks
Gradually the forest reclaimed the land, the pines and birches moving into the clearing, growing through the floor of the old house, the brambles entwining around the collapsed walls and the rusty stove. The house vanished forever into the deep glades of the forest where the trees were bare in the winter and reached their fingers high up into the sky.
But in summer, the leaves grew and the branches hung down in fronds. When the wind blew, the branches would wave and the leaves would dance. Then the sunlight made patterns of shadow and gold. And the tree trunks were white, like slender pillars along the paths.
In the forest, there was a clearing. And a man called Stanislau built a house in the clearing, a house of timber. And Stanislau and his wife Krishna lived in the house, where their first child, Marek, was born.
Stanislau planted trees in the clearing, cherry trees and plum trees, and he dug a deep well. The water that came from the well was clear like crystal, sweet and cool.
Marek grew big and strong, a happy boy with fair hair and a ready smile. And then, five years later, in the depths of winter, Eva was born. The last child, a little girl. The night of her birth, there was a storm that made the trees bend, the branches lashing through the air as the wind whooped and swirled…
No more stories.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all the people who have helped me when I was researching this book, especially Anna Gerasimova and Adam Maldzis, First Vice-President, Belarusian PEN, for the help they gave me when I travelled to Minsk; Franklin and Galina Swartz for the help they gave me with my research; the staff at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, praspekt Francyska Skaryny, Minsk, for copying photographs for me, and for maintaining such a moving and salutary memorial to the events of the 1939-1945 war.
I would also like to thank Eileen Fauset and Jenny Ryan for reading the manuscript and giving invaluable critical comment; my agent Teresa Chris for all the support she has given me during the often difficult process of writing; and Julia Wisdom and Anne O’Brien at HarperCollins, whose editing has helped to make this book what it is.
About the Author
Carla Banks grew up in a scholarly family. Her father, an Eastern European cavalry officer, came to the UK as a wartime refugee where he met and married her half-Irish mother. He told his children stories of his childhood in a country that had been destroyed by the war. Carla Banks has been an academic for most of her working life and is fascinated by the power of language. She lives in the north of England and now writes full time.
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Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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2005
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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © 2005
Carla Banks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
ISBN-13 978-0-00-719211-3
ISBN-10 0-00-719211-8
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EPub Edition © 2005 ISBN: 9780007334490
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