‘“I am now working as a teacher and accountant in Wrocław, under the name of Feliks Wasilewski. I have picked up a violin only once since I made my promise, and that was to compose these few lines of music, which I have written as a requiem for whichever descendant of mine might have paid the price for my cowardice.”’
‘It’s signed Grzegorz Walach,’ she said finally.
Jack sat for a long time in silence once Krystyna had finished reading. She reached across to him and held his hand.
‘Well,’ he said at last, looking at her. ‘I think we know where Sparky is now, don’t we?’
Along with Komisarz Pocztarek, three police officers with a Labrador tracker dog and two forest rangers, they returned to the part of the Kampinos Forest where they had searched for Krystyna’s colleague Robert.
They started by finding the place where Jack and Krystyna had stopped to consider killing themselves and Sparky had run away from them. Jack gave the tracker dog one of Sparky’s T-shirts to sniff. It had rained several times since they were here, but the overhanging trees had protected the scent from being totally washed away. The tracker dog hesitated and wuffled two or three times, but it managed to follow the trail deeper and deeper into the forest.
Before long, they reached a long downhill slope where the pine trees grew so close together that it was difficult for them to shoulder their way through. The forest was utterly silent, and dark, and claustrophobic, and Jack began to feel that they would never be able to find their way out of it.
‘If your son is here, this dog will find him,’ said Komisarz Pocztarek, trying to be reassuring. ‘The nose of this breed is so sensitive, they can even smell cadavers under running water.’
Jack said nothing. He wanted to find Sparky, but not like this.
After about ten minutes of struggling through the trees, however, the Labrador let out three sharp barks and began to scuffle with its paws at the brown matted pine needles. Its handler pulled it away, and the other two officers pulled on blue latex gloves before they hunkered down and started to brush aside the vegetation with their hands.
Jack stayed well back, and Krystyna held his hand. Neither of them spoke.
After a few minutes, the officers exposed the pale blotchy flank of a body. Komisarz Pocztarek walked over and took off his cap. ‘I’m sorry for this, sir, but it looks like your son. Could you please identify him for us?’
Jack let go of Krystyna’s hand and went up to the edge of the shallow grave. At least the Forest Ghost had respected Sparky enough to bury him, so that he hadn’t been lying here naked on the forest floor, prey to any passing animal. The body’s face was so puffy that he didn’t look like Sparky at all, but Jack instantly recognized his blond hair, and the metal pendant that he was wearing around his neck – the pendant that used to belong to his mother.
‘– dependant …’ That’s what Jack thought she had whispered to him on the plane. But in reality she had been telling him where he was, and how he could identify him when he found him.
‘– the pendant …’
Komisarz Pocztarek said, ‘I am very sorry for your loss, sir. But I still do not understand. I saw your son leave the forest and I presume that he flew back to America with you. How did he return here?’
Jack turned away from the grave. ‘I’m just beginning to find out how little any of us understand about anything, Komisarz. And now we never will.’
Requiem
Two weeks later, Sparky was buried next to his mother at Saint Boniface Cemetery. It was a dry day, but very gusty, and black hats and funeral scarves blew away in the wind.
As the casket was lowered, a single violinist played the requiem that Grzegorz Walach had written for the descendant whose life he had given away, even though he had never known who he was. Jack had wondered whether to have this music played or not, but then he decided that even if it was not yet time to forget, it was time to forgive. He had experienced the same panic for himself, and it wasn’t easy to judge his great-grandfather for the terrible promise that he had made.
The notes of the requiem were sad beyond description. They summed up all of the pain and despair that so many people had suffered over so many years, and the deep uncertainty about tomorrow. Only Jack and Krystyna knew what they really meant. They meant loss, and abandonment, and betrayal. They meant that the spirits who had protected us for so many millennia had now left us to survive on our own.
When the violinist had finished, Jack threw a clod of earth onto Sparky’s casket, and then turned away from the grave, pulling out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes. Krystyna gave him a sympathetic smile.
‘Looks like I’m on my own now,’ he told her.
She shook her head, although she didn’t say anything. She linked arms with him and they walked together toward the cemetery gates, with angels watching them on either side.
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 28
