He stops, to stare into a picture of Grandfather with a woman who must be baba. They are ringed by pines, and he wonders: is it the house in the forest where we live? Baba looks like mama used to do, and he tries to imagine her a squalling baby on the step. What is story and what is history? Grandfather’s life, scrawled all around him.
He pictures what it must be like for Grandfather tonight. In his head a hearthfire dances, and a handful of frogs broil in snow-melt thick with Jew’s ears and leaves. After dinner, though, there can be no tale to tell, for there is nobody there to hear the telling. Instead, Grandfather goes to the end of the garden and talks to mama. He stands in the curdling night until the ice solidifies around his jackboots to root him to the earth as completely as any old tree.
The boy sees Grandfather in the picture and fights back tears – it is not fair that there is nothing to ward off tears like a hot milk wards off winter – because another thought occurs: what if the car broke down, somewhere in the wild, and it took Grandfather long hours to get to school and collect him? Perhaps he is waiting there, even now, lurking at the gates of the empty schoolhouse, wondering what has happened.
He comes to mama’s door. Inexplicably, the light still shines underneath. It makes his chest flurry because, for a second, he thinks that somebody might be through there. He presses his ear to the wood, as if listening for a heartbeat, but there is just the dull buzzing of the lamplight.
It is forbidden to go through the doors, but perhaps those rules don’t mean a thing, now that mama is gone. His fingers find the handle, and the light rushes out to meet him. He stalls, lets it lap at his face, remembers the last time he went through this door and the promise he made. That promise is broken now. If mama knew he had left Grandfather out in the woods, she would never speak to him again.
He means to close the door, unable to face the ghost in the bedsheets, but smells rush out to seize him, and with them come memories. He snatches for them. The perfume she wore when she stepped out for the evening. The soap and soda she used to scrub the mattress every time she was sick. The kapusta she asked for in those last days, when she didn’t want to eat and enjoyed, instead, the spice in the steam.
‘Oh, mama,’ he says, his voice so very small.
By the time he has the courage to venture in, he can see the dim outline of the dresser, the suitcase she brought from the old house and never really unpacked, in case it was needed in dead of night for a trip in an ambulance. He walks along the side of the bed, marvelling at how it has remained unmade, and trails his hand along creases in the sheets. He imagines their every ruffle like the contours of a map, the atlas of her body pressed into the bedspread.
It is only when he steps back that he sees the photographs on the walls. They lurk, just out of sight, more fragments of long-ago times. It occurs to him: before we lived here, this was where Grandfather slept. He didn’t always sleep in the rocking chair. This is his bed, and these are his photographs … and this is his chest, sitting at the bottom of the bed.
It is something he has not seen before: a simple wooden box, with a brass lock and hinge. So worn and weathered are its corners that it looks like something that might have been unearthed in the ruin. He runs his hands over it, and when he lifts them up he can smell, not mama’s perfume, not the detergent stench of her old sheets, but the musk of branches tied in bundles to dry over the hearthfire.
It opens at his first touch, with no need for a key. Inside lies darkness, old and stale – and, beneath that darkness, a leather pouch. He delves inside and lifts it up. It is, he sees, a knapsack, just the same as the one in the story of Baba Yaga.
He sets it on the bed and stretches it out. There are letters stitched into the strap, but they are letters the boy has never seen, strange things from another kingdom. He wrestles to unfasten the buckle, but the leather is tough, flaking as he works it out. At last, he slides his hand within – but there is nothing there. His hand comes out, trailing strands like spider’s webs and, in the cracks between his fingers, he sees flecks of brown, like minuscule husks of seed – or pine needles left to dry by the fire.
He retreats to a chair by the dresser, with the knapsack in his lap. It is, he understands, a relic of Grandfather.
He stares at the bed, willing it to move. ‘Mama, papa’s in the woods.’
His voice is gone, swallowed by bedsheets as easily as snow.
‘Mama, who’ll look after him now?’
Then he remembers that mama’s in the woods too, or at least what’s left of her, and Grandfather talks to her in the roots at night. She can’t possibly be in two places at once. Grandfather was right when he said there’s nothing left in the tenement for either of them.
The boy is on his own, but that is not the thought that bores into him – for Grandfather is on his own as well, and there is a promise to keep.
Over his shoulder: the knapsack, empty but for the single tin of Smolensk Smoked Beef. He steals along the concrete row, the tenement above like a great sculpture of ice, something left behind when the sun stopped shining. Alone, he hurries down the grey stair, mama’s shawl wrapped around his shoulders.
He can find his way to the bus stop, but after that the city is as wild a thing as the pushcha itself. He tries to picture the route Mr Navitski brought him on his motorcycle, but the streets bleed into one another and it is difficult to tease one intersection from another. Even so, there is a place he remembers, one that has lodged in the back of his head: a place where buses come from all over the city, a warehouse near the railway bridges where Yuri lives above the canteen. Perhaps, if he can find his way there, there may yet be another way to Grandfather.
There are men gathered at the bus stop, faces masked by the fog of their breath. He stands with them, careful not to insinuate himself between them, lest they ask any questions. He looks up, as if he might be able to read the time in the stars, but all above is impenetrable cloud.
When the bus comes, the driver asks for a ticket and, when he doesn’t have a ticket, asks for ten thousand rubles instead. When the boy pulls his empty hands from his pockets, the driver shrugs, wearing a wicked storybook smile. He is about to send the boy back to the side of the road when a man lumbers to the front of the bus, using his knuckles like an ape. With a mutter, he produces a note from his pocket, thrusts it at the driver, and turns to sit back down.
The driver curses, pushes a paper ticket into the boy’s hand and barks for him to take a seat. With the scrap curled in his fist, he wobbles down the aisle. He thinks he should say a thank you to the man who helped, but he passes him by and nothing comes out.
Throughout the journey he keeps his eyes on the buildings that pass. At last he reaches an intersection he remembers. Here there hunches a canteen, where mama once took him for tea and a biscuit. Her hands wobbled as she tried to drink and she told him he didn’t have to go to school until the afternoon, and in that moment it felt like the best day ever, even if that was the day she told him there was poison in her blood.
When the bus stops, he follows a woman wearing a headscarf to the kerb. He is sure the driver mutters dark things at him as he lowers himself from the step.
The roads are familiar and then the roads are strange, but then there is a spire to tell you where you are, or a tower to tell you when to turn round. In this way, he comes to the road of the school. He scours the parked cars for signs that Grandfather was here, but his attempts throw up no clues. Grandfather, it seems, did not make it out of the forests at all.
The schoolhouse is a sad thing, sitting in the dark and, when a cold wind gusts along the road, clawing at the building, it only reminds him of all that he is missing, out in the wild.
Retracing the steps to the bus he took with Yuri and his mama is easy enough. He lingers in the shelter of the overhang, as one bus passes and then another. None of these look like the kind of bus that might take a boy into the forest. At last, wary that darkness is already curdling around him, he gets aboard the next bus th
at comes along.
‘Ticket?’
The boy pushes past, into the cramped interior, but the driver only barks again. ‘Ticket, boy?’
He delves a hand into his pocket and comes up with the scrap of paper the first bus driver gave him – but when he presents it, the driver merely flings it back in his direction.
‘Just what are you trying to pull?’
He stands there, dumb.
‘Go on, get off, before I throw you off myself.’
Two more buses come before he has the courage to try again. This time, a glut of women, laden with shopping bags, rush to the door, and the boy finds himself swept up among them, lost in billowing dresses and coats open wide.
The condensation is thick in the windows and he cannot see the streets that pass. He thinks they might circle the cathedral, which is a place mama once took him, but then the streets are low and less crowded and the streetlights further apart. One after another the other passengers abandon the bus. He can see their blurred outlines waddling away, along dark avenues where the houses sullenly wait.
Soon there are only three other passengers on board, and one of those is asleep on the back seat. They gutter down a road where few cars pass and swing, at last, into a yard in front of a warehouse where great doors are open wide. The boy peeps up – and there, in the jaws of the warehouse, he sees rows and rows of buses, just like the one he is on.
‘End of the line!’
Snow no longer swirls in the headlights, for they have come under the lip of the warehouse. Abruptly, the driver strangles the engine. ‘Well, come on then, this is it …’
The boy noses to the front of the bus. He stands on the step, where the cold of night assails him. The other passengers must have been here before, for they tramp towards other buses. Some of them are lined up outside, capped in thin snow with their headlights blazing and their drivers smoking idly at their sides. The boy twirls around, wondering which way he ought to go.
‘Where are you going, kid?’
He turns, to see the driver lumbering out of the bus.
‘Well?’
He whispers, ‘The pushcha.’
‘You’ll want the border bus, then. Are you going over?’
He must mean all the way over the forests, into that country on the other side. That country, too, used to be part of the Russias, and Grandfather says it really isn’t so very different. It is the kingdom called Poland.
‘Not over,’ the boy says.
By now the driver has stopped listening. ‘Well, it’s over there. It says Bialystok on front.’ He stomps off, passing a bench where some passenger has decided to slumber.
‘Hey, kid …’
He turns.
‘… should you be out alone like this?’
‘I’m going … home,’ the boy whispers, and knows that it is true.
‘Well, lucky you.’
The bus marked Bialystok is waiting outside, with its windows speckled with snow. Even the tiniest flakes can cling there, because they freeze to the windows and make a pattern like a man going blind might see. There are dark hulks moving on the other side of the glass. One passenger has his face smeared up against the window.
One of the hulks comes down from the step. He is wearing the same shirt and trousers as the last driver, and he loiters for a moment, pitching the end of his cigarette into the dusting of snow. Then his eyes light on somebody further down the bank, and he strides off, bawling out a name.
The boy pitches forward. Now might be the only chance he has.
While the driver walks away, he scurries for the step. This bus is higher from the ground than the last, and he has to use his hands to heave himself up. There are three steps, and then he is in the front of the bus, standing by the driver’s vacant seat. The keys dangle in the ignition and a fierce heat radiates from the engine below.
He goes past the man plastered against the window, past a woman with a baby swaddled up in her lap, and finds a seat at the back of the bus. If he hunkers down here, he might not be seen. A boy can make himself so very small if he has to, and he sinks as low as he can. Moments later, an old man passes to take another seat, and does not even register the boy curled up there.
Soon, he hears a change in the engine’s timbre, like a cat whose purr has taken on a new level of ecstasy. There comes a whine as the doors close, and the bus lurches forward.
When the orange orbs of streetlamps no longer glow, he knows they have left the city behind. He can smell it too, that change in the air that means they are beyond factories and roads and underworld trains. Now, only darkness rushes past on the other side of the glass. Tinny music echoes from the front of the bus. Bolder now, the boy leans over from his seat and peeps into the aisle to see the windscreen. Snow spirals hypnotically in the headlights, suspended in the air as if it is not even falling at all.
He has ploughed this road countless times with Grandfather, but it is difficult, now, to know exactly where he is. It is only when he sees a tiny black pine, growing so far out into the road that it seems an affront, that he knows he is near. Yet, the bus does not stop. It is crawling now, as the snow whips up around it, spreading the headlight beams in radiant array, and he sees it crawl past the turn-off that Grandfather always takes beneath the trees. He stands. He lurches forward. He stops. He cannot tell the driver, because then the driver would ask, and then the driver would know he sneaked aboard.
Every minute that passes now is a minute he is further from Grandfather. More than once, he creeps down the aisle as if he might demand the driver to stop, but every time he slopes back, like a beaten dog. One mile, two miles, three miles, four … Time has a way of slowing down, just like those snowflakes suspended in the windscreen. Snow distorts the world. It swallows sound and it swallows time itself.
He looks up. In the road ahead: a black ridge capped in pure white. The bus begins to slow, softly at first but then with increasing urgency. The back sways, as if refusing to obey what the front wheels tell it. In the seats opposite, two passengers wake from their slumber and exchange rapid words. Instinctively, the boy grips the seat in front.
The bus rolls to a stop, but this does not seem something that the driver can tolerate for long. He wrenches with the stick at the side of the wheel and presses his foot down; the engine roars but the bus will not move. He wrenches with the stick and tries again. This time, the bus stutters backwards before stopping dead. The driver stands, hits his fist against the dashboard, and the doors squeal as they come apart. Winter rushes in.
Through the windscreen the boy can see the driver inspecting the dark ridge that blocks the road. It is only when he has crept all the way to the front that he sees it for what it is: a tree that has fallen in a storm and been frozen there, bulging like scar tissue across the blacktop. He drops to his knees at the front of the bus and out of sight.
Now is his chance. He steals down the step. Outside, the driver is kneeling in the snow, with his head tucked under the chassis of the bus itself.
Burying his hands in his pockets, he takes the last, fateful step.
The cold taunts him, working its way up his sleeves and around the rims of his ribs. Only his shoulders, still padded by mama’s shawl, can fight it back – but even that will not be for long. He’ll need a fire, a big one leaping like in Grandfather’s hearth, and he’ll need it fast.
He keeps flush to the side of the bus and darts away from the driver, turning out of sight while his head is still buried below. At the back of the bus a weak trail of exhaust floats up. The boy gags on it, but his body compels him to stay in its cloud, because at least the fumes are warm and dry. Fighting off the temptation, he crosses the road and flails up the bank. It is difficult, here, to judge how deeply the snow has grown, and he plunges up to his waist. The shock of the fall pummels all the wind from his lungs, but he pushes up with frigid hands and skids down the other side of the bank. Now he is in the forest. He is only a yard away from the open road, but already he feels warmer,
as if the trees themselves are huddling up. There are creatures in this woodland that don’t know how to build houses and hearthfires or to cook hot nettle tea in the flames. If they can survive it, so can the boy. All he has to do is be like the fox, the bison, the elk – the wolves up in their heartland, or the bear deep in his winter lair.
The conifers are few, and once he has left them behind there is not a leaf in sight, only the lattice of naked branches and the cavernous roof of snow above. He passes a low hornbeam, dwarfed by elms on either side, and watches a rabbit dart out of its hole underneath. The whiteness underfoot is not snow but thick frost that crunches every time he takes a step. His shoes skid, and he holds out his arms to glide along, and for a while it is a game, like tobogganing without a toboggan, that only ends when his toes become snagged in a root and he smashes, face first, into frost and stone.
Dazed, he gets back up, scrambles to reclaim the knapsack from the roots onto which it has fallen. He walks on, mindful of the roots hiding just beneath the crisp white veneer. It is only when he sees the low hornbeam again that he realizes he has somehow been turned around. No doubt it happened when he took his tumble, and he rubs his hands together for warmth. Telling himself that it does not matter, he decides to plough back the way he has come. A few steps later, and a thought occurs to him: what if I wasn’t walking straight lines through the wood? What if the trees turned me around and I came back at the hornbeam from somewhere else, and now I’m walking away from the track, away from the ruin … away from papa?
He turns in a circle, trying to judge which way to go, and as he turns a sickening thought spirals up from the pit of his stomach.
‘I’m making it worse, papa.’ The words burst out. He thinks he has shouted them, but they are mere whispers, slurped up by the trees.
He comes through a stand of oak, convinced he has been this way before, and a new smell hits him, a gust of wind like the steam that curls out of one of Grandfather’s pots. He is almost upon it before he realizes what it is. What he thought was a log fallen in front of him is softer, splayed out in the snow light.
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