‘You ate all her gingerbreads.’
The boy draws away. He screams, ‘I was talking about the car!’
Then, though he doesn’t know it, he is on his feet and rampaging at his papa. With only a whisper of dark between them, he stops. He looks up through eyes thick with tears – but these are the tears of anger, of fury, and when he sees his papa it is like that time, last winter, when he was sealed up inside the car and saw a forest shade coming to stalk him.
‘Why, papa? You ruined her, you ruined …’
‘I didn’t ruin her. It was cancer ruined her.’
The boy reaches up, thinking to drag the axe out of his papa’s hand, but the old man turns back across the trail and into the trees.
‘You’re lying, papa.’
The old man stops dead. One turn over his shoulder, the ruinous half of his face. ‘Lying, boy?’
‘We could go back to the tenement. We could go back to baba’s house. You just … don’t want to.’
His papa glowers, the axe still in his hand. For a second, the boy hears the echo of some long-forgotten dream. He’s coming out of the woods.
‘Why can’t we, papa?’
A whispered, mocking echo: ‘Why can’t we, papa?’
‘Well, why can’t we? They have a little girl, papa. They look after her. Maybe they can look after us.’
This time, the old man simply shakes his head. That there are no words, that there are no reasons … The silence explodes in the boy. ‘You promised, papa. You promised you’d look after me!’
He takes off through the trees. He thinks he hears the whistle of air as his papa’s gnarled arms reach out to gather him up, but in an instant he is through them, tumbling through familiar darknesses until he reaches the top of the glade.
Sky heavy with cloud, but no snow yet. He is about to skirt the glade but this time there is no old man to insist he must not be seen, so he strides on out. Each footstep is tantamount to treachery, but he loves them, each and every one.
By the time he reaches mama’s tree, the lights are out in the windows of the house. He lingers in the forest and stares at the new façade. It is hardly believable that this rose out of the ruins of baba’s house. Its walls are finely chiselled stone, its windows plates of glass inside which hang curtains and vases of flowers.
There is nothing to look at, nothing moving, and for a moment that itself is hypnotic: no branches stirring to tell him which way the breeze flies, no shadows darting as his eyes pick out quarry or tell him to run.
The coldness gathers. He thinks: winter’s coming sooner than I thought.
He thinks: I could knock on the door and it would be rat-tat-tat, Izboushka! Izboushka! and the hut on hen’s feet would turn and let him in.
But he does not cross the garden and he does not knock at the door. Soon, he hears the familiar click of a jackboot heel.
‘Are you coming home, or not?’
The words have a smothering to them. They are like the snows that will come and banish the leaves. They cling to him and their flakes lock against each other to give him a new skin: a white crust, frozen, impenetrable, dulling everything that is good within.
He looks up. There stands his papa, a hunched shape in the snow dark.
Home, he said, and all the boy can picture are branches and demon trees with the faces of murdered men.
The boy nods, but by the time he has got to his feet to follow, his papa is already gone. He allows himself one last look at the dark façade of the house before he goes after him.
At that moment, up on the house’s face, a square of light flares. He is so busy marvelling that their ruin now has an upstairs where there was once only empty air that he does not, at first, pick out the shadow on the other side. When he does, his eyes will not work; he cannot distinguish whether it is a mama or a papa, a boy or a girl. It is only when the curtains are drawn back, allowing that unreal light to spill out, that he sees.
The little girl.
She hangs over the ledge with the window thrown wide, as if breathing in the scent of the wind. Her hair, tied back, is even the same shape as his mama’s, curled up and flicked out at her shoulders. The smaller features of her face are in darkness but, as she claws out for the window frame, he can see her in profile: as angelic as mama in miniature, her nightdress spotted with stars.
From deep inside, there comes a voice. ‘Elenya, the window!’
‘I’m closing it, mama …’
‘You’re letting the winter in!’
The boy watches until the window is closed, the curtains drawn, the electric light snuffed.
Elenya, he thinks, that one word filled with a thousand meanings. The little girl is named Elenya.
At the edge of the clearing: the camp. In the morning, the boy wakes before his papa. He uses sorceries to resurrect the fire and places chestnuts on a stone set in the flames.
At first light, the old man rises. ‘You didn’t have to wake early, boy.’
‘I’m looking after you.’
The old man accepts the food. Its effect is almost visible on him, bringing colour back to skin webbed in blue, brightness back to his eyes.
‘I don’t need looking after.’
What his papa means is: I don’t need looking after by you. But the boy doesn’t want to hear it.
‘We can’t stay here, can we, papa? We need a home.’
The old man spits a charred shell of chestnut into the frost. He spreads his crooked arms. To the boy he is saying: look around you; there isn’t a branch or root in this wild expanse that you don’t call home.
‘We had the bunker, didn’t we? Maybe we could go back to the bunker.’
The old man snorts, ‘Not across the marshes.’
‘Is it too far?’
‘Treacherous in winter, boy. The ice can tell lies about what’s underneath.’
The boy busies himself stoking the fire. He finds stones to roast in the cauldron, things they can hold onto or put into the crooks of their arms to keep away the chills. So intent is he on his work that he does not realize his papa has unsheathed the axe, is lurching around the edge of the clearing with his eyes on the branches.
‘What is it, papa?’
The old man brings back the axe, buries it in the crook of branch and trunk. The blade disappears. He wrenches it back out, swings again, and reels back onto his staff as the branch falls.
‘For the fire?’
The old man gives a simple nod of his head. Then he utters five sharp, staccato words:
‘There’s going to be snow.’
It comes before the sun is at its height. Clouds gather to blot out the pale light, the whiteness deepens, and then the first flakes float through the branches.
By first fall of snow they have followed the trail past the cattail pond and into the shadow of the emperor oak. Great branches spread out above, still laden with leaves of russet and gold. For now, this will be shelter enough. What few flakes find their way between the branches are tiny, and eddy on the soft woodland breeze. When they touch the fire, they hiss and vanish, steam masquerading as smoke.
The old man leaves him to hunt. There was a time when the boy would beg to go too, but that was last winter; summer has come and gone since, and now he does not need to follow his papa into the trees. Instead he stays behind. The snows are already here and there is much work to be done. If they do not have the ruin, they must still have a home.
He starts by heaving the boughs his papa has severed towards the trunk of the emperor oak and piling them up. At his feet run rivers of roots, and between the roots are great crevices into which he can drive the end of each branch. He forces the first into one of the cavities and, when he steps back, it remains upright, like the post in a fence. He takes another and forces that into a crevice on the furthest side of the tree. Three more go between and, in that way, he has built a wall. Soon the ice will come to freeze them in place but, for now, they are sturdy enough.
He is about to set
off, in search of pine branches to keep out the wind, when his papa reappears, dragging himself through the twilight under the trees. He comes empty-handed, his face turned down. He stops, looks at the boy’s work. His eyes fall back to the fire. ‘You let it burn down.’
‘Papa, I’m making us a house …’
The old man levers himself over the flames and fans them back to life. ‘If the fire dies, you …’ Something chokes the words in his throat. ‘Didn’t I teach you anything,’ the old man grunts, ‘this summer?’
‘Did you find anything, papa?’
The old man lifts his taloned hand, but he is holding no rabbit. ‘I threw for one. I missed.’
‘Is it your hand?’
‘The cold got into it.’
‘I can go, papa.’
The old man’s eyes burn, just as fiercely as the new flames. ‘There’s nothing abroad. The snow drives them under.’
‘We did it last winter.’
‘Last winter we had snares.’
‘I’ll find more nettles. We’ll make more snares. Or …’
The old man splays his fingers out over the fire and, in turn, moves each one back and forth. Only once he is satisfied does he speak again. ‘Or what?’
He braces himself. He will try it. One last time. His papa’s still in there, somewhere. ‘What about baba’s house?’
His papa’s head hangs low, nostrils flared and breathing in smoke. ‘What about it?’
‘We can ask them, papa.’
‘Listen to me, boy. It isn’t your baba’s house anymore. It isn’t a place. The walls are treacherous. They grew up and changed and they don’t want us anymore. What do you think’s lying in those walls? The stones don’t remember. Only the trees.’
The boy says, ‘They’re looking after the little girl, papa. They could look after us too.’
‘I told you once before about friends. What did I tell you, boy?’
It was so long ago, but the boy remembers: ‘Having friends is a dangerous thing.’
‘Don’t go down to baba’s house, boy. It isn’t for us anymore.’
It takes a season to raise a house from a ruin, but deep in the pushcha it can take mere days for a gingerbread house to be baked. The boy bakes it from branches and boughs, with roots for a carpet and pine needles to keep out the wind. He tends to it now, pressing the night’s snowfall around its bottom, packing it hard so that he will have walls of ice. He takes snowballs squeezed between his hands and uses them to line the entrance, where two great severed boughs of pine scissor and come apart. He will make an archway of ice, and excavate a winding path across the clearing, something to guide his papa home.
Last night was four nights since the new snows fell, but the first night that the old man came inside. At first he slept out, curled crooked around the cookfire, but last night he could not settle; the snow filtered through the branches, dusting him, and the cold worked its way too easily into his bones. The boy was lying in the den when the pine fronds came apart – and in lurched his papa, dead leg dragged behind him, a vision of the woodland itself.
‘You should have a fire in here, boy.’
‘I made you a bed, papa.’
It was only a nest of more pine, but warmer than the hard forest earth. Without a word, his papa sunk into it. He had already closed his eyes, already begun to make his unearthly night-time noises, when his lips came apart and uttered those familiar words.
This isn’t the tale, he breathed with eyes still closed, but an opening.
‘Papa?’
The boy stole to his side, thought to lay his hands on skin as hard as bark, but hovered there instead.
The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.
‘There won’t be any bread, papa. There won’t be a meal, not unless …’
The old man’s eyes opened. He straightened himself, and now he was looking at the boy with a clarity he could not remember since before summer began: eyes bright enough not to reflect the branches that cupped them.
And now, he whispered, we start our tale. Long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world, in a land not so very far away, on the earth in front of the sky, on a plain place like on a wether, seven versts aside, a man journeyed to the ends of the world on a train shut to the sky. He was a little pig sent to market and when the train stopped he was in the world of Perpetual Winter, at the gates of that great frozen city called Gulag.
‘Papa,’ the boy whispered. ‘Papa, are you okay?’
But his papa didn’t answer, nor even seem to notice that anyone had spoken. And the boy thought: it’s the story he didn’t tell, the story he wouldn’t tell …
With eyes open but blind, his papa continued.
Well, the great city of Gulag squatted on the Lena, whose ancient waters wended their way to lands where few men had ever trod. And the train released its prisoners onto tundra empty and white, and the train said: leave me now, go through the gates into Gulag, and know that your lives begin here, for all that happened before was a dream.
Well, some men gibbered and some men quailed, and they were the men who believed that this frozen city was the dream, and that they might wake up soon in the beds of their mamas and wives. But the great city gates of Gulag drew back, and through those teeth of ice they walked, and to the soldier it seemed as if he was being swallowed whole, by one of those great beasts who used to stalk the land in the days before men.
Gulag was wide and Gulag was wild and Gulag was the world forever and ever. On glassy streets of ice he walked, and in alleys and derelict squares he saw men turned to ice and rooted to the ground, like statues under enchantments and put to sleep for hundreds of years. Well, the new prisoners drifted into those alleys, and the soldier said to himself: what must I do, now that I am of Gulag, and where must I live?
He wandered aimless, following shadows in the streets, and those shadows had voices and some shadows had names. He went through empty buildings, empty halls, and climbed to the top of an empty tower, where yet more men were frozen and rooted to the earth. And he said: what magic happens in Gulag that men should freeze where they stand?
Soon the soldier heard the tolling of a distant bell. In the tower where he stood he went to the parapet, and from there could see the rolling roofs and minarets of Gulag, and it was strange to know that this was sky and this was street, for all about him was white.
Soon, he saw shadows in the street. And he took them for phantoms, because not since he came through Gulag’s gates had he seen real men. But soon he heard footsteps in the tower, and upon turning saw a man appear to face him. Now there was silence as he had never known. The man’s breath curled up, like a frightful dragon. He stepped forward, and it seemed he had murder on his mind.
Who are you? barked the soldier, who once was a little boy who believed in ghosts in the wood.
And the stranger held out his hand and said: do not be afraid, for I am like you, lost in Perpetual Winter with hardly a friend. On his feet were gleaming black boots, which were called jackboots. And on his shoulder he wore a knapsack, with his name stitched onto it in the language of his home. It was a language the soldier did not know, for this man was of the Kingdom of the Finns, whose name is Finn Land, and had been captured there by yet more wise men of the Winter King.
The boy listened to his papa’s wheezing but for the first time tore his eyes from the old man’s face. They fell, instead, on the knapsack in the corner. His hands reached out to trace the lettering on the frayed strap, dancing across the rim of his papa’s last remaining jackboot.
What is Gulag? asked the soldier. And why do men freeze in the streets, to stand as statues?
Men are magicked if they do not serve, and stand cold sentry on the streets to serve as warning for others. For all men sent here by the Winter King must serve in the great underworld halls, where there is no night or day. We must serve so that Gulag grows, and they say if we serve we may
go home.
Do you know anyone who ever went home?
I know nobody who ever went home.
Yet, I am a man, and I must go back, back to my babe in the woods.
The man, whose name was Aabel, looked forlorn and said: I have heard the fable before, for all men have their own babes in the woods, but a story is a hopeless thing, now you come to Gulag. Come instead to me and I will look after you, for I have saved food I have stolen and will share it with you that you might not starve.
But why would you help a stranger like me?
And Aabel said: if we starve, we will starve together, you and I, for here in the heart of this frozen city called Gulag, a man knows good from evil, and I can see that there is goodness in your heart. From now on, we will call each other brothers and eat of each other’s bread.
And the man, who once was a boy, wept for a crust, and in that way lived another day.
The old man opened his mouth to close the tale, but this time the words would not come. The bright blueness bled from his eyes; now they were grey and haunted again. He rolled over and did not look at the boy.
‘Papa,’ the boy said, crawling near, unable to look at the knapsack in the corner. ‘Is it true?’
Dead words from a dead man, dead leg twitching as if in some fevered dream: oh, I know it is true, for one was there one was there one was there.
And all through the night, the boy saw the rooftops of that great fabled city throbbing in his dreams.
In the morning, the old man is gone for kindling and whatever kills his crippled hands can make. The boy takes a moment to stir up the fire, tossing on stones to keep the heat and yet more wood to feed it. Then he takes up his knapsack. He pauses to look at the distinct stitching on the strap and wonders: how can a thing from a story be here, in my hands? But he cannot dwell on it for long, for soon the day will be old, and instead he follows his papa’s distinctive trail into the trees.
The gingerbread house is, perhaps, only an hour’s walk from baba’s house, but the boy does not head in that direction. He follows an escarpment down, to where he knows there are still a few hazels to be found and the berries of the rowan. He means to go after other treasures too: sweet chestnuts for roasting and the small brambles of the thorny briar.
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