The boy stands. It is not enough.
‘Papa,’ he says. ‘Is it true?’
In response, the old man snorts.
‘Papa,’ he says. ‘She thinks it’s true, that you’re like Baba Yaga, that you eat little boys and girls. She’s going to tell. And …’
He crouches low, thinking his whispers might infiltrate the old man’s dreams. But what thoughts fester in his sleeping head, when such stories bubble on his waking lips?
‘… she thinks you’re a monster, papa. But it’s only a story. Please, papa, let it be a story. This isn’t the tale, papa, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when …’ His voice cracks, but he will not cry. ‘… we’re filled with soft bread.’
He sits by his papa’s side, until the snow has cloaked them both, as crisp and white as the eiderdown keeping his papa warm. It strikes him: that eiderdown is the only thing making him human. Without it, he might be just another beast of the forest. Was it like that, once upon a time? Did his papa escape Perpetual Winter and feast on a man, just to get back to baba? Is he like the Old Man of the Forest, a wolf in the skin of a man? What if, one day, he sheds that skin altogether, sinks his teeth into the flesh of the boy, and cavorts off, into deeper woodlands, to live and die wild?
If Elenya tells, it will be like his papa once said. They’ll come into the forest. The promise will be broken. Wherever mama is, she’ll know that he failed.
He doesn’t want to fail.
He steals out of the clearing, refuses to look back. Back through the alders, back past the frozen cattail pond, and up to the house which he longs to be his. The lights are out now, the family asleep, and he does not need to hide as he crosses the garden.
One fist of snow at the window, and another and another. When the light flares, he gets ready.
‘You came!’ Elenya gasps, hanging out into the tendrils of white. ‘They wouldn’t believe me, Alek. Said I was telling tales. But they should know – tales can be true, just like with your papa. Wait there. I’ll wake them …’
‘No!’
Elenya’s face hardens.
‘You can’t tell, Elenya. You mustn’t.’
‘Can’t tell, Alek? Can’t!?’ Her face purples, in spite of the incessant snow.
‘If you do, they’ll catch him.’
‘They’ll catch you too. Give you a good scrubbing! Put you in proper clothes and proper food and a proper house. They’ll find you a new mama! Isn’t that what you want? A new mama?’
She means it to hurt him, like loosing a stone from a slingshot in the forest. The stone finds him, stuns him, knocks him down. But there is breath within him yet.
‘Please, Elenya …’
‘I’m telling Navitski in the morning. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll know it isn’t a story.’
The light in the window dies.
Navitski, he thinks. She’s going to tell Navitski.
He prowls the edges of the garden, churning up a trail just like the ones his papa leaves behind. More than once, he digs down into snow packed hard, brings his hand back with a stone in his fist. He means to loose it at the window, compel Elenya to face him again, but the thought of stirring her mama and papa puts more fear into him than his papa’s fable, and he casts each stone back into the forest. He goes to the door, takes the fairybook wolf in his hands, but cannot rain it down. Snow, and snow, and more snow to come.
How to stop her, before she tells?
He thinks: I’ll pounce on her in the morning, before she goes to school. But then her mama and papa would see, and know it wasn’t just tall tales. He thinks: I’ll tell my papa, and we’ll go deeper into the wilds, cross the marshes to the aspens, go deeper where only the Old Man of the Forest might dwell. But then he’d never see her again. Never sneak into the house and play games. Never hear of the world beyond the forests.
There is, it dawns on him with a dreadful clarity, only one way he can catch her.
He creeps around the building. At the front of the house sits the black truck. On the back, the flat-bed is covered with a thick tarpaulin. He finds a way to scramble up, the tarpaulin springy beneath his feet. For a while, he simply stands there, wondering: can I? Can I do this at all? Then he finds a corner where the tarpaulin is fastened down and, using frozen fingers, peels it back. All it needs is a corner. Then he can crawl underneath, into a cavity dry as bone.
He closes his eyes. Compels the night to come asunder.
When he wakes, he does not know where he is. It is voices that remind him. He can hear Elenya and her father, close, closer still.
Doors slam. An engine gutters to life. The metal beneath him, warming slightly, begins to tremble. The chattering of his teeth.
The truck is away. He feels it slough, struggle to grip the snow, before bucking hard and taking off. It has been so long that panic seizes him – but this morning panic will not be his master. He holds onto the ridges in the flat-bed floor and, using them like the rungs of a ladder, hauls himself along. The corner of tarpaulin through which he crawled down is still loose. He pushes at it, disrupting the snow on top, and peers through. White rushes past, and then all is darkness; they have reached the top of the glade, gone under the trees.
The truck settles, at last, onto a path its tyres have pounded many times before. He watches the glade recede, sees the path behind snaking away.
He does not peer out again until the truck banks right, the sound of its tyres suddenly smooth. The wind rushing past has a different clarity now, and no longer does the flat-bed rattle with the same regularity. Behind, the black ribbon of the road, banked in white, twists away. He cranes his head forward. Past the cab, he sees distant orbs of yellow and white.
The town is getting closer with every passing second. He is going back home.
In the woods, a wild man wakes.
He stirs slowly, to find himself iced into the earth. The fire at his side has long since died, its embers nothing but crystalline frost. His hands curled in strange attitudes, gnarled as the branches that cover him, he tears himself from the ground, leaving behind clumps of whiskers white as ice. What is left covers his face in an impenetrable crust, a pitted landscape of crevices and craters, strange monoliths of twisted hair in burnt sugar shells.
He rolls over. He sees the opening of the gingerbread house on the other side of the fire, the eiderdown and the Russian horse. But that is all he sees.
He stands, mutters indecipherable sounds. Whether words or not, only the trees are there to say. He pitches forward, onto the dead wood that is his staff, and in that way crosses the camp.
Over briar and bramble. Through hawthorn and rowan. Land so deathly that the only sound is that of his breathing, deep and querulous in his breast.
The click of his one jackboot heel, soft thump of his dead foot trailing behind.
Down by the cattail pond and along a trail he used to know, and there is the house that once was his. He stands in the shelter of skeleton trees, remembers dimly the roots at his feet.
Empty ache in his stomach. Axe at his side. He lifts it from the sling, runs a finger along its dull blade.
Coming out of the trees is like stepping into blinding light, even though the vaults above churn with clouds, pregnant with the promise of the blizzard to come. He heaves himself across the garden. At the windows: nothing. At the door: a sound, somebody humming, the snuffling of a dog.
He puts his shoulder to the wood. It gives. Dead wood good for nothing but kindling. No roots to bind it. No resin in its veins. Warmth rushes out, the staff falls from his hand, and now he is in a kitchen, and now he is hauling his way along its narrow hall, one hand on either surface. Fire blasts from an iron rail. His hand against it, too numb to feel the burn until it is deep in his flesh.
From around the corner, a grey hulk hurtles. The din of a wolf, but this an impostor. It comes at him, howling, but he quells it with a look and it shrinks back. On he lurches, into the path of the bitch. She scrabbles in retreat, t
ail between legs. Then she is gone.
The old man stands in a doorway. The hearthfire dead, but heat from somewhere. A stair where there was a ruin. Footsteps on it, coming down.
A woman steps into view. She stops, breath in her throat.
From the old man, guttural sounds. Behind him, only the bitch understands. Her tail reappears, her hackles rise high, lip curled back in the hint of a growl.
The woman mouths, ‘Who do you think you …’
‘Where is he?’ This time, the words decipherable. Each of them short barks, spoken from the gut and not the tongue.
‘What?’
‘The boy.’
The old man steps forward. The bitch does the same. In the same instant that she leaps for him, his fist finds the axe at his side. Wrenching it from the sling, he drives the handle into the bitch’s neck. What growl was in the creature becomes a muted whimper. She spirals back, crashes into the stones of the hearth. There she lies, gasping for air, the fur of her collar dark and matted black.
The old man brings his fist back to his side, the axe handle glistening in red. As the woman’s eyes tear from the fallen bitch, he steps towards her. Her eyes wide, but not looking at him; looking straight through him instead, along the funnel of the kitchen, at the winter woods roaring behind. The noisome, taunting trees.
‘Where,’ he utters, ‘is my boy?’
Outside, the morning dark has barely disappeared. It is a strange thing to see the hulks of factories and tenements rushing past, stranger still to breathe in the acrid smell of exhaust, see traffic lights changing from amber to red. These things are from the long ago, yet only hours from where he has lived his life.
Soon he knows where he is. At a particular intersection he lifts his head, recognizes the boarded-up shop-fronts and canteen. Now he is content to sit upright, keeping his head bowed only so that Elenya’s papa might not see him in his mirror. He knows the corners, the parked cars, the building yard still derelict and the playing field beyond.
They come to the schoolhouse while the last vestiges of morning dark still linger. There is no place to park, so Elenya’s papa pulls the truck into the side of the road; through the glass, the boy can hear him urging his daughter to jump out.
Now is his chance too. He scrambles up and, in a second, is over the rim of the truck, scuttling between two parked cars to reach the kerb. There he hunkers down, watching as Elenya puts her arms around her papa’s shoulders, plants a kiss on his cheek, and lowers herself from the truck. As the truck forces its way back into the traffic, the boy tracks Elenya with his eyes. She weaves her way to the kerb, coming past a motorcycle squeezed between two cars.
The boy remembers: I was on that motorcycle once. I sat squeezed tight between Mr Navitski’s legs and he took me to the tenement.
He takes his chance, pounces onto the kerb. He thinks to hurtle straight for her, tear at her arm and roar: you can’t tell! But before he is halfway there, some girl he has never seen has linked her arms with Elenya’s and together they head for the gates.
He opens his mouth to cry her name – but there is only silence. Instead, he creeps along the railing, reaches a spot between the gates from which he can peer into the schoolyard. Snowmen and barricades, and gangs in scarves and mittens, bound up against the cold. His gaze loses its focus – he tries to picture them in the trees, with papas just like his – and when his focus returns, he sees Yuri, kicking his heels on the schoolyard’s furthest edge, alone among everyone: his head full of stories, thoughts full of maps.
‘Yuri,’ he whispers.
At once, he is back in Yuri’s bedroom, looking at the photograph of Yuri’s Grandfather. Yuri said he was a policeman during the war, but now the boy knows better: he was a soldier of the Winter King, or a soldier of the King in the West. They are real, and the things his papa did to get home, they were real too. Perpetual Winter and Gulag, they’re places in the real world. His own baba: the babe in the woods.
Man needs meat and his own Grandfather, Baba Yaga come to life.
Into the morning air comes the pealing of a bell. He cringes from it, but he might as well be cringing from the sky. When he looks up, the children have turned. As one, they bound for the doors of the schoolhouse.
The boy’s eyes pick out Elenya in the crowd. She is flocked by other girls. She looks over her shoulder; the boy thinks she might even be smiling. Smiling. Could a girl wearing that smile be about to break open his world?
She cannot tell. She cannot tell.
He takes the deepest breath, and approaches the gates.
At the schoolhouse door, he can see through the glass. First, a teacher he does not recognize, shepherding some tiny children along their way. Then the headmistress, appearing from her study door with spectacles halfway down her nose. Along the corridor, he sees the caretaker, propped on his broom in such a way that an image forks, like lightning, across the backs of the boy’s eyes: his papa, leaning into his staff, lurching along a tunnel of snowbound trees with the branches groaning on every side.
He banishes the image and goes through the doors.
It is warm in here, so warm he might as well be sitting in the hearth while his papa whispers up a fire all around him. He comes, tentatively, around the corner, evading the sweeping gaze of the headmistress in her study door. The caretaker seems to be sleeping standing up, so heavy are his eyes, and the boy navigates his way around him. The schoolhouse walls are close, closer than they have any right to be, and he hears the scratch and tap of countless shoes scuffing the polished floor.
He passes the library corner with its rows of neat books. Yuri is ferreting on one of the shelves, but when he hears the boy approaching he stuffs whatever he has been reading back and, not bothering to look up, scuttles to catch the rest of the class. At the end of the corridor, they are milling at the entrance to the assembly hall. In gangs of twos and threes, they wander in to sit cross-legged on the floor. The boy approaches dreamily, the schoolhouse so unreal he might as well be lost in one of Elenya’s tall tales. And there she is, surrounded by friends; one of them reaches up and whispers into her ear.
Halfway along the corridor, he stops. He sees Mr Navitski emerge from the classroom and, using his hands like shovels, steer the remaining children into the hall. It is the strangest thing, but he does not look as tall as the boy remembers, nor as lean. His hair is still black and tightly coiled, and he walks after the children with an air almost meek.
The doors to the assembly hall close, and the boy is left alone, the sounds of his breathing echoing all along the empty corridor.
After a while, he creeps further, past the library and toilet door. He stops at the classroom and peers inside. There is nobody here, and it gives him the courage to wander through. On the board are written the morning sums, and the date in luminescent green chalk. Some of the children have been here already; there are coats on pegs, a ruler and a pencil with a broken end.
The tables are exactly as he remembers. He winds his way between them to take his seat at the back, the desks more ordered than the trees of the forest, so that he stubs his toe and collides with a corner, unused to walking in straight lines.
There is a coat here already, and a wet pool on the floor where snow-melt has trickled down the sleeves. Above the desk, on a board of stained cork, are pinned pictures and maps, the projects of boys and girls from the seasons he has missed. There, in the middle, he sees a picture he recognizes: the very picture he made of his papa, in that time so long ago. On the paper the eyes are vivid and blue; his lips suggest a smile and his big ears hang down with the air of a mournful dog. His eyes stray across and find Yuri’s old picture tacked up alongside. A crude fairybook ogre stares out, with hollow holes where its eyes ought to be. The boy cannot look at it for long, because to look at it is like admitting a truth he would rather remained buried out there in the forest.
He hears footsteps. He stops, cocks his head as he might at the sound of a rabbit trying to sneak past out of his
line of sight. By degrees, he turns so that he can see the classroom door out of the corner of his eye. Somebody hangs there, eyes boring into his back.
‘It’s … you.’ In the doorway stands Mr Navitski. His sleeves are rolled up, his tie hanging loose, and his face is etched in lines. Even as the boy watches, those creases deepen.
He lifts a hand, both palms open and empty. Then he just stands there. To the boy he seems to be making himself as big as he can, like a man trying in vain to frighten a bear.
The boy’s eyes dart, left and right.
‘It’s okay,’ Mr Navitski begins. ‘I’m not going to come near you. I’m just coming into the room.’ He comes closer, though they are still several desks apart. ‘I’m going to stand here,’ he goes on. ‘I’m not going to move.’
The way he is speaking does not make sense. The things he says are calm, banal, but there is something stony in his tone, something that tells the boy he is struggling not to do something else. He is like a tight blossom, ready to explode and shower down its seeds.
‘Alek,’ Mr Navitski ventures, ‘are you all right?’
The boy takes a step back, feels the cold glass of a window at his back. Mr Navitski must think he means to open it and scramble away, for suddenly he takes another step, and then another.
‘Alek, I’m not going to hurt you. I want you to know …’
The boy nods, whispers – but not a word.
‘Alek, are you well?’
Again, the boy nods.
‘Alek, where have you come from?’
Then it is relief that floods the boy’s body – for, in those words, a secret is being revealed: Elenya has not spoken to him yet; Elenya has not told.
There are other sounds now. The assembly hall doors being pushed open. The babble of children bubbling out. The boy sees their fuzzy-edged shapes gather in the corridor beyond Mr Navitski. There is pushing and shoving, and now they are streaming in.
‘I’ve been at … home.’
Gingerbread Page 29