At the front of the schoolhouse, the hall is empty. The light has a strange quality, for the glass in the doors is plastered with snow and none of the daylight can fight its way through. The boy hauls Elenya towards it.
Click, and soft thump. Click, and soft thump.
He lunges for the door handle. It turns, but will not give. While he fights with it, Elenya staggers back. The corridor is still, but sound echoes up it, like the scuttling of rats.
‘This way,’ she says. ‘We can call the police.’
‘We can’t,’ the boy sobs, knowing it impossible. ‘He’s my papa. He’s mine …’
No sooner has he said the word, the door flies open. Snow and wild wind rampages in. It takes the boy in its fist, pummels him back.
‘Come on!’ the boy cries.
He is about to plunge into the snowstorm, when a figure rushes the steps outside to battle back the door. For an instant, he believes it his papa, somehow given new form. Then he sees it for the caretaker.
‘What are you two bastards doing out of class?’ He reaches out to haul the door shut.
‘No!’ the boy exclaims, but his hands are not fast enough, his arms too weak.
The door is closed, but the wind does not die. The boy wheels around, looks at Elenya. The clicks ring more loudly. The thumps toll.
His papa appears, hauling himself to the front of the schoolhouse.
Now, it is Elenya dragging the boy. Together, they tumble through the staffroom door. Smells of coffee and dirty dishwater. Elenya slams the door behind. She yells for him to follow her lead. The first sofa is heavy and fixed to the ground. The next creaks as they heave it out of place. The carpet rucks up, resists as they push it. Outside the door: click, thump, click, thump. At last, with a great shudder of complaint, the sofa conquers the carpet and they slam it against the door; in the same instant, the door opens. They battle it back.
As the boy strains to keep the sofa in place, Elenya leaps across the room. On a table beneath the window ledge, there sits a telephone. She picks up the receiver, but she has not yet pressed it to her ear before the boy bounds across, snatches it from her hands.
‘What are you doing!?’
A handle turns. The door bucks.
‘You can’t!’ the boy thunders, wrenching the wire from the wall.
‘Why can’t I?’
‘Because he’s my papa!’
On the other side of the room, the sofa slides forward, snagging again where the carpet has torn. Behind, the door hangs ajar. It can go no further. In the gap between door and wall, the face of his papa appears like some apparition. A hand reaches through. An arm. At its end, the staff can reach over the sofa, slicing the air in the centre of the room.
‘Boy.’
That one word is like a blizzard.
The boy’s eyes beseech the girl. ‘Because he’s my papa,’ he repeats.
For a moment, she might be about to relent. Instead, she charges back, throws herself at the sofa, forces it back into the door. The door slams, trapping the old man. His face bulges, grotesque. It smears him against the wall, with one hand groping out. The shock causes his fingers to cramp, and the staff slips from his grasp, rolling past the girl and into the room.
‘Help me!’ Elenya barks.
The staff lands at the boy’s feet. Uncertain whether he should take it, he looks up. Held between door and wall, his papa thrashes.
‘Boy.’
‘Stop it!’ he yells. He throws himself at the sofa, but stops before joining Elenya. His hands close on her wrist.
‘What are you doing?’
‘He’s my papa,’ he cries. ‘You’re hurting my papa!’
A look like bewildered fury colours Elenya’s face. For a second, she stops – but a second is enough to free the wild man in the door. He drops back. First, he is gone; then, from beyond, silver crashes down. Something bites into the door, showering splinters of wood. Its teeth rear back and it drops again. This time, a jagged shard tears itself away. The third time, it sinks deep into the door. Now the boy knows: it is his papa’s axe, felling the door as fiercely as it would take the branches of a tree.
In the corners of his vision, shapes move through the snow smeared on the window glass. Children fleeing the building? The caretaker, summoned to whatever commotion rises within? Whichever it is, he does not know. The axe takes its final bite, obliterating the top of the door, and into the serrated portal comes his papa’s face.
‘Boy.’
Elenya’s scream rents the air. Above her, the wild man stares at the boy.
He searches, desperately, for sadness in the eyes. He searches for pain, for terror, for signs he thinks himself betrayed. Anything that would show him that his papa still lived, somewhere in that walking wild.
‘Papa,’ he whispers, ‘I’m sorry, papa …’
The wild man reaches out. At last, the boy understands. He reaches down, takes up the staff, offers it up. His papa’s hand clasps around it. He thinks: I’m helping him; I’m looking after him, mama. But, too late, he sees that something does live in the creature’s eyes: it shines venomously; it hates; it laughs.
His papa heaves on the staff, drawing him near. Too slow to let go, the boy finds himself dragged across the room. By the time he rips his hands back, he has landed, with Elenya, on the sofa. The wild man throws the staff behind him, grapples out to take him in his hands.
‘Boy!’
He rolls left, plunging from the sofa. His papa’s hands cannot reach him now. Instead, they drop down, finding Elenya’s hair, her shoulders, her throat. His crooked hand strokes her lips, silencing the scream that threatens to erupt. Forcing the scream back inside her, he lifts her up.
Elenya cannot hold on fast enough to keep him from dragging her through. From the floor, the boy watches her go. Her knee digs into the back of the sofa, but his papa is stronger. By degrees, she is disappearing.
He leaps up, wraps himself around her legs. For a second, he can hold her still. Then, one foot tears free of his grasp. Now, he dangles from the other leg. He slides forward. Behind the sofa, what is left of the door slams shut. He could not follow her now, even if he wanted. He feels his strength fading away. First her ankle, then her toes, and now the last part of her slides through the devastated wood.
He presses his face to the rent in the door. Along the passageway, Elenya hangs over his papa’s sunken shoulder. Click, and soft thump; click, and soft thump. The wild man lopes away.
It takes him too long to haul the sofa back, force his way through a gap in the door. By the time he has pounded to the end of the passage, the only sign of his papa is the schoolhouse door, flying wide. The storm claws within, and he forces himself to the precipice. On the schoolhouse steps, the caretaker lies in a heap, scarlet in the snow where he has been thrust against the stone.
He gazes out: pirouetting snow and endless white, gust doing battle with gust so that, everywhere, miniature storms wage war. He cannot see the drifts at the far side of the playground, for between them the flakes are more impenetrable than the forest.
All he can see is a single trench, disappearing into the storm.
A long the roads, between cars. The boy tries to keep pace with his papa’s trench, but every time he thinks he sees a figure lurching in the mists, it resolves into the face of a pillar box, the jut of a tumbledown wall. Soon he stops bawling out. The figures he passes turn at him oddly; one barks out, demanding to know if he is okay. The boy only carries on, over intersections where the traffic is packed, nose to tail. Soon the cars are fewer and far between; the buildings give way to sprawling yards and hunkered tenements, with their eyes gouged out. A factory pumps out noxious smoke; a bus sits broken at the edge of the road. All around, curling snow – and quickly the imprint of his papa is gone.
In the distance, distorted sirens and flashing blue lights.
At last, there are dark smudges in the whiteness. The skeletal trees appear. As soon as he is able, he leaves the road behind,
tracks it instead from the shelter of the forest. Through the trees he can make faster time, for he is a wild thing not meant for the blacktops and asphalt. And there, guttering from oak to blasted ash, is the trail of his papa.
He tracks it for miles, until night has come upon him. He thinks his papa must have conjured a fire, but nowhere can he see empty cauldrons or bulwarks of stone. Foxes do not have fires, nor bison nor boar. When a man has turned wild enough, he does not need fires either.
In places, the trail evaporates, but every time he finds it again. If it is not in the scoring of a jackboot or the trail of dead leg, it is in the snapped twigs on the trees, the three lines scored into bark where Elenya has clawed out, dangling from his shoulder. He is buoyed to see it, for it means his papa has not turned Baba Yaga and devoured her yet; he bears her into the woodland, but she is still alive.
‘Papa!’ he yells, but the only answer comes from the trees.
Go back, they whisper. Go back.
He had forgotten: the trees are on my papa’s side. If his stories are real, it was trees that kept him from the men who escaped from the great frozen city of Gulag; they threw up walls of thorn to protect him. Yet – why would they protect his papa? Why not Elenya? Why not …
He tears through the trees and finds himself at the head of the dell, his papa’s trail disappearing in a swirling vortex of white.
At the bottom of the glade, he can see the outline of the house, so spattered with white that it seems to meld into the sky, appearing like a ruin once again. Down there, a blue light dances, off and on, off and on, like one of the Christmas lights wrapped around Elenya’s tree. He looks for tyre tracks on the glade, but the snow has cloaked them so that he cannot tell how many men are already there.
He is about to duck back into the forest when a vile rumbling comes through the snowfall. The boy cocks his head. He would know that sound anywhere.
From behind, a ball of blackness erupts through the veil: the same black truck that unknowingly ferried the boy back to school. Down the glade it plummets, sloughing around in front of Elenya’s house. The boy watches as, with the door still hanging open, Elenya’s father leaps out and pounds towards the front door.
At the bottom of the dell, light spills out of the house. He sees other cars here – one, two, three and more. A motorcycle, its every contour familiar. Shielded by the snow, he steals close, skirting the house as if to sneak into the garden behind. In the garden, the drifts have grown high. He can hear screaming within, thunderous cries.
More light spills from the kitchen door. Some fool, heedless of winter’s malice, has left it ajar. Footsteps churn up the snow on the step, fading under the constant fall as they wend their way into the woodland.
He steals to the step. Along the barrel of the kitchen, two policemen stand with Elenya’s mother. His eyes track down. There, between the policemen, lies Mishka. She does not move. Her jaws are open. A dead tongue lolls.
‘Oh, papa,’ he whispers.
In reply, the taunting trees: oh, papa.
He turns, hurtles under mama’s branches. Up and over: the wild ways, the old lanes; frozen cattail pond and emperor oak. By the time he approaches the gingerbread house, he can see his papa’s trench winding through the trees. Yet – there is no smoke in the air, no scent of the fire.
He comes, tentatively, into the clearing. Everywhere, there are tracks: fox and wild cat; his own moccasins; Elenya’s boots, preserved from the night before – but, above them all, the deep tread of other men.
His eyes are drawn to the gingerbread house. Its walls tremble. At first, he thinks it his papa, using it as a hiding. Moments later, a silhouette appears in the doorway of the gingerbread house. It steps into the light. This is not his papa. This is a man younger than Navitski, with a coat of navy wool and a furred cap. A policeman, like the ones at baba’s house looking for Elenya.
‘Just some tramp,’ the policeman mutters darkly, oblivious to the boy.
Behind him, a second policeman emerges. In his fist hangs the little Russian horse. One gulp of fresh air, and he turns to retch into the roots. The horse rolls away.
‘He has children’s toys,’ he says, wiping the slime with his sleeve.
‘You think he brought it for the girl?’
‘Who knows, with these bastards? Come on, let’s report it back …’
The man freezes. Eyes that were once unseeing have landed on the boy. ‘Biladz,’ the man utters. ‘Is that her?’
The boy thinks to run, lose himself in the trees. He could do it if he wanted. He’d vault the fire and snake between them, lose himself under aspen and birch. They’d try and track him but end up tracking a deer, a fox, each other. These men don’t know about running wild.
Yet, he stays still. ‘Where is she?’ he utters.
‘Where …’
‘Elenya!’ the boy barks. ‘Did you find her?’
The policemen share a bitter look. ‘What are you doing here, boy?’
‘You don’t have her, do you?’
The first policeman ventures a step forward. ‘What are you,’ he says, ‘her brother?’
‘No,’ says the boy, the single word melting. ‘I’m her … friend.’
At the house that once was a ruin, more policemen gather. As they shepherd him back under mama’s branches, he fancies there must be six, seven, eight cars lined up on the dell. Flashlights roam the undergrowth, while radios crackle with static.
Among them, he sees Mr Navitski. He is different now, wearing a woollen coat the same as the rest. One of the policemen is helping fit a radio to its belt when he sees the boy being ushered across the snow dark.
‘Alek!’ he cries, bustling the policeman aside. ‘Wait. Hold him there.’
The two policemen hardly listen, pushing him instead along the thin funnel of the kitchen. They bring him to the living room. A blanket has been laid over what remains of Mishka, but from it her snout still pokes, as inquisitive as it was in life.
By the wood-burner, Elenya’s mother sits with a policewoman. Half of her face is purpled, and to it she holds a cloth soaked in water. She is murmuring to the policewoman and the policewoman translates those murmurs to a book in her hands.
‘This one mean anything to you?’
Elenya’s father turns. His eyes light on the boy. He is about to speak, when Mr Navitski forces his way between.
‘Alek, we can handle this.’
Elenya’s father says, ‘Alek, what are you doing here?’
Between wintry breaths: ‘I’ve come to find her.’
‘Find her?’
‘I can find her, I promise.’
He does not believe. The boy can tell; the look on his face screams it out, more clearly than black skies scream out thunder.
‘It was my papa,’ whispers the boy. ‘I’m sorry, but it was my papa. He came to the school and …’
‘Your papa?’
‘He brought the woods with him.’
Silenced, Elenya’s father looks at Navitski. ‘Did you bring him here?’ he says, accusing.
Mr Navitski says, ‘He wants to help.’
But Elenya’s father rages, ‘How can he possibly help?’
‘It was my papa,’ the boy repeats, as if reading a rite. ‘My papa. My papa.’
Elenya’s father strides forward, sinks to one knee. This close, he is enormous, a bear of a man. ‘Alek, listen to me. What do you know about the man who took Elenya?’
The boy is lost, with only one thing he can possibly say: the truth.
‘She was going to tell. She said she had to. That we couldn’t carry on. I went to town to stop her, but my papa came too. I thought he’d come for me, but he took her.’
Her father’s face is set, like one of the faces grown out of the murder trees. He lifts his head to stare at Navitski. ‘What is he talking about?’
‘They live out there,’ breathes Navitski.
‘Out there?’
‘In the pushcha.’
T
he boy sees the truth resolving on her father’s face. He stands, rocks back.
‘It isn’t his fault,’ the boy whispers. ‘It’s because of the trees. He wasn’t always so wild. He was good. I promise, he was good.’
‘Alek,’ Mr Navitski interjects. ‘This is important. Can you hear me?’
The boy nods.
‘Your papa, Alek. Do you know where he went?’
The boy looks from each face to the other: her mother, face shining and swollen; her father, with murderous eyes.
‘No,’ says the boy.
All three of them exhale. Fists clenched and gorges full.
‘No,’ says the boy, ‘but I know how to find him.’
Snow, and more snow, and more snow to come.
There are more than he expected: Navitski, Elenya’s father, and more police than he can count, fanning out through the woods. They have forced him into a woollen coat just like theirs, too thick and cumbersome, but he would not let them restrain him in such stupid things as mittens and scarves. By the time they come back to the gingerbread house, most of the policemen are gone – but he can still see the beams of their torches roaming under the trees, distant flashes of spectral light.
The gingerbread house looks tormented, empty and alone. Its roof has slipped, and the emperor oak that claws up makes it look like some meagre pile of kindling cast into the roots.
‘It’s where we lived,’ says the boy.
‘Here?’
Elenya’s father strides forward. The shotgun over his shoulder dangles like a taunt. He crouches, plucks something from the ground. Too late, the boy realizes what it is: he is holding the little Russian horse.
‘This is hers,’ he breathes. Eyes like fire turn on the boy. ‘Hers.’
‘No,’ says the boy, with the firmness of the forest. ‘It was mine. It was my mama’s. It was all I had, and she had it in her window. She gave it back.’
‘Did she give you this too?’ He lifts the eiderdown from beneath the crust of snow, trampled with dirt.
‘It was …’ His stomach tightens. ‘… to keep me warm. I put it on my papa, but it couldn’t keep the forest out.’
Gingerbread Page 32