The Forest of Souls

by Carla Banks

  Everything looked dull in the grey daylight. She went downstairs and switched on the coffee machine. She was out of milk. She hadn’t shopped at all at the weekend. She closed the fridge door wearily. Suddenly she was crying, the tears running down her face as she stood there in the middle of the empty kitchen. Helen was dead.

  Then she changed her damp shirt, reapplied her make-up to disguise the reddening of her eyes, and set off for work. The image of the opaque water in the dam stayed in her mind as she drove, the way it had glittered as the ripples from the stone caught the light of the setting sun. That had been yesterday. Now she had to think about today.

  When she got to the Centre, she dumped her bag and went downstairs to talk to the technicians. She wanted some add-ons for her computer. When she got to the basement, the room was empty apart from her post-grad student, Gregory Fellows, who was sitting at one of the work stations. He was wearing headphones and his eyes were closed. His body was moving in time to a rhythm only he could hear as he adjusted it on the keyboard. As she came in, he whispered, ‘Yeah.’

  Then his eyes opened and he saw her. He took off the headphones. ‘Faith,’ he said. He sounded a bit uncertain.

  ‘Morning, Gregory. Got everything sorted for your seminar?’ She forgave herself a touch of schadenfreude when he looked guilty.

  ‘It was just…’ He shrugged. ‘I’m writing something for a friend.’ His face, normally cheerful, was closed and almost sullen. He pushed the heavy mop of fair hair out of his eyes and started to collect his things together. ‘I’m going to start work on it now,’ he said.

  ‘Morning, Faith.’ The technician came in carrying a cup of coffee. ‘What can I do you for?’ Faith explained quickly what she wanted, and he made some notes. ‘I can get that for you,’ he said.

  She had an idea. ‘While I’m here…’ She explained about the paper she’d been looking for on Helen’s disk. ‘She must have printed it off and deleted it. I wondered if she left any back-ups with you?’ It was an outside chance.

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry. There’s never any need. The system backs up every night, so people don’t bother.’

  ‘Okay. I just thought I’d ask.’

  ‘Hang on, though.’ He went into the office, and came back a minute later carrying a CD. He looked triumphant. ‘I’d forgotten. The morning it…you know…happened. I knew they were going to take her stuff, so I copied it off the tapes. As it turned out, the police left a copy, so…Anyway, the one I made is still here.’

  He looked so pleased with himself that Faith didn’t have the heart to tell him that she’d already got this on the disk that Trish had given her. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  Gregory was on his way out. He hesitated then waited as Faith came towards him. ‘Could I have a word?’

  She hoped it wasn’t about the seminar. ‘What is it, Gregory?’

  ‘You were a friend of Helen’s, weren’t you?’

  That was unexpected. ‘Yes. I was at school with her.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just–some of us, we wanted to go to the funeral, only we don’t know…’

  She looked at him. It was easy not to take Gregory seriously. He was fair-haired, well built and handsome, with a casual and laid-back attitude to life that was appealing, if infuriating. She reminded herself that, for all his faults, he was an intelligent, and probably a sensitive young man. ‘I think the family want it to be just them. I don’t think I’ll be going either.’

  He started to say something, then changed his mind. He gave her a half-smile and turned away towards the stairs. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said, and was gone.

  Back in her room, she looked at the disk the technician had given her, spinning it between her fingers as she thought. This disk would be the same as the one she already had. But optimistic superstition made her put it into the drive and open it.

  And there it was. The first folder was labelled ‘Working Files’. This was how Helen always labelled her current work. She stared at it in incomprehension, then checked the stored data. The files had last been worked on the day Helen died. So why hadn’t they been on the disk that the police gave to Trish?

  This disk was a copy of whatever had been on Helen’s computer the evening she died…No, the police came to the Centre the following day, two days after Helen’s death. The system would have backed up, and then, as there had been no activity on Helen’s terminal the following day, it would have deleted everything and backed up again. The technician had taken this copy the morning the police came and collected Helen’s things–so this was the copy the police had. The disk that Trish had given her was the one that was different.

  As she rubbed her eyes, trying to make sense of it, she saw Trish holding the disk out to her with that odd smile. Trish had not liked Helen. She had seemed determined to cause Helen trouble at every opportunity. She didn’t pass on messages that hadn’t come through the correct channels, she made sure that Antoni Yevanov knew about late arrivals and non-attendances. It sounded petty–it was petty–but it also had the potential to cause damage.

  And now, Antoni Yevanov wanted Helen’s paper to go to Bonn. Would Trish’s dislike of her extend to making sure that it didn’t, now Helen was dead? Faith ran her fingers through her hair. She didn’t like what she was thinking.

  She decided she’d better see what it was she actually had. She opened the folder. Helen’s draft was there, just as it should have been: ‘Women and Totalitarianism–A Liberation Denied’. Helen’s draft. Someone had deleted the file from the disk the police had made.

  There was a second file, labelled ‘Document’. She opened it, wondering if this was also relevant to the Bonn paper. It should be–there was nothing else Helen had been working on, apart from her teaching. It contained a paper that Helen had probably downloaded from the internet: ‘Lithuanian Responses to Nazi Occupation’. Now she understood. After Daniel had destroyed the papers she’d found in his parents’ attic, Helen must have been looking for her children’s past, wanting to find out what kind of background, what kind of legacy her children’s great-grandparents had left them. Curious, Faith started to read.

  A Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion (later known as the 12th) was detailed from Kaunsas in October 1941. The arrival of the Lithuanian battalion coincided with a murderous wave of killings in the area in October 1941…She frowned, puzzled. If Helen had been looking for her children’s heritage, this surely wasn’t anything she would want them to have. She went on reading. It wasn’t an academic paper, it was a series of eye-witness accounts. Klava and Nura were the first to die…From Ostrov, a procession of soldiers went to the next village. The executioners stopped at a barn and put up two nooses…Nadehzhda was almost unconscious before she was hanged…She didn’t want to read this. Her eyes skimmed down the page:…ordered a fourteen-year-old girl to be hanged. They had the man ask the child in her own language if she understood that she was going to be hanged. She said she understood it…most being simply buried alive, the bloodstained earth above them heaving for hours after the event.

  Faith closed the file and stared at the blank screen. This wasn’t for the children. What had Helen been doing? Where had all this stuff come from? The images conjured up by the words resonated in her mind. She should know the figures, she’d seen them often enough. They paraded in graphs and charts through her mind: population displacement, demographic change, industrial production index, patterns of refugee dispersal, political blocs, economic blocs. And another set of figures: five million dead in Poland, seven million dead in the USSR…

  It was as if the whole of Europe had been participants in some vast, deadly game, and when the music stopped, half the chairs were empty. Half the players had gone.

  Minsk was enjoying an unseasonable spring. Jake sat in the window of his room watching the light over the parkland as he made his phone calls. Adam was pleased to hear from him. ‘You did not get arrested!’ he said. Jake wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not. They arranged to meet in a caf
é on the main street, Praspekt Francyska Skaryny. ‘The Pechki-Lavochki,’ Adam said. ‘Walk to the end of Masher ova and up the hill on Lenina. It’s near the metro, on the other side of the street from the McDonald’s. I am the small man with the grey hair and beard.’

  Jake described himself as tall, with brown hair. ‘I’ll be wearing a black leather jacket,’ he said.

  He let himself out of his room, aware of the scrutiny of a woman who peered at him from a cubbyhole along the corridor. A cleaner? The carpet was worn and the paint chipped. The elevator lobby was dark and smelled of cigarettes, and the lift clanked and rattled its way to the ground floor. He was amused by the way the building transformed as he came out into the entrance lobby–high-ceilinged luxury, with marble floors, plush settees and uniformed staff. He was beginning to think that he might enjoy Minsk. He stepped out of the hotel to take his first look at the city.

  Against all his expectations, he found it beautiful. It was a clear, bright day, and he was greeted by wide streets, bare trees and parkland, and the glitter of water from the river that wound through the city. The skies were blue. But despite the low volume of traffic, the air smelled tainted.

  The streets were busy. He wove through the crowds, observing the people who were strolling along the boulevard enjoying the warmth. The young women were lovely. All of them. He watched a group walking ahead of him, stylishly dressed in minute skirts or tight trousers with restrained flares. If this was Belarusian womanhood, then no wonder Sophia Yevanova was so beautiful. And he thought he saw, in the high cheekbones and the tilt of the eyes, an echo of Faith Lange. In the entrance to an underpass, a woman sold flowers, surrounded by shoeless children. There were a few old women wrapped in shawls, one, outside a church, was holding a decorated prayer card and, as far as Jake could tell, offering prayers for money. He gave her a five-hundred rouble note. He probably needed a blessing.

  He listened to the voices around him, picking up the rhythm of the Russian, aware of how inadequate his own command of the language was. The street signs and the buses and the minimal advertising were all written in Cyrillic. He had never properly mastered the written language and he felt like a semi-literate as he had to stop and concentrate, carefully spelling out each sign.

  According to his map, Praspekt Francyska Skaryny linked five of the main squares of the city. It was a wide, elegant street with buildings that looked as if they dated back to earlier centuries. Jake felt a lift of optimism–maybe the reports were wrong, and substantial parts of Sophia’s city remained–until he looked more closely and saw the telltale signs of pastiche.

  Following Adam’s instructions, he crossed the street and found a series of cafés–an authentic-looking pizza establishment that boasted a wood-burning stove, a Spanish restaurant, and the Russian café that Adam had proposed as their meeting place.

  He pushed open the door, and was greeted by a waiter in a red check waistcoat. The young man gave Jake the first smile he’d received that day. He had marked the Belarusians as dour–and they had probably marked him as a grinning fool. He gestured to the youth to wait and looked round quickly until he saw a man with grey hair and a beard watching him expressionlessly from a table in the back of the room.

  ‘There is my friend,’ he said in his halting Russian, thankful that Adam’s English, judging by their phone call, was good. He’d already found that there were few English speakers in Minsk.

  The grey-haired man had risen to greet him. Jake went across. ‘I’m Jake Denbigh,’ he said.

  ‘Adam Zuygev,’ the man said. Then he smiled. ‘You wear the biker’s jacket.’

  He had a cup of coffee in front of him, and ordered coffee for Jake. ‘This is our first meeting. We need vodka.’ He summoned the waiter again.

  Jake didn’t want to drink this early in the day, but he didn’t demur. He let the waiter put a glass in front of him and fill it with clear, pungent liquid.

  Adam raised his glass and said, ‘Cheers.’

  Jake grinned and raised his in response. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and when Adam downed the vodka in one swallow, he did the same. He felt the liquid burn its way down his throat, and then felt the sudden lift as the alcohol entered his system.

  To his relief, the other man didn’t order a refill. Instead, he pulled some papers out of his briefcase, and looked ready for business. He indicated their glasses. ‘Later,’ he said.

  ‘Later,’ Jake agreed. He didn’t mind getting wrecked in a good cause.

  And Adam had worked hard for him. Jake had asked for all the information he could find about Sophia Yevanova and her family, about Kurapaty, about the perpetrators and about the victims. And about the Nazi occupation. Miss Yevanova might not want to talk about it, but Jake wanted to see what records were left.

  ‘I did not find all you wanted,’ Adam said, ‘but the archive…’ he pronounced it archeev ‘…committee at Hrodna have sent me these–’ He laid out photocopies of what looked like legal documents and certificates.

  Jake looked at them. The entries were handwritten in fine italic that was hard for him to read. Adam, watching him, smiled. ‘I have translated,’ he said. ‘See? Here–’ he showed Jake a certificate–‘is the birth of your lady Sophia Yevanova. And here, her cousin, Raina Yevanova. Now, we do not have public records of Sophia after 1945, but you may be sure that the KGB will have known where she went.’

  Jake knew that Sophia Yevanova, as a post-war refugee and prisoner of the Nazis, would have faced re-education in a gulag had she returned home. ‘Her parents?’ he said. She had never said anything about what had happened to them. He wondered if they had known that their daughter had survived, and that they had a grandson.

  Adam spread his hands. ‘Who knows? There are no records of them from before the invasion. They sent their child away–they may have been arrested, sent for re-education. Or…’ Or they might lie in the mass graves under the trees of the Kurapaty Forest. ‘So many records were destroyed.’

  Jake thought about the way that Sophia Yevanova’s face settled into a blank mask when she talked about her past. If her parents had been murdered because of their attempts to protect her, then she would have carried that burden for the rest of her life. It might also explain her fierce loyalty to the child of her friend. She was making restitution for a crime that had not been her responsibility.

  ‘And Raina?’ he said.

  ‘Ah, here I have information,’ Adam said. He grimaced. ‘It is not a good story. Raina Yevanova was found guilty of collaborating with the fascist invaders and was sent to a gulag after the war, where she died in…’ He turned over the paper. ‘In 1946. But there was something I found…’ He was looking through the pile of material in front of him. ‘I have it here,’ he said. ‘Yes. I thought you would like to see…’ He pushed a photograph across the table to Jake.

  It was faded picture of two girls dressed in white with lacy veils over their hair. There was a handwritten inscription and Jake practised his growing facility with Cyrillic by reading it. It was easier when you knew what it said: R. Yevanova, S. Yevanova. The girls looked as though they were dressed for some kind of religious ceremony. He recognized Sophia at once–the perfection of the bone structure had been apparent even in childhood. She was dark-eyed, delicate, with long hair hanging round her shoulders. Raina was bigger and plumper, a pretty child with fair hair in braids and round eyes in a round face.

  They looked so young, maybe just in their teens. The photo must have been taken around the time Sophia went to live in Zialony Luh, in Kurapaty. And just a few years later, Sophia had been a pregnant refugee, and Raina was struggling to survive in the nightmare of the Soviet camps.

  ‘You feel pity for her?’ Adam said.

  Jake nodded. He didn’t think he would have been brave at that age.

  Adam was silent for a while. ‘I was born after the war,’ he said. ‘But my parents lived through it. They are dead now, both of them. But they told me about the collaborators, the people who turned on their
own countrymen. The children were brave, and the Nazis, they ordered them to be hanged on the streets. It was their policy, part of the terror they wanted to create. There was a proclamation that was enforced from the start: “The youth of the perpetrators will not protect them from the full payment of the death penalty.” In 1941, they executed–they murdered–sixteen and seventeen year olds. And sometimes it was our people who carried out those orders. Go to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, then you will understand. And Raina Yevanova…’ He met Jake’s gaze. ‘Some of those who were sent to the gulags were not true collaborators. Many did no more than take employment with the Nazis. Some of those who had been imprisoned were seen as tainted and sent to the gulags as well. But Raina Yevanova–she did more than collaborate. She betrayed her own people. It was her information that led to the arrest of Sophia. She was lucky to live.’

  After all these years, collaboration with the Nazis was still the unforgivable crime. Jake wondered what kind of history could underlie such bitterness and such an inability to forget, or to forgive.

  Raina had betrayed Sophia. He thought about Sophia’s story of Raina drawing her away from the window and the sounds of the forest, of Raina making her leave the wounded boy as the truck full of soldiers came into view. He thought about what Raina had seen and what she had experienced. Sophia had known: You must understand that, for some of us, the fascists came as liberators, at first.

  He shook his head. The story of human evil had been told so often it had become almost banal. It was not the fair-haired child in the picture under his hands who had been evil, but the system that had made her so. Sophia Yevanova had not condemned her, and he couldn’t find it in himself to do so either.