Gingerbread

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‘Jew’s ears,’ says Grandfather, teasing one between thumb and forefinger.

‘Jew’s ears?’

‘Just don’t let your baba hear you call them that.’

Soaking up the heat of the hearthfire, the boy has forgotten how cold the winter night can get, and once outside he starts to shiver. Grandfather tells him to take a deep breath, they’ll only be a minute, and pads to the bottom of the garden. As he follows him, he looks back at the house. Grandfather has excavated the snow from the walls, and in the crater he can see the cellar trapdoor, hard wood and iron clasp.

‘See,’ says Grandfather, staring at the roots of mama’s tree. ‘I told you he’d be back. He’s done his schooling and now it’s time for dinner. I’m making him a bird. He won’t have tasted anything like it.’

While Grandfather is talking to whatever’s left of mama, the boy imagines her working her way up the roots, into the trunk of the tree. In the spring, perhaps there will be leaves, and in the way the veins of those leaves spread out and bring colour to the leaf, there will be an image of mama. In autumn the leaves will fall down and rot, and the tree will drink them up again, and that is how mama can live forever and always.

Back inside, it is time for dinner to be served up. Grandfather even has dishes, and into each he spoons some bird and heap of roots. The boy sees, now, that there are pine needles in the broth, and chestnuts too, collected under trees planted by some ancient forester as a gift to the future. In the bottom of his bowl he finds a Jew’s ear and turns it between his teeth. It is tough as the rubber bands Yuri chews on at school, but its juices run hot and thick down his chin.

‘How do you like your real food?’

It is not like the dinners mama might make, but it is every bit as good.

‘It’s been an age since I ate like this, boy.’

‘But when did you eat like this, papa?’

‘Why, when I was young.’

‘When were you young, papa?’

‘In the long ago.’

There was not such joy in Grandfather’s voice last night. There was not such sparkle in his eyes the night before. He wonders: what has changed? It must be the house that now looks so homely. It must be the woods out back and the snow that hugs them, the hearth with its proud cookfire, and the very trees themselves. Why would his papa refuse to come to the forests, when the forests make him so happy?

‘What did you do during the wars, papa?’

Grandfather sets his wooden spoon down. The juices of grouse and starling, whose rangy skeletons now sit picked clean on his plate, glisten in his whiskers. ‘Why would you ask such a thing?’

‘It’s … for school,’ he says, though in truth it is for everything else as well. ‘Was it like in the wars of winter? Mr Navitski says there really were people living wild in the woods … Maybe there really was a baby. Maybe there really was a little boy who helped rescue it from the forest. And maybe …’

Grandfather’s owlish eyes are on him.

‘… maybe it was baba, papa? Maybe it was this very same house?’

‘And what do you think?’

‘You told me there was a bit of the true in every story.’

‘Well,’ says Grandfather, ‘maybe you’d like another tale?’

The boy’s eyes turn up. ‘Yes, please, papa.’

There comes a sound from Grandfather’s belly. It is a sound that says: settle down, boy, for we’re safe and warm, while the world is white and wild, and this tale will be long in the telling.

This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening.

The boy’s mouth follows the familiar words, surging ahead even before Grandfather has finished them.

The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread. And now, he beams, 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, there was endless, endless war.

The wars of winter had raged for a hundred long years, and time and again, our little town had fallen, first to the Winter King, then to the King in the West, then to the Winter King again. But the King in the West was strongest, and soon the little town became his dominion once and for all. The soldiers of the Winter King were frightened, but they could never give up. Do you know where they went?

The boy remembers Mr Navitski’s words. ‘They went into the forest, didn’t they, papa?’

To the pushcha, in the snow dark between the trees, for they were the soldiers of winter and knew how to live under aspen and birch.

‘And there were partisans …’ He tries the word, and finds it almost fits. ‘… already, weren’t there? Partisans with yellow stars? Because they knew about the forests too, didn’t they?’

Grandfather nods.

But the woods are wide and the woods are wild, and the woods are the world forever and ever. And there was space in the trees yet, for the Partisans of the Yellow Star and the soldiers of winter. Sometimes they would find each other, and sometimes they would help each other – and if, when winter was fiercest, they met each other in the pines, they might share their potatoes, or share their milk. Or even their guns.

‘Guns, papa?’

Oh, yes. Because the pushcha was a place of great darkness. The King in the West wreaked terrible things and, sometimes, his men would lead their prisoners out, into places where only the oaks could witness, and line them up. Then they would cast terrible magic, and the prisoners would tumble between the roots and be buried forever.

Now, trees are mighty, but a tree cannot move to help a creature in need. Some of the trees, they saw such things and screamed. Their roots spoke to their trunks, and their trunks whispered to branches and leaves, and all of the forests mourned for the men murdered in their midst. But other trees saw the work of the King in the West and were filled with joy. Because trees feed on dead things, and send their roots down to drink them up, and when the King in the West killed in the forests, some trees were tempted to feed on the murdered men. And those trees grew mighty and powerful, with branches made from dead men, and leaves that turned blood-red long before autumn’s call. And to this day you can see, out there in the forests, the trees that have drunk on the dead of the wars of winter – for those are the trees whose trunks have the faces of men. For that is their curse, to forever wear the features of the men they have eaten.

And that little baby, squalling on the step? Well, if she had stayed with her real family in the wild, she might have been drunken up by the trees as well. For her people were hunted down by the King in the West and, if ever they were caught, they were fed to the roots.

And so ends our story, of the good and bad trees.

After the tale, the boy finds that he is sleepy, lulled by the fire and the tale, but he does not want to close his eyes – not to images of trees devouring men – so, instead, he follows Grandfather back to the kitchen door, to wish goodnight to mama.

Moonlight scuds over the forest. He ventures out, tramping in the footsteps Grandfather’s jackboots have left behind, but when he reaches the roots of mama’s tree, it is not her that he sees in the branches. Instead, it is the mamas and papas marched out, lined up and shot down, so that all of the deeper trees could drink on their remains.

He has always known that the forests are home to wild things. Now, he knows that the forests are home to ghosts as well. He can almost hear them moaning, for the winter is whipping up a wind – and that wind is trapped, like a lingering spirit, beneath the canopies of ice. Deeper in, shadows stretch and dance in time with those mournful sounds.