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‘Why don’t you want to go to the forest, papa?’ he says, bolting up in bed so that his words pummel straight through the heart of Grandfather’s fable.
This time, the old man is not so angry after all. ‘That, my boy … that’s another story. One,’ he chokes, ‘that your mama never knew.’
‘We’ll take her though, won’t we?’
Grandfather whispers, ‘I’m sorry, boy. I didn’t mean to get cross. I … miss her, that’s all. We’ll take her tomorrow.’
The boy has closed his eyes to sleep, with Grandfather retreating down the hall, when he realizes he is still wrapped up in mama’s shawl. He has to be careful because one day the smell will wear out, so he takes it off and makes a nest in the corner. Then he plucks the Russian horse from the ledge and settles him down in the nest for sleep.
Outside, tiny crystals of snow are twirling on the wind. In the ragged orange of one of the streetlamps a man is hunched over Grandfather’s car. With the door half open, the man rifles inside. But he finds nothing, and then he is gone, leaving the door ajar and the snow curling through.
The boy steals back to bed, whispers goodnight to the Russian horse, and closes his eyes. It blocks out the glow of the streetlamps, but it does not block out the strange, muted whimpers coming from along the hall.
In the morning they have to dress up warm, because it’s winter and today is a day out. There are mittens and scarves that mama made, and big black boots two sizes too big. As Grandfather works them onto the boy’s feet, he tries to find answers in the lines of the old man’s face, but it is hard grappling for an answer when the question remains so out of grasp.
‘Are you going to be okay, papa?’
The last boot goes on, and Grandfather looks up with furrowed eyes. His face is not scored with the same deep crevices as the night before, but this the boy does not brood on, because the night has a kind of magic and makes things all better by morning.
‘Okay?’
‘To go into the forest.’
In response, Grandfather lifts a hat from the edge of the rocking chair and lowers it over his head. It is a ring of brown and black that, so it is said, is made out of bear.
‘We have to do it for mama, don’t we?’
Grandfather nods, with steeliness in his eyes of blue.
The car, Grandfather finds, has been open all night. Snow ices the seats and the steering wheel is rimed in hoarfrost, so that when the boy crawls inside he is colder than he was outside. In his lap sits the little Russian horse – because mama must say goodbye to that poor wooden creature too – and underneath him, his eiderdown for a blanket. It is, Grandfather says, going to be bitter and cold before they are through.
‘Do you know the way, papa?’
Grandfather says, ‘I think I remember.’
‘So you’ve been there before?’
‘Oh, long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world …’
If it seems like a story is about to begin, it quickly turns to mist. Grandfather scrubs a hole in the windscreen and squints out. ‘The winter might be against us, but you’ve the stomach for an adventure, don’t you, boy?’
It thrills the boy when Grandfather says this, because the boy has never had an adventure, not a proper adventure of the kind he thinks Grandfather must once have had. Those photographs in the tenement spell out a kind of story, and perhaps he would find it as heroic as the fables Grandfather tells, if only he knew how to read it.
‘What if we get hungry?’
Grandfather pats his pockets. ‘I brought us wings of the angel.’
The city streets are banked in grey slush. This snow, Grandfather says, is not for settling. That Grandfather is not always correct is quickly apparent, for once they have left the austere tenements behind, the drifts grow high at the banks and the blacktops are encased in ice as thick as a river.
It is frightening to leave the city. The city is school and the tenement and the miles and miles of empty factories where the boy is forbidden to play. In places, the boy knows, the forests have crept into the city itself, as if all of the streets and squares are held in a giant fist of pines, but outside there is nothing but the dark curtain of woodland and the barren heaths in between. The road weaves across them like an open white vein.
For miles the road is bordered by banks of firs but, deeper in, the trees are older still: sprawling oaks and beech, alders and ash. Once in a while an oak towers over the rest, and those oaks have stories and names all of their own. Somewhere, so deep that Grandfather says it might lie in some other country, stands the plague tree, whose branches cradled an ancient king while death ravaged his kingdom. There are oaks named after battles and tsars and emperors whose empires have long since ceased to exist, but these the boy knows he will never see, for the forest stretches until the very end of the earth and, if you follow its paths, you can never come back home. It would, he knows, be a very great adventure to see the edge of the forest; but mama is gone, and the boy has made a promise: he will not leave Grandfather to drink milk in the tenement alone.
They have gone many miles from the tenement when Grandfather pushes his old jackboot to the floor and turns the car onto a forest track. The branches above, laden with snow, have formed a cavernous roof, so that the trail here is almost naked, only lightly dusted with crystals of frost.
The boy chews his mittens off his hands and suckles on each finger for warmth.
‘Are you so hungry?’
‘No.’
‘We should have brought soup.’
‘I don’t like soup.’
‘You liked your mama’s kapusta.’
‘Which one is that?’
‘Cabbage,’ the old man beams.
There is a long silence.
‘I didn’t like it,’ the boy finally whispers, his head bowed. ‘I only told her I liked it.’
‘Why?’
‘She liked to make it for me, didn’t she, papa?’
‘I’ll make you some.’
‘Not like mama.’
‘No,’ Grandfather whispers, ‘not like mama.’
When they are deep in the wood, Grandfather slows the car. The windows are frosting again on the inside and he rubs them with his sleeve to make sure he can see the trail. ‘It must be somewhere near,’ he says.
‘Here?’
There is a trembling in Grandfather’s voice; it might be fancy, but he thinks it is because of more than the cold. The boy watches him, but Grandfather is hunched over the wheel, squinting through the ever-decreasing hole in the windscreen, and betrays not a flicker. He guides the car to the very edge of the track, cutting the engine before they’ve stopped rolling.
‘Come on, boy. We’ll know it when we see it.’
It is easy, now, to see why Grandfather did not want to come to the forest. The trees have the visages of men. They leer, and grope, and they surround. Colonies of birds with watchful black eyes line the treetops.
When he climbs out of the car, the frost is the first thing to assault him; the trees simply stay where they are, watching, and for a moment that is the most terrible thing of all. Grandfather waits between the trees, and by the time the boy catches up his face has blanched as white as the ice-bound branches around.
‘Are you okay, papa?’
‘You don’t have to keep asking, boy. We’ll see it done and then be off home.’
They set off, Grandfather – in his eagerness to see it done – always two strides ahead. The trail leads them into darker reaches of the woodland, but everywhere shimmers with the same kind of spectral light, the sunlight trapped beneath the branches by a canopy of snow. This forest they walk in is a graveyard, and fitting perhaps for mama’s end.
‘The urn!’ Grandfather mutters, opening his empty hands. ‘Stay here.’
He sweeps around and, with shoulders hunched up, barrels back down the trail.
Now the boy is alone. He stands in the middle of the track and watches his breath rise. The tips of his ears and the end of his nose tingle. He has never heard silence quite like this. He thinks that, if he coughed, it would break some secret forest rule. It would be so loud the blackbirds would scatter from their roosts and the wild cats come hurtling from their hidings.
It smells of outside, of earth and bark and crystal-clear water.
He doesn’t move until Grandfather returns, mama’s package held between hands that have lost their gloves and look raw.
‘Were you scared?’
He shakes his head.
‘I was afraid, boy, the first time I found myself in the wilderness alone.’
The boy wants to ask more, because it sounds like there’s a story in that, one quite unlike the fables Grandfather spins at night, but instead the old man tramps on and he is compelled to follow.
Before they have gone far, the trees thin, then peter out altogether. The forester’s trail turns to follow the edge of the woodland, along a ridge that overlooks a clean, white pasture. In the roots of one of the tumbled yews, there is a big yellow depression and a trail of yellow droplets running away from it.
‘Fresh!’ exclaims Grandfather, and gives a shrill, throaty cheer when he spots the tracks. ‘Roe deer. Do you see the two toes?’
He nods, even though he doesn’t. How Grandfather knows such things if he never goes to the forests, the boy cannot tell. These are the things a woodcutter might know, or a hunter or a trapper, not the things of a man pottering in his towering tenement flat. He wants to ask, but when he looks up he sees that a glassy look, as frozen as the world, is in Grandfather’s eyes. His face is haloed by the fog of his breath, and through those grey reefs he stares down the vale.
The boy’s eyes follow.
At the bottom of the pasture, nestled against another rag of woodland, there hunches a house. It is a small thing – a girl might call it dainty – but it is old and sunken and the coal shed squatting out front is collapsed, crowned with more snow and specks of black peeking through. Most of the windows aren’t glass at all, just wooden boards nailed together. There’s a chimneystack, just reaching through the snow, with bits of broken brick lying around and a wood pigeon perching on top.
‘This is it, isn’t it, papa?’
Grandfather says, ‘Did your mama ever bring you here?’
‘I think … but not like this.’
‘No?’
Sometimes, memories are like dreams. He remembers the house, but not the valley; the walls of stone, but not the ruin. In his head, it is summer. There is a cloth spread out in a wild garden ringed by forest, with the spectre of a house behind – but warm and welcoming, not frigid and alone like this thing feels. But then, he supposes, things must feel different after a death. The world is different to him, now that mama is gone, and so must be the house.
‘Are we going down?’
Grandfather sinks to his haunches. He doesn’t say a word, simply rocks on his jackboot heels, and when he draws himself back up he is changed: unwavering, resolute. He cups a hand around the back of the boy’s neck. The boy tingles. His face bursts into a grin but, when he looks up, Grandfather is still staring at the ruin, as if he can see things in the tumbledown stone and colonnades of ice that the boy cannot.
Up close, the house is more afraid than it is frightening. Like the trees, it has the face of a man. Frost along its open roof is a fringe, and the boarded windows are eyes gouged out. The door, an anguished maw, has slipped from its hinges but is fixed into place by hard-packed ice. On seeing it, Grandfather’s face is carved in the same sad lines as it was on the night he came to Yuri’s – and the boy wonders if making him come here at all is breaking that promise he made to look after him, and love him, for all time and no matter what.
‘Come on then, Vika,’ Grandfather says, in a whisper meant only for the urn. ‘We’re home, if home this truly is.’
He heads for the door, but walks in an odd, circuitous way, first parallel to the house, then turning sharply to approach the stone. The boy scurries to join him, plunging into snow as deep as his waist, but Grandfather turns and stops him with a word. ‘Watch out. There was a garden wall.’
‘Where?’
‘Right where you’re standing. It was to keep the pigs in.’
‘Papa, how do you …’
Grandfather heaves his way to the house door. It isn’t even locked, just warped and stuck in the frame. He sets the urn down, packing the snow tightly so it doesn’t sink, and puts his shoulder to the wood. The door caves in and a tide of snow falls into the house.
Together they stand, watching the dust of ages settle in the dark passage.
‘Don’t you want to go in, papa?’
But Grandfather just looks at the black forest on the borders of the dell, the mountains in the canopy where snow and ice have crafted jagged peaks. ‘Well, boy, I’d rather be in four walls than out there.’
Grandfather takes the first step, but the boy isn’t so sure. Out here it smells clean and free, but there is something different coming from the house. It smells of dust and dark and being old.
It is only when Grandfather disappears that the boy dares to follow. First, he stands on the step and pokes his nose over the threshold. He can hear Grandfather shifting inside. There are pools of light up ahead, spilled no doubt through windows on the forested side of the house, and he sees Grandfather’s shadow flit across them. For an instant it is pitch-black; then the light returns, as Grandfather moves on.
‘Papa?’ His voice echoes, lonely as he was all day yesterday. ‘Papa?’
He creeps on. It is not, he decides, so very bad. The first step is the hardest. After that, all you’ve got to do is be brave. You’ve got to stop thinking about the smell, stop imagining all the ghosts that might live in a place like this. You’ve got to remember: you promised to look after your papa, and how can you look after him if he ventures on alone?
He reaches the doorway at the end of the hall and peeps through. Once upon a time, this was a living room. There is still an armchair in front of a big cold hearth, and a mirror on the wall covered in dust and what looks like wood-pigeon muck. On the farthest wall one of the windows is boarded up, and the other is encased in ice. Grandfather has already shuffled through another door. He can hear the old man kicking his boots in frustration.
It doesn’t feel good, going into the room. There is little carpet left, only rags around the skirting board where mice haven’t chewed it away. He can see the big wet prints left behind by Grandfather’s boots. In the middle of the room the old man must have stomped in circles, circling the armchair and then striding away.
The room on the other side is a kitchen, and that’s where Grandfather is crouched, rummaging through a cupboard. Mama sits on the countertop in her urn, and Grandfather keeps calling out to her, assuring her that he’s not really left her alone. ‘Vika,’ he says. ‘Vika, why do you drag me back here?’
The boy shuffles into the door between the living room and kitchen. It is lighter in here, because more light can pour through the backdoor. The glass is coated in ice, but it is less thick on this side of the house and, if you squint, you can even make out what used to be a garden, with a chicken coop and rabbit hutch and vegetable patch with a low stone wall.
Grandfather is down on his knees, buried in a cupboard under the sink. There are things scattered around his knees: old gloves, the handle of a trowel, a terracotta plot, a clod of earth.
‘What are you looking for?’
Grandfather rears up with a sudden flourish: in his hands a single-headed, dark axe. His gnarled fingers are so tight around the handle that they look as knotted as the wood.
‘Papa!’
The old man’s eyes are raw, but he is smiling, his mouth full of gaps. ‘We’ll need kindling.’
‘Kindling?’
‘To kindle a fire.’
‘How do you kindle a fire?’
‘You do it,’ says Grandfather, putting his shoulder to the backdoor, ‘with kindling.’
