Gingerbread. Robert Dinsdale

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?’