The Forest of Souls. Carla Banks

She held a young child–about four, maybe–in her arms. Standing next to her, there was a boy who looked as if he might be ten or eleven. Lange? Jake glanced across at the old man. It was hard to tell.

      The second one was slightly larger and cut with a deckle edge. He checked the back quickly. It looked as though something had been written on it, but whatever it was, it had faded beyond legibility. It showed a young man in uniform standing in front of a building–the boy from the first photograph? If it was, he was older now, in his late teens or early twenties. This picture was unmistakably of Lange.

      He held the first picture out. ‘Your family?’ he said.

      After a brief hesitation, Lange took the photograph. His fingers brushed the woman’s face, and then the child’s, tentatively, as if the picture was a reflection in water that would disappear at his touch. He stared at it in silence for a full minute, then reached for the box and started going through the envelopes himself, impatiently gesturing Jake to silence.

      Jake waited. Lange’s reaction to the picture was odd and had aroused his curiosity. He kept his observation discreet, letting his eyes wander over to the French windows and the garden beyond. The rain had stopped, and the day had the brightness of early spring. Unlike the front, the back garden was carefully tended, a strange contrast to the shabby, neglected house. Someone had been working on the rose bed by the window. A spade was propped against the wall, and a fork was dug into the earth. The plants had been pruned, and the remaining leaves shone with health.

      ‘When we are children,’ Lange said suddenly, ‘we live in a forest. My papa go there because Mama is ill. He has to clear land, build his house. He makes the orchard–cherry trees and plum trees. I am born there.’

      ‘When was that?’ Jake knew the answer, but he wanted to hear what Lange would say.

      ‘Many years ago.’ Lange’s brows drew together as he spoke. ‘In the forest,’ he said. ‘So beautiful. And in a clearing, the timber house and cherry orchard. There was no water, so Papa build a deep well. And Mama got better. And then I was born.’ The room darkened as the sun went in. ‘It’s gone now, the orchard, the forest.’

      Jake wanted to let the old man stay in this moment of quiet reflection, but time was short. He pushed on. ‘And this one?’ he said, pointing to the photo of the young man in uniform. ‘This is you?’ It must have been taken in ’38 or ’39–just before the outbreak of the war. Jake couldn’t recognize the uniform.

      But the old man seemed not to hear him. His eyes were focused on the photograph that Jake was holding out to him, but his face was blank. ‘That winter, everyone is afraid. Fear makes people…made me…’ He was looking directly at Jake as he spoke, but who or what he was seeing, Jake wasn’t sure. ‘I should not have done it,’ he said. ‘The bear at the gate…I was there.’ He turned to Jake with a sudden intensity. ‘I was there. And the little one…’ Jake couldn’t decipher what he said next. At first he thought the old man was speaking gibberish, then he realized that he had lapsed into another language–Polish? But it seemed oddly familiar to Jake.

      The photographs dropped from the old man’s hand. Jake caught them before they fell to the floor. ‘Are you all right?’ He remembered the daughter’s warning about Lange’s health; he hadn’t taken it too seriously up until now.

      Lange seemed to have forgotten Jake was there. ‘Minsk,’ he said. ‘It was in Minsk…’ He was staring at his hand where the photograph had been.

      Minsk! Jake held his breath. But then the stillness of the house was broken as the front door slammed and feet tapped briskly across the wooden floor. A woman’s voice called from the hallway, ‘Grandpapa? Where are you?’ The guardian relative. Jake cursed under his breath. There was the sound of bags being dumped, movement, disturbance in the air. The past trembled and shattered in the vitality of the present.

      The door opened, and the woman came in. She stopped in the doorway, her eyes taking in the scene. Jake got a quick impression of dark hair, red mouth, cool, tailored elegance. The granddaughter. Lange was levering himself out of his chair. He looked slightly dazed but the expression on his face was unmistakably one of relief.

      She went up to the old man and hugged him. ‘Grandpapa!’ She studied him, her expression anxious and puzzled. Then she turned to Jake.

      Jake stood up slowly, trying to hide his frustration at the interruption. Minsk. The old man had been about to talk about Minsk. ‘Jake Denbigh,’ he said.

      She looked round at the recorder on the table, the scattered photographs, and her gaze came back to him. ‘You were supposed to wait for me,’ she said.

      Jake shook his head. ‘My appointment was for eleven,’ he said.

      She looked at Lange, who was easing himself back into his chair. He seemed quite composed now. She looked quickly back at Jake, undecided, then moved across the room to sit down on the other side of the fireplace.

      ‘Okay,’ she said with an effort. ‘I was late. I’m sorry. Please go on.’

      Jake kept his face expressionless. Something had just dawned on him. His mind had been processing what Lange had said. He hadn’t been speaking Polish. The language Lange had used was Russian, and Jake could remember what he had said. He let the surface of his mind take over the interview as he tried to translate what he thought he had heard. ‘You said it wasn’t difficult, getting started. Tell me about it. Tell me what you did.’ He barely heard Lange’s reply. The tape was collecting it.

      Lange had looked at the photo of himself as a young man in uniform, and he had said: I should have known. I did know. It was wrong.

       5

      Faith leaned back in her chair and listened to the verbal fencing that was going on between Grandpapa and this journalist, Jake Denbigh. When she’d arrived, Grandpapa had seemed confused and upset. Or that’s what she’d thought when she came into the room, but he’d greeted her as normal, and now seemed to be enjoying himself, sometimes evading Denbigh’s questions, sometimes using them as an opportunity for dogmatic pronouncements.

      Denbigh didn’t seem unduly put out by these tactics. He was good-humoured and persistent, and gradually this paid off. She watched as her grandfather’s interest was aroused, and he began to talk seriously about the difficulties of starting again as an immigrant in a strange country, in a continent that had been ravaged by war.

      ‘Is it easier now?’ he was saying. ‘There is always suspicion of the stranger. People are people, Mr Denbigh.’

      Before Denbigh could step in, he went off on a tangent about human nature, the urge to fear and reject anything that was different. Denbigh flashed her a quick, amused glance as he caught the thread of Grandpapa’s argument and deftly brought it back to the topic in hand. ‘Were you made to feel a stranger, Mr Lange? You’d fought for Britain.’

      ‘I was always the stranger,’ Grandpapa said.

      There was a box of photographs on the table, which interested her. Grandpapa was not a photograph person. As far as she knew, he didn’t even own a camera. She picked up one of the wallets and began to flick through it, keeping half her attention on the interview.

      They seemed to be business photos–records of official events that must go back years. She hadn’t known they existed. She had a sudden vision of Grandpapa’s life shut away and hidden in locked desks and dusty boxes, old papers in government offices, crumbling away to nothing, lost, because no one cared, apart from the restless archivists, people like Helen who would search and sift and bring the past to light.

      The interview was winding up. Denbigh’s questions were moving towards the general now. ‘You’ve always had a reputation as a risk taker. It’s one of the things that made you so successful. What makes someone like you walk so close to the line?’

      Grandpapa shrugged.