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.’
Grandfather has to strain to force the door, but then it crunches and gives way. Outside, the snow is piled high, and Grandfather’s hands are too big to reach through. Now it is the boy’s turn to show Grandfather how. He reaches through the crack, shovelling enough snow away that they can both squeeze out, into a garden bound by winter. It is bigger than it seemed from inside, bordered on three sides by walls of forest.
‘Do you remember it, boy?’
The memory is only faint, but the boy nods. ‘Mama brought me, with a picnic.’
Grandfather whispers, ‘She never told me.’
‘Do you remember it, papa?’
‘Oh, better than I ought. But I was a young man, then, and should have known better. Your mama was born in those four walls. Did you know that?’
The boy looks back. It is only a house, he tells himself, in the same way that those maps on Yuri’s floor are real maps. It is like a story written down but screwed up and cast away when its teller can’t find the words: out of shape, words and bricks heaped up without sense or form. It can hardly be a place where mama once lived.
‘Here?’
‘She was smaller than you when we left. I always hoped she wouldn’t remember, but once something’s in your head, you don’t shed it so easily.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Because, boy, there are things in the forest, things not fit for a baby girl.’
From the tone of his voice, he does not mean to go on. He takes one big stride, then another, and in his wake the boy follows.
Although the snow is thick on top of what used to be a vegetable patch, under the trees it is only light dust. They tramp beneath the boughs and, only a few yards in, Grandfather stomps his jackboot down. The frost is like a layer of hard sugar, and it cracks under his heel.
He begins by stripping tiny twigs and dead bark from the trunk of a black alder. A little further in, an oak has long ago been uprooted and now lies dead on the forest floor, slowly rotting away. Mosses grow across its surface, like a bison’s winter hide, but Grandfather scrapes a patch away and exposes the dead wood underneath. The axe sinks easily into the first layers, and chips of cold wet trunk shower down. The smell is cold and stagnant, and billows up in great clouds to make the boy sneeze.
‘See,’ says Grandfather. He has chipped deep into the trunk, where the wood is dry and flaking. ‘You can start a fire with this more easily than a match.’
The boy peers closely. ‘But how do you know?’
‘Don’t you think your old papa might know how to start a fire?’
‘I’ve seen you start a fire, papa. You turn the gas and strike a match.’
‘Boy, that’s barely a fire at all. Those are fires for poor old men in their tenements. I wasn’t always so very old.’
The boy replies, ‘But I’m not old, and I don’t know about fires.’
‘I wasn’t the same kind of boy as you,’ grins Grandfather. ‘I was a little bit … wilder.’
Kindling, it turns out, is twigs and flakes of trunk and even bits of bird nest that the boy finds hidden away in a hole in the dead tree. With hands and pockets full, they go back into the house.
Grandfather says there hasn’t been a fire here for years. He drops down at the hearth, props the axe against the stone, and piles the kindling in a dark mound.
The boy hugs the wall at the edge of the room. His eyes linger on the hunched figure of Grandfather, then flit to the threadbare chair, the crumbling stairs. Perhaps it should not take so very much imagination to see pictures on the walls, the windows opened up, a proper banister and bedroom above. Yet, when he tries to see mama here, the cobwebs in the corners fight back, and the idea of a baby crawling on these floors is preposterous. Only a baby animal could live here, some wild thing out of the forests.
Terrifying, to think of the long ago years before