‘Why did you run?’ Grandfather is inspecting the car, using the branch to fight the worst of the snow off the windscreen. If he is angry, the boy cannot tell. He moves awkwardly, constantly leaving one leg behind.
‘I thought …’
‘You thought what?’
‘You wouldn’t wake up.’
‘I haven’t slept so deep in … What is it, boy?’
‘You didn’t even snore. You always snore in the tenement.’
‘You wanted to go back to school, didn’t you?’
‘Only if you want me to, papa.’
‘Well, what do you want?’
He doesn’t say: mama. Instead, he says, ‘I only want to make you better.’
‘Better?’
But even the boy does not know what he means.
‘I’d be better if I had my hat, little one.’
The boy, alarmed at how he had forgotten, goes to whip the hat off his head.
‘Careful!’ Grandfather barks. ‘It’s frozen to your brow.’
‘I think it’s blistering.’
‘You’ll have to tease it off. You can do it later.’
‘Maybe I can go to school, papa.’
‘We’ll have to bring this car back to life first.’
Grandfather sends the boy to unearth stones and, in a clearing in the woodland, they build a ring inside which they can harrow the earth. After that, it does not take him long to summon up a fire. The boy watches as the baby flames dance, maturing into darting oranges and reds.
While the fire beds down, roasting the rocks that keep it hemmed in, the boy and Grandfather tramp back to the ruin, dragging out the cast-iron pot from the hearth.
Grandfather asks, ‘Are you sure you want to leave her?’
Shamefaced, the boy nods.
Once Grandfather is satisfied, they take the pot to their new cauldron in the forest. It nestles in the flames until it, too, is roasting, and then they pile handfuls of snow inside.
It takes hours of new snow-melt to excavate the car – but, at last, the thaw is complete. While the boy sets about dousing the fire in the wood, Grandfather bathes the frozen key in scalding water and turns it in the ignition. Like the Little Briar Rose being revived by a kiss, the car comes back to life.
It is another hour before they are stuttering back through the trees. The car is ailing as mama once was beneath them, but Grandfather doesn’t hear, or, if he does, he doesn’t care. They gutter around a turn in the trail and join the ribbon of black that snakes its way into town.
As the trees fade around them, the boy looks at Grandfather. Perhaps it is only the weariness in his eyes, but he thinks he sees heartache there, the same as the day mama disappeared.
‘Papa, what is it?’
‘It’s nothing, boy. You were right. You … have to go to school.’
‘It’s what mama would want.’
‘She always was wiser than her papa.’
‘Then what is it, papa? What’s wrong?’
Grandfather takes his eyes off the road; the car slews in ice and he wrests it back with birdlike arms.
‘It’s only … I don’t want to go back to the tenement, boy. It’s dead there. At least the forest’s alive. It grows. It changes.’
‘You never wanted to go to the forest, not until I made you.’
When Grandfather exhales, it might be a grin or it might be a grimace. ‘Might be I should never have made that promise to your mama. But, you see, I’ve seen it now, those old woodlands. Older than me. It’s only now it feels … right to be there.’
The boy thinks he understands. It is a kind of homesickness – because, no matter how long he lived in the tenement, it is the forest that Grandfather thinks of as home.
A strange thought erupts in him, one that must be given voice. ‘That little boy in the story, papa … the one in the war with the Winter King …’
‘Yes, boy?’
The boy loses his nerve. ‘It was only a story, wasn’t it?’
‘Well,’ says Grandfather, ‘there’s a little bit of truth in every fable.’
‘Even Baba Yaga eating little boys and girls?’
Grandfather pales, as white as the snow, and in that instant he really is the forest shade the boy thought sent to catch him. ‘Even that, boy,’ he whispers, dead words to kill the conversation.
Plague oaks and black pines hurtle past.
What Grandfather does when the boy is at school is a riddle he cannot solve. The boy watches the car stutter back along the road, and wonders at the yawning emptiness ahead. Turning to the schoolhouse, he thinks: we should have stayed in the forest. At least, then, papa had cattails to cook and kindling to muster. At least the trees are alive, not like the tenement walls. It must get very weary to be so very old.
It is daybreak and there are children milling in the schoolyard. He stands on the edge of them, shivering – for he has left his eiderdown in the car, and his clothes still cling to him, soaked in forest frost.
Yuri is already here, prowling the corners of the schoolyard with his head in the clouds. The boy means to go and play with him, but before he gets there the schoolyard starts flocking, up the steps and into the schoolhouse. Yuri has already gone through the doors by the time the boy gets there. He pauses, because to go through them now would be a very strange thing. He can see children milling beyond and the caretaker, a young man they say is as simple as the most insensible child, is moving his broom as if to sweep them on their way.
He steps through the doors, to a wave of dry heat, quite unlike Grandfather’s fires.
Almost instantly the caretaker’s eyes fall on him. ‘You can take off that hat.’
The boy goes to lift the bearskin from his head. Too late, he remembers the ice binding it to him. He pulls and the crystals tear at his skin.
‘Jesus, boy, what happened to your head?’
He lifts his fingers to trace the raised skin where he wore the halo. Occasionally his fingers find tiny outcrops of ice still sprouting from the blisters, but they perish and melt at his touch.
‘You little bastards don’t look after yourselves. What kind of mother sends her boy to class looking like that?’
With the bearskin hat still in his hands, he hurries down the corridor. It is only a small schoolhouse, with not even a single stair. The tiniest children are in two rooms around a bend in the hall, but everyone else is gathered in the three rooms that flank the corridor. In the middle is the library with its open walls, where you can go and choose a storybook or have injections when the nurse comes to visit. At the very end of the corridor, boys and girls are scrambling for pegs to hang their coats, and then cantering for the best seats in the assembly hall.
The boy is halfway along the corridor when Mr Navitski’s eyes fall on him. At first his brow furrows, eyebrows creeping up to meet the point of his black fur, but then his eyes soften and he has a look less like bewilderment, and more like … The boy knows this look well. It is a look of: your mama’s gone and you must be hungry.
As the rest of class scramble to sit cross-legged in the assembly hall, Mr Navitski picks a way through. ‘We all wondered when you’d be back.’
‘Am