It is only when he wipes the window clear for a fifth time that he realizes they are leaving the town. The streetlights have grown infrequent, and in rags the trees grow more misshapen, not tamed by human hands like the ones that sprout from concrete along the city streets.
‘Aren’t we going back to the tenement, papa?’
‘But what’s at the tenement?’
‘Well, nothing …’
‘So why would we want to go back?’
This time, the way into the wild is familiar. They draw off from the main road, into the caverns of ice, and stutter on until they have reached the old resting spot.
‘Are you warm enough in that shirt?’
The boy shakes his head.
‘There’s the eiderdown just there. But I found you a coat. There’s a cellar, under your baba’s house. There’s a trapdoor outside, near the kitchen door.’
‘I have a coat at the tenement, papa. It’s the one mama got me.’
‘This one’s warmer.’
‘But it isn’t mine, is it?’
Grandfather stalks off, up and over the dead fire, loping like a hunchback into the trees.
‘It’s in the family,’ he says.
Before they reach the ruin, the boy can see smoke curling out of the chimneystack. He can see the chimneystack too, no longer a crumbled mound of bricks but now excavated and piled high, churning clouds out into the night with the same relentlessness as the factories through which they have come. From the top of the hill, he can smell the woodsmoke.
Grandfather leads him down the dell and stops to lift a simple latch on the wooden door, no longer slumped and smashed into place, but hanging – if awkwardly – from hinges once again. When he opens the door, winter tries to rush in, but waves from the hearthfire try to rush out. A battle is fought in the open doorway, and through that prickly frontier the boy and Grandfather go.
‘Papa,’ the boy begins, begging a smile, ‘what happened?’
Grandfather shrugs, as if to hide the smile that is flourishing in the corners of his lips. ‘I found some … bits and pieces. This old house, it remembers me, boy.’
In the living room there are rugs. They do not extend quite to the edges as a carpet might, but they are deep and soft under his feet, and run all the way to the hearth, where a fire surges and rolls. Ranged around the hearth are two armchairs with a little table between. All of the brambles that once clawed in to take back the house have been hacked and bundled up, and now hang on strings above the hearth, drying out for future kindling.
In the hearth sits the cast-iron pot, and in the cast-iron pot spits and crackles a bird. Cattail roots bob, white strands trailing like Baba Yaga’s hair, in the surface of the broiling snow-melt. Its smells lift, mingle with the woodsmoke, and reach out to tempt the boy.
He peers in the pot. ‘What is it, papa?’
‘It’s like a chicken.’
‘But what is it?’
‘A grouse.’
The boy looks again, breathing in deep aromas of wild grass and wet bark. ‘There are two birds here.’
‘One’s a starling.’
‘A starling?’
‘It’s been such a long time since I ate a starling. Shall we say goodnight to your mama, boy?’
The boy follows Grandfather through the kitchen. Here, too, everything has changed. One of the smashed windows is covered with boards, and all of the pots are stacked in piles. A bowl by the tin sink is filled with cattail roots and acorns and other roots the boy does not know, all of them ugly as unborn children. In another bowl sits a handful of nuts, and in another still dry, sprawling mushrooms that look as if someone has rolled and stretched them out.
‘Jew’s ears,’ says Grandfather, teasing one between thumb and forefinger.
‘Jew’s ears?’
‘Just don’t let your baba hear you call them that.’
Soaking up the heat of the hearthfire, the boy has forgotten how cold the winter night can get, and once outside he starts to shiver. Grandfather tells him to take a deep breath, they’ll only be a minute, and pads to the bottom of the garden. As he follows him, he looks back at the house. Grandfather has excavated the snow from the walls, and in the crater he can see the cellar trapdoor, hard wood and iron clasp.
‘See,’ says Grandfather, staring at the roots of mama’s tree. ‘I told you he’d be back. He’s done his schooling and now it’s time for dinner. I’m making him a bird. He won’t have tasted anything like it.’
While Grandfather is talking to whatever’s left of mama, the boy imagines her working her way up the roots, into the trunk of the tree. In the spring, perhaps there will be leaves, and in the way the veins of those leaves spread out and bring colour to the leaf, there will be an image of mama. In autumn the leaves will fall down and rot, and the tree will drink them up again, and that is how mama can live forever and always.
Back inside, it is time for dinner to be served up. Grandfather even has dishes, and into each he spoons some bird and heap of roots. The boy sees, now, that there are pine needles in the broth, and chestnuts too, collected under trees planted by some ancient forester as a gift to the future. In the bottom of his bowl he finds a Jew’s ear and turns it between his teeth. It is tough as the rubber bands Yuri chews on at school, but its juices run hot and thick down his chin.
‘How do you like your real food?’
It is not like the dinners mama might make, but it is every bit as good.
‘It’s been an age since I ate like this, boy.’
‘But when did you eat like this, papa?’
‘Why, when I was young.’
‘When were you young, papa?’
‘In the long ago.’
There was not such joy in Grandfather’s voice last night. There was not such sparkle in his eyes the night before. He wonders: what has changed? It must be the house that now looks so homely. It must be the woods out back and the snow that hugs them, the hearth with its proud cookfire, and the very trees themselves. Why would his papa refuse to come to the forests, when the forests make him so happy?
‘What did you do during the wars, papa?’
Grandfather sets his wooden spoon down. The juices of grouse and starling, whose rangy skeletons now sit picked clean on his plate, glisten in his whiskers. ‘Why would you ask such a thing?’
‘It’s … for school,’ he says, though in truth it is for everything else as well. ‘Was it like in the wars of winter? Mr Navitski says there really were people living wild in the woods … Maybe there really was a baby. Maybe there really was a little boy who helped rescue it from the forest. And maybe …’
Grandfather’s owlish eyes are on him.
‘… maybe it was baba, papa? Maybe it was this very same house?’
‘And what do you think?’
‘You told me there was a bit of the true in every story.’
‘Well,’ says Grandfather, ‘maybe you’d like another tale?’
The boy’s eyes turn up. ‘Yes, please, papa.’
There comes a sound from Grandfather’s belly. It is a sound that says: settle down, boy, for we’re safe and warm, while the world is white and wild, and this tale will be long in the telling.
This isn’t the tale, says