A voice flurries down the hall, ‘You should be in bed.’
How Grandfather knows he is there, he cannot tell.
‘I know.’
‘Couldn’t you sleep?’
Grandfather appears in the alcove, ruddy face still glistening from the cold. He looks different tonight. He has taken off his overcoat to reveal a slick black suit underneath. Grandfather has never looked as smart as he does in the suit, but it is a sad thing to see a man look so smart. His tie is done up tight and it bunches the loose skin of his neck, leaving a horrid red line like a scar. His hair has oil in it and is combed so you can see every strand. He has had a shave and all of his whiskers, once so prickly and wild, have gone.
‘I see you made the milk.’
‘It was to ward off winter.’
Grandfather’s face cracks in a smile. ‘Like in the story!’
It was one Grandfather told him on the night mama died, of the peasant boy Dimian and his forest home, and how he loved to take his fists to his neighbours and would do almost anything to tempt them to a fight.
Grandfather shuffles into the alcove, and, like a mouse afraid of being trampled, the boy scrambles out of the rocking chair to make space. Before Grandfather settles, though, there is the fire to be made. He keeps the brown paper package nestled in his arm and bends to turn a gauge. Then there is a match; a spark flies up, and the fire is lit.
‘Come on, we can have a biscuit. I don’t think she’d mind if you wanted a biscuit, would she?’
‘Even late at night?’
‘Well, it’s a special kind of night.’
Grandfather retreats to the kitchen, returning with the package under one arm and a biscuit tin in the other. Inside are ten pieces of gingerbread with decorations carved into each: ears of wheat curling around a ragged map, and a star with five points hanging above.
The boy is reaching in with a grubby paw when Grandfather stops him.
‘Maybe we should share one.’
Really, the boy would rather have one all for himself. These are special ones, made with honey, not like the ones with jam you can buy in the baker’s. He feels distinctly more hungry just to see one.
‘Can I have one for my own?’
‘No,’ says Grandfather. ‘They have to last.’
It doesn’t matter, in the end, because Grandfather has just a tiny corner, and the boy can suckle on his piece all night. It is rich and sticky in his mouth, coating his gums so that he will be able to taste it all the way to morning.
‘Did mama make the biscuits?’
Grandfather nods. ‘There’s nine more.’
‘Can I have another?’
‘No.’
He doesn’t ask why. Even so, he realizes he’s being especially careful not to make crumbs.
After a great, honeyed silence: ‘What was it like today, papa?’
Grandfather nestles, and might be readying himself for another fable.
This isn’t the tale, he begins, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the …
‘Papa, please.’
‘It was quiet, boy. Snow on the cemetery. They brought your mama in a black car. I wanted to lift her down myself but she was too heavy. So the men from the parlour had to help me.’
‘Did you … see her, papa?’
‘Not today, boy.’
‘It’s her in the paper, isn’t it?’
Both sets of eyes drop to the brown paper package in Grandfather’s lap. Somehow, mama is inside. All of her that was, boiled down to nothingness and poured into a little tin cup. Inside that package are all the times she walked him to school, all the dinners she made, all the stories before bedtime. And the promise she made him make.
‘Can I hold her?’
Grandfather offers her up. In his hands, she feels light as the air. She is the same as any package that might come through the door. He puts his ear to her and listens, but she no longer has a voice.
‘When will we do it?’
Grandfather takes her back.
‘Do it?’
‘Take her to that place, in the forest.’
Grandfather’s face is lined, and for a moment the boy thinks he doesn’t understand.
He says, ‘You know, the place where baba went.’
Grandfather shakes his head. ‘Not there,’ says the old man, lifting mama to marvel at her. ‘We’ll find a place here, in the city. A place near your old house. A special spot. Somewhere she loved to take you. And then, every time we want to talk to her, every time we want to hear her voice or see her eyes, we’ll go there, you and me, and listen to the wind. What do you think, boy? Can you think of a place?’
Sitting at Grandfather’s feet, with the prickling heat of the gas fire touching his back, the boy is somehow frozen. His fingers twitch, as if he might reach out for mama once again, but Grandfather’s hands close protectively around her. He picks out Grandfather’s eyes, but they are still so perfectly blue, that the boy thinks he must simply be mistaken.
‘Papa,’ he whispers. ‘She wanted to be with baba …’
‘She told you that, did she?’
The boy feels as if he is shrinking in size, barely big enough to perch on Grandfather’s boots. ‘No, papa, she told you.’
The silence of the deepest snowfall fills the alcove.
‘When?’ Grandfather begins, his voice a-tremble.
‘It was when we came,’ breathes the boy, as if fearful of his own words. ‘You were in the kitchen and mama was crying and, papa, she made you promise.’
Grandfather hardens. ‘Your mama would understand, boy, if you wanted her near, some place she could be with us. I don’t want to take her to that place, boy. Do you?’
Though the boy is uncertain of the precise place mama meant, he has an image in his head. He was not there when the dust of his Grandma sifted through mama’s fingers, but she took him there in later years – and there he saw the fringe of the rolling forest, the tumbledown ruin which was a place of stories and histories as well. One hour out of the city, two hours or more, and the woods are wide and the woods are wild and the woods are the world forever and ever. It is, he knows, a place that baba loved through all of her life, a place mama would go to, over and again, to hear her dead mother whisper in the leaves.
‘You promised, papa.’
Grandfather is silent. The boy wonders: does he know the meaning of a promise? Perhaps a promise is a thing only for little boys and girls, like schoolyards and alphabets and mittens.
‘Sometimes, boy, you make a promise to stop someone’s heart from bleeding.’
It isn’t like that for the boy. He won’t forget sitting at mama’s side and putting his arms around her and making his oath: to look to his papa, to love his papa, to look after him for all of his days.
‘Papa, she’ll be upset.’
His fingers reach for the brown paper. At first, Grandfather lifts it away. Then, he relents. His fingers scrabble at it, find its corners, tear and touch the urn underneath. ‘Papa, you wouldn’t break a promise if mama knew.’
Grandfather’s chest rises, fills with