Listening to the snarl still in his voice, the boy crawls across the floor and snatches up mama’s urn. The lid is still in place and he thinks to lift it, peer at what still remains, but instead he turns to see Grandfather disappearing from the alcove. Heavy footsteps tramp back into the kitchen.
He clings to his mama. ‘Why is papa so angry, mama?’
He hears the rattle of pans, the tramp of more footsteps, a single click as if Grandfather is donning his big black jackboots. Only when the tramping dies does he dare venture up, out of the alcove, and into the kitchen door. Inside, Grandfather has not donned his jackboots at all. He is hunched over a pan of milk and his heavy breathing fogs the tenement air.
‘You’re not angry, are you, papa?’
He is; the boy can see that he is. Even when it is not foaming on his lips, it is shimmering in his eyes. At first, he does not reply. He simply breathes in and, by breathing in, seems to force the anger back deep inside him. The darkness evaporates and his eyes sparkle blue all over again.
‘I’m … sorry, boy. Your mama, is she okay?’
The boy offers up the urn. ‘I don’t think it hurt her, papa.’
It is a good thing when Grandfather takes the urn. The boy can feel his hands, cold and wet and scored with lines. They linger a little on the boy’s hand, and it is like a little pat that you might give a dog in the street. When Grandfather pulls his hands away, the boy’s go with them, his fingers entwining with the gnarled old knuckles.
‘Is it a tale before bedtime, boy?’ the old man asks, almost contrite.
The boy nods. ‘And mama can listen too.’
In the bedroom, Grandfather tells him of the little briar rose. It is a German story, and not of their people, but in it are forests the same as theirs, and peasants who might be like them, were it not for different tongues and different kings. In the story a mama and a papa want a baby of their own, but their lives are empty as the tenement today, until one day an enchantment gives them a daughter, the Little Briar Rose. There is a feast, but there is no place at the table for the thirteenth wise woman of the village, and in revenge she makes a prophecy that, on her fifteenth birthday, the Little Briar Rose will open her finger on a spindle and fall into an unending, poisoned sleep.
Grandfather’s voice has the same sound, like feathers being ruffled, that is swiftly becoming familiar. The boy lets it wash over him. His thoughts, punctuated by mourning mamas and walls of thorn grown up to hem in the sleeping girl, wander.
‘Why don’t you want to go to the forest, papa?’ he says, bolting up in bed so that his words pummel straight through the heart of Grandfather’s fable.
This time, the old man is not so angry after all. ‘That, my boy … that’s another story. One,’ he chokes, ‘that your mama never knew.’
‘We’ll take her though, won’t we?’
Grandfather whispers, ‘I’m sorry, boy. I didn’t mean to get cross. I … miss her, that’s all. We’ll take her tomorrow.’
The boy has closed his eyes to sleep, with Grandfather retreating down the hall, when he realizes he is still wrapped up in mama’s shawl. He has to be careful because one day the smell will wear out, so he takes it off and makes a nest in the corner. Then he plucks the Russian horse from the ledge and settles him down in the nest for sleep.
Outside, tiny crystals of snow are twirling on the wind. In the ragged orange of one of the streetlamps a man is hunched over Grandfather’s car. With the door half open, the man rifles inside. But he finds nothing, and then he is gone, leaving the door ajar and the snow curling through.
The boy steals back to bed, whispers goodnight to the Russian horse, and closes his eyes. It blocks out the glow of the streetlamps, but it does not block out the strange, muted whimpers coming from along the hall.
In the morning they have to dress up warm, because it’s winter and today is a day out. There are mittens and scarves that mama made, and big black boots two sizes too big. As Grandfather works them onto the boy’s feet, he tries to find answers in the lines of the old man’s face, but it is hard grappling for an answer when the question remains so out of grasp.
‘Are you going to be okay, papa?’
The last boot goes on, and Grandfather looks up with furrowed eyes. His face is not scored with the same deep crevices as the night before, but this the boy does not brood on, because the night has a kind of magic and makes things all better by morning.
‘Okay?’
‘To go into the forest.’
In response, Grandfather lifts a hat from the edge of the rocking chair and lowers it over his head. It is a ring of brown and black that, so it is said, is made out of bear.
‘We have to do it for mama, don’t we?’
Grandfather nods, with steeliness in his eyes of blue.
The car, Grandfather finds, has been open all night. Snow ices the seats and the steering wheel is rimed in hoarfrost, so that when the boy crawls inside he is colder than he was outside. In his lap sits the little Russian horse – because mama must say goodbye to that poor wooden creature too – and underneath him, his eiderdown for a blanket. It is, Grandfather says, going to be bitter and cold before they are through.
‘Do you know the way, papa?’
Grandfather says, ‘I think I remember.’
‘So you’ve been there before?’
‘Oh, long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world …’
If it seems like a story is about to begin, it quickly turns to mist. Grandfather scrubs a hole in the windscreen and squints out. ‘The winter might be against us, but you’ve the stomach for an adventure, don’t you, boy?’
It thrills the boy when Grandfather says this, because the boy has never had an adventure, not a proper adventure of the kind he thinks Grandfather must once have had. Those photographs in the tenement spell out a kind of story, and perhaps he would find it as heroic as the fables Grandfather tells, if only he knew how to read it.
‘What if we get hungry?’
Grandfather pats his pockets. ‘I brought us wings of the angel.’
The city streets are banked in grey slush. This snow, Grandfather says, is not for settling. That Grandfather is not always correct is quickly apparent, for once they have left the austere tenements behind, the drifts grow high at the banks and the blacktops are encased in ice as thick as a river.
It is frightening to leave the city. The city is school and the tenement and the miles and miles of empty factories where the boy is forbidden to play. In places, the boy knows, the forests have crept into the city itself, as if all of the streets and squares are held in a giant fist of pines, but outside there is nothing but the dark curtain of woodland and the barren heaths in between. The road weaves across them like an open white vein.
For miles the road is bordered by banks of firs but, deeper in, the trees are older still: sprawling oaks and beech, alders and ash. Once in a while an oak towers over the rest, and those oaks have stories and names all of their own. Somewhere, so deep that