Robert Dinsdale - Gingerbread

Ho, said the skull, but you are mistaken. Your reward will be to be eaten, because for Baba Yaga to be eaten is a great reward. Heed me, for I was once a boy who got lost in the woods and toiled in Baba Yaga’s hut.

But what can we do, asked the girl, but work hard and be rewarded?

You must run, said the skull, and take this ribbon. Be kind to the trees of the forest, for they will help if they can.

Well, the boy and the girl waited until dead of night, when Baba Yaga was abroad. And though the girl wanted to run, the boy was too afraid. So the girl said: I will run and find our papa and we will come back to help. And she ran.

But Baba Yaga knew a spiteful pine and the pine’s branches whispered to its needles who whispered to a crow who brought Baba Yaga down. And Baba Yaga gave chase on her broom. At once, the girl remembered the skull’s words. Be kind to the forest, and the forest will be kind to you. So she took the ribbon and tied it to a birch. And the birch was so filled with goodness that the trees of the forest, all but the spiteful pine, grew tangled and would not let Baba Yaga pass.

So the girl found her papa and told him what had come to pass, and the papa took his axe into the forest, but because the forest was kind it let him pass. And at last they came to Baba Yaga’s hut, but of the boy there was no sign. Now there was only another skull in the wall of the hen’s feet hut, one to sit next to the other little boy. For the boy had been eaten up and now was part of Baba Yaga forever and more.

And from that day until this, two boys can be heard talking at night in the dead of the forest.

‘Is it true?’ marvels the boy.

Oh , says Grandfather. I know it is true, for one was there who told me of it.

The boy beams. It is the way a story is always signed off, a thing he has heard every time mama tells him a story. He looks around, to see if mama has loved the story as much as him, but he sees, instead, that her face is webbed in strange patterns, that her eyes are sore and red, that some monster has hacked away at her beautiful hair to leave her scarred, ugly, naked as Grandfather’s pate.

‘Come on, boy,’ says Grandfather, lumbering to his feet. ‘I’ll make you a hot milk.’

Grandfather’s hands find his shoulders, try to drag him from mama’s knee. All around him, locks of blonde and grey shower down. His little hands reach out to catch them, but they slip away.

‘It’s okay,’ says mama, ‘I’ll finish it. Don’t cry, now.’

In the kitchen, the boy frets over a pan of milk that won’t stop scalding. He can hear Grandfather and mama, and mama has lost all of her words. Then he hears the footsteps and closing of a door that tells him mama has gone to her bedroom.

Grandfather finds him wrestling with the pan, and gently sets it down. ‘She wants to see you.’

A fist forces its way up the boy’s throat. Though they have been with Grandfather only weeks, it is a law as old as time itself, one of the rules whipped up when the world was young, the forests were just tiny green shoots, and Baba Yaga only a babe: you must not go through mama’s bedroom door, not after bedtime.

Grandfather ushers him down the hall and leaves him at the door.

At first, the boy does not want to go through. His hand dances on the handle and he is about to turn away, crawl into his bunk.

Then mama’s voice itself summons him through. ‘Don’t be afraid. It was only a few little tears.’

It is a small room, with a bed with red patchwork and a cabinet with a lamp. On one wall there is a dresser, and around that more photographs of the kind he has seen in the hallway. In these photographs there are no soldiers, nor men in jackboots with rifles on their shoulders, but only the same woman, over and over again. It is, the boy knows, his own baba, who once was married to Grandfather.

Mama is on the bed but not in the covers. She has a shawl on her shoulders, the same one in which she used to wrap the boy when he was but small, and the knotted handkerchief is back on her head. Even so, it cannot disguise the fact that somebody has shorn off the last of her locks.

The boy hovers in the open door.

‘Why were you crying, mama?’

Mama makes room for him on the bed. At first, he is uncertain; the room is a storm of different smells, alien even to the rest of the tenement. Only when he sees the pained expression on mama’s face does he hurry over and scramble onto the covers. She folds an arm around him and he is surprised to find that she feels the same, even though she looks so different.

‘It was only the story,’ she says. ‘Papa used to tell me all kinds of stories when I was a girl. Stories of the woodland and the wild, the kind of stories he’d heard from his papa, and his papa before him. Then, one day, when your mama wasn’t so very much older than you, he stopped telling those stories. He wouldn’t take us to the forest anymore. He wouldn’t talk about the wolves and the stags, and I never knew why. I used to love hearing about my papa’s time in the wilds, but from that day on he barely left the city. It was … nice to hear him that way again. That’s all.’

The boy isn’t certain he understands, but to say as much would be to betray mama, so he only nods. ‘Papa has lots of stories of the forests, doesn’t he?’

‘They’re all there, waiting, still inside him.’

‘Do you think he’ll tell me them, mama?’

‘I hope so. But your papa, he’s a … very old man, little thing. There are some stories he doesn’t want to tell. Some he shouldn’t …’

Mama means to go on, but there come footsteps from beyond the door. They hover, and they turn, and they click – as if Grandfather has put his old jackboots back on and is meandering up and down the hall. Mama waits for him to drift away once more.

‘Listen,’ she says, shuffling so that they can face each other on the bed, the boy nestled in the diamond of her legs. ‘I need you to hear this.’

The boy stiffens. When somebody says I need , it means that the thing they will tell you is a terror, and must not really be heard at all.

‘I won’t be here for very much longer,’ she says, with a finger brushing at his fringe so that he cannot hide. ‘Your papa is a great man, a kind man, in his heart. But his heart can be buried. He lived in terrible times. You can see it in his eyes sometimes, those terrible things. It’s why we haven’t seen him so very much, not since your baba died. But I want you to know – you’re of him, just as you’re of me and I’m of you.’

Half of the boy wants to squirm, but the other half pins him down.

‘He’ll care for you and love you and, even when I’m not here, I’ll be loving you too. I’ll be in your head. I’ll be in your dreams. You can talk to me, and even if I can’t talk back, you’ll know I’m listening. I’ll watch over you.’

They sit in silence: only the thudding of two hearts, out of beat, in syncopated time.

‘It’s okay to be scared,’ whispers mama.

‘I’m not scared.’

‘It’s okay … to want it.’

The boy’s eyes dart up.

‘It won’t be long,’ she promises, with her lips so close to his face he can feel their warmth, smell the greasy medicine still in her mouth. ‘It will be over soon. And then … then … I want you to make me a promise.’

The boy says, ‘Anything, mama.’

‘Promise me you’ll look to your papa. No matter what happens, no matter what stories he tells, no matter what you see or hear or … No matter what you think , little one. Promise me you’ll love him, and you’ll care for him, forever and always.’

The boy doesn’t need to think. He nods, and lifts his arms to cling from mama’s neck, like a papoose made of skin and bone.