Robert Dinsdale - Gingerbread

‘Whatever happens, little thing. Whatever stories he tells. Whatever you see in his eyes. Whatever happens in your life or his, he’s yours and you’re his.’

The boy nods again, head lifting only a whisper from mama’s shoulders and held there by strands of tears thick as phlegm.

He is in school and making paper foxes with Yuri when Mr Navitski tells him, ‘Today, Yuri’s mother is going to take you back home.’

He has been to Yuri’s house before, for a birthday party at which he was the only guest. Yuri has a stepfather who works on the railway that goes east, into all of the Russias, but more often than not he is away and it is only Yuri and his mother in the little flat above the workers’ canteen. When he emerges from school at the end of day, white clouds are hunkering over the schoolhouse, and Yuri’s mother is talking to Mr Navitski at the distant gates.

Across the yard, and Mr Navitski ushers him on his way. ‘Take care,’ he says. ‘We’ll see you … soon.’

‘ Tomorrow ,’ the boy says, with a hint of defiance.

Mr Navitski nods as if he does not really believe it, and then strides back to the schoolhouse.

Yuri’s mother has eyes that nest in wrinkles and black hair scraped back in a bun. She has rings on each of her fingers and a coat with fur in its collar, but her boots are scratched and thin, at odds with the rest of her appearance, and it is these that the boy looks at as he approaches.

‘Yuri,’ she says, growing impatient at the boy still dragging himself across the schoolyard. ‘Don’t keep your friend waiting. We’re taking the bus.’

The promise of the bus fires Yuri, and he is much more spirited as they puff their way to the stop. The boy follows. Yuri has a strange waddling gait, like a duck being plumped up for the oven. The boy thinks: he’s like the boy in Grandfather’s story, ready to be eaten up by Baba Yaga.

It is a bus he has not taken before, down past boarded-up shop-fronts. As they go, the clouds break, and fat flakes of white seal the bus in a sugary case. By the time they climb out, it lies thick on the roadsides. The city has changed shape, its corners grown less defined. Yuri’s mother leads them on, past the railway canteen, and up a flight of frigid metal stairs. There, she takes a key from her purse and admits them to Yuri’s world.

Yesterday’s kalduny and draniki , heavy with fat, and a box of sugary juice for afters. While his mother is clearing up, Yuri takes him to his bedroom, which has bunks just like in Grandfather’s tenement.

The boy sits on the carpet with his bowl between his legs. Yuri considers him silently, reaches out a hand with a wrist quite as big as its palm, and pats him quickly on the head. Then he turns to open a box. From it, he pulls two silver trains and a piece of toy track.

The carpet of Yuri’s room is covered with a map, something Yuri has drawn himself, on the backs of envelopes and cereal packets. On the map are scrawled the most wonderful mountains and forests, rivers and roads. Yuri sets the trains down on a plain where a torn magazine front makes a ragged shore, and pushes one to the boy.

‘Mother says you’re not living at home.’

The boy rolls his train along the shore, bound for a head-on collision with Yuri. ‘We have a new home.’

‘A new home?’

‘With my papa.’

Yuri swerves his train out of the way. ‘What’s your papa like?’

The boy remembers mama’s words – your papa, he’s a great man, but he lived in terrible times – and they must certainly be true. But there’s another truth too: Grandfather has blue eyes just like mama, and a hundred different tales for the telling. He makes hot milk in a pan and, once, when the boy woke from a nightmare and cried, it was Grandfather who stirred and came into the bedroom and straightened his sheets and told him: hush now, it’s only a dream. It didn’t even matter that the dream was of mama, shrunk and desiccated in bed because they forgot that she was alive, because Grandfather’s vivid blue eyes made it better.

‘He’s like my mama, but old,’ the boy says.

‘I have a papa too.’

Yuri digs again in the toy box and pulls up a photograph in a frame.

‘He’s the papa of my real father.’

The picture is much the same as the ones that line the tenement hall, but these men are wearing a uniform subtly different from Grandfather’s own. In the image they stand in a row against a brick wall, each with a rifle in the crook of their arm.

‘He was in police, in the war.’

Yuri seems inordinately proud, and lands a plump finger on the man who is his Grandfather.

‘What did your papa do, in the war?’

The war was a thing that happened in the long ago, in a time beyond all reckoning. In that age there were heroes and winters that lasted for seasons on end. There were kings with companies and they waged battles on ice-bound tundras, and took up brave quests. In truth, the boy does not know if Grandfather was in a war or not. It might be that those winter wars happened in his great-grandfather’s time, or even an aeon before that. In the war, soldiers rode on woolly mammoths and unleashed great wildcats into battle, to cut down evil mercenaries with teeth like sabres.

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

‘My mama says I’m not to know, but I do. He was a police and he kept people safe.’

At that moment, the bedroom door flies open and Yuri’s mother reappears. On a tray she has pastries, dusted with sugar, like the ones mama would take him to marvel at in the baker’s window. She is about to set it down when she sees that Yuri is holding the photo.

‘I told you! Put that dirty thing away or it goes in the rubbish!’

Yuri scurries to squirrel it back in the box, ducking his mother’s hand.

Without another word, she tosses the tray on the bed and sweeps out of the room.

‘It’s because of my stepfather,’ Yuri explains, deliberating over which of the identical pastries he should devour. ‘My stepfather says the police were wicked in the war, but he doesn’t really know. How can a police be wicked, when he’s there to help?’

The boy shrugs.

‘Maybe I can come to your house again. Then we can play without getting bashed.’

The boy nods, but it doesn’t seem a thing that could happen, to have boys or girls to play in the tenement. The tenement is a place like that photograph now stashed away, where time is out of step and the real world awry.

They play on, and in stages the tray is cleaned of pastries, shreds, and crumbs. To lick the tray clean is a forbidden thing, but the crumbs taste better for being forbidden.

Soon, the snow is so thick against the windows that there is absolute dark. Through the walls, the boy can hear the tinny buzzing of a television set; Yuri’s mama is, he says, watching her stories and mustn’t be disturbed. There is the clinking of a bottle and, intermittently, she barks at the cavorting characters on screen, even though she cannot be heard. To Yuri, this appears to be the end of the world. He flushes crimson red, refuses to catch the boy’s eye and mutters about a new game, anything to distract the boy from what is happening on the other side of the walls.

A clock above the door ticks – and the longer the games go on, the more persistent the ticking seems to be. Yuri chatters on, explaining new portions of his map and new games to be played, but all his words are drowned out by that simple, unchanging tick.

On the clock’s face: seven o’clock, now eight, now nine.

Yuri has dragged a new piece of card to the foot of his bed, and is cultivating a dark pine forest in its corners, when the boy thinks he can detect another ticking in the air. This one comes with a different rhythm; it sounds more heavily, with a dull reverberation.