Carla Banks - The Forest of Souls

‘I have every confidence in the solicitor I have instructed. But the police worry me. I want to know what they are thinking, how they are interpreting what they find. Are these questions you could ask?’

It wouldn’t be the Manchester force dealing with it. He ran his list of contacts through his mind. He had some ideas about who he could approach. ‘Give me the details,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

As he stood up to leave, she handed back the photographs. ‘Why did you show me these?’ she said.

‘I need to know where they were taken. I thought you might be able to help me.’

‘The first one is a peasant house. As I told you, there were many such. I have no idea where it might be. But this one–’ Her fingers touched the photo of Marek Lange, the young man standing proudly in his uniform. ‘I can tell you about this one.’ Her face looked sad. ‘It was taken in Minsk.’

Sophia Yevanova sat watching the fire. The coals shifted, scattering ashes on to the hearth and sending sparks flying up the chimney. The evening was drawing in and the shadows pooled in the corners of the room. She looked up at the icon on the wall, then her eyes went back to the red glow at the heart of the dying fire.

She sometimes thought that all the comforts around her were no more than ramparts she had built against the past, walls that she had braced and strengthened over the years.

Sometimes those years seemed closer than the present. When she had talked to Jake Denbigh, she felt as though she was walking again under the trees of Kurapaty. She had felt the leaf-mould under her feet, and smelled the pine resin on the breeze. Just for a moment, she had been afraid to open her eyes, in case she would find herself back there.

And now the shifting coals were drawing faces in the flames. She watched, and didn’t watch, for the face she was afraid she might see and the face she still, after all these years, wanted to see, the face of the man she had loved, the face of her son’s father, dead so many years before.

The cushions on her chair had slipped, and her back was starting to ache. She made herself sit up straighter. The discomfort was a useful antidote to fatigue, and she could feel her leg starting to twitch and jump, a sure sign that she was tired.

She heard the sound of doors opening and closing, of people talking in the corridor, Mrs Barker’s low voice, and the authoritative tones of her son. She listened to them with a resigned amusement–did they think she was deaf as well as ill? Antoni was asking about Jake Denbigh’s visits, something he’d paid little attention to before, and Mrs Barker was telling him, in her muted, self-effacing way, about the events of the day. Antoni would not be pleased. He was not a patient man–but then she hadn’t brought him up to be patient.

She heard his footsteps moving along the corridor as he came to greet her. She switched on her light and picked up her sewing. She didn’t want him to find her sitting idle in the dark. It would worry him. She sat up straighter, ignoring the stab of pain in her back, and smiled as the door opened.

‘Antoni,’ she said, holding out her hand.

He took it and looked down at her, his face shadowed. ‘You look tired,’ he said abruptly. ‘I understand that journalist visited you again today.’

‘He is a pleasant young man.’ She shifted to ease her discomfort. ‘I enjoy talking to him.’

He made an impatient sound and went down on one knee to rearrange her cushions, positioning them so that they supported her back. ‘Better?’ He assessed her with his eyes. ‘Good. It’s the man’s profession to make himself pleasant. Mrs Barker, I can understand, but I thought that you would be impervious to the power of a smile.’

‘I will have plenty of time to resist young men with charming smiles when I am in my grave. In the meantime, allow me the few small vices I can still enjoy.’ She studied his face as she spoke. He was the one who looked tired. His eyes–suddenly she was looking into his father’s eyes, and had to drop her gaze before he could see her expression change–his eyes looked weary and shadowed.

He put his hand on her arm. ‘It would be better for you if you didn’t see this man again. I can easily arrange it. You don’t have to be troubled.’

‘It doesn’t trouble me,’ she said. ‘It’s Nicholas I’m concerned about.’

He gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘Nicholas Garrick is not your responsibility. You paid his hospital bills. You found him work. Don’t you think you’ve done enough?’

She watched the fire. The coals shifted again, and the flames licked up. ‘No.’

‘There’s no reasoning with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and change. I’m free this evening. There’s a performance of Der Rosenkavalier on Radio 3. Shall we listen to it?’

Back in the days when she was well, they used to go to the opera together. They’d been to La Scala when he had lived in Milan, to the Metropolitan in New York, to the Royal Opera House during his time in London. As her illness confined her more, prevented her from travelling, he would come to her and they would attend performances at the Manchester Opera House. Now, she was dependent on the radio schedules.

After he left, she sat looking out of the window at the night. The rain spattered against the glass and blew across the roofs. Behind her, the hot coals hissed.

This is the story of the witch in the woods.

Not far from the house in the forest where Marek and Eva lived, there was a village. After the railway came to the forest, the village began to grow, and slowly the forest around the wooden house began to vanish as the village spread.

And there were troubled times. Men came and took Papa away. They took the fruit from the orchard, and the hens. ‘They want to make us Polish,’ Marek had said angrily. ‘They want to take away our home and our language.’ Without the fruit to sell, and the hens for eggs, it was a time of being hungry.

Marek went into the forest when Mama wasn’t looking. He would put his fingers to his lips if Eva saw him, and vanish down the paths. He brought back mushrooms and nettles and rabbits, and sometimes a bird. He would pretend to Mama that it was a gift from a neighbour, or that he had found these things near to the house. And sometimes he would slip out early in the morning and then there would be milk for Eva.

Then there came a time when Marek slipped out and came back limping, and there was no milk. Eva was more hungry than she had ever been, and Mama’s hands were so white it was as if the light was shining through them. ‘Read to me,’ she would say, to distract Eva from the empty place that gnawed inside her, so Eva would sit beside her and read to her, her voice halting at first as the letters gradually shaped themselves into sounds, the sounds into words, the words suddenly leaping from the page. She read the story of the firebird, the story of Havroshechka, the story of the snow child who played in the forest too close to the fire. She read the story of Baba Yaga, the witch whose house ran on chicken legs, and whose fence was hung with the skulls of the people she had eaten.

And sometimes, Mama would fall asleep in her chair, the bump, bump of the rockers slowing to silence. Eva would tiptoe to the door and watch Marek until she saw him slip away along the path that led into the forest, and then she would follow him. Now she was older, she could walk further into the forest, but that day Marek was walking fast and she lost sight of him. She didn’t mind at first, following him along the path. She would catch up with him soon. The sun felt warm where it shone through the leaf canopy and she swung herself round the trunks of the trees, the silver of the birch and the dark, heavy pines.