Gingerbread

This morning, he is lying in the covers with the old bunk beams above, when the door opens with an unfamiliar creak. There is an unfamiliar tread, unfamiliar breath – and, though he wants it to be mama, it is Grandfather who tramps into the room.

‘Come on, boy. Time for school.’

The boy scrabbles up. ‘Is mama …’

‘She’s only resting.’

That is enough to quell the fluttering in the boy’s gut, so he rolls out of the covers and follows Grandfather. The old man is retreating already down the hall, past the photographs of the long ago, when everything was black and white. The boy hesitates, eyes drawn inexorably to the doorway across the hall. Then Grandfather calls and he follows.

In the kitchen, he studies Grandfather as they eat. Once upon a time, Grandfather was only a story. The boy lived with his mama and only his mama in a house near the school, and in the days he learnt lessons and played with the boy named Yuri, and in the nights he came home and sat with mama with dinner on their laps. Now, Grandfather is real. He has a face like a mountain in the shape of his mother, and ears that hang low.

‘What was mama like when she was little?’

Grandfather pitches forward, breaking into a smile that takes over all of his face. What big teeth he has, thinks the boy.

‘She was,’ he beams, ‘a … nuisance!’

Then Grandfather’s hands are all over him, in the pits of his arms and the dimples on his side, and he squirms and he shrills, until Grandfather has to tell him, ‘You’ll wake your mama. Go on, boy, up and get dressed.’

It used to be that mama walked him to the school gates, but the tenement is far from the school, almost on the edge of the city, where hills and the stark line of pines can be seen through the towers and factory yards, so today they must take a bus. The boy asks, ‘Why can’t we drive the car?’ But Grandfather isn’t allowed to drive, so instead they wait in the slush at the side of the road until a bus trundles into view.

As he puts his foot on the step to go in, he thinks of mama, alone in the tenement like a princess locked in her tower. He halts, so that the people clustered behind him bark and mutter oaths.

From the bus, Grandfather says, ‘What is it, boy?’

‘It’s mama.’

‘She’ll be okay. She’s resting.’

‘I don’t want her to be on her own. Not when …’

Grandfather’s face softens, as if the muscles bunching him tight have all gone to sleep. ‘That isn’t for a long time yet.’

The boy nods, pretending that he believes – because even pretending and knowing you’re pretending is better than not pretending at all.

He settles into a seat beside Grandfather and, as the bus gutters off, cranes back to see the tenement retreating through the condensation.

Sitting next to Grandfather is not the same thing as sitting next to a stranger, because in his head he knows that Grandfather was once mama’s papa, and that, once upon a while, Grandfather took mama to school and maybe even sat on a bus just the same as this. Yet, knowing a man from photographs is not the same as sitting next to him and hearing his chest move up and down, or seeing the ridges on the backs of his hands. Every time Grandfather catches him watching, the old man grins. Then the boy is shamefaced and must bury his head again. Once the shame has evaporated, the boy can look back; then Grandfather catches him again, grins again, and once even puts a hand on the boy’s hair and rubs it in the way mama sometimes does.

‘I bet you’re wondering about your old papa, aren’t you?’

The boy shakes his head fiercely. It is a terrible thing not to know which is wrong and which is right.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard stories.’

That word tolls as strongly as any other, and he looks up. ‘Stories?’

‘Things your mama’s told you, about her old papa.’

‘Oh …’

‘No?’

‘I thought you meant other sorts of stories.’

They sit in silence, as the bus chokes through the lights of a mangled intersection.

‘You like stories?’

The boy nods.

‘Then maybe we’ll have a story tonight. How does that sound?’

The boy nods his head, vigorously. It is a good thing to know which is wrong and which is right. ‘Do you know lots of stories?’

Before Grandfather can elaborate, the bus stutters to a stop, the driver barks out a single word – schoolhouse! – and the boy must scramble to get off.

‘Are you coming, papa?’

It seems that Grandfather will take him only to the edge of the bus, but there must be a pleading look in the boy’s eyes, because then he comes down to the slushy roadside and, with one hand in the small of his back, accompanies the boy to the schoolhouse gates. There are other children here, and other mamas and papas, but none so old and out of place as Grandfather.

He looks for faces he knows, and finally finds one: the boy Yuri, who does not run with the hordes but paces the school fence every morning and afternoon, muttering to himself as he dreams. Yuri is good at drawing and good at stories, but he is not good at being a little boy like all of the rest. He is about to go to him when a figure, the vulpine woman who does typing in the headmistress’s study, appears on the schoolhouse steps and begins clanging a bell.

‘Will you come, papa, when school’s done?’

Grandfather has a sad look in his eyes, which makes the boy remember his promise.

‘Tonight and every night, boy.’

‘And you’ll look after mama?’

Grandfather nods.

Next come words the boy knows he should not have heard. ‘And hold her, when it’s time?’

Grandfather opens his leathery lips to speak, but the words are stillborn. ‘Off with you, boy,’ he finally says.

The boy turns and scurries into school.

In lessons, Mr Navitski asks him about his mama and he lies and says his mama’s getting better, which will stop them asking and, in a strange way, make it so he doesn’t have to lie again. Mr Navitski is a kind man. He has black hair in tight curls that recede from his forehead to leave a devil’s peak, but grow wild along the back of his neck as if his whole pate is slowly stealing down to his shoulders. He wears a shirt and braces and tie, and big black boots for riding his motorcycle through town.

In the morning there is drawing, and he makes a drawing of Grandfather: big wrinkled mask and drooping ears, but eyes as big as silver coins and dimples at the points of the greatest smile. Yuri, who doesn’t say a thing, works up a picture of a giant from a folk tale – and when Mr Navitski lines them up for the class to see, the boy is bewildered to find that Yuri’s giant and his Grandfather have the same sackcloth face, the same butchered ears, the same bald pate and fringe of white hair. The only difference, he decides, is in the eyes, where simple flecks of a pencil betray great kindness in Grandfather and great malice in the giant.

In the afternoon it is history. This means real stories of things that really happened, and when Mr Navitski explains that, one day, everything that happens in the world will be a history, it thrills the boy – because this means he himself might one day be the hero of a story. He looks at Yuri sitting at the next desk along and wonders: could Yuri be the hero of a story too? He is, he decides, more like the hero’s little brother, or the stable-hand who helps the hero onto his horse before he rides off into battle.

On the board, in crumbling white chalk, Mr Navitski writes down dates. ‘Who can tell me,’ he begins, ‘what country they were born in?’

Hands fly up. The boy ventures his too late, and isn’t asked, even though he’s known the answer all along. This kingdom of theirs is called Belarus.