LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Papa, just a little more.’

      Grandfather lifts his hands, as if in submission.

      ‘Maybe you can tell us a story, papa? One for me and for mama.’

      Grandfather says, ‘Something to help the long night pass …’

      ‘One more story, and then we can go.’

      Grandfather breaks from whatever dream was holding him. ‘I have a story,’ he says, taking in the timbers and stones, the pools of orange and pools of black. ‘But settle down, boy, for this tale is too long in the telling.’

      The boy nods.

      This isn’t the tale, says Grandfather, but an opening. The tale comes tomorrow, after the meal, when we are filled with soft bread.

      On hearing the familiar words, the tension rushes out of the boy. He wriggles back into the eiderdown, bathed by the dying fire. Up close, Grandfather wraps his arms around his legs.

      And now, he whispers, we start our tale. Long, long ago, when we did not exist, when perhaps our great-grandfathers were not in the world, in a land not so very far away, on the earth in front of the sky, on a plain place like on a wether, seven versts aside, came the war to end all wars.

       Now, war, as we know, is a most terrible thing. For a long time, war had been talked of between kings and in courts, but in the little town where our story begins, war was a faraway thing, fought by champions and knights, and not for the grocers and farmers and carpenters who lived in the town, kind and careful, without any thought for killing.

       Yet, war … war changes everything. In the east, there was a great emperor, the Winter King, who lived in his Winter Palace and ruled his empire with an iron fist. And, in the west, there was a clever man, a calculating king who had fought in wars before, and been locked away, and risen to rule with a party of fierce companions, who all hated each other but hated others most of all. And, caught between these two evil kings, soon there was whispering in our little town that war … war itself would seek them out.

      The boy is rapt. It is, he decides, unlike the stories of before, those of Baba Yaga, of Dimian the peasant, of the Little Briar Rose. There is wickedness in those stories, but there are certainly no wars.

      But, before we find ourselves at war this night, Grandfather goes on, this is not a story of the war, not of the evil Winter King, nor the calculating King in the West. This is the story of a little boy, much the same as you, and the stories he heard of the ghosts in the woods …

       That little boy was smaller than you when the kings made war. He was four or he was five, and he lived, like you, in a town on the edge of the forest. And do you know how big the forest was?

      ‘The woods are wide and the woods are wild, and the woods are the world forever and ever,’ whispers the boy, as if repeating an ancient rite.

       For a little while, the wars of the Winter King were only stories to that little boy. For him the world was only his house and the streets and the finger of forest that cut into his town. It was many months before the war found him, but when it found him it changed his world.

       For the King in the West had broken a promise, and turned against the Winter King, who he had sworn was his friend. Angry as the end of all things, the Winter King rushed to meet the King in the West in pitched battle, and in the morning, when the boy awoke, his streets were filled with tanks and soldiers and new sounds, and languages he could not understand. He watched from his window and saw soldiers a-marching, and he knew they were a different kind of man to his papa and brothers. These were men raised in a world where they had never before known the sun, or the summer. They were soldiers from winter itself.

       And so it happened that the town changed. His papa became a clerk, working for those same soldiers who took his grain and commandeered his horse and took their pigs off for slaughter. He kept their stores and wrote in a ledger book every time they ate the sausages that should have been his. Some of the men in town hated his papa for serving the soldiers, and perhaps he even hated his papa little bit too.

      ‘Were the soldiers very terrible, papa?’

       Well, sometimes they were terrible, and sometimes they were kind. Mostly they were just soldiers, and took their delights as soldiers sometimes will. But that little boy’s papa made friends with those soldiers and, in that way, stood guard over his little boy for two whole years.

       Well, one day, things changed, as things often will. Because the King in the West was bitter that the Winter King had brought his soldiers to town, and so the armies of the King in the West marched and laid siege. And the King in the West had soldiers reared on hate, and the Winter King’s soldiers were scared, and turned tail and ran. The new soldiers wore brown shirts and spoke a language more terrible yet, and they came in their thousands with murder on their minds.

      ‘Murder, papa?’

      Yes, says Grandfather, and for a moment his voice loses its sing-song lilt, and it might be that he is not even telling a story at all. That little boy saw it for himself. For the King in the West had made a plan that certain mamas and papas and boys and girls must wear golden stars, and then the soldiers would know whom they should kill. Those mamas and papas and boys and girls were sent to live in a different part of the town. For a little while they were kept there. They had to make uniforms and cobble boots, and when they didn’t work hard enough, a soldier would come and say: the King in the West has called your name! Now you won’t know night from day! And that person would be taken away, and then that person might never be seen again.

       Well, some of the mamas and papas and boys and girls worked harder and harder, hoping the soldiers might let them survive. But some of the mamas and papas thought: the soldiers are wicked, and their King is more wicked still. We must run away, or else be ruined and turned into dust. And one papa said: there are woods beyond town, and the woods are wide and the woods are wild and the woods are the world forever and ever. And there we shall be safe, because in the woods there is no King in the West, nor even a Winter King, and in the woods they will not find us.

      ‘It’s like the story of Baba Yaga, isn’t it, papa?’

      ‘How, boy?’

      ‘If you’re kind to the woods, the woods are kind to you.’

      Grandfather nods.

       Well, at night, our little boy would look out of his bedroom window. There, he could see the first line of the pines and know that things were moving out there, in a world he could never pass into. Because only little boys made to wear the yellow stars could go and live wild in the forest …

       Well, that boy was watching one night, when out of the town there hurried a girl. She was older than the boy, but not yet as old as the boy’s mama, and for many months she had been wearing a yellow star. Now, she went to the forest to live wild. But she had lost her way, and that night rapped one, two, three times at the boy’s front door.

       Please, please, let me in, she cried.

       Do the soldiers chase you? came the reply.

       No, for I go to make my home with the runaways in the wild, and live my life under aspen and birch.

       Well, the boy’s mama and papa let the girl with the yellow star in. The boy watched them in secret from the top of the stairs. And what he saw was not one girl but two, for the girl had a baby swollen in her belly and ready to come out. You must stay, said the boy’s mama, and have your babe in these four walls. But no, said the girl, for the soldiers will find me and make my baby wear a star.

       So she was fed and warmed and went on her way, deep into the pines.

      Well, the runaways found her, cold and alone. They took her to their hideaways and fed her their

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