The Forest of Souls

5

Faith leaned back in her chair and listened to the verbal fencing that was going on between Grandpapa and this journalist, Jake Denbigh. When she’d arrived, Grandpapa had seemed confused and upset. Or that’s what she’d thought when she came into the room, but he’d greeted her as normal, and now seemed to be enjoying himself, sometimes evading Denbigh’s questions, sometimes using them as an opportunity for dogmatic pronouncements.

Denbigh didn’t seem unduly put out by these tactics. He was good-humoured and persistent, and gradually this paid off. She watched as her grandfather’s interest was aroused, and he began to talk seriously about the difficulties of starting again as an immigrant in a strange country, in a continent that had been ravaged by war.

‘Is it easier now?’ he was saying. ‘There is always suspicion of the stranger. People are people, Mr Denbigh.’

Before Denbigh could step in, he went off on a tangent about human nature, the urge to fear and reject anything that was different. Denbigh flashed her a quick, amused glance as he caught the thread of Grandpapa’s argument and deftly brought it back to the topic in hand. ‘Were you made to feel a stranger, Mr Lange? You’d fought for Britain.’

‘I was always the stranger,’ Grandpapa said.

There was a box of photographs on the table, which interested her. Grandpapa was not a photograph person. As far as she knew, he didn’t even own a camera. She picked up one of the wallets and began to flick through it, keeping half her attention on the interview.

They seemed to be business photos–records of official events that must go back years. She hadn’t known they existed. She had a sudden vision of Grandpapa’s life shut away and hidden in locked desks and dusty boxes, old papers in government offices, crumbling away to nothing, lost, because no one cared, apart from the restless archivists, people like Helen who would search and sift and bring the past to light.

The interview was winding up. Denbigh’s questions were moving towards the general now. ‘You’ve always had a reputation as a risk taker. It’s one of the things that made you so successful. What makes someone like you walk so close to the line?’

Grandpapa shrugged. ‘What is there to lose if the gamble fails? It is only fear that stops you.’

Denbigh looked at Grandpapa. ‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Eastern Europe was closed to us for decades. Has the new openness reunited you with your past?’

The silence stretched out. She saw that look of blankness she thought she’d seen in his eyes when she first arrived. She took a breath to intervene, but then he spoke.

‘I have never left it,’ he said.

Denbigh stood up, closing his notebook carefully. He held out his hand to Grandpapa. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Lange. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.’

‘And I you, Mr Denbigh,’ Grandpapa said.

‘I’ll see you out,’ Faith said. She followed him out of the room and retrieved his coat from the hall closet, noticing as she did so that the central heating was switched off. No wonder the house was so cold. Irritated, she pressed the button to trip the switch. Grandpapa was taking economy to ridiculous lengths these days. She needed to talk to him about that.

Jake Denbigh was waiting in the hall. She gave him his coat. ‘Was that useful?’ she asked as she unlocked the front door.

It was a formal query, but to her surprise he took it seriously. He paused in the doorway. ‘I don’t know. I think so. He’s got some stories that I’d like to hear, but I don’t think he’s going to tell them.’

‘Such as?’ she said.

‘I’m interested in Eastern Europe before the war. I’m working on a book.’

‘About Poland?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘Belarus.’

‘I don’t think there’s much he could tell you about that.’ She racked her brains. ‘The Treaty of Brest,’ she said.

He looked at her in surprise. ‘What?’

She laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I was just trying to think of anything I knew about Belarus, and that was it.’

‘It’s more than most people. What do you know about the treaty?’

‘It gave Poland its independence in 1918,’ she said, ‘and it gave them western Belarus. Byelorussia, it was then.’

‘Which wasn’t popular with the Belarusians.’ He was looking thoughtful. ‘Whereabouts did your grandfather come from? Where was he born?’

‘Don’t you know?’ If he’d done his research, he should.

‘There was something…’ He shook his head. ‘It’s probably nothing. I’ve had some trouble tracking down the original records, that’s all.’

‘Well, a lot of them were destroyed. He lived in the east, in the forested part. There wasn’t much there. The nearest village was called Litva. I get the impression it was just a tiny place. I don’t think it exists any more.’

‘And he doesn’t talk about it?’

‘He talks about his childhood,’ she said. ‘It’s the war that he won’t discuss. I think a lot of the survivors are like that.’

He leaned his shoulder against the door jamb and looked at her, considering what she’d said to him. ‘That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve been talking to a lot of wartime refugees. Most of them want to tell their stories. They feel forgotten.’

She remembered what Katya had told her, about the ex-Nazi in Blackburn, and she wondered what it was he wanted to know. ‘Is your book about the war? Do we need another one?’

‘Not really,’ he said.

‘We don’t really need it, or you’re not really writing about it?’

He laughed. ‘Appearances to the contrary, you’re very like your grandfather. Okay, I’m working on something that’s linked to the war.’

‘Which is…?’

He kept his eyes on her but didn’t say anything. ‘…none of my business,’ she completed for him.

‘It isn’t that. It’s complicated, that’s all.’ But she noticed he still didn’t tell her what he was writing about.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m just…concerned about him. He truly doesn’t like to talk about the war.’

He nodded. ‘That’s okay. We didn’t.’

‘When will it come out? This article?’

‘Next issue,’ he said. ‘I’ll send you a copy.’ They stood in silence, looking at each other, then he pushed himself upright. ‘I’ve got to go. It’s been good meeting you. Really.’

When she’d first seen him in the gloom of Grandpapa’s living room, she’d been surprised how young he looked. Now, seeing him in the clear light, she could see the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that said thirties rather than twenties. She watched him as he walked down the path towards his car. Despite the cold, he didn’t bother putting on his coat. He slung it in the back of the car with his bag, then looked up and saw her watching him from the doorway. He raised his hand in salute, then got in the car and drove off.

She closed the door, shivering slightly in the cold. It was almost twelve. She had to be back for her appointment with Yevanov, but she could spend a bit of time with Grandpapa before she left. It was draughty in the corridor. The door into the study was standing open. That wouldn’t help. She went to close it, and heard the sound of someone moving around.

‘Grandpapa?’ She put her head round the door.

The woman from the cleaning agency was busying herself round the desk. She turned quickly as Faith spoke.

Faith had forgotten it was one of Doreen’s days. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

Doreen pushed the bureau drawer shut. ‘I’ve just done,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like to go while Mr Lange had a visitor. I didn’t know you were here.’ She came out into the hall, and went to the closet to get her coat. ‘He doesn’t like the heating on,’ she said.

‘It’s too cold without.’

‘I’ll be off, then.’ Doreen wrapped a scarf round her neck and buttoned up her coat. ‘He’s been worrying about burglars again. He had a go at me about locking the windows.’ Her gaze challenged Faith to make some response.

‘There’ve been some break-ins. You need to be careful.’ It wasn’t like Grandpapa to be nervous. ‘Is everything locked up now?’

‘I always leave it right,’ Doreen said.

Faith closed the door behind her, then checked her phone in case Helen had left a message, but there was nothing.

She went back into the front room. Grandpapa was still in his chair looking thoughtful. ‘I’ve switched the heating on,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have the house so cold.’

He didn’t respond, which wasn’t like him. The heating argument was a regular feature of their encounters. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking out of the window at the roses that grew against the glass. She remembered the dream she’d woken up to. ‘I used to help you prune those,’ she said. ‘It was my job, in the summer, remember?’

He shook his head as though he’d been thinking of something else. ‘Pruning the roses?’ he said vaguely. Then he seemed to come back to the present, and looked at her severely over his spectacles. ‘You used to pick them, not prune.’

That was true. One summer–she must have been about thirteen–she’d stripped half the blooms from his prized red rose and woven them into a crown for her hair and carried the rest in a bouquet or pinned to her dress when she went to a party. It had been the party of a girl from school who had tried to bully Helen and Faith. Helen had not been invited. The party was fancy dress, and the girl had been boasting about the Rose Red outfit her mother had bought for her. Faith had decided to go as Rose Red too, only she would have real roses. She smiled, remembering. ‘You bought me a present after that,’ she said, wondering if he’d remember. He’d never been a man for presents.

He nodded slowly. ‘A red ribbon for your hair.’ She thought he looked weary. Then he shook himself out of his fatigue and stood up. ‘You are staying?’ he said. ‘We have lunch?’

‘I can’t. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll make some coffee.’

She went through to the kitchen, which was cold and silent. There was a sour smell that she tracked down to an unwashed cloth in the spotted damp under the sink. She dumped it in the bin. It disturbed her, the way the house seemed to be sinking into the decay of abandonment. She’d have to try–again–to get some basic maintenance done. She’d tried once or twice, even going so far as to phone a local builder, but Grandpapa had been adamant. ‘Not necessary,’ he’d said.

She’d lived in this house until she was eighteen. Katya had brought her here when she was born, and had left her here in Grandpapa’s care when she went to live in London. What Katya had been looking for, Faith didn’t know. Her mother had been an angry woman when Faith was a child, and was still an angry woman. She had never married, and had had no more children.

She shrugged off the memories and spooned coffee into a jug. She put cups on to a tray, and took it through to the sitting room where Grandpapa was tidying up the table where the photos had been scattered, tucking them into the envelopes and putting them back into the box.

‘Don’t put them away,’ she said. ‘I want to look at those.’ She put a cup of coffee on the table beside him.

‘Is just photos, sweetheart,’ he said, frowning. ‘From work–long time ago.’

‘But I’ve never seen any photos of you from then,’ she said. He was not a man who preserved memories of his life. There was no photographic record of Katya’s childhood, and what photos there were of Faith’s grandmother, Katya had taken when she had left. ‘Come on, hand them over.’

He pushed the box across to her reluctantly, and went on putting away the remainder of the photos, carefully checking each one.

He was right. The photos were dull–pictures of mill buildings, factories, industrial landscapes that had vanished years ago. But there were one or two where a young Marek Lange appeared. They must have been taken in the post-war period. He looked tall and robust, a young man full of energy and dynamism. But his face looked older. Even then, Grandpapa’s face had worn that same cold severity with which he met the world today.

He finished putting the photographs away, and sat back in his chair, frowning.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘I think I have been dreaming…’ The cup he was holding tilted slightly, the coffee spilling over the rim.

‘Careful,’ she warned.

He didn’t seem aware of her. ‘Winter,’ he said. ‘So cold…’

She mopped at the spilled coffee with a tissue. ‘It’ll be spring soon.’

‘In spring it rain,’ he said. ‘So cold, that year. They told me…I have to do it. I have to.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘What did you have to do?’

He looked at her. ‘Faith…’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He pushed himself out of his chair. When he spoke again, his voice was firm. ‘I must see to the garden.’

After he left the Lange house, Jake drove back into Central Manchester. He called in at the university library to collect a book, then walked down to Oxford Street station for coffee. He ordered an espresso and watched the people passing by outside the window as he went over what he had just learned. The waitress smiled at him as she brought his cup across. She was pretty with dark hair, which made him think of Faith Lange who’d brightened up the gloomy, rambling house.

Why was it that a man of Lange’s means had let that beautiful old house deteriorate into such dilapidation? Some old people lived in the past, he knew that. But Lange had–apparently–rejected his own past.

Whatever that past was. After meeting the man, Jake wanted to know.

Faith Lange had told him the same story the few records told, but these were all records that would have relied on Lange for their information. It was possible that a tiny village in agricultural Poland might have vanished, but without any trace, leaving no evidence of its existence? He wasn’t convinced. As for the destroyed records…not so. It was surprising, once the Iron Curtain had fallen, to find how intact the records were. As you moved further east, further into the areas that had been devastated by the battles that had raged across the land, then the gaps started to appear, but if the story Marek Lange told was true, then there should have been something.

Further east…the further east you went, the darker the story became. He lit a cigarette, narrowing his eyes against the smoke as he remembered that tantalizing moment, cut short by Faith Lange’s untimely arrival. Lange had spoken Russian. Old people in times of stress sometimes reverted to the language of their childhood. In extreme cases, they could lose the language they had later learned. Something had shocked Lange, and in that moment he had switched, unconsciously, Jake was sure, not to Polish, but to Russian.

And he had been in Minsk at the start of the war. When the old man had named the city, almost as if the word had been torn out of him, a chill had run down Jake’s back.

He opened his notebook. As Faith Lange had walked into the room, on impulse he’d slipped the two black-and-white photographs between the pages. He studied them again, the mother and children standing in the doorway of the house, the young soldier in his uniform.

Jake was reminded of a photograph Juris Ziverts had shown him the first time they met, soon after the Latvian government began extradition proceedings against the old man, charging him with war crimes. Latvia and the other Baltic countries had been brutally occupied by Stalinist Russia when Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. Two years later, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets, the stage was set for tragedy. Eastern Europe erupted in a frenzy of killing as virulent anti-Semitism was compounded by a hatred of communists and the ‘lesser races’. From the Baltics, from Estonia, from Lithuania and Latvia, the death squads went forth.

And now, after decades of inaction, their governments were trying to make amends. Memories from half a century before were taxed; photographs of men, young and in uniform, were compared with pictures of aging exiles. And the fingers of accusation began to point.

Juris Ziverts lived in a small semi in Blackburn. He had welcomed Jake, ushering him into the front room of his house, a room with a patterned carpet, blown vinyl wallpaper and bric-a-brac on the narrow mantelpiece above the electric fire. There was a fuchsia on the coffee table, its frilled petals looking oddly exotic in the resolutely suburban home. Jake, looking for a neutral topic to break the ice, said, ‘That’s a beautiful plant.’

The old man’s face, heavily bearded, was hawkish, but it lit up at Jake’s words. ‘You like flowers? I too. Since I retired, I spend my days in my greenhouse.’ He poured tea for Jake, his hands trembling slightly. ‘I am so glad you have come, Mr Denbigh. There has been a mistake. I’m sure it will all be sorted out…’ He was trying to make light of it, but his tense face and trembling hands told their own story.

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ Jake had come to the house with no strong views about Ziverts one way or the other, but he was prepared to listen.

‘It is…’ Ziverts’ voice wavered, then came back stronger. ‘I am Latvian, Mr Denbigh. I was a refugee after the war. My family died, so I came here. I am a teacher. Of maths. I married. I worked in Manchester for forty years, then I retired.’ He hesitated and cleared his throat. ‘When I arrive,’ he continued, ‘my English was not good. My name–it was very strange to the people here. They called me George. It was easier, and they meant no harm. So I became George Ziverts.’

Jake nodded. It wasn’t unusual for Eastern Europeans to change their names. He knew a Kazimierz who had changed his name to Carl and a Zbigniew who had become John. ‘And then…?’

‘I fought in the war,’ Ziverts said suddenly.

Jake kept his tone casual. ‘The German Army?’

‘No. Never. But many of us…I…fought on the side of the Nazis when they drove the Russians out. The Soviets were brutal oppressors–we were glad to oppose them. But I was not a Nazi,’ he said. ‘We had welcomed in a monster to drive out a monster, and we paid the price. I was never a Nazi.’

Jake listened as he told his story. It was an ugly one, as were so many that came from that time, that place. The investigators claimed to have evidence that the man who was known in Blackburn as George Ziverts was in fact Juka Zivertus, former commander of one of the death squads in Belarus. Zivertus had organized the rounding up of hundreds of civilians, women and children, and had had them machine-gunned by the side of their graves.

‘Never!’ Ziverts said, his distress making his voice stumble over the words. ‘I never did such things. I never knew such things were happening. I fought the Soviets. I killed young men like myself. We have all had to live with that. I am not this man, this Zivertus, but how can I prove it? My family is dead. My friends are dead. They refuse to believe my papers. I don’t know what to do.’

Jake thought about this now, as he finished his cigarette, turning the photograph of Marek Lange round and round in his fingers. Had he believed then that Juris Ziverts was innocent? He couldn’t remember. He’d thought the case against him was thin to the point of unprovable, and he’d found Ziverts an unconvincing candidate for a war criminal. Perpetrators of such crimes–those who organized or authorized them–tended towards an unapologetic arrogance. They were in no hurry to admit culpability, but neither did they see themselves as having done anything wrong. Ziverts’ distressed bewilderment–and his horror at the accusation levelled against him–was not the response of a guilty man. The problem was that there was almost no way to prove guilt or innocence after all these years.

He’d told Ziverts that the whole matter was academic. The police had no convincing proof and little chance of getting any. ‘Don’t worry,’ he’d reassured the old man. There was no story for him and he hadn’t planned on returning–which was a mistake, as it turned out. But Zivert’s story had first aroused his interest in Belarus.