4

The Goose

Dusk fell with the snowflakes as father and son made their way home. Peter was as tall as his father now, and certainly as strong. Maybe Tomas had once been a powerful man, but Peter could not remember that time. Tomas did less and less work, and relied more and more on Peter to keep them fed. As far back as Peter could recall, Tomas had drunk. Once upon a time it must have been different. Peter’s mother had died giving birth to him. Tomas had found a wet nurse, but had brought Peter up himself ever since the child could walk and talk. Maybe he hadn’t been able to afford the nurse anymore, but it seemed he had wanted the woman out of their lives as soon as possible. Since then it had been just the two of them.

On Peter’s fifth birthday Tomas had given him a clasp knife. Not a toy, but a well-made and useful tool.

“Time you learnt to use one,” Tomas said.


 

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Peter had watched, entranced, as his father took an off-cut of a branch and quickly carved a small bird for him. A goose.

“It’s a good one,” Tomas said. “Sharp.”

“Yes, it’s a good one,” his little son had echoed, laughing, though it was not the knife he meant, but the slender little goose, the very image of the birds that he loved to gaze at as they flew overhead.

Later, Tomas taught him to read, and that wasn’t the action of a drunkard, nor even a soldier, but once Tomas had belonged to a very different kind of family. Now the drink seemed to possess him, and it cost Peter a lot of effort chopping logs to buy a bottle of slivovitz or rakia.

 

As they came within sight of the hut, Peter could see the birch smoke trailing up from the chimney, gently twisting into ghostly shapes in the dusk, drifting away and spreading like mist through the treetops.

Peter smiled. The fire was still alight; the hut would be warm.

The hut stood in a strange position. The river Chust, from which the village took its name, forked in two here, as it snaked through the woods. With deep banks, the river had spent ten thousand years eating its way gently down into the thick, soft, dark forest soil. Its verges were moss-laden blankets that dripped leaf mold into the slow brown water. But at a certain point in its ancient history, the river had met some solid rock hidden in the soil, and had split in two. It was at the head of this fork that the hut stood.

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Just over a year ago, in late autumn, Tomas and Peter had been traveling again when they’d heard there was a need for a woodcutter in Chust. They’d been moving from village to village, always heading as far from civilization as it seemed possible to go, and ever deeper into the vast forest. Tomas was pleased, and they took the job. There was a perfectly good, large hut on the edge of the village, but Tomas had insisted they build a new one of their own. Peter was used to such eccentricities, and he merely bent his back to the axe to cut the trees to make the planks for their new home.

They laid a rough bridge of two halved tree trunks to cross to the middle of the fork, and began to build.

Winter was coming on by the time they finished the hut, with a stable on one side and a toolshed on the other. Then Peter started to cut wood to earn their keep, but Tomas got his spade out.

“What’s that for, Father?” Peter asked, but his father, as so often, replied only with actions.

He surveyed the hut from the very tip of the river fork. Then he strode around the sides of the hut’s single storey, inspecting it from every angle.

Peter leant on his axe and watched his father from across the river, where they had decided to make their timber yard.

Tomas stood at a point twenty paces from the front of the hut, in the exact center between the two arms of the river. He swung his spade from his shoulder, thrust it into the spongy soil, and began to dig.

Peter shook his head and went back to work. They had promised the kmetovi deliveries of chopped birch a week earlier, and they had already aroused suspicion by deciding to live outside the village. Father had tried to explain that it made more sense for them to live closer to their work, but that sort of logical explanation impressed no one in Chust.

After an hour, Peter straightened his back and looked across to his father. Tomas had by now dug a deep but narrow pit. Peter sat down and pulled his knife from his pocket, the same knife he’d been given on his fifth birthday. From another pocket he pulled a piece of plum wood he’d been working on, and began to shave curls of wood from the back of the little sheep he was carving.

Tomas was already up to his waist in the soil when Peter suddenly looked up to see his father’s eyes on him.

“Get on with your work,” Tomas called. “I’ve got enough to do here.”

Peter muttered to himself, but did as he was told. His father was in a mood. A mood that told Peter to keep himself to himself. It seemed to Peter it had always been like that, the two of them living in the same single room, but like leaves that fall from the same tree, always spinning ever further apart.

Peter muttered again. There was always something.

Always something to do. Somewhere to go.

Something he was told to do. Something he was told not to do.

Something like the box his father owned, that Peter was never allowed to open.

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After two days’ digging, Tomas’s hole had become a trench, and Peter began to have an inkling of what his father was doing. Two more days and the trench was four feet wide and stretched very nearly from one arm of the river to the other. Only a small gap of maybe three feet lay between the hole and the gurgling water at each end.

“Careful,” Peter said, unable to keep quiet. “If you dig any closer the bank will give way.”

Even as he said it he saw that that was just what his father wanted.

Tomas laughed, and swung his spade into the top of the last plug of earth. Water gushed into the trench, filling it more quickly than Peter would have believed possible. Tomas ran to the other arm of the river and breached the soil there too. He had dug the channel on a slight slant, so that water was already flowing in from the arm of the river nearest to the village, through the channel, and away to the other arm.

“I always wanted to live on an island!” Tomas, suddenly full of joy, and laughing like a young boy, called to his son. Soaked to the chest, he climbed out of the water and went inside to dry his clothes by the stove.

That night he got drunk on rakia, while outside the flowing water did a good job of cleaning and widening the trench, removing the last clods of soil from its two mouths. As he sat by the fire, his arms ached from the work, and through his tiredness something stirred within him. His muscles remembered working that hard. Years ago, he had swung his arms, but not with a spade.

Not with a spade.

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Now Peter and his father made their way over the same bridge of trunks they had laid a year ago and onto their little triangular island.

Their horse, Sultan, whinnied softly as their footfalls sounded on the bridge. He pulled at his tether, a simple rope from his bridle to a tree stump.

“Put him in, Peter,” Tomas said.

Peter nodded.

He patted Sultan’s flank and led him into the tiny stable.

“Hay again, Sultan,” he whispered. “One day I’ll bring you some beet. You’d like that. One day soon, I promise.”

Sultan flicked his head toward Peter, but it was a gentle gesture.

 

By the time Peter got inside, Tomas had already poured himself a mug of rakia.

“Have some?” he asked.

Peter shook his head.

“For God’s sake!” his father shouted, without warning. “For God’s sake have a drink with me for once!”

Peter stood, shaking a little, trying to stay calm and be friendly, as he always did at these moments, though his heart felt as if it were in a vice.

“I will, Father, I will.”

He went over to sit by the stove with Tomas. The lamp glowed; a lone moth flitted about against the smoky glass. His father fumbled for another mug and poured a thick finger of rakia into it.

Peter forced the firewater down, trying not to shudder as it burnt its way into his belly. He knew that would irritate Tomas further. But his father seemed placated, and began to hum tunelessly. Peter looked at him, opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. He could see that his father’s eyes had glazed; his mind was elsewhere, miles away. Years away, maybe. Peter tried to think of something to say, something that despite the drink would reach out to his father, make a small bridge across to his island.

But it was Tomas who broke the silence.

“We haven’t heard that tune for a while, have we?” he said.

Peter shook his head. “I never understood it anyway. Why does the shepherd let himself be murdered? Without trying to fight, or to argue? It’s stupid.”

“Ah,” Tomas said. “Ah.”

He began to sing, his eyes shut and his face turned to the roof beam.


“By a rolling hill at Heaven’s doorsill…”


The moth tumbled onto the table, exhausted by its efforts to fly into the light. It lay on its back, struggling.


“Where the trail descends to the plain and ends…”


“Why does everyone sing it anyway?” Peter asked. “The Miorita?”

Tomas stopped and turned his gaze momentarily on his son, but he was distracted by the moth, which had flipped over onto its legs. From the strange milky skull-shape on its back they could see it was a death’s-head moth.

“It makes no sense, but people sing it all the time,” Peter went on.

Tomas slammed his hand down on the table and left it there. The moth had no chance of escaping. Peter winced, then looked away as his father lifted the squashed corpse from his palm, opened the door of the stove, and threw it in.

There was something wrong with killing even such a small thing for the sake of it. There was no point saying so, Peter knew that, unless he wanted a lecture about what ten years in the King’s army did to your opinion on killing. Ten years in the army and four in jail. Enough to make any man violent.

Peter stood up and got the pot from the cupboard, to make soup.

“The song, the Miorita, makes sense to some people,” Tomas said cantankerously, but Peter had turned his back on his father to chop vegetables, and couldn’t tell what his father thought of it himself. Presumably he ranked it alongside all the other superstitious nonsense people spouted. His mood was thick and dour. The death of the moth seemed to have put a sudden end to his drunken good humor, and he sat by the open door of the stove for the rest of the evening, staring into the flames, until the bottle was empty and he staggered to his cot, ignoring the soup that Peter had set in front of him.

Peter finished his own meal, then sat by the fire, carving a miniature fir tree. Something about that appealed to him; it was almost like giving back to the forest, rather than just taking wood to sell and to burn all the time. Turning one small piece of wood back into a tree again was an offering to the Mother Forest, and Peter believed that was very important. It would never do to anger the great power that lurked all around them, every day of their lives. Peter finished the carving and put it on the shelf above his bed, along with all the others.

He sighed. He had never had his father’s skill with his hands and the tree was clumsy. But it was his.

 

The snowy night hung thickly over the village, and the two arms of the river, and the trees. The forest stretched away in almost every direction for five hundred miles, unbroken except for the faint huddle of a village here and there.

The hut crouched on the island Tomas had made, as if waiting, a dim light shining weakly from the gaps in its two tiny shutters.

Away, across one of the river’s arms, something watched the hut. It stirred. The figure of shadow moved slowly from cover and then sped like daybreak into the trees.