Forest
This is a story I wrote for my Advanced Writing workshop.
It was an experiment, written at a transitional point in my writing from fantasy to a more literary magical realism.
I'm not seeking to have it published.
Forest by Jonathan Duckworth
Mother asks that I stay home. There are dark circles under her eyes as she stirs the stewpot.
“I woke up like this on the night your father died,” she says, laying out a steaming bowl for me. “I dreamt we walked down a road and your father left us. Today you left me too.”
I laugh. “Dreams are nothing.”
She says nothing more. I eat the stew then step into my boots. I wear the black robes and heavy cross of a monk over my school-teacher clothes; to make thieves think I’m a holy man. I search the room for father’s gold compass-watch with the brass chain and find it on chair near door. Father told me that a German in a workshop in Paris made it with American gold.
“That means it is magic,” he said when he presented it. That was ten years ago, one year before his entrails were strewn across Manchuria by the little yellow men in the Far Eastern War; when he died grasping the Tsar’s two-headed eagle.
I slip it under my robes and kiss mother on both cheeks. She stares.
“It’s important,” I say to her silence. “The children will not teach themselves.”
I kiss her on her cheeks three more times then leave.
Outside it’s colder than expected. Neighbors are all huddled inside their homes where gray fingers waft up from stone chimneys. I shiver and remind myself of the importance of teaching the children, even if they’re all unruly peasant boys that don’t know a piano from a billiard table.
Neighbor girl Yulia waits for me at the fence, leaning on the fencepost with her chin on her perfect white hands and her lips turned up in a rosy smile. She doesn’t wear mittens or a scarf and ignores the snow falling on her shoulders. She’s a tall, strong woman with braided hair the same color as the watch chain. She tugs at my cross and her breasts quiver with laughter; she always finds it funny. When I first discovered how wondrous a woman’s body could be I saw only joy in Yulia. Now I must work not to picture a half dozen children crowding behind her: the younger ones with their mouths wide open like hungry chicks and the older ones holding out their hands and swearing that this is the last time I need loan them money because their luck at the card tables is sure to turn.
“Vanya,” Yulia coos, “Shall we marry today?”
My response is the same as ever. “It would be a nice day for it.”
She pats her full stomach. “Do you think our son will raise himself?”
I blink. “Are you sure?”
She stands up straight and crosses her arms. “Sure of what?”
Sure that you’re not just putting on weight. Sure that its mine.
“Never mind, I must go,” I say, kissing her on lips.
I feel her stare on the back of my skull. My robe catches on the fence on way out; I almost tear it getting free.
Just outside of the village waits Old Pavel. He traded one leg for a brass medal in the Far Eastern War. He leans on his crutches and waggles his stump at me in greeting. His black mustache hides his lips so it’s impossible to know when he’s smiling or frowning.
“When will you enlist, Ivan?” Pavel asks. “The Germans will not kill themselves.”
“Perhaps another day.” I pat him on his shoulder.
“They are nicer to volunteers than conscripts,” he says. He’s right, of course.
“I must teach the children,” I say.
Even if they don’t know their atoms from apples.
He shakes his head. “Do you like the Germans?”
“I like all kinds of people,” I say. I pat his shoulder again then leave him behind.
Me, a soldier? Ridiculous. I’m more useful to Russia in a school than on a battlefield. Perhaps when the Tsar comes to school to help me teach arithmetic and grammar I’ll return the favor and help him with his war.
I march up hills and through copses on a road I’ve traveled a thousand times.
The snow is ankle high and will only get worse as winter deepens. I trudge through it and wonder if the children really can teach themselves. Ah, but to live in a city, where schools are just one street over, and where children don’t point to the Pacific ocean when asked to find Russia on a globe.
I stop at the crossroads between home and the school. The left and right roads are as white and barren as the road behind. But ahead, toward the school, birds sing from the boughs of green trees and fat bees pollinate the flowers growing in cracks between the naked paving stones.
Strange. Nothing in the books I stole from the University in Voronezh speaks of such an oddity. Then I remember reading that in faraway Brazil, the summer comes when winter falls on Russia. The world has made a mistake, like when a man walks out of his home wearing two socks that don’t match. In any case, the warm air returns feeling to my ears, nose, fingers, and toes. Farther down the road I start sweating.
I try to pull off my monk robe. It gets caught on my head, I tug and tug, the fabric stretches, and I almost stumble. Groaning, I pull the robe back down.
My heart jumps. Trees everywhere: trees as wide as horses are long, with bark as white as fish bellies. Bramble patches cover the ground where the road was. Vines with heart-shaped purple leaves wrap around the tree trunks. I try to remember if anything like this was supposed to happen in the Amazon Rainforest where winter is summer. Nothing comes to mind.
The road is gone, but I’m not lost yet. Not while I have my compass-watch. I pull it out. Flip it to the compass side. Needle spins. Once, twice, thrice. My heart thumps. The needle spins on.
A rustle in the brush. I turn my head, and a white blur shaped like a woman springs out from a mass of vines and snatches at my watch. The chain snaps, I fall into the briars, my robes tear on the thorns, and the cross digs into my chest. The girl giggles. Her footsteps patter across the vines and shrubs. I scramble up; the girl is already many yards off. She only allows me brief glimpses as she weaves around the trees and through the bushes. Strong, springy legs. A lean body of white ash and feet of black char. A scent like a smoking hearth. Father said that a man’s soul is in his hands, and that a woman’s is in her eyes. This girl hides her eyes under tangled hair. I cannot catch her, even when she stops to laugh and wave.
Deeper, deeper into the forest. My lungs plead with me, my legs pop like old wood, but I go deeper, deeper, deeper into the forest until I collapse. The pain in my lungs is what a bullet must feel like. I rise to my knees, strip off robes, and shed the cross. Perhaps I can stay on my knees for rest of my life.
“Father’s watch will not recover itself,” I mutter, and rise.
Days pass, wandering the forest in a vain search. The forest is large enough that I can scream and not even a poacher answers. The bark on the trees is smooth and soft, like Yulia’s hands used to be. The leaves are three, five, and seven pointed star shapes of all colors. Colors like those that the wandering monk in black robes made with his prism of glass when he visited my village ten years ago. He held the prism with cracked and cut fingers, bony but strong. This monk said that a forest existed somewhere, where little boys wandered in and never came out. He had a thick black beard and stared a thousand miles off. I was too scared to ask him his name. Perhaps I should have, it feels important now.
There’s no moon at night, but the flowers in the underbrush make silver light. They wither when I touch them, and the light dies. To preserve the light I leave them be. The birds here have golden wings and red crests like crowns. They don’t sing and spend all their time preening. They must be from the west.
I drink from puddles for the first two days until the third morning when I find a stream. I throw off my clothes and jump in. My face is dirty, my hair is starting to grow out already. Too messy for school teacher. I’ve a purple welt the shape of a cross on my chest. The cold water soothes the welt, though it still aches. I dunk my head into the water and the current runs through my hair.
Then the girl giggles, as clear as if she were in the water with me. I breach the surface with a gasp. She’s on the bank, her eyes still hidden, and my boots in her hands. I try to say something dynamic and commanding, something that will make her drop the boots and return my watch.
All that comes out though is “Who are you?”
I try to leave the stream, but my foot slips on the stones and I almost fall again. She’s gone by the time I regain my balance. Then the wind arrives and passes through my skin down to my bone. I get dressed to stop the shivers.
The wind carries smell of roasted bird. My stomach growls then roars.