Baba Lenka Read online

  The cemetery was quite a way out of the village, perched high on the hill and well away from the church. The priest had not been happy about burying her, either. There had been a loud exchange of words at the farm door about it this morning.

  I didn’t understand German, but, fortunately, neither did my dad, so Mum had been forced to explain. She sounded weary. “He’ll do the ceremony, he says. But not in the churchyard because she weren’t a Christian. It’s to be in the cemetery outside the village. We’ll ’ave to settle for it, at any rate, and we’ve to pay him.”

  Now, as we began to climb the hill once more, the old women stood like wizened crows watching our slow ascent.

  We’d already been walking for a good twenty minutes by the time a particularly ferocious blast of icy wind hit the procession. Everyone dipped their heads, turning away from it, eyes streaming. It froze your lungs; you couldn’t breathe at all.

  In the distance the higgledy-piggledy crosses of the old cemetery finally came into view, with what looked like wishing wells – but were actually carefully constructed gables or little houses – over the graves. Ribbons and garlands, scarves and mementoes clanked and danced in the wind. It looked like, what did my dad say…heathen was the word…like something for gypsies.

  “We take food and drink into the graveyard and leave it there,” my mother had explained when we’d set off from the house. The old ones had handed out round parcels for us to give. “It’s part of the special ceremony and must be left for the deceased. Nothing must be removed after it’s been taken in and offered. Not the flowers from the grave, the water, even the ropes used to lower the coffin into the ground – or they could be used to bring greater power to a curse.”

  She fed my imagination with talk of superstition and bad luck. If the flowers strewn at the funeral were picked up, you risked transferring the disease of the dead one to yourself; you must not bring any dirt back on your hands or shoes from the cemetery, and never drink from the cup meant for the deceased. The table where the casket had rested back at the farmhouse would be turned over, an axe would be placed on the deathbed, and candles burned on water and salt instead of in candlesticks, the contents later tipped away and blessed. All of these precautions were to prevent illness and harm for the forty days following a funeral when the soul was transcending. Most of all, the bindings used on the body of the deceased must remain there at the site. And buried.

  I had never considered being partly German would mean all this.

  My mother read my mind. “The people here, the old ones, are from a different age, Eva. They came from a different place. These are very old Slavic traditions and something they wanted to preserve. It’s dying out now, though. So we do this for Baba Lenka and for our ancestors, okay?”

  She looked away quickly, and for the first time a layer of doubt crawled in and wedged between us. First she didn’t know who these old people were and couldn’t understand them. Now she knew a whole lot more. And what did Slavic mean?

  On the brow of the hill, the four elderly men set down the coffin while the rest of us caught up, the wooden cart they’d been pushing like a barrow now resting at an angle on the snowy ground. But as we neared, the men moved into position – one on each of the four sides of the cart, facing outwards. And the two women who had washed Baba Lenka’s body turned and stepped closer to it.

  “What are they doing now?”

  “It’s a crossroads,” my mother said, as if that should make sense.

  With their backs to the coffin, the men stared outwardly ahead, grim-faced and expressionless, in the directions of the four winds while the women began to mumble and wail as they had earlier at the well. Those raggedy birds overhead circled and cawed, and the women’s cries, not those of sadness, quickly became frenzied. They stamped their feet and began to swirl around and around in a dance ritual. In an instant the bizarre scene became sinister, the women clapping, stamping and shrieking.

  The priest pushed past us, marching forwards. “Nein! Nein…Achtung…”

  I had a really bad feeling then in the pit of my stomach, something deeply foreboding. And no sooner had that thought consolidated when the day darkened as abruptly as if a switch had been flicked. The sun was no longer a hazy, wintry sun but that of a bright moon, all colours ebbing away in a tide. There was an intense feeling of being trapped in a place of impending doom, of being unable to move forwards in time or space, of things coming to an end. A skyline of withered trees seared onto my mind’s eye in a crackle of black and white, every bit as violently imprinted as the looming view of the glacier from the plane, with its tiny hut clinging to a precipice.

  My mother’s grip tightened. Three sharp jabs. I wasn’t to speak but to stay put. She seemed to know something, to anticipate it, and by the time the vision of doom ended, she was already running uphill fast on the heels of the priest.

  Just as suddenly as they’d started the tribal dance, however, the two old women fell silent and the four men turned back around to face the coffin. Events happened simultaneously. As the priest and my mother drew level, without any warning, the old ones picked up the coffin and began to rotate it, spinning it around and around and around – before flipping it upside down.

  The corpse tipped over inside.

  The lid gave way. And Baba Lenka’s body fell out.

  ***

  Chapter Two

  Amid all the gasps and shouts, a tiny object came hurtling down the hill with all the alacrity of a Catherine wheel flying off a wall.

  At first it looked like a scrap of tumbleweed billowing down the lane, only taking form when it finally bumped the toe of my shoe – a strange little bundle of straw and feathers in the shape of a scarecrow.

  To you…

  Bending down, I quickly picked it up and pocketed it before anyone saw. They’d be bound to ask what it was and maybe snatch it away, so a cursory glance was all there was time for. Enough only to note the hooked beak and tiny crow-like skull, to feel the crepuscular rustle of its feathery arms in my fingers and the strongly bound cord of its hemp body. No one else had noticed it. Maybe my mother was quick enough to catch the guilty look on my face when she swung around a second later, but she didn’t see the poppet. No, she hadn’t seen…

  As it turned out, the momentary distraction was a blessing. In fact, it would have been far preferable had I carried on staring at the straw dolly and thus never seen the contents of the overturned coffin. Instead, immediately after secreting the poppet, I glanced up. And the full impact of the tragedy struck with a force I would never forget to my dying day.

  Baba Lenka had fallen badly. In their apparent haste to wash and inter the body, the old women had not bound the corpse properly or disguised the mutilation, let alone fastened the shroud securely enough. She lay at a distorted angle in the snow, the stem of her twig neck clearly snapped in two, her hands bent backwards in rictus claws, one blind opaque eye staring directly at me. The muslin shroud she was wrapped in had hitched up to expose where the backs of her ankles had been hacked to the bone, the heels stuffed with coarse black hair before being crudely sewn back together.

  Everyone stared in freeze-framed horror. Baba Lenka’s meagre possessions lay strewn across the crossroads – smashed earthenware, shattered glass, a wooden hairbrush netted with a few wisps of grey hair, grainy photographs scooting across the snowy fields.

  How could the nails have given way? How could the bindings holding her legs and arms together have come untied and flown high into the ether? They should have been buried, my mother had said so… And the cross that had been put underneath her body…how could it have pierced her spine like that?

  It’s possible that my young mind blanked out what followed because I don’t remember a thing. I don’t even recall the flight home. All I remember and all I will ever remember is that the watery sun had turned into a bright moon, the whistling wind died on a whisper, and the day became unnaturally still. And I remember the old folk. I see their backs to this day
, bent and black, as they threw themselves to the floor, wailing and hitting themselves with sticks and chains.

  To you…to you…

  ***

  Chapter Three

  Eldersgate, Yorkshire

  When we returned home, my perspective on the world changed. I looked at my hands and felt they were not mine. The eyes reflected in the mirror were stormy, troubled and knowing. And there was the strangest, creepiest feeling that someone else was in my head. I know there is therapy for traumatised children now, but there wasn’t then. Not where I came from, anyway – you were either loony or you just got on with it. Besides, it was the Winter of Discontent, the age of the three-day week and power cuts – people had more on their minds. That my great-grandma’s funeral casket had tipped over somewhere in Germany was of little interest to anyone. It’s a pity, though, because maybe if there had been help, what happened shortly after we got back might not have done?

  Eldersgate sounds nice, doesn’t it? It isn’t. It’s an ex-mining village southwest of Leeds; the mine had closed, and the people were angry. The women stood hard-faced in doorways, with their arms folded. Without exception, they were big, wielded slaps harder than men, and meted out judgements more confidently and mercilessly than any judge on earth. They queued for fish ’n’ chips in their slippers and saved up Green Shield stamps for little luxuries like a new floor mop. Most of the secondary schoolkids bunked off school to loiter in the park, smoking Silk Cut and terrorising people, and the majority of working-age men rolled out of bed and into the pub the minute it opened. There were three shops in the middle of the estate – a butcher’s, a co-op, and a chippie – and on the corner near the main road was the pub – The Greyhound – along with a betting shop and a working men’s club.

  My dad was one of the few who worked full-time. He was the postman, and prior to the trip to Bavaria, ‘Postman Pat’ had been the main chant behind me on the walk to and from school: ‘Postman Pat’ along with ‘Gingernut’. Only now it had been replaced with ‘Achtung’, ‘Nazi!’ and ‘Heil Hitler!’ along with goose steps and salutes.

  One of the gossiping mothers had found it necessary to spread the news Mum was German. She knew no details other than what my mother had told her in the Co-op one morning, that we had to go to a funeral and Deidre from Number Seven was looking after the cat.

  So now I was a Nazi.

  It seemed nothing from that ill-fated trip could be forgotten. Even the Alpine winter had followed us home. Eldersgate, never pretty, was now coated in grimy snow. Piles of slush lined the roads, the pithead wheel starkly silhouetted against the bleak and distant moors. The estate’s pebble-dashed semis hunkered beneath a dismal wash of sleet as evenings set in early, televisions flickered through unlined curtains, and drunken rows thudded through the walls. When the power grid cut out, it always came as a shock, a collective groan when televisions died and everyone was plunged once more into icy darkness.

  We walked to school through the slush, faces pink and stinging. The classrooms were gloomy and unheated, each desk lit with one candle. We sat in wet gabardines and sopping gloves, citing times tables while squeezing fingers and toes together to keep the blood pumping. My ears hurt with a deep ache… Well, that’s what I remember – the cold, the candles, the dark. And that terrible morning when my life, and that of my family, changed forever.

  We hadn’t been home long, maybe a week, but the odd, disconnected feeling persisted as if a sheet of glass separated me from the outside world. And it was impossible to shake the cold – it shivered like an icy breeze inside of me – or the feeling that day was night. And the strangest thing of all was that the girls who’d been my best friends before the trip were now whispering behind my back. A band of evil little Machiavellians, they exchanged significant looks or pulled faces whenever I spoke.

  Well, that particular morning, while it was still dark and candles were flickering on the wooden desks, we were instructed to split into groups for a reading project. Expectantly I turned to my trusted set of friends – Sharon, Jill, Lizzie, and a girl called Maxine Street, already gathering up books – when Maxine gave the others that significant look, and the four of them shot off without me. They actually linked arms, moving fast and purposefully towards the reading corner. It had been planned; of that there was no doubt. And the air of daring excitement about them confirmed it.

  The instigation, of course, had come from Maxine. Maxine was the cool girl – the one whose straight black hair had been cut into a pageboy style while the rest of us still had pigtails. She was the first to have a cheesecloth blouse to wear at weekends, and white boots that laced up the front. She told us to like T-Rex and dump the Osmonds.

  Yes, she was the one. And when that knowledge hit me and I saw what she had done, I hated her to murder pitch.

  Without further thought, as the giggling girls ran past – leaving me alone, stunned and humiliated – I unzipped my pencil case, took out the geometry compass and, with wildly shaking hands, hurried after them. Adrenalin obliterated all further thought and I fair flew into the reading room.

  As I approached, Lizzie turned. The room was unlit save for a few slats of light through the blinds and buttery flicks of candlelight, but a flash of horror registered on her face…

  Just before my hand plunged the compass needle into the back of Maxine Street’s calf muscle. I stabbed her hard, over and over and over, and I meant to do it.

  ***

  Afterwards, there was a missing jigsaw piece in my memory, only this vague recollection of howling hysterically in class later on that day. The teacher, young and pregnant in a flowery smock, with a topknot on her head, snapped, “For God’s sake, Eva, shut up!”

  Her words were like a slap, and the misery stuck in my throat un-sobbed. How did I get home? I don’t know. What happened to Maxine? Again, I don’t know. I think she had to have stitches, and so did Lizzie because she’d put out her hand to protect Maxine. Oh God, yes, I can see her hand now – splayed over the other girl’s leg…and all the blood…gushing into her white ankle sock.

  Mum and Dad found out from the headmaster because I sure as hell wasn’t telling. A stone of fear dropped into the cold pond of my stomach at the look on my mother’s face. I was drifting away…a small figure clutching on to a balloon as it caught on the wind and lifted off… She changed towards me, too. Even her voice changed – her entire demeanour. “We’ll have to go to the police. Or a psychiatrist! God only knows, because I bloody don’t.”

  What actually happened was I never attended that school again. The ensuing months became a blur, spent lying on my bed in a stupor. I think a man came to ask questions. All that remains of that time is the view from the bedroom window of the distant pit wheel and the moors, and the sound of tinny bursts of laughter emanating from the black-and-white television set downstairs. The only companion I had was Sooty the cat, named after Sooty out of ‘Sooty and Sweep’. He slept on my bed, came in through the bedroom window, and exited the same way. Mum even took to leaving his food out at night because he never came in the house except to my room.

  Sometimes I’d take out the strange little straw dolly with its beak head and feather arms, a prize kept hidden since the day it had rolled down the lane to bump against my shoe…To you… The little creature was endlessly fascinating and not at all frightening, just the opposite, in fact, for on the day of the funeral, it had offered both distraction and consolation, and I clung to it – my secret – the one good thing to have come out of that horrible trip. Someone had fashioned it with such care and skill. It was quite a work of art: a small half-bird, half-man had been moulded from clay, the chest bound with hemp, glossy black feathers stretching outwards in the shape of a cross to resemble a scarecrow. Closer inspection revealed engravings on the neck and forehead, little nicks of a knife, tiny symbols.

  Had some other child lost it? It seemed like something that would be made for a child, for a girl…or what else could it be?

  As the months drif
ted on, I lay watching clouds scud across the sky. Occasionally the sound of other children’s shouts carried on the wind, or the clunk of a cricket bat on willow. But I never went back to that school or saw any of those girls again. One day, it occurred to me the sun seemed lower in the sky; a soft haze hovered over the purple moors, and the leaves had become tinged with gold.

  In walked my dad. “We’re moving house, Eva.”

  My words sounded syrupy and slow. “What, now?”

  He laughed, “Well, not right this minute.”

  “Before my birthday?”

  “You had your birthday six months ago, love. Don’t you remember?”

  Six months? I’d missed my birthday? I must be eight!

  “You’ve been poorly, love.” He sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair from my face. “Thing is, we reckon a move will do us all the power of good – you know, a fresh start?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “A fantastic place we’ve found in Leeds. Needs a bit of doing up, but you’re going to love it – it’s huge, and it backs onto the woods. And best of all, you’ll be going to a new school – a much better one an’ all. We’re going to see it tomorrow. You up for it?”

  He had such an air of optimism about him as he faded in and out of focus that it seemed mean not to smile and nod. But the truth was, it frightened me very much. Waking up, that is.

  ***

  Chapter Four

  It was like being beamed into an alien landscape, standing there on a tree-lined pavement with cars whizzing past. And the new house was far bigger than the last. We got out of my dad’s Cortina and stared up at a large Victorian four-bed detached. Set well back from the road, it had an air of hollow neglect about it, the window frames ragged with flaking paint, a crazy paved driveway tufted with weeds, and a badly overgrown garden tangled with nettles and brambles.