Marta and Ivan: October 1940:

Marta’s Guide Troop has broken out onto the rocky plateau above the conifers that they’ve been trekking through since they left town six hours ago. Up here, the afternoon light is flat and cold, and the wind makes the bristly grass vibrate sporadically. Marta, like most of the girls, is feeling tired and fed up, but their habit-instilled stoicism blankets any expression they might make of mood or dissatisfaction. Up at the front of what has become an increasingly straggly column, their two female leaders are consulting a map and compass.

“Five minutes’ stop for water and one piece of fruit, girls. Then we’ve only another hour to camp. Almost there!”
At the start of this weekend trek, [Guide officer title]’s enthusiasm had actually been amusing and energising, but her bonhomie is very thinly stretched now, and barely wraps around the girls: here and there, sharp elbows or pouting lips push through its attenuated surface.

It’s about three-thirty now, Marta guesses from the angle of the sunlight, and the shadows on the shoulders of the horizon-rimming clouds. The blue autumn sky is taking on the flat, whitish look that presages the fading of the day’s heat, and the roof of the evergreen forest is already taking on the softer, hazier look that comes on as the light fades and the mist rises.

She knows the forest well, of course, from her childhood, when her nurse walked her in the fringes near the villa, and when, later, she would play there alone, or with Ivan. But it had been different walking up the tracks between the dark trees with her fellow Guides today: none of these girls were what she would call her friends, but she had felt herself being drawn into the edge of their shared feelings about the stillness, hush, and shadows of the close-ranked pines.

At the start of their trek they had gathered at the Guides’ wood and tarpaper hut on a suburban street not far from Marta’s home. Most of the girls had arrived with their mother or father, who had usually carried their daughter’s rucksack for them. The parents were mostly well-dressed, in long overcoats and smart hats, as if they were dressing for church or for some formal gathering. Marta had made her own way there, alone, and stood at the periphery of the hands-shaking and cheek-kissing throng of parents and children. That apartness, that sense of being different and left out, was the hallmark of her relations with the other girls in the group; sometimes at one of the meetings, or on one of their regular hikes or coach trips, she’ll feel that she’s started to make a friendship – or a better understanding, at least – with one of the other girls but, next time they meet, she will find her smile ignored by the same girl, or be met with blank disdain when she approaches someone expecting to be recognised or greeted. She can’t understand the inconstancy and unpredictability of these other girls; at home, everyone – for good or ill – behaves in regular, predictable ways, and she can navigate her way through their moods, knowing how to seek out the comfort or coolness that she wants. Each Guide meeting, though, brings fresh bafflement, as she won’t know which people will be approachable, and which will be cold or hostile. She wished that each fresh rebuff didn’t hurt her, and it makes her feel stupid and inadequate to admit that the other girls’ harshness does hurt and confuse her – but it does, oh it does.

As they leave town, reach the forest track, and start their climb up into the hills, she finds herself wishing that someone would fall into step with her and show her that they wanted to walk with her, talk with her, ask her to sleep in their tent with their other friends. But she walks on her own, flanked by pairs and clusters of girls who chat excitedly at first, but who gradually quieten down as their tiredness increases and the extended nature of the trek settles onto them like an increasingly rain-sodden overcoat.

There is something mood-flattening about the pine forest, too: whether it’s the relentless regularity of the trunks stretching away into shadowed indistinctness, or the way that the heavy forest canopy and muffling bed of fallen needles deaden all sound, or the scarcity of light and birdsong; whatever it is, it’s noticeable that everyone’s mood gradually dips as they trdge on between the sandy trunks.

All the scary outdoor tales they’d been told as children centred on the forest, and on the things that would menace – and try to capture and kill – any child that ventured from the path: unkillable ghouls with iron talons and teeth, cruel woodsmen with gimlet eyes and sharp axes, held firmly, resolutely, in their hard hands; headless, rotting things that stalked you between the boughs; evil forest spirits and fairy tricksters who would lure you from the paths and into the shadier depths with promises of warmth, safety, shelter, and fairy food and drink. In most of these narratives, the story children ended up transformed, dead, eaten or disappeared. There weren’t many happy endings, and when the children did survive, they were missing a digit or a limb, and were often crippled, disfigured, or prematurely and spectacularly aged.

Marta could feel these Ur-tales of fear and dread stirring in her memory as she watched the girls ahead of her dragging their booted feet wearily up the slope. She had had a cherished story book when she was a child, and she remembered its thick pages and rounded corners as she walked, remembered the uncommonly rich colours of the illustrations: the black-green trees, the blue-black night sky with its haloed yellow stars and moon, the unnaturally red, round cheeks of a dumpling of a girl who ran away from home, out into the purple-shadowed snow, when her usually indulgent grandparents declined to let her have a fifth piece of gingerbread from their precious supply. Marta remembers falling asleep with the book open on her chest, her hand clutching the pages, and waking to find that the light was out and that the comforting square weight of book had been removed and put away.

(c. 1040 words)