The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (42 page)

They ate the last potato and walked farther into the forest. Hansel wrapped the little bottle that still had the smell of raspberry clinging to its insides in a rag and put it gently in his pocket. The children walked through the woods that were ripening as it grew warmer and humming with bees and the scent of the flowers that preceded the fruit. As they walked on, the forest thinned and was less damp. Hansel watched uneasily as the light grew brighter, and he could see farther and farther ahead as the trees grew smaller. If he could see ahead, then anyone could see him.

At last fields spread in front of the children. Hansel pulled Gretel back by the hand, looking at the fields outlined by trees, the road with no shelter where they could hide. They stood in the last piece of forest, the last safe place, and he shivered. It was hard to walk out into the bright, unfiltered sunshine.

“Come on,” he said loudly. “We’re going out of the forest now.”

“I haven’t seen the bison.” She thought about this while they walked. It was nearly summer, and she hadn’t seen the bison. It made her sad, and she didn’t speak again for hours. Even the warmth of the sun didn’t cheer her. Behind her, farther away with each step, was something large, and dark, and beautiful that she had not found.

They couldn’t go many miles each day. Hansel was too tired all the time now. They stopped and slept and rested a lot.

“We have to steal some food,” he told her. “But they could kill us if we steal.”

“Then I’ll just ask them for it.” Gretel smiled.

Hansel knew she had no fear because she was crazy. Everybody was afraid except crazy people. He had seen people like that in the ghetto, and they were the only happy people. Hansel sat and tried to remember the apartment. It had been years ago when they lived there, he guessed.

But Gretel did ask for food. She walked up to farms and went to the houses outside villages. She smoothed her hair and smiled and knocked on the doors and asked for food. It wasn’t begging exactly. She just asked for bread as if she had been sent by a neighbor to borrow it.

And the people looked at the blond, radiant child, so thin you’d think the light would just shine right through her, and they gave her bread. Sometimes a person slammed the door shut and told her to go away, but mostly they gave her bread. Women offered to let the girl sleep inside for the night, but Gretel shook her head. It was warm now, and she loved being outside.

They ate and wandered, and Hansel knew he needed to find the city, but he couldn’t remember the name of it, and he was afraid to ask at any of the farms. They just kept moving.

They had gone twenty or thirty miles when they came to a river. It wasn’t a big river, only a tributary of the larger one, and it looked shallow, but neither of the children dared to try to wade it. They couldn’t swim.

“We’ll walk along the bank and maybe we’ll find a bridge,” Hansel said.

They walked past two bends in the river, and Gretel saw it first. There was a long field, rising to a hill, and over the hill came something large and white. Hansel was lying on his side, nearly asleep, and she called to him.

“Look, Hansel! It’s a huge swan.”

Hansel sat up and stared at the tank coming toward the river. There were more tanks coming after it. He knew they should run, but his legs were so heavy. He was too afraid to move. He sat and panted like a fox cornered by hounds.

Gretel watched the tanks coming, the white one, camouflaged for winter snow, leading, and six others behind. It was a swan, and it was coming right toward her.

The noise of the tanks was deafening as they came close. Hansel saw that there were men riding on top of the tanks. They laughed when they saw the children, and the white tank slowed. A man on the tank called down to Gretel, but she shook her head. It wasn’t Polish.

Hansel knew it must be Russian because it didn’t sound like German either. Some of the tanks had rags of red flags flying on the top. One of the men pointed across the river and gestured.

“Tak,”
Gretel shouted in Polish. “Yes!”

The soldiers on the white tank laughed. One of them jumped down and tossed first Gretel and then Hansel onto the tank. The children sat, held firmly by the men, and the white tank moved on with a jolting rhythm.

“The swan is taking us across the river,” Gretel screamed over the noise of the engine.

“It’s a tank,” he screamed back. “It’s not a swan.”

The tank moved into the water and when they had crossed the river and gone up into the next field, it slowed and the soldiers lowered the children to the ground.

“Goodbye, dear swan,” Gretel called as the tanks moved away.

She thought it was a swan, and Hansel didn’t care. They were over the river.

They lay in the fields that night. It was clear and there was no sound of guns, only the owls and the squeak of bats and the cicadas that were beginning their shrill calling.

“See the stars,” Gretel said. “I know what they are.”

“What are they?” Hansel was half asleep and glad it wasn’t raining.

“All those stars in that big streak that goes over the whole sky? You see them? Those are all the Jews who’ve died. All of them died and went up in the air, and the stars are the stars that they wore on their coats. The stars on the coats come off when their souls float up and the stars live up in the sky forever.”

Hansel stared at the mass of light in the Milky Way and shivered. “That’s awful.”

“No it isn’t. It’s lovely. They’ll be there forever.”

They were nearly asleep when he spoke again.

“It wasn’t a swan.”

But Gretel just smiled and looked up at the stars until her eyes shut and she fell asleep.

The Wheat Field

I
t was safer to move by day now, but at night the planes came and sometimes they tossed down bombs that left holes in the road. Hansel tried to think of everything.

Don’t walk on the road at night.

Don’t get close to the soldiers.

Don’t get so tired you fall asleep out in a field where you can be seen.

As they walked in the Polish countryside, the skeletons of burned-out tanks and trucks lay scattered like the toys of the devil. There were dead bodies, and Hansel didn’t look at them. The summer heat rotted the corpses so fast that the children could not take anything from them. The food left in the dead soldiers’ packs smelled of their rotting flesh, and made them feel sick.

Gretel hated the dead horses. She turned her head when they came on one, legs stuck out, belly swollen with gas, in a field or washed up on the gravel bar of a river.

Hansel wasn’t sure what he was doing now. He still thought of the city sometimes, but he couldn’t hold the idea in his head. Mostly he looked for food and watched out for the airplanes and for stray soldiers who might be hiding in the fields. Sometimes he was angry with Gretel and screamed at her. She was supposed to help, and he couldn’t always make her do what she had to do. Some days he just ignored her and didn’t try to make her be quiet and hide when he did.

It was July, and the fields were full of food. Hansel looked for a field of chickpeas with tangled brush near it. The brush nearly always had berries they could eat, and the chickpeas made his stomach ache, but they filled him up.

Gretel was happy wandering, singing and telling stories she remembered from her old books. Hansel was too tired to tell her to shut up, and he kept walking even though he didn’t think much more about where they were going. He still had the little bottle in his pocket. It didn’t smell of raspberries now, and it was all that was left of the time in the hut and of Magda.

At night he fought with his sister. Gretel liked sleeping in open places, and Hansel knew it wasn’t safe. He tried to make her crawl into brushy thickets, but she refused. He even threatened to leave her. She just laughed and walked away into the middle of a field where she lay down and stared up at the sky as it turned from dark blue to blackish blue to black. Gretel loved to lie and look up at the stars.

So Hansel, afraid to sleep apart, slept with her in the middle of the fields of growing things. They would lie and watch the sky and the waxing and waning of the moon as the summer passed.

The shooting stars disturbed Gretel. She was afraid that a Jew had fallen out of the sky, and she would begin to cry. Hansel didn’t know what to say at first, but he thought of something that made her hush.

“They aren’t falling. They’re going down to meet other people that are going up.”

Gretel liked that, and she stopped crying for the falling stars. Hansel wondered if he would be met by a star when he died. He thought he’d die soon. He wanted to lie down and sleep all day and all night and never have to wake up.

Finally, it was August, and the planes flew over less often at night, but the drone of the engines above the earth still woke Hansel. He would look for the machines moving between the earth and the stars, but they flew on, and he would go back to sleep.

And then they found a field that Gretel loved so much she refused to walk past it.

“Look,” she shouted. “Look what I’ve found.”

The thing stood on the edge of a field that was planted in wheat. The smoke from a village was over a distant hill, so Hansel let her stay in the field. There were no workers in sight.

“Look!”

He saw it, but he didn’t know what it was. A wooden thing on legs.

“It’s got hay in it. It’s a box to feed the cows.”

“No. It’s not for cows. It’s a grand piano.”

She stroked the swollen keys, locked solid by months of rain and snow. Some were missing, and the lid of the piano was gone where the farmer had torn it off.

Gretel stood in front of it, and her mind began to remember a little. She almost fainted with the way she felt, standing in front of the mutilated piano. She placed her fingers on the swollen keys and began to play a song that sounded only in her head. Someone had taught her to play the song. In a house. A woman. A sweet smell. The woman put her hands on Gretel’s hands.

Gretel leaned against the piano for nearly an hour, playing the same song over and over on the keys that didn’t move. The gutted box of the instrument stood rotting. Hansel crawled under it and slept in the shade during the noon heat, but Gretel kept playing and playing the song. It disturbed her. She wanted to cry or laugh. She moaned a little but kept stroking the keys.

Gretel refused to leave the field. When she touched the piano, she was afraid, but she couldn’t leave it. The music she heard in her head had stirred her up. “I’m sleeping here.”

“It’s too open. Let’s sleep near the creek.”

“I like the field.”

“You could get water easier near the creek.”

“No.”

“You like the piano,” he accused her. She would make stupid decisions just because of something like a rotten old piano. He stared out at the field. “And those flowers. You want to sleep on the flowers.”

She nodded. The wheat was beginning to turn darker gold, and the poppies sprinkled in the gold were red and beautiful as the wind made them sway.

“They’re like houses where fairies could live.” She touched the red petals of a poppy softly.

The flowers looked like drops of blood to Hansel, but he didn’t argue. They lay down by the piano, and both fell into an exhausted sleep. Neither stirred as seven men slipped from the direction of the creek and walked into the wheat field, spreading out and lying down like the children but not sleeping, their guns, oiled and clean, beside them. They lay in the field waiting for hours.

The sun turned the gray light pink and golden. It was dawn. Hansel sat up and stayed perfectly still, thinking. Something was different. Something was not the way it ought to be in the morning, but he couldn’t think what it was. He just sat and didn’t move.

Then he realized what was different. The birds, the crows, and all the songbirds were not flying over the field. Few birds darted over the wheat catching insects. It was silent the way morning shouldn’t be silent.

Hansel was listening so hard that his jaw clenched. And then Gretel woke up. She stretched and started to stand.

“Get down,” Hansel whispered and reached out for her leg to stop her.

“It’s morning. I’m thirsty.”

“Shut up, Gretel.” Hansel was straining to hear.

She pulled her leg away and stood up, lifting her arms over her head in a stretch. Hansel opened his mouth to call her, but the sound of his words were lost in the crash of gunfire. Hansel stood up and saw the men.

They were in the middle of the wheat and were firing at men in German uniforms who had just come out of the trees near the creek on the far side of the field. The Germans fell to the ground and returned fire.

Hansel opened his mouth and began to scream. Gretel stood stunned, looking at the men, her hands open in front of her, fingers wide apart, as if she could push the bullets away. Hansel didn’t care anymore. He stopped screaming and began to walk toward the men with the guns. He was too tired. He had just woken up, but he was so tired that he knew he was probably dead. It didn’t matter.