The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (22 page)

Pawel and his wife had gone. The light of the fireplace burned steadily. Telek stood outside and watched. He heard the boy calling out occasionally, arguing with his sister. The baby was probably asleep.

It was no good standing in the cold. The Major was always busy after dinner drinking vodka and getting a little drunk. He wouldn’t prowl the streets for another hour. Telek entered quickly. The boy turned, and Telek hit him hard with the stick. The girl stared as Telek moved over her and struck her on the head too. Their bodies lay limp on the floor.

He moved to the curtains and jerked them shut. The baby was asleep, no need to strike it.

Telek was sweating. His breath came in gasps. First he took the kerosene lantern and filled it carefully from a jar he carried in his coat. If anything was left, it had to look like an accident so the parents wouldn’t be blamed.

He took a stick from his coat that was wrapped in rags. He lit the rags, and they sprang to life. He let the torch burn for several minutes until the boy’s legs twitched. He didn’t want to hit the child again. It was hard to hit lightly enough not to kill.

Telek took the torch and held it against the arm of the boy. He came awake with a shriek, and Telek hit him with the wood of the torch. There was a long burn on his arm. Telek lay the torch on the boy’s shoulder and neck. The shirt took flame and Telek smothered it with his coat sleeve.

The girl was next. She was so still. He had hit her a little too hard. His hands were shaking.

Telek looked at her face, and he couldn’t stand to scar it. Instead, he lit the fair hair, and let it burn. He put it out when she began moaning. There was a livid burn on her scalp. He touched her hand with the torch and burned it, watching the pale skin bubble into blisters.

The baby he couldn’t stand to look at. He rolled it over, pulling the blankets off and the nightshirt up. He burned it once on the neck and back, and the baby shrieked and flung its arms and legs spasmodically out like the flopping of a wounded rabbit.

The rest went quickly. He took the kerosene lamp and spilled it all over the room. Grabbing up the howling baby and the two others in his arms, not caring if he hurt them, just wanting to get it over, get them out, Telek flung the torch which smoldered onto the kerosene.

He had to stand and wait while it lit and the room began to burn. He stood holding the moaning children, waiting for the flames, and when the room was an inferno and the fire moving to the thatch roof, Telek stepped to the door and went out into the cold darkness.

“Fire, fire!” he screamed hoarsely. “Fire!”

Men began to run from the houses. The thatch had caught and the house was a torch.

Pawel was at his side, taking the children from Telek.

The fire would be impossible to put out, but it wouldn’t spread. They had lost everything, but now the Major wouldn’t accuse Pawel and Marta of damaging the children on purpose. No one would deliberately lose their shelter in the coldest days of winter.

The Major stood and watched the house burn to the ground. Once the thatch caught, the village men gave up and moved back. The roof blazed and fell in with a soft whoosh and a great puff of sparks that rose in the still air for hundreds of feet.

“God damn Poles. Leaving their children alone with a kerosene lamp. Cows are better parents. It’s a miracle that any of the children grow up with such fools caring for them.”

Wiktor stood beside the Major, and his curiosity rose. Why hadn’t the parents taken the children with them? But he said nothing. It was no business of his.

Three done. Only four more. Telek thought about it the next day. It was a problem. How badly mutilated did the children have to be?

He approached Patryk and his wife together. They were sensible and closemouthed. They had to know before he injured the child.

“Are you sure of this?” Patryk watched Telek’s face closely.

“They’re doing it now in Bialowieza. They have done it in other villages.”

“He is very high up in the SS.” Patryk looked at his wife. “We wondered at the time. A man that high coming here.”

“It’s something that Himmler cares about. He must promote those who do it so no one can interfere.” Telek waited.

Patryk looked at his wife. “Should we trust Telek to do this?”

Zanna stared at Patryk. She turned it over in her mind. The men sat and waited.

“We’ll do it ourselves if it has to be done. We can’t live in the woods until spring. It’s too harsh a winter. The boy could die.”

“And she is pregnant again,” Patryk said softly to Telek.

“What God wills,” she said.

“You understand that it has to be done soon. And it must look like an accident.”

Patryk was a strong man. He didn’t wait. The accident happened while Patryk was gathering wood. “I was going down the road with a full load of wood, digging the cart out when I had to, when it happened,” Patryk told the Major.

“What fool thing did you do?” The Major sighed. It was constant, the problems of trying to govern these people. They couldn’t even drive a cart and horse.

“A deer leapt over the road and the horse bolted. The cart went into a tree and the axle smashed. My son is hurt.”

“Next time you’ll learn to keep a tighter grip on the horse. And the wagon?”

“The axle I can repair. Tomorrow we’ll lift the cart out of the ditch and mend it.”

Patryk went home. His wife was setting the child’s leg, broken in two places, and the boy moaned in pain. There was a long gash on his face that would leave a thick-edged scar.

“Shall I get Magda?” his wife asked.

Patryk touched his son’s head softly. “No. Clean his face and let it be.”

“The Major may wonder why we didn’t sew it up.”

“We’ll tell him we didn’t think it needed it.”

“Will he believe that? A cut this deep?”

“We’re just Poles who don’t have sense enough to hold on to our horses. He must look ugly!”

She and her husband sat beside the boy’s bed, holding hands as the night grew colder. He was all they had left other than the new heart beating underneath her own, his two sisters lying under the frozen ground for two years.

Telek knew he should wait and space out the injuries, but he couldn’t stand it. Three more. And Miron and Ania’s two who weren’t perfectly blond, but close enough to be chosen. He couldn’t make up his mind about them. He knew his nerve would fail if he didn’t hurry.

He took the first little girl and, tying a cloth over her eyes, her body drooping, half asleep from all the vodka sweetened with raspberry syrup her mother had fed her, her small mouth sticky and stinking of fruit and alcohol, laid her hand on the table. With a single blow of a butcher knife, Telek severed her index finger.

“Say it was an accident. She put her hand on the chopping block when he was cutting meat. They’ll believe it, but wait a day. There mustn’t be too many accidents on one day.”

Telek ran from the house and had to force himself to walk. The child had screamed even with all the vodka. Now the parents had to make her believe that it had been an accident. The sound of her scream bounced in his head and he couldn’t get rid of it. He walked to the well and pumped water onto his head. It was so cold that it began to freeze in his hair, but the pain of the icy water on his scalp drove the scream out. The whole village was silent again.

He walked to the edge of the village as if he was going to get firewood. The walk calmed him, and he began to warm up as he moved quickly. Then he began to enjoy the blankness of the fields and the occasional coughing cries of the ravens. When he realized that he was relaxing and taking pleasure in his aloneness in the white silence, he stopped short and jerked around. He went back toward the village almost at a run.

He thought as he moved, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy. The next child was the son of Jasia, and Jasia would be a problem. Her four-year-old son looked exactly like his father, and his father had been kidnapped and taken to Russia. Jasia talked about her husband, but she knew that he was a dead man. If he lived through the trip in the boxcar, the frozen heart of Russia would never give him up.

Telek’s mouth grew hard as he knocked on the door, and Jasia stared at him as he pushed inside. It took a while to convince her, and he talked so fast that he had to keep repeating things.

“Don’t hurt his face, for God’s sake, Telek. I can’t live if you ruin his face. It’s his father—when I look at him—”

Her father had been the Mayor. When the Mayor and his wife had been shot, Jasia had been allowed to live because she was the clerk who handled all the records of farm yields. The Germans needed her to make up lists for summer production. She had slipped through their net by making endless copies of farm records.

“I won’t hurt his face,” Telek promised. “Go draw water, Jasia. Stay away.”

“No. Take him in the bedroom. I won’t leave him.”

The boy also stank of raspberries and vodka. Telek’s stomach rolled over. He knew that he would never eat raspberries again. Perhaps never drink vodka, although God knows what that would leave to drink in Poland.

Telek broke the boy’s arm with such a wrench that it dislocated the shoulder.

“I’ll send Magda when I’ve done with the other one,” he whispered to Jasia as he fled.

Telek entered the last house looking so fierce that the parents fled. He took the almost unconscious child, again the stench of fruit and vodka, and holding him tightly, he put the child’s left hand on the stovetop. The smell of seared flesh filled the room. Telek looked at the hand calmly and lowered it again. It must be a bad burn. One that made the child almost a cripple for months. It must make him useless for whatever labor the Germans intended.

This time he ignored the child’s screams. He left the house and it was done. They’d disliked him since his mother was left in poverty and then killed herself. No one in the village had liked him. The odd one. The boy who stayed in the forest and didn’t speak much, and now they had a reason to fear him. He was a man who could torture children.