The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (27 page)

He felt such pity that he sat on the snow and watched the child. She was playing some game. He would sit awhile. It might quiet her. Then he could take her back to the hut.

Opening the sack, Gretel took out eight pieces of candle. All different sizes, most of them only stubs, and began to arrange them. “All in a straight row. None higher than the others. Not in a circle. Far enough apart so the flames don’t touch,” she chanted.

The child worked hard. It wasn’t easy getting the odd-sized candles level, but she packed snow to hold them until they stood in a ragged line between her and the priest. “Now the shamash.” She drew the last candle from the bag.

The priest winced at the foreign word. It was a dangerous word from her past, he knew.

Taking a twig, she lit it on the coals in the bucket and then lit the ninth candle. She used it to light the other eight. “Candles right to left, light them left to right,” she chanted.

All the candles were lit, and she set the ninth candle beside the others in the snow.

“And what is this, girl?” He knew what it must be, but he wondered if she remembered.

“It makes the stars come out at night,” she said, and then she shook her head. “The first star—” she whispered and shook her head again.

They sat in silence and watched the flames so golden against the whiteness around them.

“I know,” Gretel said. “It means that God is here. God loves us. And all of it”—she made a sweeping gesture with her arm—“is a miracle.”

The priest began to cry. His body was chilling, but the tears were warm on his skin.

“Don’t cry. I made God be here for you, and now we’re free.”

“I’m not free, child. I’m a sinner. I need to confess, but it would take until summer.” He began anyway. “I never took care of my daughter. I took no responsibility for her—for her mother. I haven’t helped Nelka, and now she has a baby.” He groaned and rocked back and forth in the snow. “I’ve never helped any of them. Oh God, help me. Let me not die so sinful.”

Gretel remembered now. When the candles were lit it meant that they would live. It was lovely, and she began to sing one of the Christmas carols that Nelka had taught her.

The voice of the child reached to the tops of the trees and drowned out the mutter of the creek. The priest sat crying before the menorah, listening to a Christmas carol sung by a Jewish child driven into madness.

It was cold and he ached but suddenly he felt happy. The trees were solid and lifted to the sky where the sun tried to break through the clouds which moved quickly above them.

“I am happy,” he said to the cold air. And he wished he could do something, some act that would prove his joy, allow it to shine forth to the world and make up for the past.

Magda and Hansel found them sitting beside the candles guttering in the snow, the old man and the girl, smiling into the bright air of high noon.

Bones

“
Y
ou wife’s gone a long time,” Lydka said to him.

The Mechanik nodded absentmindedly. It had been a crazy idea. She suddenly wanted to go to the burnt-out farm and see if any of the horses or cattle had wandered back after the fire.

“We can’t feed a horse,” he’d told her.

“But the cows. They ran during the fire, but cows always come back. If one came back, I could drive it here. It’d be a feast.”

It hadn’t been like her to think about food so much. She always said that thinking about food was weakness. The next morning she was gone.

“Can’t keep your woman under control?” the Russian joked. “Get a stick, Mechanik. A good beating is what she needs. I bet she finds a cow. I bet she finds three cows.”

After two days, the Mechanik set out toward the farm. He was stronger now, but he only found the farm because of the standing walls of the stone barn and the chimney of the house. He sat in the woods and watched for an hour. She wasn’t there. He waited until he was sure that no one guarded the place, and then went to the ruins and walked around them. There were no other footprints in the snow. The stone walls of the barn stood blackened with the sky over them.

He stood in the ruin of the barn and tried to think logically, but his heart was breaking. He tried to be quiet in his sobbing, but the sobs tore out of his body, and finally he cried out with each gasping sob so loudly that the ravens flew over the barn and called back to him in curiosity.

He waited until noon the next day, and then gave up and walked back to where the Russian and his men waited. With every step he hoped that she would be there, the Russian making fun of her for thinking she could find a cow. He groaned when he saw them step out of hiding. No dark head, smooth and round, streaked with silver. No small hands to take his when the others weren’t looking. No sidelong look and smile to give him heart.

No one asked anything when he rejoined them. They all knew. Somewhere out there she’d been killed. The Russian made the decision.

“We have to move. We aren’t safe anymore.”

So they moved. They walked for days until they were close to another road on the other side of the river. They crossed the river by walking on the patches of ice. Sometimes the ice gave under their boots in the middle, but they reached the other side.

The Mechanik almost stayed behind, but the Russian persuaded him gently. “Go with us. If she’s alive, you’ll find her someday. After it’s over.”

“When it’s over,” the Mechanik said. He tried to have hope. She would have despised him if he became depressed and lost heart. So he thought of what he would do after the Russian army came. He pictured the map of Poland in his mind as they walked and sectioned it off neatly into parts where he would search for her and the children.

At night he talked to her in his head as he lay next to the others, trying to get warm, trying to go to sleep. First it was as if she was alive and lying beside him. He would tell her about the day and what they had done. Then he noticed that the talking to her had become like a prayer, so he stopped doing it and lay staring at the cold sky until he fell asleep. You only prayed to dead people. Or God. And he didn’t believe in God and couldn’t accept that she was dead. He was left lying on the frozen earth with the dark sky above and his heart unable to take comfort from anything.

“At least I don’t believe in God,” he told the Russian one morning.

“And if you did believe, Mechanik, what then?”

“Then I’d kill myself. Because if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, he must have no pity. He looks down and sees everything and doesn’t bring the evil to an end. I wouldn’t live if I thought a God could end the pain and didn’t.”

“And what good would your death do?”

“It would teach God a lesson.” The Mechanik walked on and didn’t care that the Russian laughed. He knew it was true, and he was glad that he didn’t believe. It saved his life every day.

“We keep going east,” the Russian said. “The Soviet army must be just ahead of us. We’ll thread our way through the Germans, link with my people, and fight our way to Germany. You’ll make a good Soviet, Mechanik. We don’t give a damn about religion, and you don’t believe in God anyway. We’ll make a Communist of you.”

When the Russian paused for breath, they heard the voices.

“Fix the damn thing! What use are you? This goddamn country.”

The words were German. They dove into the woods. Using the trees for cover, they moved parallel to the road until they saw the truck. Two German soldiers had the hood up. Another soldier stood guard beside the truck holding a rifle, watching the woods. A man in civilian clothes paced on the road beside the truck. He was the one talking so loudly.

“I’ll take the guard.” The Mechanik pressed his rifle against the tree trunk to steady it.

“I’ll get the one whose butt is hanging out of the engine. You—” The Russian pointed to two others. “Take the other guy near the hood, and you take the little jerk in the suit.”

“No.” The Mechanik whispered. “The man in the suit doesn’t show a gun. Shoot the other three, and then we take the one in the suit and get information.”

“Don’t get killed trying to take the bastard,” the Russian warned. “When I count three.”

The guns fired and the crows flew up in a panic of fluttering wings and loud cries. Two of the soldiers dropped and lay still. The man who had been bending into the engine was hit in his buttocks and screamed. The Russian fired another bullet, but he still moaned.

The man in the suit broke into a run and kept slipping on the ice and giving little shrieks as he fought for balance.

The Russian was roaring with laughter. “Catch the bastard.”

The Mechanik went to the moaning soldier and shot him in the head. The road was quiet except for the crows and the cries of the man in city shoes who ran up the road. They brought him back, searched him, and stood him before the Russian. The German’s teeth chattered so hard the Mechanik wondered if he would crack them.

“I’m not a soldier. I’m a medical student. I’m not a soldier. I don’t have a gun.”

“You understand this, Mechanik?”

He nodded. “I’ll translate.”

The Russian looked at the truck. Two of his men were searching the flatbed, opening the containers. “Any food in those boxes? Any guns? What’s our young dandy carrying in his truck?”

One of the men leaned over the metal barrel and reached inside. He pulled out a round thing and held it up. It dripped liquid.

“Blessed Virgin!” The Russian stepped back and crossed himself. “It’s a fucking head!”

“There’re more of them. Packed in liquid and bags of bones. Human bones.”

“I’m not a soldier. They ordered me to do it,” the German whispered.

“Ask him what the fuck this is,” the Russian shouted. “Translate, damn it.”

“It wasn’t my idea. I’m a doctor.” The young man scrabbled in his inside pocket and came out with a paper. The Mechanik read the paper out loud slowly in Polish.

The men stood silent until the Russian walked over to one of the dead soldiers and unbuttoned his pants. He urinated on the corpse and then buttoned his pants slowly. Then he lit a cigarette. It was one of the last ones from the farm. He had held it back for a special moment. He dragged deeply and passed it to the man next to him. They all stood and shared the cigarette, and looked at the truck and the tin boxes and the bags.

“Bury them,” the Russian finally said. He turned to the young German who was shaking all over now. “Whose heads are in those boxes? Maybe my friends?”

He hit the German and the man dropped like a sack of potatoes.

They buried the heads under snow and piled logs and brush on them. The bones they were going to leave in the bags, but the Russian shook his head.

“Bury their bones clean. Let the earth have them.”

When they were done, they waited. The Russian was pacing, and his scarred neck and face were livid. They waited for him to say what to do next.

“Now.” His voice was calm. “Strangle this bastard,” he said, and the oldest of the Poles fell upon the young German, and knocked him back down on the road, and clenched his chapped, rough hands on the slender neck. The German managed to batter the Pole’s face, but his throat broke and he flopped for a minute and then his tongue came out and he was dead.

“Take all their clothes off. We can use the coats and pants.”

The Russian stood and looked at the naked bodies. “I want you to cut their heads off and put the bodies in a line with the heads at their feet.”

It took an ax to sever the spinal cord. The Mechanik had helped undress them, but he didn’t help with the cutting. They should move on. You couldn’t revenge yourself on dead men.

The headless men lay in a row. The Russian stabbed the order from Himmler on the chest of one of the corpses with a German knife.

They walked on down the road, listening for more trucks. It was too bad they had to leave the truck, but there was no petrol to run it. Looking back, the Mechanik squinted his eyes. It was hard to tell what the dark splotches on the road were from a distance. He wondered who would find the bodies. He hoped it wasn’t a child.