The True Story of Hansel and Gretel (45 page)

“She hasn’t got it right,” Hansel began, but he clung to his father and couldn’t talk.

“You were gone, and Stepmother was gone and we’ve looked for you for so long.” Gretel’s body wouldn’t stop shaking.

He nodded. “They told me you were taken to the camps. They said you were dead.”

“I couldn’t find the house where we lived. The cobblestones were gone.”

“I knew you’d come to the city if you were alive. I knew you’d think of it.” He stood with his children and the joy nearly made his heart stop beating.

“I remember so much, but sometimes it goes away.” Her face twisted, and she stared into his eyes. And then she began to smile. The beard made his face like the face of her grandfather. The man who gave her oranges.

“I will help you remember,” her father said.

“I can’t remember either.”

“What can’t you remember, my son?”

“The Stepmother told me that I’m Hansel. But who was I before? Gretel got better, but she wouldn’t say our names.”

Gretel tried to remember her real name. She had dreamed about it so many times, since the wheat field, but she couldn’t pull the name out of her dreams and speak it. The name had stayed gone, as if it were hiding from her. And her brother’s name was gone too.

The man looked down at the faces of his children. So thin. So much older looking in the ravaged tightness of their skin. They looked back at him, heads tilted up and eyes shining, their lips half open, both of them waiting to hear their names.

He spoke each name slowly, quietly, the crowd of workers that had gathered around the three catching up the sounds and echoing the names in whispers. He spoke their names over and over, and watched these gifts brought out of darkness, these bits of flesh, this blood of his blood and bone of his bone, his children, begin to smile as they became, once again, themselves.

The Witch

I
t is finished. The tale is told truthfully, and truth is no heavier, no more beautiful than lies. Yet there is something that makes me love the truth, and that love made me wander and worry until the truth was given to you, like a gift. For this in the end is what we have. The love of something.

Wild ponies. A kiss salted by tears. The scent of raspberry syrup in a bottle. Oranges. Two lost children who come to your house in the dark forest.

There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again.

The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh. This we will drink forever. I know. I am Magda. I am the witch.