Gretel and the Dark (20 page)

Daniel shrugs. ‘They’ve gone, like my little sister did. They won’t come back. I told you already, that’s what happens here.’

Sometimes, when I’m very sad, I visit Uncle Hraben in his tower. He lets me put on one of my nice frocks and gives me paper and crayons so I can draw pictures. Once he brought me ice cream, but usually it’s cake or Apfelstrudel. I don’t mind so much any more. One Sunday, he came to the shed to find me because there were new baby rabbits. Daniel ran away when he saw him. All the others shrank back and made themselves look very small. When I come back, Erika and Cecily make me tell them everything.

‘Were you in a room alone with him?’

‘Not today.’ I tell them about the baby rabbits. They don’t seem very interested. ‘When I go to his special tower, he gives me nice things to eat. And I can change into my other clothes.’

They look at each other. Erika shakes her head. ‘From now on, you will come to work with me. At least I can keep an eye on you there.’

‘Why?’

‘So that he doesn’t lure you into his tower again. You mustn’t go there.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s not a nice man.’

‘But Uncle Hraben knew Papa. They were friends. He
is
nice. He says he wants to be my new father.’

‘You and I must have a long talk about … certain things,’ says Erika. ‘Innocence is not the same as ignorance.’

‘Keep out of his way,’ advises Cecily. ‘Hide when you see him coming. Take nothing. If you do, there will be a high price to pay.’

‘He is feeding you up,’ says Lena, who’d been pretending to be asleep. ‘He is fattening you for the kill.’

‘That’s silly,’ I say. ‘He’s not a witch.’

Lottie thinks Uncle Hraben might be a witch in disguise because he pinches my bottom and squeezes my legs and arms exactly like the witch did to Hansel when she put him in the cage. We argue then, because I know why Lottie doesn’t like him. He says she’s ugly and he’ll buy me a new doll if I throw her away. In the end I call her Charlotte and put her back in her hiding place.

In his haste to catch up with interrupted jobs, Benjamin overfilled the baskets and, while hurrying towards the kitchen, tripped on uneven stones, spilling potatoes and scattering mud all over the newly swept path. Fear of Gudrun’s wrath made him kick as much of the soil as possible into the herb garden before running to the stables for a yard brush. Here he found Lilie perched on the old bench where he usually sat to polish tack, her eyes wide open, staring straight ahead, hardly blinking.

‘Lilie?’

‘You all think I’m mad. That horrible fat policeman waved his hand in front of his face, like this, as if my mechanism’s faulty, one of my springs come loose. I see what I see. There’s nothing I can do that would make them understand.’

‘Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.’ He rubbed his palms clean on his trousers and then tentatively took her hand in both of his. Lilie looked at it and smiled.

‘It’s nice when you do that.’

Benjamin regarded her warily. ‘But I’ve never …’

‘Not often enough,’ she said. ‘Did you ever think I was mad? There were times when I thought I might be.’

Suddenly unsure of himself, Benjamin relinquished her hand. Poor girl. What could he say? Lilie was obviously still more fragile than he’d realized. Perhaps it would be better if she went indoors. A storm was brewing. Somewhere a dog
howled, and dense flocks of starlings flung themselves screaming from one rooftop to the next. Even the stoical old carriage horse had become restless, whinnying softly, constantly fidgeting, its shoes striking sparks on the stable floor. The playful breeze that had been tugging leaves from the walnut tree all afternoon was now gathering strength, growing into a knife-edged wind, making the mass of foliage above their heads shift and sway. Looking up, Benjamin caught sight of a single pink rose far enough back to be protected from the weather, and he thrust his hand deep into the thorns to pick it.

‘For you,’ he said, cradling the flower against the wind. ‘It’s an old-fashioned rose: an Old Blush China.
Frau Doktor
Breuer says this variety has been cultivated in China for over a thousand years.’

‘ “The Last Rose of Summer”.’ Lilie cupped it in her hands, breathing in the sweet fragrance. ‘There’s a poem written about it. I learned some of the words in …’ She looked confused. ‘I once learned it:

‘
Die letzte der Rosen steht blühend allein;

All ihre Gefährten, sie schliefen schon ein.
’

She sighed and repeated the few lines:

‘’Tis the last rose of summer,

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone.’

‘A sad poem, by the sound of it,’ said Benjamin, wishing he’d ignored the flower, which he had hoped would lighten Lilie’s
spirits not plunge her into further melancholy. He felt his own spirits plummet. ‘Summer will come again, Lilie, and so will the roses. More, with care.’ He’d prune the bush at the earliest opportunity, heap so much fertilizer around its roots that next year’s display would astound her. ‘It will be a glorious new century, with more roses than ever before.’

Lilie turned her head away. ‘Not for us.’

‘Why not? What do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you remembered yet?’

‘Remembered what?’ Benjamin took a swipe at yet another pair of black-and-white butterflies riding the wind currents around his head. The garden was overrun with the damn things. Nothing could shift them. And really, the autumn should have finished them off by now. ‘Lilie, what are you talking about?’ He reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder, hoping his touch would provide some comfort.

She smiled sadly. ‘The last verse of the poem goes like this: ‘

When true hearts lie withered

And fond ones are flown,

Oh! who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?’

‘You won’t be alone, Lilie,’ Benjamin said staunchly. ‘If you’ll only allow me, I‘ll stay with you for ever.’

‘Get up then!’ shouted Lilie, her entire body tensing. ‘On your feet! Walk! Now!’

‘What?’ He rose slowly, looking down at her in dismay. ‘Come, Lilie. Time to go into the house and rest. Everything will be fine.’

‘Only if you can keep moving,’ she said, her face unutterably
weary. ‘We’re getting nowhere and I no longer have the strength to support you.’

‘Just look at that,’ said Gudrun, standing, arms akimbo, at the kitchen door. ‘Now the young fool’s got the cheek to pick your wife’s roses for her.’

Josef, who’d come in search of a linden tisane to ease his throbbing headache, moved unwillingly to stand at her shoulder. She jabbed the air, pointing to where Benjamin and Lilie were sitting together on the tiny bench. His view was partially obscured by a bush planted against the stable wall, but he saw enough – his touch, her smile – to gauge their growing closeness, and turned away, his cup juddering violently against the saucer. ‘Two young people thrown together by circumstances. One can expect little else.’

He swallowed the tisane in one go, scalding his throat, and immediately poured more boiling water into the cup, drinking the pale-green liquid before it had a chance either to infuse or to cool, as if it might cauterize a raw wound deep in his chest. ‘I will eat alone in my study this evening. A light supper, if you please.’

Josef lurched back to his sanctuary, where he paced the floor, kneading his temples, almost weeping with misery. His father’s eyes followed him, his portrait radiating disapproval, until finally Josef turned on it, shaking his fist. ‘Your wife was no older than Lilie,
Vater
, so if I’m an
alter Wüstling
, what does that make you? Two old lechers together, then – it must be a family trait. As for me being married, do you know how long it is since Mathilde and I –?’

He sank into a chair, gripping his head with both hands as the dream of the wild forest was replayed before his closed
eyes, only now it was Benjamin lying with Lilie in the soft ferns, Benjamin’s work-worn young hands on her smooth white body …

How would he dispatch the boy? Poison? The knife? No, he’d dismiss him without a reference. Throw him on to the street. Let him starve. He’d – potassium bromide. That was the answer. A hefty dose of the anaphrodisiac would soon put paid to Benjamin’s interest in Lilie. Josef groaned. That way lay madness: any more and he’d end up in a worse state than the poor muddle-headed creatures he passed on to the sanatorium. Some days he woke convinced Lilie was simply a figment of his imagination, a beautiful fantasy born of loneliness and despair, and was forced to rush downstairs to assure his senses of her flesh-and-blood reality. However had things come to such a pass?

He straightened, clutching the edge of his desk as he fought for self-control, but in spite of his efforts, the image of Lilie’s pale body against the dark trees lingered. Then another character stealthily interposed itself on the scene and Josef gasped as he visualized the painting that for days had remained so tantalizingly out of reach. A picture of Lilith, a fairly recent work by one of those passionate Pre-Raphaelite painters, an Englishman who’d studied at the Munich Academy. Lilith but with Lilie’s face, barefoot and naked in a lonely forest, happily entwined with her familiar. What was the painter’s name? Perhaps he’d read about the work in the
Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst
: the magazine for fine arts seemed a likely place. Josef’s eyes strayed to the cabinet: he kept back copies.

Collier, that was it! John Collier.

Collier’s Lilith was supremely beautiful, with a voluptuous body and a torrent of red-gold hair. There was no trace of the
storm witch, the bringer of illness and death, in her calm and peaceful expression. As for the serpent, it was huge. Josef could imagine Sigmund making much of Lilith’s contented smile as she cradled the creature against her body, its head lying over one shoulder like a caressing hand, flickering tongue pointing to her pert right breast, its sleek coils encircling her hips, fettering her ankles … apart from that one sly coil parting her knees and travelling up the back of her thigh.

Josef swallowed hard. He’d studied the painting at length when a copy had first come into his hands. Now he wondered whether his naming of Lilie had been in response to the erotic sensations he’d felt at the time, rather than with reference to a garden flower whose symbolism was chastity and innocence … although it did denote a quality of innocence, if he remembered correctly, which the Greeks associated with ignorance of approaching danger. Perhaps, if Lilie was Lilith abbreviated, she was to blame for his present confusion since her demonic namesake was the incarnation of lust, causing the most proper of men to be led astray. Rabbinical myth decreed: one may not sleep in a house alone, for whoever sleeps in a house alone is seized by Lilith. In the Zohar it claimed she roamed by night, vexing the sons of men and causing them to defile themselves in the manner of Onan.

At this point Josef caught his father’s eye. He took a deep, calming breath.

Leopold Breuer, educated and progressive Jewish scholar, had poured scorn on such beliefs, pointing out that – far from deriving from any rabbinic legend or Midrash – most of the superstitions about Lilith the she-demon originated in a medieval work known as
The Alphabet of Ben-Sira
. He’d considered the book scurrilous, possibly anti-Semitic, an impious digest of
risqué folk tales with a protagonist born of an incestuous union between the prophet Jeremiah and his daughter; it was to the shame of uncritical Jewish mystics in medieval Germany that such nonsense came to be accepted as truth. An echo of his father’s sardonic laughter floated down the years. Josef subsided. He permitted himself one scowl at the labouring clock, which had so gleefully counted away all the days of his youth, and attempted to fix his thoughts on the purity of a white lily.

For a while he was successful, then other suspicions returned to gnaw at his good intentions – about Lilie’s possible collusion with Bertha, or Freud, other estranged colleagues, political activists, perhaps even Mathilde – and Josef knew that if he were to retain his equilibrium, never mind his sanity, these must also be confronted. For if Lilie was an actress planted here to discredit and shame him –

It was impossible. To reason along those lines was as ludicrous as linking her with a she-demon. ‘Forgive me, sweet child,’ he murmured, smoothing his beard. ‘I had to start somewhere.’ One thing was certain: for both their sakes he must persist in seeking clues to the girl’s background. Benjamin had been unsuccessful. Josef had already discounted the escaped-criminal story – apparently the police weren’t taking it seriously either – and it irked him that Gudrun showed no sign of contrition. Perhaps he should avail himself of the services of a private detective … but, contrary to popular fiction, such men were mostly drawn from the lower strata of society and might be induced to talk in their cups however much they were paid.

Josef recommenced his pacing. And stopped dead.

Nothing had changed. If he had to continue searching for information it should be here, in Vienna. The little he did know suggested that Lilie had been kept somewhere against her will.
She’d been beaten and, he feared, worse. The horror of the experience had affected both her memory and her thinking processes.

Once again he came back to it: failing a monstrous family home, there was only one place in this city that could be likened to the seraglio, a place where, it was rumoured, young foreign women were held captive for the pleasure – sadistic, or otherwise – of any member with enough money to hire the use of their defenceless bodies. Outrageous. Criminal. Bestial. Josef loosened his collar. He would insist that Benjamin found a way of getting inside the Thélème to make enquiries. It would almost certainly be dangerous. The boy might come to serious harm.

Josef avoided looking in his father’s direction. A thrashing never killed anyone. Benjamin was young. He would mend.

At first glance, the place seemed ordinary enough: a respectable house at one end of a terrace of similarly respectable houses. Benjamin walked slowly the length of the street and back again, unobtrusively examining its facade as he passed, wondering if the building really was Vienna’s prime den of iniquity or whether the friends who’d assured him of this were even now doubled up with mirth as they anticipated the voluble indignation of the below-stairs maids. Earlier, he’d passed a few street vendors en route to the main thoroughfare – a broom-squire laden with every manner of brush in creation, a shoeshine woman, a scissors sharpener. Now the street was empty apart from two soberly dressed matrons who passed by on the other side darting quick, contemptuous looks in his direction. Benjamin examined his hands. The doctor’s insistence that he set out immediately had hardly given him time to
scrape the dirt from under his nails. He’d never known his employer so frosty, so abrupt. They’d both remained standing throughout the interview. The coins the doctor had tipped on to his desk for expenses were generous, but the gesture seemed almost contemptuous and his mouth was grim as he watched Benjamin laboriously pick them up. There’d been no goodbye, none of the usual pleasantries.

‘I’ll do my best,
Herr Doktor
,’ he said, and meant it, but the doctor merely turned his back and walked to the window, throwing it open to allow half a dozen of the black-splotched butterflies to escape. Benjamin decided he’d better check the cabbages again. The things were getting everywhere – garden, stable, even into the kitchen, where Gudrun spent half the day swatting them with dish rags. They were turning into a veritable plague, though the Talmud had never mentioned butterflies. ‘I’ll go round with the chemicals again tomorrow,’ he promised, and left when the doctor still didn’t respond.