Gretel and the Dark (33 page)

He dozed for a while, waking with his forehead pressed against the blotter. His dream had been vivid, sun-kissed, warm, full of spring sounds – a wood pigeon’s vibrato croon, a cuckoo’s call, the drone of honeybees – and beneath them all the rise and fall of a quiet voice. The sounds of nature faded with the dream. The voice did not, though he still couldn’t distinguish the words. Instead, it grew louder, a melody of few notes that relentlessly drew him into the corridor, up the stairs, along the passage, until he came to the sickroom. Josef pushed open the door and saw Gudrun asleep in a chair by the window.

‘He started to make his way through the maze of backstreets.’

The voice was quite distinct now and easily identifiable as Lilie’s. Josef took a step nearer the sickbed before recoiling. The two were lying wrapped in each other’s arms. With shaking hands he pulled away the quilt. Lilie was all but naked, her skin dappled with the blood that had seeped from Benjamin’s dressings. Gudrun shifted at his cry of anguish, but didn’t wake.

‘After a few hundred yards he came to the lamp where –’ Lilie continued. Josef seized her arm, tearing her from the bed.

‘Let go of me at once!’ she cried. ‘I must stay with him. Don’t you understand? He’ll die if I leave.’

‘Do you love him?’ Josef glared at her.

‘We’ve been through so much that we’re bound together for ever.’

‘But do you love him?’

‘Yes,’ she answered simply.

Josef clenched his fists. ‘And what about you and me?’ His expression darkened. ‘What of your promise?’

‘I’ll keep my word.’ She shrugged. ‘You can do whatever you want to me. I’ll endure anything. Just take me to Linz so that I can –’

‘Endure?’ Josef felt the blood drain from his face. What she was proposing was worse than nothing. ‘You will return to your room immediately,’ he said, through clenched teeth.

‘No.’ Lilie clung to the bed. He was forced to rip her hands free and drag her towards her room.

‘Tomorrow, I’ll have you interned in an institution. Let them listen to your fantasies. As for your paramour, the hospital can have him. If he survives, he’ll never work for me again.’ Throwing her inside, he locked the door. ‘You can go to Hell, the pair of you, as far as I’m concerned.’ He turned away, screwing up his mouth as though chewing a bitter fruit.

‘I will be with Benjamin,’ said Lilie, her voice small but resolute as she walked away down the corridor.

Josef stared at the door. It was still locked. There was the key. He flung it open and ran after Lilie, seizing her arm and pulling her backwards, forcing her into the darkened space. When she began to dissolve on the threshold he pushed at the air, slamming the door so hard that the entire wall shook. This time the key grated as it turned. And Lilie was walking along the corridor away from him, already made small by distance. Josef began to run, his footfalls heavy against the polished wood, but every step widened the gap, until she was little more than a pale shadow, a phantom, an illusion, a creature spun of moonlight.

This time the knocking was so loud and so persistent that Josef finally lifted his head from his hands. He’d been sitting at his
desk for a very long time, had hardly moved since returning heart-sore from Gmunden. He was chilled to the bone and his legs were stiff from lack of use. Plates of untouched food surrounded him, and there were more trays on the floor. A carafe of wine lay on its side, spilling dark liquid on to his papers. Groaning with effort, he rose and shuffled over to unlock the door.

‘I know you told me not to disturb you, but I must.’ Gudrun waved a telegram in his face. ‘It’s for you,
Herr Doktor
Breuer. It’s from your wife. She’ll be home by nightfall.’ She blushed. ‘Normally, I wouldn’t open other people’s correspondence, you understand, but in the circumstances … not speaking or eating, never venturing out … You haven’t been yourself, sir.’ She waited, her eyes raised expectantly.

‘You did the right thing,’ Josef said, with an air of resignation. He glanced at the flimsy paper. ‘Nightfall, you say?’

‘If not sooner.’ Gudrun flung wide the curtains, rubbed dust from the sill with a corner of apron and started piling up plates in the crook of her arm, clicking her tongue in exasperation. ‘At least now everything will go back to normal. How I’m to get the house straight before then, I don’t know. Were these important?’ She draped the wet papers along the back of a chair and awarded the model of the inner ear a desultory polish. ‘That’s a little better.’

‘The girl …’ Josef began, knowing Gudrun would overwork her, given the chance.

‘Yes, but where can we find one quickly?’

He tried again. ‘Lilie’s –’

‘I know, I know, there must be fresh flowers for the house too. Someone will have to go to the market.’

‘But I didn’t –’

‘We can’t wait. With everything topsy-turvy I need immediate
help.
Frau Doktor
Breuer mustn’t see her home in this state. What a
Schlampe
she’d think me!’ She sighed. ‘Heaven knows, I tried, but –’

‘You did your best, Gudrun. No blame will be apportioned to you. When you were left to look after the house it was never intended that you’d have me here, never mind the others.’

‘Others?’ Gudrun’s brow furrowed. She frowned as if trying to remember elusive faces, before making a dismissive gesture with her free hand. ‘It was always too much for me,
Herr Doktor
, even when the house was empty. The truth must be faced: I’m not as young as I once was.’

‘None of us is.’ Josef padded towards the window and stared into the street. ‘Older, but no wiser. Alas, our dreams continue to haunt us.’

Gudrun looked at him doubtfully. ‘About the house,
Herr Doktor
… I have a niece, a very willing and hard-working young
Frau
. With proper direction, she’d help me set things to rights in no time at all. And perhaps one of her young brothers could tidy up outside.’ She waited for an answer, adding, when none was forthcoming: ‘
Frau Doktor
Breuer will not be pleased to see her garden so neglected.’

‘Do whatever you think best, Gudrun. I will see to it that he’s generously recompensed.’ The words were oddly familiar. They sent a small chill up his back, though he could see nothing in them that should cause the least alarm. Perhaps this sensation was what the French scientist Émile Boirac meant by the term ‘
déjà vu
’ – he’d never really understood the concept, and his erstwhile friend Sigmund had dismissed such eerie feelings as simply
das Unheimliche
. The uncanny. What did it matter? It meant nothing.

For the first time in days, Josef managed to rouse himself
from his apathy and plodded outside. He stood breathing in the frost-tinged autumn air. Gudrun’s comments were justified: the garden was unkempt. Docks and nettles were winning the eternal battle between Man and Nature in Mathilde’s herb patch. Even the bushes on which the weekly washerwoman spread laundry to dry had become leggy and looked dead at the crown. He nipped off a single remaining flower spray and breathed in its fragrance.

‘There’s rosemary,’ he muttered, ‘that’s for remembrance.’ The smell awoke in Josef a troubling sense of something too soon forgotten, but whatever it was continued to elude him. He wandered further along the path and saw bindweed choking the fruit cage. Couch grass and moss had invaded the vegetable plot. And beneath the old walnut tree the fragile autumn crocus struggled for life and light through a heap of mouldering nuts. Everything was falling into decay.

The outbuildings were also in poor shape. Mathilde had, of course, retained the carriage for her daily excursions around Lake Traunsee, and without the horse the stable was a chilly, sour-smelling place. He braved the crumbling stairs to reach the attic where the children once played. Now it contained only a half-empty feather mattress inhabited by mice. Two ancient saddles hung from the rafters. A mildewed book lay abandoned on a window ledge, an ancient copy of
Kinder-und Hausmärchen
and he paused to flick through the pages. It fell open at ‘
Hänsel und Gretel’.
Josef smiled. It had been Margarethe’s favourite childhood story, the volume no doubt hidden here because Mathilde so strongly disapproved of the Brothers Grimm. She considered their tales quite unfit for children. Witches, ovens, talking animals, small frissons of fear – he’d never really understood her objections to these things, which
seemed so natural a part of childhood. Josef glanced over his shoulder, then turned the pages until he came to his own favourite, ‘
Der Froschkönig
’. ‘In the good old times,’ it began, ‘when wishes often came true –’ He smiled rather sadly, for ‘The Frog-King’ was a story where true love looked beyond mere outward appearances. The book closed with a dull thud that sent a cloud of dust spiralling upwards.

There was nothing to do but return to the house, its rooms shrouded in dust sheets. He went upstairs, visiting each bedroom in turn, lingering when he reached the one at the back of the house, reserved for guests. A solitary white butterfly beat its wings against the windowpane; released, it fluttered towards the stable and clung to the old rose tree growing over the entrance. Josef could not bring himself to leave this room, where a faint, sweet smell brought to mind those months when he’d cared for Bertha Pappenheim, her eager wit, that storm cloud of dark hair, those smouldering eyes, her small and delicate form. What could life have been, if he hadn’t forsaken his little Anna O? He’d justified his decision by speaking of responsibilities, his marriage, his work, his children …

She’d spoken only of love. ‘Love will not come to me again. I’ll vegetate like a plant in a cellar, without light.’

So many years had gone by that another face than hers was attempting to superimpose itself, a different constellation of features, the eyes turquoise, the hair like spun gold. Such are the tricks that age plays on us, thought Josef, shuffling back to his study. The house would soon be a furore of mops and pans. Perhaps it was time to venture forth and re-enter his old life. Go to Café Nihilism, mingle with the great and the good – and, with luck, the not so good – and see if the rumours of a new wave of anti-Semitism, rife before he left for Gmunden, were to
be believed. The thought of company, of bright conversation, was certainly appealing. Josef wondered about the advisability of requesting hot water for a bath, decided against it, and was about to attend to his appearance when he heard the distant sound of the doorbell. Moments later Gudrun entered the room, bearing a visiting card on the old brass salver.

‘Frau Heidemann’s maid, requesting to know when it will be convenient to call upon you. She says the pain in her mistress’s chest is worse than ever.’

Josef bit back an angry retort. Why couldn’t these people wait? Tonight, the last thing he wanted was to have a batch of ailments deposited in his lap by patients, especially those idle few that regarded visiting their physician as part of the social round. Frau Heidemann was a stupid woman. Her heart pains were purely imaginary and if – Compassion took over. He stopped himself. Perhaps her heart pain, like his, was caused by the unrequited dreams of love trapped there.

‘It’s a lonely place,’ he muttered, ‘Vienna, this city of dreams.’

It is many years before the Pied Piper comes back for the other children. Though his music has been silenced, still thousands are forced to follow him, young, old, large, small, everyone … even the ogres wearing ten-league boots and cracking whips, even their nine-headed dogs. We are the rats in exodus now and the Earth shrinks from the touch of our feet. Spring leaves a bitter taste. All day, rain and people fall; all night, nixies wail from the lakes. The blood-coloured bear sniffs at our heels. I keep my eyes on the road, counting white pebbles, fearful of where this last gingerbread trail is leading us.

Has the spell worked? I think so: coils of mist lap at our ankles, rising to mute all sounds, swallowing everyone around us whole. When the moment comes, we run blind, dragging the Shadow behind us, stopping only when my outstretched hand meets the rough bark of pine trunks. One step, two, and we’re inside the enchanted forest, the air threaded with icy witch-breaths. The day collapses around us. Phantom sentries swoop from the trees demanding names but our teeth guard the answers so they turn away, flapping eastward in search of the cloud-shrouded moon. Roots coil, binding us to the forest floor, where we crouch in silence punctuated by the distant clatter of stags shedding their antlers.

We wake, uneaten. Every trace of mist has been sucked away by the sun. The landscape seems empty. We haven’t come far: I can see where the road runs but there’s no sign of anything
moving along it. It’s quiet until a cuckoo calls from deep within the trees.

‘Listen.’

‘Kukułka,’ he says, shielding his eyes as he searches the topmost branches.

‘Kuckuck,’ I tell him. He still talks funny. ‘She’s saying Kuckuck!’

He gives his usual jerky shrug. ‘At least we’re free.’

‘Only if we keep moving. Come on.’

The Shadow whimpers but we force it upright and support it between us, moving slowly along the edge of the trees until we come to fields where more ravens are busy gouging out the eyes of young wheat. Beyond, newly buried potatoes shiver beneath earth ridges. Cabbages swell like lines of green heads. When we kneel to gnaw at their skulls, the leaves stick in our throats.

We carry on walking, feet weighted by the sticky clay, until the Shadow crumples. I pull at its arm. ‘It’s not safe here. We must go further. If they notice we’ve gone –’ Keep going. Sooner or later kindly dwarves or a soft-hearted giant’s wife must take pity on us. But fear has become too familiar a companion to act as a spur for long. Besides, we’re carrying the Shadow now. Its head lolls, the wide eyes are empty, and its feet trail behind, making two furrows in the soft mud. It could be the death of us.

‘We should go on alone.’

‘No,’ he pants. ‘I promised not to leave –’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Then you go. Save yourself.’

Daniel knows I won’t go on without him. Besides, I’d never have found him if it hadn’t been for this miserable creature. ‘No good standing here talking,’ I snap, hooking my arm under
the Shadow’s shoulder and wondering how something thin as a knife blade can be so heavy.

Another rest, this time perched on the mossy elbow of an oak tree, attempting to chew a handful of last year’s acorns. Only the sprouted ones stay down. The Shadow lies where we dropped it, facing the sky, though I notice its eyes are completely white now. Without warning it gives a cry, the loudest noise it’s ever made, followed by a gasp and a long juddering out-breath. I finish spitting out the last of the acorns. The Shadow isn’t doing its usual twitching and jumping; it doesn’t even move when I push my foot into its rubbery chest. After a moment, I gather handfuls of oak leaves and cover its face.

Daniel tries to stop me. ‘Why are you doing that?’

‘It’s dead.’

‘No!’ he cries, but I can see the relief as he pulls himself on to his knees to check. ‘After enduring so much, still we die like dogs …
pod płotem
… next to a fence, under a hedge.’ He closes the Shadow’s eyes. ‘
Baruch dayan emet
.’ It must be a prayer: his lips go on moving but no sound emerges.

‘But we’re not going to die.’ I tug at his clothes. ‘Shadows never last long. You always knew it was hopeless. Now we can travel faster, just you and me.’

He shakes me off. ‘The ground here is soft. Help me dig a grave.’

‘Won’t. There’s no time. We must keep going. It’s already past midday.’ I watch him hesitate. ‘Nothing will eat a shadow. There’s no meat on it.’ When he doesn’t move I trudge away, forcing myself not to look back. Eventually, he catches up.

The path continues to weave between field and forest and, once, we catch sight of a village but decide it’s still too near the
black magician’s stronghold to be safe. Finally, even the sun starts to abandon us and our progress slows until I know we can drag ourselves no further. By now the forest has thinned; before us stretches an enormous field with neat rows as far as the eye can see. We’ve pushed deep between the bushy plants before I realize it’s a field of beans.

‘What does it matter?’ Daniel asks wearily.

‘Cecily said you go mad if you fall asleep under flowering beans.’

‘No flowers,’ he says curtly.

He’s wrong, though. A few of the topmost buds are already unfurling white petals, ghostly in the twilight, and in the morning it’s obvious we should have pressed on, for hundreds of flowers have opened overnight, dancing like butterflies on the breeze, spreading their perfume on the warming air.

‘Let me rest for a bit longer,’ he whispers, his cheek pressed against the mud, refusing to move, not even noticing a black beetle ponderously climbing over his hand. ‘No one will find us here.’

His bruises are changing colour. Where they were purple-black, now they are tinged with green. When he asks for a story, I remember what Cecily told me about two children who came out of a magic wolf-pit. They had green skin too.

‘It was in England,’ I tell him, ‘at harvest-time, a very long time ago. A boy and a girl appeared suddenly, as if by magic, on the edge of the cornfield. Their skin was bright green and they wore strange clothing.’ I look down at myself and laugh. ‘When they spoke, nobody could understand their fairy language. The harvesters took them to the Lord’s house, where they were looked after, but they would eat nothing at all, not
a thing, until one day they saw a servant carrying away a bundle of beanstalks. They ate those, but never the actual beans.’

‘Why didn’t they eat the beans like anyone else?’

‘Cecily said the souls of the dead live in the beans. If you ate one you might be eating your mother or your father.’

‘That’s plain silly.’

‘I’m only telling you what she said. It’s a true story, but if you don’t want me to –’

‘No, go on,’ he says, and I notice in spite of his superior tone he’s looking uneasily at the bean flowers. ‘What happened to the green children?’

‘After they ate the beanstalks they grew stronger and learned to speak English. They told the Lord about their beautiful homeland, where poverty was unknown and everyone lived for ever. The girl said that while playing one day they’d heard the sound of sweet music and followed it across pastureland and into a dark cave –’

‘Like your story of the Pied Piper?’

‘Yes.’ I hesitate, remembering that in Cecily’s story the boy died and the little girl grew up to be an ordinary wife. ‘I don’t remember the rest.’

He’s silent for a moment, then looks at me. ‘What are we going to do? Where can we go? Who can we turn to? Nobody has ever helped us before.’

‘They said help was coming. They said it was on its way.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘Yes. That’s why we must keep walking towards them.’ Beneath the bruises, his face is chalk-white again. His arm doesn’t look right and he winces whenever he tries to move it. There’s fresh blood at the corners of his mouth. And suddenly I’m so angry I might explode. ‘I wish I could kill him.’ My fists
clench so hard my nails dig in. I want to scream and spit and kick things. He continues to look questioningly at me. ‘I mean, the man who started it all. The Monster. If it hadn’t been for him –’

‘Didn’t you hear what everyone was whispering? He’s already dead.’ Again, the small shrug. ‘Anyway, my father said if it hadn’t been him there’d have been someone else just like him.’

‘And maybe then it would have been someone else here, not us.’

He smiles and squeezes my hand. ‘And we would never have met.’

‘Yes, we would,’ I say fiercely. ‘Somehow, somewhere – like in the old stories, we would meet, because we must. And still I wish it could have been me that killed him.’

‘Too big,’ he says weakly. ‘And too powerful.’

I knuckle my eyes. ‘Then I wish I’d been even bigger. I would have stepped on him or squashed him like a fly. Or I wish he’d been even smaller. Then I could have knocked him over and cut off his head or stabbed him in the heart.’ We sit in silence for a while. I think about all the ways you could kill someone shrunk to Tom Thumb size. ‘We ought to go now.’

‘Let me sleep.’

‘Walk now. Sleep later.’

‘All right. But first tell me a story – one of your really long ones – about a boy and a girl who kill an ogre.’

I think for a moment. My stories are slowly coming back to me, but none seems bad enough until I realize there were other circumstances in which an ogre really could be killed. It was easy enough. I’d seen it done. And now the smoke ghosts catch up, settling around us and coating every leaf and flower with
anonymous ash. Erika, Annalies, Lena, Cecily, Hanna … Only their voices identify them, frantically repeating what messages they must before we breathe them in, using them up by making their dust our own.

‘Yes, life is hard,’ whispers Erika, ‘but knowing about other people, other civilizations, other ways of living, other places – that’s your escape route, a magical journey. Once you know about these things, no matter what happens, your mind can create stories to take you anywhere you want to go.’

I sit up. Anywhere?

‘Anywhere and any-when.’

‘My grandfather would do anything for anybody,’ adds Hanna. ‘If anyone asked him for help, he’d give it unstintingly. He was renowned for it.’ And, almost as an afterthought: ‘He never lost his eye for a pretty face.’

All of a sudden, I’m excited. Daniel is still holding my hand. I give it a sharp tug. ‘Get up. From now on I shall only tell you my story while we’re walking. The moment you stop, I shan’t say another word.’ But his shoulder hurts. He won’t move, so I start my story anyway, letting him rest, while all around us the bean flowers flutter and dance in the sunshine like butterflies about to take flight. If Cecily is right, it could be in these very ones that the vanished people have taken refuge. There are thousands, millions – one for every stolen soul. Already there are too many to count and yet all the time more are opening their fragile petals to the soft breeze.

We try chewing beanstalks, but they’re stringy with juice like pale-green blood. The tender young leaves at the top of the stalks are better, even though their taste reminds me of
Bohneneintopf
, the nasty bean stew Greet forced me to eat.

When night comes, it’s almost too cold to sleep. We curl
close together and I continue whispering my story into the darkness, only stopping when Daniel’s whimpering tells me he’s dreaming. At first light we stumble on until we reach a cattle trough at the edge of the next field. Both of us drink, in spite of the squirming insects and the water-boatmen bugs skating along the surface. The earth beneath the trough is soft and wet. Daniel kneels, digging for worms with his good hand. I try to eat one but it wriggles at the back of my throat, making me retch.

‘You’ve got to put your head back, like this,’ Daniel says, and demonstrates with a fat pink one. He swallows hard and rubs his throat. ‘See? Then they go straight down.’

I wipe my mouth on my sleeve. ‘I’m not hungry for worms.’

He shrugs and digs some more. After another rest we move faster for a while, following a cart track across a stretch of rough land bordered by more forest and broken up by enormous bramble bushes humped like sleeping whales. We argue about my story: Daniel thinks I should make Benjamin taller and cleverer.

‘That’s stupid. He’s only a gardener.’

‘I don’t want to stay a gardener all my life,’ he says indignantly. ‘I’m going to be a professor, like my father.’

‘Who said you were Benjamin?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘I must be. You’re Lilie, aren’t you? You’ve made her beautiful
and
clever.’

‘She has to be, stupid, so Josef helps her find the monster in Linz before it’s too late to change everything.’

‘Well, at least you could stop the old hag pushing Benjamin around.’

I scowl at him. ‘It’s
my
story. If you don’t like it, I won’t tell you any more.’

We walk in silence for a while. The land dips into a valley with a road running alongside a small river, both making for a distant lake with a village on its far side. I look at the sun and wonder if we’re still going the right way … and who it is we are seeking.

As we reach the road, Daniel says: ‘I wouldn’t mind being a gardener. At least you’d always have plenty to eat. Potatoes, carrots, peppers … apples, apricots –’

‘Cherries,’ I say, closing my eyes to bring back the taste. ‘Strawberries.’

‘Cabbage. Beetroot.’

‘Ugh.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d tasted my grandmother’s
goł
bki.
’ Daniel smacks his lips. ‘It means little pigeons. They’re parcels of meat and onions wrapped in cabbage leaves. And we’ll need to grow plenty of beetroots for making
barszcz –’