Gretel and the Dark (8 page)

Benjamin swallowed hard. Either the woman was mad or there were unguessed horrors being perpetrated in the backstreets of this city. Hugo met his eyes.

‘Gehenna,’ he said, softly. ‘Hell. Sheol. Hades.’

Benjamin nodded. He needed a drink, but every tankard and glass was empty. No, what he needed was to get out of here. Without another word, he stood up and stumbled towards the door, followed by curses and catcalls as he fell into tables and tripped over chairs.

A hand descended on his shoulder as he reached the entrance. Benjamin pulled free, spinning round and bringing up his fists. The size of the man who’d accosted him put paid to any ideas of successfully fighting his way out of trouble, but he kept them up all the same. Two steps behind the huge man, tucked into his shadow, lurked the sharp-featured fellow with the long nose. Away from the tavern’s lights he resembled a weasel, but his authority became evident when he stepped forward. He flicked his skinny fingers at Benjamin’s bunched fists.

‘No need for that.’

‘What are you after?’ demanded Benjamin, sobering up fast. ‘I’ve got no money.’

‘Judging by the state of you, any you did have is about to be pissed into the nearest gutter.’ He drew close enough for Benjamin to smell peppermint on his breath, only faintly masking the odour of fried fish. One bony finger shot forward to prod his sternum. ‘You’re keeping bad company, Benjamin. Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been up to.’ The finger jabbed again. ‘Your fat, shit-stirring friend imagines he knows everything, but let me tell you, nothing goes on in this city without me hearing about it. Nothing. I’ve got my eye on you, boy. Go home, unless you fancy sobering up in the cells.’

‘You’re police,’ said Benjamin, only now taking in the bulky man’s grey uniform, the grenade insignia. ‘But I haven’t done anything.’

‘Wallow with pigs and expect to get dirty. My advice to you is – keep away from Besser and his kind.’

‘All right, sir.’ In spite of the lingering emphasis on ‘pigs’, Benjamin deliberately kept his voice even, his demeanour reasonable. He reached for the door. ‘I’ll go straight home, sir.’

‘Give my regards to
Herr Doktor
Breuer.’

Glancing back, Benjamin saw that both men had already been swallowed by the crowded tavern. He started to make his way through the maze of backstreets, wondering how much, if anything, they knew about Lilie. After a few hundred yards he came to the lamp where he’d seen the clown-faced whores earlier. They were still eager for business, but to his surprise both suddenly turned their backs on him. One minute he was upright, staring towards the soft glow of the
Altstadt
and wishing himself home, the next he was lying on wet cobbles
regarding the Seven Sisters high in the heavens. Pain rushed at him, wild as a runaway carthorse. He groaned, reaching a hand towards his aching skull, the movement interrupted by the large boot stamping on his wrist. Benjamin shrieked.

‘Keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you.’ The voice seemed to come from a long way away and was accompanied by the distinctive aroma of Turkish tobacco. ‘Gentlemen’s clubs aren’t for you or your ilk. Neither are the women in them. Understand?’

‘Ye-
es
.’ The man released his wrist and what felt like a sledgehammer crashed into Benjamin’s ribs. He rolled on to his side, trying to escape. The next blow was unerringly aimed at his kidneys, landing on the side of his back, between his ribs and pelvic bone. Black chrysanthemums flowered in mid-air and he felt himself falling into a deep chasm. The small hands searching his pockets brought him to himself.

‘Get his coat,’ whispered a voice, close to his ear. ‘Good cloth. We can sell that easy as anything.’

‘Clear off.’ Benjamin struggled on to his knees, pushing them away. ‘Fucking old whores.’

‘Fucking drunkard,’ came their sharp retort as he doubled over, puking.

Gritting his teeth, Benjamin finally got himself upright. His pockets, like his stomach, were now empty; they’d taken every last Heller of the doctor’s money, his pen, even the used handkerchief.

I stand outside the door, listening to Elke complaining to Papa about my naughtiness. She’s a big fat liar. I didn’t steal any
cake
. And I never said bad words or scratched her
arm
.

‘Yes, yes,’ he says, in his voice which means
No
, ‘I understand how trying it is for you, but we must take into account –’

Elke interrupts him.

‘Sad things happen to many children. The girl still needs discipline.’

‘That’s for me to decide.’ A pause. Then he says: ‘Was there anything else?’ I can tell he wants her to go away but Elke hasn’t finished. She’s like my old clockwork sailor. Wind him up and nothing could stop him beating his drum – at least until Greet stepped on him by mistake.

‘The Devil makes work for idle hands. Your child needs something to occupy her. Why isn’t she at school? It isn’t right. You should send her to school.’

This time the silence is much longer and full of the sort of crackles that hang in the air before thunderstorms. I hold my breath. If Greet were here we’d be hiding under the stairs so the lightning didn’t burn us to cinders.

‘My daughter will go to school after the summer.’ I hear him push back his chair. ‘Thank you, Frau Schmidt, for coming to me. I’ll talk to Krysta –’

‘Talk? You’ll
talk
to her?’ Elke’s voice rises. ‘Isn’t she going to
be punished? That girl needs her backside warmed. If she was my daughter –’

And I hug myself with delight for here comes the thunder.

‘Enough!’ roars Papa. ‘She’s not your daughter.’
Clump
,
clump
, go his big boots as he paces the floor. His shadow falls across the crack in the door and I step back, holding my breath. ‘Like any other child,’ he continues, more quietly, ‘Krysta needs time to adjust to becoming motherless. There may be further minor difficulties. If you feel unable to accommodate them –’

‘I can manage,’ says Elke sullenly.

‘Excellent,’ says Papa. ‘That will be all …
for now
.’

I scuttle back to my hiding place. Lottie wants me to tell her about Hansel and Gretel. It’s her favourite story. Last time we pushed Elke and her ugly old friends into the oven. This time we make sure they are nearly dead by forcing them to eat poisoned bread first. Then we blow on the fire until the stove glows red-hot. The noise they make hammering on the door with their fists is like the rattle of the saucepan when Greet made John-in-the-Pocket. She said it was John trying to get out before he was boiled alive but Papa told me it was really only the pudding basin jumping up and down on the trivet. When everything goes quiet again we carefully open the oven door and see only scraps of burnt paper. I throw them into the air, letting their words float away on the wind.

Papa asks me later about the things Elke reported to him. ‘Do you steal from the kitchen, Krysta?’ I shake my head. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you. Nothing? All right. Now, did you scratch Elke?’

I open my eyes very wide. ‘No, Papa.’

‘What about the bad words? She says you called her rude names.’

‘What sort of rude names?’ I ask, cautiously. But he doesn’t answer and I can tell he doesn’t really believe her. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, Papa. She’s being nasty.’

‘Even so,’ Papa says, ‘I’d like you to tell Elke you’re sorry for upsetting her. Will you do that for me?’

I scowl and stick out my bottom lip. ‘Why?’

‘Because,’ he says wearily, ‘I need her to keep an eye on you while I’m at work.’

‘Why can’t I come to the infirmary with you?’

‘Don’t be silly, Krysta.’ He brings out a brown-paper bag. ‘Look what I’ve brought for you – some lovely black cherries.’

Papa only gives me the cherries when I promise to apologize. I take Lottie into the garden, where we count the stones and see how far I can spit them:

‘
Eins, zwei, Polizei,

Three, four, an officer,

Five, six, an old witch … ’

Elke finds a knot in my hair and yanks it out with the comb.

‘Aw! Aw! Don’t, you’re hurting me.’

She starts braiding, pulling so hard that it feels as if every hair is being pulled up by its roots
ping
,
ping
,
ping
, like Greet thinning out the radishes. ‘Stop that silly noise,’ she hisses, close to my ear, ‘or I’ll give you something to really snivel about.’ She ties a red ribbon at the end of each plait, screwing up her mouth until it looks like the twisted end of a sausage, and then scrapes the hair away from my face, securing it with matching hair slides.

‘Take them out. They’re too tight.’

‘Leave them alone. Finish your milk. Hurry. I’ve got better things to do than dance attendance on you all morning.’

‘Won’t.’ I push my cup over and watch the milk run along the table, a big white river carrying with it rocks made of crumbs that disappears over the edge like a creamy waterfall. The cup rolls after it, bounces on the lino and breaks into several pieces.

‘You little –’ Elke draws back her hand and slaps my leg so hard she leaves red imprints of her fingers. I try to remember the bad words Greet said under her breath when the fire went out or the bread wouldn’t rise.

‘
Hure!
’ I yell. ‘
Miststück!
’

Elke is outraged. ‘What did you call me?’

‘Slut. Slut. Slut. Bitch. Bitch. Bastard.’ I rack my brains for the one Greet shrieked at the maid next door. ‘
Nutte!
’

Elke’s face turns the colour of my spilled milk. This time she grabs me, holding my shoulder and spinning me around to land a dozen blows on my bottom. My flailing arms aren’t long enough to reach her but I manage to bite her hand. Screaming and hiccupping with fury, I suddenly need to go to the bathroom. It’s too late and I don’t care. I’m still kicking and trying to hit her back while the wee runs down my legs.

One of the other witches pokes her head around the door. ‘Everything all right in here, Elke?’

‘See what she’s done? Look at this mess. And she’s pissed herself. Dirty little creature isn’t right in the head. She ought to be over there with the rest of the savages.’ She turns on me. ‘Go and wash yourself, you filthy animal.’

Lottie says we should find Papa, but the gates to the zoo are closed. Because I fall asleep hiding inside the flowering currant bush, Elke gets to him first. This time his face is very serious.

‘Krysta, Elke tells me you did not apologize, even though you promised me you would. To make matters worse, this morning you deliberately broke some crockery. What’s more,’
and here he looks away, so I know what’s coming, ‘she tells me you’re no longer clean in your personal habits. Is this true?’

‘She kept shouting and hitting me.’ I start to cry, but watch him between my fingers. ‘I couldn’t help it … I was so frightened, Papa.’

His eyes widen. ‘Elke
hit
you?’

‘Lots and lots of times.’ I show him the marks on my leg and tell him how much it hurts to sit.

‘What started all this? Why was she shouting?’

‘She wanted me to hurry and I dropped my cup. D-d-didn’t mean to.’

‘I see.’

Emboldened by his grim expression, I add: ‘I hate Elke,
sie ist ein gemeines Stück
.’

‘Krysta!’ Papa looks shocked. ‘Wherever did you learn to use such coarse language?’ He waits, but I close my mouth and put my hand over it. ‘I can only suppose you’ve overheard the men here talking among themselves. I’ll have a word with them. Elke is not …
that
. However, she is clearly unfit to look after a better class of child.’

Elke is sent away. I stand behind Papa, peeping round him to smile at her. Very early next morning he says I must come to the infirmary with him until a new lady is found to look after me. None of the women here will do it. He sighs over my hair and keeps starting again but the plaits still come out kinky and uneven.

‘I only want Greet to do my hair. Send for Greet.’

‘Greet can’t come here.’

‘Why not? Why not?’ I repeatedly kick the table leg so that the breakfast things jump and clatter. Papa’s coffee cup falls on to its side. ‘I want Greet. I want Greet.’

‘That’s enough,’ he says. ‘Carry on like this and I shall start to wonder if Elke was telling the truth.’ I stop immediately and stick my thumb in my mouth. He sighs. ‘She was right about one thing. You’re far too big to be doing that. What will they say when you go to school?’

‘Don’t like school. Won’t go.’

‘It’s about time you learned to do as you’re told, Krysta. Now fetch a book and whatever else you want.’

His voice is very tired and I’m sad that he’s unhappy again so I get my things together quickly. Going to the infirmary is exciting: everything’s painted white; there are a great many closed doors; and I can hear someone crying. I hope he’ll let me wear a nurse’s uniform and bandage people up. But Papa takes me into a little room with a narrow bed, a table and a chair. In one corner is a horrible enamel bucket thing with a lid instead of a lavatory.

‘Stay here until I come back,’ he says.

‘But I want to help you.’

‘You can’t, Krysta. Nobody can help me.’ He does a bit of his hand-washing without water. ‘Promise me you’ll stay in here until I come for you. Promise?’

I nod. ‘Yes, Papa.’

‘Good girl.’

I stand with my ear to the wood, listening to his footsteps die away. Then I count to a hundred before opening the door a crack. First some nurses swish past, then two skinny old men in stripy overalls pushing a squeaky trolley. When they’ve gone, I creep back down the corridor to see what Papa’s doing. They must cure sick animal-people here, too: something is making a terrible noise that sounds like cats at the end of winter, which is when Greet says they get up to no good. I don’t open the
door where the noise is in case they escape, but there are only empty beds in the others. At the end of the corridor I find an office with Papa sitting at a desk signing papers. He jumps up, looking cross.

‘I am very disappointed in you, Krysta. Very disappointed. Doesn’t a promise mean anything to you? We’ll have to discuss this later. There’s no time now.’ Grabbing my arm, he marches me back to the little room. ‘As I can’t trust you, the door must be locked. I’ll come for you at midday so that we can have lunch together.’

I kick the door and beat on it with my fists. ‘I HATE YOU.’ Every single one of my new crayons breaks when I throw the packet on the floor.

‘Bad Charlotte!’ I pick her up by the hair.

When we’ve both finished crying about the crayons, I notice the bars on the window are quite far apart, very like the ones on the coal chute at home. Getting out is as easy as escaping from the cellar when Greet locked me down there, except that I fall on to the path and graze my knees. I keep close to the wall, bent double so Papa doesn’t catch sight of me from his office. I can’t see any zoo animals. There are flower beds, and a big aviary in the distance, but the wire’s buckled and there are no birds in it. I wonder if the animal-people ate them.

At the back of the building the worm boy is pulling up tufts of grass and scrabbling in the dirt with his fingers. This close I can see that he’s very skinny with a sharp nose and big red ears like an imp in one of my storybooks. He has really short black hair that he keeps scratching, and nobody makes him wash his neck.

‘Hello.’

The boy scowls. ‘Go away.’

‘I saw you eating a worm the other day. Yuk.’

‘So what? I ate lots more this morning.’ He says his words in a funny way.

‘Do you know what little boys are made of?’

‘Go away. I’m busy working.’

‘That’s silly. Little boys don’t work.’ After a few moments I chant the rhyme Greet taught me:

‘What are little boys made of?

What are little boys made of?

Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails – and worms –

That’s what little boys are made of.’

‘I already told you to go away.’ He is very carefully pulling a fat pink worm out of the earth. It breaks in half and he quickly digs down to catch the rest of it.

‘You can’t tell me what to do.’ I remember what Elke said. ‘You should be at school. Why aren’t you at school?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘What’s your name?’ After I’ve asked him three times, he tells me it’s Daniel.

‘I’m Krysta. This is Lottie. My papa’s a doctor. What does yours do?’

‘He’s a professor.’

‘Oh.’ I look at his ragged clothes. ‘You don’t look like a professor’s little boy.’

‘Go somewhere else and play with your silly doll.’

‘What does worm taste like?’

Daniel narrows his eyes and looks fierce. ‘It’s my worm. You’re not having any.’ He opens his mouth, throwing back his head so that the dirty pink worm, both halves still wriggling, goes straight down his throat.

‘Yuk. Yuk. Yuk. Are you so hungry?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Didn’t you eat your breakfast?’

‘It wasn’t enough.’

‘They tried to make me eat an egg. I don’t like eggs. I wanted ice cream. Papa said no, for breakfast I must eat what everyone else eats. I’m
never
going to do what everyone else does.
Never.
I don’t like soft bread or rye bread or pumpernickel. I don’t like sausage or cheese or meat or potato.’

Daniel keeps digging but I see him lick his lips. ‘What
do
you like?’

‘Ice cream. Strawberries. Cherries. Sugared almonds. Pancakes, but only sometimes. Marshmallow. Greet says I live on fresh air.’

He squints at me. ‘People can’t live on fresh air, stupid.’

‘Don’t call me stupid. I’ll hit you.’

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. You’re like a big baby with your stupid doll and your stupid frilly frock and your stupid ribbons.’ Daniel dives on a worm, a very small one. ‘Anyway, hit me, and I’ll hit you back.’

‘Boys mustn’t hit girls. It’s not nice.’