Gretel and the Dark (15 page)

‘I’ll lay him out, if that’s what you mean. As for the little one, she’ll need some black clothing.’ She puts her hand on my shoulder.

‘Won’t wear black.’ I don’t want to be made into a witch.

‘Your days of “Won’t do this”, “Won’t do that” are over,’ announces Ursel, looking pleased. ‘No one to baby you now. Girls in orphanages do as they’re told without backchat. And they grow up fast.’

‘For pity’s sake, Ursel,’ says the witch, ‘no need to be so callous. Her father’s just died.’

‘Papa isn’t dead.’

‘As a doornail,’ says Ursel. ‘No good pretending otherwise.’

‘Stupid fat witch.’ She raises her hand and I back away. ‘My
papa isn’t dead.’ Then Lottie asks what we’ll do now Papa is dead. Who will look after us? I shake her. She asks again and I pull her hair. ‘He isn’t dead.’ Lottie starts arguing. She says Papa loves Mama better than me and he’s gone away to find her. ‘Papa isn’t dead,’ I shout. ‘He isn’t, he isn’t.’ Lottie keeps telling me that Papa’s dead and we are all alone. She won’t stop, even when I hold her by the feet and swing her at the wall, so I scream to cover the sound of her voice and keep screaming until everyone in the room has their hands over their ears except Lottie and me. Uncle Hraben bends down to talk to me. I scratch his face. I run round the room spitting and yelling very bad words. Lottie’s right: now everyone’s gone away – Mama, Papa, Greet – and there are only nasty people left. I hit Witch Schwitter and kick Metzger’s legs. Herta tries to hold my arms behind my back. Ursel grabs me by the hair and slaps me again. I bite her hand and spit out the blood.

The witch raises her wand and taps me.

It is suddenly very quiet. I am shaking from head to toe. I feel like a blancmange not quite set.

‘That’s enough,’ she says, and pushes me into the other room. ‘Sit down, and if you want to talk or cry, do it more quietly. Ursel will bring you warm milk and honey. I want you to drink every drop. Afterwards you can have a little nap.’

‘That one’s a bloody handful,’ someone says. It’s Metzger. I can tell by his crackly voice. ‘Still –’ He laughs. ‘I dare say someone will enjoy taming her when the time comes.’

Uncle Hraben laughs too. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘The child’s backward. Abnormal. She’ll never fit into proper society. She needs putting away.’

I think that’s Herta talking, but Witch Schwitter has taken out a comb and is pretending to tidy my hair when really she’s
casting a sleeping spell. When I wake up it’s getting dark and this isn’t my bed. Green curtains hang at the window and I can smell polish. There’s a big cross facing me with Jesus nailed on it. Below his feet is a statue of Mother Mary, all in blue, beside a box of candles. I’m lying under a quilt, still wearing my clothes, and Lottie is tucked in beside me. I push her away.

People are talking somewhere nearby. I recognize Witch Schwitter’s voice, and Uncle Hraben’s, but there’s another deep, bear-growly man, as well as a lady who bites her sentences into little bits and spits them out in the wrong order. I creep on to the landing to look down but it’s all shadowy below and I can’t see anyone. The words squirm out of the darkness like imps in a horrible dream.

‘Impossible,’ the growly man is saying. ‘Totally impossible. The behaviour described to me suggests some mental aberration approaching mania. Psychiatric treatment is indicated.’

‘Crazy, you mean. We guessed that.’ That’s nasty Ursel’s voice.

Growly man coughs. ‘I believe she could be a suitable subject for convulsive therapy – some interesting work being done in Erlangen – but of course that’s not my field of expertise. As it is, the child would need to be kept in total isolation, and we simply don’t have the facilities.’

‘Lack of control. Disruptive. Other girls. No.’

‘She’s had a terrible shock,’ says Witch Schwitter. ‘Surely that needs taking into consideration.’

‘It’s not simply natural distress at the death of her father,’ puts in Uncle Hraben. ‘There’s more to it. According to Johanna –
Aufseherin
Langefeld – the child discovered her mother in the act of committing suicide.’

Ursel snorts. ‘Madness runs in the family then.’

‘
Frau
Richter, please.’ Uncle Hraben is almost shouting. ‘Surely, as
Frau
Schwitter says, allowance should be –’

‘Yes, yes, we mustn’t discount the effects of grief –’

‘No self-control. Disastrous. Learned early. Essential.’

‘However, I understand that Krysta regularly exhibits antisocial behaviour, and I regret that an orphanage isn’t the place for her.’

‘Where, then?’ asks the witch.

There’s a long silence, then someone pushes back a chair.

‘Stick her with the other undesirables,’ says Ursel.

‘Not that.’ Witch Schwitter sounds horrified. ‘She’s just a little girl. And Krysta is such a pretty child too. Isn’t there anyone to take her in?’

Behind me, Lottie shouts that nobody wants us. We will have to live in the forest and eat berries and make clothes out of leaves. When the snow comes we’ll creep into a cave like bears.

‘Wait a minute,’ says Uncle Hraben. ‘Perhaps I could be appointed the child’s guardian or …’

‘That wouldn’t be appropriate.’ A new voice, high and clear: I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. ‘Particularly as there’s also the question of blood. It seems her great-grandmother was an …
Untermensch
.’

‘She was a princess,’ I shriek, picking up a vase and throwing it over the banister. ‘And you are all
dumme Schweinhunde
. I hate you.’

I run back into the bedroom to pick up Lottie and hold her tight. It’s her idea to light candles and set fire to the curtains.

It seemed to Josef, on waking from another restless night, that he had been wandering in the deep, dark forest of fairy tales, going everywhere but ending up nowhere. Or almost nowhere … Aspects of the fractured narrative contained material wholly unsuitable for the bedtime stories of children. In his dreams, writhing in luxuriant foliage or tangled in folds of flesh-coloured velvet, his body flagrantly expressed all those secret desires that could never be spoken. Mathilde repeatedly turned from him. Lilie had not, and they lay together among the fragrant spring flowers of a forest clearing.

The cold sausage and tepid coffee of early morning tempered his memories. For a brief time he dwelled on the other occupants of his dreams: his five children filing past the scene of his debauchery, sometimes as infants, sometimes as adults, loitering only to stare in their adolescent forms; colleagues, retreating, advancing, with mouths pursed, eyes averted; his father, Hebraic features enormously exaggerated, shaking an admonishing finger, threatening to beat him for the third time in his life;
Großmutter
wielding her wooden spoon of office; and a drifting white shadow exuding melancholy which might have been his mother. And Lilie? Even in her state of abandonment Lilie looked them all straight in the eye and continued to smile. Josef had clung to her lack of shame as a drowning man clings to a straw through which, though he sink below the water into the blackest mud, he imagines it might still be possible to
breathe. Now he thought dismally of the creatures of Midrashic literature:
mazakim
, night-demons, succubi, fair-faced without exception –

Josef pulled himself up sharply. These were unsuitable thoughts for a modern, educated man, a scientist and an innovator. Thrusting away the delights of his nocturnal fantasies, he reapplied himself to consideration of his patient’s medical condition. Lilie’s silence, her reluctance to answer questions – unless it was with nonsense or snippets of homespun philosophy – together with the lack of background knowledge beyond the scant facts relating to her discovery, had initially presented an enthralling challenge. Now his inability to move the treatment forward had him pacing the floor and tugging at his beard. With any illness, as with a crime – and perhaps here one followed on from the other – some form of elimination and deduction was called for. Josef smiled. In that, he was not so very different to Conan Doyle’s famous detective, in whom Mathilde took such a keen interest. The smile died. He would not think of his wife. Nevertheless, even Sherlock Holmes needed some practical evidence on which to base his deductive reasoning. Here there was nothing, barring the signs of assault and the allusion to a monstrous man, possibly imagined, certainly exaggerated, for how could loveliness like hers be retained where it had been confronted with the trappings of evil? But Lilie hadn’t simply dropped from the ether. Of course, if she came from a privileged background she might have been kept at home, her hysteria concealed from the world. Certain factors led him to believe the latter was unlikely, unless she was a young and unfortunate wife. Nevertheless, whether she’d lived in a great house or a modest apartment, been cloistered
in a nunnery, prison – yes, even if she’d been confined in that accursed club – someone in Vienna must know something.

‘
Etwas Neues kann man nur finden, wenn man das Alte kennt
,’ Joseph murmured.
One can find something new only if one knows at least something of the old.
Yes, it was true. Benjamin would have to redouble his efforts, continue to be his master’s eyes and ears in discovering it. Josef was still unwilling to face the world and even more unwilling to analyse why this should be, simply telling himself there would be too many questions if it was known he’d returned alone from a vacation so eagerly anticipated; too many knowing looks. He regarded the breakfast table with distaste and wondered if he could disguise himself well enough to slink, eyes cast down, into Café Museum. Perhaps not: part of the pleasure of sitting in Adolf Loos’s new coffee house was open perusal of the clean bright design, inside and out – almost aesthetic negation, considering the flamboyance of neighbouring Secession buildings – together with the expectation of being in the company of Vienna’s foremost artists and intellectuals. Josef stabbed at a slice of sausage and gloomily resigned himself to breakfasting at home.

When the worst of his indigestion had subsided, he went in search of Lilie but found only Gudrun, sifting through piles of old newspapers and pasting cuttings into a large scrapbook, the latest of several volumes. This pastime had occupied her for as many years as he could remember and her eclectic tastes were a quiet family joke. Pages cut from old comic books jostled for space with religious texts, with
Partezettel –
little could be more fascinating than affectionate obituaries of the loathed departed – and extravagantly illustrated seed packets, among
die-cut scraps featuring cherubs, posies and mottoes, sentimental girls clutching spaniels, or boys with tops and hoops. Many of his children’s youthful drawings – so innocently observant – were pasted here: Mathilde grown comfortably plump; his erstwhile protégé, Sigmund Freud, hardly visible through a cloud of cigar smoke; and poor, bent
Großvater
, bearing a painful resemblance to a croquet hoop. There was even one of himself walking with his good friend Ernst Mach, proceeded by dramatically jutting beards, hands gesticulating as they discussed some knotty philosophical problem relating the sense of equilibrium in society as a whole to their independent discoveries of how an individual’s sense of balance functions by means of fluid within the semi-circular canals. Josef remembered that afternoon well. Dora also, no doubt, for she’d ventured too close to a swarm of ferocious bees. Poor girl, though one torture quickly followed upon another – it had taken hours to remove the venomous stingers and give her peace from the poison – stoical to the last, she’d not uttered a sound.

Josef craned his neck to examine, on the current double page, a snippet of advertisement – some marketing puffery for furniture polish, which showed two trim maidservants shining the face of a beaming full moon – almost obscuring a flyer for the fifth exhibition of the Vienna Secession. Facing it was a reprint of a Max and Moritz cartoon, sprung from the pen of Wilhelm Busch, a man whose intellect Josef considered severely underrated, though his witticisms were fast becoming adages. Ah, the wisdom of the court jester.
Vater werden ist nicht schwer, Vater sein dagegen sehr
, quipped Busch –
It’s easy to become a father, but being one is harder, rather
.

All this, however, served as light relief, for Gudrun’s main
interest was the compilation of lurid press reports, of snide tittle-tattle about Lueger’s Amazon corps, his so-called harem of female supporters, of intrigues, cases of bigamy, scandals, murders, violent robberies, rapes, beatings and stabbings, the details occasionally of such beastliness that Mathilde had once forbidden the children to leaf through the pages.

‘I see you’re still attending to your barometer,’ he said with a smile.

Gudrun ceased shuffling her findings to glance up at him. ‘You may laugh,
Herr Doktor
, but within these pages lies a great deal of information about the temperature of Vienna. And it’s simmering, I tell you. It’s simmering. Heaven help us all if it should ever come to a full rolling boil.’

‘Indeed,’ said Josef, replacing the smile with what he hoped was an expression of grave interest. Gudrun turned back a few pages.

‘For example, this poor woman, Marie Kindl, who killed herself –’

‘Ah, yes, last year, suspended from the window of a
Riesenrad
carriage
.
A dreadful thing to do in a place where young families –’

Gudrun silenced him with a frown. ‘When
Frau
Kindl committed suicide by hanging herself from the Ferris wheel she was drawing attention to the depths of her family’s poverty,
Herr Doktor
. An act of desperation, I’m sure you’ll agree. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer in this city. While some can afford to fritter money on pleasure rides, others have no bread to fill their children’s mouths. No good will come of it.’

‘Indeed,’ Josef said uncomfortably. ‘However, Vienna has various benevolent societies –’

‘Simmering, I say, and the fire being steadily stoked. If what some of us fear comes to pass then even respectable households such as this won’t avoid the consequences. Especially now that we’ve opened our doors to trouble.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ve seen men loitering in this very street. Oh, yes. There’s been a man standing at the corner watching this house for the last twenty-four hours. I swear somebody followed me to the market. And last night I found someone lurking at the side entrance. I went out with the poker to see him off – Benjamin nowhere to be found when he was needed, as usual – and the fellow pretended he’d been sheltering from the rain. Nonsense, of course, a grown man frightened of a light shower. I’m sure there were other things on his mind.’ Gudrun paused, her mouth twisting with distaste. ‘Perhaps he was one of Lilie’s former …
acquaintances
.’

Josef winced at her scathing tone. ‘And where is Lilie?’

‘Picking beans. It’s taken her three times as long as any normal person. If she was
my
kitchen maid –’

Josef frowned. ‘But Lilie isn’t a servant.’

Gudrun drew herself up. ‘Indeed, no. Some people don’t know the meaning of hard work. Of course it doesn’t help that the young fool’s dancing attendance on her, as usual.’

‘Benjamin?’ Feeling a sick lurch in the pit of his stomach, Josef crossed to the open door and peered down the garden, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare. ‘I can’t see them.’ He was about to step outside when Gudrun laughed and muttered something. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Climbed up the
Bohnenstängel
, I dare say.’

‘Beanstalk?’ He stared at her. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘ “Jack and the Beanstalk” – it’s a fairy tale, a bedtime favourite
of Johannes when he was small – in which an idle child climbs up his magic beanstalk into a world where normal rules don’t apply. It seems some folk will believe any fairy tales Lilie chooses to spin, so why not that one?’

Josef drew himself up. ‘Frau Gschtaltner, you forget yourself.’

Gudrun lifted her chin and met his outraged glare. ‘I speak as I find,
Herr Doktor
. Things are not as they were in this household.’

‘I wish to see Lilie as soon as she returns. Kindly convey my message to her.’ He turned on his heel, biting back a torrent of offensive words.

Half an hour later, a tight-lipped Gudrun rapped at his door, flung it open and, addressing Josef with excessive formality, indicated with a curt jerk of her chin that Lilie should enter.

‘Come along. Come along. We haven’t got all day.’

‘Good morning, Lilie.’ He waited while Gudrun settled herself, noting that beyond taking out her thimble – a gift from the children, with tiny needlepoint roses under a glass band at the rim, brandished like a reproach – she made no pretence of working. That done, he turned to his patient, who was standing motionless before him, fresh and sweet in a wide-collared linen blouse. Josef recognized it as belonging to Margarethe, his eldest daughter, worn when she could have been no more than thirteen. Perhaps Dora had inherited it. Maybe she’d even been wearing it during that terrible afternoon. Such things stick in the memory. At any rate, it served to show how small Lilie was, almost as small as Bertha, but more slightly formed, daintier, and …
fey
, yes, a good word: fey, fairy-like, not of this world, a creature of the imagination. Murmuring
pleasantries as he gestured towards a seat, Josef saw that the blouse formed part of a sailor suit of the sort once made popular in London by the Empire-building English queen, who’d invariably dressed her young offspring in variations on the seafaring theme, presumably a nod to the mariners who underpinned her power. He also observed that Lilie was wearing buttoned boots, which seemed several sizes too large judging by her awkward walk. Today her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkled, though she kept her face expressionless, and Josef’s spirits plummeted as he considered what had so enlivened her.

‘You look happier this morning, Lilie.’ The words had to be forced past his teeth. ‘Did you enjoy being outside in the sunshine?’

Lilie said nothing. She stared, unblinking, at the wheezing clock.

‘I’m told you were picking beans,’ Josef persisted. ‘A fine crop this year, I believe.’ A small shiver ran up his spine as he remembered that in classical times beans were a protection against ghosts and spectres; at the Roman feast of the Lemuria the head of the household was obliged to throw beans over his shoulder to redeem his family. ‘Green beans,’ he murmured, almost sure the beans that disempowered the lemures were black and wondering why it should matter. ‘Are there more to come?’

The girl didn’t reply. Gudrun clicked her tongue with annoyance. After a moment, Josef rose from his seat.

‘I need to examine the wounds on your neck, Lilie. Be so good as to undo your top buttons.’

Gudrun also rose, moving closer, stumbling in her haste. ‘Get on with it, girl. Wake up. Do what the doctor says.’ And
when Lilie made no effort to comply she tugged impatiently at the buttons herself. Lilie flinched and her fists clenched so tightly that her knuckles gleamed white, but throughout the examination she continued to stare towards the labouring old clock.

There was no danger of infection; the cuts had healed. Josef feared they would leave a scar, a shame, though he foresaw that such a blemish might only draw attention to the perfection of the rest. He gently turned Lilie’s head, noting that the bruises below her ears were now hardly visible … and stiffened as his eyes were drawn to another mark, small, new, livid. A foul taste rose in Josef’s mouth and he swallowed hard, fearing this was a mark of passion, but the tender curve of her neck, the soft golden curls clustered at her nape, were so childishly innocent his suspicions melted away. He teased her collar back into place and dropped his hands.