Gretel and the Dark (23 page)

‘I’ve only got one pair of hands,’ Greet tells the ceiling, as she sharpens her big cleaver and lines up the knives. ‘God knows there’s
enough to do in this house without playing butcher.’ She glares at me. ‘Out from under my feet, Miss, if you please.’

I run outside and only creep back when the old man and his boy have been for the heads and feet Greet doesn’t want. The kitchen smells of rusty iron. A few flies circle the huge pans of meat.

‘Waste not, want not.’ Greet quickly stuffs some money into her pocket. ‘These days, plenty of people are being reduced to eating blockade mutton again.’

‘Mutton’s sheep.’

‘Dog, I mean. That’s what blockade mutton is: dog.’ I can tell by her voice she’s still angry. Sometimes Greet uses Pfeffernüsse in the
Hasenpfeffer
and though I won’t eat hare stew I want some of her ginger cookies before they all go to thicken the gravy.

‘Shall I pick the herbs for you, Greet?’

She blinks. ‘That’s an improvement, I must say. Yes, I’ll need some thyme, Krysta, and a few sprigs of rosemary. Ah, and two bay leaves from the tree at the end of the garden.’

As a reward, I get a handful of cookies. When I ask for a story it’s full of bangs and crashes.

‘There was once a pretty young maiden promised to a wicked bridegroom. One day she went to visit him, following an ash path to his lonely black house in the middle of the darkest forest that ever was. Nobody was at home except an old woman, who told her the bridegroom was a robber and warned her to run home as fast as she could. But this silly girl –’ The cleaver falls and splinters of bone fly into the air. Greet wipes the sweat from her forehead with a red-stained corner of apron. She sniffs mightily. ‘– This silly girl, like so many others, took no notice at all until it was too late, for the wicked bridegroom
and his friends were at the door. Just in time, the old woman hid her behind a barrel. In come the evil men,
betrunken wie Herren
, dragging after them a young girl. First they forced her to drink wine with them: a glass of red, a glass of white and a glass of black. After that they pulled off her pretty clothes and put them in a pile ready to sell in the market. And then they –’ Greet stops abruptly. She clears her throat and glances towards the door.

‘What?’ My voice has shrunk to a croak. I’ve heard enough but still I have to know what happened next.

‘And then they … uh … after they’d finished doing evil things –’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Things so bad I can’t tell you. All I’ll say is that it went on for a long time and she screamed and cried and called on God and all his angels to help her.’ She dives into the deer, ripping out its liver and lights. ‘And when they’d all finished what they were doing over and over again she was dead, so, after chopping off her fingers to get her rings, they cut her up small and sprinkled the pieces with salt.’

‘Did they eat her?’

Once again Greet looks at the door. ‘Of course. And afterwards they threw the bones on the fire to make more ashes for the path through the forest.’

‘W-what happened to the bride?’

‘She ran home and told her father, who had the robbers brought to trial. They were flayed alive and beheaded with axes.’ Greet stares into the basin of entrails. ‘Yes, that day there was so much blood it ran from the courthouse in Altona right down to the Elbe.’

It’s Erika’s turn to get a new job – sorting big piles of dressing-up clothes in a place much warmer and cleaner than where she plaited straw. There are long tables heaped with pretty silk dresses like Mama used to wear, shoes, handbags and mountains of fur coats. Sometimes I try things on, but there’s no looking glass to see myself in. We find funny things mixed in with the clothes – soap and toothpaste, false teeth, spectacles, photographs, combs. The person in charge here does not shout or slap. His name is Schmidt; he makes sure the soup at midday is hot and lets everyone have a proper rest. After a bit, he gives me a job, too: my fingers are small enough to help unpick the fur coats so the tailors can sew them into new ones.

It’s hard to find the tiny stitches in the fur. Whenever it’s easier I know someone has unpicked them before and there will be money and jewels hidden inside the collars and cuffs. This is a big place, with many rooms, and yet every time it happens I look up to find Schmidt standing over me. In the end, I realize he’s another sort of witch. There’s an ugly old ginger cat here that watches us with eyes the colour of Greet’s nastiest pea soup; it runs to tell Schmidt the minute my fingers feel something lumpy beneath the seams. One day a pretty gold brooch falls from a hem even before I snip the stitches. It’s tiny, in the shape of a flower, with blue stones for petals, and I’m about to hide it inside my shoe when Schmidt turns up, holding out his big red hand. The cat weaves through his legs, looking at me and smiling by narrowing its eyes. It disappears into thin air when I swing my foot. Erika tells me to leave it alone in case I get sent to work in the bad room full of dirty, smelly clothes covered with blood and bugs, but I don’t care.

A few days later, I pretend to make friends with the witch’s
cat and get it by the neck, squeezing so hard its eyes bulge as it claws empty air. Suddenly Schmidt appears and I have to stop. Next time it won’t be so lucky.

When we want to make up stories, Daniel and I go to our special place behind one of the sheds. ‘It’s your turn,’ I remind him. He shakes his head.

‘Your stories are better than mine. Nastier things happen to the bad people.’

‘All right. Who shall we kill today?’ We decide all the zookeepers must die. Since they’re so much bigger than us, first we need to put a magic spell on them. This makes us huge and turns them into dwarves. Then we make them line up like children in the schoolyard. Daniel has a large whip and when they won’t do as they are told quickly enough he snaps their legs with it. They have to stand there a long time while we run between their legs very fast, playing the game Cecily taught us in order to keep ourselves warm:

‘In and out the Bluebell Windows,

In and out the Bluebell Windows,

In and out the Bluebell Windows,

I am your master.’

When the verse comes to an end we’re supposed to choose someone and sing:

‘Pat the one you’ve chosen on their shoulders,

Pat the one you’ve chosen on their shoulders,

Pat the one you’ve chosen on their shoulders,

All day long.’

But by then we’re tired and giddy so we leave that part out and march them through the dark forest until we get to the gingerbread cottage. We have to hurry because the magic doesn’t last long and they’ll soon grow back to their real sizes. This witch keeps an enormous oven, big enough for elephants and giraffes or a thousand ordinary animals, hidden behind her bathhouse. The zookeepers must know about it because we have to prod them with pitchforks and fire guns into the air to make them move. They shuffle forward, blubbing and wailing, pretending they’re sorry and saying someone else made them do the bad things. We force them all in, even Uncle Hraben, though he begs me not to. ‘I knew your papa, Krysta. I gave you toffees.’

Daniel slaps his head. Once. Twice. Three times. ‘Isn’t everything bad enough without losing every last shred of self-respect?’

When we have bolted the door, we cover it with mud so we can’t hear them howling and gather fir cones and dead branches for the fire. The witch has to light it. She’s very frightened and makes secret signs with her fingers. Then she gets on her knees and tries to remember how to pray. A lot of smoke comes out of the tall, tall chimney. Today it smells of violets and burnt caramel. The ash is black and the trees shrivel and die as it falls on them.

Outside the tailors’ factory we can see the tops of forest trees over the wall. Most are ink-black firs, but one is a spiteful chestnut that wouldn’t throw us a single nut in the autumn, though now spring’s comes it lets the wind carry heaps of yellow-green catkins into the yard. Two of my bean plants have grown, though they’re not very big yet.

A whole lot of new people come. One of them is an ugly old woman, who stares very hard at me and clutches her chest, croaking: ‘It’s my girl from the cabinet!’

I poke out my tongue and run away, but she hobbles after us, dragging one foot and wanting to touch me. Daniel says she’s not right in the head. He waves his hand in front of his face.

Uncle Hraben has been away for a long time. One day he reappears to tell me the cherry trees are blossoming. ‘I’ve missed you, Krysta. I used to look forward to our little chats. Come and see me one afternoon. There are new baby rabbits. Your pretty clothes are waiting for you.’

I look at my feet and say nothing.

‘Come soon.’ He looks so sad that it’s hard to believe any of the things Erika told me. Later on, when he says the first cherries of the year have arrived, Lottie warns me to stay away from him, but her voice has grown very faint. There’s not much left of her now.

All that day and the next while I am unstitching the big coats I try to remember the taste of cherries. There will be cake as well. Or even some bread … with butter. On Sunday I creep towards the tower, slipping from one building to the next so that Erika can’t see me, racing up the steps. ‘Where are the cherries?’

Uncle Hraben sits back in his chair and lights a cigarette. ‘Now, pretty Krysta, you know there are things you must do first.’

I wash my hands and take out my best frock and clean white socks. Although Uncle Hraben pretends not to watch, he starts laughing when I can’t do up the buttons.

‘You’re getting to be a big girl now. Never mind. Come here, anyway.’

I sit on his knee, but today it feels bony and uncomfortable. When he hands over the cherries they’re unripe and tasteless. I eat them anyway. Uncle Hraben pats my head. He squeezes my arms and legs and tickles inside my unbuttoned dress while telling me about his new puppy, which is called Fürst.

‘Is he called Prince because he’s a King’s son?’

‘No, silly little thing. He’s
der Fürst der Finsternis
, the Prince of Darkness.’

Uncle Hraben says nothing for a while then slowly puts his hand where Greet said nobody ever should.

‘Stop that!’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘No.’ I quickly jump up and pull on my ordinary clothes.

He laughs again, but it’s not a very nice laugh. ‘Time to get rid of that dirty old toy,’ he says, when I wrap Lottie in her carrying rag. ‘Big girls have better things to do with their time than play with broken dolls. Come back tomorrow, Krysta. There’ll be more cherries … other nice things, too.’

I want to talk to Erika about what happened but she’s busy with a whole crowd of new people. It was probably one of them that stole my plants with the tiny bean pods. She doesn’t finish telling her new friends things until it’s almost dark. Then she goes to the lavatories and disappears. When I can’t find her, Cecily holds me tight and says she’s in a better place. For a little while, I hope Cecily might be my new foster-mother, but she prefers being a teacher to telling people to wash their necks. ‘You must do these things for yourself now, Krysta. It’s time to stop letting people treat you like a baby simply because you’re so very small. Don’t forget, I know what a clever girl you are.’ She hesitates. ‘However strange this may sound, Krysta … no, listen to me, this is important … sometimes, even when it’s
impossible to get the things you want – love, security, attention – it’s still possible to give them. Do you understand?’

I shrug. ‘That’s stupid.’

‘Look around you at all the children with mothers too sick and weak to care for them. Perhaps you –’

‘Don’t look at me. I don’t want to look after them. Why should I?’

Lena comes back soon afterwards. She’s ill and won’t even share my bed. Now there’s no one to look after me. Nor is there anyone to make me waste long days in the fur place, so Daniel and I spend most of our time together when I’m not doing my lessons. In the spring he suddenly shot up in height; now the ladies in my shed tell me I’m doing the same. Lena wants me to cut my long hair off.

‘You be careful,’ she says, between coughs. ‘They’ll come for a pretty girl like you if you survive long enough.’

I stay away from Uncle Hraben but often see him at a distance, walking with the Prince of Darkness. One day, I almost bump into him and another man with a full-grown dog as they inspect the shed where the mad women press their faces against the glass. The Prince of Darkness growls at first, then tries to jump up and play. Uncle Hraben slaps the puppy’s nose very hard with his leather glove. The other dog snarls, showing huge yellow teeth dripping foam, until the owner orders it to stop. Then Daniel comes racing round the corner.

‘Found y–’ He stops dead. The colour drains from his face as the big dog lunges forward, straining at his leash, twisting and turning, growling and snapping at the air as it tries to reach him. Uncle Hraben roars commands at the Prince of Darkness, encouraging him to do the same. Very slowly, very gently, Daniel begins backing away. I see Uncle Hraben mouth something
to his companion, who nods and yanks the bigger dog so hard that for a moment he’s up and dancing on his hind legs. Meanwhile Uncle Hraben has slipped the Prince of Darkness off his leash. The young dog leaps forward and Daniel is on the ground screaming, rolling in the dust as he tries to break free.

‘Stop him!’ I yell, and beat at Uncle Hraben with my fists.

‘Don’t worry, Krysta,’ he shouts above the noise, ‘nothing much will happen – just a few bites, unless the mutt’s better than expected. This is just a little practice for young Fürst. All dogs have to start somewhere.’ He waits a moment or two longer, holding me back so that I can’t run to help Daniel, then bends and says, very close to my ear: ‘I’ll call the dog off now, Krysta, as long as you promise to come and see me tomorrow. From now on you’ll have to be a good girl and do as I say. Otherwise …’