The True Story of Hansel and Gretel Page 16

  He had to save Nelka’s baby and the children. She had to love him, because he could never bear to live again as the man he had been for thirty-five years before she kissed him on the road.

  The first houses of the village appeared. Nelka took the baby from Telek. The boy was screaming now for his nursing. Telek touched Nelka’s cheek and went to get buckets. She would need water.

  Feliks stood near the village well with his bucket while Telek drew water. “The SS and the Brown Sister are finishing in Bialowieza. They’ll be here soon. What about the children?”

  Telek moved under the wooden yoke and grunted as he lifted the weight of four buckets.

  “You drew the straw. It has to be done.”

  “They should take care of their own children.” Telek felt the jaws of the trap around him.

  Jedrik, the only fat Pole left in the village, slunk past Telek, and Telek didn’t look at him. Jedrik got food from the Major since he had pointed out the Mayor, and his wife, and the Jews.

  And then there was Feliks. Walking miles to other villages. Taking a chance on getting caught and shot. Bringing information. Taking information to the partisans.

  “Every Pole who isn’t a devil is an angel,” Telek muttered. There would be time to take care of the collaborators after the Nazis were driven out by the Russians.

  He stopped and left a bucket on Nelka’s doorstep. Tonight he would begin.

  Telek walked up to Pawel as if he was trying to sell him some wood.

  “Look at the wood on my back and listen.”

  Pawel nodded. He lifted the top pieces and felt them, as if to see how wet they were.

  “Tonight you and your wife will go to see her sister. You’ll leave the children in the house. If your wife has a brooch or anything of value, have her wear it.”

  “Everything we had went into Russia. They stole the clock off the wall.”

  “Be gone by dark. Leave the children.”

  “All three?” Pawel was so pale that blue shadows lay around his eyes and mouth.

  “All three.”

  “Telek, don’t—”

  “It’s this or have them kidnapped. And for God’s sake, don’t tell your wife.” Telek hesitated, and then climbed the steps of the church. He dropped the wood on the porch and went inside where the man hung on the cross.

  “Why don’t you do something?” he said to the crucified man. There was no sound in the building except the sound of the wind through the broken windows. It would be a bad night.

  Pawel and his wife had gone. The light of the fireplace burned steadily. Telek stood outside and watched. He heard the boy calling out occasionally, arguing with his sister. The baby was probably asleep.

  It was no good standing in the cold. The Major was always busy after dinner drinking vodka and getting a little drunk. He wouldn’t prowl the streets for another hour. Telek entered quickly. The boy turned, and Telek hit him hard with the stick. The girl stared as Telek moved over her and struck her on the head too. Their bodies lay limp on the floor.

  He moved to the curtains and jerked them shut. The baby was asleep, no need to strike it.

  Telek was sweating. His breath came in gasps. First he took the kerosene lantern and filled it carefully from a jar he carried in his coat. If anything was left, it had to look like an accident so the parents wouldn’t be blamed.

  He took a stick from his coat that was wrapped in rags. He lit the rags, and they sprang to life. He let the torch burn for several minutes until the boy’s legs twitched. He didn’t want to hit the child again. It was hard to hit lightly enough not to kill.

  Telek took the torch and held it against the arm of the boy. He came awake with a shriek, and Telek hit him with the wood of the torch. There was a long burn on his arm. Telek lay the torch on the boy’s shoulder and neck. The shirt took flame and Telek smothered it with his coat sleeve.

  The girl was next. She was so still. He had hit her a little too hard. His hands were shaking.

  Telek looked at her face, and he couldn’t stand to scar it. Instead, he lit the fair hair, and let it burn. He put it out when she began moaning. There was a livid burn on her scalp. He touched her hand with the torch and burned it, watching the pale skin bubble into blisters.

  The baby he couldn’t stand to look at. He rolled it over, pulling the blankets off and the nightshirt up. He burned it once on the neck and back, and the baby shrieked and flung its arms and legs spasmodically out like the flopping of a wounded rabbit.

  The rest went quickly. He took the kerosene lamp and spilled it all over the room. Grabbing up the howling baby and the two others in his arms, not caring if he hurt them, just wanting to get it over, get them out, Telek flung the torch which smoldered onto the kerosene.

  He had to stand and wait while it lit and the room began to burn. He stood holding the moaning children, waiting for the flames, and when the room was an inferno and the fire moving to the thatch roof, Telek stepped to the door and went out into the cold darkness.

  “Fire, fire!” he screamed hoarsely. “Fire!”

  Men began to run from the houses. The thatch had caught and the house was a torch.

  Pawel was at his side, taking the children from Telek.

  The fire would be impossible to put out, but it wouldn’t spread. They had lost everything, but now the Major wouldn’t accuse Pawel and Marta of damaging the children on purpose. No one would deliberately lose their shelter in the coldest days of winter.

  The Major stood and watched the house burn to the ground. Once the thatch caught, the village men gave up and moved back. The roof blazed and fell in with a soft whoosh and a great puff of sparks that rose in the still air for hundreds of feet.

  “God damn Poles. Leaving their children alone with a kerosene lamp. Cows are better parents. It’s a miracle that any of the children grow up with such fools caring for them.”

  Wiktor stood beside the Major, and his curiosity rose. Why hadn’t the parents taken the children with them? But he said nothing. It was no business of his.

  Three done. Only four more. Telek thought about it the next day. It was a problem. How badly mutilated did the children have to be?

  He approached Patryk and his wife together. They were sensible and closemouthed. They had to know before he injured the child.

  “Are you sure of this?” Patryk watched Telek’s face closely.

  “They’re doing it now in Bialowieza. They have done it in other villages.”

  “He is very high up in the SS.” Patryk looked at his wife. “We wondered at the time. A man that high coming here.”

  “It’s something that Himmler cares about. He must promote those who do it so no one can interfere.” Telek waited.

  Patryk looked at his wife. “Should we trust Telek to do this?”

  Zanna stared at Patryk. She turned it over in her mind. The men sat and waited.

  “We’ll do it ourselves if it has to be done. We can’t live in the woods until spring. It’s too harsh a winter. The boy could die.”

  “And she is pregnant again,” Patryk said softly to Telek.

  “What God wills,” she said.

  “You understand that it has to be done soon. And it must look like an accident.”

  Patryk was a strong man. He didn’t wait. The accident happened while Patryk was gathering wood. “I was going down the road with a full load of wood, digging the cart out when I had to, when it happened,” Patryk told the Major.

  “What fool thing did you do?” The Major sighed. It was constant, the problems of trying to govern these people. They couldn’t even drive a cart and horse.

  “A deer leapt over the road and the horse bolted. The cart went into a tree and the axle smashed. My son is hurt.”

  “Next time you’ll learn to keep a tighter grip on the horse. And the wagon?”

  “The axle I can repair. Tomorrow we’ll lift the cart out of the ditch and mend it.”

  Patryk went home. His wife was setting the child’s leg, br
oken in two places, and the boy moaned in pain. There was a long gash on his face that would leave a thick-edged scar.

  “Shall I get Magda?” his wife asked.

  Patryk touched his son’s head softly. “No. Clean his face and let it be.”

  “The Major may wonder why we didn’t sew it up.”

  “We’ll tell him we didn’t think it needed it.”

  “Will he believe that? A cut this deep?”

  “We’re just Poles who don’t have sense enough to hold on to our horses. He must look ugly!”

  She and her husband sat beside the boy’s bed, holding hands as the night grew colder. He was all they had left other than the new heart beating underneath her own, his two sisters lying under the frozen ground for two years.

  Telek knew he should wait and space out the injuries, but he couldn’t stand it. Three more. And Miron and Ania’s two who weren’t perfectly blond, but close enough to be chosen. He couldn’t make up his mind about them. He knew his nerve would fail if he didn’t hurry.

  He took the first little girl and, tying a cloth over her eyes, her body drooping, half asleep from all the vodka sweetened with raspberry syrup her mother had fed her, her small mouth sticky and stinking of fruit and alcohol, laid her hand on the table. With a single blow of a butcher knife, Telek severed her index finger.

  “Say it was an accident. She put her hand on the chopping block when he was cutting meat. They’ll believe it, but wait a day. There mustn’t be too many accidents on one day.”

  Telek ran from the house and had to force himself to walk. The child had screamed even with all the vodka. Now the parents had to make her believe that it had been an accident. The sound of her scream bounced in his head and he couldn’t get rid of it. He walked to the well and pumped water onto his head. It was so cold that it began to freeze in his hair, but the pain of the icy water on his scalp drove the scream out. The whole village was silent again.

  He walked to the edge of the village as if he was going to get firewood. The walk calmed him, and he began to warm up as he moved quickly. Then he began to enjoy the blankness of the fields and the occasional coughing cries of the ravens. When he realized that he was relaxing and taking pleasure in his aloneness in the white silence, he stopped short and jerked around. He went back toward the village almost at a run.

  He thought as he moved, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy. The next child was the son of Jasia, and Jasia would be a problem. Her four-year-old son looked exactly like his father, and his father had been kidnapped and taken to Russia. Jasia talked about her husband, but she knew that he was a dead man. If he lived through the trip in the boxcar, the frozen heart of Russia would never give him up.

  Telek’s mouth grew hard as he knocked on the door, and Jasia stared at him as he pushed inside. It took a while to convince her, and he talked so fast that he had to keep repeating things.

  “Don’t hurt his face, for God’s sake, Telek. I can’t live if you ruin his face. It’s his father—when I look at him—”

  Her father had been the Mayor. When the Mayor and his wife had been shot, Jasia had been allowed to live because she was the clerk who handled all the records of farm yields. The Germans needed her to make up lists for summer production. She had slipped through their net by making endless copies of farm records.

  “I won’t hurt his face,” Telek promised. “Go draw water, Jasia. Stay away.”

  “No. Take him in the bedroom. I won’t leave him.”

  The boy also stank of raspberries and vodka. Telek’s stomach rolled over. He knew that he would never eat raspberries again. Perhaps never drink vodka, although God knows what that would leave to drink in Poland.

  Telek broke the boy’s arm with such a wrench that it dislocated the shoulder.

  “I’ll send Magda when I’ve done with the other one,” he whispered to Jasia as he fled.

  Telek entered the last house looking so fierce that the parents fled. He took the almost unconscious child, again the stench of fruit and vodka, and holding him tightly, he put the child’s left hand on the stovetop. The smell of seared flesh filled the room. Telek looked at the hand calmly and lowered it again. It must be a bad burn. One that made the child almost a cripple for months. It must make him useless for whatever labor the Germans intended.

  This time he ignored the child’s screams. He left the house and it was done. They’d disliked him since his mother was left in poverty and then killed herself. No one in the village had liked him. The odd one. The boy who stayed in the forest and didn’t speak much, and now they had a reason to fear him. He was a man who could torture children.

  He staggered off the porch of the house and walked down the muddy road like a drunk. His hands hung loose at his sides like dead things.

  “Nelka.” He walked into her house with no knock. “Nelka.”

  She was making bread. The flour was gray with rough sprinkles of sawdust. She had mounded it carefully and was kneading it, making sure that not a single grain was lost.

  “Telek? Don’t wake the baby.”

  “I had to hurt them. I burned Pawel and Marta’s house. The children were perfect. They had to be mutilated. I burned the girl’s head. I hurt her.”

  “You hurt children? So they wouldn’t be kidnapped? But why you? You have no children.”

  “I drew the straw. They didn’t want to make their children hate them. Only Patryk took care of his boy. I had to scar the rest of them. My straw was short.”

  “So the SS man will leave them in the village?”

  He nodded and looked into her eyes. He wanted to be dead.

  “The cowards. And they let you be one of them. Part of the village council. They paid no attention to you before the war. And now when you go in the forest and bring news and do things that are dangerous—then they meet with you.” Her cheeks were red.

  “I drew the short straw.”

  Nelka glared at him, and he began to cry.

  She stroked his face with her hands. “They were cowards, and you saved their children.”

  He was so grateful that he began to sob. He could tell her. He could tell her anything. She was wiser than he had understood. He had only seen her beauty, but she was also wise.

  “They all stank of raspberries and vodka. They screamed.”

  “Oh, my darling.” Nelka tried to move away so she could see his face, but he clutched her.

  “I couldn’t do Miron and Ania’s two. They have dark hair, but their eyes are blue. I can’t do any more. If their blue eyes get them kidnapped, their parents will have to save them.”

  “It wasn’t fair, Telek. Every parent should have to protect their own.”

  “But there’s more.” He looked toward where the baby slept.

  “But he’s just born! He cries all night.”

  Telek stared at her, and knew he couldn’t mutilate a newborn baby. It was too much.

  “You promised to take us and hide in the woods.”

  He pulled Nelka to him and held her until she was still. The weather would kill the baby, but he could save her. He had waited too long for her, and she was all he’d wanted.

  “I’ll take you both into the forest, but you have to understand. It’s cold. They bring dogs and sweep the woods looking for partisans.”

  “I’ll carry him inside my clothes and keep him warm. I can feed him.”

  “The constant walking. No food. You’ll lose your milk.”

  “You can kill ponies for food, or one of the bison.”

  “They’re preserving this forest for Göring’s special hunting grounds. If they found a carcass, they’d kill all the village.”

  “I won’t have him look in the mirror and see all this evil marked on his face all his life.”

  Telek picked her up and carried her to the curtain that hid the bed next to the oven. He felt himself growing warm as he laid her on the bed. “I’ll take you both into the forest. We’ll survive.”

  Telek stripped and lay beside her. She rubbed
her hands, covered with flour paste over his chest and back. She stroked him hungrily, and he moved swiftly over her, taking her clothes off with clumsy fingers.

  She wanted him so badly, wanted the maleness of him, the hardness of his body against her so much, that she sobbed as she pushed against him. He held her and they both were lost in their passion, getting finally what she had wanted for months, Telek had wanted for years, and they rocked together in love that was done and then done again during the gray afternoon.

  When the baby finally woke, Telek rose and took the child to Nelka. She nursed him there in the bed made damp with their sweat, Telek lying beside her, watching.

  “Will you love us, Telek?”

  “I always have.”

  “But will you love him?”

  “He’s my son now.”

  She nodded and lay nearly asleep, the only sound in the hut the wet sucking of the child.

  Blood

  It was an ugly room. Floorboards unpolished and darkened by years of mud. A bed next to the wall. Two chairs, neither comfortable. Apine table. There had been a rag of a rug, but the Oberführer had it taken away. He supposed the Russians had stolen any decent rugs, assuming that the village ever had a rug worth owning. Major Frankel said it was one of the better houses in the village because the floor was wooden rather than clay. It was barely sufficient.

  But other things were proving more than sufficient. Sister Rosa had examined the woman’s blood. It was a magnificent chance. Nelka’s blood type and his matched. They were both O negative.

  The door opened and Nelka came in. Following her was Sister Rosa, dressed as always in her long brown dress and dark bonnet, a gray cape sweeping the tops of her boots.

  “I see that your baby was born.” The SS man smiled at Nelka. She was pale, but the golden quality had not been disturbed by childbirth.