Hansel felt a wave of exhaustion come over him. Gretel had been sick for too long. He lay on the far corner of the platform and pulled the blanket over his head to shut out the sight of the cage. Sleep came on him like a hammer blow. The boy twitched once and then lay still.
Gretel muttered and sighed. She rolled and twisted, but she didn’t try to stand. Her face bumped against the cage, but she was too weak now to hurt herself.
Magda went close to the cage and held out an icicle. “Suck on this, little dear.”
The girl opened her eyes wide and stared into Magda’s face. Gretel saw the cage for what it was, and began to moan in panic.
“It’s just to keep you safe. You’ll be sitting at the table again tomorrow.”
Gretel’s feverish brain tried to understand. The witch had trapped her in a cage.
“You’re going to eat me. You’re going to make me fat and eat me.”
“No, no.” Magda backed away. “No, child, I’m going to make you well.”
“The witch is going to eat me.”
Gretel slept during the worst of the night, her breathing quick and shallow, her face red. The girl’s thin body twitched and she moaned, but she slept.
“The Hour of the Wolf has passed,” Magda whispered. That was the worst time, the darkest moment before dawn when the souls of humans gave up and stopped hoping for the light.
She was nearly asleep when Gretel began to scream hoarsely. Magda stood beside the girl, gazing at her face, but Gretel didn’t see anyone. Just a ragged scream going on and then another one, not stopping, the girl lost in her fever dreams.
Hansel was awake. He moaned as his sister screamed.
“The fever hasn’t broken, child. Soon, I hope.”
Hansel looked around the hut. His eyes were wild.
“Go outside and get an icicle off the roof, child. It doesn’t matter about the soot.”
“No! Don’t open the door, Magda. Be quick, be quick.” Hansel remembered now. He remembered what people in the ghetto did when a child was near death. He had seen it done. “Get some money.”
“I don’t have any money, boy. What do you want it for?”
“You must have a coin! Quick!”
Magda could hardly think. She couldn’t bear the one child moaning and screaming and now the boy shouting at her. She moved to the wall and slid a board to one side. Taking out a leather sack smaller than her palm, she opened it and shook out two coins and a button.
The button was the one from Hansel’s coat. Magda remembered tearing it off as payment for the charm. She remembered how the boy had looked, standing in the circle she drew in the dirt, weeping over his lost bread.
Hansel stood close and turned Magda until she faced Gretel.
“I am selling Magda my sister,” Hansel said loudly. He took the coins from Magda’s hand, leaving the button on her palm. “You now own her. She is not in my family anymore. She is sold to you. Her soul is safe in your family.”
Then Hansel climbed on the platform and took up Gretel’s ragged clothes. He took her coat and shoes and the rags she used for socks. Leaping down Hansel threw open the door of the stove.
“Gretel is gone. She isn’t here with me anymore. She’s dead,” the boy shouted. With swift thrusts he put the clothes on the coals and they sprang up in flames. Looking wildly around the hut, Hansel saw the stick doll that Telek had made for Gretel. Hansel snatched it up and pushed it into the stove. It lay on the burning clothes, and he slammed the door of the oven.
“Gretel is dead,” he screamed. Hansel reached to the neck of his shirt and tugged. “Help me, Magda,” he cried. “Tear it!”
Magda was dazed, but she tore the cloth with a twist of her hands, and Hansel wailed.
Magda understood then. The dark spirits outside must be fooled into thinking that the girl was dead. Magda grabbed the hem of her dress and tore it upward. She touched the floor by the stove and made her hand ashy. Stepping forward she rubbed ash on Hansel’s face and on her own.
The two of them stood close in the hut, the boy and the old woman, keening and shrieking as if Gretel were dead. Breathless at last, they stood there, the only sound the crackle of burning cloth; the smell of burning leather, like flesh, filled the hut.
“She’s dead,” Hansel said. He walked to the door, trembling, and flung it open.
“We’ve burned her clothes and her doll. Gretel is dead. There’s only a girl here that belongs to Magda. Poor Gretel has died.” Hansel shouted the words into the darkness.
He stood in the cold draft from the forest and the wind began to blow. Hansel shivered and stepped back as the blast of cold air entered the hut. Magda moaned, and the tears ran down her face, black with ash. For several minutes the wind howled and gusted in the forest around the hut, and the woman and the boy stood and let it clean out the smell of sickness. Then the wind died down, leaving only the bitter cold.
Hansel closed the door. It was not dawn, but the quality of the darkness was not so heavy.
“It’s gone.”
Magda nodded. The Angel of Death had been fooled. It was gone. She turned back to the small form of Gretel, the girl whose soul she had bought, lying in the cage. She was shiny, wet, gasping for breath, and Magda began to laugh.
“Help me get her out, Hansel. The fever has broken.”
The two of them lifted Gretel out and washed her thin body gently. She shivered, but she was clean now. Magda wrapped her tightly in the blankets and kissed her forehead.
Then she turned to the exhausted boy and lifted him, she knew not from where the strength came, and sat in the rocking chair with Hansel curled in her lap.
Gretel lay on the platform and watched, half-asleep, as Magda began to hum.
The old woman hummed, the sound from deep in her chest, until Hansel, eyes nearly shut, was filled with the vibration, and it warmed him inside in all the deep parts where he had been frightened.
She hummed, her eyes slits, trancelike, and then began to sing. The key was minor, not a song but a chant. Magda was a Gypsy now, and she did what her grandmother had done with her. She looked far ahead and told Hansel who he was and who he would be.
“You are a beloved boy, a boy of laughter. You loved the park and the squirrels. You knew every street and crept through the wall once all by yourself. You will live and grow old.”
The words stopped, and she hummed again for a long time until he was nearly asleep.
“You will be brave and it will be hard. You will be the big brother. You will be the older one. You will finally run after death itself. And when you are a man, you will find many cities and travel around and around the world. You will belong to a country where you can be free forever.”
She hummed, and her rocking nearly stopped.
“You will have a wife, my gypsy boy. Children will call you father and grandfather.”
She smiled and hummed more.
“You will never be rich, my child, you will be moving too fast to be burdened with all those things that the outsider, the gadji, want. You will be filled with the fire of the world.”
Magda hummed and hummed, the notes strange and not like anything the boy had ever heard.
“I’ll live with you, Magda,” the boy whispered. “I’ll take you everywhere.”
Magda stopped rocking and sat very still.
“The wheel turns,” she sang. “The red wheel with the blue sky above and the green grass underneath. It turns, my little boy.”
“You will go with me around the world,” Hansel whispered. “You and Gretel.”
And then he fell into a dreamless sleep, not disturbed by the coughing of his sister that went on for hours as liquid came out of her lungs and freed her from drowning.
Magda hummed softly, sitting between the coughing child on the platform and the child in her arms. She hummed and stared at the yellowed oil paper of the window as it grew brighter when the sun rose. Then she sat silent for more than hour, not asleep but alert and quiet.
> Finally, she groaned from the stiffness of sitting with the weight of the child on her lap. She stirred a little and his hand moved from under the blanket and clung to her blouse.
She looked down at him and smiled. The button from his coat was in her pocket. He had thrown away his luck, but then she had made a charm. The boy had paid her, and she had brought his luck back. She looked at Hansel and thought of what had come to her through the mist when she had sung to him. She shook her head and sighed.
“I will not go around the world with you, little gypsy love. Child of my heart, I will never see your children.” The crisis of the night had passed, and she would sleep in the chair until the children awakened.
December 10 , 1943
It had been Basha’s idea, everyone said. Something in her fierce heart couldn’t watch her children wasting away. When the smallest one died in the first icy days of October, Basha did not report it. She made Andrzej take the tiny corpse to the forest and bury it in secret. Then the food coupons for the child could still be used, and that meant seven hundred extra calories for the remaining two children, and now Basha and Andrzej had been hanged for the deception.
Nelka walked down the street. There were no children playing outside today. It was snowing lightly, but that usually didn’t keep them inside. It was what hung in the heart of the village, the bodies of the man and the woman left swaying in the cold wind, not even a scarf over her face, that kept the children crouched by the stoves.
Nelka didn’t look up at the bodies as she crossed the square. She didn’t want to be in the village. Gretel’s fever had broken ten days ago. Hansel hadn’t gotten the grippe, so Nelka could go and stay with Magda. She couldn’t bear the village now. Nelka stopped and groaned. She had been hungry for two days, ravenously, painfully, waking at night hungry.
She was beside the last house with fields in front of her when she heard it. She looked up, open-mouthed, and far above her head was a humming like a fly. The plane was barely visible, a small gray thing in the gray of the snow clouds, and then she saw the paper floating over the roofs of the village and blowing like larger flakes of snow.
Nelka bent and picked one up. She smoothed it with her cold fingers. She hadn’t seen any paper since last summer. No one had paper except the Major. It was roughly printed in Polish.
POLISH PEOPLE!
GREETINGS FROM OUR BELOVED LEADER,
JOSEPH STALIN
AND THE SOVIET PEOPLE.
BE COURAGEOUS AND STRUGGLE UNDER THE YOKE OF THE FASCIST OPPRESSOR! YOUR SOVIET BROTHERS AND SISTERS ARE TOILING WITHOUT REST TO FREE OUR NEIGHBOR POLAND. THE SOVIET TROOPS ARE VICTORIOUS AND DRIVING THE GERMANS OUT OF OUR BELOVED MOTHERLAND. WE WILL GREET YOU SOON AND FIGHT SHOULDER TO SHOULDER TO FREE YOUR TOWNS AND VILLAGES.
TAKE ARMS! WEAKEN THE GERMAN BEAST IN EVERY WAY AND PREPARE FOR OUR TRIUMPHANT ARMIES TO COME AND JOIN YOU!
THE BATTLE WILL BE TAKEN TO GERMAN SOIL, AND THEY WILL BE MADE TO SHED GERMAN BLOOD FOR EVERY RUSSIAN AND POLISHMAN AND WOMAN WHO HAVE DIED IN THIS GREATEST OF STRUGGLES.
JOIN US!
WE ARE BRINGING YOU LIBERTY!
Setting down her basket, Nelka ran back and forth picking up all the paper she could. It made the most wonderful paper to use in the outhouse.
It was too bad you couldn’t write on it. No one was allowed to write now. You could be hanged for just writing a list or a letter to a cousin. But the Germans didn’t mind if it was used to wipe your bottom, and it would be comforting sitting in the outhouse, reading the message.
Telek said the Nazis were a rabid dog in Poland’s house that was biting and killing the family. Now a Russian black bear, lean from winter starvation, savage and wild, knocks on the door. The bear will kill the dog, but how do the Poles get rid of the bear?
She wished she had the courage to take two of the sheets and pin them to the flapping coats of the two hanging bodies, but it was a stupid idea. It wasn’t worth death.
Nearly at Magda’s, she had to urinate. She squatted and the urine came out in a fine stream and then gushed and cascaded out of her. Her water had broken. She felt the first long pain as she stood and pulled her coat around the swelling of her belly. She didn’t wait until the pain was over. She turned into the trees and walked between the enormous trunks of the hornbeams and oaks, moving toward the warmth of the stove that glowed like a soul in the darkness of Magda’s hut.
Telek knew it wasn’t a good time to leave the village. Nelka had said the baby wouldn’t come until after Christmas, but women couldn’t carry their babies full term with so little food. The babies seemed to push out into the world already hungry, desperate to take their chance of getting more food in the cold air of the village than they did in their mother’s womb.
Telek set his mouth in a grim line and loped steadily down the road. There were no trucks or troop to be seen. The Major had been sleeping when Telek slipped away from the village and circled around the one sentry who guarded the road. Telek passed close enough to the sentry to cut his throat, but that was for later. The soldier was only a boy. The young one had been sent lately from the Russian front. He was asleep, and his rifle sagged, the tip touching the frozen road.
It was tempting to hit him on the head and take the gun. The boy wouldn’t have dared go back to the Major without a rifle. He would have ended up hiding in the woods, but Telek kept moving down the road. He would deal with the boy later. By spring, perhaps. He loped at a steady pace like a wolf. He could have gone on all day.
The Lithuanian saw Telek first. “He’s here.”
“That’s all of us, then.”
“We waited this long for one man?” The Stepmother frowned.
“He’s worth waiting for,” the Russian said.
The others laughed and watched as Telek came toward them. The man on sentry waved at Telek and he came through the drifted snow beside the road.
“We have everything. Another hour of walking and we reach the rail line.” The Lithuanian said, shaking Telek’s hand.
Telek looked at the group. Seventeen in all. The Russian had done well. They all wore the greatcoats of the German army. And the woman was still with them.
Telek squatted and took the flask they offered. He drank a deep sip of vodka and coughed. They waited while he ate bread and sausage.
“Let’s move out.” The Russian turned and looked at the Lithuanian. “Should we stick to the road and take a chance on meeting Germans?”
“There hasn’t been anything for three weeks except the usual deliveries for the villages. I think it’s safe, and we’ll make better time on the road. The truck that brings supplies is every Thursday, between two and five on this part of the road.”
“Their punctuality might kill them someday,” a man muttered.
Everyone laughed, and Telek looked at the man. It was the new one. The one who looked like a Jew. It was amazing that he had lived so long, but the rifle in his hands was clean and glistening with oil. He wasn’t a helpless city Jew.
They all loped down the road now, guns at the ready. Telek had no rifle, but he held his pistol in his hand and it made him feel comradely.
It was a beautiful gun. Not as powerful as some of the new German pistols, but Telek would never part with it. He had taken it off the body of a dead Polish officer who had been wounded and crawled in the woods to die when the Russians had invaded eastern Poland.
The gun was a VIS, the automatic pistol of the Polish army, made before the war. It had the Polish eagle on the slide, staring out fiercely, the wings strong and ready to soar, claws sharp to tear flesh and kill. Telek had promised the dead officer that his gun would have an honorable war.
Nelka wore an old shift of Magda’s. It clung to her body, wet with sweat, and she sat on the stool precariously, gripping the edge of the table to keep her balance when the pain rose and the vise that clamped her belly tightened and pressed. Her belly was hard as iron and low, and Nelka groaned with the increasing waves of pain.
“Send Han
sel out,” Nelka said to Magda when the last pain ended. “Send them both out.”
“The girl is only over the grippe for a few days. They have to stay warm.”
Hansel knelt beside Nelka and held icicles to her lips. They were bright red from where Nelka had bitten them to keep from screaming.
Magda sat in the chair and waited. The girl was strong. The baby was turned right. She had made sure of that a week ago. It had not slipped wrongly, and the head was down. She rocked and hummed and waited.
Gretel lay on the platform as far into the corner as she could squeeze. She lay with her face to the rough boards of the wall and breathed with her mouth open. She’d seen a dog do it once, the pups coming out in thin sacks, the mother dog tearing the sack and eating it, licking the pups.
That was when she was somewhere else. A long time ago. The pups and the mother dog had disappeared the next day. She wondered what had happened to them. She remembered the dog grunting and moaning, panting with her mouth open and her sides heaving.
Hansel wiped Nelka’s face with the melted water from the icicles. Nelka smiled at him.
“Will you help me take care of my baby, Hansel?”
The boy shook his head. “I hate it.”
“Pant, girl,” Magda said. “Pant. Like a dog.”
Nelka tried to think only of the panting. When the contraction ended, she sat gasping.
“Why didn’t Telek bring you?” Magda asked.
“He said he would be gone today.”
The two women looked in each other’s eyes for a second and then away.
“Probably gathering wood for someone.”
“Yes,” Nelka said. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, waiting to fall into the next chasm of pain that was ahead of her.
The Russian was smiling all the time now. The tracks led due east, through the forests and over the swamps into the heart of his country. The trains ran east carrying guns and ammunition and troops to kill his people. They came out filled with German wounded, picking up any Poles who were strong enough to work as slaves in Germany.