Gretel and the Dark (30 page)

‘Why didn’t she climb out of the coal hole?’

‘Emperors
don’t use coal. They burn banknotes.’

‘What happened to the girl in the end?’ I dance from one foot to the other, impatient for the rest of the story. ‘Didn’t someone come to rescue her?’

‘No,’ snaps Greet, snatching up the peg-bag. ‘This time the wicked girl had to learn the hard way not to tell lies. She’s probably there still if she hasn’t been eaten alive by hungry rats.’

Whatever it is comes nearer. It isn’t rats: too big, and too much heavy breathing.

‘Keep away,’ I snarl, putting up my fists.

‘Don’t be frightened. I won’t hurt you. You’re the little girl who tells stories.’

I know that voice. It’s ugly Hanna with the white-striped hair. ‘Go away. Leave me alone.’

‘Your name’s Krysta, isn’t it?’

I don’t answer. Everything hurts too much. All I want is to be quiet but Hanna starts talking and doesn’t stop. I put my fingers in my ears; when I take them out she’s describing her family’s garden. There’s a big walnut tree under which a huge patch of meadow saffron grows, so palely pink, so apt to quiver in the slightest autumn breeze, that her
Großpapa
called them naked ladies.

Every time I close my eyes 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 –’

Now
ugly Hanna’s telling me about the stable where a white owl lived, sleeping by day and hunting mice by night, annoying the old cat who thought it was her exclusive territory. They were constantly at war: he’d shriek and she’d caterwaul until the scullery maid threw buckets of water at them.

And then it’s Greet’s voice again: ‘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.’

I doze and wake to Hanna still talking. Now it’s about her grandfather’s study with a mangy deer’s head on one wall and a picture of
his
father in funny, outmoded clothes. On the desk sat a huge model of the inside of an ear. It terrified her. What if an earwig climbed inside and got lost in the labyrinth? There were hundreds of books:
Großpapa
was a great thinker, conversant with the writings of eminent philosophers – Plato, Kant, Mill, Spencer – but he never lost his eye for a pretty face. Sometimes she and her brother, Erich, would look through his portfolios of pictures, copies of famous paintings depicting beautiful women. There was one in particular, of Lilith by John Collier.

‘I used to dream of growing up and looking like that,’ said Hanna. ‘Of course, it could never be, since I was so dark and strong-featured. And one day I saw the painting brought to life. Do you remember how I stared? Collier might have been painting you, pretty Krysta –’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘With
your long golden hair –’

‘I’ve cut it off.’

‘Oh, no! Why?’

‘I don’t want to be beautiful. Now I’m just a machine.’ Nobody can hurt a machine. Greet starts whispering her story inside my head. But now it’s Uncle Hraben’s tower I see, rather than the robber’s house in the forest. And Greet’s voice turns slower and deeper.

‘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 –’

I realize Hanna has fallen silent for the first time since I was pushed in here. Then, she whispers: ‘Poor child. Come here.’ Even a dead person needs comfort. Even a machine. Hanna winces when I find her hand, and I shudder, for the rags have fallen off and now I can feel she has no nails on her fingers. ‘You’re cold. Spring will be here soon. Then it’ll be warmer. In Vienna we would walk to Stephansplatz in good weather. You must go there after this is over, but don’t stand too close to the towers in case the cathedral bells deafen you. It’s said that Ludwig van Beethoven discovered he was stone deaf when he saw pigeons taking off from the towers as the bells were rung but could hear nothing at all. Yes, every one of them is a working bell, so they all have names, just like people. There’s Feuerin, whose job is rousing the city in case of fire, and Bieringerin, the beer ringer, who warns the tavern keepers it’s time for last orders. Poor Souls only tolls for funerals. Kantnerin calls the cathedral musicians, while Feringerin tells the people it’s time for High Mass on Sundays. As for the Pummerin – Old Boomer – that hangs in the south tower, it’s so big and heavy it used to take sixteen men pulling on the bell rope to get the
clapper to strike. But the weight was so great the tower started to suffer. It can never be swung again, it’s forbidden, for fear of bringing the whole edifice crashing down. People forget how heavy the Pummerin is. It was cast from more than two hundred melted-down cannons captured from Turkish invaders over two centuries ago and is nearly ten foot across. The bell’s very important to the Viennese; some say the city might fall if anything happened to it.’ Hanna pauses to draw breath. She touches me in the darkness. ‘Are you still awake, Krysta?’

‘Why do you talk so much?’

‘Because soon I shall go from here and everything that I have seen or heard, felt, smelled, tasted, enjoyed, loved, will be extinguished and forgotten. There will be nothing left of me but a number on some ledger. And so, I give the Earth my memories.’ She laughs. ‘It’s my talking cure.’

‘Cure for what?’

‘Fear, perhaps. Nobody wants to be just a number.’

Hanna doesn’t know she’s talking to a dead girl. ‘I do.’

‘That will pass, Krysta. It will pass.’ She hardly pauses before plunging back into the streets of Vienna. ‘Things being as they were, Father didn’t like us to go inside the cathedral, though Elisabet and I crept in many times to see the
Zahnweh-Herrgott
and nobody ever said a word. I’ve thought back to that figure many times recently: poor man, face contorted by such human pain; I’ve seen that expression on countless faces here. But then, how could two little girls know what was to come? Anyway, the story goes that three medical students, a little the worse for wine, decided he was suffering from toothache and tied a bandage round his jaw. Their mockery was rewarded with severe toothache the very same night. Back they had to go, and publicly apologize. Their toothache was immediately
cured. Father thought people believing such nonsense were hardly better than primitive heathens, but
Großpapa
disagreed. “Son-in-law,” he said, “the power of the human mind and its susceptibility to suggestion is truly amazing.” ’ Hanna rises and walks around for a few minutes.

Greet’s voice tiptoes into the silence. ‘After they’d finished doing evil things –’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Things so bad I can’t tell you.’

Hanna comes back to sit beside me. ‘You’ll find things of interest on the outside walls of St Stephan’s too. There are two bars an ell long on the wall outside for measuring fabric. An ell is the length of a man’s arm, but “Which arm?” we used to ask. For the arms of Herr Gruber, the butcher, were very short and fat, while those of old Herr Böker, the piano tuner, reached way below his knees. And whatever you do, don’t miss
der Fenstergucker
. He’s beneath the stairs: a stone self-portrait of the unknown sculptor gawking through a window. Perhaps the same man was responsible for those carved lizards and toads biting each other all along the handrail. At the top of the stairs, there’s a stone puppy. Aunt Dora told me about the puppy. Poor Dora.’ Hanna is silent for a moment and I slide in a quick question.

‘Why did they put you in here, Hanna?’

‘We heard a rumour. They’re saying he’s dead. I said very loudly that I hoped it had been a long, painful and totally humiliating death with the knowledge that all he’d striven for had failed utterly.’

‘But who are you talking about?’

‘The monster, Krysta.’ Her voice is almost impatient. ‘Herr Wolf.
Der Groefraz
.
Der Teppichfresser.
’ She spits out the names.
‘The fiend responsible for all of us being contained here, the black-hearted Pied Piper who deals in
Massenausschreitungen.
That’s all it is, mob violence. If only I’d been able to see into the future, I would have crawled to Linz – that’s where he was raised, the area around Linz – yes, I would have crawled there on my hands and knees. I would have done what Yahweh did as he passed through Egypt at Passover, though I wouldn’t have limited myself to the first-born.’

I ask her to explain, and she does, but immediately afterwards she’s off again, guiding me around her city, to Stock-im-Eisen-Platz, describing the nail pillar and the bronze sculpture of locksmiths with their nimble fingers – she swears some are depicted with six on each hand. Now on to the Secession building with its gilded dome consisting of three thousand gold-plated leaves and seven hundred berries; to Graben and the plague hag; over the canal to ride on the big Ferris wheel. I’m only half listening because I didn’t know there were more people to wreak vengeance on than the keepers here.

It seems a long time later that Hanna tells me her grandfather was a doctor. That makes me sit up. ‘My papa was a doctor.’

‘Ah, then you will know what special people physicians are. But of course when I was a little girl the eminent
Herr Doktor
Josef Breuer was simply my grandpa, who used to take us out and buy forbidden sweets and ice cream. “
Na, Opa, nun mach mal schneller!
Come on, Grandpa, hurry up!” we’d shout. He would do anything for anybody. If anyone asked him for help, he’d give it unstintingly. He was renowned for it.’ She chuckles. ‘He had his little weaknesses: shlishkes with freshly roasted and ground coffee,
Germknödel
with extra poppy seeds and vanilla sauce …’ Hanna laughs again. ‘Once, he fell in love with a patient. It was almost a scandal. None of it matters now.’

Her
voice rises and falls. Neither wholly asleep nor totally awake, I follow her around Vienna’s markets and pastry shops, and back to the old Breuer house in Brandstätte to rummage for dressing-up clothes in the attic, or eavesdrop on the old housekeeper squabbling with the groom.

The minute I fall asleep, into my dreams come the evil men 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.

A noise alerts me. It gnaws and scratches at the wall. This time it must be a rat, but I don’t care until a thin shaft of moonlight the colour of pea soup points across the floor. Someone has made a tiny hole between the bricks.

‘Hanna, look.’

‘Krysta. Krysta.’

I hear the whisper before she gets a chance to respond. The light is extinguished. Someone has covered up the gap. ‘Daniel? Go away. You shouldn’t be here.’

‘I had to see if you were –’

‘Go.
Now!
You shouldn’t be here. Go. Quick! You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Where will I go if you aren’t with me?’

I can’t answer that. And, anyway, Daniel’s gone. Snatched away. He doesn’t say another word. The moonlight continues to finger through the gap he’s made.

‘Was that the young boy I saw you with?’ asks Hanna. ‘Your
zvug
perhaps?’

‘What’s that?’

‘The one you are meant to be with. Your one-day husband.’

‘I don’t want a stupid husband.’

‘Grandfather
said even the great Plato taught that each of us is only half of the whole. Our lives are spent seeking the person who will make us whole. We know it as
bashert
– that coming together with the lost half. They say when it happens the pair is lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. Afterwards one will not be out of the other’s sight even for a moment.’

I shrug in the darkness. There’s nothing to say. It’s just another of Hanna’s stupid stories. A minute later she’s telling me about holidays with her grandparents.

‘They always took their summer vacations in Gmunden. It’s a town surrounded by mountains, the Traunstein, the Erlakogel, the Wilder Kogel, and the Höllengebirge –
Großpapa
made us learn all their names – and there are beautiful views over the lake. It’s peaceful now, though it had its moments in history. In 1626, a General Pappenheim put down a peasant rising in Gmunden. It was round about the time battleships were made there. These days, it has a large maternity home.’ She laughs. ‘Of course they only employ storks that deliver blue-eyed, fair-haired babies.’

I’m back in the kitchen. Greet’s cleaver falls and splinters of bone fly into the air. She eyes me, hesitating over punishing me with the rest of her story.

‘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. Things so bad I can’t tell you. Things so bad –’

I
can only measure time passing by the light creeping through the tiny chink in Daniel’s wall. Morning comes at last. The day passes. Another night. Hanna is too busy remembering to bother with sleep. When they come for her on the morning of the third day, she quickly whispers instructions to me before walking to meet them, still spinning her story after her like Clotho – one of the old Greek ladies Cecily says measure out our lives, long or short, nice or nasty, depending on what mood they’re in. I do what she says, making myself small in the corner, hoping I’ve been forgotten. The door slams. I don’t hear the lock turn, but I stay very still, waiting and waiting until the tiny light beam fades and everything’s completely dark. Once outside, I slink between shadows, dodging the giant eyes of the lights as they sweep backwards and forwards, missing nothing in their path. Our hut is strangely quiet: far less whimpering and moaning, hardly any snoring. Lena’s bed is empty. I crawl underneath and wait for morning. My voices slide in after me.