The True Story of Hansel and Gretel

by Louise Murphy

  Hansel walked faster now. He followed the rich scent that thickened the air, and he turned into a large room, pulling Gretel with him. The room had tables and chairs set up in rows. Women walked to and from the kitchen, which was behind the room, putting out plates, and spoons, and bowls on a long table next to the wall.

  “Look! Oh, Hansel! Look!”

  He looked. Stoves with shining pots almost as large as he was. Soup cooking. Meat roasting. Best of all, metal racks reaching nearly to the ceiling. Racks full of bread baked before dawn in the ovens.

  Hansel stared and felt the saliva run down his chin. He wiped it away and reached his hand out to steal a loaf of bread. There were too many people in the room. He would be beaten and driven off. And that’s when he saw it.

  “Gretel, the breadcrumbs. They won’t care about the crumbs.”

  He remembered now. The breadcrumbs he had thrown on the ground in the forest. The night. The owl calling. There were breadcrumbs on this floor, but a lot of them. A long path of crumbs leading to the back of the kitchen. Women carrying racks of bread walked past the children and more crumbs fell onto the floor.

  “Magda said I threw away our luck. I tore up the bread and threw it on the ground.”

  “It was me,” Gretel said. “I stepped on the line in the dirt. I stepped out of the circle the first day. When we found Magda. It was bad luck.”

  He was crying now. He moved away from his sister and crouched on the floor, sweeping the crumbs up and putting them in his pockets, trying to get every one. He followed the trail of flakes from the dozens and dozens of loaves of bread brought out of the ovens, and he was determined to pick up all the bread, all the luck that he had dropped and thrown away. He crawled across the floor, white-faced, intent, not missing a crumb.

  Along the back wall was a line of ovens. Men stood with flat wooden paddles, and occasionally they opened the doors and shoveled out the loaves of bread cooked golden by the fires. Two men turned to stare at the boy and the blond girl who followed him.

  One of the men, thin and dark-bearded, a round scar on the right side of his chest, let his paddle fall from his hand, and the crash of wood on the floor made Gretel jump. Hansel looked up and saw the man fall to his knees beside the oven.

  The boy’s face puckered. He frowned and clenched his fists. Then slowly he got up and walked over the crumbs into the arms of the man.

  “You left us,” Hansel said. “You went away.”

  The man sobbed and he held the boy out so he could look into his face. He ran his fingers over the poor, dyed hair and the pale skin. He touched the dark circles under the boy’s eyes and the bruise on one cheek.

  Gretel couldn’t move. She stood and watched her father sobbing and Hansel standing rigid in his arms. She looked at the two of them, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  The Mechanik was able to stand then. He looked at the girl. His eyes were so tear-filled that her face blurred, and her hair became a pale light around her head and shoulders. Keeping his hand locked on Hansel’s shoulder, he moved to her.

  “Father?”

  He nodded and pulled her to him.

  “It was cold,” she said. “She tried to cook us, and I never saw the bison.” Gretel was shaking all over, and her mind was chaotic again as she tried to take it in. It was her father.

  “She hasn’t got it right,” Hansel began, but he clung to his father and couldn’t talk.

  “You were gone, and Stepmother was gone and we’ve looked for you for so long.” Gretel’s body wouldn’t stop shaking.

  He nodded. “They told me you were taken to the camps. They said you were dead.”

  “I couldn’t find the house where we lived. The cobblestones were gone.”

  “I knew you’d come to the city if you were alive. I knew you’d think of it.” He stood with his children and the joy nearly made his heart stop beating.

  “I remember so much, but sometimes it goes away.” Her face twisted, and she stared into his eyes. And then she began to smile. The beard made his face like the face of her grandfather. The man who gave her oranges.

  “I will help you remember,” her father said.

  “I can’t remember either.”

  “What can’t you remember, my son?”

  “The Stepmother told me that I’m Hansel. But who was I before? Gretel got better, but she wouldn’t say our names.”

  Gretel tried to remember her real name. She had dreamed about it so many times, since the wheat field, but she couldn’t pull the name out of her dreams and speak it. The name had stayed gone, as if it were hiding from her. And her brother’s name was gone too.

  The man looked down at the faces of his children. So thin. So much older looking in the ravaged tightness of their skin. They looked back at him, heads tilted up and eyes shining, their lips half open, both of them waiting to hear their names.

  He spoke each name slowly, quietly, the crowd of workers that had gathered around the three catching up the sounds and echoing the names in whispers. He spoke their names over and over, and watched these gifts brought out of darkness, these bits of flesh, this blood of his blood and bone of his bone, his children, begin to smile as they became, once again, themselves.

  The Witch

  It is finished. The tale is told truthfully, and truth is no heavier, no more beautiful than lies. Yet there is something that makes me love the truth, and that love made me wander and worry until the truth was given to you, like a gift. For this in the end is what we have. The love of something.

  Wild ponies. A kiss salted by tears. The scent of raspberry syrup in a bottle. Oranges. Two lost children who come to your house in the dark forest.

  There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again.

  The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh. This we will drink forever. I know. I am Magda. I am the witch.