Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  “Look, Gretel,” Hansel said, “our prayers are answered. We have found something to eat at last. I will reach up and eat a bit of the roof, and you can eat some of the window. It will taste nice and sweet.”

  Hansel stood up on tip-toe and broke off a little corner of the roof to see what it tasted like, and Gretel leant against the window, and pulled away a piece of the pane.

  Faint with hunger, they were feasting on the house, when a soft little voice cried out from inside:

  “Nibble, nibble, gnaw,

  Who is nibbling at my little house?”

  The children thought quickly, and then answered

  “The wind, the wind,

  The heaven-born wind,”

  and went on eating, not pausing for a moment. Hansel, in his hunger, tore away a great chunk of the roof, and Gretel pulled out a complete circular window-pane, sitting down and leaning against the wall to eat it.

  Suddenly, the door of the house opened, and a very old lady, frail, bent-over, came out slowly, supporting herself on crutches. Hansel and Gretel, frightened and guilty, dropped what they had in their hands, and Hansel put his arms around his sister.

  The old lady, however, smiled gently, and held out her arms.

  “Oh, you poor, dear children,” she said tenderly, “here in the forest all by yourselves. You must come in and let me look after you in my house. Here you will be safe. Here you will be cared for.”

  She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house, talking to them kindly, and welcoming them. She sat them at the table in the little kitchen, beside the warm firelight, near a big tiled oven, and the smell of cooking filled the room. Then she set a meal before them: milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterwards, she took them into the bedroom, where two pretty little beds were covered with soft white linen. Hansel and Gretel lay down to go to sleep, and thought they were in heaven.

  The old lady had only pretended to be kind. She was, in reality, an evil witch who lay in wait for children, and who had built the little gingerbread house in order to lure them into her power. When she had a child under her control, she killed it, cooked it, and ate it, and that day was a feast day for her. Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen sense of smell, like animals, and know when human-beings are nearby. When she realised that Hansel and Gretel were drawing near to her house, she laughed with malicious delight, and said, “I shall have them! They shall never escape from here.”

  Early the next morning, before the children were awake, she got up and went into their bedroom, and looked at them as they lay asleep in bed, young and unprotected, with their rosy cheeks, and warm breath, their hands flung back against their pillows.

  “These two will taste good!” she thought, drooling.

  She seized Hansel, sleepy and confused, in her shrivelled hands, and carried him behind the house into a little stable, and locked him into a cage made out of iron bars. Hansel screamed repeatedly for help, but there was no one there to hear him, or to come to his help. The immense dark forest stretched away on all sides, silent and unpopulated, empty of all humanity. Snow had started to fall, and the huge flakes fell silently from the grey sky, covering all the dark earth with a deep, trackless whiteness, dazzling to look at.

  The old woman went back into the bedroom, and shook Gretel until she woke up.

  “Where is Hansel?” Gretel asked at once, frightened to be alone. “Where is my big brother?”

  The woman laughed, immensely amused.

  “You’re never going to see him again,” she said. “Get up! Make yourself useful. Bring me some water from the well, and then you can cook something good for your brother. I have locked him in the stable behind the house, and I’m going to feed him up and make him fat. When he is all ready, I am going to eat him.”

  Gretel, terrified and lonely, sobbed as if her heart would break, but the old woman only laughed at her, and tormented her, and forced her to do all that she had commanded.

  In the days that followed, as the snow continued to fall, all the best food was cooked for Hansel, locked away out of sight in the stable, but Gretel got nothing to eat but the shells of crabs. As she worked, weak and exhausted, beaten and mocked by the old woman, she found a long corridor leading out of the kitchen, near the oven, lined with doors. Behind the doors were many rooms piled to the ceilings with all kinds of goods, all neatly stacked and sorted. One room was full of money, paper and coins from many different countries; another was full of jewellery, rings, brooches, necklaces, valuables of every type imaginable. There were rooms entirely filled with children’s clothing, with shoes, with children’s toys, underclothing, blankets, handkerchiefs, and hair cut from girls’ heads.

  Every morning, the woman went out to the little stable, and up to the cage.

  “Hansel,” she commanded, “put your finger out so that I can feel if you are getting any fatter.”

  Hansel, thinking desperately, stretched out a little bone through the bars of the cage towards her, and the woman, whose eyes were dim, thought that it was Hansel’s finger, and was angry and astonished that he seemed to be getting no fatter.

  Four weeks went by in this way, and Hansel still seemed to remain as thin as ever, so that the woman was seized with impatience, and decided that she was not prepared to wait any longer.

  “Gretel!” she shouted at the little girl. “Bring me some water this instant. I’ve waited long enough. Tomorrow, whatever happens, I’m going to kill your brother, fat or thin, and cook him.”

  Almost blinded with tears, Gretel stumbled towards the well, the water falling unheeded from her eyes. She tried to remember what her brother had said to her, to comfort her, when he was there beside her, and could speak to her, and give her courage. “God will not forsake us,” he had said. “Don’t believe that we can ever be totally abandoned.”

  “Dear God, please help us,” she cried in her despair. “If the wild animals in the forest had torn us to pieces, at least we would have died together. I’m so frightened of being all by myself.”

  “Stop that noise!” the woman sneered. “It won’t do any good at all. No one can hear you, and no one will come and help you. Your brother dies tomorrow.”

  Early the next morning, when it was still dark, the woman made Gretel get up, light the fire, and hang up the cauldron full of water. Outside the windows, the snow was still falling.

  “We will bake first,” the woman said. “I’ve already heated the oven, and the dough is all kneaded and ready.”

  Gretel stood bowed over the cauldron, silent, the tears running down her cheeks.

  “Come here,” the woman said. “Stand in front of me.”

  Gretel did as she was told, too frightened to resist without her brother.

  “Take off your clothes,” the woman said.

  Sobbing helplessly, frightened and alone, Gretel took off her shoes, her pinafore, her dress, and all her clothes, folding them neatly as she undressed, as she had been shown by her mother before she died.

  When she was completely undressed, the woman took a pair of scissors and cut off all Gretel’s hair, close to her skull. Gretel remained with her head bowed as her hair fell to the floor, the braids falling all in one piece, with the ribbon still in them.

  “Give me that chain,” the woman said.

  Gretel unclasped the chain from round her neck. It had been a birthday present from Hansel, and had a little star at the end of it. She handed it to the woman.

  She took Gretel over to the oven, from which the flames were already darting

  “Creep in,” said the woman, “and see if it is properly heated for the bread.”

  “Hansel,” Gretel whispered. “Hansel.”

  “Get in,” the woman said, and Gretel, without saying another word, climbed up into the oven, and the woman shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt.

  When she was sure that Gretel had been burnt to death, the woman went behind the house, and walked through the deep drift
s of snow to the little stable, and walked up towards the iron cage where Hansel was imprisoned.

  “Gretel?” Hansel called out when he heard someone approaching. “Is that you, little sister?”

  “Your sister is dead,” the woman said. “I put her into my oven, and she was burnt to death. Now it is time for you to die.”

  She opened the door of the cage.

  “Get out,” she said. “What are you crying for?”

  Hansel stood shivering in the cold stable, his breath white. The whole stable was flooded with a hard bright light from the snow outside.

  “Come here,” the woman said. “Stand in front of me, and take off your clothes.”

  Shivering, in tears, Hansel fumbled with the fastenings of his clothes, folding them neatly as he took them off, as Gretel had.

  When he was completely undressed, Hansel stood shivering helplessly, his hands cupped in front of him, his head bowed, his body pinched and white.

  “Give me that ring,” the woman said.

  Hansel pulled at the ring until it came away from his finger, and handed it to the woman. His mother had given it to him on the day that Gretel was born, and told him that it was a present brought for him by his new little sister.

  The woman took Hansel out of the stable, and into the deep snow.

  “Walk to the house,” she said.

  His arms wrapped around himself, his body burning in the icy air, the flakes of snow like drops of fire, Hansel walked naked through the falling snow in the dark air. He saw the thick smoke pouring from the chimneys of the house.

  “God, do not forsake me,” he whispered. “Let my little sister be alive. Don’t let me die.”

  She took Hansel over to the oven, where the flames were now high and bright.

  “Get in,” the woman said. Hansel stood for a moment, and saw his sister’s hair lying on the kitchen floor, beside her neatly folded clothes. Then, without another word, he bent over, and climbed up into the oven, and the woman shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt.

  When she was sure that Hansel was dead also, the woman went back out of the house, and to the stable. She closed the door of the iron cage, and picked up Hansel’s clothes, then walked back to the house, closing the stable door behind her. The whole clearing around the house was white and trackless as the snow continued to fall.

  Inside the house, she picked up Gretel’s clothes and hair, and added the children’s clothes to all the others in the room in the corridor. She put Gretel’s chain and Hansel’s ring in the room with all the other jewellery, and then walked back into the kitchen, and towards the oven, drooling with anticipation. Today was going to be a feast day.

  She is living there still, happy and contented, living in perfect comfort and prosperity, waiting for the children who come through the forest.

  ten

  HE TURNED at the top of the steps and stood looking back the way he had come, towards the Ferry House, out into the darkness of the playing-fields, from the terrace that ran along the back of the school buildings, above flood-level. As he looked, for a long time, out across the low-lying fields towards Dunwich, down the coast, he felt, in the darkness and cold air, as if he were at the edge of the earth, facing out across the unknown, at unmapped and desolate regions stretching endlessly away, the sound of the sea on his left. He had felt the same feeling when he was little, when he stood outside the front of the Ferry House, beyond the school grounds, and looked across the common, rising beyond the footpath, filling all the distance to the sky. It had seemed to him like the beginnings of the outside world, a mysterious and untracked wilderness where the sun went down and strange creatures lurked in the bushes and long grass.

  He turned and walked towards the school, the unlighted mass of the buildings a darker solid shape against the sky. He was not a boarder in the school, and only saw the dormitories during the holidays. In his imagination, they were always empty and echoing, the beds stripped, the walls bare.

  Instead of walking along the terrace to make his way out on to Dunwich Green, near Tennyson’s, he went inside, switching his torch on as he opened the nearest door, and began to walk parallel to the terrace, through the centre of the buildings. The reflection of his own light moved towards him, caught in the glass of class-room doors. In the school theatre the set was still up for The Winter’s Tale, the tall leafless tree in the centre, its branches spreading over the bare stage, and there was one of the programmes designed for them by Lilli still lying on the floor, a dusty footprint across its front cover.

  His feet echoing, he passed empty class-rooms, with writing still on the blackboards, possessions stacked neatly in the lockers, all the children gone. The room he eventually went into was the German room, where he had hardly ever been before, as he did not take German. He switched on the light and sat at a desk near the door, at the back of the room.

  Above the blackboard were tables of the definite and indefinite articles, irregular verbs, personal pronouns. Lotte Goetzel’s father had written that Lotte felt very strange when she had heard English parents calling their children “you,” because she thought that was really a plural pronoun, and it sounded so formal and distant. The days of the week, and the months of the year, written in German, which lined the walls near the ceiling, reminded him of the letters of the alphabet which ran around the walls in his infants’ school, when there had been so much to learn, so many tasks to master, in order to become grown-up, a big boy: weeing like a big boy, and climbing stairs properly, having a proper big boy’s bed, tying a tie, fastening shoe-laces. Every child, through all the years of childhood, worked with great intentness to acquire the skills of a proper adult person.

  On the blackboard was a partially erased drawing of a human figure, a clownish matchstick giant drawn by a small child, the parts of the body carefully labelled: das Auge, der Mund, das Ohr, die Nase; and he saw that every object in the room had a neat little label on it, naming what it was, as if giving that object reality, like pages in an illustrated A.B.C.—der Stuhl, der Tisch, die Decke, die T)r, dar Fenster. When he had been teaching Lilli, over a year ago, he had drawn blank maps of parts of Southwold, and simplified sketch outlines of some of her illustrations, asking her to write in the names of as many of the buildings or objects as she could. He remembered her clutching her pencil fiercely, her eyes determined.

  The vocabulary list pinned to the wall beside the blackboard was for die Stadt: the town, and the first words in the list which followed—die Hauptstrasse: the main street, die Strasse: the street, die Gasse: the lane—reminded him of the nursery rhyme on one of the birthday cards from Jo. (This is the key of the kingdom: In that kingdom is a city, In that city is a town, In that town there is a street, In that street there winds a lane…)

  Jo had bought two cards for him, one for a ten-year-old and one for a six-year-old, and he had found them suspended from the ceiling above his bed when he had woken up that morning, together with a poster —“HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG 16-YEAR-OLD-TYPE CORRIE”—that he had drawn using his set of Winsor & Newton coloured inks that had been one of Lilli’s Christmas presents to him. He loved the decorative boxes that the bottles of ink came in. The one he liked best was the design for ultramarine ink, where a little boy in a sailor suit knelt on a rock at the edge of the sea, sailing a model yacht. It was like the design on the painted enamel egg in the kitchen. Each of the cards had Jo’s signature inside, and a pencilled scrawl that was Matthias’s signature when Jo held his hand. All that it said inside the card for the ten-year-old was I can do anything, now that I’m ten. A lot of people had sent him cards, and there had been two greetings telegrams, one from Dad—“SIXTEEN! DON’T BULLY YOUR FRAIL OLD DAD. MISSING YOU, SON”—and one from Cato—“CONGRATULATIONS ON SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY. PLAIN BROWN PACKAGE FOLLOWS.” He remembered how much he had looked forward to his tenth birthday because his age would be in double figures.

  As a small child, he hated having his birthday so close to Christmas. It seemed so unfair to have two
such special days so close together, reducing the time he could spend on speculation and building up excitement, though his parents had always been meticulous in keeping the two occasions separate, giving his birthday an importance not overshadowed by Christmas. He remembered asking his mother why she hadn’t chosen him on a better day. He had hankered after the twenty-eighth of October at one time, as something to look forward to in the middle of the longest term of the school year. Birthdays belonged to dark nights and cold weather: the games inside could be more exciting then, he had thought.

  WHEN he walked through into the sun lounge from Lilli’s kitchen, she was on the far side, bent over her loom. He had heard the click-click as he approached.

  She moved along the bench as he came in, and he sat beside her.

  They sat in silence together as they often did for a while before he went to bed. He leaned forward, watching the pattern emerge, thread by thread. He looked carefully at the design of the shawl she was making. Lilli’s hands moved smoothly backwards and forwards, up and down, the hand nearest to him passing the shuttle swiftly away from him.

  As he had requested, there had been no formal celebration for his birthday: Lilli baked a cake, Sal came round, there had been presents, but that was all. He would open his presents at supper-time, the last thing before he went to bed. It was a tradition he had started when he was little, to keep his birthday presents as far away as possible from his Christmas presents. After Matthias had gone to bed, they had played Dungeons and Dragons for a time, though Sal left before the game was completed.

  “Twenty questions,” Corrie said.

  “‘Try to speak. Try to answer without writing anything down,’” Lilli quoted to him.

  “What is your name?”

  “What is the name of my school?”

  “What is the weather like today?”

  “What season is it?”

  “How old am I? “

  “What part did Jo play in The Winter’s Tale?”

  “Which room are we in?”