Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  “On the Death of My Child.”

  “Do you know the meaning, word by word, of what you sang?”

  Jo shook his head.

  “Corrie wanted me to learn the German version for you. I only had a German edition to learn all the words. He explained what the poem was about. We looked at the painting.”

  He indicated the painting of the empty cradle, the man and the woman sitting across from each other on either side of a fire.

  “It is a poem I often thought about when I was first in England. I had put all my illustrations away. When I looked at the empty cradle in my painting, I thought of the little empty cradle I had brought with me out of Germany, the little children’s toy.”

  She looked across at Corrie.

  “Corrie knows exactly what the words mean. He has read the English translation. His music fits the mood so precisely, and he has been able to express the emotions of other people. Listen, Jo, these are the words for which Corrie wrote the music.”

  Holding Children’s Voices, she read the translation, slowly and quietly, the words that went with the music Corrie had written for the song in “Hansel and Gretel,” the song for Florian and Dorothea Weisser.

  “The clock strikes far away,

  It is already deep in the night,

  The lamp burns dimly,

  Your cot is made.

  Only the winds still go on

  Keening round the house.

  We sit lonely inside

  And often listen out.

  It is as though you were

  Going to tap gently at the door,

  As if you had only lost your way

  And were coming back tired.

  We poor foolish people!

  It is we who are still wandering,

  Lost in the horror of darkness—

  You have long ago found your way home.”

  She passed the book over to Jo.

  “They are beautiful words, and you wrote beautiful music, Corrie, but now it is only the first three verses that remain true for me. I cannot agree that death is where a child belongs, that a child is best out of the world, that death is the most comforting home for a child. We are wandering, we are lost in darkness, perhaps, in England, in Germany, over much of the world, but it is the children who will lead us out of this darkness, who will put an end to our wandering. With each child’s birth, they say, the world begins again, and it is you who must use your life in trying to find a way, trying to light that darkness. This is what I truly believe.”

  She turned towards Jo.

  “Will you sing again for me, Jo—in English this time?”

  Corrie was still sitting at the table.

  As Jo sang, Corrie looked at the painting of himself in the candle-light, and at the candle-light of the photograph, all Lilli’s family grouped around the table at the beginning of a meal. In “Godfather Death” the poor man had refused to allow God to hold his child as His godson at its christening because God left the poor to starve; rejected the Devil because he led men into evil; and chose Death as his child’s godfather because Death made all men equal, and made no distinction between rich and poor. When his godson was grown up, Godfather Death led him deep into the forest and gave him his present, the skills which would make him a rich and famous physician: a secret herb to cure ills, and the power of telling if a person was going to live or going to die. Whenever the godson was with a patient, Godfather Death would appear, and if he stood by the patient’s head, he would recover, but if he stood by the patient’s feet, that person belonged to Death and the godson was forbidden to use the herb to cure him. At the end of the story, after the godson had defied Death to save the life of a king’s dying daughter, Death took the young man deep below the surface of the earth into a cave where countless candles burned, millions upon millions of them, flickering, rising up, and dying away perpetually, the lights of the lives of all the people in the world, and showed him the candle of his own life, tiny and guttering, and when the young man pleaded with him to light a new candle for him, out of love, so that he could marry the king’s daughter and live the rest of his life in happiness, Godfather Death threw the little piece of candle down to the floor of the cave, so that it was extinguished and the young man belonged in the hands of Death for ever.

  He remembered the candles of his birthday cake, and of Christmas Eve, when the fir-tree was covered with candles and the whole room swayed and swam with their flames. That was how they had staged the final scene of The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, Perdita, Paulina, and Polixenes moved silently towards the statue of Hermione in the chapel, hardly visible in the dark centre of the stage, beneath the white wood of the dying tree, behind the banks of unlit candles, and in a long sequence without any dialogue, as his music was played by the consort off-stage, as Jo began to sing, they took tapers, knelt before the statue of the wife who had died of grief, and stood to light the candles, one by one; and Hermione became bright and visible in the warm, shifting glow. After sixteen years of winter, a barren mountain and perpetual storm, tears shed daily at the grave of a wife and child buried together, Leontes’s wife returned to him from death, as music played, as the tree burst into blossom and fruit—a warm and living woman, candles lit to light all the candles that had gone out in their world.

  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.”

  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.”

  Gretel thought of her brother’s words, and then of her brother. She looked at the oven, and then at the woman, thinking rapidly.

  “Into there?” she said. “Into the oven? How on earth can I do that?”

  “You little fool!” said the woman. “Are you totally helpless? It’s easy enough for anyone, even a child. There’s plenty of room to get in through the door. Look, I’ll show you.”

  She pushed Gretel to one side, and leaned forward into the oven.

  “Like this,” she said, her head entirely inside. “Like this,” her voice echoing and hollow.

  With all her strength, Gretel gave the woman a tremendous shove that knocked her right into the middle of the oven, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt.

  The woman began to howl with pain and anger, but Gretel instantly ran out of the house, and the godless witch perished in the flames.

  Gretel ran like the wind to the back of the house, through the deep drifts of snow to the little stable, to the iron cage where Hansel was imprisoned.

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

  Gretel flung open the door of the cage, crying, “Hansel, we are safe! The witch is dead!”

  Then Hansel sprang out like a freed bird, and they flung their arms around each other, laughing and crying in their joy.

  Hand in hand, they ran through the snow back into the house, and, in one of the rooms in the long corridor, found hoards of precious stones.

  “These are a l
ot better than pebbles!” said Hansel, dropping them into the pockets of his coat until they were both crammed full, and Gretel filled her pinafore.

  “We must go now,” said Hansel. “We must leave this dark forest, and never come back.”

  He took his little sister by the hand, and they began to walk.

  As they walked, the sun began to rise, and, in the warmth, the snow began to melt from the branches of the trees, sparkling water falling all around them as the green of the trees emerged.

  After several hours of walking in warmth and light, the trees beginning to thin around them, grass now growing beneath their feet, they came to a great river, clear and calm in the green solitude. Beyond the trees, beyond the river, open green fields stretched emptily away towards a wide horizon.

  “We cannot cross out of the forest,” said Hansel. “I can’t see a bridge, not even a plank.”

  “There’s no ferry either,” Gretel replied, “but there’s a white duck swimming there. I’m sure she’ll help us, if I ask her.”

  Then she stood on the river bank and sang.

  “Little duck, little duck, the river’s so wide

  Hansel and Gretel beg you for a ride.

  There’s no way across for us, no bridge in sight,

  Please take us across on your back so white.”

  The duck immediately swam across to them, and let Hansel sit himself on her back.

  “Sit beside me, little sister,” he said, making a place for her.

  “No,” Gretel replied. “That will be too heavy for the little duck. She shall take us across, one after the other.”

  The little duck did this, and they were soon safely across the river.

  When they had walked for a short time, their surroundings seemed to be more and more familiar to them, until, in the distance, they saw their father’s house.

  Hand in hand, they began to run across the green fields.

  As they drew nearer, they saw their father, very still, sitting in a chair beside the door, like a very old man, his head bowed.

  “Father!” Hansel and Gretel shouted. “Father!”

  Slowly, their father looked up.

  He had known no moment of happiness since he had left his children in the forest, and had spent his life in mourning since that time.

  He stood up, as they ran towards him, holding out his arms, tears running down his cheeks.

  He threw his arms around them, embracing them as if he could never again bear to be parted from them.

  “Oh my daughter, oh my son,” he whispered, “forgive me for what I have done. You are my beloved children. Stay with me. Stay in your father’s house.”

  They poured the precious stones at his feet. He didn’t even look at them, but gazed into his children’s eyes.

  They are together still, happy and contented, living in perfect comfort and prosperity, a devoted family, away from the world, at the edge of the forest.

  My story is ended now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am greatful or permission to quote from the following texts:

  The Diary of Anne Frank: Translated from the Dutch by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. First published 1947 in Holland by Contact, Amsterdam. Copyright ©1958 by Vallentine, Mitchell & Co., Ltd. “Children’s Crusade,” by Bertolt Brecht: English translation by Hans Keller Copyright ©1969 by Stefan S. Brecht. Reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Bertolt Brecht.

  Emil and the Detectives, by Erich Kästner: Copyright 1929, 1931 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne: Published by Methuen & Co., Ltd.

  The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame: Copyright by the University Chest, Oxford.

  A Calendar of German Customs, by Richard Thonger: Copyright 1966 Oswald Wolf (Publishers) Ltd. Quoted on page 36.

  “On the Death of My Child”: Translated from the German by Leonard Forster. From The Penguin Book of German Verse, page 313. Copyright © 1957, 1959 Leonard Foster. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, Ltd.

  The Children’s Haggadah: Edited by Dr. A. M. Silberman. Published in 1937 by Shapiro, Valentine & Co.

  The versions of the stories by the Brothers Grimm are based upon the translations by Margaret Hunt and James Stern in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Copyright 1944 by Pantheon Books, Inc. Copyright renewed 1972 by Random House, Inc. Published in Great Britain by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1975.

  I hope that the dedication at the beginning of this novel, which includes all the above authors, expresses my gratitude to them.