The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy Read Free Book Online

damn holiness. All your life. And an illegitimate daughter, and now a pregnant granddaughter, and you vowing celibacy.”
    “Half the village is dead. Sent to Germany as slaves. Sent to Russia to build roads in Siberia. Shot. Starved. Forced to enlist in the Russian army. They’ll shoot the whole village if they find these children hidden with you.”
    “We won’t hide them. We’ll treat it all as natural. You have the connections. Get me peroxide. I’ll dye the boy’s hair. Get the baptismal certificates. We’ll apply for food coupons.”
    “You’ll kill the whole village for those two?”
    “What has the village ever done for me?”
    “They’ve kept silent about your grandmother.”
    “They sent her to prison after she spent years cleaning up their embarrassing mistakes.”
    He stood and stared at Magda. She stared back, and Gretel shut her eyes and prayed. Let the woman win.
    “You want me dead,” he said.
    “Why not pretend to be a Christian?”
    “Don’t use God as a weapon against my life. I have a duty to abstain from suicide.”
    “Your whole life has been a suicide.”
    “Go to Hell.”
    “This is Hell. God couldn’t invent anything worse. The Nazis have exceeded the imagination of God.”
    “Blasphemer.”
    “If you won’t do it as a priest, I demand that you do it on the head of our dead mother.”
    “Don’t drag her into this. She was dead before it started.”
    “She took you and abandoned me and my sister. She left us with my grandmother because I wasn’t beautiful enough. She dumped us and never looked back and took her golden boy. Her blond, beautiful, clever, good, pious little altar boy with her. And then you abandoned her.”
    “Enough.”
    “She came back to me, and used up all I had with sickness.”
    “She died.”
    “On her miserable head, I demand that you do this. Get the certificates.”
    “Why punish me now?”
    “Because it amuses me. You and your going to Rome. The boy genius. You’re a trapped rat with all the other stinking rats now.”
    He was silent, and sweat ran down his face.
    “Do this, brother, or I’ll march these children in and leave them in your church. I’ll say you hid them there, and they’ll burn the church to the ground with you and the children and everyone else inside.”
    “You don’t care about these Jews.”
    “That’s none of your business. Go and do your duty. Tell Zbigniew to bring his camera.”
    “He has no film.”
    “He has film to take pictures of documents and make identity papers for those with enough money. He can spare an inch of film to help me. Remind him of his clerk. She could have embarrassed him badly before the war. She was a Jew and she carried his half-Jew child until I helped her.”
    The man ran his hand through his hair. His eyes rolled like a horse hearing the airplanes coming back over the fields. The whites of his eyes showed for a second.
    “I couldn’t help you with our mother. When she was sick I was in Rome. We’ll be killed for this.”
    Magda looked at the two children. The boy was nearly dead. The girl was forcing herself to stay awake in the warmth of the hut. Only a gray light came through the one window, but the girl’s hair shone like moonlight.
    “Our grandmother would have fed them.”
    “Those were different times.”
    “Besides, I need help. I can hardly get wood. The girl is strong enough. The boy is tough. I’ll survive the winter with them to help me.”
    “It may be impossible.”
    “Do it.”
    He left the hut and Magda sat very still for long minutes. She began to rock finally and looked up at the girl.
    “Can you make soup?”
    “Yes.” Gretel had never made soup, but she had seen it made.
    “I’ll show you where the food is hidden outside, and you can begin.”
    Gretel climbed down and the two of them, the girl walking now only by will alone, and the old woman nearly bent double, went into the snow, leaving the boy asleep and dreaming on the platform.

Nelka
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