Free The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy Page B

This coat had been stolen in Bialystok by—she almost stumbled on a rut in the road. Stolen by someone. She did not think his name. “What’s not the same?” she asked again.
    “When you live in the forest, you forget what people smell like when they live all together on one piece of mud. But it used to be—” She hesitated, thinking. “It used to be better. I would walk into the village and almost decide to live here.”
    “Why?” Hansel still held her hand, but he skipped and jumped occasionally and she felt his energy springing out as she walked more slowly.
    “Food cooking. Bread baking. Hunter’s stew and meat roasting. Pancakes sizzling in oil, and in the summer the smell of melons and peaches hung over the fields around the village like perfume. My God! What a lot we ate then!”
    “What do you miss the most, Magda?” Gretel knew what she missed. Her mouth watered delicately as she remembered it.
    “Good Polish soup. Full of everything the earth gives us. So thick you stick a spoon in it and it can’t fall over. Soup with a little beer mixed in, and a glass of strong wine beside it.”
    “I miss oranges.” Gretel could hardly say the word. Water filled her mouth at the memory of the sweetness.
    “That’s for city folk. Maybe at Christmas they’d bring a basket of them out here.”
    “I don’t think oranges are all that good.” Hansel pulled away from Magda and picked up a stone. He threw it, and it went wild and hit a tree limb with a sharp click. He blew on his fingers to warm them.
    “You never had an orange. You were too little when we had them. Babies don’t eat oranges.” Gretel was sure of it.
    “You never had oranges either.” He ran behind Gretel and jerked her braid.
    “I ate an orange every day.” Gretel stopped. The memory was clear. He had white hair, and he came every morning. He crept in very quietly and gave Gretel an orange and he smelled of tobacco and he smiled as he held the waxy orange fruit out to her. He said that she would have an orange every morning of her life. He had been wrong. She had called him Zayde, a Yiddish word, even though Father frowned. Her Zayde. Grandfather.
    “Gretel?” Magda stared at the girl.
    Gretel opened her eyes. It had been so clear. The warm room with the table. His coming in and handing her the orange.
    “Daydreamer, daydreamer,” Hansel chanted. He leaped from side to side on the road, taking twenty steps for Magda’s one.
    “Hold my hand, Hansel. We’re there.” She was almost glad that the Nazis had shot all the dogs. The way they used to run at her whenever she went into the village, barking and snarling. She hadn’t liked it any more than the Nazis. But the dogs were dead now.
    Magda walked around the curve in the road, holding the boy firmly by the hand. Her face was still and had the blankness of one who lives alone, but her heart convulsed in her chest with quick jerks.
    The road ran through the village of Piaski with streets even narrower and muddier going off it. There were only three buildings larger than the huts of the peasants: the school, the building for the village officials with the jail in the back rooms, and in the middle of the village, the church.
    The Communists and the Nazis between them had burned all the other churches in the district, but not this one. The spire, tipped with a cross for a thousand years, still stood in the heart of the village, but the cross had been broken off by the Russians. Only a stick remained.
    The Communists had used the church as a restaurant, and they made the women cook meals in front of the altar. A big stove was set up where God had lived and the roof broken open to let out the stovepipe. All the soldiers ate there, and sang their Russian songs and drank until they puked on the floor and lay in it.
    The stove had been bad enough, and using the altar itself to cut meat and vegetables—setting pots of water on the wood that stained it and left rings and tore away the finish