Sieglinde had been taught to avoid scandal, and had always done her best. Here she was, a few months shy of sixteen, and she still wasn’t allowed to see Klaus without a chaperone—even though the family knew the two would one day get married—even though the family had chosen him in the first place! Sieglinde knew she should ask no further questions about her grandmother and her heinous ways. But she liked Grossmutti Greta. She was the favorite of all her grandparents, probably—Greta was a little stern, but then, they were all a little stern. And sometimes when Sieglinde went to visit, especially when she’d been a little girl, Greta had made her the most wonderful gingerbread men. Sieglinde had never tasted anything as good as those gingerbread men. Sieglinde never knew what special ingredients there must be in them.
She knew that if she asked her parents whether she could visit her grandmother, they would say no. So she didn’t ask. One afternoon, when Father was in his study, and Mother was busy in the kitchen, Sieglinde sneaked away. She didn’t want to go to her grandmother’s empty-handed, and so spent her pocket money at the baker’s, buying a bag full of brioches; some of them had chocolate in the middle.
Her grandmother didn’t seem surprised to see her. “There you are,” she said. “Good. You can help me find a suitcase.”
“I brought brioches,” said Sieglinde.
“I have eaten my last brioche,” said Grossmutti Greta.
“Some of them have chocolate inside.”
“The same for chocolate,” said Grossmutti Greta.
“So, it’s true, then? You’re really leaving?”
“Yes,” said Grossmutti Greta.
“Are you mad? Everyone thinks you’ve gone mad.”
“I haven’t gone mad,” said Greta. “Or if I am mad, I am as mad as I was before. I have just decided to stop pretending. All the pretense, I am so tired of it. I have baked some gingerbread men, my very last batch. We shall eat gingerbread men and talk.”
Sieglinde agreed. She hadn’t tasted one of her grandmother’s gingerbread men for a long time, and had rather assumed she was now too old for them.
“Ach, nonsense,” said Greta. “You’re the perfect age for my gingerbread men. All the other men you’ve eaten, that was just practice. Now, at last, you can eat the real thing. But first,” she added, “we find my suitcase, yes?”
They went up to the attic. There was no light up there. “Your grandfather,” said Greta, “he always said he’d fix the electrics, but he never did; it was always ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, you’ll have your lightbulbs tomorrow.’”
Sieglinde asked if that was why she was leaving him. “All in good time,” said Greta as she poked around in the dark, and then she said, “Yes, yes, here it is,” and she was pulling a suitcase out of the shadows. It was big and brown and had brass buckles on it. “Good,” she said. “Now we talk.”
The gingerbread men were fresh from the oven; they smelled moist, they smelled juicy, somehow, even though Sieglinde knew there was no juice in gingerbread. She felt her mouth water. Greta picked up the bag of brioches, opened it, recoiled, then dropped it unceremoniously into the swingbin.
“Do you really have to go away, Grossmutti?” asked Sieglinde, and tears pricked at her eyes, and that was strange, for she was not a sentimental girl—sentiment was frowned upon in the Von Zieten house.
“Now, now,” said Grossmutti, and she tapped at Sieglinde’s hand sympathetically, and she wasn’t used to acts of sentiment either, and she did it too hard and too awkwardly, and it felt like being comforted by a wrinkly bag of onions. “I shall tell you the story, the same as I told my husband. And you shall eat.”
Sieglinde bit into the gingerbread man. It tasted good.
“I came from a poor family, much poorer than yours. I had a brother called Hans, a father who cut wood, and, for a little while, I had a mother. Then the mother died. And my father married again. The stepmother didn’t like us much.”
“Was she a cruel stepmother?” asked Sieglinde.
“I don’t think she was particularly cruel, or any crueler to me than my own mother was. Stepmothers have a bad time of it. It’s hard enough to love your own flesh and blood, and I should know. It’s almost impossible to love someone else’s. Ach, this is not a story about wicked stepmothers.”
“All right.”
“You’re as bad as your grandfather. No more interruptions.”
“Sorry.”
“Stepmother didn’t want us home. She tried to smile at us when we were there, but Hans and I could see through them: there was effort in those smiles; it was like she had toothache. We played in the forest. Deeper and deeper we’d go; every day we’d dare ourselves to get to the very heart of it. And one day out playing, Hans said to me, ‘Well, we’ve done it now, Sister, we’re well and truly lost. Home could be miles away, and in any direction. We could walk around for the rest of our lives and never find it. Might as well face it, we’re going to die out here—if starvation doesn’t get us first, the cold and the wolves will’—and he had a tear, for my brother was an unnaturally sensitive boy.
“We laid ourselves down to die, and we were resigned to it; we didn’t used to struggle so much against death as people do now. But before we expired we found an old woman was standing over us. I say she was old; she was probably not old, but I was of the age when I thought that anyone with gray hair and missing teeth and pockmarks was old. She said, ‘You poor children, you must be hungry. Let me take you to a place where there is food, all is food. My pantries are filled to bursting, and the bricks of my walls are made of fresh soft bread, the cement is warm chocolate fudge, the roof is thatched with licorice sticks. Will you come with me? It isn’t far.’
“Hans was my brother; I always did what Hans said. Hans said, ‘Okay.’ And I wondered whether this woman could be our new mother. I asked for her name, and she said she hadn’t got a name, or if she’d had one, she’d lost it. I began to tell her our names, and she stopped me, and she said she didn’t think we would have that kind of relationship.
“And so it turned out to be. We entered her house and she locked the door behind us with a big key. ‘I’m so sorry, my dears,’ she said, and to be fair, she looked very sorry too, and we couldn’t be angry with her. She said, ‘As you can see, the bricks are made of brick, the cement is just some cement, the thatch has largely blown away, but when it was there it was very far indeed from looking like licorice. This is a house of food—but the food is you—you are it—by which I mean, I’m going to eat you both up, are you following me? It’s inside you, your kidneys and your hearts and your chitterlings: you walk about carrying all that tasty grub wrapped up in thin sausage skin, and it’s a waste, and we’re going to let it out.”
“She snapped off one of Hans’s fingers and ate it. Then she snapped off one of mine, chewed at it thoughtfully. Because, as you know, the fingers are the best way of determining whether a child is ripe or not. ‘Not quite ready yet,’ she said, ‘but not long to go, and what a feast you’ll make! And in the meantime, I promise you, I’ll be kind to you, and nice; I’ll be a mother to you—it’s the least I can do. I really am most terribly sorry, but you must understand, I really am most terribly hungry as well.”
“She had to fatten us up. And that wasn’t easy, since there was no food in the house. She would stand us upright in the bathtub, naked, and scrub away at us with a loofah, one of those big loofahs with the hard bristles, you know? And all the dead skin would come peeling off, and she’d gather it all up, every last wormy strand, and she’d fry it, and tell us to eat—and that skin smelled so good, it was like onions, it’d sizzle so invitingly in the pan. And yet she never ate a morsel, no matter how hungry she got—‘No, no,’ she’d say, ‘this is a treat for you kids, don’t you worry about me, I’ll get my dinner soon enough’—but sometimes she would watch us eat and she couldn’t help it, the sight of it would make her tummy gurgle, and she would cry. We’d beg her, ‘Eat, please eat.’ We’d say, ‘Take another of our fingers, snap them
off, have them as a snack.’ One day she did that, and she put them in her mouth and she winced and said we still weren’t ripe—and we’d caused her to waste two perfectly good fingers before they were ready, that was very selfish of us. She was angry, I think, for the only time we knew her, and she sent us to bed without any supper. Which, in those days of starvation, was pretty much par for the course.
“One morning, over breakfast, as Hans and I gorged ourselves on the dead skin leftovers, the woman said she couldn’t wait any longer. She was starving; she would be dead from starvation within the hour; then where would we all be? She’d have to eat us both right now. And if we weren’t ripe enough yet, well, she’d just have to put up with any resultant indigestion. She was too weak to prepare the oven, so Hans and I did it all for her, and we did our very best, but somehow we made a mistake: we ended up cooking her instead of ourselves. I kept saying to Hans, ‘Are you sure we’re doing this right?’ as we folded the woman’s arms together and tucked them underneath her belly so she’d fit through the oven door, and he told me not to worry about it. The woman didn’t blame us. She said, ‘Oh, well, either way, here’s an end to my suffering’—and I suppose it was.
“We took the key and opened the front door and went out into the forest, and oh, the air tasted so fresh, it was almost good enough to eat. And we were free. And we set off home.
“I don’t like that suitcase.”
“Sorry?” said Sieglinde. “What about the suitcase?”
“I don’t like it,” said Grossmutti Greta. “All those big brass buckles! Such ostentation! So shameless! Ach, when you’re lugging a suitcase about, with nowhere you can call home to take it, you don’t need brass buckles weighing you down. No. We go back to the attic. Come on. Back to the attic; we find a better suitcase.”
Sieglinde thought that the dark of the attic seemed even darker than before, and that was impossible, surely—but the black made Sieglinde’s eyes hurt. “Stay here,” said Grossmutti Greta, and then she plunged into the blackness, and Sieglinde knew she wouldn’t be able to see a thing—Sieglinde’s eyes were still young and untainted; how much weaker must Greta’s be, ancient as she was!
And she heard Greta grunt with effort, as if she were wrestling with something, as if she were wrestling with the dark itself. And Sieglinde felt the sudden certainty that she would never see her grandmother again, that she’d be lost within the dark, that she’d die—and that the only way she could save her would be if she too jumped into the blackness and put herself at the mercy of whatever was inside and begged for her grandmother’s life—and she hadn’t got the courage, she realized, and what was worse, she hadn’t got the inclination.
And then Greta emerged, and her hands were tight around another suitcase—this one bigger, grayer, and free of all offending buckles. And she looked calm, and matter-of-fact, as if she hadn’t tussled with the monsters in the black, as if she hadn’t confronted death itself—and maybe she hadn’t. “Some tea,” she said, “that’s what we need, and you can have another gingerbread man, yes? Come along, come along.”
In the kitchen Sieglinde said, “I won’t have another gingerbread man, thank you.”
Grossmutti Greta said, “Why not?”
Sieglinde explained she didn’t want to get fat.
Grossmutti Greta said, “There was a time when we didn’t worry about such stupid things. It was good to be fat. It meant we might survive the winter.”
Sieglinde said that had been a long time ago, and now it wasn’t good to be fat, and that Klaus wouldn’t want her if she put on weight—he’d told her he didn’t fancy girls with big thighs.
Greta said, “That Klaus of yours is an idiot,” and she said, “and your thighs are not fat, and believe me, I am an expert, I feel they could do with a lot more fattening. Now, eat another gingerbread man, or you will offend me and we shan’t part as friends.” And Sieglinde didn’t want that, and besides, she did like the gingerbread men: they really were quite delicious.
“Won’t you have one?” asked Sieglinde as she bit off a leg, and Greta waved the offer aside and instead clasped hold of her teacup, and Sieglinde noticed that there were indeed fingers missing from Greta’s hand, and she’d never seen that before; how strange.
“I liked your story, Granny,” said Sieglinde. “But I don’t understand why you’re leaving Grossvatti.”
“That’s because the story isn’t finished yet,” said Grossmutti Greta. “Now be quiet, blood of my blood, and listen.”
“I said that the air tasted so fresh that it was good enough to eat. Well, you couldn’t. And though Hans and I enjoyed our freedom, and thought we’d escaped certain death at the hands of the old woman, in truth we were still in danger. We walked through the forest as hungry as before, and as lost. We walked for hours and our feet hurt and our stomachs hurt, and Hans said, ‘It’s no good, my sister, we were better off as we were. At least before there was a reason for our deaths: another would have lived through our sacrifice, and she would have buried our bones, and she would have remembered us, and in the darkness of the night when she was all alone she might have patted her belly for company.’ Hans shed a tear, because, as I say, he was very sensitive.
“Still we walked on, and it was with our last remaining strength that we dragged ourselves to a house. And only as we reached the door did we realize we knew this house—we had spent all this time walking in a circle. We had returned to the cottage where we had been imprisoned, and the bricks were not made of bread, and the cement not made of fudge, but nevertheless something inside smelled very tasty. And we opened the door, and there, of course, was the woman—just as we’d left her, and cooked to an absolute tee.
“Oh, how my tummy cried out for that meat. ‘We have no choice,’ said Hans, and from the oven he took the roast dinner, and broke off one of the woman’s arms, and began to gnaw at it. The woman stared at us through eyes that had browned in the heat and looked like fried eggs. ‘At least close them,’ I said, and Hans did one better: he tore off her face altogether and threw it into the fire. ‘You have to eat,’ he said. ‘My dear sister, you know we can’t afford to be picky with our food now.’
“And I said, ‘Could you find me a piece of meat that isn’t too meaty—something that won’t look too much like it’s from a corpse?’ And he had a rummage, and then produced something that looked a little like chicken, and I put it in my mouth, and I swallowed.
“And oh! It was good. My stomach roared with approval—so much so, in fact, that at first it sent the meat right back up again, and I had to swallow it once more, more slowly, to prove to it it wasn’t dreaming. We had a feast that night. I soon overcame my scruples—what else was there for it, when I had the evidence of my own senses? The body had such a variety of tastes—the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the flesh: not a single one bland, not a single one without subtle flavors all its own. We are meant to be eaten—we are designed that way. Pretty soon I even fished the woman’s face out of the fire, and we ate that too. And do you know, the eyes did taste a little like eggs, if you closed your own and pretended.
“I said that the food would give us the strength to find our way home the next day, and Hans agreed. And that night we slept with full bellies—so full that we couldn’t sleep on them; so full that we kept rolling right off our bellies and onto our sides. And in the morning Hans said, ‘But why leave? This can be our house now. And we can eat the fruits of the forest. Because the forest is full of children, all the children of the world play here at some time, and most will come too far and too unwisely; there are a million cruel stepmothers to escape from, there are a million million kindly woodcutters who don’t take enough care.’
“I remember the first child we caught. It looked up at us with such idiot relief. It said it thought it was going to die alone. Hans said, ‘Not alone’—and he broke its jaw fast, because the woman had been right, it was better the child didn’t give its name; you didn’t want to get too attached to the livestock. We broke
off a finger each, and sucked on them, and they seemed ripe enough to us, but what did we know? Then we hung the child upside down and it was bawling all the while, and then it stopped bawling and its sobbing was so quiet, and we slit its throat, and then even the sobbing stopped.
“Childmeat is the best meat of all: it lifts straight off the bone and melts in your mouth—and it tastes of death, and the taste of death is good. You can survive on vegetables but you can’t enjoy them, and feasting on death gives even for a moment the sense we have risen above death, we are gods, we will live forever.
“And this went on for some years. And we were never cruel to the children—they never suffered unnecessarily—and that was good too, because an unripe child may taste a little sour, but a suffering child tastes sourer still. And we forgot the face of our father. And we didn’t care—I thought we didn’t care.
“One day we found a little girl sleeping under the bushes. She was just outside the house, no more than a few feet away—it was as if she’d been left there as a gift. At first I thought she was already dead, and there is little worth in a child who is already dead—it’s edible, but where’s the fun in eating the leftovers of crows and worms? Hans turned it over with his foot, and she opened her eyes, and blinked at us, and smiled. She smiled. Hans said, ‘We are going to eat you.’ And the girl said, ‘I know the way out of the forest. I know the way home.’
“I said to Hans, ‘This is it, this is our chance to escape.’ And Hans said, ‘There is no escape for us. We are what we are, and we can never be anything else. We prey upon the weak and the defenseless, and if that makes us evil, why, then, so we are evil, but we do our evil honestly. There is no home out there for us, Greta.’
Fearie Tales Page 9
