consciousness, it’s May. Birds flutter from an apple tree beneath the window. Gasping, Hansel awakens to freedom. Beside him in the silver morning lies Gretel. She is his ward from now until death. Today Elijah will walk them into the forest together. Hansel has lined his pockets with gravel.
A knock. Hansel rises. He hears the bolt slide and in walks Father Elijah, eyes averted under his fedora. His dog collar hangs limp off his throat. Gretel stirs in bed.
“We must leave in fifteen minutes” says Elijah shaking her through the duvet. He paces out of the room and thunders downstairs. Dispelling their sleep in the cold water at the bedroom sink the siblings join him. He is stood in the kitchen behind their emaciated mother. She is sat on a threadbare wooden chair at the oak dining table. Mother cannot recognise them. She cannot recognise anyone but Elijah.
The children chase down their stale bread with diluted milk. Both taste bitter. When they finish, Elijah unhooks the rifle above the mantelpiece. They leave Mother, who continues to stare into the distance at some point beyond sight or comprehension. They exit through the garden door and step into the spring. Hansel squints. He is photosensitive, like Mother.
“Where are we going?” asks Gretel.
“To do God’s work” Elijah coughs, leading them through the garden. Gretel stops by some rhododendrons in full flower. Her tomatoes are ripe and bursting beside them.
“When I see them, something in my heart just explodes” she says.
“Bring some” Hansel smiles.
“Your only food is to do the will of him who sent for you” Elijah interjects. “In times of famine we hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
“Will we not eat tonight?” Hansel asks.
“He is the bread of life. Whoever goes to him will never go hungry.” He marches them to the stile at the end of the garden and rests his gun on his shoulder. His skeletal face looms out of his cassock as he waits for them to mount the stile. Hansel climbs over, followed by Gretel, whom he helps.
Elijah leads them towards the woodland. After an hour Gretel hears the babble of a brook.
“Elijah, please may I stop?”
“We must go on.” They climb a small elevation and see the brook slanting through the trees ahead. They move forward. Every so often Hansel has been dropping small white pebbles from a hole in his coat onto the ground. Elijah’s long stride tires Gretel. Hansel notices and takes her hand. It is sunset now, she is frustrated and wants to stop.
“Elijah, may we stop? I need to pee,” she says.
“You may,” says the emaciated old priest grinning back at them with famished eyes in the clearing.
*
I loved that man once. He was charming and quick though perhaps too righteous.
I thought he would settle down in domestic life but when he married me he started to find reasons to hate us.
He said we were cursed, and that my children were born in sin. He refused to baptise them.
I think he tried to smother me. But I don’t know, because it is the remains of a memory that I am not even certain is real. Memories of my physical life are reduced to a formless abstract residue. I cannot even remember my children’s faces. I am mostly gazing into fields of nothing.
Every day the nightmare gets worse. My thoughts are losing their shape.
I long to hold my children.
*
Hansel and Gretel are hogtied and placed roughly in the middle of the clearing, their heads pointed at the charred remains of a campfire in the centre, both bodies nearly symmetrically obtuse to the radial line that marks their entry point, like two clock hands reading twenty to five. It is after dark and moonbeams bathe the clearing. A gaunt savage, whose rags suggest that he has sold everything he has in order to eat, lopes towards them from their entry point. He is hindered by a sudden coughing fit. When he recovers, the children can see the saliva flooding his mouth; his lusting eyes communicate a terrible monomania. Hansel feels the warm fan of his own urine spreading beneath him as the wire man starts to cackle.
“D’ere’s na wode!” he gibbers, “I gut togert somme wode!” He tramps off into the shrubbery around them and begins collecting firewood. Every time he has collected an armful he returns to the clearing and drops it in the centre. Gretel whimpers and starts to scream. Hansel screams over her, hoping she stops. She does stop, when she sees how much Hansel’s eyes are telling her to stop.
“Et nede fier!” the idiot says. He looks around, panicked. Remembering the children, he limps over to Hansel and frisks his pockets. He finds a box of matches. Beaming, he lights several matches and carefully places them on the pile until he starts a blaze. He is laughing when a bullet shatters his jaw.
*
A shot resounds through the clearing. Hansel and Gretel go from prone position into a sprint like olympians. In their panic, they fail to note that they’re not hogtied, and that the body of the idiot is not where it had fallen. The collected firewood sits unburnt in the centre but Hansel’s trousers are still wet. Scrambling to leave the way they came, Hansel runs headfirst into the shoulder of a stranger in furs stepping out from the trees. He is carrying a gun.
“Oh! sorry!” Hansel yelps.
“Are you children OK?” says the hunter, concerned, fatherly.
“He was going to eat us” Gretel says.
“I fired a warning shot. Man of the cloth with a couple defenceless children, misinterpret that and you’re going to hell for a long time. Can’t shoot an emissary.”
“He was a cannibal! You hit his jaw!” Gretel protests.
“He probably was, probably was.” The hunter lights a cigarette. He doesn’t say any more. “Thing is, there’s an hour of daylight left. Do you know how to get home?”
“I left a trail of stones at our feet” says Hansel.
“Stones or teeth?” says the hunter. He sidesteps off into the foliage so that the children can see a trail of wet human molars, canines and incisors twinkling as it penetrates deep into the forest behind him.
*
He is hurting them but all I can do is sit here trying and failing to scream.
It is useless. I long to die.
He sold all the ammunition.
*
“Hansel no! We can’t ever return!” Gretel despairs. Her pacing is wearing the bedroom floor.
“OK, but we can’t leave Mother to him!” Hansel snaps. After a long silence Gretel whispers:
“We need to kill her” Hansel shakes his head. Despite her matricidal will the clock ticks along to Elijah’s plan, Gretel thumps and tears her pillow to feathers. At sunrise, Elijah unbolts their bedroom door and trains his gun on them, marching them downstairs, through the kitchen, past their unseeing mother and into the garden. The rhododendrons are there but the tomatoes are not. Gretel’s heart is empty.
At sunset they are in a clearing. It looks like the one from the night before. The firewood is there but the earth is not charred. Elijah shoots them dead.
*
Lost, the children walk towards the dying sun. The horizon is as red as the blood that drips from Hansel’s right hand leaving a trail behind them. In his left hand he holds Elijah’s gun.
“Hansel, we need to find somewhere safe. I long for sleep.” Gretel says. She keeps looking to her right, Hansel is on her left.
“I long to eat, Gretel” he replies, softly. They are half mad.
“Every time I turn to look at you you disappear, yet you have been with us since we left the garden” says Gretel, looking over her right shoulder.
“Gretel, who are you talking to?”
“Elijah.” After a moment she says “he’s not real is he?”
*
Elijah wakes up in the undergrowth to a terrible ache in his head. His face is bloody and his right eye is swollen. He staggers through the black forest. The canopies are dense overhead so starlight is scarce. He hears the sound of a brook and follows it. Climbing to the top of an elevation, he sees the coursing stream shimmering below. Cautiously, he descends the elevation and heaves himself towards the stream. Crouching beside it, Elijah cups the water to his cracked lips and drinks. When he has drunk his fill he starts to wash the blood and dirt from him. When he is done, he defecates on the bank and washes his anus in the water. He stands up and walks back towards the elevation. In the patchy light he sees the wet twinkling of hundreds of teeth strewn in a line. He follows the trail till it stops, two hundred metres from the edge of the forest.
*
He came back in last night furious. His anger is the most vivid thing I’ve felt in weeks. He smashed all of the plates and glasses, and then he sat beside me and started wolfing tomatoes. He didn’t give me any, just spat bits of them at my face and called me a whore and a slut and a dirty fucking pig with hell fiends for children.
The light gets dimmer. My thoughts get slower. I will die soon.
I haven’t eaten in days.
Still here…
Still.
*
At first light the children see a viaduct curling through the mountains ahead. Desperate, they walk towards it. They see a stone cottage nestled in some trees at the base of a mountain. Next to it, a mill wheel turns to the gentle plashing of water. Relief lifts the weariness from their bodies as they approach the house. Gretel stands transfixed by the red whorls of some laceleaf beneath a window as Hansel approaches the sage green door to knock. He knocks several times but receives no answer. He tries the handle and discovers that the door is open. They go inside and the smell of cinnamon, ginger, vanilla, honey and steamed milk hits them. They follow the vapours into a kitchen. The simmering pots on the stove appear to be stirring themselves as sweet effusions flood the room. On the long central dining table is a feast of waffles, ice cream, crêpes, rice pudding, éclairs, baklava, donuts, madeleines, crème brûlée, coffee, hot chocolate, cream, grapes, grapefruit, apples, pears, nectarines, oranges, bananas, mangos, watermelon, strawberries, pineapples, cherries, and much more besides. Hansel kisses Gretel with joy at the sight of it, and the pair are so drunk on the mountainous view that they eat standing up, oblivious to the chairs positioned round the table when they descended upon the feast. When the siblings have eaten and drunk to their delight they go with hanging heads upstairs to bed. Déjà vu. They have already seen this house, eaten its food, had this experience. At the foot of a large four-poster bed in the bedroom at the top of the stairs lay folded two sets of pyjamas. With the last of their energy they change out of their damp dirty clothes and tuck themselves into the uterine warmth of the duvet.
*
Hansel and Gretel have been trapped inside the house for three days now. When they opened the front door to leave after their first night they found themselves peering into the hallway of a house that was exactly like the one they were in. They passed the threshold and walked through the inverse hall to a backdoor only to find it yielded much the same situation; there was another hall, this time leading to an identical open front door. They appear to be stuck in an infinite continuum of identical houses, each one exactly like the last, down to the hairs they left in the bathtub that morning and the crumbs on their pillows. In their desperation to get back to their mother they have tried and failed to break the enchanted windows that face out onto the forest and the viaduct that curls through the mountains. They have spent so long opening front and back doors and walking through houses that they have lost track of the original house. The pots on the stove continue to simmer and food continues to replenish itself on the kitchen table.
*
He has run out of tomatoes. He left this morning to check the traps he set in the environs. He returned disappointed. He expects the children will come back but I am sure they are far away now. I am the only food for miles.
It’s getting so very hot here. I did not think I was destined for hell, but I feel the inferno now melting my skin.
I pray that my children are safe.
*
“Hansel, come! I heard mother!” Gretel screams one night up the stairs. Hansel drops the guitar he was plucking and tumbles off the bed, downstairs, across the hall, and over to the living room fireplace. “It was coming from there,” Gretel says, her face like a startled rabbit as she points to the chute. “It’s stopped now, but I heard it! You have to believe me!”
“What did she say?”
“She prays we’re safe, and said that she’s burning.” Startled, Hansel takes a poker from the fireplace and strikes the nearest window. It bounces from his hands and smashes a lamp beside an armchair. He huffs, picks it up again and runs to the front door. He throws it open and dashes through the impossible hall beyond towards the inverse backdoor. He fumbles with the handle and throws it open, charging through hallway after hallway. He tires and drops the poker and collapses onto the parquet floor crying. Gretel walks over to him from the living room. She embraces him and they sob together until they are both heaving tearlessly. They hear footsteps. They look up to see the silhouette of a woman smiling at them from the frame of the open front door. Behind her is the forest. Sunbeams flood their eyes through the space between her body and the doorframe. Hansel squints. It is Mother. Gretel runs over the threshold and into her arms. They cannot believe their luck. Hansel is afraid to blink, hoping to fix her eternally in that spot, framed by the doorway, embracing his sister, all three of them untouched by the decrepitudes of famine around them. Mother says nothing. She and Gretel walk over to Hansel and they embrace. He is lost in her hair and everything is as it should be, before the famine, before her illness, before Elijah, when it was just the three of them entangled in the fragrant silk of Mother’s hair, her breath blowing from the depths of her onto them, carving olfactory memories into them, falling off the fronts of them as they huddle by the moonlit Rhine, and smoke escapes the bordello window nearby, along with the sound of mirth and drink and glasses going clink as a pianist cascades through the notes in C Major with his right hand while his left holds a gently variating waltz rhythm, and each of them thinks that this is what it means to be happy, poor sure, but together, and that feeling mounts higher and higher into an ineluctable spiritual crisis because in the end nothing stays as it should.
*
That night in the house Hansel was plagued by a nightmare. A forest under bougainvillea twilight. The rough hands of Father Elijah strike him and Gretel deeper into the woodland. When they get to a clearing Elijah hogties them. Hansel prays that his sister doesn’t die of despair. Then Elijah rolls Hansel onto his back and sits on his chest. The Father bares his necrotising gums and shattered brown teeth; his cadaverous visage blots out the moon. It is the last thing Hansel sees. His arms and legs are crushed behind him as he feels life slip away into
The Wall 2013 