Page 1 of Hansel and Gerhardt
Hansel and Gerhardt
At the edge of a great forest lived a woodcutter with his two children. His two wives, long since dead of fever and famine, lay rotting amongst the mouldering leaves behind his little cottage, unable to help the poor boys they’d left behind, who lived in daily fear of the temper of their father.
Hansel, now twenty-two winters old, sunk his trowel into the barren dirt of what had once been a vegetable patch. His cold and filthy fingers ached, his broken blisters were edged black with earth. Thechank,chank,chankof the tool, digging and searching fruitlessly, made the only sound to be heard besides the wind in the trees, the few birds that dared to sing, and the crunch of the stick that his stepbrother Gerhardt chewed on to stave off hunger.
“It’s pointless, Hansel,” he muttered. “No matter how long you dig, you’ll never have a thing to show for those blisters. And he’ll be back soon. You may as well face up to it.”
Hansel failed to keep the frantic tremor out of his tone. “Maybe if you could help?”
“And what for? Exhaust myself for a few worms? Serve him that for dinner and see where it gets you.”
“You think I don’t know?” Hansel snapped. “Look, I’ve already found a potato—”
“If you could call it that,” Gerhardt sniped, looking askance at the small and misshapen yellow-brown blob.
“And three berries—” Hansel went on.
“Which would serve you better in your stomach!” It was Gerhardt’s voice that raised now, with all the little energy he had in him, nervous tension and nothing more driving him, not having eaten in the last day. “If we ate that—”
“If we eat that, he’ll kill us.” A stark end to the conversation, but just then came the rumbling of a distant cart. Their eyes locked.
“He can’t be back already,” Hansel whispered on a taut breath. As though he’d just been slapped across the face, he broke into a frenzy of action, climbing onto his knees, stabbing the trowel into the earth.
How it angered Gerhardt to see him like that. Digging, scraping away, pouring all of what was left of his humanity into that ground, which waited daily to swallow him up as it had done Gerhardt’s own mother. Three months she’d lasted there at the isolated cottage. Three short and agonised months before she’d left her son in the hands of these strangers, Hansel and his father. And Gerhardt had only been twelve.
He was snapped out of this miserable reverie by Hansel rising to his feet, thrusting his dirty fingers into his thick red hair, a spray of filth falling across his broad shoulders. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
Gerhardt’s dark gaze fell on him, vexed, accusatory. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all day. You work yourself to the bone just to get beaten, anyway. There is no stopping it. Just get it over with and stop boring me with your drama.”
Piercing disbelief flung back at him from the crazed blue eyes. “Don’t you understand how much worse it could be?”
Gerhardt threw down his stick and climbed to his feet, the crunch and crumble of the cart wheels and Hansel’s looming breakdown ratcheting up around him like puppet strings. “I want it to be worse,” he spat. “I want it to be over. If he’d just kill me already, the fucking coward.”
Hansel cast a terrified look over his shoulder as the cart came into view. He rushed forward and slapped a hand over Gerhardt’s mouth. “Bite your tongue!”
Gerhardt slapped his arm away. “What I wouldn’t give to be dead in the ground with the rest of them. You mark my words, it’s the only way either of us will ever get out of this place.”
Something in Hansel’s scared gaze sharpened into horror. A quickening of the blood that raced beneath his skin shot cold with those words. “Don’t say that.”
“What is there to live for, Hansel? Look around you. This is it. This was your whole life. And you spent it scrapping and scraping on your knees outside the same cottage you were born in. Why do you wish to prolong it?”
The words were cruel, but it was a cycle that had driven Gerhardt close to madness. As poverty and famine swept the land, so he was caught in the wave with Hansel, every day sucking the lifeblood out of the two of them, all of it beneath the thumb of that violent and callous man.
Hansel’s lips parted, but nothing more than a soft breath came out, a barely audible gasp, choked by their father’s sharply shouted, “Hansel!”
His terrified head turned, and it always cut Gerhardt to the quick to see that prey-like look in his eyes. He was a deer, searching for a way out—there was a blankness to him—all other thoughts fled and nothing but survival on his mind.
It was base, low and inhuman, and it turned Gerhardt’s stomach to see how quickly he changed. The way his head dipped, the way he made straight for the cart, all while a protective anger held Gerhardt in place.
He refused to turn and welcome the man who put that terror in his brother’s eyes, even if it meant he might not see the whip coming before it fell across his own shoulders. He didn’t think he’d feel it just then, anyway. His anger was like an impenetrable wrapping, and he held onto it, because fury was the one thing he could trust to trump fear.
Crack. The sound of an open palm on the soft flesh of Hansel’s cheek. Had he been so stupid as to tell him right off that there was no food? Though there was little point in trying to wait for their father to fall into a clement mood. He seemed to have been born red and vicious, and Gerhardt pitied the two poor women who had fallen into his clutches. The realisation each must have had when they understood they were trapped out here in the forest, and no one was coming to help them…
Gerhardt sank down and tapped at the earth with the rusty trowel. Not for his father’s sake. He knew somehow, subconsciously, that small movement might give Hansel a spark of hope. Some sleeping bravery at the thought they might be saved at the last hour. Even if Gerhardt knew full well, that wasn’t the case.
He could hear chains behind him, Hansel taking the horses off the cart. Then his world shook, a stark and brutal black covering his eyes from his father cracking a hand down on his ear.
Gerhardt stumbled to his feet, clutching the side of his head. “What the fuck was that for?”
