Page 52 of Hansel and Gerhardt
“What’s wrong with you?” cried Hansel, starting forward, taking a hand to Gerhardt’s cheek.
Gerhardt smashed it away. “Not a thing! I could ask the same of you, only we all know the answer to that, don’t we? You enormous fucking oaf!”
Hansel was struck mute. Gone was the searching spark in Gerhardt’s eye. No more did his fingers turn pale with whatever odd impulse had made him take Hansel’s hand earlier. He was all anger, but a dismissive, cruel anger.
He turned away, dug a hand deep into the cake, then shoved a huge piece into his mouth even as he spoke, crumbs dropping all over his green velvet vest and to the floor. “Why are you still here? Why can’t you just leave me to eat my dinner in peace?”
Again Hansel started forward, grasping Gerhardt’s arm to pull the cake away from him.
Gerhardt slapped the food down on his chest as he shoved him off. Then he stepped forward, fronted up to him, chest to chest. He raised his chin. “What are you going to do? Are you going to hit me?”
In perfect shock, Hansel could barely manage the words. “What? No. Gerhardt, no. Why would you say that?”
Gerhardt shoved him back again, hard, a drift of white sugar sweeping over Hansel’s shoulder as he hit the wall. “You’re just like him. You think you can come over here and put your hands on me?”
“I don’t. I would never do that.” Every muscle in Hansel’s body yearned for him. His arms flung out of their own accord, needing that head against his chest, but they were repulsed with a violence that begged for a fight.
Gerhardt turned, swiping up more of the cake, but this time he held it in the hand he flung out long, pointing his finger at Hansel. “I’m better than that. I’m better than you.”
“Oh, Gerhardt,” said Herr Candy, even as he ran a steady stream of fresh wine into his glass. “Don’t let him upset you so, dearest.”
“I’m not upset,” he said, shoving more cake into his mouth. That same blissful shudder shook his shoulders, and a small groan broke free, but his following words remained angry. “He’s nothing to me.”
“That’s not true,” said Hansel, tears fast at his eyes. “I know it’s not. In the forest…”
“Pure survival,” Gerhardt threw at him. And not a flash of his former tenderness was discernible. Nothing but clenching hands and cake crumbs and hatred. “I did what I had to do. Just as I’ve always done.”
To hear those words was the worst of all the terrors that had struck Hansel since they’d arrived in that cursed house. To see no sign in Gerhardt that it was a lie. “You didn’t need to do any of that and you know it.”
“Would you have saved me from that tree if I hadn’t?”
“Of course I would have!”
“No. Not you. You’re a coward, Hansel. How many beatings did you let me take to save your own skin?”
“It wasn’t like that.” His voice breaking with the pain of the memories, with the guilt, “Please, Gerhardt. Please don’t say that to me. You know it wasn’t like that.”
“Look, dearest, you made him cry,” said Herr Candy. “Have some wine.”
Chest rising and falling violently, Hansel pointed at Herr Candy, well aware any attempt to strangle him, to stab him through the heart with his knife, would fall flat. “It’s him. He’s the one coming between us. This isn’t you. I know you. I know you from the stream and the mountain, and I know this isn’t you. I’ve seen you.” He raised a hand to his chest. “I know you in here.”
Gerhardt leaned his head back, a cruel sneer unlike any Hansel has seen on him before staining his adored face. “You don’t know me. You know some boy who was taken and stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere with a psychopath. Just to be starved. To be beaten and abused. You don’t know who I am without you, outside of that house. You don’t know how quickly I’d dump you just as soon as I get the chance.” One step, two, closer, and right in front of Hansel, Gerhardt looked deep into his eyes. “When I look at you, he’s all I see. Your eyes, your hair, your voice. Youarehim. You are every awful thing I want to leave behind. And the way you’re acting tonight just proves it.”
It may as well have been Hansel’s heart that Gerhardt bit into then. He turned away, pacing the floor, eating, always eating, leaving a trail of crumbs as he walked.
“Hansel, you don’t look well,” said Herr Candy. “You look delirious. Hungry. Maybe if you ate something, you’d feel better.”
But Hansel barely heard him. He wanted so much to take Gerhardt’s hands, to wrap them around himself once again. Just to feel him close, to feel his heart beating against his own.
But those things he’d said… Hansel believed they were true. Somewhere, deep inside, they were all his worst fears. That he hadn’t escaped. That he would never escape, no matter where he went. That he, if he started a life and a family of his own, would bring the same horrors to his own table, the poison that was his father.
Had he laid his hands on Gerhardt in violence just now?
Had he hurt him?
Had he really scared him?
He meant only to stop him from eating the enchanted food. At least that’s what he thought he’d meant to do…
