Hansel and Gretel

There was a woodcutter who lived at the edge of a great forest with his two children, Hansel and Gretel, and his wife, who was not their mother.

That year the harvest failed and then it failed again, and by the second winter there were four people in that house and food for two.

One night Hansel woke because the grown-ups were talking.

"We take them into the wood," the woman was saying. "Deep in. We build them a fire and we tell them to wait."

"They're children."

"Then all four of us starve. Is that better?"

There was a long silence, and in that silence Hansel understood that his father was going to agree, and that he was going to hate himself for it, and that neither of those things was going to help.

Gretel had heard too. She was crying with her face in the blanket so as not to be heard.

"Don't," said Hansel. "I'm thinking."

He waited until the house went quiet. Then he took his boots and went out into the yard, where the moon was up, and the path in front of the house was scattered all over with little white pebbles, and they shone like coins.

He filled both pockets.

In the morning the woman shook them awake. "We're going for wood," she said. "All of us. Bring nothing."

They walked a long way in. Hansel kept stopping.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking at my cat. He's sitting on the roof, saying goodbye."

"That is the sun on the chimney, you foolish boy."

But it was not the cat and it was not the sun. Each time he stopped, Hansel dropped a white pebble on the path behind him.

Deep in the wood their father built them a good fire, better than he needed to, and he took a long time over it.

"Wait here," he said, and he did not look at either of them. "We won't be long."

They waited all day. When the moon came up, the path behind them was scattered with little points of light, all the way home, and they followed them and were back at the door by midnight.

Their father cried when he saw them, which Hansel thought about for a long time afterwards.

But the food did not come back.

A few weeks later Hansel got up in the night again and found the door locked from the outside.

So in the morning, when they gave him his piece of bread, he did not eat it. He crumbled it in his pocket, all the way, and every so often he stopped and scattered a little of it behind him on the path.

And the birds ate it. Every crumb. Before the sun had even gone down.

This time when the moon came up there was nothing on the path at all.

They walked for two days. They ate berries, and then they did not eat. Gretel cried and then stopped crying, which was worse. On the third morning they came round a stand of birches and there was a house in a clearing that had absolutely no business being there.

The walls were gingerbread. The roof was slabs of cake. The windows were clear spun sugar, and the gables were iced white, and there was a smell coming off it that made Hansel's whole head go quiet.

They ate. They could not have done anything else.

"Nibble, nibble, little mouse," said a voice. "Who is nibbling at my house?"

An old woman stood in the doorway leaning on a stick. She was very old and quite bent and she was smiling at them with such warmth that Gretel took a step towards her before she knew she had.

"You poor things," said the old woman. "Look at you. Come in."

Inside there was milk and pancakes with sugar, and apples and nuts, and two little beds with white sheets, and the children ate until they could not sit up and then slept for eleven hours.

The old woman was a witch, and her eyesight was very poor, and she had built her house out of food for exactly one reason.

In the morning she took Hansel by the arm, and she was much stronger than she looked, and she put him in a stable behind the house and shut the door on him.

Then she shook Gretel awake.

"Get up. Water, fire, cooking. Your brother is going to be fattened, and you are going to do the fattening."

And for a month, that is what happened.

Every morning the witch went to the stable door and told Hansel to put out his finger so she could feel how plump he was getting. And every morning Hansel put out a thin dry chicken bone from the corner of his cage instead, and the witch, whose eyes were no good at all, felt it and grumbled that the boy was made of string.

Gretel carried water. Gretel scrubbed. Gretel was frightened the entire time, so frightened that she could not think, and every night she lay on the floor by the stove and told herself she was useless.

On the last morning the witch ran out of patience.

"String or not," she said, "we cook him today. Gretel. Get in and check the oven is hot."

And Gretel, who had done every single thing she was told for a month, looked at the open oven door and understood exactly what was being asked of her.

"I don't know how," she said.

"You are a stupid girl. Look. Like this."

The witch bent down and put her head inside the oven to show her.

Gretel did not think about it, because there was no time and because thinking had never once helped her. She put both hands flat on the witch's back and shoved with everything she had, and the witch went into the oven, and Gretel slammed the iron door and dropped the bar across it.

Inside, the witch shouted a great deal. Gretel stood with her back against the door until the shouting turned into ordinary furious complaining, and then she went and let her brother out of the stable.

Hansel came out of that door like a bird out of a window.

They did not go straight home. They went through the witch's house first, sensibly, and they found pearls and gold in a chest under the bed and filled every pocket they had, and Gretel filled her apron too.

Then they walked.

After two days they came to a wide stretch of water with no bridge and no boat, and Gretel sat down on the bank and said she could not think of anything.

"There," said Hansel.

A white duck came across the water. She took Hansel first, because the duck was small and they were not, and she came back for Gretel, and set her down on the far bank beside her brother.

And after that the wood began to look like a wood they knew.

Their father was sitting in the doorway. He had not had a happy hour since the day he walked out of that clearing without them. The woman was gone; nobody in the story ever says where.

He saw them at the end of the path and he could not get up.

They emptied their pockets onto the table, pearls and gold rolling everywhere and falling on the floor, and that was the end of being hungry in that house.

And Gretel, who had been useless for a month, never once thought of herself that way again.