“And you belatedly gave birth to a fifteen-pound monster?”
“We won’t take him out at first.”
“We cannot make him ours; the child is marked.”
“What do you mean, marked?”
“Don’t you know that the heartless are marked, that this is how they can be recognized?”
“Marked how?”
“Their nature is not like ours.”
“I saw no mark.”
The woodcutter busies himself unwrapping the little package so that it is revealed in all its nakedness.
“See? See?”
“See what?”
“The mark.”
“What mark?” the poor woodcutter’s wife asks, gazing at the child in turn. “I see no mark.”
“Look at the lad—he is not made as I am.”
“No, but she is made as I am. Look how beautiful she is.”
The woodcutter quickly turns away, scratches his head beneath his cap, then sets about rewrapping the little package whose eager fists push away the assailing hands.
“What are you doing?” the poor woodcutter’s wife says anxiously as she watches her husband pick up the package and stride toward the door. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to leave it next to the railway line.”
At this, the poor woodcutter’s wife hurls herself at him in a fury and tries to snatch her little package from her husband. When this fails, she blocks his path and says:
“If you do that, husband, you will have to throw me with her under the wheels of the cargo train, and the gods, all the gods, of the heavens, of the earth, of the sun, and of the train, will hunt you down wherever you go. Whatever you do. You will be cursed for good and forever.”
The woodcutter’s husband stands, motionless, for a moment. He returns the little cargo to his wife, the “little lad” now a “little lass,” since her nature has now been revealed to us and that nature is unarguably female.
As the little cargo passes from hand to hand, amid wails and fury, she too begins to shriek like a thousand muted trumpets.
The woodcutter, who is not, it seems, a music lover, instantly covers his ears and bellows:
“So be it! So be it! Let it be so, and let all the misfortune that follows be your misfortune.”
The poor woodcutter’s wife, hugging her little cargo to her, says:
“She will be my joy, and yours.”
“You can keep the joy to yourself, thank you. Much good may it do you. But know this: I don’t want to hear her or see her ever again. Shut her up and consider yourself warned.”
As she rocks her little cargo, the poor woodcutter’s wife goes out to the woodshed, where there are no floorboards, and settles there with the child the gods have given her to cherish. Hard on her heels, the woodcutter appears and tosses her a tattered bearskin that has been gnawed by field mice.
“Here! And don’t you go catching a cold!”
“The gods will protect me,” the poor woodcutter’s wife responds.
The child still sobs, now half asleep.
As he leaves, the woodcutter growls:
“Shut her up! Or else . . .”
The poor woodcutter’s wife carries on rocking the child, holding her tightly and peppering her forehead with the gentlest of kisses. And here they fall asleep, mother and child. A silence descends, a silence scarcely troubled by the mournful snores that issue from the nostrils of the poor woodcutter’s wife, and the counterpoint of contented sighs that rise from the little cargo, gift from God, and her new and loving mother, wrapped as they are in a tattered bearskin gnawed at by field mice.
5
The cargo train, designated by the bureaucracy of death as Convoy 49, having set off from Bobigny-Gare near Drancy on March 2, 1943, arrived on the morning of March 6 in the pit of hell, its final destination.
After offloading its cargo of former tailors for gentlemen, ladies, and children, both dead and alive, accompanied by their relatives, whether close or distant, along with their customers and their suppliers, not forgetting, for the devout, their ministers of religion, and for the invalids, the old, the sick, and the impotent, their personal doctor, Convoy 49—doubtless impatient to become Convoy 50, or 51—immediately set off back the way it had come.
The poor woodcutter’s wife did not see it roar past, empty, absorbed as she was in her new responsibilities as a mother.
Any more than she witnessed the passing of Convoy 50, or those that followed.
Once the cargo had been received, it was immediately subjected to a selection process. Having conducted their examination, the expert selectors—all qualified doctors—retained only 10 percent of the delivery. A hundred head out of one thousand. After treatment in the late afternoon, the remainder, the rejects—the elderly, the men, the women, the children, the infirm—vanished into the thin air or the boundless depths of the desolate Polish sky.
Thus it was that Dinah, registered as Diane on her provisional papers and her brand-new official family record book, and her child Henri, twin brother of Rose, slipped the surly bonds of the earth and reached the heavenly limbo promised to the innocent.
6
In many fairy tales—and this is indeed a fairy tale—there is a forest. And in that forest, there is a grove denser than the surrounding woodland, one that can be entered only with difficulty, a wild, secret place protected from intruders by the vegetation itself. An isolated place where neither man, nor beast, nor god can enter without trembling. In the sprawling forest in which the poor woodcutter and his wife strive to subsist, there exists such a grove, a place where the trees are lusher, denser. A place spared by the woodcutter’s ax, through which there is no path. A leafy copse into which one may steal only in silence. Children are not allowed to play here. And even their parents dare not set foot here for fear of getting lost.
The poor woodcutter’s wife, who knows these woods as she knows her own pockets—the shawls in which she swathes herself in winter have no pockets, and if they did, she would have nothing to put in them—even so, let us say that she knows this place, which, she believes, is the preserve of faeries and sprites, of witches and werewolves. She also knows that a lone human lives herein like a hermit, a creature who inspires fear and horror in everyone, one whom even the Boches and their miserable conscripts dread encountering. Some say the creature is malevolent. Others say he is a friend to animals and an enemy to man. The woodcutter’s wife has glimpsed him only on days when she was gathering wood on the outskirts of the grove, over which he reigns supreme and solitary.
Alas, she also knows, has known since the early hours, that her little cargo cannot survive and thrive without milk.
After the woodcutter headed to work, she wrapped herself in scarves into which she slipped her little cargo, enfolded in the shawl provided by the gods themselves, the shawl trimmed with gold and silver that might have been woven by a faery hand.
Then she set off for that part of the forest where no one ventures without trembling and committing his soul to God’s keeping. As she approached the grove, she was met by the darkness that perpetually reigns in this part of the forest. She waited and watched. Was the man here? Could he see her? What of the goat? Was the nanny goat still of this world? Did she still give milk?