Read by Sarah Feathers
Who knows how children get such mad ideas? Some blame the tree. The old twisted oak glowering down on Gigi’s village was just like the oak in the schoolmaster’s tale. ‘Proud and large, overlooking the plains, visible from afar.’ Dark brown furrowed bark, one low fat branch sliding westwards on the sparse grass, giving the oak purchase against centuries of nipping eastern winds. On rain-heavy war mornings the children of the village watched the tree’s bare knotty branches writhe in the fog, stealthily alive. Their oak! Ready to bring wooden maces down on invaders’ soft heads.
The schoolmaster came to their village once a week, and taught the children in one of the cottages left empty by the war. Frail, watery-eyed master Lupescu was their third schoolmaster in less than a year. Between the end of the war and the beginning of collectivisation, teachers often said the wrong things. The last schoolmaster had spoken to them about peasants from neighbouring villages happily signing away their land to the commune, and had been dragged off one night. Gigi found a bloodied foot-cloth in the brambles outside the teacher’s cottage.
So Master Lupescu, dabbing at his runny eyes, told them old stories and legends. In this particular tale, one day, five hundred years ago, children just like them had hanged a boy in play from a giant oak. They were still playing when the hanging boy saw the black swarm in the distance. He recognised the enemy’s red and yellow flags, and called out: ‘The Turks!’ The children scattered to warn the village, leaving him behind. The boy wriggled and squirmed, but he couldn’t slip out of the rope. And the Turks, they didn’t even bother to spur their horses up the hill. They just used him for target practice. For a little hanging boy, the brave Ottoman army darkened the sky with arrows.
By the time Master Lupescu had fallen silent, the children had tears in their eyes too. They must have all thought of the same thing, of the big oak at the top of the hill where each autumn they took the pigs to feed on acorns. Because no one spoke up to say ‘let’s go to the oak’, and yet they all went. There was a restlessness in them, an urge to sneak inside the tale and touch that long ago boy and that howling injustice.
Eight boys ran up the hill to the oak, and one ran back down to fetch the rope. ‘Rope from where?’ thin, sandy-haired Mişu said sullenly. A taller boy, Radu, grabbed his arm and pushed him down the hill. ‘The barns. The hay-cart rope!’ he shouted after him.
They stood in silence under the oak, their eyes following Mişu down the hill and into the first barn. Gigi, the youngest of them, already knew that he would be the one to hang. Among boys taught by war and famine to be skittish like rabbits, shifty-eyed and sly, Gigi was quiet and serious. He, too, had crawled in the dirt under barn fences, sneaking in to steal walnuts or apples, but he never bolted at the first noise. And the story called for a boy who could act like a man. There must be no whining.
Mişu ran out of the barn, a large coil of rope on his shoulder. They watched him struggle up the hill, fall, get up and run again on all fours. To the boys standing there, it was easy to think of the five hundred years that had passed as a trifle. They knew war well enough: the oldest of them had stood on this hill and, like the hung boy, had seen approaching armies. They were as poor and hungry as the boys five hundred years ago. Snotty-nosed, barefoot more often than not, their patched trousers held up with strings of sackcloth, they had been taught the same lessons about how to cheat hunger. The boys remembered shivering pale strangers with deep-socketed eyes who had climbed up the hill during the war and eaten acorns. Remembered how the starving strangers then threw up blood: begrudgingly, reluctantly, their eyes small and bilious at the sight of having to give up yet more of themselves. Children from around here would never eat acorns.
Bent double and panting, Mişu let the heavy coil fall to the ground in front of the others. No one moved. When finally Radu picked it up, he looked at the greasy, tallow-smelling flax, then at the tree. Master Lupescu had said nothing about the hanging itself. To the schoolmaster, ‘hanging a boy in play’ could only have meant hanging someone from their shoulders, as in a harness.
Radu swung one end of the rope over a branch; it fell through the leaves with a snaky rustle. He turned to the other boys. Gigi took a step forwards. Realising how rigid the rope was and how difficult to twist into a knot, Radu added more and more rope to the loop around Gigi’s neck. The first knot he tied was as loose as the elbowy knot one makes with one’s arms. Gigi had put his hands inside the coil below his jaw, to keep it from choking him. Behind him, the boy made a second knot, and pulled at the rope with all his force to tighten it. Gigi reeled as Radu tugged at the rope.
‘Hey! Gotta return that or my uncle’ll kill me,’ Mişu said.
Ignoring him, Radu pulled at the last knot until he was satisfied that it would hold. Gigi still stood there with his fingers inside the rope-collar. The boy slapped Gigi’s hands away. He then grabbed Mişu, and said, ‘You. Stand leapfrog. Here.’
Mişu bent down in front of them, and Gigi climbed up on his back. The rope around Gigi’s neck was heavy, but he got up, his toes frog-like, spread wide for balance on Mişu’s bony back. Once Gigi was upright, Radu pulled at the other end of the rope until there was hardly any slack. He threw the rope up again and let it make three rings around the branch. For a moment he swung on the rope; it held him. At Gigi’s end, there was only a meter or so of stiff rope between his neck and the branch.
Radu stepped back from the two, joining the half circle of boys who had been watching.
'When I say ‘go’, Mişu, you go. We only hang him for a short while, then I’ll grab his legs. Boy can hold his breath that long.’
Gigi nodded. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He still wanted to put his hands inside the rope, but that would be cowardly. His right hand tugged nervously at the side of his trousers.
‘Go!’ Radu shouted, and Mişu ducked away from under Gigi’s feet.
The boys were quiet. They watched Gigi kick out in a spasm once and then fall still. He wasn’t looking at them, and his head was caught in the loop at an odd angle. Some of the boys craned their necks to look past the oak into the distance, at the scattered flock of sheep that was not turning into the Sultan's army.
Radu felt uneasy. He had meant to count to fifty, but at thirty he was already holding up Gigi’s legs. Gigi still wasn’t moving.
Abruptly, one of the boys turned and ran down the hill; others followed. At the foot of the hill they met their parents: wailing, cursing, rushing to the oak.
(c) Oana Aristide, 2014
Oana Aristide studied creative writing with John Petherbridge at City Lit, and is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. Her story "Venom" will be included in the 2014 Fish Anthology, to be published in July. When not officially writing fiction, she's an economist.
Sarah Feathers trained at East 15. Theatre work includes All You Ever Needed (Hampstead Theatre), A Hard Day’s Month (Rose Theatre, Kingston), 26 (BAC), Moll Flanders (Southwark Playhouse) and The Winter’s Tale (Courtyard Theatre). Film includes Coulda Woulda Shoulda, Feeling Lucky and More Than Words. TV: The Real King Herod.
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