Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (11 page)

“His brothers,” I said, “cannot have been pleased with this situation.”

Anton shook his head. “They were madly jealous, of course,” he said, “and furious that the youngest of them was now going to get the kingdom. They tried to take the feather from him: he would not give it to them. They ran him through with their swords, therefore, and took the feather from his dead hand when he fell: though they had hard work to get it, the hand clutched so hard. The two brothers carved the young Prince up like a side of beef, and threw him into the river, in pieces. And then they rode home, and told their father the tale of how long they had traveled and how hard they had searched, but after days and nights they had finally found the feather. And they gave it to him.”

This was the point at which divergence in the story became likely: which way it would go was harder to guess. “It didn’t work?” I said.

“Oh, it worked fine. The King was healed of his long sickness. But he cared little for that now, because his youngest son had been missing for as long as the others had been away. The elder brothers told their father not to worry, to wait a few weeks: he would probably come dawdling along sooner or later.”

“And he waited day after day….and no youngest son.”

“No. And then he sent messengers out to look for the boy, over hill and down dale…no one found anything. The older brothers pretended to mourn: little they really cared. Summer followed winter, and winter summer, and the youngest did not come back: and the King, though still mourning, told the elder brothers that the kingdom would be divided between them, since they had brought the feather from the Vogel Griff.”

I nodded, thinking that this was the point in many fairy tales where justice normally began to assert itself. There is first a depth of despair to be reached, an acknowledgment that there’s nothing more a man or woman can do but live in the grief or the pain; then, with human denial out of the way, the Universe steps in. “Well,” Anton said, “then something odd happened. A herd-boy some miles down the river went wood-cutting by the banks. He chopped down a young birch-sapling that had sprung up there, and cut it up and took it home to dry and cure. When it was dry, from one trunk-cut the length of his arm, the herdboy started to carve a flute, one of the big five-stopped ones such as we use around here at Fasnacht. And very strange he found it when, in the midst of his whittling, he discovered a bone running up and down the length of the piece of wood: but it carved like wood, though it polished lighter. So the herdboy finished his carving, and then tried the new flute out. But no matter how he blew on it, the flute would make no sound but that of a human voice, moaning in grief or pain.”

This made it plain where the story would go at last. “So the herdboy took the strange flute to the king,” he said.

Anton nodded. “The king’s advisors and other people from his court all tried the flute, and proved the marvel, hearing nothing but the moan. Finally the King himself blew on it. And he nearly dropped the flute, then, for instead of the moan, there came from the flute a sad high voice, and it cried:

“‘Father, do you know you’ve blown
On your very flesh and bone?
‘Tis my thigh-bone that you blow:
Deadly envy laid me low!
Bird Grip’s feather found for thee
Brought me to this misery!’

“The King cried out at the sound of his youngest son’s voice: and as for the elder sons, they turned as white as new-limed walls, the both of them. To the eldest son, the King said, ‘Blow on this flute, and hear what it may say to you!’ At first the eldest laughed and scoffed: “That nasty thing? Indeed not!’ But the King grew angry, and the eldest saw there was nothing for it but to do his father’s bidding. He took the flute and blew on it, and the flute cried out,

“‘Murderer-brother, now you’ve blown
On your slaughtered brother’s bone!
Tremble, for your fate is nigh
as the sword upon your thigh!
As it brought me misery,
Bird Grip’s feather shall to thee!’”

I nodded, thinking that these things tend to come in threes. Anton refilled the 2-
deci
 pitcher, and said, “The eldest brother shook so in all his limbs that he couldn’t stand, and he fell down before his father and begged his mercy. But the King was half wild with rage, and wouldn’t hear him. He made the second-eldest brother blow on the flute too: and the flute cried out:

“Murderer, you as well have blown
On your slaughtered brother’s bone!
As thou chopp’d me limb from limb,
Such fate comes to thee and him!
Now an end to misery:
Bird Grip’s feather sets me free!’

“And the feather, that the King kept in a glass case in his throne room so that all could see its shining and burning, now burned so bright and hot that the glass shattered outward and lay melting in pools on the floor, and everyone there fell down and covered their eyes as if the sun itself had fallen into the room, for so it seemed to have done. And when the light died a little, all looked and saw where the second-eldest son had let the flute fall. No flute was there any more: only a little scorched ash on the floor. But there instead stood the Bird Griff, its huge wings outstretched and burning like fire: and it threw itself at first the elder brother, and then at the younger, and tore them limb from limb, and scattered their bones about like twigs, tearing their burned flesh with its great bird’s beak and its eagle’s claws. Finally, when they were torn and broken so small that the hens could have pecked them up, the Bird Grip took to its wings and flew away, crying triumph in its voice like a lion’s and an eagle’s. And the King stood up, and commanded the palace servants to come with mops and brushes and dustpans, and remove what was left of his two sons; and he wept, but it was the third son he wept for.”

Anton picked up another glass from the rinsing-sink and began to dry it. I waited. He didn’t say anything.

“Didn’t the youngest son come back from the dead?” I said.

Anton smiled at me, a little pityingly. “The stories don’t generally go that way in these parts,” he said. “The happy endings are usually in the rewritten versions. You’ve seen what they did to the Grimm brothers’ stuff….”

I had to agree with him there, and glanced out the window at the 
Mittlerebrücke
, where the dance of the costumed people was still going on, to the interest of the passers-by, including one wearing a beat-up brown leather jacket covered with old Soviet and US astronauts’ and pilots’ patches, and featuring on the back a bald eagle wearing much too much eye makeup. “Better give me a double Bushmill’s and soda,” I said, “and some of those hot cheese things. The Appenzell fried curls.”

“Fine,” Anton said. He turned away to the bar computer to punch in the food order for the kitchen. “Anyway,” he said, “one of the medieval guilds over in Kleinbasel adopted the Vogel Griff as their symbol. The other two guilds’ symbols, the Lion and the Green Man, come out and dance with it, three times before the Carnival season starts. A symbol of the returning year, supposedly.”

“Yeah,” I said, “gryphons are supposed to be solar in nature.”

Anton nodded. “The computer’s acting up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He headed out from behind the bar. Bellow immediately woke up and rolled upright, eyeing me and the cash register with mild concern.

It was not until then, watching Anton go out past the piano, that I noticed he was limping. Shortly thereafter Peter came in, and the realization got misplaced in the ensuing description of the Fischerstube’s “Vogel Griff” 
weissbier
, which it turns out is brewed each year only when the Gryphon comes out to dance with its two partners. But the next morning, as we were checking out, I remembered: and while Peter was signing things at the reception desk, I said to little Ueli, the hall porter, “Did Anton hurt himself? He was limping yesterday.”

Ueli looked concerned for a moment, and then realized what I was worried about. “Oh, no,” he said. “That’s the false leg.”

Immediately I recognized, if retroactively, the typical swing-from-the-hip of someone with a high subfemoral or full-length prosthesis, and marveled that I had never noticed it before: but then that was the sign of real mastery in a wearer, someone who has thoroughly made his peace with the loss and turned it into part of life. “You’re right, of course. What happened?”

Ueli shrugged. “Something during the war,” he said unconcernedly; and I let the subject drop, for many Swiss have a Something During The War, which they don’t discuss much more readily than they discuss the strange barred gates you see in mountainsides there, sometimes, or the machine guns sticking out of concealed pillboxes looking down over mountain passes. So Peter and I headed out of the 
Drei Könige
, having said goodbye to everybody, and took the tram up to the station to catch the 11:02 InterCity to Bern: and the whole thing went out of my mind.

…until the next time I heard the five-stopped flutes crying out in the dark at Fasnacht, like human voices crying. Then I wondered a little about Anton… and I still do.