Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read online

  That particular January afternoon, Bellow was sleeping, since Anton was behind the marble bar polishing the glasses, and I was sitting down in one of the comfy chairs near the archway by the windows that look down on the river and the Middle Bridge. Peter was across the river in Kleinbasel, “Little Basel”, at the Fischerstube pub-and-microbrewery, passing judgment on their weissbier, a beer brewed from wheat rather than barley. I was scribbling in my Filofax, crossing things off a slightly tattered to-do list—we don’t get to Basel as often as I wish we did—and going through the Basler Zeitung making notes on places to hit the next time. Every now and then I would glance up and out the window, checking the Mittlerebrücketo see if Peter might be coming along. I doubted I would see him for a while yet: P. believes in giving any new beer a fair trial, which tends to involve extended and careful deliberation, usually a couple of liters’ worth.

  After a while I finished with the Zeitung and looked up, and saw something on the Bridge: what seemed like a small crowd forming, on either side of the northbound lanes. There were what seemed to be people jumping around in the middle of the road—an odder sight than usual, when you’re in Switzerland, a country where even slightly chaotic behavior is something you don’t usually see except at Fasnacht, or just after the national football team has made it into the World Cup. The people jumping around were only a few, and they were oddly dressed—one mostly in green, it looked like: one in yellow and red: a third in red and orange, with some kind of large false head on. In fact, they all had false heads.

  “What’s that?” I said to Anton.

  He came down to the end of the bar, poured the last two decis of wine from the little pitcher into my glass, and only then looked out toward the window. “Oh,” he said, and smiled a little. “The Vogel Greif.”

  “Wie bitte?”

  “What’s today? The twenty-fourth? They’ll do it once more this month, and once the first week in February.”

  “Is it something to do with Fasnacht?” For Fasnacht is one of the city’s great fames, the maddest Lenten-time carnival in Switzerland, the oldest, possibly the most dangerous. Certainly nowhere else in the country had I ever had the feeling, as on four of a freezing February morning last year, that I had accidentally fallen into part of my stock in trade, a genuine timewarp, and had come out the other side into a black night of some medieval year, where the hammering of drums in the total darkness and the shriek of all the city’s massed fifes warned with desperate 4/4 gravity of the enemy outside the gates.

  “Not directly,” Anton said. “Older, I think.”

  “How much?”

  “Well, there was a king—” Anton said.

  “One of the Drei?”

  He smiled, that smile that means “Who knows?” and “Who cares?”, both at once, and also “Who’s telling this story?” “Probably not,” he said. “They were only here about 1031.” It was Conrad II, the old Emperor, he meant, and Henry III his son, and Rudolf III, the last King of Burgundy, who had stopped in at the new little coaching inn on this site, then called zum Blüme, “at the Sign of the Flower”, and spent a week and a half there working out how to divide up the region amongst them. “This would have been well before that, I should think. This king had three sons—”

  “Oh, one of those kings.”

  Anton smiled. “And why shouldn’t it have been a real king? They were all over this area in the Middle Ages: you couldn’t spit out a window in Basel without hitting a king, they say. Either just passing through, or in town to do some deal with the Prince-Bishops.” He had a point there. Both the Basels, the canton—Basel-Land—and the City, Basel-Stadt—have the crozier of the ancient Prince-Bishops of Basel on their civic arms: those clerics were the main power in this part of the world once upon a time, a power with whom even kings had to reckon.

  “Anyway,” Anton said, “this king— He’d lain sick hereabouts for a long time; no one knew what ailed him, no doctor could help. Somehow, word about his illness came to one of the wise men who lived in the woods in those days, a hermit of some kind, maybe up in the Riehen woods—they were bigger then. This wise man came and examined the king, and finally said to him, ‘Only the feather of the Bird Grip can make you well. Nowhere may this bird be found but in some forest which lies under enchantment; may God speed you in finding it!’”

  I knew which way this story was going already, at least for its first half. Thirty-five years of studying folktales and fairy tales had left me as familiar with certain basic openings as an intermediate-level chess player is with the Ruy Lopez. But I nodded, and pushed the little 2-deci pitcher back at Anton. He took it, and refilled it to the white line with the house Fendant.

  “Now this king’s three sons,” Anton said, “the two eldest were almost men grown, but the third was hardly more than a boy. Still, he loved his father best of all the three. To the elder two, the King their father said, ‘Whichever of you two shall bring me the feather of the Bird Grip, that one shall have my crown and my kingdom when I die!’

  “So the elder two set off to find this Bird: and the youngster, he went too. His brothers, though, were put off their resolve by the temptations of the City, the big markets, and the women—”

  I smiled. “Then too?” I said, for earlier I had been teasing Anton about the ladies down in the lobby. Very polished and studiedly gorgeous young lionesses they seemed indeed, Bally at one end and L’Oreal at the other, and Rolex and Diorprêt-a-porter in between. But there they were regardless, what Mike the hotel manager ruefully called “ladies of the horizontal persuasion”, lying in wait for the well-to-do executives who were up in Basel on business, and on holiday from their wives. Even in Switzerland, no big-city hotel is safe from them.

  Anton smiled too. “One brother said, ‘Look, no harm in spending a night or so here before setting off into the wild,’ and the other agreed. ‘Our legs are cramped already with riding, let’s stretch them under the table long enough to have a meal and a drink—!’ Though you can guess it was longer than that.”

  “Usually,” I said, “they forget about their sick father around the second glass of wine.”

  Anton picked up a glass from the rinsing sink and started drying it. “Jaja. The youngest, though, he took to the road without thought of food or drink or rest, so eager was he to find what would make his father well. He would grab a crust here or a night’s sleep under a tree there, and just kept going, looking, seeking for any word or sign of the Bird Grip.

  “And after a long long journey, up hill and down dale, he came to a huge dark wood. Probably the Schwarzwald,” and Anton grinned a little; for these days the Black Forest is only about an hour to the north, the first fifteen minutes or so of which you can do on the number 5 tram to the German border at Otterbach. “But huge and gloomy the forest was, and despite this, there were people encamped all over, great numbers of them. The youngster was surprised by this, and he asked a herdboy he met, ‘What goes on here that there’s such a crowd gathered?’ The herdboy looked at him slightly cockeyed, and he said, ‘You must really be from a long way off, if you have to ask. The Bird Grip flies through these woods sometimes—but not often. This is the one day in a hundred years when folk know the Bird will come. It has feathers like those on no other bird on Earth: they burn with so many colors that the rainbow is nothing to them, and one of them, the most beautiful and priceless one of all, would cure all diseases, even death, for the one who gets it.’

  “The young prince told the herdboy his story then, and the herdboy said, ‘Maybe all the trouble you’ve been through will help you to be the one who gets the feather. Only the person who finds the Bird by himself will be given it, they say.’

  “‘I can only try my luck,’ said the young prince. So all that day he wandered that black wood, looking and listening for any sign of the Bird. No sign he saw, and he was weary and half-fainting for lack of food and drink at the end of the day, when he stood still at last, staring into the dark under the trees, too tired even to moan
. And then there came a great noise of wind, so that branches broke and trees fell around him as if in a storm, and there came the Bird Grip flying on huge wings. In the late sun above the trees its plumage burned and glittered with a thousand colors, so bright that anyone glimpsing it would have had to avert their eyes. Once the bird circled over the great throng that had come seeking it, and then turned again and flapped away to the lonely place in the wood where the King’s son was, and came down and landed before him. It said, ‘I know why you’ve come, Prince. Choose a feather, and hold fast; if despite all fear you can still hold on for all the way we have to go, I’ll bring you to your home and your father’s cure.’

  “So the youngster grabbed the brightest of the Bird Grip’s feathers—it was the false primary on the right wing, what falconers call the ‘thumb-feather’—and the Bird leapt into the air and carried him off, over hill, over dale, a long flight: and the young Prince clutched the feather despite all fear and all the flapping, and never let go. And at last the Bird dropped low over the Earth, and the boy saw below him the same road he had set out on, not far from home, and his brothers riding it.”

  “Looking somewhat hung over, I would imagine.”

  Anton picked up another glass. “He begged the Bird to let him down, and it did so: but it seemed to the Prince that it did so with some sadness. The feather the Prince had been holding onto came away in his hand, and the Bird bowed its head to him. Then it flew away, with its wings like the thunder—”

  The penny finally dropped. Anton had been saying it in Hochdeutsch at first, as Vogel Greif: but this time he said it in what I guessed might be Baslerdeutsch: Vogel Griff. Not “the bird Grip”, as I had non-idiomatically heard it, but Griffin, Gryphon—

  “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 h
im 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?”