Voices in the Night: Stories

RAPUNZEL

Climbing

Hand over hand, each foot lifting above the other and pressing against the rough stone, his back tense, his neck arched, the braided hair tightening in his fists: the Prince is strong, but it’s no easy task to make his way up the face of the tower. The adventure excites him. He thrives on obstacles, perils, impediments of every kind. He is filled with such exhilaration that he would cry out for joy, except that his teeth are clenched and his lips stretched wide in a grimace of exertion. He remembers his first glimpse of her: the window high above, the dark figure below, the hair coming down like a shower of fire. Now he’s climbing that burning hair, which, in the summer dusk, in the shadows of the high pines and firs, is not golden, as he always remembers it, but the color of a bale of hay in the shade of a stable. There is danger in the climb, since at any moment he might fall and crack his neck, break his back. And even if his hold is sure, a second danger threatens from the forest: the sudden return of the sorceress, who will see him trying to reach the forbidden place. The Prince welcomes danger, exults in it, for it’s danger that makes him feel his life. In the late dusk the tower lies in darkness, but up above, where the sky is still pale, the casement window catches the last light. The Prince thinks: If only it could be this way forever! — the pull in his arms, the thrill of the ascent, the scrape of branches against his neck. An owl calls in the forest. The Prince pauses, slaps at an insect, continues climbing. From his upthrust hip, his sword hangs straight down, as if it has stopped suddenly in the act of falling.

The Mirror

As the Prince climbs the tower, the sorceress returns through the forest to her cottage at the edge of the darkening village. The cottage is surrounded by a high wall; the sorceress has no use for neighbors. Inside, she walks past the table and the cupboard and goes at once to her dressing table, where she picks up an oval mirror with an ivory handle. It is always like that: after the tower, the mirror. In the glass she sees her reflection staring at her with a familiar look of revulsion. She glares back with fascinated loathing, with a kind of eager bitterness. She detests the thick eyebrows, the small eyes set too close together, the thrusting ridge of the nose, as if drawn by a village caricaturist sketching a witch. Her lips are a knife-slash, her chin juts out like a knuckle. From a wart in her chin-cleft, three hairs stick out like tubers sprouting from an old potato. Her skin is yellow. Her black hair hangs in her face like bush-branches over a fence. Her herbs, her roots, her medicinal salves, even her spells, which can raise towers out of thin air — all useless. She thrusts the mirror aside. The cruelty is that she has always loved beautiful things. At once she thinks of Rapunzel. And her heart lifts: the golden hair, skin like the down of a swan, the graceful slope of the nose. Rapunzel is safe in the tower, asleep under her coverlet. She will visit her darling when night is done.

Hair

In the tower chamber, Rapunzel lies waiting for the Prince. Sometimes she waits by the window, but this evening she is lying on her bed, on the other side of the small room. Her braided hair stretches across the coverlet and over the wooden table to the hook in the ledge. She’s proud of her hair, which is much longer than she is, and comes pouring out of her like rain from the sky, though it takes up a lot of room and can be a nuisance as it drags around the floor picking up dust. Sometimes she wishes she could cut it all off with a sharp snip-snip and watch it lie there nice and dead without it slithering along after her all the time. At sunset, as soon as the sorceress let herself down, Rapunzel drew up the thick braid, waved good night from the window, and stood watching as the sorceress disappeared into the dark trees. Not long after, the Prince appeared in the small clearing at the base of the tower. Rapunzel tied her braid again around the hook in the ledge, then let down her hair hand over hand, as if she were lowering a bucket into a well. When the last handful was over the sill, she returned to the bed and lay down. Even though her braid is tied to a hook, she can feel the tug of the Prince as he climbs. He’s like a boy, her Prince, teasing her by pulling her hair. Through the window she sees the darkening sky. She knows that he loves the difficult climb, but she herself does not love it; she worries every second about the return of the sorceress, she’s afraid that even the slightest movement on her part will cause him to lose his grip and plunge to his death, and she dislikes the perpetual tugging at her scalp. She wishes they could find another way. But the tower has no door, there is no stairway, even the sorceress can’t reach the top without climbing the rope of hair. Of course, there’s the half-finished silk ladder hidden under the mattress, but the thought of it fills her with anxiety. Rapunzel turns her mind to more pleasant things: the moment the Prince will appear in the window, the leap of her heart, his hand on her face. She can hear the squeak of her hair on the hook, the sound of his foot, far down, scraping against stone.

Beautiful Women

As the Prince climbs toward the top of the tower, he thinks suddenly of the palace, which lies on the other side of the forest. Rapunzel is so unlike the ladies of the court that he sometimes finds it difficult to account for what draws him to her, night after night. The ladies of the court are so beautiful that they are dangerous to behold. Sometimes a courtier, catching a stray glance, is stricken as by a bite in the throat; such a man sickens with love as with a wasting disease. The Prince, who has never been sick in his life, admires the ladies of the court and is by no means indifferent to their amorous glances. He has had many opportunities for clandestine adventure and, for so young a man, is already an experienced lover. But although there are many varieties of physical loveliness at court, he’s aware of a note of sameness, for the ladies who surround him are remarkable above all for something high and severe in their beauty: the tightness of their pulled-back hair reveals the fine lines of their cheeks and foreheads, the narrowness of their nostrils, the exquisite modeling of their lips. Sometimes a courtier, bored by such abundance of perfection, seeks out the opposite: a coarse-featured peasant girl, a plump merchant’s wife with a crooked tooth. The Prince, too, has had adventures in the country villages and farms, though he looks not for coarseness but for the unexpected burst of beauty in a gesture or a look. Always, in his love adventures, he has felt pleasure and something else: a remoteness, a lack of conviction, as though he were sitting nearby, observing the antics of the young Prince performing a seduction. It is never that way with Rapunzel. It’s as though she has slipped inside him and moves when he moves. What he sees, when he looks at her, is harder to say. The court ladies would find her wanting in beauty. There is nothing proud and haughty in her face, nothing lofty in the cut of her bones. Sometimes, turning to look at her as she lies beside him, he is startled by something childish and unformed in her features; it’s as if he has never seen her before, doesn’t know what she looks like. At other times, when the Prince is alone and tries to summon her to mind, he can’t see her with any certainty; he sees only what she is not. What he remembers, always, is the first sight of her hair, falling from the tower like fire. She seems to exist only in the realm of dream. Is that why he returns to her, night after night? To assure himself that he isn’t dreaming? And suppose she finds the courage to leave the dream-tower, as he wants her to do. Will she dissolve in the hard light of the sun? The Prince’s thoughts irritate him like gnats; he shakes them away. Reaching up, he grips the hair, lifts a foot and slaps it higher on the wall. He looks up at the evening sky. Somewhere up there, an invisible woman is waiting.

Waiting

The sorceress, too, is waiting. She is waiting for the long night to begin, so that it can come to an end. In the first light of dawn, she will return to her Rapunzel. She can, at any moment, leave her cottage and make her way through the forest to the tower, but she resists what she recognizes to be no longer a real temptation. After all, she spends the entire day with Rapunzel; the night is for herself. It is better that way. She doesn’t want Rapunzel to tire of her — lately there have been troubling signs — and besides, there are things that need to be done at home. Because she hates the sharp light of the sun, which draws attention to her witch’s face, her demon’s hair, she works in the dark. As soon as the moon is up, she will step outside and tend her vegetable garden, cut dead twigs from her pear and plum trees, water her shrubs and flowers. Then she will carry her clothes in a basket to the stream that runs along the edge of the village. She will wash her clothes under the moon and carry them home to hang on a line to dry. She will bake bread in the oven for Rapunzel, she will fetch water from the well. Only then will she prepare for bed. In the dark she’ll remove her long black dress and slip on her nightdress, which no one has ever seen. She will lie down in her bitter bed and think of Rapunzel, white and gold in her tower. Standing at her dressing table, the sorceress glances again at the mirror. She reaches for it, snatches away her hand. She begins to pace up and down with her hands behind her back, the top of her body leaning forward, as if she is walking uphill.

Helpless

As she waits for the Prince to reach the window, Rapunzel feels the sensation she always feels when he’s partway up the tower: she is trapped, she can’t move, she wants to cry out in anguish. She understands that her feeling of helplessness is provoked by the long climb, by her refusal to stir for fear that she’ll cause the Prince to lose his grip, by the continual tugging at her scalp. What’s taking so long? She reminds herself that only during the climb itself does she feel this way. The Prince’s descent takes place swiftly, nothing could be easier, no sooner has he dropped below the sill than he’s standing at the foot of the tower far below, looking up. The sorceress herself climbs the tower as if she’s walking across a room, even though she carries a sack on her back filled with vegetables and bread. Why oh why does the Prince take so long? He must enjoy making her miserable. Or is it possible that he isn’t taking as long as she imagines, that he’s actually rushing up to her like a great wind, and that only the eagerness of her desire makes his progress seem so slow? Through the open window Rapunzel can see the top of the hook, the little jumps of yanked hair. Will he never arrive?

Disappointment

The window is just above his head, with another pull his face will rise over the sill, but as the Prince grips the window ledge he feels the familiar burst of disappointment. He is disappointed because the climb is about to end, the victory is within reach, already he longs for a new difficulty, a stronger danger — a beast in the forest, an assassin in the chamber. He would like to battle a dragon at the mouth of a cave night after night, as he fights his way to Rapunzel. He is happy of course at the thought that he’ll soon be reunited with his beloved, whom he has imagined exhaustively during the long hours of the tedious day, but he knows that, in the instant of seeing her, he will be startled by the many small ways in which she fails to resemble his memory of her, before the living Rapunzel replaces the imaginary one. As he pulls himself up to the window ledge, he wishes that he were at the bottom of the tower, climbing fiercely toward his beloved.

Suspicion

As the Prince rises above the window ledge, the sorceress pauses in the act of pacing in the dark cottage. Rapunzel has seemed changed lately — or is she only imagining things? Sometimes, when the sorceress looks up from the table in the tower to watch Rapunzel sitting across from her, bent over her needlework, she sees the girl staring off with parted lips. If she asks her what she’s thinking, Rapunzel laughs gaily and replies that she isn’t thinking anything at all. Sometimes the girl sighs, in the manner of someone releasing an inward pressure. The sorceress, whose unhappiness has sharpened her alertness to signs of discontent, is alarmed by these evidences of a secret life. She speaks gently to Rapunzel, asks her if she is feeling tired, reaches into the pocket of her dress and draws forth a piece of marzipan. The sorceress is well aware that she has placed Rapunzel at the top of an inaccessible tower in the middle of a dark forest, but she also knows that her sole desire is to shield the beautiful girl from the world’s harm. If Rapunzel should become dissatisfied, if she should ever grow restless and unhappy, she would begin to imagine a different life. She would ask questions, open herself up to impossible desires, dream of walking on the ground below. The tower would begin to seem a prison. It is not a prison. It is a refuge, a place of peace. The world, as the sorceress knows deep in her blood, is full of pain. She vows to be more attentive to her daughter, to satisfy Rapunzel’s slightest desire, to watch for the faintest signs of unrest.

At Last!

Rapunzel watches as the Prince swings gracefully into the chamber, stares at her as if spellbound, and at once turns to unfasten her hair from the hook in the ledge. Everything about the Prince moves her heart, but she is always disappointed by the way he looks at her at the moment when he arrives. He seems bewildered in some way, as if he’s surprised to find her there, at the top of the tower, or as if he can’t quite figure out who exactly she is, this stranger whose hair he has just been climbing. With his back to her he begins pulling up her hair from below, setting the coils of her braid on the table, pulling faster and faster as the slippery heap of hair slides from the table and drops to the floor, where it quivers and shakes like a long animal. When the Prince turns toward her with his hands still holding her braid, as if he has come to her bearing a gift of her own hair, he no longer wears a look of bafflement but one of tender recognition, and as she rises to meet him she feels her release flowing through her like desire.

Shameless

The Prince lies back languorously on the rumpled bed, watching Rapunzel move about the chamber in her nightdress of unbound shimmering hair, and reflects again on her absence of shame. He knows many court ladies who are without shame in matters of love, but their shamelessness is aggressive and defiant: the revelation of nakedness is, for them, an invitation to enjoy the forbidden. One lady insists that he stand aside and watch as she undresses herself slowly, pausing for him to admire each part as she caresses herself with her hands; at the very end she holds before her a transparent silk scarf, which she then lets fall to the ground. In their desire to outrage modesty, to cast off the constraints of decorum, the Prince sees an allegiance to the very forces they wish to overcome. Sometimes a peasant girl in a haystack reveals a sensual frankness for which the Prince is grateful, but that same girl will carry herself primly to church on a Sunday. Rapunzel is without shame and without an overcoming of shame. She walks in her nakedness as if nakedness were a form of clothing. The innocence of her wantonness disarms the Prince. There is nothing she won’t do, nothing she feels she should resist. Sometimes the Prince wishes that she would tease him with a sly look, that she would cover her breasts with an outspread fan of peacock feathers, that she would lie on her stomach and look at him mischievously over her shoulder, as if to say: Do you dare? The Prince is a fearless lover, but there are times when he feels shy before her. At such moments he longs for her to resist him violently, so that he might force her into submission. Instead he bends down, far down, and kisses, very slowly, each of her toes.

Into the Forest

Rapunzel watches from the window as the Prince descends quickly, hand over hand, and leaps to the ground. He looks up, calls her name. So far down, he seems no Prince, but a small creature of the forest, a fox or a weasel. He turns, vanishes into the trees. The dark sky is breaking up with dawn. A sudden desire comes: to leap from the tower, to fall down, down; her hair lifting above her like a column of smoke; the wind rushing up at her; the world’s weight gone; lovely falling; blissful dying.

Brushing

In the brightening chamber, the sorceress sits at the table by the window, brushing Rapunzel’s unbraided hair. Rapunzel sits across from her, sipping an herbal brew. Her needlework lies to one side; she looks a little tired. The sorceress fears she isn’t sleeping well, or perhaps is coming down with something; the herbal remedy should restore her. Because the hair is so long, the sorceress doesn’t begin at the top and brush down. Instead, she begins at the bottom, holding an armful of hair on her lap and brushing it free of tangles. The brush is of pearwood, with dark boar bristles; the sorceress received it from an old woman in the village as payment for curing an ache in the back. When she finishes with one lapful of hair she reaches down for another, gently pushing aside the brushed portion, which spills puffily over her legs to the floor. From a distance the hair is blond, but up close she can see many colors: wheat, fawn, red-gold, butter yellow, honey brown. The hair on her lap is a warm cat, asleep in the sun. When she is done brushing, the sorceress will plait the hair patiently into a single thick braid. The soft folds will gradually become heavy as rope, a sunshiny snake slithering along the floor. Again she looks at Rapunzel; she never tires of looking at Rapunzel. The girl’s head is turned toward the window but she is not gazing out. Her eyes are half closed; morning light strikes her neck and lower cheek; she is not blinking; she is gazing in. A penny for your thoughts! the sorceress wants to cry, but she continues brushing the hair in her lap. Suddenly she bends forward, buries her face in the hair, breathes it in, covers it with kisses. She looks up guiltily, but Rapunzel dreams away.

The Ladder

The Prince, riding home through the forest in slants of dawn-light, reproaches himself for his weakness. Once again he hasn’t asked about the ladder. Each night he brings Rapunzel a cord of silk, which she’s supposed to weave into the lengthening silk ladder concealed beneath her mattress. He might easily have presented her with a fully formed ladder, when the idea first came to him, but he wants her to engage fully in the act of escape. The Prince fears that she may not be ready to leave her sheltered life for the public life of a Princess; lately, indeed, she has avoided all mention of the ladder. This ought to disturb him more than it does, but he himself is not without doubts. Instead of asking her about her progress, he hands her the silken cord in silence. She slips it under the mattress. They do not speak of it.

Secrets

As the sorceress continues to braid her hair, Rapunzel is relieved to be spared another of those piercing looks. Can the sorceress suspect something? Rapunzel understands that by concealing the existence of the Prince, she’s cruelly deceiving the sorceress, who is also her godmother. The thought pains her like a splinter burning in a finger. She’d love to tell her all about the Prince, since the sorceress would be sure to like him if only she knew him; often Rapunzel imagines the three of them living together in the sunny chamber. An instinct tells her to keep it to herself. She knows that the sorceress adores her, spoils her, sees to her every need, but it’s precisely the intensity of her devotion that warns Rapunzel not to speak. She is everything to the sorceress; but everything leaves room for nothing else. Sometimes, at a sudden sound, the sorceress will leap up and go to the window. Then her eyes, searching the forest, grow hard and cold; her body, bent forward, seems crooked and ancient. At such moments Rapunzel looks away and waits for the change to pass. She knows that the sorceress craves continual signs of strong affection, which for that matter Rapunzel has always felt for her; the nightly visits of the Prince can be taken only as acts of betrayal. It’s also true that the Prince, while not attacking the sorceress directly, disapproves of what he calls Rapunzel’s imprisonment, and wants her to escape with him from the tower to the court. There they will be married and live in happiness all the days of their lives. Rapunzel glances at the mattress, under which the latest cord of silk lies beneath the half-finished ladder, and then at the sorceress, who is bending over and pressing her face against the folds of Rapunzel’s hair.

The Plan

The Prince’s plan is composed of two parts, the escape and the destination. He has revealed both parts to Rapunzel up to a point, but only up to a point, since each part includes complex secondary calculations that he hasn’t yet found time to discuss with her in the detail they deserve. The escape will be difficult, without a doubt. The tower is forbiddingly high — to jump is out of the question. But the Prince has thought of two ways. The first is the ladder, which requires her full participation, demonstrated over the course of many weeks. They no longer discuss the ladder, which lies hidden under the mattress like an old love letter buried in a drawer. But there’s a second way, one that acknowledges the impulsive in human nature and invites Rapunzel to risk all at a moment’s notice. When he judges the mood to be right, the Prince will reveal this second method. They will spring into action. He’ll fasten her braid to the hook and lower himself to the bottom. Immediately Rapunzel will draw up her hair, unfasten it from the hook, and fasten it a second time, using the very end of the braid. In this manner she’ll be able to descend by means of her own hair. At the bottom, the Prince will cut the braid with a pair of gold scissors borrowed from his mother’s seamstress, and they will escape into the forest, where two horses will be waiting. They will ride off to — where, exactly? For the destination, like the escape, is no simple matter, and here, too, the Prince has not been entirely forthright with Rapunzel. He has told her that he wants to bring her to the court, and this is true enough. But he hasn’t confessed to her his fear that she might find it difficult to live as a Princess among courtiers and ladies, all of whom have a style and manner that might seem to her impossible to emulate. They themselves, and in particular the court ladies, will observe her closely and judge her according to their code. Rapunzel is not familiar with the fashions of the court. She lacks the court wit, the court polish, the court gift for concise and allusive speech. Even her name will draw amused attention. The Prince is not ashamed of Rapunzel, but he knows that the pressure of polite disapproval is likely to make him impatient with her shortcomings. Even if she should make an initial impression of freshness and innocence, such qualities might, in the long run, come to seem wearisome to the court. It might therefore be better to avoid the court altogether and flee with Rapunzel to a royal residence in the remote countryside. Such residences, it is true, are supplied with large contingents of servants, many of whom wield great power within the household and are accustomed to highborn masters with an instinct for command. Gentle Rapunzel, who has no experience of public life, will immediately be seen as weak. Wouldn’t it be better, in every way, to choose a humble cabin on a wooded mountainside, far from the haunts of man? There they can live alone, without a care in the world. They will eat wild berries plucked from the vine, drink water from clear streams, and wander hand in hand in the paradise of Nature. In his mind, the Prince hears the phrase “paradise of Nature,” which pleases him, but which also makes him uneasy. The Prince knows himself; he knows that he grows restless when he’s away from court for more than a few days, for he misses the repartee, the rich feasts, the continual arrival of messengers bearing reports of wars, the sense of being at the center of a vital world. Mightn’t it be better, all things considered, simply to move with Rapunzel from place to place, staying no more than a few weeks in a single dwelling? The thought of a wandering life does not please him. It’s as if he can never imagine a settled existence for himself and his beloved. It’s as if he himself is imprisoned in the tower, and can see nothing beyond the familiar chamber, which he carries in imagination from region to region — a restless and unhappy solitude.

Night Worries

In the cottage, in the middle of the night, the sorceress walks around and around the table with her hands behind her back, the top of her body leaning forward. Ah, she is sure of it: Rapunzel is concealing something. The girl flicked her eyes away more than once during the day, as if to avoid scrutiny. At other times she sat staring off with her eyes half closed, like someone fallen into a trance. The sorceress senses danger. Has someone discovered the tower? Has Rapunzel been seen in the window? She imagines the worst: a stranger scaling the tower, entering the chamber. Rage flames in her; she must calm herself. After all, the tower is well hidden, surrounded by massive trees in the middle of an immense forest. It can’t be seen at a distance, since the top does not reach above the highest branches. Even in the unlikely event that someone should discover it, there is simply no way for him to reach the top: the tower is too high, the walls are without purchase for foot or hand, and no ladder in the world is long enough to reach the window. Even if such a ladder should be fashioned in the workshop of a master craftsman, it could never be carried through the dense forest, with its irregular growth of vast, mossy trees. Even if a method should somehow be contrived to carry it through the trees, the ladder could not by any stretch of the imagination be set upright in the small space between the tower and the thick branches, which come almost to the tower walls. Even if, for the sake of argument, it should be granted that a way might be found to stand the ladder against the high tower, the sheer impossibility of drawing it up into the little chamber would immediately become apparent. Even if, by a suspension of the laws of Nature, the ladder should miraculously be drawn up into the chamber, it would leave highly visible traces of its presence in the tangle of thornbushes that grow around the tower’s base. No, the turned-away looks, the half-closed eyes, the drift of attention, must have some other cause. Has Rapunzel caught an illness? It might have been transmitted by one of the crows that sometimes land on the windowsill and sit gleaming there like wet tar in sunlight. She’s told the girl time and time again to stay away from that windowsill. But Rapunzel’s appetite remains unchanged; in fact, she has been growing plumper of late. There must be another explanation. Something is wrong, the sorceress can feel it like a change in the weather. As she continues pacing around and around the table, she thinks of secret causes, hidden reasons, dark possibilities. In the night that does not end, in the circle of floorboards that creak like animals in pain, she pledges herself to new intensities of vigilance.

Unreal

Because the Prince knows about the sorceress, but the sorceress does not know about the Prince, Rapunzel reproaches herself for behaving dishonestly toward the sorceress; but she knows that she has been dishonest toward the Prince as well. It isn’t simply that she’s stopped working on the silken ladder concealed beneath the mattress. It is far worse than that. The Prince has often spoken to her of his life outside the tower. He has described the court, the jeweled ladies, the circular stairways, the unicorn tapestries, the feasts at the high table, the bed with rich hangings, and she has listened as though he were reading to her from a book of wondrous tales. But when she tries to imagine herself stepping into the story, a nervousness comes over her, an anxious shudder. The images frighten her, as if they possess a power to do harm. The ladies, in particular, fill her with a vague dread. But there is something else. The court, the King, the handmaidens, the flagons, the hounds — she can’t really grasp them, can’t take hold of them with the hands of her mind. What she knows is the table, the window, the bed: only that. The Prince has burst into her world from some other realm, bringing with him a scent of far-off places; at dawn, when he vanishes, she wakes from the dream to the table, the window, the bed. And even if she were able to believe in the dream-court, she knows that she herself can be no more than an outlandish visitor there, an intruder from the land of faery. Under the stern gaze of the King, the Queen, the courtiers, the jeweled ladies, she would turn into mist, she would disappear. If only things could stay as they are! Now the sun has set. The sorceress has vanished into the forest, the Prince has not yet come. It is cool at the window. Rapunzel feels a burst of gratitude for this moment, when the calm of dusk comes dropping down like rain.

1812 and 1819

In the 1812 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the discovery of Rapunzel’s secret comes when she innocently reveals her pregnancy by asking the sorceress why her dresses are growing tight. In the second edition, of 1819, Wilhelm Grimm, in an effort to make the stories more suitable for children, altered this passage. The discovery now comes when Rapunzel thoughtlessly asks the sorceress why she is harder to pull up than the Prince.

Discovery

It happens suddenly, as these things do: a careless word, a moment’s lapse of caution. Everything changes in an instant. Now the sorceress, hideous with rage, stands leaning over Rapunzel, who is falling backward in her chair as she lifts one forearm before her face. The sorceress holds a large pair of scissors wide open — like a beast’s jaws — above Rapunzel’s braid. The braid hangs over the girl’s shoulder and trails along the floor. The sorceress’s nose, like another dangerous instrument, thrusts violently from her face, as if she’s trying to slash Rapunzel’s cheek with it. From the wart on her chin, three stiff hairs spring forward like wires. Her eyes look hot to the touch. Rapunzel’s eyes, above her forearm, are so wide that they look like screaming mouths. Her eyebrows are raised nearly to the hairline. An immense shadow of scissor blades is visible on the bodice of her flowing dress.

Dusk

It never palls: the feel of the hair in his fists, the sheer wall soaring, the pull of the earth, the ache in his arms, the push of his feet against stone. No palace behind him, no dream-room above him, but only the immediate fact: hardness of stone, twist of hair, thrust of knee. He is young, he is strong, he is happy, he is alive. The world is good.

Wilderness

With a crunching squeeze of the scissors the sorceress has cut off Rapunzel’s hair, her treacherous hair, and has banished her to a wilderness. It is a place of rocks and brambles, of weed-grown heaths; prickly bushes and twisted trees rise from the parched earth. Sunken paths of bone-dry streambeds hold clumps of thistle. The sun is so hot that toads lie dead in the shadows of rocks. The night will be bitter cold. Rapunzel crouches in the hollow of a boulder. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes until she sees points of light. She drops her hands, stares out. It is no dream.

At the Window

He’s there, the evil one, the usurper. The sorceress watches the look of horror come over his face like a shaking of leaves in a wind. Her trick has succeeded: the braid tied to the hook. She sees that he’s handsome, a Prince, a young god; the beauty of his face is like needles stabbing her skin. She howls out her hate. Never see her! Never! Her words scorch her throat, burn his eyes. He has all the world, the handsome one, the god-man, he is rich, he is happy, he needs nothing, and yet he has climbed the tower and stolen away her one happiness. Even as black hate bursts from her like smoke, she feels the power of his face, she is stirred. She wants to scratch out his eyes with her claws. The Prince stares at her with eyes that are changing, eyes that are no longer young, then leaps from the tower.

Falling

As he falls, the Prince knows that this is the secret buried in the heart of climbing, climbing’s dark twin. Everything he loves is annihilated in this savage mockery of striving, this climbing-in-reverse. As a child he dropped a ball into a well and watched it fall. Now he is that ball. He’s rushing away from the dream-chamber, which without him is rising higher and higher — soon it will soar above the clouds and be lost forever. And yet this falling, this soft surrender, fills him with such hardness of not-yielding that he can feel a swell of refusal, an upsurge of protest, and in an ecstasy of overcoming he embraces the last adventure: the rush of wind in his eyes, his hair streaming up over him, the sharp scent of green in his nostrils.

Rapunzel’s Father

On the other side of the high wall, which separates his property from that of the sorceress, Rapunzel’s father is tending his garden. Since the death of his wife two years ago, he spends more and more time pulling out weeds, straightening the vine poles, watering the soil. The garden grows right up to the high wall, which he has crossed only three times in his life: once when his wife begged him to steal a head of lettuce from his neighbor’s garden; once when he returned to steal a second head of lettuce and was caught by the sorceress, who made him promise to give her his child on the day it was born; and once after a year had passed, when he longed to catch a glimpse of his daughter, but found only the sorceress, who shrieked out her rage and told him that if he ever tried to see his daughter again, she’d tear out his eyes and strike his wife blind. Much time has passed since then. Sometimes he thinks of her, the daughter that he gave away, but it is like thinking of his own childhood: it’s all so long ago that it doesn’t seem part of him. As the Prince falls from the tower, Rapunzel’s father bends over a weed that has sprung up at the side of a string-bean vine.

Eyes

And the Prince falls into a thornbush. And the thorns scratch out his eyes.

Time

Time passed. Two words, a breath: time passed. Days rush by like wind in your face, weeks are devoured by months, years are gone in the space of two syllables. Time passed. Time passed, and a great thornbush grew up around the tower. Now the stone was entirely hidden, bristling with thorns as sharp as daggers. The casement window, too, was no longer visible behind twisting branches. Every morning, before the sun rises over the forest, a dark figure appears at the foot of the tower. She seizes a thorn branch, which cuts deep into her hand. As she climbs, lines of blood run along her fingers and arms. The thorns rip her dress, catch her hair, slash at her face and throat. The pain eases her a little. At the top she pushes through the thorn-window into the dark chamber. There she washes herself at the basin, sits at the table, and begins to unbraid Rapunzel’s hair. When the hair lies in soft folds on her lap, she brushes it, very slowly. When she is done brushing, she braids the hair carefully, then lays it in winding ropy lines on the bed. All day she sits and gazes at Rapunzel’s hair. Sometimes she unbraids it and brushes it again. The sorceress seeks relief, but there is no relief. There is only the fading light behind the window of thorns. When the chamber begins to grow dark she pushes herself through the sharp branches and makes her way down the tower, tearing her body on the long thorns, gripping them with her bloody hands.

The Chamber and the Wilderness

In the days of the tower chamber, Rapunzel would sometimes dream of another world, an open world, without walls that stopped her at every point. Now, in the wilderness that stretches away in every direction, she seeks only shelter: the walls of a hollow rock, an opening in a rise of ground, the low space under a bramble bush. She listens for the sounds of hungry animals. She wraps her two babies in coverings of branches and dry leaves.

Dark

As Rapunzel roams in the wilderness, the Prince wanders in darkness. He has learned which fruits he can eat and which fruits will twist inside him like sharp metal. Sometimes he’s so weak with hunger that he chews on pieces of bark, swallows them down. He has learned to listen for the sounds of creatures who might bite his legs, learned to strike out with his sword and feel the warm blood on the blade. He sleeps wherever he can in the forest, seeking out hollow places behind branches that hang to the ground or feeling his way to shallow openings in hillslopes. Once, waking, he feels a tongue licking his face. His skin is hatched with dried blood, his branch-ripped clothes are smeared with smashed berries and leaf-slime. Bits of leaves cling to his hair. Around his waist he wears a girdle of woven vines. Though he’s still young, a streak of white cuts like a gash through his tangled beard.

The Second Rapunzel

In the long nights the sorceress is busy. She draws on her deepest powers, snatches visions out of the dark. Sometimes she wakes to find herself on the hard floor. In the mirror her eyes are wild. She neglects her garden, shuts herself up in the shed behind her cottage. One morning at daybreak she climbs the tower with a bundle on her back. At the top she takes a knife from her pocket and cuts a hole in the branches that cover the casement window. Now she can pass her bundle through without catching it on the thorn-points. In the chamber she unwraps the bundle, lays the figure on the bed. Skillfully she attaches the hair. She slips the nightdress over the figure and steps away. A narrow ray of sunlight strikes the faintly flushed cheek, the closed eyes. The forearm is bared to the elbow. The image of wax and blood is so exact that it seems to be the living and breathing girl. A dark joy floods the heart of the sorceress. She sits watching over the sleeping girl. No harm must ever come to her.

Song

Time passes in the wilderness, where the infants have grown into children, but for the Prince there is no time, only a darkness that is always. In the nothing of his days he comes to a place of rock and brambles. Here, there is sun like flakes of fire. Here, there is hot shade that presses up against him like wool. In the dry ground he digs up roots, sucks their bitter juice. At night the air is cold as snow. He sleeps against stone. When something strikes at his leg, he beats it with a rock. The holes of his eyes hurt. One day, resting among spiky bushes that clutch at his arms, he hears a song. He is shivering with fever. He doesn’t know whether the song is within him or without. He is back at the tower, the hair coming down like fire. He rises shakily. The song touches his face. He stumbles forward as though pulled by a hand.

Tears

In the shadow of her rock she looks up and sees him. His arms hang like broken branches. His eyes are dead, his lips a bitter wound. His wild hair, his beard. From the depths of dream he has come to her, the lost one. He looks like a dying tree. She is standing before him, the stranger. She tries to remember the tower, the braided hair. Now her hair is ragged and full of thistles. The children have sucked at the breasts where he has sucked. Tears scratch at her eyes like thorns. They drop onto the stones of his eyes. In the wilderness, water is rushing between rocks, blossoms are bursting from thorns. Slowly the Prince opens his eyes.

Homecoming

Banners fly from the corner towers. Streamers hang from every window. As the Prince enters the main courtyard with his bride-to-be and their two children, voices of welcome fill the air. The Prince sees the faces of dear friends, lovers, companions of the hunt, but he is curiously unmoved. He wonders whether it’s because, as they cross the courtyard, he can think only of her. It’s as if he fears that at any moment he might lose her again in the dark. But as he moves among the courtiers and ladies, who part before the steps that lead to the Great Hall, he understands that his estrangement will not be temporary. Between him and the faces that welcome him lies the darkness. His wounds are healed, his beard is short and cut to fashion, his cloak is trimmed with ermine, but he is no longer of their world. He turns to look at Rapunzel. He tries to remember the girl in the tower, the hair coming down like a shower of fire, his feet against stone — it’s all a story in a book. The woman beside him is marked with a fierce beauty of suffering that makes the court faces seem childlike. As they approach the high steps, he touches her arm. The day has tired him a little. He looks forward to the end of the long celebration, when he and she can be quiet for a time.

In the Tower

In the thorn-tower, where Rapunzel lies sleeping, the sorceress sits brushing the hair in her lap. Rapunzel has been tired lately; it is good for her to sleep. A ray of sunlight slants through the space in the thorn-crossed window. It strikes the back of a wooden chair, runs across the stone floor, climbs the bedside, lies across the coverlet. When she is done brushing the hair until it shines, the sorceress will braid it slowly and carefully, feeling the weight of it in her lap. From time to time she looks up at her darling, who sleeps peacefully, safe from harm. Suddenly the sorceress stiffens with alertness. She lays aside the hair, goes to the window, and looks out between branches of thorns. It was only a crow, landing on a pine branch. She returns to the chair and continues brushing. Later she will get up and smooth the coverlet, plump the pillow. When Rapunzel wakes, the sorceress will prepare an herbal drink. She will feel her daughter’s forehead, she will ask if there is any soreness in her throat. But for now she will let her sleep. There’s no hurry. They have all the time in the world.

Rapunzel

Walking beside the Prince along the courtyard, toward the steps leading to the Great Hall, Rapunzel is aware of the glitter of many jewels. The costumes are richly colored and catch the sun. On a gallery above the courtyard, men bearing shields look down. Voices cry out in welcome. She tries to recall her childish fear of these faces, but it is like trying to recall the pictures in an old book. Long ago she lived in a tower, in the middle of a great forest. The sorceress, the high window, her hair falling toward the bottom of the tower, all of it is fading away. In the sunlit courtyard she sees flashes of bright hair, high-arched eyebrows, earlobes with rings. She will study them, she will learn what she needs to learn. The Prince no longer doubts her, as he did in the time before the wilderness. Night after night he came to her in the tower. She can feel his eyes on her face. She turns, sees that he is tired. Soon he can rest. She understands that he is done with trials and challenges, with perilous adventures. She understands one more thing: she is stronger than the Prince. It is good. She will laugh again, she will grow out her hair, she will play. But for the moment, as they approach the steps, she will walk beside her Prince among the courtiers and the ladies, inviting their attention, meeting their glances, looking calmly at them as they observe their Princess.