A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

HER HAIR

After the witch caught on …

after she cut off Rapunzel’s hair …

after the prince fell from the tower onto the thornbush, which pricked out his eyes …

He wandered the world searching for her, astride his horse. He took no one with him other than the horse.

He knocked on a thousand doors. He rode along village streets and down country lanes, calling out her name. Her name was sufficiently strange that the villagers and farmers he passed assumed him to be deranged. It never occurred to them that he might be seeking an actual person.

Some were helpful: There’s a river ahead, watch out for the gully coming up. Some threw stones at him, some flicked switches at his horse’s gaunt flanks.

He didn’t stop. He searched for a year.

Until, finally, he found her …

he found her in the desert shanty to which the witch had banished her …

he found her living alone, with dust devils swirling through the curtains, with flies thicker than the dust …

She knew him the moment she opened the door, though he was all but unrecognizable by then, sallow and torn, his raiment in rags.

And there were those empty black sockets, the size of ravens’ eggs, where his eyes had been.

He said only, “Rapunzel.” A word he’d spoken at a thousand thresholds already, and been a thousand times turned away, either cruelly or kindly, for the destitute and deranged creature he’d become. There is, as he’d learned, a surprisingly fine line between a prince on a quest and an addled, eyeless wanderer who has nothing more useful to offer than that single, incomprehensible word.

He’d come to know the condition of the benighted; he who had, a year earlier, been regal and splendid, broad and brave, climbing hand over hand up a rope of golden hair.

When he stood finally at her doorway, having sensed the presence of a house, having felt his way along its splintery boards until he touched a threshold …

when she reached out to touch his scabbed and bleeding hand, he recognized her fingers a moment before they made contact with his skin, the way a dog knows its master is approaching, while still a block away. He emitted a feral moan, which might have been ecstasy or might have been intolerable pain, as if there existed a sound that could convey both at the same time.

He couldn’t cry. He had no more apparatus for that.

Before he and Rapunzel left for his castle, she made a quick excuse, ran back into the shanty, and took her hair out of the bureau drawer in which she’d been keeping it all the past year, wrapped in tissue, as safe and sequestered as the family silver.

She hadn’t looked at it, not once, since the witch took her to the shanty.

What if it had turned drab and lusterless …

what if it was infested with mites …

what if it simply looked … dead … like an artifact in some small local museum …

But there it was, two twenty-foot-long red-blond skeins, intertwined, shining, healthy as a well-fed cat.

She slipped the hair into her bag before leaving with the prince.

They live in the castle now. Every night the prince lies beside her and caresses her hair, which she keeps by the bedside …

which she washes and perfumes …

which she pulls out discreetly, as the prince finds his way into bed.

He buries his face in her hair. Sometimes she wonders — why doesn’t he ask how the hair still grows from her head? Didn’t he see it severed by the witch? He can’t possibly imagine it’s grown back in only a year.

But he still, with his eyeless face swaddled by her hair, lets out (though less and less often) that terrible howl, that protestation of revelation and loss, that mewling tentative as a kitten’s yet loud as a leopard’s growl.

It seems he’s either forgotten or prefers not to remember. So she never reminds him that the hair is no longer attached …

she never reminds him it’s not a living thing any longer …

she never reminds him it’s a memory that she keeps intact, that she maintains in the present, for him.

Why would he want to know?