Fairy Tales

THE GIRL WHO STEPPED ON BREAD

You MUST HAVE HEARD about the girl who stepped on bread to avoid dirtying her shoes, and how badly things turned out for her? It’s been both written down and printed.

She was a poor child, proud and arrogant. There was a bad streak in her, as they say. As quite a young girl she used to enjoy catching flies and pulling their wings off to make crawlers out of them. She took June bugs and dung beetles and stuck pins in them. Then she would put a green leaf or a little scrap of paper up to their feet and the poor bugs would clasp onto it, turn and twist it, to try to get off the pin.

“Now the June bug’s reading!” said little Inger. “Look how it’s leafing the page!”

As she grew up, she became worse rather than better, but she was pretty, and that was her misfortune. Otherwise she probably would have been treated harsher than she was.

“Desperate diseases must have desperate remedies,” said her own mother. “You often stepped on my apron as a child, and I’m afraid you’ll step on my heart when you’re older.”

And she did too!

She went into service out in the country with some distinguished people. They treated her as if she were their own daughter, and dressed her like it too. She looked good, and her arrogance grew.

When she’d been there a year, her mistress said, “You should really visit your parents sometime, little Inger!”

She went, but it was to show off. She wanted them to see how fine she had become. But when she came to the edge of town, she saw girls and boys gossiping by the pond, and her mother was sitting there on a rock resting with a load of firewood that she had gathered in the woods. Inger turned around because she was ashamed that she, who was so finely dressed, should have a mother who was so ragged, and who gathered sticks. She didn’t regret turning around; she was just irritated.

Half a year went by.

“You should go home one day and see your old parents, little Inger,” said her mistress. “Here’s a big loaf of white bread you can take along for them. They’ll be glad to see you.”

And Inger put on her best clothes and her new shoes, and she lifted her skirts and walked so carefully so that her feet would stay nice and clean, and one can’t blame her for that. But when she got to where the path went over some marshy ground, and there was water and mud for a long stretch, she threw the bread into the mud so she could step on it and get across with dry shoes. But as she stood with one foot on the bread and lifted the other, the bread with her on it sank deeper and deeper. She completely disappeared and there was nothing to be seen but a black bubbling pool.

That’s the story. Oh, you’d like to hear what happened to her?

Well, she came to the bog woman, who brews in the marsh. The bog woman is an aunt of the elf maidens. Everyone knows the elves. Ballads have been written about them, and they’ve been painted. But about the bog women people only know that, when there’s mist on the meadows in the summer, it’s the bog woman who’s brewing. Well, Inger sank down to her brewery, and you can’t stand it there for long. A cesspool is a light, magnificent apartment compared to the bog woman’s brewery. Every vat stinks so badly that humans faint from it, and the vats are pressed against each other. If there’s a little opening between them anywhere, where you could squeeze through, you can’t anyway because of all the wet toads and fat snakes that are matted together there, where little Inger sank. All the nasty living mass was so icy cold that her body shivered through and through, and became more and more stiff from it. She was stuck to the bread, and it pulled her, like a clump of amber pulls in a little straw.

The bog woman was home. That day the brewery was being inspected by the devil and his great-grandmother. She is an old, very venomous woman, who’s never idle. She never goes out without her needlework, and she had it here too. She was sewing trick insoles for people’s shoes so they couldn’t stop moving. She embroidered lies and crocheted thoughtless words that had fallen to the ground. Everything she did was for harm and depravity. Yes, that old great-grandmother could sew, embroider, and crochet.

She saw Inger, put her glasses on, and looked at her once again. “That’s a girl with talent,” she said. “I’d like to have her as a souvenir of my visit here. She would do for a pedestal in my great-grandson’s anteroom!”

And she got her. That’s how little Inger went to hell. People don’t always go straight to hell, but they can get there the long way around, if they have talent.

There was an unending anteroom there. You would get dizzy looking forward and dizzy looking back, and there was a languishing crowd of people who were waiting for the doors of mercy to open, and they would wait for a long time. Big fat waddling spiders spun a thousand-years web over their feet, and this web tightened like screws in the foot and held them like copper chains. Added to this was the eternal anxiety in each soul, a painful anxiety. The miser had forgotten the key to his money chest, and he knew it was standing in the lock. Well, it would take too long to rattle off all of the torments and tortures that were felt there. Inger felt that it was gruesome to stand as a pedestal. It was as if she was clamped from below to the bread.

“That’s what you get for wanting to keep your feet clean,” little Inger said to herself. “Look how they’re staring at me!” Yes, everyone was looking at her. Their evil desires shone from their eyes and spoke without sounds from the corners of their mouths. They were a terrible sight.

“It must be a pleasure to look at me,” thought little Inger. “I have a pretty face and good clothes.” She moved her eyes, her neck was too stiff to move. She hadn’t thought of how dirty she had gotten in the bog woman’s brewery! Her clothes were coated with a single big slimy blob. A snake had gotten tangled in her hair and was dangling on her neck, and from every fold of her dress a toad peered out and croaked like a wheezy pug. It was very unpleasant. “But everyone else down here looks terrible too,” she consoled herself.

But worst of all was the dreadful hunger she felt. Couldn’t she bend and break off a piece of the bread she was standing on? No, her back had stiffened; her arms and hands were stiff. Her whole body was like a stone statue. She could only move the eyes in her head. She could turn them completely around and see backwards, and it was an awful sight. And then the flies came. They crawled all over her eyes, back and forth. She blinked her eyes, but the flies didn’t fly. They couldn’t because their wings had been torn off. They had become crawlers. It was a torment, and then there was the hunger—at last she thought that her insides had eaten themselves up, and she was empty inside, so hideously empty.

“If this continues much longer I won’t be able to stand it,” she said, but she had to stand it, and it did continue.

Then a burning tear fell down on her head and rolled over her face and breast right down to the bread. Another tear fell, and many more. Who was crying over little Inger? Didn’t she have a mother up on earth? Tears of sorrow that a mother cries for her child always reach the child, but they don’t set it free—they only burn and make the torment greater. And then this unbearable hunger and not being able to reach the bread she stepped on with her foot! Finally she had the sensation that everything inside of her had eaten itself up. She was like a thin, empty pipe that pulled every sound into itself. She could hear clearly everything that concerned her up on earth, and everything she heard was bad and hard. Her mother was indeed crying deeply and sadly, but she said, “Pride goes before a fall! That was your misfortune, Inger! How you grieved your mother!”

Her mother and everyone up there knew about her sin, how she had stepped on the bread and sunk in the mud and disappeared. The cow herder had told them. He had himself seen it from the slope.

“How you have grieved your mother, Inger!” said her mother, “but this is what I thought would happen.”

“I wish I’d never been born!” thought Inger at this. “It would have been much better for me. It doesn’t help that my mother is crying now.”

She heard how the master and mistress, those good-natured people who had been like parents to her, talked. “She was a sinful child,” they said. “She didn’t respect the Lord’s gifts but trod them underfoot. The doors of mercy will be hard for her to open.”

“They should have disciplined me better,” thought Inger, “and cured me of that nonsense.”

She heard that a ballad had been written about her: The arrogant girl who stepped on the bread to have Pretty shoes, and it was sung all over the country.

“That I have to keep hearing about it! And suffer so much for it!” thought Inger. “The others should also suffer for their sins. There would be a lot to punish! Oh, how I’m tormented!”

And her mind became even harder than her shell.

“You certainly can’t improve here in this company! And I don’t want to be better. Look how they glare at me!” And her mind was angry and hateful to all people.

“Now they have something to talk about up there! Oh, how I am tormented!”

And she heard them tell her story to the children, and the little ones called her the ungodly Inger. “She was so horrid!” they said. “So awful, she deserves to be tormented.”

The children spoke nothing but hard words against her.

But one day as indignation and hunger gnawed in her hollow shell, she heard her name mentioned and her story told for an innocent child, a little girl. Then she perceived that the little one burst into tears at the story of the arrogant, finery-lov ing Inger.

“But won’t she ever come back up?” asked the little girl.

And the answer came:

“She’ll never come back up.”

“But if she asked for pardon and promised never to do it again?”

“But she won’t ask for pardon,” they said.

“I really wish she would,” said the little girl. She was quite inconsolable. “I will give my dollhouse if she can come back up again. It’s so horrible for poor Inger!”

And those words reached down into Inger’s heart and seemed to do her some good. It was the first time that anyone had said “poor Inger,” and not added the slightest mention of her mistake. A little innocent child cried and begged for her. It made her feel so strange. She would have liked to cry herself, but she couldn’t cry, and that was also a torment.

As years passed up above, there was no change down there. She heard sounds from above less often. She was spoken of less and less. Then one day she perceived a sigh, “Inger, Inger how you grieved me! I thought you would.” It was her mother, who was dying.

Sometimes she heard her name mentioned by her old master and mistress, and the mistress’ words were the gentlest. “I wonder if I’ll ever see you again, Inger. You never know where you will go.”

But Inger understood that her fine old mistress would never come where she was.

More time passed, long and bitter.

Then again Inger heard her name mentioned and saw above her something like two bright stars shining. They were two gentle eyes that closed on the earth. So many years had passed from the time that the little girl had cried inconsolably over “poor Inger” that the child had become an old woman who was now being called to the Lord. And just in this moment when thoughts from her whole life raised up, did she also remember how she as a little child had cried so bitterly when she had heard the story about Inger. That time and that impression were so vivid to the old woman at her time of death that she exclaimed aloud, “Lord, my God, haven’t I, like Inger, often stepped on your blessed gifts without thinking about it? Have not I also walked with arrogance in my heart? But in your mercy you have not let me sink, you have held me up! Don’t desert me in my last hour!”

And the old woman’s eyes closed, and the eyes of the soul opened for what had been hidden, and since Inger was so vividly in her last thoughts, she saw her, saw how far she had sunk, and with that sight the good woman burst into tears. She stood in heaven and cried for Inger like a child. Those tears and prayers rang like an echo down to the hollow, empty husk that surrounded the imprisoned, tortured soul who was overwhelmed by the unimagined love from above. An angel of God was crying over her! Why was she granted that? The tortured soul remembered all the acts she had done on earth, and trembled with the tears that Inger had never been able to cry. She was filled with remorseful grief and realized that the gates of mercy could never open for her. And at the same time as she brokenheartedly admitted this, a beam shone down into the abyss. The beam shone with more power than the sunbeam that melts the snowman boys build in the yard. And then, faster than the snowflake that falls on a child’s warm mouth melts to a drop of water, Inger’s petrified figure dissolved, and a little bird flew in zigzag-like lightning up towards the human world. But it was afraid and shy of everything around it. It was ashamed of itself and all living creatures and quickly hid itself in a dark hole it found in a decayed wall. It sat there huddled over, trembling over its entire body. It couldn’t give forth a sound. It had no voice. It sat there a long time before it calmed down enough to see and perceive all the glory out there. Oh, it was magnificent! The air was so fresh and mild. The moon shone so brightly. There were fragrances from the trees and bushes, and it was so pleasant sitting there in a fine clean coat of feathers. Oh, how all creation was brought about in love and splendor! The bird wanted to sing out all the thoughts that moved in its breast, but it wasn’t able to do so. It would have liked to sing like the cuckoo and the nightingale sing in the spring. But God, who hears the worm’s soundless hymn of thanksgiving, perceived the paean that arose in the chord of thought just as the psalm sang in David’s breast before it had words or a melody.

For days and weeks these soundless songs grew and swelled. They would be expressed with the first wing beat of a good deed, and this had to be done.

Then came the holy celebration of Christmas. The farmers raised a pole close by the wall and tied a sheaf of oats to it so that the birds should also have a happy Christmas and a good meal in this season of the Savior.

The sun rose on Christmas morning and shone on the oat sheaf and all the twittering birds that flew around the pole feeder. Then from the wall also was heard “peep peep.” The swelling thought became a sound. The faint peep was an entire hymn of joy—a thought of a good deed had awakened, and the bird flew out from its hiding place. In heaven they knew who the bird was!

Then winter came with a vengeance. The lakes were deeply frozen, and the birds and animals in the forest had a hard time finding food. The little bird flew by the road and found a kernel of grain here and there in the tracks from the sleds. At the places where the travelers rested it found a couple of crumbs, but only ate one of them and summoned all the other starving sparrows so they could eat. It flew to the towns, scouted about, and where a friendly hand had thrown bread from the window for the birds, it ate a single crumb, and gave the rest to the others.

During the course of the winter the bird gathered and gave away so many bread crumbs that together they weighed as much as the bread that little Inger had stepped on to avoid dirtying her shoes, and when the last bread crumb was found and given away, the bird’s grey wings turned white and grew larger.

“There’s a sea swallow flying over the lake,” said the children who saw the white bird. Sometimes it dived down into the water, and sometimes flew high in the clear sunshine. It shone in the sun so it was impossible to see what became of it. They said that it flew right into the sun.