Tails of Wonder and Imagination

SOMETHING BETTER THAN DEATH Lucy Sussex

For anything I know it was all due to jetlag, that curious fugue state in which the body has leapt over space and time as if in seven-league boots, with the protesting spirit, or soul, striving to catch up. Or due to the jetlag medication. Or else that I was betwixt and between stages of my life, or thought I was, and my subconscious was trying to tell me different. Whatever the cause, I walked between waking dreams, intermittent hallucinations, in which what was real and what wasn’t mingled and merged madly. In the end it didn’t seem to matter—I just went with the flow.

It all began in the Sydney International Departures check-in, where the teenage girl ahead of me exclaimed:

“Ohmigod! Tell me I’m hallucinating!”

Gladly, sweetie, I thought. I hadn’t slept the previous night and was decidedly on edge, my body on automatic pilot, my mind darting every which way. Terminals always are artificial, in their air-conditioned saccharine blandness, and today this one seemed particularly unreal. That what seemed might actually be a genuine unreality was a notion I could welcome.

I followed the direction of her pointing, black-varnished finger, to see four figures and a trolley piled high with flight cases. And a part of me that I had resolved to leave behind pawed the ground and said: Aha! A band.

The trouble with music promotion, if you’ve done it too long, or long enough that it stops being fun, or fannish, is that you automatically categorize market niches. The girl was an obvious Goth. The band was a little more difficult: tatts, black clothes, long hair can indicate anything from stadium rockers to Norwegian Black Metal, who are more trouble than they’re worth, as they have an annoying habit of burning down churches. Probably Speed Metal, I decided, as the girl started hyperventilating. Cult-level, if they’re at the economy counter. I could guess at the festival they’d just attended and even take a punt at the promoter. My old life pawed at the ground again, raring to start a professional chat, about festival logistics, equipment, transport. Not the least of the fun would have been giving the Goth fangirl the vapours. To her, I was over forty, and thus nigh death—but I could still best her in the catty cunning stakes.

Instead I suppressed the urge, and stood meekly in queue. Was I not en route to a new life, leaving all frivolous, pop-culture things behind? The band passed through check-in, then security without incident. If the Goth fangirl got autographs I didn’t see, for I was deep in Duty-free. What can you get a serious-minded man, apart from seriously good drink? Then I stretched my legs for the last time until Changi, a long walk around the corridors with my headphones and German-language CD. The Goth fangirl I spotted in the lounge for Vanuatu, which would surely ruin her graveyard pallor. My flight had been called, I was handing my boarding pass to the Stew, when a bloc of black joined the queue—the band again, clutching tacky outback souvenirs. Not as evil as you like to pretend, I thought. Like most metallists—who upon acquaintance tended to be polite and obliging, the reverse of the Christian rockers.

I have flown so much it has become routine, but even the tedium failed to deaden my jangling nerves. I watched a movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, and decided I didn’t believe a word of it, apart from Jimmy Smits playing against type as a nice family man. I ate automatically, listened to my tapes again, dipped into my E-book, which was programmed with everything about Germany, from the Rough Guide to the Brothers Grimm. The Stews handed out cocoa, started dimming the lights. Outside it was dark, as if we were passing through an interminable tunnel. It was 2 a.m. my time, and there would be light, and an airport, in a few hours. I took a pill, and, just to make sure, chased it with the last of my dinner red wine.

And awoke, with sleeping passengers all around me and my nerves jangling again. My feet, in their airline socks, felt cramped, so I wandered down the aisles. As I neared the back row, the middle aisle, I had a sense of being watched, and traced it to a hulking dark shape, almost entirely muffled by an airline blanket worn like a hoodie. Eyes showed beneath it, large and lustrous. Beside my watcher were several other forms, similarly shrouded in blanket and curled up in the narrow seats like a pet in a basket. I caught only a glimpse of dyed Mohawk protruding. The band, I thought.

It was easy enough to catch my travel dress on a protruding, blanket-clad limb—elbow or knee I don’t know, as he overflowed his seat in several directions. As I crouched down to extricate it, the “Sorry”, “No I’m sorry” morphed into a whispered conversation. The accidental proximity of air travel can make for unlikely fellow travelers having even more unlikely conversations. But, as I crouched beside him, whispering into the space beneath his hood, and he whispered back in an accent I couldn’t trace, it all seemed natural and easy—in retrospect too easy.

In dreams or drug trips, events occur without apparent connection, and very quickly. They cut to the chase, without small talk—and that’s what happened here. Within a short time we were getting personal in a mixture of English and German, a language I was still learning.

“Warum?” Why? Why was I traveling?

“Ein mann,”—the truth, just to stave off any possible pass.

“And what sort of man, to take you half the length of the world?”

“Ein musik-mann.”

He emitted a soft laugh, breathy, harsh and nasal, and with more wryness than mirth in it.

“Nobody you’d know. He plays classical, and conducts a small avant-garde consort at the Music School in Bremen.” I pronounced it the correct German way, Bray-men.

“Donkey,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Katz.”

“Yes, I’m Jane Katz,” I said. Had he been ever a client, in some previous band incarnation?

That laugh again, but less wry than simply pleased. “Donkey, katz,” he repeated. “And hund. And rooster.”

“Oh,” I said, catching on. “Well, Grimm to you too!” I had just read the story, on the E-book, and it was fresh in my mind. On the first day of Christmas my truelove had even sent to me a stuffed toy, the tourist symbol of the city, a donkey with a dog on its back, on the dog a cat, on the cat a rooster. The Four Musicians of Bremen, made in China.

“That’s an interesting story, more than it seems. Like most of Grimm.”

“It begins with a donkey,” I said.

“Too old to work on the farm anymore.”

“And rather than die for the only thing valuable left on him, his skin, he gallops away, down the road to Bremen.”

“And there I think is an in-joke. Why does the donkey head for Bremen? To be town-musician. Which indicates the Bremen musicians had the reputation of being worse than donkeys.”

“Interesting,” I said. “He says he can play the lute.”

“How can a donkey play the lute?”

I considered this. “With his teeth, like Hendrix. Or using one hoof on the fret, like a bottleneck or slide.”

“Vir gut,” he said. Very good.

“The hound says he can play kettledrum,” I said, leaping ahead to the next character. “Maybe with the stick tied to his tail.”

“To show you can teach an old dog new tricks.”

“He too has run away, because he is too old to hunt, and his master has nearly beaten him to death.”

“Then they meet a cat.”

“Wet through and thoroughly pissed-off.”

“Escaped from drowning.”

“Because she is too old a hunter, even for mausen.”

“What does the cat play?”

I thought again. “Probably some kind of string instrument. With those plucking claws.”

“They’ve already got a guitarist.”

“Bass, then.” I had dabbled at bass, like various girls in ’80s bands. When I got beside rather than on the stage I gave it up, but still harboured respect for the bassists I encountered. They were cool cats mostly, especially the jazzers.

“And the last one,” he said. “The rooster.”

“Crowing as loud as it can.”

“The phrase is ‘through marrow and bone.’ Vir gut, very creepy.”

As is your being word-perfect in a story I only just read, I nearly said. Odd little doubts stir below the surface of dreams, but are never expressed.

“His fate is to be made into soup.”

“That’s farm economics,” I said. “Utterly unsentimental and practical. I grew up on a farm.” And got as far away from it as I possibly could.

“And so the rooster completes the band,” he said.

“As lead singer, with his penetrating voice.”

“All of them seeking in Bremen ‘something better than death,’ as the Esel, the donkey says.”

Now that really was creepy. If there is something that everybody fears, and avoids as hard as they can, it is growing old, finding yourself beyond a useful date, and the end nearing. Old boiler, that’s what they say of women, only suitable for soup, like Grimm’s rooster.

I think at that point I returned to my seat, too unsettled to continue. Next thing I was waking from a totally unrestful doze, with the cabin lights on for the descent into Changi. There I used the free internet, to send a message to Bremen, and because the line about something better than death was really getting to me, some Duty-free but still expensive night cream. At the bar, I encountered the band again, looking thoroughly unslept—and noticed no Mohawks. Nor were any of them particularly big. And, I suddenly realised, whoever I was talking to, he was older, because he kept emphasizing the animals’ age. A young man wouldn’t do that, they believe they’re immortal. Get off that fire escape now, drink this water, no, don’t try and snort wasabi… all from days when my promo work shaded into nannying.

Who was my conversationalist of the night-flight? Someone out of the common, certainly unlike the fellow passengers lining up for airport security yet again, in their tracksuits and jeans, the children clutching Harry Potter. He must be on the German-bound flight, he spoke German to me. I scanned the line of passengers, but drew a blank.

No matter, I was really tired now. I wrapped myself in blanket, closed my eyes—and kept waking every fifteen minutes or so, all the way to Hamburg. Mein mann had told me of a spot, hidden but known by seasoned travelers, where you could sit in reclining chairs and watch the take-offs. I found it, but still couldn’t relax before my connecting flight to Bremen.

The flight was full of German business-folk, who disembarked with their briefcases, or waited somberly by the carousel for their suitcases. There the strangeness started again: I swear I saw a sniffer dog leap onto the carousel. Oho, a drug bust! I thought, glad this time I wouldn’t be getting any client out of trouble. Instead the dog took hold of a suitcase handle in its mouth, and dragged it off the carousel, for the benefit of a man who merely picked it up, and walked away, the dog trotting briskly at his heels. The things they teach seeing-eye dogs these days! I thought.

I found that Germans took dogs everywhere: into department stores, museums, so a dog in an airport soon seemed not so strange. Not as strange as the new country, even with a native guide in the shape of the musik-mann. How to describe him, except in terms of the stereotypes of love, of race? He was tall, blonde, blue-eyed, handsome (natch!), earnest, methodical, serious. Reader, I fucked him—as soon as we got back to his tidy apartment. Then I slept, despite my resolve to stay up until I was in sync with the local time. Sex does that to me, even earnest, methodical, serious sex. I woke, to find him dressing for a class he had to teach. Why didn’t I come and take a look around the wintermarket while he worked, see the Christmas schmuck (baubles), and drink Lumbaba (coffee with rum)?

So, not long afterwards, I was alone in Germany, in below zero cold, bundled up in woollens, at a Christmas funfair. Here were mistletoe branches, the first time I had seen them in their cold green actuality, there were merry-go-rounds, plywood silhouettes cut into Christmas scenes, gingerbread hearts. It was a festival that said: Be merry and keep the frost giants away!

“Ich möchte ein Kaffee,” I said carefully to the man at the Schmaltzküchen. Then, “Danke Schon,” when I got the coffee.

It raised my body temperature a notch. But still I felt the chill penetrate the sleeves of my coat, cutting through to the marrow and bone of my forearms. Looking around for something to do, preferably warm, I saw a tour for the historic Rathaus, that’s Ratehouse (Townhall) auf Deutsch and in English.

I paid my euros, joined a queue again, of people in padded jackets and woolly hats, usually with technicolour plaits attached, a fashion that was no doubt practical but too hippie for my tastes. Inside was warmth again, and our guide.

The bi-lingual tour was detailed, but told with a light, witty touch. I learnt about the Hanseatic league, Bremen as republic, Bishop Ansgar who evangelized Scandinavia from Bremen, about 1000 years ago. And Sydney town is only two hundred years old, I thought, unless you are Yothu Yindi.

Interesting though the tour was, odd details kept distracting me: the dog that padded along with the tour, as if it too had paid its euros to attend, a gargoyle face squinting from a riot of wooden carving, the wry, nasal laugh of the guide…

“Someone has just asked me about the symbol of the city, the key. It was not like now, where keys of the city are given as honours. Not a symbol of opening, but closure. Medieval cities were walled, against what might attack them from outside the zone of tilled fields and pasture, from robbers to robber barons. The keys were closely guarded, for behind the walls were not tolerant places. They had to be that way, to survive.”

I looked properly at the guide for the first time. He was large, male, graying, about my vintage, nondescript almost by intention, as if trying to fit in as precisely as a jigsaw piece.

“Since you’re talking about symbols, what about the musicians of Bremen?” I asked.

It was as if the rest of the tour group had vanished, and we were just talking to each other one to one, as we had in the plane.

“They never got here,” he said. “They got diverted.”

“By the lights of a house in the forest,” I breathed.

“And when they looked in the window…”

“They saw firelight and robbers, feasting around a table.”

“Their mouths started watering, with the hunger.”

“And they slunk back into the dark.”

“Discussed what to do.”

“And devised a plan.”

“They watched and waited until the robbers were drunk, but not legless.”

“Then the donkey sank down on his knees, and the dog scrabbled onto his back.”

“The cat elegantly leapt onto the back of the dog from her vantage point on a water barrel.”

“The rooster swallowed his nerves, and fluttered onto the back of the cat.”

“The donkey stood carefully, lifting the pyramid of animals.”

“And a monstrous silhouette appeared in the robbers’ window, followed by an equally demonic sound, in concert. The donkey brayed.”

That laugh again.

The dog, who had been sitting quietly by, ears pricked, emitted a small bark.

“The cat wailed,” I said, groping in my linguistic memory for the word. “Das miaoen!”

From the tour group came the final sound in the quartet, a crowing ringtone from a mobile phone. It broke the spell, as the guide sighed, and wagged a finger at the perpetrator. Now he was just a tour guide again, and I was just another tourist, alone in an alien country.

Another day, another place, more disorientation. Mein mann had a free weekend and was taking me on a tour of his favourite Germany. This meant a 6 a.m. start, when I had woken at 2, and lay beside the sleeping six-foot of him, unable to doze, unable to find something to do in a strange flat full of books I couldn’t read, appliances of which I was yet to learn the nuances. We caught the ICE, the inter-city express, at the Hauptbahnhof as the sun rose. Gradually the landscape emerged from the darkness: mostly windfarms, and winter-brown woods. We changed at Hanover, changed again at a station I only remember for a tree delineated in ice like a faery toy, a moment of sheer magic despite my fatigue. Then, hours later, we reached Arnstadt, famous for Bach. The tour had been organized methodically, chronologically, Arnstadt being where Bach had his first job, as organist at a Lutheran church.

We stood, boots on frost, and surveyed the memorial statue. “Seated one day at the organ,” in the hoary old song. Mein mann was reverent, but I had to suppress a giggle. The young Bach was unmistakably phallic, suitable for a father of twenty. And hadn’t he wielded a sword, too? He reminded me of the young Keith Emerson but I knew better than to share that thought, especially with the man with whom I would be sharing my life. We entered the Neuekirche, and my irreverence continued, for the interior was like a white and gold wedding cake, even the organ. Can I have a cake like that? I very nearly said. We would have to get married, if I was to stay in Germany, rather than pursue a long-distance romance. He had the steadiest income—I was the alien immigrant, seeking the keys to the city, to let myself into the warmth and the firelight.

The walled cities were not tolerant places, I remembered, from the tour guide’s talk. I shivered. He misunderstood, and put his wool-clad arm around me. A warm misunderstanding, in which I could luxuriate for the moment, as we stood like bride and groom in the middle of a white and gold church.

We had lunch in the Musician’s Café (of course!): kaffee, schwarzbrot, tagessuppe (daysoup—soup of the day, and vegetarian, for unlike my escort I didn’t fancy the chicken broth). In the pearly-grey winter light I watched a stocky white cat skirt the Arnstadt Rathaus, appropriate given the bi-lingual pun.

“I have an appointment for the early afternoon. Musical.”

Of course, I thought.

“While I’m away, would you like to see the Puppenstadt?”

“Dollhouse?” I said, after a moment’s translating thought.

“Famous. From Bach’s time.”

Whatever you say, I thought. He could have suggested I go ice-skating on the nearest pond, such was my passive desire to please. But a dollhouse, when I was neither childish nor twee? What did he think of me?

Unexpectedly, it captivated—eighty or so rooms in glass cases, a German principality in miniature, compiled by the childless and widowed Princess Auguste Dorothea, a plump and amiable lady from her portrait. Well, it beats music promotion as an achievement, I thought. I moved among the cases, nose almost touching glass, reading the details of a lost time, musicians, maids, weavers, bakers, dancing bears and all. Behind me came and went a tour group, German old age pensioners, and their guide. Someone lingered, I was aware of the presence, but was otherwise intent on a miniature replica of the Princess’s Audience room. The detail extended to a pet monkey—and was that also a cat?—lurking by the folds of her brocade silk skirt.

“Would you like to go in?” said a voice behind me, one with which I was becoming very familiar. A hand moved briefly into my peripheral vision, holding between finger and thumb a tiny key.

“To the dollhouse world? Is it any different from the medieval walled cities?”

“The eighteenth century was more civilized,” he said. “The Princess was fond of her court musicians and her pets. But observe the man selling rat traps, the dancing bear”—polar, made of real white fur—“and the old beggarwoman.”

“We might come to that yet.” Such a fear, to be alone, and old, poor and friendless. I shivered again.

“Imagine,” he said, “if I stand at the window, the dog on my back, and you, Katzwoman, between dog and rooster, and we open our mouths and make the biggest cacophany we can—”

“To scare away the dollhouse folk, like we did the robbers,” I breathed. “Miaoen!”

My mew was soft, but it seemed shockingly loud in the silence of the museum, somehow augmented, by the laugh behind me, the bark of a dog, even that ringtone cockcrow again: hee-haw-arf-meow-cock-a-doodle. As if the glass before me were water, a surface to shimmer with my breath, it shook. I suddenly found myself not outside, but within a 1700s provincial audience room, crouched at the foot of a throne upholstered in yellow silk, around me Chinoiserie wallpaper and marquetry furnishings.

The monkey and I were face-to-face. I bared my teeth at it, hissed, and it slunk away. Then I did what any cat would do, jumped up and settled myself in the best seat in the room, the princely throne with its soft yellow silk, underneath a matching Austrian blind of a canopy.

“And what is your decree, Princess Catwoman?” said the face in the glass, occupying one wall of the audience room.

I waved one paw airily.

“Release the monkey from its chains, also the bears, take the horses out of their harness, and ban all rat catchers, except me!”

“Vir gut,” said the voice behind glass, laughing again. The glass quivered and the vision reversed, so that I stood once more gazing into the audience room, with its static doll-princess, monkey, and cat.

“What are you?” I said. “Some kind of animal liberationist?”

“I can hardly be anything but,” he said, his voice a trailing thread of sound, ending in silence. I turned and found myself alone. The mobile mein mann had given me rang in my pocket, a Bach fugue. It was time to go.

The next few days passed in snapshots, images of a fairytale tourist German Christmas. Dinner that night was at the Goldene Sonne, where generations of the Bach family had an annual musical meet, and we slept in the hotel above, all to ourselves. Sex was 6/10, from my continuing tiredness perhaps, or else some unacknowledged sense of disapproving Bach family ghosts. To the Lutheran Church the next day, to hear Bach’s organ being played, although I nearly nodded off during the sermon. Back to Bremen in the train, snow having fallen so that the countryside was almost over-the-top picture postcard, except for the windfarms. Left alone the next day, I watched German TV, and found it equally trash culture as elsewhere. Feeling very brave, I walked from the Neustadt (new town, typically a name hundreds of years old) along the riverside, all by myself.

I wanted to see the famous statue of the Musicians of Bremen, cast in bronze. It was polished keen by tourist hands, and I touched it too, first the katz, then the donkey, but felt not warm hide and hair, but cold metal. I waited, as tourist happy-snappers came and went, as if listening for a distinctive breathy, braying laugh. Nothing happened; and I consoled myself with some glühwein, drunk in a booth while the Christmas revelers all around slapped backs, dispensed Christmas cheer—to everyone except me, it seemed.

Night, and I put on what I had of winter glam, and went out with mein mann, to see his consort perform. Avant-garde meets with rock music at some junctures, especially at arts festivals—and thus ageing lady rock promoters meet serious classical music dudes. I knew my Steve Reich, my Phil Glass, even if I preferred my beloved Sonic Youth. Why did the performance then seem a cacophony dressed up as art, not even with the honest purpose of frightening some robbers away from their ill-gotten gains? Not to mention that I really did fall asleep during the “quiet movement”. Result, in the freezing wind outside, a blazing row, luckily for any relationship grudge sheet largely conducted (by him, berating) in German. Under different circumstances I might have stomped off angrily, but in sub-zero temperatures, in a foreign country, I had no choice but to follow him meekly home, to his home.

By next morning we had sort of made it up. He ate salami for breakfast (German habit, bad as Vegemite) and we took another train, off to Lübeck, where Bach had walked all the way from Arnstadt to hear Buxtehude play. How young, how fannish, I thought, but did not say. The ICE was crammed with Germans, their suitcases and Christmas parcels, all last-minute panic as they headed back home to the volks for Weihnachsfest. We changed trains, as we had on the way to Arnstadt, but this time in a major city. I had missed my essential morning coffee, to make the train, and was decidedly blurry, not-with-it. As we waited outside the coffee booth, I said:

“Where are we?”

His face said: she doesn’t know? “Hamburg, of course.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly locating a culture point I recognized. “Where the Beatles honed their art!”

And then stopped cold, as his expression changed from condescending amusement to naked disgust. So you think that of me, what I have done, what I adore! With a psychic jolt, as of a train coupling, my jetlagged spirit or soul caught up with me, and with it came my senses. I knew then, that I had made a huge mistake: had I really believed true love was possible with a stranger who was my musical opposite?

“Snob,” I shouted, a word identical in English and German. From around us came answering shouts, an approaching roar of song, even what sounded like gunfire. Feet tramped, a whistle sounded, and police in uniforms, with batons and guns, surged into the station. On the next platform a train pulled in, full of football fans, singing lustily and setting off firecrackers. The police flowed to meet them, and within moments there was a riot going on, not only on the platform, but between us lovers-no-more, as last night’s row flared again. This time I gave as good as I got, in words with Germanic roots, four-letter, cutting, nasty and final.

Dramatic exit time, like a bow in front of a curtain. I turned on my boot heels and stepped into the larger chaos of the riot. I’ve survived mosh pits at festivals, I know how to move through trouble unhurt. Not so the fan to one side of me, who stumbled, and got a kick to the head, dislodging his beanie. As the riot eddied around us, I pulled him upright, lest he be trampled.

He looked near-stunned, blood tricking down from his Mohawk, dyed in the team colours. I did what I usually did, when I had a client in strife, led him towards the edge of the riot, then out among the watching passengers, and towards a safe stillness. Somehow along the way we acquired a police dog. I looped a finger through its collar, and as a scuffle neared us took a step sideways, and down a flight of stairs. Perhaps the dog led, perhaps I did, as we step-stumbled down towards a local service platform, containing only a few scattered passengers and their parcels.

A train pulled in, and automatically we entered. It chugged away back in the direction of Bremen, as the looming clouds released their snow, and we passed through empty farmland, small station after small station. The track dived into woodland, and in its centre stood a deserted station, the smallest so far. The dog barked, pulled at my coat skirts with its teeth. I heaved my dopy charge upright again, and we disembarked in the swirling snow, nobody following us out into the cold. The fan bent, scooped up a handful of snow, and rubbed it on his head. It seemed to revive him, and he lurched towards the exit. I could hardly abandon him—so I followed, as did the dog, wagging his bristly tail.

Waiting under the overhang of the station roof was a large grey donkey, whom the fan embraced around the neck, then used, as he had me, as a walking support. So out we stepped into the snow, the four of us, through a village, decorations and Christmas candelabras at each window, like an advent calendar. Within a few streets the village petered out, and our paws, hooves, runners, and boots stopped scrunching snow, instead fell silent among the rag-rug of damp pine-needles in the forest. The fan walked free now, but I stumbled on a tree root, went headlong, knocking the heel off my boot. The dog bent over me, panting, the donkey lowered its velvet muzzle as if in concern, and the fan lent me a hand upwards. I wobbled, and he scooped me up as easily as he had the snow, depositing me on the back of the donkey. This is not Nazareth, I thought, and I’m definitely not a pregnant Mary. Nonetheless I rode on donkey-back through the forest to a clearing, in which stood what looked like a converted stable, or barn.

I know the donkey nudged the door with its muzzle and it swung open, I remember that, but the next moments are unclear. Somehow I went from riding on a hard hairy back to being carried bride-style, in a man’s arms, over the threshold. I got deposited in a hearthside chair, and there followed a flurry of movement, as a fire was lit. I pulled off my wet boots, set them on the ashy hearthstone to dry. The fire caught, streaks of orange shooting up the chimney, and I slid onto the hearthrug. It was littered with straw and pet hair, but I lay on it, luxuriating in the warmth. The dog settled beside me, sighed, and went to sleep. After a moment I closed my eyes too.

Hours later I woke after the first proper sleep in a week. The early winter dusk had come, and with it had come Christmas, celebrated on the Eve in Germany. The fire illuminated a table, set for the feast, and a Christmas tree laden with bling. I couldn’t see the fan anywhere, but the dog still snoozed beside me, paws twitching. In the chair on the other side of the hearth sat the Rathaus guide.

“You are Esel,” I said.

A smile and nod.

“Tell me what happened next with the story,” I said. “So the Bremen musicians drove the robbers out?”

“And the four animals ate their feast and took over the house.”

“Did the robbers ever come back?”

“They sent a scout, to reconnoiter. In the dark, only to get scratched by the cat, kicked by the donkey, bit by the dog, and near deafened by the rooster. So he ran off wailing of witches with long talons, men armed with knives and clubs, whatever his fears made believable.”

“Unlike an animal insurrection,” I said. The fire was furnace-warm now, too much for my woolens. I sat up, and as I did saw perched in the rafters a rooster, with—surely not—what looked like a band-aid on its comb.

“Donkey, hund, hahn… Vo sind die katz?”

“She has nine lives. She might go and live in another one for a while, but always comes back.”

Reader, we spent Christmas together, snowed completely in till almost the New Year, in freak winter weather conditions for that part of the country. We talked, prepared excellent meals with Esel, drank glühwein, got to know each other. Nothing more, I wasn’t leaping into anything rash again. We listened right through a large collection of vinyl and DVD, then the musical instruments emerged. Esel, could he play slide guitar! And I plunked away cautiously on bass. Hahn hung from the rafters and sang football songs in a mean imitation of Robert Plant. Hund was shy, some drummers are like that, but every now and then he would pad down to the cellar studio, from which would arise the sound of drums, played like a fury.

Just when all the food in the house was exhausted except for a box of chocolate mice, the villagers arrived with a snowmobile and dug us out. And, because I could leave then, cat-contrary, I didn’t.

One upon a time the Grimm brothers collected an oral story, tidied it up for print consumption, but left the message intact. Strip it down, and the story is about finding a haven, or of being diverted from your path, most fruitfully. I went to marry a classical musician, and ended up living with a rock band. Nothing I hadn’t done before, in my wild youth, an old life of mine, to which I had inevitably returned.

“How does the story end?” I asked Esel, as we watched the New Year’s sunrise, coiled up together, under a geological strata of blankets. “So they lived happily ever after?”

“No, that’s not what the story says.”

“What, then?”

He lay back, thinking. “Everything prospered so well with the quartet.”

“That’s good!”

“That they did not forsake their situation.”

“How very formal those Grimms were!”

“Not the very last line. It ends with: ‘And there they are to this day for anything I know’.”

There are two ways to write what happened. First is a romantic tale: on the way to what I thought was the love of my life, but in reality was a flingette, I met on the plane a gent more congenial to my tastes, musical and otherwise. Then I encountered him again, while he was doing emergency tour guide work, and found that I could survive a snowed-in Christmas with him and his band-mates. They could even use an experienced rock promoter.

Second is something stranger: life in a continuous Grimm’s tale, with a bunch of musical shape-shifters.

It could even be both.

For anything I know.