"Come here, little boy. I've bought your breath."
For the first time in those other worlds I'd traveled (lived?) in, I felt thoroughly trapped and afraid. I have never been to a whore, but if their world is anything like that, they have my full sympathy. All that mattered there were orgasms and fantasy. But the orgasms came too quickly (or not at all) and the fantasies were like bad stage sets. I didn't even know my name because the men called me different things. It was not a degrading experience because I felt so distant from what was done to me. No, the fear came from feeling this is it, I'll never leave here. This will be where I end my life.
The morning after, I got out of bed and immediately began looking through Maris's boxes for her tarot cards. After an hour I realized she often carried them in her purse, so there was a good chance she had them at the hospital.
In a great mood when I got there, she hesitated only a bit before agreeing to do a reading for me. How could I have been so selfish and thoughtless? Why didn't I once think that her problem might be due to my magic, or "Papa," and not natural causes? So much else had gone wrong because of those things. Perhaps I didn't consider them because I wanted the doctors to be right – it was a baby, this happened often, it was medical, and not unnatural.
From the first card she turned, I knew it was wrong to ask. The Tower. The Eight of Swords, the Nine of Swords, Death . . . Any good card was upside down, the bad cards in every important place. I know nothing about the tarot, but I could read her face and that told me enough. By the time she turned the last one, her hand was shaking.
"Forget it." I started to sweep the cards up in my hand.
She grabbed it. "Don't do that! Don't touch my cards! I have to do it again. Give them to me, Walker. Now!"
"Forget it."
"Give them!"
"It doesn't matter, Maris!"
"It does. I have to do it for me too. Don't you understand?"
I handed them back. After shuffling many times, she laid down exactly the same hand.
"Oh, God. Walker, call the doctor. I think I'm bleeding again."
She was, and this time there was a rush of doctors and hurried talk.
Luckily, Doctor Scheer was on duty and explained what was happening.
"It's not good, Mr. Easterling. Everything was going well until now, but this indicates serious problems. We're going to have to keep much closer watch now, especially with that baby inside her. Doctor Lauringer said he's very concerned she might lose it if the bleeding continues."
"Could it have been stress?"
"That is as good a reason as any."
I stood in the parking lot outside, looking up at the sky.
"Help her, for God's sake. Use whatever you have to help her. She's your life, Walker. She's in there and she's sick and you're not helping at all. Think about Maris first. Think about the baby. Save them and you save yourself. Save them and you've saved yourself."
Dave Buck looked like a refugee from Woodstock. He wore a full-length beard, American army fatigues, and combat boots. I'd been to his apartment once and the only picture in the whole place was a psychedelic poster of Moby Grape.
If he wasn't deep in the bowels of the National Library looking up facts on his Anabaptist, Buck was walking the city. He knew more about the place than most Viennese, and would often take me to see some strange Roman ruin or undiscovered junk store way out in the Twenty-third District that sold old war medals and uniforms.
"The problem with the Brothers Grimm is there's been too much written on them. I got your info for you, but I've been in the friggin' library too long. My eyes feel like old headlights. Let's walk the Ring and I'll tell you what I found."
Any guidebook will tell you that Vienna is one of the great walking cities in the world. The streets are either wide and tree-lined, or else crooked/narrow and filled with interesting or odd stores. The automobile is part of the city but doesn't own it yet.
Winter there means cold and mist. It rarely snows hard, but the days are short, cold, and damp. Buck was standing at Schottentor with his bare hands under his armpits and a green camouflage watchcap on.
"You look like you're going on maneuvres."
"Yeah? Come on, I gotta get my blood moving."
We walked in front of the university, past the Burg Theatre and Town Hall.
"Are we going to hike or talk?"
"Talk." Still moving, he took a tape recorder out of one of his many pockets. "I use this when I want a quote from a book I can't take out of the library. Listen."
He turned the machine on and thumbed it to its highest volume. I took it and held it to my ear.
"'Contrary to popular belief, the Grimms did not collect their tales by visiting peasants in the countryside and writing down the tales that they heard. Their primary method was to invite storytellers to their house and then have them tell the tales aloud, which the Grimms either noted down on first hearing or after a couple of hearings. Most of the storytellers during this period were educated young women from the middle class or aristocracy.'"
He reached over and took the machine away from me. "That's it for that. I've got a bunch of quotes for you that I'll transcribe and send over, but that's the most important one.
"The other thing you should know, and this applies to almost all of the Grimm fairy tales, the men changed a hell of a lot of them before they ever saw print. The brothers were big believers in both the unification of Germany and the true German spirit, whatever that is. It meant they took stories they'd heard from their sources and edited them. Took out sexy parts, changed morals around . . . That kind of thing. They didn't want any good German child reading salacious or lewd stuff. Bad for the upbringing. In their way, they really were kind of literary fascists. I never knew that before."
We stopped at the light in front of the entrance to the Hapsburg Palace and watched tourist busses pull in, eyes and cameras glued to their windows.
"Have you noticed that, like, every other tourist in Vienna these days is Japanese? What does that mean?"
"That they have better taste than the Americans who all go to Paris and eat at McDonald's.
"What about 'Rumpelstiltskin'? What did you find there?"
"The names to remember are Dortchen and Lisette Wild. No, don't bother writing them down because I've got it typed for you. The story was told in 1812."
"Where was this?"
"The town of Kassel in Germany. The Grimms lived there for a number of years and I gather that's where they heard many of their most famous stories. The imaginations of all those nice bourgeois girls. Today we'd call it sexual hysteria."
"Go on."
"I looked through fifteen books for you, Walker. Some of them were older than your story. The best I could find was this: The Wild sisters told the Grimms 'Rumpelstiltskin' in 1812 and the only notation I could find about it specifically was it's one of the 'mixed version' stories. That means one of two possibilities: The girls made up or told the story together, or after the Grimms heard it, they took what they wanted from the original and threw the rest out."
"Or both."
"Or both, but my guess is the former."
"Why?"
"The brothers got their stories from basically two sources: middle-class girls like the Wilds, or low-lifes like the neighborhood tailor's wife. There was even an old soldier named Krause who gave them stories in exchange for old clothes! Now, the books say the girls got their stories from household servants. Even if what they heard was sexy, I can't imagine in those prudish days young girls would have had the courage to tell people of their own class racy stories. Especially if their listeners were of the opposite sex! It just wasn't done. Take a look at what the women wore in those days if you want an indication of their mores. It wasn't the Age of Aquarius.