Tales from the Tower, Volume 2

by Isobelle Carmody

It was past midnight when she stumbled onto the road leading to the farm. The closer she got to the house, the more she was plagued by dream scraps. Breath sawed in and out of her lungs and she shivered and sweated. It’s fever, just fever, she told herself. Otto would never harm a baby. And the paintings of that monstrous child, that’s what was giving her nightmares. But with that thought came the red-and-blue flash of a police car or ambulance. It was heading towards her – had they come to fetch her back? Trailing its skirl of sound, faint and distorted by distance and wind, it rushed along the home road and turned in at the farm gate. She hurried on, stumbled and fell heavily as it careered past her. An ambulance. Oh God, and not for her. One of Otto’s woodheap sculptures had felled her and now her shin burned with pain. The siren wound down to silence but the lights continued to pulse.

  She ran – staggered – up the driveway, dread locking her throat. The house was ablaze with light, but there was no welcoming racket – where were the dogs? The lights on the ambulance revolved endlessly, painting her hand on the doorhandle red and blue by turns. Then she was in the kitchen. Muffled voices came from one of the bedrooms. Her fingers fumbled for the light switch. She heard each breath as a high keening cry, but it was distant. Was it coming from her? And that smell – an odour of roasted bones and glutinous flesh.

  The globe was slow to warm, and she saw first the roasting dish and in the blue-and-red strobe a small rib cage picked clean. The tiny vertebrae were set in congealed fat and meat jelly. There was a skull, and slender arm bones. Greer stared and felt her gorge rise in horror. Heat broke into fresh sweat on her face, then ice spread numbingly through her body. Faintly she heard something shuffling towards the kitchen door, and looked up to see the old Judy, her face creased with anxiety and her eyes sharp and hostile.

  Greer could not speak. She had woken into nightmare.

  ‘Grir? Is you?’ the crone was speaking to her, knew her name. Greer stared.

  ‘Com. Com. Sit.’ The old woman pulled out a chair beside the hideous remains.

  Greer backed away, and the old woman, seeing her fixed stare, picked up the roasting dish to move it to the sink.

  ‘He say you no want kill bebe but he kill. He eat. It kill him maybe.’ Her lips pursed and she shrugged helplessly, indicating the murmured voices somewhere in the house. ‘No can help him.’

  Greer tried to breathe, to weep, but a black tidal bore was sweeping through her, engorging her skull. In a dozen strides she was at the woodheap, grasping the axe, the smooth wood fitting her hand like an old friend. She swung it up and gripped it behind the head, then she was in the kitchen, the darkened hall, with the old grandmother at her heels gabbling and shouting and plucking at her.

  ‘Otto!’ It was the voice that quelled dogfights, dragged up from the pit of her lungs. Two uniformed figures were bent over the bed, working at something, one of them glancing up at her, alarm rounding his eyes. She hefted the axe, but a knobbed hand caught it and held it and would not let go.

  The cry was lustier than she remembered, and she thought, this is madness then, but was glad of it, glad to hear her little son one last time. She relinquished the axe and slumped in the doorway, confounded. The old woman shuffled from the room, muttering to herself, the axe gripped to her withered breasts. As she stared blankly at the stooped backs of the paramedics, the crying stopped and she heard only strange crooning words she did not understand. There, almost as she had dreamed it, was the old Judy with a tightly swaddled baby in her arms, coming towards her in the dim hall.

  ‘Otik!’ She snatched the child away, scrabbling at the cloth that bound him as she hurried down the hall and shouldered open the kitchen door. The little face was pinched and thin, but his colour was good. Greer laid him on the kitchen table and unwrapped him completely, needing to reassure herself that he was truly there, alive and healthy. The old woman watched, clucking with approval or disapproval, Greer had no way of knowing, as she unfastened the last folds of cloth, and there he was, coated in something white and greasy, like vernix, as if he were newly born. And for Greer he was. Risen from the dead. Plucked from the belly of his father, still coated in lard, for that was what it was, she could smell it. Perhaps it was a peasant remedy, or a salve against starvation.

  The old woman extended a gnarled hand and gently pinched the soft arm, which was furred with hunger hair like a famine victim. ‘No fat,’ she said. ‘Papa too much fat.’

  Greer wrapped him up hastily and fumbled to free her breast for him. She could feel the milk tingling through her, rushing to the nipple. ‘Milk com,’ the old woman said, her voice crackling with age. The work-roughened hands clasped Greer’s breast as she brought the baby’s head firmly towards it, pressing the clamouring mouth onto the nipple. ‘Good. Is good.’

  And it was good. Greer felt the milk being pulled from the roots of her heart, but it was there, and it would be there in greater quantities if she could but rest and eat and recover. She turned her back on the pitiful remains of the suckling pig, and understood, at last, why the ambulance and paramedics were here.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am.’ One of them stood in the doorway. ‘The old lady thought he’d just overdone it, but it’s a bit more than indigestion, I’m afraid. We’ve got him stabilised, so we’ll be off now.’

  Greer looked up at the paramedic and nodded. ‘I should come, but I can’t. I’m sorry.’

  He gave her an odd look and said only, ‘Righto. Probably have to shift him to the city pretty soon. Not looking too hot.’

  Greer phoned Charlie as soon as it was a decent hour. She was shuddering with fatigue, but she had slept for a few hours, and so had little Otik, his belly full. And here was his grandmother, neither mad nor dead, come just in time to care for her grandson, fretting over the poor starved scrap. The hospital must have provided formula and bottles, but still the baby had lost weight. Now the old Judy muttered over the tins and bottles, encouraging Greer to put the child to the breast again. It was difficult to understand what had happened the previous night, but it seemed Otto’s mother had been convinced that he was suffering from nothing more than indigestion until he collapsed; then she had called for help. How she had come to be here, Greer could not discover. She spoke very little English, and although she talked volubly in her own language, Greer could understand not a word of it, apart from names.

  She heard the dogs first, scrabbling at the back door and yipping to be let in. ‘Is it okay?’ Charlie called. ‘Can they come in? Can I?’

  Spinner bounded up to her, and Molly wagged herself in circles, but they quietened when they smelt the baby, stretching their noses to take him in, this new creature. Greer thought gentleness, then reverence. How much did they understand? She looked up at Charlie with a tired smile, and he smiled back, embarrassed to see her breastfeeding, but pleased that she was back.

  ‘The dogs turned up at my place. They were pretty hungry.’ He would say no more. ‘And I guess you know you’re one piglet down.’

  Greer nodded. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘Can you drive us back to hospital, please, when he finishes feeding?’

  She saw Otto for the last time in a small bare room in a city hospital. His mother stood beside her, weeping quietly, but Greer was dry-eyed. It was hard to recall the small energetic man who had so beguiled her. There was a long gash down his sternum that had been stapled together like a crude drawing of a wound. The bloated belly, once tight as a drum, was flaccid and yellow-grey. Naples yellow, she thought absently, but couldn’t name the grey. She reached out and touched him very lightly on the shoulder. It felt like the trunk of a gum: cool, unyielding, wooden.

  Greer recalled his painting of the gutted pig’s carcass, and imagined an empty cavity beneath this zipper of flesh and steel. He had crammed himself with so much, she thought, that it had clogged and curdled in the vessels of his heart. Still light-headed and disoriented, Greer pictured the surgeon levering open the cage of ribs to find a cart and a horse, a girl and a sheep. Or perhaps just the rem
ains of one small black-and-white piglet, too young to leave its mother.

  AFTERWORD

  The story of Otesánek is simple enough: a childless couple long for a baby; the husband finds a root or stump that looks like a child and shapes it roughly with his axe, then presents it to his wife. She coddles it, and it transforms into a baby with an insatiable appetite. It eats all the food in the house, then turns on its parents, gobbling them up, then their neighbours, the livestock and crops. This monster of greed eventually tries to eat an old grandmother, but she hacks him open and out pours all that he has swallowed, unchanged. The couple swear that they will never again long for a child, and order is restored.

  I first read ‘Otesánek’ in manuscript, submitted to me, disturbingly, by a new father, but it was not until I saw the Svankmajer film of the same name that I understood that ‘Otesánek’was not an original work, but a traditional Czech fairytale. Perhaps I would not have found it so unappetising had babies not been so much a part of my own life then.

  For Svankmajer, it was a cautionary tale about humans assuming godlike powers of creation, similar to Adam and Eve’s impertinence, and perhaps the arrogance that led to the Tower of Babel. These ‘religious’ interpretations didn’t interest me, nor did they seem particularly illuminating. Not all men who breathe life into their creations offend the gods: Cadmus created soldiers from a dragon’s teeth; Pygmalion sculpted his beloved Galatea from stone; Hephaestus created his automata and handmaidens; the giant Hrungnir built his helper, Mökkurkálfi (Mist Calf), from clay and gave him the heart of a mare; and Rabbi Loew of Prague pressed his golem from clay, predating Karel Capek’s robot (the word comes from the Czech, robota, meaning to work or slave). Closest to Otesánek and expressing the same yearning for a child, is the story of Geppetto’s Pinocchio, and there is lastly Frankenstein and his pitiable monster. Some of these ‘fathers’ and their ‘sons’ come unstuck, but the gods don’t punish all of them.

  There are similar tales of monstrous selfishness that lack any element of hubris or human transgression, such as ‘Tiddalik the Frog’. Tiddalik drinks up all the water in the land and must be tickled into returning it to the rivers and waterholes so that all animals can drink and survive. This creature puts itself before others and its selfishness threatens the survival of everyone. For me, much of the power of Otesánek came from his relentless greed and complete disregard for those around him, not from his origin as a rough stump artfully shaped by a man.

  To be honest, I loathed the story, but my reaction was immoderate. It’s always worth investigating such visceral responses: they can tell you much about what you’ve locked away from the light. Like the couple in the story, I had longed for a child, and been lacerated by envy at the sight of women with babies and children. I well understood why this sad couple had shaped a clumsy infant for themselves.

  When I first read the story, I was breastfeeding. I’d already noticed the curious hostility or discomfort in some people when confronted by the unfettered desires of a hungry baby, and the deep pleasure it takes so unselfconsciously. Most adults have learned to mask their greed and pleasure; perhaps the sight of it in an infant is unsettling. When I came to write this story, I wondered if this was enough to explain the amplification of a baby’s natural hunger in this story? So much is tied up in hunger and its satisfaction: nurture, love and generosity run as deep as selfishness and greed.

  My next thought was that Otesánek might be a famine tale. If times were hard enough, a new baby really might threaten the life of its starving parents or even the survival of the tribe or community. Perhaps desperation turns babies into monsters in their parents’ eyes. Was hunger the key? What lost meanings did this repellent little story carry?

  In the original tale, the father shapes Otesánek from inert matter. This act goes against nature in another way, because the mysterious ability to bring forth life belongs to the woman, not the man. She creates new life from her flesh, from the food that she eats, from the water she drinks. This is the true miracle of transubstantiation, universal and banal, but miraculous nonetheless. Otesánek himself ‘gives birth’, although by brutal caesarean section. Life springs from his belly after he is cut open by the grandmother–midwife, and he manages to usurp the powerful magic of women for himself, although it costs him his life.

  I began to wonder hazily about eating, and the transformation of food, about metamorphosis. I thought about the broader meanings of consumption and production. To consume means not only to eat or drink, but to buy, to use something up, to destroy. But consuming neces- sarily produces something, even if it is only manure and heat, and production is close to creation, so do the farmer and the artist share some common ground? I was fumbling with images and ideas and getting nowhere.

  I looped back to transubstantiation (the changing of one substance into another), but in a broader sense than the theological or even the biological. I wondered about change, about taking in or consuming experience, sights, sounds, objects. I thought about the mysterious metamorphosis that occurs in the production of art from these same raw materials. The monstrous baby absorbs everything that surrounds him, as any artist must, but he fails to transform it. In the original story, all that he eats re-emerges unchanged. The only act of transformation is from stump to baby, the father’s act. So he is the only artist in that tale.

  I considered the life of artists, their place as out- siders, the overwhelming selfishness of some of them, justifiable in those who produce great art, or even good art (how many of us would save the Leonardo from the flood rather than the baby?). But who pays the piper, the poet, the painter, when they can’t earn their bread? How does one live the life of art without becoming a monster of selfishness?

  Otesánek never doubts that he is entitled to all he takes. He is made monstrous by his appetite, but also by his selfishness, a thing apart from his community, unable to postpone his gratification for an instant, even when it leads inexorably to his own destruction. He stands for competition rather than cooperation, the individual rather than the collective. The natural greed and hunger of babies, their need for nurturing, becomes grotesque in a being like Otesánek, and distasteful in an adult. Nobody would argue that Otesánek’s short brutish life was good, and yet he snatched everything he desired and nobody could stop him. All that went into the mix, too, because I am curious about what it is to live a good life.

  ‘Glutted’ was originally called ‘The Life of Art’. I wrote it to try to understand why Otesánek preoccupied and repelled me, and to elaborate on some of the themes that had occurred to me as I puzzled over this fairytale of greed and self-indulgence, which could as easily be a parable for this era of rampant consumption.

  INTRODUCTION

  Children, sooner or later, realise that adults keep secrets. Those who seek answers listen at doors, spy, probe, stickybeak, hunt out forbidden books and ask endless questions:

  Where do babies come from?

  The stork brings them.

  What are you making?

  A wing-wong for a goose’s bridle.

  Why won’t you tell me?

  Because Y’s a crooked letter and you can’t make it straight.

  Curious children look for clues anywhere and everywhere, and hone their instincts for the cryptic and the mysterious. They want to know.

  I was a curious child, preoccupied with notions of secret knowledge, and I poked around until I found it. On a high shelf I came upon the St John’s Ambulance Association’s First Aid to the Injured, with a whole section on childbirth which I read with appalled delight . . . several times. The faded blue cloth-covered volume of Grimms’ fairytales was not forbidden, and yet the stories seemed full of secrets, hidden meanings and immutable laws. I could not understand their harsh wisdom, or their strange power, which I still find difficult to explain. Despite their apparent simp- licity, they felt dark and deep. I recognised but could not name a quality that was lacking in other stories, and I listened to them with dread and fasci
nation.

  I wanted to understand life, but nobody would answer my questions, and school was clearly no place to begin. By university, I knew I’d taken a wrong turn. The big narratives of history – politics, wars, the Church, the state – did not interest me as much as the traces left by ordinary people. When I should have been translating the Battle of Maldon or the Venerable Bede in Anglo-Saxon, I would flip through the riddles and charms. There were charms against a wen or boil, against swarming bees, delayed childbirth, even something called water-elf disease. These, like the fairytales of my childhood, seemed to be full of ancient knowledge, unscientific but enthralling. I especially liked the charms that required herbs or the plants we call weeds. The names were evocative – venom loather and hare speckle, dragonwort, ironhard and mare gall – and seemed to retain some of the lost herbal lore of the women who must once have used them. One charm, the Holy Salve, required almost sixty different plants – plus some black snail’s dust – which you mixed with butter from a cow of a single colour, ‘red or white and without deformity’.

  Another charm, ‘Against a Stabbing Pain’, required you to boil butter with feverfew, red nettle and waybroad, which is plantain, the long ‘soldiers’ we used as children in swishing fights, trying to decapitate our opponent’s ‘head’. The charm diagnoses the cause of the pain as a wound from the nasty little iron knives or spears of hags, smiths, mighty women, gods or elves. In Germany, these sudden pains are still called hexenschuss (witch shot), a word linked to hex, witchcraft and hags, but more on them later. The charm’s chorus – ‘Out, little spear, if it be in here!’ – along with the herbal butter, will drive out the demons and cure the pain.

  Fairytales spring from the same soil as these charms: girls like Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty also receive magical wounds, not from knives, but from spindles or needles, and are transformed. Stay with me; sometimes hidden insights can be uncovered by pursuing instincts and hunches, by musing on the elements of these old tales.