Zel

by Donna Jo Napoli

  I consider the dagger swinging in his pouch. “I’ll never see her again.” I want to lean against the wall. I want to become the wall.

  Panic plays in his eyes. His voice comes tremulous. “Where is she?”

  I look at this ridiculous man, with the peg and hammer tucked in his belt. He thought he could steal her away so easily. He knows nothing, understands nothing. He will live his simple life and die his simple death. And he’ll never know what ruin he brought to Mother and Zel in his clumsy stumbling into our lives. “You’ll never see her again, either.”

  Konrad thrusts his neck forward, though he remains in a crouch. His eyes go to Zel’s dress on the floor. He scans the mattress, the walls. Finally, he looks at me once more. And now I see his face well. His eyes. His mouth. He holds more misery than I realized a man could feel. And instantly I know what I never wanted to know, what I hate knowing: He is my soulmate—he loves my Zel. No! What have I done? The world is wrong.

  Konrad’s head falls back as the scream empties his lungs. When there is no more left, he draws the dagger. “I will find her. I cannot bear the pain of living without Rapunzel.”

  “Nor can I,” I whisper, each word costing more energy than I can afford, “but such is our fate. All is inevitable.”

  Konrad’s eyes flame. He begins his lunge.

  My fingers open as my hands rise in a move of self-protection. The braids fly. In that split second, from nowhere comes the image of Pigeon Pigeon being smacked from the window. From nowhere comes her squawk. And I know what will happen. I would grab the braids back, but they are already gone.

  The braids whip Konrad from the window. Gone like the bird. Gone like Rapunzel.

  No! I close my eyes and squeeze my hands together and use the final reserve of my strength.

  Konrad is caught and pierced by the brambles that have sprung up around the base of the tower.

  He lives.

  I die.

  Chapter 30Zel

  alnuts. And pines. They carry her. And oaks, aspens and birches, chestnuts, larches, and now cedars and cypresses. Hour after hour, tree to tree, around lakes, across rivers, over mountains. She thinks nothing. She sees a sharp peak like a giant cat’s tooth. She is in the branchy hands of a colossal sycamore, the skeleton hands of stubby olive trees. The cows change from brown with white faces to all white. Day after day, tree to tree. No tree hurts her, but no tree releases her.

  And now she thinks. She knows. This is a careful conspiracy of leaves and branches. Night and day. And then darkness.

  GATHERING

  Chapter 31All

  young woman stands on earth of many colors. People come from far away to see the range of those colors, from deepest ochre to palest cream. The woman paints on paper, inspired by the colors of the earth.

  She doesn’t always paint. She often uses that earth to fashion pots and dishes, vases and cups. Everyone who has the money buys her pottery, and those who can’t afford to buy receive gifts.

  She lives in a small home attached to other homes on both sides and below. She has become accustomed to the stone walls of this home, cold like the stone of the tower, so unlike the warm wood of her alm home. She no longer shrinks away when she touches those stones.

  She loves the closeness of town. She talks to everyone who passes beneath her window, and today she talks to the travelers on the road as she paints the meeting of the sky with this land.

  This land differs from her homeland—from the Alps of her past—in ways that turn her heart. She stops for a moment and lets her eyes follow the road till it twists out of sight through hills that tumble down to the sea. This is salt sea, whitish water, not sweet lake water. But, though she loves the sight of the sea, especially when it’s turbulent, she has gone there only twice. She doesn’t stray often from town. Fear can still seize her.

  Three years ago the trees handed her over to a vine that stretched and stretched and deposited her in mounds of sand. The vine retreated. She slept.

  When she woke, she saw only the glare of sun on sand. The air seemed calm. She refused to be fooled. Would they reach out for her again? Was this a way station or a final resting spot? She would not wait to find out.

  She stood and called. Her voice fell dull on an empty world. Though she was bruised in all parts, hungry and dry and naked, she walked. With every step, gratitude filled her heart. Sand beneath her feet was a thousand times better than the stone of the tower. Freedom, even lost and alone, was superb.

  When she closed her eyes, loss and fear and, finally, rage burned red inside her head. So she worked to keep her eyes open. She blinked only when they were so dry she screamed from pain.

  Night followed day followed night, and she lost track of time. But her feet wouldn’t stop. There were no curved walls to limit her path. She could go as far as she dared.

  And then her energy was spent.

  She opened her eyes finally to water trickling across her cheeks. People stared at her, speaking in a nonsense tongue. The crickets screamed in midday, “Desert, desert, desert.” She looked around and saw the town hugging the hill. The insects were crazy—for this was no desert. She had walked to a far better land. She gaped at pink and red and white oleanders, blue hydrangeas, yellow mimosa, violet bougainvillea. She shook her head with wonder at the palm trees and yucca, things whose names she had yet to learn.

  The wind, a dandelion seed on a summer day, whispered, “Banishment.” That tiny wind was as foolish as the crickets. Banishment to these colors could have been a blessing in disguise for an artist, if the taste of water at last hadn’t brought the longing. She trembled at how quickly the longing came and settled within, at how quickly her mind absorbed what had happened and didn’t close up at the horror but took it all in and in and in, then stayed open to welcome the longing for him.

  She sat on the dirt, wordless. They lifted her, half-starved, dry as a bone. They wrapped her blistered body, her burned feet, in cloth soaked with oil. They fed her juices of miracle fruits. And she thought to go in search of him immediately. But when she got up from bed, she retched. When she ate, she retched. A sudden movement, a particular smell, could bring the heaves. She realized she couldn’t travel until she recovered.

  The women accepted her like the earth opening itself to rain. They laughed and caressed her. Yet the young woman kept retching even after the blisters had healed. The women nodded knowingly. They fed her bread. They taught her a new tongue, brought her to church. And by the time the retching ended, she saw her own gently rounding belly and realized she would have to delay her searchings, for other matters pressed.

  The woman listened to those around her. Slowly her gratitude turned into friendship. She makes all their care fruitful in every way she can. She helps in the garden, painting the fences and trellises so the blue and pink clematis vines can twine in abandon. She helps in the house, carving pot plugs from the bark of the cork oaks that color the air with their silver green leaves. She helps in the barns, her soothing ways yielding more milk from one sitting than the other maids get in three.

  The people have grown to love her. They respect her devotion and slide over easily to make room for her in the church pews. The family that took her in lives downstairs from her now, for when the twins were born, she needed a place of her own.

  When they first told her she should move to the rooms upstairs, fear flickered in her chest. She insisted they build two more sets of stairs, one in the rear straight out to the garden and one in the front straight out to the street. And even now every day she races up and down all three staircases several times. She comes and goes as she pleases.

  She grows a tangy lettuce with round leaves and gives it to anyone who wants it. People laugh teasingly at this strange, small gift. Her answer is another handful of leaves. She prays that no one anywhere will do the rash for want of rapunzel.

  And there are other things she does that they call peculiar. She holds tears in her eyes, even when she smiles, even when she laughs, bu
t she never sheds them. She wears no ring, but she talks of her husband, for whom she will go searching as soon as the twins are old enough to travel. And she does not touch live trees, though lately she has consented to sit with others under a fig.

  She has many ordinary ways, though. She eats at normal hours, sleeps at normal hours. She never speaks out of place. She bows her head when she should. But sometimes, still, she finds herself counting feathers in the milliner’s, cheese wheels in the milk shop, baguettes at the baker’s. And she realizes she lost herself for a moment. That’s when she reminds herself that life is no longer slippery. The urges she felt to self-destruct ended when the torture ended. The madness stayed in that tower. She is here.

  Is she safe?

  She doesn’t believe in safety. She believes in life, in all its beauty and fragility. She has her daughters. She has her art. She feels rich. Her soul mends.

  The woodpecker that pecks now is in a parasol pine. The air thickens with the smell of rosemary shrubs. Sunflowers peek over a wall at the edge of town. This land could not be more alien. Even Mother would feel assaulted by the profusion of plants. But this is home to Eve and Hélène, the two-year-old twins who now collect stones tossed here by the mistral wind that blew all day yesterday, that cried like ghosts.

  “Time to go home, girls.”

  Eve and Hélène, both naked and brown, have nowhere to hold the stones so carefully selected. The woman offers her skirt, and they load it up, all three counting together. Ten stones, the size of fists. The woman knows somehow that this number is right for the stones, though she cannot figure out where this feeling comes from.

  At home the girls sit out back and poke fingers in paint. They decorate the stones with dots, lines, handprints. The woman is overcome with the ferocity of her love for these children. She pictures two women standing in a doorway bargaining—the first hands over lettuce; the second hands over a child. She knows this is not the real picture. She will never know the real picture. But in some way, this has to be the right picture. She has lived need. And one in need can do the dreadful, the unthinkable—trade lettuce for a child, lock a child in a tower.

  These precious children push the stones together, nestle one against the other, like eggs in a nest. Ten. The woman looks and remembers finally. Each year the goose added one more. It was five the last time the woman saw. It would be ten now. The woman scans the sky for a stray goose. Then she shivers and puts the girls to bed.

  The woman stands at the window and contemplates what sleep might bring. Her dreams hold on to almost thirteen years, good years. Mother was a good mother. The alm was a good place to stretch and grow. Her nightmares hold on to two years of granite that won’t respond to her touch, wildlife that doesn’t come to her call, a waste bucket and a mattress and a stack of papers and paints and brushes and a sharp stone. And, finally, trees, branches, leaves, for hours and days. Mother was a witch.

  The woman has read and reread the faces of the people of her town. They are good faces, kind faces. She looks into these faces and she believes there isn’t a one of them who wouldn’t sell his soul for the right price. She has to believe this. She loved Mother. When she murmurs tender words in her daughters’ ears, when she caresses them and combs their hair—hair she never plaits, will never plait—when she bakes them the dark breads of her childhood, she touches them with the flesh of human charity. Her heart opens. Even to the woman who traded away her child, the unknown woman, whom this young woman works to keep herself from searching for in the face of every older woman who passes.

  This young woman owes her life to the unknown woman. She owes her soul to the witch woman.

  But lately she dreams of none of that, but of a young man, tender and true, with a horse that likes to eat mattresses. He talks to her and listens to her. He kisses her and gathers her kisses. He knows her heart and she knows his. This night Zel goes to bed and dreams of Konrad.

  * * *

  I watch the world. I have no powers anymore. I see as though through a goose eye.

  * * *

  A man on horseback clops southward. He does not come to see the range of colors in the dirt. He is blind. His eyes were scratched beyond sight by a fall into brambles that he knew weren’t there as his feet left the tower. He knows who put the brambles there in that crucial instant. The woman called Mother saved his life. So that he could find his love? Or so that he would have to live out his days in the misery of Zel’s absence? These questions come to him often, though he has told himself the answer does not matter to him, only to her.

  A pigeon rides on his shoulder. The bird sat warbling by the man when he first came to consciousness in the brambles. His hands told him it had a broken wing. It has stayed with the man ever since.

  Meta brought the man home. His mother washed the caked blood from his cheeks and eyes. The physicians put poultices and raw eggs and slabs of cold, bloody beef on his wounds. They fought against the darkness in his head; his mother and father prayed against the darkness in his head, but the man accepted it, brushed it aside, even. It was hardly relevant in comparison with what mattered.

  They said he needed time to heal. But he crept out and mounted Meta. The menservants brought him back. They took away his clothes so he wouldn’t go out again. But he went anyway, naked as a babe. The servants brought him back. They tied him to the bed.

  And with time, he healed. But his eyes stayed sightless.

  His parents urged him to go forward with his life—forward with his wedding plans. After all, the mystery of the tower begged to be undone, and, not inconsequentially, the young countess was exceedingly wealthy. They pressed hard.

  The man would not yield. He called upon his classics tutor to write a letter on his behalf to the young countess. He laid out what had transpired, detail by detail, each one more strange, more unbelievable, more horrific than the last.

  The man did nothing to mitigate those details, knowing full well the impression they gave.

  The maiden’s father abruptly cut off the betrothal.

  The man’s parents stood aghast, and silenced, at last.

  The man returned to his thoughts, his memories, his true plight.

  One day the man thought the bird said, “Who?” The air had cooled by now, and the man knew it was evening. He realized that the moon must by then have gone to nothing and started to grow all over again. The man listened hard. Indeed, the bird said again, “Who?” That’s when he first knew for sure the woman was alive.

  As soon as his mother would allow him to leave his bed, the man was up and about. He loaded Meta with provisions. Then he left, the pigeon on his shoulder.

  They searched the west side of the lake first, but only to confirm what the man suspected: The tower was silent. Deserted. Searching the western slopes revealed no one. So they took to wandering the east side. Eventually horse, man, and bird stumbled their way to the alm with the little wooden footbridge and the high-sided goose nest. It didn’t amaze him that in just a few months he could find in his blindness what he had failed to find in two years of sighted searching, for now he had the bird’s coos to lead him.

  The man entered the cottage and fingered his way around the two rooms, across the two beds, the two chairs at the kitchen table, the two bowls and spoons and plates and cups. The bird plucked at the strings of the fiddle. Meta snuffled at the empty chicken yard. The man slept in the bed and dreamed of a child running on the alm, free and happy, then spirited off to a tower where she could run only in circles. He woke alone and held small, girl, leather shoes in his hands and let his cheek rest on the kitchen table as the sun came in the window. One day he picked up the bedroll to carry it outside, so he could sleep beneath the stars he couldn’t see, when he heard something fall soft to the floor. It was a folded paper. Inside were seeds. The man put the seeds in his pocket.

  It took till the first snowfall for the man to realize that his love was gone from this home for good. He returned to the castle and passed the first winter the
re, planning.

  In the spring, man, bird, and horse went forth again. They were accompanied by five soldiers. They questioned every worker in the vineyards, every lumberjack, every merchant, every mother. They knelt before little children and spoke in voices they hoped were little. The man gave the children the seeds he’d found under the bedroll. He made them promise to plant them.

  As summer came, they traveled beyond the mountains northward, all the way to a deep sea. The man insisted on camping along the cold shore, on swimming in the cold sea. He dreamed of ice water in thick veins. Of braids impossibly long and brambles springing up from nothing. He cried out in his sleep. At the first snowfall, they rode swiftly south, back to the castle. And the second winter passed.

  Spring brought a new plan. The man went forth again accompanied by horse and bird, but now with a small cadre of holy men. They set to buzzing a network of ministers and priests alike across the lands looking for a girl damaged by a witch. The man was tireless. He listened no matter what the language; he sought no matter how far the church; he met maiden after maiden, one more tortured than the last. But none was the maiden who had lived in the tower for two long years. None was his wife.

  At last they found themselves in a busy city in a southern river valley. The holy men wanted to return home, where they could serve. But the man wouldn’t leave. He dreamed of a little girl coming to market, to a town that seemed to her country eyes as bustling as this big city. Of that girl buying rapunzel and taking it home to feast upon. Of that girl, with so much joy, later joyless and desperate, rocking her head on a stone floor till her jaw almost cracked.

  Late, late in December, much later than snow came to the Alps, they headed home. But as they traveled north, they found the roads iced over. They took dangerous risks. The man insisted. When they arrived home at last, the holy men told all. The people looked at each other and rubbed one foot against the other. When the third spring came, no one, no one, was willing to go forth with the man, who had proved himself reckless.