Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

  The Mirror

  As the Prince climbs the tower, the sorceress returns through the forest to her cottage at the edge of the darkening village. The cottage is surrounded by a high wall; the sorceress has no use for neighbors. Inside, she walks past the table and the cupboard and goes at once to her dressing table, where she picks up an oval mirror with an ivory handle. It is always like that: after the tower, the mirror. In the glass she sees her reflection staring at her with a familiar look of revulsion. She glares back with fascinated loathing, with a kind of eager bitterness. She detests the thick eyebrows, the small eyes set too close together, the thrusting ridge of the nose, as if drawn by a village caricaturist sketching a witch. Her lips are a knife-slash, her chin juts out like a knuckle. From a wart in her chin-cleft, three hairs stick out like tubers sprouting from an old potato. Her skin is yellow. Her black hair hangs in her face like bush-branches over a fence. Her herbs, her roots, her medicinal salves, even her spells, which can raise towers out of thin air—all useless. She thrusts the mirror aside. The cruelty is that she has always loved beautiful things. At once she thinks of Rapunzel. And her heart lifts: the golden hair, skin like the down of a swan, the graceful slope of the nose. Rapunzel is safe in the tower, asleep under her coverlet. She will visit her darling when night is done.

  Hair

  In the tower chamber, Rapunzel lies waiting for the Prince. Sometimes she waits by the window, but this evening she is lying on her bed, on the other side of the small room. Her braided hair stretches across the coverlet and over the wooden table to the hook in the ledge. She’s proud of her hair, which is much longer than she is, and comes pouring out of her like rain from the sky, though it takes up a lot of room and can be a nuisance as it drags around the floor picking up dust. Sometimes she wishes she could cut it all off with a sharp snip-snip and watch it lie there nice and dead without it slithering along after her all the time. At sunset, as soon as the sorceress let herself down, Rapunzel drew up the thick braid, waved good night from the window, and stood watching as the sorceress disappeared into the dark trees. Not long after, the Prince appeared in the small clearing at the base of the tower. Rapunzel tied her braid again around the hook in the ledge, then let down her hair hand over hand, as if she were lowering a bucket into a well. When the last handful was over the sill, she returned to the bed and lay down. Even though her braid is tied to a hook, she can feel the tug of the Prince as he climbs. He’s like a boy, her Prince, teasing her by pulling her hair. Through the window she sees the darkening sky. She knows that he loves the difficult climb, but she herself does not love it; she worries every second about the return of the sorceress, she’s afraid that even the slightest movement on her part will cause him to lose his grip and plunge to his death, and she dislikes the perpetual tugging at her scalp. She wishes they could find another way. But the tower has no door, there is no stairway, even the sorceress can’t reach the top without climbing the rope of hair. Of course, there’s the half-finished silk ladder hidden under the mattress, but the thought of it fills her with anxiety. Rapunzel turns her mind to more pleasant things: the moment the Prince will appear in the window, the leap of her heart, his hand on her face. She can hear the squeak of her hair on the hook, the sound of his foot, far down, scraping against stone.

  Beautiful Women

  As the Prince climbs toward the top of the tower, he thinks suddenly of the palace, which lies on the other side of the forest. Rapunzel is so unlike the ladies of the court that he sometimes finds it difficult to account for what draws him to her, night after night. The ladies of the court are so beautiful that they are dangerous to behold. Sometimes a courtier, catching a stray glance, is stricken as by a bite in the throat; such a man sickens with love as with a wasting disease. The Prince, who has never been sick in his life, admires the ladies of the court and is by no means indifferent to their amorous glances. He has had many opportunities for clandestine adventure and, for so young a man, is already an experienced lover. But although there are many varieties of physical loveliness at court, he’s aware of a note of sameness, for the ladies who surround him are remarkable above all for something high and severe in their beauty: the tightness of their pulled-back hair reveals the fine lines of their cheeks and foreheads, the narrowness of their nostrils, the exquisite modeling of their lips. Sometimes a courtier, bored by such abundance of perfection, seeks out the opposite: a coarse-featured peasant girl, a plump merchant’s wife with a crooked tooth. The Prince, too, has had adventures in the country villages and farms, though he looks not for coarseness but for the unexpected burst of beauty in a gesture or a look. Always, in his love adventures, he has felt pleasure and something else: a remoteness, a lack of conviction, as though he were sitting nearby, observing the antics of the young Prince performing a seduction. It is never that way with Rapunzel. It’s as though she has slipped inside him and moves when he moves. What he sees, when he looks at her, is harder to say. The court ladies would find her wanting in beauty. There is nothing proud and haughty in her face, nothing lofty in the cut of her bones. Sometimes, turning to look at her as she lies beside him, he is startled by something childish and unformed in her features; it’s as if he has never seen her before, doesn’t know what she looks like. At other times, when the Prince is alone and tries to summon her to mind, he can’t see her with any certainty; he sees only what she is not. What he remembers, always, is the first sight of her hair, falling from the tower like fire. She seems to exist only in the realm of dream. Is that why he returns to her, night after night? To assure himself that he isn’t dreaming? And suppose she finds the courage to leave the dream-tower, as he wants her to do. Will she dissolve in the hard light of the sun? The Prince’s thoughts irritate him like gnats; he shakes them away. Reaching up, he grips the hair, lifts a foot and slaps it higher on the wall. He looks up at the evening sky. Somewhere up there, an invisible woman is waiting.

  Waiting

  The sorceress, too, is waiting. She is waiting for the long night to begin, so that it can come to an end. In the first light of dawn, she will return to her Rapunzel. She can, at any moment, leave her cottage and make her way through the forest to the tower, but she resists what she recognizes to be no longer a real temptation. After all, she spends the entire day with Rapunzel; the night is for herself. It is better that way. She doesn’t want Rapunzel to tire of her—lately there have been troubling signs—and besides, there are things that need to be done at home. Because she hates the sharp light of the sun, which draws attention to her witch’s face, her demon’s hair, she works in the dark. As soon as the moon is up, she will step outside and tend her vegetable garden, cut dead twigs from her pear and plum trees, water her shrubs and flowers. Then she will carry her clothes in a basket to the stream that runs along the edge of the village. She will wash her clothes under the moon and carry them home to hang on a line to dry. She will bake bread in the oven for Rapunzel, she will fetch water from the well. Only then will she prepare for bed. In the dark she’ll remove her long black dress and slip on her nightdress, which no one has ever seen. She will lie down in her bitter bed and think of Rapunzel, white and gold in her tower. Standing at her dressing table, the sorceress glances again at the mirror. She reaches for it, snatches away her hand. She begins to pace up and down with her hands behind her back, the top of her body leaning forward, as if she is walking uphill.

  Helpless

  As she waits for the Prince to reach the window, Rapunzel feels the sensation she always feels when he’s partway up the tower: she is trapped, she can’t move, she wants to cry out in anguish. She understands that her feeling of helplessness is provoked by the long climb, by her refusal to stir for fear that she’ll cause the Prince to lose his grip, by the continual tugging at her scalp. What’s taking so long? She reminds herself that only during the climb itself does she feel this way. The Prince’s descent takes place swiftly, nothing could be easier, no sooner has he dropped below the sill than he’s standing at the foot of
the tower far below, looking up. The sorceress herself climbs the tower as if she’s walking across a room, even though she carries a sack on her back filled with vegetables and bread. Why oh why does the Prince take so long? He must enjoy making her miserable. Or is it possible that he isn’t taking as long as she imagines, that he’s actually rushing up to her like a great wind, and that only the eagerness of her desire makes his progress seem so slow? Through the open window Rapunzel can see the top of the hook, the little jumps of yanked hair. Will he never arrive?

  Disappointment

  The window is just above his head, with another pull his face will rise over the sill, but as the Prince grips the window ledge he feels the familiar burst of disappointment. He is disappointed because the climb is about to end, the victory is within reach, already he longs for a new difficulty, a stronger danger—a beast in the forest, an assassin in the chamber. He would like to battle a dragon at the mouth of a cave night after night, as he fights his way to Rapunzel. He is happy of course at the thought that he’ll soon be reunited with his beloved, whom he has imagined exhaustively during the long hours of the tedious day, but he knows that, in the instant of seeing her, he will be startled by the many small ways in which she fails to resemble his memory of her, before the living Rapunzel replaces the imaginary one. As he pulls himself up to the window ledge, he wishes that he were at the bottom of the tower, climbing fiercely toward his beloved.

  Suspicion

  As the Prince rises above the window ledge, the sorceress pauses in the act of pacing in the dark cottage. Rapunzel has seemed changed lately—or is she only imagining things? Sometimes, when the sorceress looks up from the table in the tower to watch Rapunzel sitting across from her, bent over her needlework, she sees the girl staring off with parted lips. If she asks her what she’s thinking, Rapunzel laughs gaily and replies that she isn’t thinking anything at all. Sometimes the girl sighs, in the manner of someone releasing an inward pressure. The sorceress, whose unhappiness has sharpened her alertness to signs of discontent, is alarmed by these evidences of a secret life. She speaks gently to Rapunzel, asks her if she is feeling tired, reaches into the pocket of her dress and draws forth a piece of marzipan. The sorceress is well aware that she has placed Rapunzel at the top of an inaccessible tower in the middle of a dark forest, but she also knows that her sole desire is to shield the beautiful girl from the world’s harm. If Rapunzel should become dissatisfied, if she should ever grow restless and unhappy, she would begin to imagine a different life. She would ask questions, open herself up to impossible desires, dream of walking on the ground below. The tower would begin to seem a prison. It is not a prison. It is a refuge, a place of peace. The world, as the sorceress knows deep in her blood, is full of pain. She vows to be more attentive to her daughter, to satisfy Rapunzel’s slightest desire, to watch for the faintest signs of unrest.

  At Last!

  Rapunzel watches as the Prince swings gracefully into the chamber, stares at her as if spellbound, and at once turns to unfasten her hair from the hook in the ledge. Everything about the Prince moves her heart, but she is always disappointed by the way he looks at her at the moment when he arrives. He seems bewildered in some way, as if he’s surprised to find her there, at the top of the tower, or as if he can’t quite figure out who exactly she is, this stranger whose hair he has just been climbing. With his back to her he begins pulling up her hair from below, setting the coils of her braid on the table, pulling faster and faster as the slippery heap of hair slides from the table and drops to the floor, where it quivers and shakes like a long animal. When the Prince turns toward her with his hands still holding her braid, as if he has come to her bearing a gift of her own hair, he no longer wears a look of bafflement but one of tender recognition, and as she rises to meet him she feels her release flowing through her like desire.

  Shameless

  The Prince lies back languorously on the rumpled bed, watching Rapunzel move about the chamber in her nightdress of unbound shimmering hair, and reflects again on her absence of shame. He knows many court ladies who are without shame in matters of love, but their shamelessness is aggressive and defiant: the revelation of nakedness is, for them, an invitation to enjoy the forbidden. One lady insists that he stand aside and watch as she undresses herself slowly, pausing for him to admire each part as she caresses herself with her hands; at the very end she holds before her a transparent silk scarf, which she then lets fall to the ground. In their desire to outrage modesty, to cast off the constraints of decorum, the Prince sees an allegiance to the very forces they wish to overcome. Sometimes a peasant girl in a haystack reveals a sensual frankness for which the Prince is grateful, but that same girl will carry herself primly to church on a Sunday. Rapunzel is without shame and without an overcoming of shame. She walks in her nakedness as if nakedness were a form of clothing. The innocence of her wantonness disarms the Prince. There is nothing she won’t do, nothing she feels she should resist. Sometimes the Prince wishes that she would tease him with a sly look, that she would cover her breasts with an outspread fan of peacock feathers, that she would lie on her stomach and look at him mischievously over her shoulder, as if to say: Do you dare? The Prince is a fearless lover, but there are times when he feels shy before her. At such moments he longs for her to resist him violently, so that he might force her into submission. Instead he bends down, far down, and kisses, very slowly, each of her toes.

  Into the Forest

  Rapunzel watches from the window as the Prince descends quickly, hand over hand, and leaps to the ground. He looks up, calls her name. So far down, he seems no Prince, but a small creature of the forest, a fox or a weasel. He turns, vanishes into the trees. The dark sky is breaking up with dawn. A sudden desire comes: to leap from the tower, to fall down, down; her hair lifting above her like a column of smoke; the wind rushing up at her; the world’s weight gone; lovely falling; blissful dying.

  Brushing

  In the brightening chamber, the sorceress sits at the table by the window, brushing Rapunzel’s unbraided hair. Rapunzel sits across from her, sipping an herbal brew. Her needlework lies to one side; she looks a little tired. The sorceress fears she isn’t sleeping well, or perhaps is coming down with something; the herbal remedy should restore her. Because the hair is so long, the sorceress doesn’t begin at the top and brush down. Instead, she begins at the bottom, holding an armful of hair on her lap and brushing it free of tangles. The brush is of pearwood, with dark boar bristles; the sorceress received it from an old woman in the village as payment for curing an ache in the back. When she finishes with one lapful of hair she reaches down for another, gently pushing aside the brushed portion, which spills puffily over her legs to the floor. From a distance the hair is blond, but up close she can see many colors: wheat, fawn, red-gold, butter yellow, honey brown. The hair on her lap is a warm cat, asleep in the sun. When she is done brushing, the sorceress will plait the hair patiently into a single thick braid. The soft folds will gradually become heavy as rope, a sunshiny snake slithering along the floor. Again she looks at Rapunzel; she never tires of looking at Rapunzel. The girl’s head is turned toward the window but she is not gazing out. Her eyes are half closed; morning light strikes her neck and lower cheek; she is not blinking; she is gazing in. A penny for your thoughts! the sorceress wants to cry, but she continues brushing the hair in her lap. Suddenly she bends forward, buries her face in the hair, breathes it in, covers it with kisses. She looks up guiltily, but Rapunzel dreams away.

  The Ladder

  The Prince, riding home through the forest in slants of dawn-light, reproaches himself for his weakness. Once again he hasn’t asked about the ladder. Each night he brings Rapunzel a cord of silk, which she’s supposed to weave into the lengthening silk ladder concealed beneath her mattress. He might easily have presented her with a fully formed ladder, when the idea first came to him, but he wants her to engage fully in the act of escape. The Prince fears that she may not be ready to leave her shel
tered life for the public life of a Princess; lately, indeed, she has avoided all mention of the ladder. This ought to disturb him more than it does, but he himself is not without doubts. Instead of asking her about her progress, he hands her the silken cord in silence. She slips it under the mattress. They do not speak of it.

  Secrets

  As the sorceress continues to braid her hair, Rapunzel is relieved to be spared another of those piercing looks. Can the sorceress suspect something? Rapunzel understands that by concealing the existence of the Prince, she’s cruelly deceiving the sorceress, who is also her godmother. The thought pains her like a splinter burning in a finger. She’d love to tell her all about the Prince, since the sorceress would be sure to like him if only she knew him; often Rapunzel imagines the three of them living together in the sunny chamber. An instinct tells her to keep it to herself. She knows that the sorceress adores her, spoils her, sees to her every need, but it’s precisely the intensity of her devotion that warns Rapunzel not to speak. She is everything to the sorceress; but everything leaves room for nothing else. Sometimes, at a sudden sound, the sorceress will leap up and go to the window. Then her eyes, searching the forest, grow hard and cold; her body, bent forward, seems crooked and ancient. At such moments Rapunzel looks away and waits for the change to pass. She knows that the sorceress craves continual signs of strong affection, which for that matter Rapunzel has always felt for her; the nightly visits of the Prince can be taken only as acts of betrayal. It’s also true that the Prince, while not attacking the sorceress directly, disapproves of what he calls Rapunzel’s imprisonment, and wants her to escape with him from the tower to the court. There they will be married and live in happiness all the days of their lives. Rapunzel glances at the mattress, under which the latest cord of silk lies beneath the half-finished ladder, and then at the sorceress, who is bending over and pressing her face against the folds of Rapunzel’s hair.