The Plan
The Prince’s plan is composed of two parts, the escape and the destination. He has revealed both parts to Rapunzel up to a point, but only up to a point, since each part includes complex secondary calculations that he hasn’t yet found time to discuss with her in the detail they deserve. The escape will be difficult, without a doubt. The tower is forbiddingly high—to jump is out of the question. But the Prince has thought of two ways. The first is the ladder, which requires her full participation, demonstrated over the course of many weeks. They no longer discuss the ladder, which lies hidden under the mattress like an old love letter buried in a drawer. But there’s a second way, one that acknowledges the impulsive in human nature and invites Rapunzel to risk all at a moment’s notice. When he judges the mood to be right, the Prince will reveal this second method. They will spring into action. He’ll fasten her braid to the hook and lower himself to the bottom. Immediately Rapunzel will draw up her hair, unfasten it from the hook, and fasten it a second time, using the very end of the braid. In this manner she’ll be able to descend by means of her own hair. At the bottom, the Prince will cut the braid with a pair of gold scissors borrowed from his mother’s seamstress, and they will escape into the forest, where two horses will be waiting. They will ride off to—where, exactly? For the destination, like the escape, is no simple matter, and here, too, the Prince has not been entirely forthright with Rapunzel. He has told her that he wants to bring her to the court, and this is true enough. But he hasn’t confessed to her his fear that she might find it difficult to live as a Princess among courtiers and ladies, all of whom have a style and manner that might seem to her impossible to emulate. They themselves, and in particular the court ladies, will observe her closely and judge her according to their code. Rapunzel is not familiar with the fashions of the court. She lacks the court wit, the court polish, the court gift for concise and allusive speech. Even her name will draw amused attention. The Prince is not ashamed of Rapunzel, but he knows that the pressure of polite disapproval is likely to make him impatient with her shortcomings. Even if she should make an initial impression of freshness and innocence, such qualities might, in the long run, come to seem wearisome to the court. It might therefore be better to avoid the court altogether and flee with Rapunzel to a royal residence in the remote countryside. Such residences, it is true, are supplied with large contingents of servants, many of whom wield great power within the household and are accustomed to highborn masters with an instinct for command. Gentle Rapunzel, who has no experience of public life, will immediately be seen as weak. Wouldn’t it be better, in every way, to choose a humble cabin on a wooded mountainside, far from the haunts of man? There they can live alone, without a care in the world. They will eat wild berries plucked from the vine, drink water from clear streams, and wander hand in hand in the paradise of Nature. In his mind, the Prince hears the phrase “paradise of Nature,” which pleases him, but which also makes him uneasy. The Prince knows himself; he knows that he grows restless when he’s away from court for more than a few days, for he misses the repartee, the rich feasts, the continual arrival of messengers bearing reports of wars, the sense of being at the center of a vital world. Mightn’t it be better, all things considered, simply to move with Rapunzel from place to place, staying no more than a few weeks in a single dwelling? The thought of a wandering life does not please him. It’s as if he can never imagine a settled existence for himself and his beloved. It’s as if he himself is imprisoned in the tower, and can see nothing beyond the familiar chamber, which he carries in imagination from region to region—a restless and unhappy solitude.
Night Worries
In the cottage, in the middle of the night, the sorceress walks around and around the table with her hands behind her back, the top of her body leaning forward. Ah, she is sure of it: Rapunzel is concealing something. The girl flicked her eyes away more than once during the day, as if to avoid scrutiny. At other times she sat staring off with her eyes half closed, like someone fallen into a trance. The sorceress senses danger. Has someone discovered the tower? Has Rapunzel been seen in the window? She imagines the worst: a stranger scaling the tower, entering the chamber. Rage flames in her; she must calm herself. After all, the tower is well hidden, surrounded by massive trees in the middle of an immense forest. It can’t be seen at a distance, since the top does not reach above the highest branches. Even in the unlikely event that someone should discover it, there is simply no way for him to reach the top: the tower is too high, the walls are without purchase for foot or hand, and no ladder in the world is long enough to reach the window. Even if such a ladder should be fashioned in the workshop of a master craftsman, it could never be carried through the dense forest, with its irregular growth of vast, mossy trees. Even if a method should somehow be contrived to carry it through the trees, the ladder could not by any stretch of the imagination be set upright in the small space between the tower and the thick branches, which come almost to the tower walls. Even if, for the sake of argument, it should be granted that a way might be found to stand the ladder against the high tower, the sheer impossibility of drawing it up into the little chamber would immediately become apparent. Even if, by a suspension of the laws of Nature, the ladder should miraculously be drawn up into the chamber, it would leave highly visible traces of its presence in the tangle of thornbushes that grow around the tower’s base. No, the turned-away looks, the half-closed eyes, the drift of attention, must have some other cause. Has Rapunzel caught an illness? It might have been transmitted by one of the crows that sometimes land on the windowsill and sit gleaming there like wet tar in sunlight. She’s told the girl time and time again to stay away from that windowsill. But Rapunzel’s appetite remains unchanged; in fact, she has been growing plumper of late. There must be another explanation. Something is wrong, the sorceress can feel it like a change in the weather. As she continues pacing around and around the table, she thinks of secret causes, hidden reasons, dark possibilities. In the night that does not end, in the circle of floorboards that creak like animals in pain, she pledges herself to new intensities of vigilance.
Unreal
Because the Prince knows about the sorceress, but the sorceress does not know about the Prince, Rapunzel reproaches herself for behaving dishonestly toward the sorceress; but she knows that she has been dishonest toward the Prince as well. It isn’t simply that she’s stopped working on the silken ladder concealed beneath the mattress. It is far worse than that. The Prince has often spoken to her of his life outside the tower. He has described the court, the jeweled ladies, the circular stairways, the unicorn tapestries, the feasts at the high table, the bed with rich hangings, and she has listened as though he were reading to her from a book of wondrous tales. But when she tries to imagine herself stepping into the story, a nervousness comes over her, an anxious shudder. The images frighten her, as if they possess a power to do harm. The ladies, in particular, fill her with a vague dread. But there is something else. The court, the King, the handmaidens, the flagons, the hounds—she can’t really grasp them, can’t take hold of them with the hands of her mind. What she knows is the table, the window, the bed: only that. The Prince has burst into her world from some other realm, bringing with him a scent of far-off places; at dawn, when he vanishes, she wakes from the dream to the table, the window, the bed. And even if she were able to believe in the dream-court, she knows that she herself can be no more than an outlandish visitor there, an intruder from the land of faery. Under the stern gaze of the King, the Queen, the courtiers, the jeweled ladies, she would turn into mist, she would disappear. If only things could stay as they are! Now the sun has set. The sorceress has vanished into the forest, the Prince has not yet come. It is cool at the window. Rapunzel feels a burst of gratitude for this moment, when the calm of dusk comes dropping down like rain.
1812 and 1819
In the 1812 edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the discovery of Rapunzel’s secret comes when she innocently revea
ls her pregnancy by asking the sorceress why her dresses are growing tight. In the second edition, of 1819, Wilhelm Grimm, in an effort to make the stories more suitable for children, altered this passage. The discovery now comes when Rapunzel thoughtlessly asks the sorceress why she is harder to pull up than the Prince.
Discovery
It happens suddenly, as these things do: a careless word, a moment’s lapse of caution. Everything changes in an instant. Now the sorceress, hideous with rage, stands leaning over Rapunzel, who is falling backward in her chair as she lifts one forearm before her face. The sorceress holds a large pair of scissors wide open—like a beast’s jaws—above Rapunzel’s braid. The braid hangs over the girl’s shoulder and trails along the floor. The sorceress’s nose, like another dangerous instrument, thrusts violently from her face, as if she’s trying to slash Rapunzel’s cheek with it. From the wart on her chin, three stiff hairs spring forward like wires. Her eyes look hot to the touch. Rapunzel’s eyes, above her forearm, are so wide that they look like screaming mouths. Her eyebrows are raised nearly to the hairline. An immense shadow of scissor blades is visible on the bodice of her flowing dress.
Dusk
It never palls: the feel of the hair in his fists, the sheer wall soaring, the pull of the earth, the ache in his arms, the push of his feet against stone. No palace behind him, no dream-room above him, but only the immediate fact: hardness of stone, twist of hair, thrust of knee. He is young, he is strong, he is happy, he is alive. The world is good.
Wilderness
With a crunching squeeze of the scissors the sorceress has cut off Rapunzel’s hair, her treacherous hair, and has banished her to a wilderness. It is a place of rocks and brambles, of weed-grown heaths; prickly bushes and twisted trees rise from the parched earth. Sunken paths of bone-dry streambeds hold clumps of thistle. The sun is so hot that toads lie dead in the shadows of rocks. The night will be bitter cold. Rapunzel crouches in the hollow of a boulder. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes until she sees points of light. She drops her hands, stares out. It is no dream.
At the Window
He’s there, the evil one, the usurper. The sorceress watches the look of horror come over his face like a shaking of leaves in a wind. Her trick has succeeded: the braid tied to the hook. She sees that he’s handsome, a Prince, a young god; the beauty of his face is like needles stabbing her skin. She howls out her hate. Never see her! Never! Her words scorch her throat, burn his eyes. He has all the world, the handsome one, the god-man, he is rich, he is happy, he needs nothing, and yet he has climbed the tower and stolen away her one happiness. Even as black hate bursts from her like smoke, she feels the power of his face, she is stirred. She wants to scratch out his eyes with her claws. The Prince stares at her with eyes that are changing, eyes that are no longer young, then leaps from the tower.
Falling
As he falls, the Prince knows that this is the secret buried in the heart of climbing, climbing’s dark twin. Everything he loves is annihilated in this savage mockery of striving, this climbing-in-reverse. As a child he dropped a ball into a well and watched it fall. Now he is that ball. He’s rushing away from the dream-chamber, which without him is rising higher and higher—soon it will soar above the clouds and be lost forever. And yet this falling, this soft surrender, fills him with such hardness of not-yielding that he can feel a swell of refusal, an upsurge of protest, and in an ecstasy of overcoming he embraces the last adventure: the rush of wind in his eyes, his hair streaming up over him, the sharp scent of green in his nostrils.
Rapunzel’s Father
On the other side of the high wall, which separates his property from that of the sorceress, Rapunzel’s father is tending his garden. Since the death of his wife two years ago, he spends more and more time pulling out weeds, straightening the vine poles, watering the soil. The garden grows right up to the high wall, which he has crossed only three times in his life: once when his wife begged him to steal a head of lettuce from his neighbor’s garden; once when he returned to steal a second head of lettuce and was caught by the sorceress, who made him promise to give her his child on the day it was born; and once after a year had passed, when he longed to catch a glimpse of his daughter, but found only the sorceress, who shrieked out her rage and told him that if he ever tried to see his daughter again, she’d tear out his eyes and strike his wife blind. Much time has passed since then. Sometimes he thinks of her, the daughter that he gave away, but it is like thinking of his own childhood: it’s all so long ago that it doesn’t seem part of him. As the Prince falls from the tower, Rapunzel’s father bends over a weed that has sprung up at the side of a string-bean vine.
Eyes
And the Prince falls into a thornbush. And the thorns scratch out his eyes.
Time
Time passed. Two words, a breath: time passed. Days rush by like wind in your face, weeks are devoured by months, years are gone in the space of two syllables. Time passed. Time passed, and a great thornbush grew up around the tower. Now the stone was entirely hidden, bristling with thorns as sharp as daggers. The casement window, too, was no longer visible behind twisting branches. Every morning, before the sun rises over the forest, a dark figure appears at the foot of the tower. She seizes a thorn branch, which cuts deep into her hand. As she climbs, lines of blood run along her fingers and arms. The thorns rip her dress, catch her hair, slash at her face and throat. The pain eases her a little. At the top she pushes through the thorn-window into the dark chamber. There she washes herself at the basin, sits at the table, and begins to unbraid Rapunzel’s hair. When the hair lies in soft folds on her lap, she brushes it, very slowly. When she is done brushing, she braids the hair carefully, then lays it in winding ropy lines on the bed. All day she sits and gazes at Rapunzel’s hair. Sometimes she unbraids it and brushes it again. The sorceress seeks relief, but there is no relief. There is only the fading light behind the window of thorns. When the chamber begins to grow dark she pushes herself through the sharp branches and makes her way down the tower, tearing her body on the long thorns, gripping them with her bloody hands.
The Chamber and the Wilderness
In the days of the tower chamber, Rapunzel would sometimes dream of another world, an open world, without walls that stopped her at every point. Now, in the wilderness that stretches away in every direction, she seeks only shelter: the walls of a hollow rock, an opening in a rise of ground, the low space under a bramble bush. She listens for the sounds of hungry animals. She wraps her two babies in coverings of branches and dry leaves.
Dark
As Rapunzel roams in the wilderness, the Prince wanders in darkness. He has learned which fruits he can eat and which fruits will twist inside him like sharp metal. Sometimes he’s so weak with hunger that he chews on pieces of bark, swallows them down. He has learned to listen for the sounds of creatures who might bite his legs, learned to strike out with his sword and feel the warm blood on the blade. He sleeps wherever he can in the forest, seeking out hollow places behind branches that hang to the ground or feeling his way to shallow openings in hillslopes. Once, waking, he feels a tongue licking his face. His skin is hatched with dried blood, his branch-ripped clothes are smeared with smashed berries and leaf-slime. Bits of leaves cling to his hair. Around his waist he wears a girdle of woven vines. Though he’s still young, a streak of white cuts like a gash through his tangled beard.
The Second Rapunzel
In the long nights the sorceress is busy. She draws on her deepest powers, snatches visions out of the dark. Sometimes she wakes to find herself on the hard floor. In the mirror her eyes are wild. She neglects her garden, shuts herself up in the shed behind her cottage. One morning at daybreak she climbs the tower with a bundle on her back. At the top she takes a knife from her pocket and cuts a hole in the branches that cover the casement window. Now she can pass her bundle through without catching it on the thorn-points. In the chamber she unwraps the bundle, lays the figure on the bed. Skillfully
she attaches the hair. She slips the nightdress over the figure and steps away. A narrow ray of sunlight strikes the faintly flushed cheek, the closed eyes. The forearm is bared to the elbow. The image of wax and blood is so exact that it seems to be the living and breathing girl. A dark joy floods the heart of the sorceress. She sits watching over the sleeping girl. No harm must ever come to her.
Song
Time passes in the wilderness, where the infants have grown into children, but for the Prince there is no time, only a darkness that is always. In the nothing of his days he comes to a place of rock and brambles. Here, there is sun like flakes of fire. Here, there is hot shade that presses up against him like wool. In the dry ground he digs up roots, sucks their bitter juice. At night the air is cold as snow. He sleeps against stone. When something strikes at his leg, he beats it with a rock. The holes of his eyes hurt. One day, resting among spiky bushes that clutch at his arms, he hears a song. He is shivering with fever. He doesn’t know whether the song is within him or without. He is back at the tower, the hair coming down like fire. He rises shakily. The song touches his face. He stumbles forward as though pulled by a hand.
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