Sleeping in Flame

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 Vie

"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 Vie

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 Vie

"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.

"No, my guess is Dortchen and Lisette heard a maid tell a story which, with a little fixing, became 'Rumpelstiltskin.' After the girls had cleaned up whatever parts they thought weren't fit for good ears, they went to the Grimms with it."

He stopped and grabbed my arm. "Know why else I think that? Because Dortchen ended up marrying Wilhelm Grimm later on. She didn't want to make a bad first impression, you know?"

"That's interesting. What else, Dave?"

"Only one more thing. They never stopped revising the tales. It's like the Folios of Shakespeare. First Folio, Second Folio . . . In 1920 in a place in Alsace called the Olenberg Monastery, someone discovered a set of the stories in the brothers' handwriting. Obviously that's become the definitive Grimm, but every scholar I read said they worked and reworked the originals for years. Even when you read them in German, imagine the difference between the 1812 'Rumpelstiltskin' and the last edition that came out in 1857."

"But there's no trace of the original story that the Wild Sisters told?"

"None."

Besides telling me this information, Buck was a quiet walker. If there was a landmark or building worth noting he mentioned it, but otherwise we trudged through the cold in silence. Past the Opera, the Bristol Hotel, the Imperial. At Schwarzenberg Platz we turned right and walked toward the Russian War Monument.

"Where are we going?"

"I found a Yugoslavian restaurant down by the Sudbahnhof that serves good sarma. You in the mood?"

"Lead on."

He was quiet awhile longer, but as we passed Belvedere Palace, surprised me by asking, "Why're you so interested in 'Rumpelstiltskin'?"

"A new movie project."

"What's the story?"

"It's an interesting idea. Did you ever read Grendel, by John Gardner?"

"Yes. The story of Beowulf told through the eyes of the monster?"

"This is similar. The story of 'Rumpelstiltskin' through his eyes."

"You're writing for Walt Disney these days?"

"No, but it's got some of the same feeling. In my story, the reason why the little man spun for the girl was so she'd love him. She promised she would if he made her straw into gold. But he doesn't trust her, so he makes her promise to give him her first child, just in case."