Fairy Tales

Rudy was leaving. There were others besides Grandfather to whom he had to say good bye. First there was Ajola, the old dog.

“Your father was a postman, and I was a post dog,” said Ajola. “We traveled both up and down, and I know the dogs and people on the other side of the mountains. It’s never been my habit to talk much, but now that we won’t be able to talk to each other much longer, I will say a little more than usual. I will tell you a story that I’ve always thought a lot about. I don’t understand it, and you won’t be able to either, but that doesn’t matter because I have gotten this much out of it: things are not distributed quite the way they should be, either for dogs or for people in this world. Not everyone is created to sit on laps or drink milk. It’s not something I’ve been used to, but I have seen a puppy ride on the postal coach sitting in a passenger seat. The woman who was his mistress, or perhaps he was the master, had brought a milk bottle with her that he drank from. He was given cake, but he couldn’t be bothered to eat it. He just sniffed at it, and so she ate it herself. I was running in the mud beside the coach, as hungry as a dog. I chewed on my own thoughts. It wasn’t right, but then again there is much that isn’t. I hope you’ll end up on a lap and in the coach, but it’s not something you can do by yourself. I haven’t been able to, either by yipping or yawning.”

That was Ajola’s speech, and Rudy put his arms around the dog’s neck and kissed it right on its wet snout. Then he picked up the cat, but it squirmed.

“You have become too strong for me, and I don’t want to use my claws! Climb over the mountains. I have taught you to climb, you know! Never think that you will fall, and you’ll manage!” And then the cat ran away because it didn’t want Rudy to see the sorrow in its eyes.

The hens were running around on the floor. The one had lost its tail. A tourist who wanted to be a hunter had shot the tail off because he thought the hen was a bird of prey.

“Rudy’s going over the mountains,” said one hen.

“He’s always in a hurry,” said the other, “and I don’t like saying good-bye!” And both of them pattered off.

He also said good by to the goats, and they cried, “Nayhhh, nayhhh.” They wanted to go along, and it was so sad.

There were two good guides in the district who were just then going over the mountains. They were going down the other side through the Gemmi pass. Rudy went with them, on foot. It was a rigorous hike for such a little fellow, but he had great strength and tireless courage.

The swallows flew with them for a distance. “We and you, and you and we!” they sang. The route went over the rapid Lutschine that gushes forth in many small streams from Grindelwald glacier’s black cleft. Loose tree limbs and boulders act as bridges here. Now they were high in the scrub alder and started up the mountain, close to where the glacier separates from the side of the mountain, and then they went out on the glacier, over blocks of ice and around them. Sometimes Rudy had to crawl, sometimes walk. His eyes shone with pure pleasure, and he stepped firmly with his iron clad mountain boots as if he wanted to mark where he had walked. The black earth deposits on the glacier spawned by the mountain water flow gave it the appearance of being calcified, but the blue-green, glassy ice still shone through. They had to walk around small pools that were damned up by the ice pack, and once they came close to a big boulder that was rocking on the edge of an ice fissure. The rock lost its equilibrium and fell rolling. The echo came resounding from the glacier’s deep hollow caverns.

Upward, ever upward they walked. The glacier itself stretched up in height like a river of wildly towering ice masses, squeezed between sheer cliffs. For a moment Rudy thought about what they had told him—that he had lain deep down in one of these cold-breathing crevices with his mother, but soon such thoughts were gone. It was to him like one of the many similar stories he had heard. Now and then when the men thought it was a little too hard for the boy to climb, they reached out and gave him a hand, but he wasn’t tired, and he stood as surefooted as a goat-antelope on the ice. Then they came out on the bare rock again, sometimes walking between barren rocks, sometimes between dwarf spruces, then out on grass-covered slopes. Always changing, always new. Around them rose the snow-covered mountains, those that he, like every child here, knew: The Jungfrau, Munken, and Eiger.

Rudy had never been so high before, never before been on the outstretched ocean of snow, lying there with immovable waves of snow that the wind blew a few flakes from, like it blows foam from the ocean. The glaciers hold each other by the hand, if you can say that about glaciers, and each is a glass palace for the Ice Maiden whose power and will is to capture and bury. The sun was shining warmly, and the snow was blinding and looked like it had been sown with sparkling whitish-blue diamonds. Innumerable insects, especially butterflies and bees, lay dead in masses on the snow. They had flown too high, or the wind had carried them until they died in the cold. Around Wetterhorn a threatening sky hung like a finely carded wad of black wool. It sank down bulging with its hidden Fohn, a violent force when it broke loose. The impressions of the entire journey became forever fixed in Rudy’s memory: staying overnight on the mountain, the path from there, and the deep mountain ravines where the water had sawed through the boulders for so long it made him dizzy to think of it.

An abandoned stone hut on the other side of the sea of snow gave them shelter for the night. They found charcoal and tree branches there, and a fire was soon lit. They prepared for the night as best they could. The men sat around the fire, smoked tobacco and drank the hot, spiced drink they had made themselves. Rudy received his share, and then the men talked about the mysterious creatures of the Alps and the strange giant snakes in the deep lakes, about the folk of the night, the legions of ghosts who carried the sleeper through the air to the wonderful swimming city of Venice. They talked about the wild herdsman who drove his black sheep across the pastures. Even if they hadn’t seen them, they had nevertheless heard the sound of their bells, and heard the uncanny bleating of the herd. Rudy listened curiously, but without fear because he was never afraid. As he listened he thought he could sense the ghostly, hollow bellow. It became more and more audible. The men heard it too and stopped talking. They told Rudy not to go to sleep.

It was the Fohn blowing. The violent stormy wind that flings itself from the mountains down into the valley and cracks trees in its fury as if they were reeds. It moves log houses from one side of the river bank to the other as easily as one moves a chess piece.

After an hour had passed they told Rudy that now the storm was over and he could sleep. He slept as if on command, so tired was he from the trek.

They broke camp early in the morning. That day the sun shone for Rudy on new mountains, new glaciers and fields of snow. They had arrived in the canton of Valais and were on the other side of the mountain ridge you could see from Grindelwald, but still far from Rudy’s new home. Other mountain ravines, other grassy pastures, forests and mountainous paths unfolded before them. They saw other houses and other people, but what people they were! Indeed, they were deformed, grim, fat with yellow-white faces. Their throats were heavy, ugly clumps of flesh hanging out like bags. They were cretins.⁶ They dragged themselves sickly forward and looked with dumb eyes at the strangers. The women looked the worst. Were these the people of his new home?

3. RUDY’S UNCLE