Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

The monkey and I were face-to-face. I bared my teeth at it, hissed, and it slunk away. Then I did what any cat would do, jumped up and settled myself in the best seat in the room, the princely throne with its soft yellow silk, underneath a matching Austrian blind of a canopy.

“And what is your decree, Princess Catwoman?” said the face in the glass, occupying one wall of the audience room.

I waved one paw airily.

“Release the monkey from its chains, also the bears, take the horses out of their harness, and ban all rat catchers, except me!”

“Vir gut,” said the voice behind glass, laughing again. The glass quivered and the vision reversed, so that I stood once more gazing into the audience room, with its static doll-princess, monkey, and cat.

“What are you?” I said. “Some kind of animal liberationist?”

“I can hardly be anything but,” he said, his voice a trailing thread of sound, ending in silence. I turned and found myself alone. The mobile mein mann had given me rang in my pocket, a Bach fugue. It was time to go.

The next few days passed in snapshots, images of a fairytale tourist German Christmas. Dinner that night was at the Goldene Sonne, where generations of the Bach family had an annual musical meet, and we slept in the hotel above, all to ourselves. Sex was 6/10, from my continuing tiredness perhaps, or else some unacknowledged sense of disapproving Bach family ghosts. To the Lutheran Church the next day, to hear Bach’s organ being played, although I nearly nodded off during the sermon. Back to Bremen in the train, snow having fallen so that the countryside was almost over-the-top picture postcard, except for the windfarms. Left alone the next day, I watched German TV, and found it equally trash culture as elsewhere. Feeling very brave, I walked from the Neustadt (new town, typically a name hundreds of years old) along the riverside, all by myself.

I wanted to see the famous statue of the Musicians of Bremen, cast in bronze. It was polished keen by tourist hands, and I touched it too, first the katz, then the donkey, but felt not warm hide and hair, but cold metal. I waited, as tourist happy-snappers came and went, as if listening for a distinctive breathy, braying laugh. Nothing happened; and I consoled myself with some glühwein, drunk in a booth while the Christmas revelers all around slapped backs, dispensed Christmas cheer—to everyone except me, it seemed.

Night, and I put on what I had of winter glam, and went out with mein mann, to see his consort perform. Avant-garde meets with rock music at some junctures, especially at arts festivals—and thus ageing lady rock promoters meet serious classical music dudes. I knew my Steve Reich, my Phil Glass, even if I preferred my beloved Sonic Youth. Why did the performance then seem a cacophony dressed up as art, not even with the honest purpose of frightening some robbers away from their ill-gotten gains? Not to mention that I really did fall asleep during the “quiet movement”. Result, in the freezing wind outside, a blazing row, luckily for any relationship grudge sheet largely conducted (by him, berating) in German. Under different circumstances I might have stomped off angrily, but in sub-zero temperatures, in a foreign country, I had no choice but to follow him meekly home, to his home.

By next morning we had sort of made it up. He ate salami for breakfast (German habit, bad as Vegemite) and we took another train, off to Lübeck, where Bach had walked all the way from Arnstadt to hear Buxtehude play. How young, how fannish, I thought, but did not say. The ICE was crammed with Germans, their suitcases and Christmas parcels, all last-minute panic as they headed back home to the volks for Weihnachsfest. We changed trains, as we had on the way to Arnstadt, but this time in a major city. I had missed my essential morning coffee, to make the train, and was decidedly blurry, not-with-it. As we waited outside the coffee booth, I said:

“Where are we?”

His face said: she doesn’t know? “Hamburg, of course.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly locating a culture point I recognized. “Where the Beatles honed their art!”

And then stopped cold, as his expression changed from condescending amusement to naked disgust. So you think that of me, what I have done, what I adore! With a psychic jolt, as of a train coupling, my jetlagged spirit or soul caught up with me, and with it came my senses. I knew then, that I had made a huge mistake: had I really believed true love was possible with a stranger who was my musical opposite?

“Snob,” I shouted, a word identical in English and German. From around us came answering shouts, an approaching roar of song, even what sounded like gunfire. Feet tramped, a whistle sounded, and police in uniforms, with batons and guns, surged into the station. On the next platform a train pulled in, full of football fans, singing lustily and setting off firecrackers. The police flowed to meet them, and within moments there was a riot going on, not only on the platform, but between us lovers-no-more, as last night’s row flared again. This time I gave as good as I got, in words with Germanic roots, four-letter, cutting, nasty and final.

Dramatic exit time, like a bow in front of a curtain. I turned on my boot heels and stepped into the larger chaos of the riot. I’ve survived mosh pits at festivals, I know how to move through trouble unhurt. Not so the fan to one side of me, who stumbled, and got a kick to the head, dislodging his beanie. As the riot eddied around us, I pulled him upright, lest he be trampled.

He looked near-stunned, blood tricking down from his Mohawk, dyed in the team colours. I did what I usually did, when I had a client in strife, led him towards the edge of the riot, then out among the watching passengers, and towards a safe stillness. Somehow along the way we acquired a police dog. I looped a finger through its collar, and as a scuffle neared us took a step sideways, and down a flight of stairs. Perhaps the dog led, perhaps I did, as we step-stumbled down towards a local service platform, containing only a few scattered passengers and their parcels.

A train pulled in, and automatically we entered. It chugged away back in the direction of Bremen, as the looming clouds released their snow, and we passed through empty farmland, small station after small station. The track dived into woodland, and in its centre stood a deserted station, the smallest so far. The dog barked, pulled at my coat skirts with its teeth. I heaved my dopy charge upright again, and we disembarked in the swirling snow, nobody following us out into the cold. The fan bent, scooped up a handful of snow, and rubbed it on his head. It seemed to revive him, and he lurched towards the exit. I could hardly abandon him—so I followed, as did the dog, wagging his bristly tail.

Waiting under the overhang of the station roof was a large grey donkey, whom the fan embraced around the neck, then used, as he had me, as a walking support. So out we stepped into the snow, the four of us, through a village, decorations and Christmas candelabras at each window, like an advent calendar. Within a few streets the village petered out, and our paws, hooves, runners, and boots stopped scrunching snow, instead fell silent among the rag-rug of damp pine-needles in the forest. The fan walked free now, but I stumbled on a tree root, went headlong, knocking the heel off my boot. The dog bent over me, panting, the donkey lowered its velvet muzzle as if in concern, and the fan lent me a hand upwards. I wobbled, and he scooped me up as easily as he had the snow, depositing me on the back of the donkey. This is not Nazareth, I thought, and I’m definitely not a pregnant Mary. Nonetheless I rode on donkey-back through the forest to a clearing, in which stood what looked like a converted stable, or barn.