23/10/98

The Enchanted Nature Reserve

A Grimm modern-day parable, with a cast of thousands.

    Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a king.
    His name was Yahu.
    Yahu was not a great king, but not bad either -- kind of so-so -- yet his kingdom was not a happy place.
    "Off with his head!" some of the people sometimes shouted.
    At the edge of his kingdom there was a dark forest where an ugly ogre lived. His name was Fat.
    Fat was bad. He ate little girls. He wore a tablecloth on his head. And he didn't even shave.
    Some of the people liked Fat. They wanted him to be king. Why? Because the kingdom was not only faraway, it was strange.
    Very strange.
    One day, King Yahu gathered all his trusted advisers in his castle. "We must do something," he said, and his advisers agreed.
    "Kill Fat!" one said.
    "Kill Fat!" the others agreed.
    But Yahu had never killed anybody. He would not know where to start.
    They sat and thought and thought and sat, when all of a sudden, a soft little voice was heard.
    It was the cleaning lady. She was a strange cleaning lady. She hummed happily. She wore one glass slipper.
    "You could turn him into a pumpkin," she said.
    "Hmm," the advisers hmmed.
    The king thought this was a stupid idea, and punished the cleaning lady. She was forced to live at the top of a beanstalk until her hair grew.
    The king turned to his oldest adviser. He was 106 years old. That was very old in a land where people were always eating poison apples and turning into stone.
    "What shall I do?" the king said to Rabbistiltskin.
    Rabbistiltskin lived in an old shoe with lots of children who ate nothing but kosher gingerbread.
    Rabbistiltskin closed his old eyes and started to mumble. He was casting a spell. When he opened his eyes, he was holding a magic amulet.
    "Oh, my!" gasped the king.
    "Only 26 shekels each," said Rabbistiltskin. "Everyone in the kingdom shall buy one and it will turn everything they touch into gold. They will like that. Whomsoever does not buy one will turn into a toad, and they will not like that. And so the people will love you more."
    The king stroked Rabbistiltskin's long beard. "Hmm," he said.
    But it came to pass that Fat found a magic lamp. He rubbed it and a genius appeared. The genius was a dwarf grandmother who dressed like a wolf and lived in a cupboard.
    "My, what big lips you have," the old yente said to Fat.
    "Never mind that," the ogre snapped, "I want my three wishes. One: I wish to be king."
    "Trust me," said the genius, "you don't want to be king. You think a king is happy? You'll ride around with no clothes on and everyone will stare because, take my word for it, you're uglier than an ugly duckling."
    Fat looked at his mirror, mirror on the wall, and a handsome reflection looked back, but it was not his.
    "Okay," he said, "first make me look like a prince."
    She waved her magic wand, some sparkly special effects appeared, and poof!, he was now a toad.
    "Ribbet," he roared. This was not exactly a wish come true.
    "Well naturally," said the genius. "Did you buy an amulet? No. And so you have to wait until a beautiful girl kisses you."
    "But who would kiss a toad?"
    "Trust me, it happens."
    Sure enough, from all over the land, beautiful girls lined up to kiss the toad, because they wanted him to rule the land. But all of a sudden, from out of nowhere, a pied piper appeared, and all the beautiful girls went chasing after him, leaving the disgusting toad to wallow in the smelly swamp, and can you blame them?
    Meanwhile, the happy king was growing sad. He called for his fiddlers three, but they only made him sadder. He summoned the three little pigs, but that only made Rabbistiltskin mad.
    Presently, a big-eared elephant floated by his window. That gave him an idea.
    "Dumbo!" he shouted excitedly, and all his advisers quickly assembled at his feet.
    The king spoke to them. "It is no secret that the evil ogre Fat is a thorn in my paw, and all the witches and fairies in the land cannot make him disappear. He wishes my beautiful kingdom, and nothing in my power can stop him. But this is not how things happen in real life as we know it: is it not true that good must always triumph over bad? What, prithee, is to be the moral of a story in which everyone lives unhappily ever after?"
    The advisers shrank back in horror. "Gevalt," they cried.
    But the king was wise. He had read lots of stories. He knew what to do.
    "If anyone could help me," he said, "it is the Wizard at the end of the yellow brick road, out there in Kansas." (Editor's note: Arkansas, actually.)
    Well, to cut a long story short, the king boarded the Jumbo Dumbo and flew off to see Bill the Wizard, who was, at that moment, in bed with the three little bares.
    The Wizard fiddled with a few nobs (just for effect), and promptly told Good King Yahu what must be done:
    "A nature reserve," he said.
    "A what?!"
    "Just a few dunam. Give it to Fat, and he will be king of something, and he will be happy. There: you wanted a moral? That's it."
    Yahu didn't get it, but he couldn't hang around, because it was soon 12 o'clock, and you know what happens then. So he went home.
    The next day he woke up. The birds were a-chirping, the mice a-squeaking, the cockroaches a-scuttling. It was a glorious morning. The king despatched his trustiest messenger to the dark forest, to the smelly swamp where Fat sat a-croaking.
    Fat hopped off his lily pad, and tried to kiss the messenger with his big froggy lips. (Editor's note: This was subsequently mistranslated as "kill the messenger.")
    The messenger messenged his message. No dice, said Fat. He was hopping mad. "What about my national covenant? My three wishes? It's just not fair."
    And so, the so-so king dropped everything and ventured into the eerie forest, for a summit meeting with the toad.
    (In the realms of both diplomacy and fairy tales, all this makes perfect sense.)
    On the way there, a scorpion asked Yahu for a tremp across the river. The king squashed it with his shoe. It did not live happily ever after.
    King Yahu promised Fat the ogre a wonderland all his own, a nature reserve, faraway from the faraway land.
    "Oh, sure," said Fat sulkily, "You'll be king of a kingdom, and I'll be a ranger. You get six million people and I get sly foxes and ugly ducklings and fire-breathing dragons and Pooh. A lot of poo."
    Yahu pointed out that he had all the king's horses and all the king's men on his side, and Fat only had one tin soldier. "Sort of like the ant and the elephant," Yahu said allegorically.
    Fat had no choice. "I will take the nature reserve," he said glumly. "But it has to be big."
    All of a sudden a rainbow appeared. "I'll tell you what," Yahu said, smiling to himself. "You can have everything from here until the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Fair, no?" And then he patted the toad on the tush, and said, "Go for it."
    The toad took a giant leap, bounding hither and thither and yon in search of the farthest reaches of his realm. And he lived hoppily ever after.