{"id":148168,"date":"2020-10-07T11:22:40","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T15:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=148168"},"modified":"2020-10-07T13:20:58","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T17:20:58","slug":"its-time-to-pay-the-piper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/10\/07\/its-time-to-pay-the-piper\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Pay the Piper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s column,\u00a0Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Pied Piper illustration by Kate Greenaway<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s time to pay the piper. We gather around the old wooden table. No one wants to pay, but it\u2019s time. It\u2019s one thousand o\u2019clock. Everyone is here. The living and the dead. My grandparents, my mother, my father, my sons, my husband, the rabbis, even the president. You are here, too. Your teachers, your neighbors, your long-lost friends. Everyone you know is here. We put what we can on the table. Everyone must add to the pot. My sons leave wildflower seeds, my husband leaves a rose-colored pendulum, the president mutters and leaves ash, the rabbis leave ink marks scattered like sewing needles, my father leaves his stethoscope. I leave this essay. I leave my favorite broom. My grandfather leaves a small black key. My grandmother leaves her radiance. My sister leaves her hair. \u201cI\u2019m not paying,\u201d says my mother. \u201cI\u2019ve paid enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The earliest known version of \u201cThe Pied Piper of Hamelin\u201d is not a fairy tale, but a stained glass windowpane from a church in Hamelin, Germany, that was destroyed in 1633. Only a shard remains, which my nine-year-old son, Noah, pulls from his pocket and holds up to the light. It\u2019s the piece of glass with the piper\u2019s magical flute. The flute is bronze, and the light catches what\u2019s left of the piper\u2019s hands. Noah adds the shard to what we\u2019ll use to pay the piper.<\/p>\n

We miss the old sky. We think if we pay the piper now, the wildfires and the wind and the virus and the floods will swirl back into their wellspring, but the piper is missing. In a large dark sack, we drag our payment through the streets calling the piper\u2019s name. Our heavy debt. Our hands are blistered and hot but we must pay the piper. We look for his red and yellow striped scarf and the pipe that hangs from it. We should\u2019ve paid him long ago, when he emptied our town of rats \u201cwho bit the babies in the cradles \u2026 and made nests inside men\u2019s Sunday hats, \/ And even spoiled the women\u2019s chats \/ By drowning their speaking \/ With shrieking and squeaking,\u201d as Robert Browning writes. We should have paid him before the sea levels rose and the polar bears thinned. We should have paid him before the first man was shot for the color of his skin, before the first wire barbed. But we didn\u2019t pay the piper, so the piper made a new song for the children that promised \u201ca joyous land \u2026 where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew.\u201d We didn\u2019t pay the piper, and so the children merrily followed him into a mountain, and a disappearing door shut fast when the last child was inside. Now there are no more children.<\/p>\n

Now there are no more children, except for one hobbling boy left behind, who couldn\u2019t dance into the mountain fast enough. There is always one hobbling boy left behind, to describe the song the children followed. He is the poet. And there is always one rat left behind to describe the song the rats followed. The rat is the poet, too.<\/p>\n

On Rosh Hashanah we blow the shofar one hundred and one times. The blasts alternate between broken howls and long moans. According to the Talmud, the shofar should be a ram\u2019s horn because it is hollow and recalls Abraham\u2019s near sacrifice of his only son. It recalls Abraham\u2019s blind devotion, which blurred only when an angel showed him a ram whose horns were caught in a nearby thicket. Abraham was ready to overpay the piper, but paid with the terrified ram instead.<\/p>\n

The shofar we have is broken. My sons take turns blowing it, but all we can hear is silence. It is a beautiful silence. One day, when there are too many of me, that is the song I will follow into a mountain. We add the broken shofar to the missing piper\u2019s payment.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you ever feel like you\u2019re dreaming while you\u2019re awake?\u201d asks Eli, my seven-year-old. \u201cSometimes,\u201d I say. \u201cDo you?\u201d \u201cOf course,\u201d says Eli. \u201cWe are always dreaming. I am a dream and you are a dream and Papa is a dream and Noah is a dream. Our house is a dream and the earth is a dream.\u201d I add Eli\u2019s words to the piper\u2019s payment. Into the sack it goes, instantly doubling its worth.<\/p>\n

When the piper arrives in Hamelin he seems to have walked from his \u201cpainted tombstone,\u201d like an ancestor rising on the \u201cTrump of Doom\u201d (or Judgment Day) to rid the town of a plague. \u201cThere was,\u201d writes Robert Browning, \u201cno guessing his kith or kin.\u201d He is the Godot we barely had to wait for and then when he arrived he was the Godot we didn\u2019t pay. Or is he God, or Guru, or Go? What was his name?<\/p>\n

I do not consider myself a follower even though I have followed things up trees, into rivers, and across bridges. I have listened carefully. I have taken notes and memorized. I have followed instructions, and I have been obsessed. I have been indoctrinated as often as I have pulled up roots and left behind a trail of soil. Once, when I was nine, I was about to follow my father into a mountain when my mother held me back. \u201cYour father,\u201d she said, \u201cis brainwashing you.\u201d I had never heard that word before, but it sounded like \u201cbewitched\u201d and I liked it. \u201cLook,\u201d said my mother. And I looked. My father dipped my brain into a bucket, and sloshed it around in lavender suds. The water was cool and fresh, and it felt like heaven. He folded my brain over a clothesline to dry in the motherless sun. Over my father I was gaga. Over my mother I was un-gaga. \u201cSee?\u201d said my mother. I didn\u2019t see. Ideology is made out of appetite, and sometimes we are hungry to be famished. For a long time I followed my father\u2019s hum. It never wasn\u2019t love. All over my heart are still-glittering flecks from that song I followed. If the piper ever comes to collect payment, I\u2019ll put the glittering flecks in the sack, too.<\/p>\n

Not once have I seen my son Noah walk in a line with his schoolmates without falling behind or straying, without looking up at the clouds or studying the ants. For better or for worse, I remind myself, he is the poet.<\/p>\n

How do we choose what to follow? Or what not to follow? How old is this song we\u2019re now following, with its cracked notes and strange ways of stopping and starting? Are we, I wonder, like lemmings to the sea? \u201cThat\u2019s a myth,\u201d says my husband. \u201cWhat is?\u201d I say. \u201cLemmings to the sea,\u201d he says. \u201cLemmings don\u2019t march blindly to their deaths.\u201d \u201cBut it\u2019s an idiom.\u201d I say. \u201cIf it\u2019s not like lemmings to the sea than what is it like?\u201d The news is on. The same president who added ash to the piper\u2019s sack is rising in the polls, or pretending to rise in the polls. \u201cLike humans,\u201d says my husband. \u201cLike humans to the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1958 Disney made a documentary called The White Wilderness<\/em> to prove that lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping off seaside cliffs. But lemmings don\u2019t. The documentary shows hundreds of lemmings jumping into the Arctic Sea, except they are not jumping and this is not the Arctic Sea. The filmmakers purchased lemmings from children, brought them to the Bow River, and placed them on a turntable to create the effect of a frenzied death march. The lemmings are falling but they do not want to fall. What is happening is not what is actually happening. The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary.<\/p>\n

I wonder what it must feel like to be one of those lemmings. I wonder what it feels like to have been caught and brought to a precipice to perform the myth of yourself. Or maybe that\u2019s exactly what we are doing day in and day out. Maybe what we are doing is performing the myth of ourselves on a cliff to the tune of a missing piper\u2019s song.<\/p>\n

If you see the piper tell him we have his payment ready. I\u2019ve added the dreams of a lemming and my favorite orange sweater. This sack is getting heavier and heavier. Tell the piper we don\u2019t know how much farther we can carry it while calling for him by a name we\u2019ve never known. It\u2019s now one thousand and one o\u2019clock. It\u2019s now later than we ever thought.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Happily here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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