Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

50 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
one of those very tablets “still to be found”—in the phrase I’d so
blithely tossed off in my paper.
My mind was full of questions, but Brillig was in full flight and I
was loath to interrupt.
“Had I lingered,” he said, “I would surely have been caught.
However, I was able to slip out, smiling and bowing, murmuring
my thanks, before the merchant could realize what I’d done. I
dashed back to join the other Brothers and we returned to our
mountain retreat without incident.
“Alone in my room, I gloated. I tucked the stone under my pillow
and spoke of it to no one.
“Some few weeks later we were hastily evacuated, first to Warsaw,
then via Hamburg to Rotterdam, where we embarked on a
freighter bound for New York. 54 I later learned that the area we had
left, including both Kraznacs, was totally destroyed in an Allied
bombing raid the following month.”
I shook my head at this close call, but did not comprehend its
full import until later in the day.
“From New York I returned to the home base of my Order, but I
stayed only a few months, due to a pernicious custom that had been
instituted in my absence. Every morning Father handed to each of
us—we were about twenty in all—a slip of paper folded twice. One
of these slips bore the words ‘You’re It’—meaning that the Brother
so designated, unknown to anyone else, would play the part of Lilith
all that day. Only Father knew who had received it. Perhaps on
some days all the slips were blank, but, since no one knew, the result
was the same, as you will see.”
It was now getting on for eight. I heard someone entering the
bathroom. Sunny left to see what was up.
I scratched my head and looked at Brillig.
“Lilith? . . . The legendary first wife of Adam? His devilishly
54 This truly frightful journey in the shadow of troop movements and fleeing peasants
is here passed over lightly. Brillig’s extensive notes at the time, which Norman
is in the process of editing, will be included in The Compleat Brillig. In the
meantime, interested readers will find the flavor of such a trip dramatically captured
in Sigrid McPherson, The Refiner’s Fire: Memoirs of a German Girlhood,
pp. 101ff.