“And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing”

“And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing” is the remembered final line of a fairy tale whose plot its speaker can no longer recall. Repeated as he tells of meeting a former lover and stopping short of sex, the line becomes an involuntary refrain: a strange, comic image attached to a sadness he cannot otherwise resolve.

The fragment of a fairy tale

As a child, the speaker read a fairy tale whose ending struck him as strange. He has forgotten how the story went, and can recall only its last line: “And when it was all over, the king and his retainers burst out laughing.” He wonders what kind of story could have ended that way, but the missing plot remains missing. What endures is the incongruity of laughter after an unspecified conclusion.

The remembered line surfaces again while the speaker recounts an encounter with a woman he once loved. He had gone to her home after facing a choice about whether to meet her. They shared drinks, talked, and listened to old records. The story pauses over his childhood fragment before returning to the evening, so the remembered ending hangs between the reunion and what followed rather than explaining either one.

An encounter that cannot be repeated

The former lovers held each other, but did not have sex. The speaker did not take off her clothes; instead, he touched her with his fingers, as he had in the old days. He says they both seemed to arrive at the same decision and sat together touching for a long time. This restraint makes the reunion intimate without making it a return to their former relationship.

He contrasts their present with the life they might once have had. Long ago, they would have had sex and grown closer; they might even have ended up happy. But that possibility, he says, had already passed and was sealed away, frozen solid, never to open again. The image of something frozen gives the lost future a physical finality: affection remains, while the life it might once have produced is no longer available.

A refrain for sadness and comedy

After telling the story, the speaker repeats the fairy-tale line, explaining that it always comes to him when he remembers what happened, like a conditioned reflex. He believes that very sad things contain an element of the comical. The line does not turn the reunion into a joke or supply a moral; its odd burst of laughter instead registers the dissonance between the story’s pain and the image his memory attaches to it.

The framing narrator cannot laugh at the story, and says he still cannot. The contrast between the speaker’s recurring comic refrain and the narrator’s silence preserves the sadness rather than resolving it. In the closing reflection, the narrator rejects a moral or lesson, emphasizing that the episode happened to the speaker and, in a broader sense, to everyone involved. The line’s force lies in that unresolved double register: laughter remains in memory, but it does not cancel grief.