Tyll Read online

  No one moves. Dr. van Haag looks at the guards; the guards look at Dr. Tesimond.

  “Perhaps it is thirst for glory,” says Dr. Tesimond. “Perhaps something worse. Time will tell.”

  Laughter goes through the crowd. Dr. van Haag takes another step back and puts his hand on the hilt of his sword. He really could have escaped, for the guards are neither fast nor brave, but now Master Tilman is standing beside him and shaking his head.

  That’s all it takes. Master Tilman is very tall and very broad, and his face all at once looks different than it did just a moment ago. Dr. van Haag lets go of the sword. One of the guards grasps him by the wrist, takes the sword, and leads him to the shed with the iron-reinforced door.

  “I protest!” says Dr. van Haag, as he goes along without resistance. “A man of rank must not be treated like this.”

  “Permit me, dear colleague, to promise you that your rank will not be forgotten.”

  While walking, Dr. van Haag turns around once more. He opens his mouth, but he seems suddenly to have no strength. He has been completely taken by surprise. Now the door is opening with a creak, and he disappears into the shed along with the guard. A short time passes. Then the guard comes back out, closes the door, and secures the two bolts.

  Dr. Kircher’s heart is pounding. He feels dizzy with pride. It’s not the first time he has watched someone underestimate his master’s determination. You are not the sole survivor of the Gunpowder Plot for no reason; you do not become one of the most famous religious witnesses in the Society of Jesus just like that. Time and again there are people who don’t know whom they are dealing with. But without fail they find out.

  “This is the great trial,” Dr. Tesimond says to Peter Steger. “This is not the time for milking cows. If your cattle’s udders are hurting, then they are hurting for God’s cause.”

  “I understand,” says Peter Steger.

  “Do you really understand?”

  “Really. Yes, yes, I understand.”

  “And you, miller. We have read out your confession. Now we want to hear it, loud and clear: Is it true? Did you do it? Do you repent?”

  It grows quiet. Only the wind can be heard and the mooing of the cows. A cloud has drifted in front of the sun; to Dr. Kircher’s relief, the play of light in the crown of the tree has ceased. Now, however, the branches are rustling and whispering and hissing in the wind. It has grown cold. Probably it will soon rain again. Even the execution of this warlock won’t do any good against the bad weather, for there are too many evil people, all of whom together are to blame for the cold and the failed harvests and the scarcity of everything in these final years before the end of the world. But one does what one can. Even if one is fighting a losing battle. One holds out, defends the remaining positions and waits for the day when God will return in glory.

  “Miller,” Dr. Tesimond repeats. “You must say it, before all the people here. Is it true? Did you do it?”

  “May I ask a question?”

  “No. You shall only answer. Is it true? Did you do it?”

  The miller looks around like someone who doesn’t know exactly where he is. But this too is probably a feint. Dr. Kircher knows well that one mustn’t fall for it, for behind these apparently lost people the old adversary is hiding, ready to kill and to destroy wherever he can. If only the branches would quit making their noises. The rustling wind is suddenly even worse than the flickering light was. And if only the cows would be quiet!

  Master Tilman steps beside the miller and puts his hand on his shoulder as if they were old friends. The miller looks at him. Since he’s shorter than the executioner, his gaze goes upward like that of a child. Master Tilman bends down and says something in his ear. The miller nods as if he understood. There’s an intimacy between the two of them that confuses Dr. Kircher. This is probably due to the fact that he is not paying attention and is looking in the wrong direction, directly into the eyes of the boy.

  The boy has climbed onto the balladeer’s wagon. There he stands, elevated above everyone, on the edge of the wagon, and it’s strange that he doesn’t fall. How is he keeping his balance up there? Dr. Kircher can’t help smiling tensely. The boy doesn’t smile back. Involuntarily Dr. Kircher wonders whether the child too has been touched by Satan, yet in the interrogation there was no sign of it. The wife wept a great deal, the boy was withdrawn into himself, but both of them said everything that was necessary. All at once Dr. Kircher is no longer certain. Were they too careless? The feints of the Lord of the Air are manifold. What if the miller is not the worst warlock at all? Dr. Kircher feels a suspicion stirring in him.

  “Did you do it?” Dr. Tesimond asks once again.

  The executioner backs away. All listen attentively, stand on tiptoe, lift their heads. Even the wind subsides for a moment as Claus Ulenspiegel draws a breath to finally answer.

  III

  He didn’t know such good food existed. Never in his life has he encountered anything like it: first a hearty chicken soup with freshly baked wheat bread, then a leg of lamb, spiced with salt and even pepper, then the loin of a fat pig with sauce, finally sweet cherry cake, still warm from the oven, with a strong red wine rising like fog to his head. They must have brought a cook from somewhere. As Claus eats at his small table in the cowshed and feels his stomach filling up with warm, fine things, he thinks that a meal like this is ultimately even worth dying for.

  He believed the hangman’s meal was only a figure of speech, never suspecting that a cook was actually called to prepare you food better than any you’d had in your whole life. With your arms chained together it’s hard to hold the meat, the iron chafes, your wrists are sore, but at the moment it doesn’t matter, so good does it taste. And on the whole his hands no longer hurt as much as a week ago. Master Tilman is also a master of healing; Claus has to admit without envy that the executioner knows herbs he has never heard of. Nonetheless, the feeling hasn’t returned to his crushed fingers, and so the meat keeps falling to the ground. He closes his eyes. He hears the chickens scratching in the coop next door, he hears the snoring of the man with the expensive clothing who wanted to be his advocate and is now lying chained up in the straw. As he chews the wonderful pork, he tries to conceive of the fact that he will never learn the outcome of this man’s trial.

  For he will be dead by then. Nor will he learn what the weather will be like the day after tomorrow. He will be dead by then. Or whether it will rain again tomorrow night. But it doesn’t matter anyway, who cares about the rain.

  Only it really is odd: Now you’re still sitting here and can rattle off all the numbers between one and a thousand, but the day after tomorrow you will be either an ethereal being or else a soul that returns to the world in a person or animal and hardly remembers the miller you still are—but when you are some weasel or a chicken or a sparrow on a branch and don’t even know that you were once a miller who concerned himself with the heavenly course of the moon, indeed, when you are hopping from branch to branch and thinking only about seeds and of course the buzzards you have to escape, what meaning does it actually still have that you were formerly a miller whom you have now completely forgotten?

  He remembers that Master Tilman told him he could have more at any time. Just call, let me know, you can have as much as you want, because afterward there won’t be anything else.

  So Claus tries it. He calls. He calls while chewing, for he still has meat on his plate, and there’s still cake too, but when you can have more, why wait until everything is gone and until the people outside might change their minds? He calls again, and the door really does open.

  “Can I have more?”

  “Of everything?”

  “Of everything please.”

  Master Tilman walks out silently, and Claus tucks into the cake. And while he is chewing up the warm, soft, sweet mass, it suddenly b
ecomes clear to him that he has always been hungry: day and night, evening and morning. Only he no longer knew it was hunger—that feeling of dissatisfaction, the hollowness in everything, the never-abating weakness of the body, which makes the knees and the hands limp and confuses the head. It wasn’t necessary, it didn’t have to be like that, it was just hunger!

  The door opens with a creak, and Master Tilman carries in a tray with bowls. Claus sighs with pleasure. Master Tilman, misunderstanding the sigh, sets down the tray and puts his hand on his shoulder.

  “It will be all right,” he says.

  “I know,” says Claus.

  “It happens very quickly. I can do that. I promise you.”

  “Thank you,” says Claus.

  “Sometimes the condemned anger me. Then it doesn’t happen quickly. Believe me. But you haven’t angered me.”

  Claus nods gratefully.

  “These are better days. In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you’re standing before the Creator. You’re incinerated afterward, but by then you’re dead, it doesn’t bother you at all, you’ll see.”

  “Good,” says Claus.

  The two of them look at each other. Master Tilman seems not to want to go. You might think he liked it in the shed.

  “You’re not a bad fellow,” says Master Tilman.

  “Thank you.”

  “For a servant of the devil.”

  Claus shrugs.

  Master Tilman walks out and laboriously bolts the door.

  Claus continues to eat. Again he tries to imagine it: the houses out there, the birds in the sky, the clouds, the brownish green ground with grass and fields and all the molehills in spring, for you’ll never get rid of the moles, not with any herb or spell, and the rain, of course—all this going on without him.

  Only he can’t imagine it.

  For whenever he pictures a world without Claus Ulenspiegel, his imagination smuggles back in the very Claus Ulenspiegel it is meant to remove—as an invisible man, an eye without a body, a ghost. But when he really thinks himself utterly away, then the world he would like to imagine without Claus Ulenspiegel vanishes with him. However often he tries it, it’s always the same thing. May he conclude from this that he is safe? For he cannot be gone at all, because the world ultimately must not vanish and because without him it would have to vanish?

  The pork still tastes wonderful, but, he notices now, Master Tilman didn’t bring more cake, and because the cake was the best of all, Claus gives it a try and calls once again.

  The executioner comes in.

  “Can I have more cake?”

  Master Tilman doesn’t reply and goes out. Claus chews the pork. Now that his hunger is sated, he realizes all the more how good it tastes, how fine and rich, how warm and salty, and a bit sweet too. He contemplates the wall of the shed. If you paint a square on it shortly before midnight and also draw two double circles with some blood on the ground and invoke three times the third of the secret names of the Almighty, then a door will appear, and you can slip away. The only problem would be the chains, for to cast them off you would need horsetail extract; and so he would have to flee in chains and find horsetail on the way, but Claus is tired, and his body hurts, and it’s also not the season for horsetail.

  And it’s difficult to begin anew elsewhere. In the past it would have been possible, but now he is older and no longer has the strength to be a dishonorable traveling journeyman again, a despised day laborer on the outskirts of some village, a stranger shunned by everyone. You couldn’t even work as a healer, because that would attract attention.

  No, it’s easier to be hanged. And if it should be that after death you can remember what was before, then this could advance your knowledge of the world further than any ten years of research and exploration. Perhaps afterward he will understand the principles behind the course of the moon, perhaps also grasp at which grain a heap ceases to be a heap, possibly even see what distinguishes two leaves between which there’s no difference but the fact that they are indeed two and not one. Perhaps it’s due to the wine and the warm comfort enveloping Claus for the first time in his life—whatever the reason, he no longer wants out. Let the wall stay where it is.

  The door is unbolted. Master Tilman brings cake. “But that’s it now, I’m not coming again.” He pats Claus on the shoulder. He likes to do that, probably because he is forbidden ever to touch people outside. Then he yawns, walks out, and slams the door so loudly that the sleeping man wakes up.

  He sits up, stretches, and looks around in all directions. “Where’s the old woman?”

  “In a different shed,” says Claus. “Fortunately. She moans incessantly, it’s unbearable.”

  “Give me wine!”

  Claus looks at him in fright. He wants to reply that this is his wine, all his alone, that he has honestly earned it, for he must die for it. But then he feels sorry for the man, who doesn’t have it easy either, after all, and so he passes him the jug. The man grabs it and takes big gulps. Stop, Claus wants to cry, I won’t get any more! Yet he cannot bring himself to do it, for this is a man of rank; you don’t give someone like that commands. The wine runs down his chin and makes stains on his velvet collar, but it doesn’t seem to trouble him, so thirsty is he.

  Finally he puts down the jug and says: “My God, that’s good wine!”

  “Yes, yes,” says Claus, “very good.” He fervently hopes that the man doesn’t want the cake too.

  “Now that no one can hear us, tell me the truth. Were you in league with the devil?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “How can someone not know that?”

  Claus reflects. It’s obvious that he did something wrong in his stupid head, or else he wouldn’t be here. But he doesn’t really know what it was. He was interrogated for so long, again and again, in so much pain, he had to retell his story so many times, each time something else was missing, he always had to add something, another demon that had to be described, another conjuration, another dark book, another Sabbath, so that Master Tilman would let him be, and then he had to retell these new details too again and again, so that he no longer really knows what he had to make up and what actually happened in his short life, where there had not been much order anyhow: now he was here, now there, then somewhere else, and then he was suddenly in the flour dust, and his wife was dissatisfied, and the mill hands had no respect, and now he is in chains, and that was everything already. Just as the cake is about to be finished—three or four more bites, perhaps five, if he has only very little each time.

  “I don’t know,” he says again.

  “Damned misfortune,” the man says, looking at the cake.

  In fright Claus takes all that’s left and swallows it without chewing. The cake filling his throat, he swallows as hard as he can: it’s gone. So that was it with food. Forever.

  “Sir,” says Claus, to show that he knows what is proper. “What’s going to happen to you now?”

  “Hard to predict. Once you’re in, it’s not easy to get out. They will bring me to the city, then they will interrogate me. I will have to confess something.” With a sigh, he gazes at his hands. He is obviously thinking of the executioner; everyone knows that he always starts with the fingers.

  “Sir,” Claus says again. “If you imagine a heap of grain.”

  “What?”

  “You keep taking one away and putting it to the side.”

  “What?”

  “Always just one. When is it no longer a heap?”

  “After twelve thousand grains.”

  Claus rubs his forehead. His chains rattle. He feels the imprint of the leather band on his forehead. It was hellish agony, he still
remembers every second he howled and begged, but Master Tilman loosened it only when he invented and described another Witches’ Sabbath. “Twelve thousand exactly?”

  “Naturally,” says the man. “Do you think I can get a meal like that too? There must be something left. This is all a great injustice. I shouldn’t be here. I only wanted to defend you to write about it in my book. I finished the study of crystals. Now I wanted to take up law. But my situation has nothing to do with you. Perhaps you are in league with the devil, what do I know, perhaps you really are! Perhaps you’re not.” He is silent for a short time. Then he calls Master Tilman in an imperious tone.

  This won’t go well, thinks Claus, who knows the executioner fairly well by now. He sighs. Now he would like to have some more wine to keep the sadness from returning, but he was clearly told there was no more.

  The door is unbolted. Master Tilman looks in.

  “Bring me some of this meat,” the man says without looking at him. “And wine. The jug is empty.”

  “Will you be dead tomorrow too?” asks Master Tilman.

  “This is a misunderstanding,” the man says hoarsely, acting as if he were speaking to Claus, for it’s better even to talk to a condemned warlock than to an executioner. “And it’s a nasty affront too, for which some people are going to pay.”

  “If you will be alive tomorrow, you don’t get a hangman’s meal,” says Master Tilman. He puts his hand on Claus’s shoulder. “Listen,” he says softly. “When you’re standing under the gallows tomorrow—don’t forget that you have to forgive everyone.”

  Claus nods.

  “The judges,” says Master Tilman. “And you have to forgive me too.”