Tyll Read online

  Nele nodded, and so they became acquainted for the first time with Gottfried’s paltry talent. “The Great Litany of the Campaign of Duke Ernest Against the Treacherous Sultan” had thirty-three verses, and although Gottfried could do little else, he did have an outstanding memory and had forgotten not a single one.

  Thus they traveled for a long time. The singer sang, the horse grunted from time to time, and the wheels rumbled and squealed as if they were carrying on a conversation with each other. Nele saw out of the corner of her eye that tears were running down the boy’s face. He had turned his head away so that no one would notice.

  When Gottfried was finished with his song, he started from the beginning. Next he sang them a ballad about the handsome Elector Friedrich and the Bohemian estates, next he sang about the evil dragon Kufer and the knight Robert, next about the wicked king in France and the great king in Spain, his enemy. Then he told stories from his life. His father was an executioner, so he was supposed to become an executioner too. But he ran away.

  “Like us,” said Nele.

  “Many people do it, more than you think! It is part of an upstanding life to stay put, but the land is full of people who didn’t stay put. They have no protection, but they are free. They don’t have to string anyone up. They don’t have to kill anyone.”

  “Don’t have to marry the Steger son,” said Nele.

  “Don’t have to be day laborers,” said the boy.

  They heard how Gottfried had fared in earlier days with his master. Vogtland had often struck him and kicked him and once even bit him in the ear because he didn’t hit the right notes and could also hardly play the lute with his thick fingers. Poor idiot, Vogtland exclaimed, didn’t want to be a hangman, now you torture people ten times over with your music! But then Vogtland didn’t drive him away after all, and so he improved more and more, Gottfried said proudly, until he himself finally became a master. He discovered, however, that people want to hear about executions, everywhere, all the time. No one is indifferent to executions.

  “I know all there is to know about executions. How to hold the sword, how to position the knot, how to stack a pyre, and the best place to apply the hot tongs—I know everything about that. Other singers might have smoother rhymes, but I can tell which hangman knows his trade and which doesn’t, and my ballads are the most accurate.”

  When it grew dark, they lit a fire. Gottfried shared his provisions with them: dry flatbread, which Nele immediately recognized as having been made by her father. Her eyes briefly welled up with tears too, for at the sight of this bread with the cross pressed into the middle and the crumbling edges it became clear to her that she was in the same situation as the boy. He would never see his father again because he was dead, but she wouldn’t see hers either, because she couldn’t go back. Both of them were now orphans. But the moment passed. She stared into the fire and all at once felt as free as if she could fly.

  The second night in the forest was not as bad as the first. They were now used to the sounds; besides, warmth emanated from the embers, and the singer had given them a blanket. As she was falling asleep, she noticed that Tyll was still awake next to her. He was so wakeful, so attentive, he was thinking so hard that she could feel it. She didn’t dare turn her head in his direction.

  “Someone who carries fire,” he said softly.

  She didn’t know whether he was talking to her. “Are you ill?”

  He seemed to have a fever. She snuggled up to him. Waves of warmth radiated from him, which was pleasant and kept her from freezing so. Thus she fell asleep after a short time and dreamed of a battlefield and thousands of people marching over a hilly landscape, and then the cannons began to hammer. When she woke up, it was morning, and it was raining again.

  The singer was sitting hunched under his blanket, a small writing calendar in one hand and the pencil in the other. He wrote in tiny signs, almost illegibly, for he had only this calendar, and paper was expensive.

  “Versifying is the hardest,” he said. “Do you know a word that rhymes with rogue?”

  But finally he did finish the song of the evil miller, and now they are in the market town, while Gottfried sings and Tyll dances to it, with such lightness and elegance that it surprises even Nele.

  Other wagons are standing here too. On the opposite side of the square is the wagon of a cloth merchant, next to two scissors grinders, next to a fruit merchant, a kettle mender, another scissors grinder, a healer who is in possession of theriac, which can cure any illness, another fruit merchant, a spice merchant, another healer who unfortunately has no theriac and hence is left empty-handed, a fourth scissors grinder, and a barber. All these people are in the traveling trades. Anyone who robs or kills them is not prosecuted. That is the price of freedom.

  At the edge of the square are another few dubious figures. These are the dishonest people, including musicians with fife, bagpipes, and fiddle. They stand far away, yet it seems to Nele as if they were grinning across at her and whispering jokes about Gottfried to each other. Next to them sits a storyteller. You can recognize him by the yellow hat and the blue jerkin and by the sign around his neck on which something is written in big letters that must mean “storyteller,” for only storytellers have signs—senseless though it is, since his audience consists of people who cannot read. You can recognize musicians by their instruments and merchants by their wares, but to recognize a storyteller all it takes is a sign. And then there’s also a man of small stature in the widely recognizable clothing of traveling entertainers: motley jerkin, puffed breeches, fur collar. With a thin smile he too looks across, something worse than mockery is in it, and when he notices that Nele is looking at him, he raises an eyebrow, shows his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and winks.

  Gottfried has reached the twelfth verse for the second time, he concludes his ballad for the second time, considers for a moment, and then starts again from the beginning. Tyll gives Nele a sign. She stands up. She has danced before, of course—at the village festivals, when musicians came and the young people jumped over the fire, and often she also danced with the female hands, just like that, without music, during breaks from work. But she has never done it in front of an audience.

  Yet as she spins first in one direction and then in the other, she realizes that it doesn’t make a difference. She only has to follow Tyll. Whenever the boy claps his hands, she claps too, when he raises his right foot, she raises her right foot, and the left when he raises the left, at first with a slight delay, but soon simultaneously, as if she knew beforehand what he was going to do, as if they were not two people but in dancing became one—and now all at once he pitches forward and dances on his hands, and she spins around him, again and again and again, so that the village square turns into a smear of colors. Dizziness rises in her, but she fights against it and keeps her gaze directed into empty space, it’s getting better already, and she can keep her balance without teetering while she spins.

  For a moment she is confused when the music swells and the tones grow richer, but then she realizes that the musicians have joined in. Playing their instruments, they approach, and Gottfried, who cannot keep their rhythm, helplessly lowers the lute, so that now finally everything sounds right. The people applaud. Coins leap over the wood of the wagon. Tyll is again standing on his feet. Nele stops spinning, suppresses her dizziness, and watches as he knots a rope—where did he get it from so quickly?—to the wagon and then casts it from him so that it unwinds. Someone catches it, she can’t tell who it is because everything is still swaying, someone has fastened it, and now Tyll is standing on the rope and jumping forward and back and bowing, and more coins are flying, and Gottfried can hardly pick them up fast enough. Finally Tyll jumps down and takes her hand, the musicians play a fanfare, the two of them bow, and the people clap and howl. The fruit merchant throws them apples. She catches one and bites into it. She hasn’t eaten
an apple in an eternity. Next to her Tyll catches one too and another and another and then another and juggles them. Again a cheer goes through the crowd.

  When evening falls, they are sitting on the ground and listening to the storyteller. He is speaking of poor King Friedrich of Prague, whose reign lasted only a winter, before the Kaiser’s mighty army drove him out. Now the proud city has been laid low and will never recover. He speaks in long sentences in a liltingly beautiful melody, without moving his hands; with his voice alone he ensures that you won’t look elsewhere. All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true. And Nele, without understanding what that’s supposed to mean, claps.

  Gottfried scrawls in his calendar. He didn’t know, he mutters, that Friedrich was deposed again already; now he has to rewrite his song about him.

  On Nele’s right the fiddler tunes his instrument with his eyes closed in concentration. Now we belong here, she thinks. Now we are among the traveling people.

  Someone taps her on the shoulder. She wheels around.

  Behind her crouches the traveling entertainer who winked at her earlier. He’s no longer so young, and his face is very red. Heinrich Tamm had such a red face shortly before he died. Even his eyes are shot through with red. But they are also sharp and alert and shrewd and unkind.

  “You two,” he says softly.

  Now the boy too turns around.

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Yes,” the boy says without hesitation.

  Nele stares at him uncomprehendingly. Didn’t they want to travel with Gottfried, who is good to them, gives them food, led them out of the forest? Gottfried, who could really use the two of them?

  “I can really use two people like you,” the entertainer says. “You could use someone like me. I’ll teach you everything.”

  “But we’re with him.” Nele points to Gottfried, whose lips are moving as he writes in his little book. The pencil in his hand breaks. He curses softly, keeps scrawling.

  “Then you won’t go far,” says the entertainer.

  “We don’t know you,” says Nele.

  “I am Pirmin,” says the entertainer. “Now you know me.”

  “My name is Tyll. This is Nele.”

  “I won’t ask again. If you’re not sure, never mind. Then I’ll be gone. Then you can go on with him.”

  “We’re coming with you,” says the boy.

  Pirmin extends his hand. Tyll grasps it. Pirmin chuckles, his lips twisting, his thick, moist tongue again becoming visible in the corner of his mouth. Nele is loath to travel with him.

  Now he extends his hand to her.

  She doesn’t move. Behind her the storyteller is speaking of the flight of the Winter King from the burning city—now he is a burden to Europe’s Protestant princes, roams the land with his silly court, still wears purple as if he were one of the great, but the children laugh at him, and the wise men shed tears because they see in him the frailty of all greatness.

  Now Gottfried too has noticed it. With a furrowed brow he looks at the fool’s extended hand.

  “Come on,” says the boy. “Shake his hand.”

  But why should she do what Tyll says? Did she run away in order to obey him instead of her father? What does she owe him, why should he be in charge?

  “What’s wrong?” asks Gottfried. “What’s going on here, what is this?”

  Pirmin’s hand is still extended. His grin too is unchanging, as if her hesitation didn’t mean anything, as if he had long known what she will decide.

  “Well, what’s this all about?” Gottfried asks again.

  The hand is fleshy and soft. Nele doesn’t want to touch it. It’s true, of course, that Gottfried can’t do much. But he has been good to them. And she doesn’t like this fellow. There is something not right about him. On the other hand, it’s true, of course: Gottfried will not be able to teach them anything.

  On the one hand, on the other hand. Pirmin winks as if he were reading her thoughts.

  Tyll jerks his head impatiently. “Come on, Nele!”

  She need only extend her arm.

  Zusmarshausen

  He could not have known, of course, the fat count wrote in his life’s chronicle, penned in the early years of the eighteenth century, when he was already an old man, plagued by gout, syphilis, and the quicksilver poisoning that the treatment of the syphilis brought him—he could not have known, of course, what awaited him when His Majesty dispatched him in the final year of the war to find the famous jester.

  At that time Martin von Wolkenstein was not yet twenty-five but already corpulent. As a descendant of the minnesinger Oswald, he had grown up at the Viennese court. His father had once been chief chamberlain under Kaiser Matthias, his grandfather second key bearer of the mad Rudolf. Whoever knew Martin von Wolkenstein liked him; there was something bright surrounding him, a confidence and a friendliness that never failed him, even in the face of adversity. The Kaiser himself had shown him his favor several times, and he had also understood it as a show of favor when Count Trauttmansdorff, the President of the Privy Council, had summoned him and informed him that the Kaiser had heard that the most famous jester in the Empire had found refuge in the half-destroyed Abbey of Andechs. They had seen so much go to ruin, had been forced to allow so much destruction, invaluable things had been lost, but that someone like Tyll Ulenspiegel should simply waste away, whether Protestant or Catholic—for what he actually was, no one seemed to know—that was out of the question.

  “I congratulate you, young man,” said Trauttmansdorff. “Take advantage of the occasion, who knows what could come of it.”

  Then, as the fat count described it more than fifty years later, he had held out his gloved hand to him for the kiss that was at the time still prescribed by court ceremony—and that was exactly how it had been, he had made up none of it, even though he gladly made things up when there were gaps in his memory, and there were a lot of those, for all this was, by the time he was writing it down, a lifetime ago.

  The very next day we ventured forth, he wrote. I rode in good spirits and full of hope, yet not without melancholy, because, for reasons that even now remain obscure unto my understanding, I could not look upon the path before me as one foreordained, eager though I was to behold the undisguised countenance of the red god Mars.

  It was not true about the haste; in actuality more than a week had passed. After all, he had still had to write letters conveying his plans, had to say his goodbyes, visit his parents, be blessed by the bishop; he had to drink with his friends once more, had to call once more on his favorite among the court prostitutes, the dainty Aglaia, whom he still remembered decades later with a remorse he himself could not fathom; and of course he had to select the right companions. He chose three battle-tested men from the Lobkowitz dragoon regiment along with a secretary of the Imperial Court Council, Karl von Doder, who had seen the famous jester twenty years earlier at a market near Neulengbach, where the man, as was his way, played a very dirty trick on a woman in the audience and afterward provoked a bad knife fight, to the delight, naturally, of those who were not affected by it, for so it always was when he appeared: Some fared badly, but those who got away enjoyed themselves immensely. At first the secretary didn’t want to come with him. He argued and begged and pleaded and cited an unconquerable abhorrence of violence and of bad weather, but all to no avail. An order was an order; he had to do as he was told. Slightly over a week after the mission was assigned, the fat count thus set off westward with his dragoons and the secretary from the capital city and imperial residence of Vienna.

  In his life’s chronicle, the style of which was still beholden to the fashionable tone of his youthful days, that is, of erudite arabesque and florid ornamentation, the fat count depicted in sentences that, precisely due to their exemplary tortuousness, have since found th
eir way into many a schoolbook, the leisurely ride through the green of the Vienna Woods: At Melk we reached the wide blue of the Danube, alighting there at the magnificent abbey to pillow our weary heads for the night.

  Once again this was not entirely true; in reality they stayed for a month. His uncle was the prior, and so they ate splendidly and slept well. Karl von Doder, who had always been interested in alchemy, spent many days in the library, absorbed in a book by the sage Athanasius Kircher, the dragoons played cards with the lay brothers, and with his uncle the fat count completed several chess games of such sublime perfection as he would never again attain; it almost seemed to him later as if his subsequent experiences stifled his gift for playing chess. Only during the fourth week of their stay did a letter find him, sent by Count Trauttmansdorff, who believed him to be already at the destination and asked whether they had found Ulenspiegel in Andechs and when their return was to be expected.

  His uncle blessed him in parting. The abbot gave him a vial of consecrated oil. They followed the course of the Danube to Pöchlarn, thence turning southwest.

  At the beginning of their journey they encountered a steady stream of merchants, vagabonds, monks, and travelers of all sorts. But now the land seemed empty. Even the weather was no longer congenial. Cold winds blew, trees spread bare limbs, almost all the fields lay fallow. The few people they saw were old: hunched women at wells, old men who crouched haggard outside huts, hollow-cheeked faces on the roadside. Nothing indicated whether these people were only resting or rather waiting for their end.

  When the fat count spoke to Karl von Doder about it, he only wanted to talk about the book he had been studying in the abbey library, Ars magna lucis et umbrae. You became quite dizzy, you gazed, so to speak, into an abyss of erudition—and no, he had no idea where the younger people were, but if he might venture to surmise, then anyone who could still run had long since run away. But that book expatiated upon lenses and how one could magnify things and moreover upon angels, their form, their color, and upon music and the harmonies of the spheres, and finally upon Egypt too—by God, it was a very peculiar work.