Tyll Page 15

  What sounded like a commonplace was the truth. It was not an easy story to tell. Not for him, at least. From the instant he rode out of the forest on the hill and looked across the river valley and saw the Kaiser’s army stretching to the horizon with its cannon emplacements, entrenched musketeers, and the pikemen standing in orderly groups of a hundred, whose pikes seemed to him a second forest, he felt as if he were experiencing something that did not belong in reality. The fact that so many people could come together in formation seemed so weighty that everything was thrown off balance. The fat count had to seize the mane of the horse to keep from sliding off.

  Only then did it become clear to him that he had not only the imperial army before his eyes. To their right the slope fell away sharply. Below it was a wide road on which, silent and without music, so that only the hooves on the stone could be heard, the cavalry of the united crowns of France and Sweden was approaching: one rank behind the other, heading toward a single small bridge.

  And at that moment it happened that this very bridge, which had just a second ago still stood there so solidly, dissolved into a small cloud. The fat count almost had to laugh at this magic trick. Bright smoke rose, the bridge was gone, and only now, when the smoke had already begun to drift away in the wind, did the bang reach them. How beautiful, the fat count thought and immediately felt ashamed and a moment later thought again, as if in defiance: No, that was beautiful.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Karl von Doder.

  Too late. Time, like rapids, was carrying them along. Over on the other side of the river, small clouds were rising, a few dozen, white and shimmering. Our cannons, thought the fat count, that’s them, our Kaiser’s artillery, yet even before he had finished the thought, more clouds rose from where the musketeers were standing, tiny but countless ones, for a moment still sharply divided from each other, then quickly mixing together into a single cloud, and now the noise came rolling, and the fat count heard the shots ring out, the steam of which he had just seen, and next he saw the enemy’s horsemen, who were still advancing on the river, perform the strangest trick. Swaths were all at once cut in their ranks, one here, another right next to it, one at some distance. While he was still straining his eyes to grasp what he was seeing, he heard a noise like nothing he had ever heard before, a screaming from the air. Franz Kärrnbauer threw himself from his horse; surprised, the fat count watched him rolling through the grass and wondered whether he shouldn’t do the same, but the horse was high and the ground was covered with hard stones. Now Karl von Doder did it first. Only he didn’t jump in one direction but in two, as if he hadn’t been able to decide and had taken both opportunities.

  At first the fat count thought that he must have been dreaming, yet then he saw that Karl von Doder was indeed lying in two places: one part to the right of his horse, the other to the left, and the one on the right was still moving. A disgust of monstrous proportions overcame the fat count, and then, to crown it all, he remembered the goose that Franz Kärrnbauer had shot dead days ago; he thought of how he had seen its head explode, and comprehended that he had been so shocked because that event had heralded this one, against the current of time. In the meantime the question of whether he should get off his horse or not had been rendered irrelevant; his horse had lain down, just like that, and when he hit the ground sideways, he noticed that it had begun to rain again, but it was not the usual rain, not water, that made the earth spray, rather invisible flails were threshing the ground. He saw Franz Kärrnbauer crawling on his belly, he saw a horse’s hoof lying in the grass with no horse attached to it, he saw Konrad Purner riding down the slope, he saw that the smoke was now coiling around the ranks of imperial soldiers on the other side of the river too, which he had just a moment ago still been able to make out so clearly. They were gone. In just one place the wind swept away the thick smoke and revealed the men crouching between their pikes, who now stood up, all at the same moment, and with raised weapons walked backward like a single man—how did they make their movements correspond so perfectly? Apparently they were backing away from the cavalry, which was now coming through the water after all. The river seemed to be boiling, horses were rearing, horsemen were falling, but other horsemen reached the riverbank. The water had turned red, and the pikemen walking backward disappeared in thick smoke.

  He looked around. The grass stood calmly. The fat count struggled to his feet. His legs obeyed him, only he couldn’t feel his right hand. When he held it in front of his face, he noticed that a finger was missing. He counted again. Indeed, four fingers, something was wrong, one was missing, it was supposed to be five, it was four. He spat blood on the ground. He had to go back into the forest. Only in the forest was there cover, only in—

  Shapes assembled themselves, colorful surfaces emerged, and as it became clear to the fat count that he must have fainted and was now coming to, a painful memory seized him, rising as if out of the void. He thought of a girl he had loved at the age of nineteen; at that time she had laughed at him, yet here she was again, and the knowledge that they would never be reunited filled every fiber of his being with sadness. Above him he saw the sky. Far and full of frayed clouds. Someone bent down over him. He didn’t know him—yes, he did know him, now he recognized him.

  “Stand up!”

  The fat count squinted.

  Ulenspiegel drew back his arm and slapped his face.

  The fat count stood up. His cheek hurt. His hand hurt even more. The missing finger hurt most of all. Over there lay what was left of Karl von Doder, next to that lay two horses, and nearby was the dead Konrad Purner. Fog hung in the distance, flashes flaring in it. Horsemen were still trotting closer, a swath opened up and closed again—that must have been the work of the twelve-pounder. Horsemen were swarming along the river and impeding each other and brandishing whips, horses were splashing into the water, men were bellowing—but he could tell only by the fact that their mouths were moving, he could not hear them. The river was full of horses and people, more and more of them made it to the riverbank and disappeared in the thick smoke.

  Ulenspiegel set off, the fat count following him. The forest was only a few paces away. Ulenspiegel began to run. The fat count ran after him.

  The grass sprayed up beside him. Again he heard the scream from earlier, ringing through the air, ringing next to him. Something hit the ground and rolled toward the river with a roar. How can anyone live, he thought, how can anyone stand it when the air is full of metal? At that moment Ulenspiegel threw his arms outward and hurled himself, chest first, onto the meadow.

  The fat count bent down over him. Ulenspiegel lay motionless. The back of his cowl was torn, blood was flowing out, he was already lying in a pool of it. The fat count backed away and started to run, but he stumbled and fell down. He struggled to his feet, ran again. Someone was running next to him, the grass was again sprayed up by bullets—why were they shooting in this direction, why not at the enemy, why so wide of the mark, and who was running here at his side? The fat count turned his head.

  “Don’t stop,” Ulenspiegel hissed.

  They ran into the forest. The trees stifled the thunder. The fat count wanted to stop, he had stabbing pains in his chest, but Ulenspiegel grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the underbrush. There they crouched down. For a while they listened to the cannons. Ulenspiegel carefully took off the torn cowl. The fat count looked at his back: the shirt was smeared with blood, but there was no wound to be seen.

  “I don’t understand it,” said the fat count.

  “You have to tie off your hand.” Ulenspiegel tore a strip from the cloak and wrapped it around the fat count’s arm.

  Even then he sensed that all this would have to be told differently in his book one day. He would not succeed in any description, for everything would elude him, and the sentences he would be able to form would not match the pictures in his memory.

  And indeed: tha
t which had happened did not even appear in his dreams. Only occasionally did he recognize in what seemed utterly different dream events a distant echo of those moments when he had come under fire at the edge of Streitheim Forest near Zusmarshausen.

  Years later he questioned the unfortunate Count Gronsfeld, whom the Bavarian Elector had had summarily arrested after the defeat. Toothless, weary, and coughing, the former commander of the Bavarian troops named the names and places, he described the strength of the various units and drew deployment maps so that the fat count managed to some extent to account for roughly where he had been and what had befallen him and his companions. Yet the sentences refused to fall into line. And so he stole others.

  In a popular novel he found a description he liked, and when people urged him to recount the last battle of the great German war, he told them what he had read in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus. It didn’t quite fit, because that passage was about the Battle of Wittstock, but it didn’t bother anyone, no one ever raised any questions. What the fat count could not have known, however, was that Grimmelshausen, though he did experience the Battle of Wittstock firsthand, had himself been unable to describe it and instead had stolen the sentences of an English novel translated by Martin Opitz, the author of which had never witnessed a battle in his life.

  In his book the fat count then also briefly depicted the night in the forest, when the fool, all at once becoming talkative, had told him about his time at the court of the Winter King in The Hague and about how he had been buried alive three years ago during the Siege of Brno. First he had been in the town commandant’s bad graces because of a remark about his face, so that the man had stuck him with the miners, and then the shaft had caved in over his unit—here, the scar on his forehead, he got it there. He had been confined in the darkness, deep down, no way out, no air, yet then wondrously saved. It had been an incredible and wild story, the fat count wrote, and the fact that he then abruptly changed the subject, and did not elaborate on how the miraculous salvation under Brno had actually taken place, would later arouse the bewilderment and anger of many a reader.

  Ulenspiegel, in any case, was a good storyteller, better than the abbot and better than the fat count too, and his stories distracted the fat count from the throbbing pain in his hand. Don’t worry, said the fool, that night the wolves would find enough to eat.

  At the first morning light they set off. They avoided the battlefield, from which a smell wafted to them that the fat count never could have imagined. Then they traversed Schlipsheim, Hainhofen, and Ottmarshausen. Ulenspiegel knew his way around, and he was calm and collected and never once insulted the fat count again.

  The empty landscape had filled up with people. Peasants were pulling their possessions in carts. Scattered soldiers were searching for their units and families. The wounded were squatting on the roadside, in makeshift bandages, staring motionless into space. The two of them passed burning Oberhausen to the west and arrived in Augsburg, where the remnants of the Kaiser’s army had assembled. After the defeat, it was no longer large.

  The camp outside the city stank even worse than the battlefield. Like visions of hell, the deformed bodies, the festering faces, the open wounds, the heaps of excrement burned themselves into the fat count’s memory. I will never be the same again, he thought, as they pushed their way to the city gate, and: they’re only images, they can’t hurt me, they can’t touch me—only images. And he imagined he was someone else who walked invisibly alongside them and didn’t have to see what he saw.

  In the afternoon they reached the gates of the city. Fearfully, the fat count revealed his identity to the guards, and it surprised even him when they believed all he said and let them in without hesitation.

  Kings in Winter

  I

  It was November. The wine supply was exhausted, and because the well in the garden was filthy, they drank nothing but milk. Since they could no longer afford candles, the whole court went to bed in the evening with the sun. The state of affairs was not good, yet there were still princes who would die for Liz. Recently, one of them had been here in The Hague, Christian von Braunschweig, and had promised her to have POUR DIEU ET POUR ELLE embroidered on his standard, and afterward, he had sworn fervently, he would win or die for her. He was an excited hero, so moved by himself that tears came to his eyes. Friedrich had patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, and she had given him her handkerchief, but then he had burst into tears once again, so overwhelmed was he by the thought of possessing a handkerchief of hers. She had given him a royal blessing, and, deeply stirred, he had gone on his way.

  Naturally, he would not accomplish it, neither for God nor for her. This prince had few soldiers and no money, nor was he particularly clever. It would take men of a different caliber to defeat Wallenstein, someone like the Swedish king, say, who had recently come down on the Empire like a storm and had so far won all the battles he had fought. He was the one she should have married long ago, according to Papa’s plans, but he hadn’t wanted her.

  It was almost twenty years ago that she had instead married her poor Friedrich. Twenty German years, a whirl of events and faces and noise and bad weather and even worse food and completely wretched theater.

  She had missed good theater more than anything else, from the beginning, even more than palatable food. In German lands real theater was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled. This was probably due to the cumbersome language. It was no language for theater, it was a brew of groans and harsh grunts, it was a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like a man with beer coming out his nose. What was a poet supposed to do with this language? She had given German literature a try, first that Opitz and then someone else, whose name she had forgotten; she could not commit to memory these people who were always named Krautbacher or Engelkrämer or Kargholzsteingrömpl, and when you had grown up with Chaucer, and John Donne had dedicated verses to you—“fair phoenix bride,” he had called her, “and from thine eye all lesser birds will take their jollity”—then even with the utmost politeness you could not bring yourself to find any merit in all this German bleating.

  She often thought back to the court theater in Whitehall. She thought of the small gestures of the actors, of the long sentences, their ever-varying, nearly musical rhythm, now swift and clattering along, now dying gradually away, now questioning, now bristling with authority. There had been theater performances whenever she came to the court to visit her parents. People stood on the stage and dissembled, but she had grasped at once that this was not so at all and that the dissembling too was merely a mask, for it was not the theater that was false, no, everything else was pretense, disguise, and frippery, everything that was not theater was false. On the stage people were themselves, completely true, fully transparent.

  In real life no one spoke in soliloquies. Everyone kept his thoughts to himself, faces could not be read, everyone dragged the dead weight of his secrets. No one stood alone in his room and spoke aloud about his desires and fears, but when Burbage did so on the stage, in his rasping voice, his very thin fingers at eye level, it seemed unnatural that men should forever conceal what transpired within them. And what words he used! Rich words, rare, shimmering like cloth of gold—sentences so perfectly constructed that they were beyond anything you yourself could ever have managed. This is how things should be, the theater told you, this is how you should talk, how you should hold yourself, how you should feel, this is what it would be like to be a true human being.

  When the performance was over and the applause faded, the actors returned to the state of paltriness. After taking their bows, they stood like extinguished candles. Then they approached, bending down low, Alleyn and Kemp and the great Burbage himself, to kiss Papa’s hand, and if Papa asked them something, they answered like people whom language resisted and to whom no cle
ar sentences occurred. Burbage’s face was waxy and weary, and there was nothing special anymore about his now rather ugly hands. Hard to believe how quickly the spirit of lightness had abandoned him.

  That spirit had itself appeared in one of the plays, which had been performed on Allhallows. It was about an old duke on a magical island, who captured his enemies only to spare them in the end. At the time she had been unable to understand why he had been lenient, and when she thought about it today, she still didn’t understand. If she had Wallenstein or the Kaiser in her power, she would handle things differently! At the conclusion of the play the duke had simply released his ministering spirit, so that he might pass into the clouds, the air, the sunlight, and the blue of the sea, and had remained behind like an old sack of flour, a wrinkly actor who now briefly apologized that he had no more lines. The leading dramatist of the King’s Men had taken on the role himself at the time. He was not one of the great actors, not Kemp and certainly not Burbage. You could even tell by looking at him that he struggled to remember his lines, which none other than he himself had written. After the performance he had kissed her hand with soft lips, and because it had been impressed on her that at such moments she must always ask some question, she had inquired whether he had any children.

  “Two daughters living. And a son.”

  She waited, for now it would be Papa’s turn to say something. But Papa was silent. The dramatist looked at her. She looked at him, her heart beginning to pound. All the people in the room were waiting, all the lords with their silk collars, all the ladies with diadems and fans—they were looking at her. And she realized that she had to keep talking. This was just how Papa was. When you were counting on him, he left you in the lurch. She cleared her throat to gain time. But you don’t gain much time by clearing your throat. You can’t clear your throat for very long, it hardly gets you anywhere.