Tyll Page 2

  He neither teetered nor tried to find his balance—he simply walked. His arms swinging, he walked the way you walk on the ground, except it looked a bit mincing how he always set one foot precisely in front of the other. You had to look closely to notice how he absorbed the swaying of the rope with small movements of his hips. He took a leap and bent his knees for only a moment when he landed. Then he strolled, his hands folded behind his back, to the middle. The sparrow took off, but it only beat its wings a few times and perched again and turned its head; all was so quiet that we could hear it cheeping and peeping. And of course we heard our cows.

  Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly—not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with his right foot lengthwise on the rope, his left crosswise, his knees slightly bent and his fists on his hips. And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.

  “Take off your shoes!”

  We didn’t know whether we had heard him correctly.

  “Take them off,” he shouted. “Everyone, your right shoe. Don’t ask, do it, it will be a lark. Trust me, take them off. Old and young, woman and man! Everyone. Your right shoe.”

  We stared at him.

  “Haven’t you been enjoying it so far? Don’t you want more? I’ll show you more, take off your shoes, everyone, your right shoe, go on!”

  It took us a while to get moving. That’s how it always is with us, we’re unhurried people. The first to obey was the baker, followed by Malte Schopf and then Karl Lamm and then his wife, and then the craftsmen who always thought they were better than everyone else obeyed, and then we all did, every one of us, with the exception of Martha. Tine Krugmann next to her nudged her and pointed to her right foot, but Martha shook her head, and Tyll Ulenspiegel on the rope took another leap, striking his feet together in the air. He jumped so high that he had to spread his arms when he landed to find his balance—only very briefly, but it was enough to remind us that even he had weight and couldn’t fly.

  “And now throw,” he cried with a high, clear voice. “Don’t think, don’t ask, don’t hesitate, this will be a great lark. Do what I say. Throw!”

  Tine Krugmann was the first to do it. Her shoe flew, rising higher and disappearing in the crowd. Then the next shoe flew, it was Susanne Schopf’s, and then the next, and then dozens flew and then even more and more and more. We all laughed and screamed and shouted: “Watch out!” and “Duck!” and “Heads up!” It was terrific entertainment, and it didn’t matter that some of the shoes hit people’s heads. Curses rang out, a few women scolded, a few children wept, but it wasn’t bad, and Martha even had to laugh when a heavy leather boot only barely missed her, while a woven slipper sailed through the air to land at her feet. He had been right, and some even found it so exhilarating that they threw their left shoes too. And some also threw hats and spoons and jugs, which shattered somewhere, and of course a few threw stones too. But when his voice spoke to us, the noise faded away, and we listened.

  “You idiots.”

  We squinted. The sun was low in the sky. Those at the back of the square could see him clearly, while for the rest he was only a silhouette.

  “You half-wits. You crumb-heads. You tadpoles. You good-for-nothing beetle-brained oafs. Now fetch them again.”

  We stared.

  “Or are you too stupid? Is the word fetch too much to penetrate your skulls?” He let out a bleating laugh. The sparrow took off, soared over the roofs, was gone.

  We looked at each other. We had been derided, but then again his rude mockery was not so sharp that it couldn’t have been meant in jest. He was famous, after all, he could take that liberty.

  “Well, what is it?” he asked. “Don’t you need them anymore? Don’t you want them anymore? Don’t you like them anymore? You dolts, fetch your shoes!”

  Malte Schopf was the first. He had felt ill at ease the whole time, and so he now ran to where he thought his shoe had flown. He pushed people aside, forcing and jostling his way through the crowd, bending over and rooting around between their legs. On the other side of the square Karl Schönknecht did the same, followed by Elsbeth, the widow of the smith, but old Lembke blocked her and shouted at her to be off, that was his daughter’s shoe. Elsbeth, whose forehead was still hurting from being hit by a boot, shouted back that he was the one who should be off, because she could certainly still recognize her own shoe, Lembke’s daughter by no means had such beautifully embroidered shoes as she did, whereupon old Lembke screamed at her to get out of his way and not to disparage his daughter, whereupon she in turn screamed that he was a stinking shoe thief. Here Lembke’s son intervened: “I’m warning you!” At the same time Lise Schoch and the miller’s wife began to quarrel, because their shoes really did look alike, and their feet were the same size, and Karl Lamm and his brother-in-law also exchanged loud words, and Martha suddenly grasped what was happening here, and she crouched down on the ground and started to crawl.

  Above her there was now shoving, rebuking, and jostling. A few, who had found their shoes quickly, slipped away, but among the rest of us a rage broke out with the force of long-pent-up grievance. The carpenter Moritz Blatt and the blacksmith Simon Kern pummeled each other so ferociously that someone who thought they were fighting over shoes could not have understood, since he would not have known that Moritz’s wife had been promised to Simon as a child. Both were bleeding from nose and mouth, both were panting like horses, and no one dared break them up. Lore Pilz and Elsa Kohlschmitt were locked in terrible combat too, but then they had hated each other for so long that even they had forgotten why. It was very well known, however, why the Semmler family and the people from the Grünanger house lashed out at each other; it was because of the disputed field and the unresolved inheritance that went back as far as the days of Prefect Peter, and also because of the Semmler daughter and her child, which was not her husband’s but Karl Schönknecht’s. The rage spread like a fever—wherever you looked people were shrieking and punching, bodies were rolling, and now Martha turned her head and looked up.

  There he stood, laughing. Back arched, mouth wide, shoulders heaving. Only his feet stood steadily, and his hips swung with the swaying of the rope. It seemed to Martha as if she only had to look more carefully, then she would understand why he was so delighted—but then a man ran toward her and didn’t see her and his boot struck her chest, and her head hit the ground, and when she inhaled it was as if needles were pricking her. She rolled onto her back. Rope and sky were empty. Tyll Ulenspiegel was gone.

  She struggled to her feet. She hobbled past the brawling, rolling, biting, weeping, battering bodies, here and there still recognizing their faces; she hobbled along the street, hunching her shoulders and bowing her head, but just as she reached her front door, she heard the rumble of the covered wagon behind her. She turned around. On the coach box sat the young woman he had called Nele. Next to her the old woman crouched motionless. Why wasn’t anyone stopping them? Why wasn’t anyone following them? The wagon passed Martha. She stared after it. Soon it would be at the elm, then at the city gate, then gone.

  And now, when the wagon had almost reached the last houses, someone was running after it, with effortless long strides. The calfskin of the cloak bristled around his neck like something alive.

  “I would have taken you with me!” he cried as he ran past Martha. Shortly before the bend of the street, he caught up with the wagon and jumped aboard. The gatekeeper was with the rest of us on the main square; no one held them back.

  Slowly Martha went into the house, closed the door behind her, and bolted it. The billy goat was lying next to the stove and looked up at her questioningly. She hea
rd the cows bellowing, and our shouting rang out from the square.

  In the end we recovered our tempers. The cows were milked before sundown. Martha’s mother came back, and besides a few scratches not much had happened to her. Her father had lost a tooth, and his ear was torn. Someone had stepped on her sister’s foot so hard that she limped for a few weeks. But the next morning and the next evening came, and life went on. In every house there were bumps and cuts and scratches and sprained arms and missing teeth, but by the next day the main square was clean again, and we were all wearing our shoes.

  We never spoke about what had happened. Nor did we speak about Ulenspiegel. Without having arranged it, we stuck to this. Even Hans Semmler, who was so severely injured that from now on he was confined to his bed and could eat nothing but thick soup, pretended it had never been otherwise. And even the widow of Karl Schönknecht, whom we buried the next day in the churchyard, acted as if it had been a blow of fate and as if she didn’t know exactly whose knife it had been in his back. Only the rope still hung for days over the square, trembled in the wind, and was a perch for sparrows and swallows until the priest, who had been roughed up especially badly during the brawl, because we didn’t like his boastfulness and his condescension, could climb up the bell tower again to cut it down.

  At the same time, we didn’t forget. What had happened remained between us. It was there while we brought in the harvest, and it was there when we bargained over our grain or assembled on Sunday for the Mass, where the priest had a new facial expression, half wonder and half fear. And it was there especially when we held celebrations on the square and when we looked each other in the face while dancing. Then the air seemed heavier, the water different on our tongues, and the sky, where the rope had hung, not quite itself.

  It was a good year later before the war came to us after all. One night we heard whinnying, and then there were many voices laughing outside, and soon we heard the crash of doors being smashed in, and before we were even on the street, armed with useless pitchforks or knives, the flames were flickering.

  The soldiers were hungrier than usual, and deeper in their cups. It had been a long time since they entered a town that offered them so much. Old Luise, who had been fast asleep and this time had no presentiment, died in her bed. The priest died standing protectively in front of the church portal. Lise Schoch died trying to conceal a stash of gold coins. The baker and the smith and old Lembke and Moritz Blatt and most of the other men died trying to protect their women. And the women died as women do in war.

  Martha died too. She saw the ceiling of the room turn into red heat above her, she smelled the thick smoke before it seized her so tightly that she could make out nothing more, and she heard her sister cry for help, while the future that had a moment ago been hers dissolved: the husband she would never have and the children she would never raise and the grandchildren she would never tell about a famous jester one morning in spring, and the children of these grandchildren, all the people who now would not exist. That’s how quickly it happens, she thought, as if she had penetrated a great secret. And as she heard the roof beams splintering, it occurred to her that Tyll Ulenspiegel was now perhaps the only person who would remember our faces and would know that we had existed.

  Indeed the only survivors were the lame Hans Semmler, whose house had not caught fire and who had been overlooked because he couldn’t move, and Elsa Ziegler and Paul Grünanger, who had secretly been in the forest together. When they returned at dawn with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair and found nothing but rubble under curling smoke, they thought for a moment that the Lord God had punished them for their sin by sending them a mad vision. They moved west together, and for a brief time they were happy.

  As for the rest of us, we can sometimes be heard here, where we once lived, in the trees. We can be heard in the grass and in the chirping of the crickets, we can be heard when you lean your head against the knothole of the old elm, and at times children think they see our faces in the water of the stream. Our church is no longer standing, but the pebbles polished round and white by the water are still the same, just as the trees are the same. We remember, even if no one remembers us, because we have not yet reconciled ourselves to not being. Death is still new to us, and we are not indifferent to the things that concern the living. For it all happened not long ago.

  Lord of the Air

  I

  He stretched the rope at knee height, from the linden to the old fir. He had to cut notches for it, which was easy to do in the fir, whereas the knife kept slipping off the linden, but in the end he did it. Now he tests the knots, slowly takes off his wooden shoes, climbs onto the rope, falls.

  He climbs on again, spreads his arms out, and takes a step, but he can’t keep his balance and falls. He climbs back on, gives it another try, falls once again.

  He tries and falls again.

  It is not possible to walk on a rope. That is clear. Human feet aren’t made for it. Why attempt it at all?

  But he keeps trying. He always starts at the linden. Every time he falls immediately. Hours pass. In the afternoon he successfully takes a step, just one, and by the time it grows dark, he hasn’t managed another. Yet for one moment the rope held him, and he stood on it as if on solid ground.

  The next day it’s pouring rain. He stays indoors and helps his mother. “Hold the cloth taut, stop daydreaming, for Christ’s sake!” And the rain patters on the roof like hundreds of little fingers.

  The next day it’s still raining. It’s icy cold, and the rope is clammy, making it impossible to take a step.

  The next day, rain again. He climbs on and falls and climbs on again and falls, every time. For a while he lies on the ground, his arms spread, his hair so wet that it’s only a dark blot.

  The next day is Sunday, and so he can’t get onto the rope until the afternoon, when the church service is finally over. In the evening he successfully takes three steps, and if the rope hadn’t been wet, it could have been four.

  Gradually he comprehends how it can be done. His knees understand, his shoulders carry themselves differently. You have to yield to the swaying, have to soften your knees and hips, have to stay one step ahead of the fall. Heaviness reaches for you, but you’ve already moved on. Tightrope walking: running away from falling.

  The following day it’s warmer. Jackdaws are cawing. Bugs and bees are buzzing, and the sun is dispelling the clouds. His breath rises in small puffs of mist into the air. The brightness of the morning carries voices; he hears his father shouting at a mill hand in the house. He sings to himself, the song of the Grim Reaper, they call him Death, his power’s from God on high—the melody is conducive to walking on the rope, but apparently he was too loud, for all at once Agneta, his mother, is standing next to him and asking why he isn’t working.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Water has to be fetched,” she says, “the stove cleaned.”

  He spreads his arms out and climbs onto the rope, trying to disregard her bulging belly. Is there really a baby inside her, kicking and thrashing around and listening to them? The thought disturbs him. When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person? There’s something ugly in the fact that all beings emerge in obscurity: maggots in dough, flies in excrement, worms in the brown earth. Only very rarely, as his father explained to him, do children grow out of mandrakes and even more rarely infants out of rotten eggs.

  “Shall I send Sepp?” she asks. “Do you want me to send Sepp?”

  The boy falls off the rope, closes his eyes, spreads his arms out, climbs on again. The next time he looks, his mother is gone.

  He hopes that she doesn’t make good on the threat, but after a while Sepp does come. Sepp watches him briefly, then he comes up to the rope and pushes him off: no light nudge, but a push, so hard that the boy falls flat on his face. In his anger he calls Sepp a disgusting ox’s a
rse who sleeps with his own sister.

  That wasn’t wise. Because first of all he has no idea whether Sepp, who like all mill hands came from some unknown place and will move on to some unknown place, even has a sister; secondly, the fellow was only waiting for something like this. Before the boy can get up, Sepp has sat down on the back of his head.

  He can’t breathe. Rocks are cutting into his face. He writhes, but it’s no help, because Sepp is twice his age and three times his weight and five times his strength. He pulls himself together so that he doesn’t use up too much air. His tongue tastes like blood. He inhales dirt, chokes, spits. There’s a humming and whistling in his ears, and the ground seems to be rising, sinking, and rising again.

  Suddenly the weight is gone. He is rolled onto his back, soil in his mouth, his eyes sticky, a piercing pain in his head. The mill hand drags him to the mill: over gravel and soil, through grass, over even more soil, over sharp pebbles, past the trees, past the laughing female mill hand, the hay shed, the goat stable. Then he yanks him up, opens the door and shoves him in.

  “Well, it’s about time,” says Agneta. “The stove isn’t going to clean itself.”

  * * *

  —

  To go from the mill to the village you have to pass through a stretch of forest. At the point where the trees thin and you cross the village farmland—meadows and pastures and fields, a third of them lying fallow, two thirds cultivated and protected by wooden fences—you can already see the top of the church tower. Someone is always lying here in the dirt and mending the fences, which are constantly being broken but have to be maintained, otherwise the livestock will escape, or the forest animals will destroy the grain. Most of the fields belong to Peter Steger. Most of the animals too, which is easy to tell, for they have his brand on their necks.

  First you pass Hanna Krell’s house. She sits—what else is she supposed to do?—on her doorstep and patches clothing; thus she earns her daily bread. Then you walk through the narrow gap between the Steger farm and Ludwig Stelling’s smithy, step onto the wooden footbridge that prevents you from sinking into the soft muck, go beyond Jakob Brantner’s cowshed on your right, and find yourself on the main street, which is the only street: Here lives Anselm Melker with wife and children, next door his brother-in-law Ludwig Koller, and in the next house Maria Leserin, whose husband died last year, because someone cursed him. Their daughter is seventeen and very beautiful, and she will marry Peter Steger’s oldest son. On the other side lives Martin Holtz, who bakes the bread, together with his wife and daughters, and next to him are the smaller houses of the Tamms, the Henrichs, and the Heinerling family, from whose windows you often hear quarrels. The Heinerlings are not good people; they have no honor. Besides the smith and the baker, they all have a little land outside, everyone has a few goats, but only Peter Steger, who’s rich, has cows.