Tyll Read online

  They set off before sunrise after a night of heavy rain. Fog hangs between the tree trunks, the high branches seem to disappear in the still-dark sky, the meadows are waterlogged. The donkey takes dragging steps, it’s all the same to him. The boy has known him as long as he can remember. He has spent many hours sitting with him in the stable, listening to his soft snorting, stroking him and taking pleasure in the way the animal pressed his always damp muzzle against his cheek. Agneta holds the reins. The boy sits next to her on the box, his eyes half closed, and snuggles up to her. Behind them Heiner is lying on the sacks of flour; sometimes he grunts, and sometimes he laughs to himself; you couldn’t say whether he’s asleep or awake.

  If they had taken the wide road, they could have been at their destination already this afternoon, but it passes too close to the clearing with the old willow. No unborn child may come close to the Cold Woman. Therefore, they have to take the detour by way of the narrow overgrown path that leads much deeper through the forest, past Maple Hill and the large Mouse Pond.

  Agneta is talking about the time when she was not yet Ulenspiegel’s wife. One of baker Holtz’s two sons wanted to marry her. He threatened to join the soldiers if she didn’t take him. He would march east, to the Hungarian plains, to fight against the Turks. And she almost would have taken him—why not, she thought, in the end they’re all the same. But then Claus came to the village, a Catholic from the north, which was in itself strange enough, and when she married him, because she couldn’t resist him, young Holtz didn’t march east after all. He stayed and baked bread, and when two years later the plague spread through the village, he was the first to die, and when his father too died, his brother took over the bakery.

  Agneta sighs and strokes the boy’s head. “You don’t know what he used to be like. Young and lithe and completely different from the others.”

  It takes the boy a moment to understand whom she’s talking about.

  “He knew everything. He could read. And he was beautiful too. He was strong, and he had bright eyes, and he could sing and dance better than anyone else.” She reflects for a while. “He was…awake!”

  The boy nods. He would rather hear a fairy tale.

  “He’s a good person,” says Agneta. “You must never forget that.”

  The boy can’t help yawning.

  “Only, his mind is never there. I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t know that such people existed. How should I have known, I who have never been anywhere but here, that he would never truly live among us? In the beginning his mind was elsewhere only now and then. Most of the time he was with me. He carried me in his arms. We laughed. His eyes were so bright. Only sometimes did he read his books or do his experiments, igniting something or mixing powders. Then he began spending more time with his books and less with me, and then even less, and now? Well, you see. Last month, when the mill wheel stopped. Only after three days did he repair it, because first he wanted to test something out in the meadow. He didn’t have time for the mill, the miller himself. And then he repaired the wheel poorly too, and the axle got stuck, and we had to get Anselm Melker’s help. But he didn’t care!”

  “Can you tell me a fairy tale?”

  Agneta nods. “A long time ago,” she begins. “When the stones were still young and there were no dukes and no one had to pay a tithe. A long time ago, when even in winter no snow fell…”

  She hesitates, touches her belly, and shortens the reins. The path is now narrow and runs over broad roots. One false step by the donkey and the wagon could overturn.

  “A long time ago,” she begins anew, “a girl found a golden apple. She wanted to share it with her mother, but then she cut her finger, and from a drop of her blood a tree grew. It bore more apples, though not golden ones, but shriveled ugly nasty apples. Whoever ate them died a hard death. For her mother was a witch. She guarded the golden apple like her most treasured possession, and she tore to pieces and devoured every knight who went up against her to free her daughter, laughing and asking: Is there no hero among you, then? But when winter finally came and covered everything with snow, the poor daughter had to clean and cook for her mother, day in, day out and without end.”

  “Snow?”

  Agneta falls silent.

  “You said there was no snow in winter.”

  Agneta remains silent.

  “Sorry,” says the boy.

  “The poor daughter had to clean and cook for her mother, day in, day out and without end, and this even though she was so beautiful that no one could look at her without falling in love.”

  Agneta is silent again. Then she groans softly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “And so the daughter ran away in the depth of winter, for she heard that far, far, far away, at the edge of the great sea, there lived a boy who was worthy of the golden apple. But first she had to flee, and this was hard, for her mother, the witch, was watchful.”

  Agneta falls silent once again. The forest is now very dense; only high up between the treetops are there still flashes of light blue sky. Agneta pulls on the reins. The donkey stops. A squirrel jumps onto the path, looks at them with cold eyes. Then, as quickly as an illusion, it is gone. The farmhand behind them stops snoring and sits up.

  “What’s wrong?” the boy asks again.

  Agneta doesn’t reply. She’s suddenly deathly pale. And now the boy sees that her skirt is full of blood.

  For a moment he is surprised that he didn’t notice such a big spot until now. Then he understands that just a moment ago the blood wasn’t there yet.

  “It’s coming,” says Agneta. “I have to go back.”

  The boy stares at her.

  “Hot water,” she says, her voice cracking. “And Claus. I need hot water, and I need Claus too with his spells and herbs. And the midwife from the village, I need her too, Lise Köllerin.”

  The boy stares at her. Heiner stares at her. The donkey stares ahead.

  “Because I’ll die otherwise,” she says. “It has to happen. It can’t be helped. I can’t turn the wagon around here. Heiner will support me, we’ll walk, and you stay.”

  “Why don’t we keep driving?”

  “We won’t be at the Reutter farm until evening. To get back to the mill on foot will be faster.” Panting, she climbs down. The boy tries to reach for her arm, but she pushes him away. “Do you understand?”

  “What?”

  Agneta is struggling for air. “Someone has to stay with the flour. It’s worth as much as half the mill.”

  “Alone in the forest?”

  Agneta groans.

  Heiner looks dully back and forth between them.

  “I’m here with two idiots.” Agneta places both hands on the boy’s cheeks and looks him in the eyes so hard that he can see his reflection. Her breath whistles and rattles in her throat. “Do you understand?” she asks softly. “My heart, my little boy, do you understand? You wait here.”

  The pounding in his chest is so loud that he thinks she must be able to hear it. He wants to tell her that she’s not thinking straight, that the pain has clouded her mind. She won’t make it on foot, it will take hours, she’s bleeding too heavily. But his throat is dried out; the words get stuck in it. Helplessly he watches her hobble away, leaning on Heiner. The farmhand is half supporting her, half dragging her. With each step she lets out a groan. For a short time he can still see them. Then he hears the groaning fading away, and then he is alone.

  For a while he distracts himself by pulling on the donkey’s ears. Right and left and right, each time the animal makes a sad noise. Why is he so patient, why so good-natured, why doesn’t he bite? He looks him in the right eye. It sits in its socket like a glass ball, dark, watery, and empty. It doesn’t blink, it just twitches a little when he touches it with his finger. He wonders what it’s
like to be this donkey. Imprisoned in a donkey soul, a donkey head on your shoulders, with donkey thoughts inside it—what does it feel like?

  He holds his breath and listens. The wind: Noises within noises behind other noises, buzzing and rustling, squeaking, moaning and creaking. The whispering of the leaves over the whispering of voices, and again it seems to him as if he would only have to listen for a while, then he could understand. He begins to hum to himself, but his voice sounds foreign to him.

  At this moment he notices that the flour sacks are knotted with a rope—a long one, which runs from one sack to the next. With relief he pulls out his knife and sets to work cutting notches into tree trunks.

  As soon as he has fastened the rope at chest height between two trees, he feels better. He tests the firmness. Then he takes off his shoes, climbs on, and walks with outspread arms to the middle. There he stands, in front of the cart and donkey, over the loamy path. He loses his balance, jumps down, immediately climbs back up. A bee rises out of the bushes, descends again, and disappears in the greenery. Slowly the boy starts moving. He almost would have made it to the other end, but then he falls after all.

  He stays on the ground for a while. What’s the point of standing up? He rolls onto his back. He feels as if time were coming to a halt. Something has changed: the wind is still whispering, and the leaves are still moving, and the donkey’s stomach is growling, but all this has nothing to do with time. Earlier was now, and now is now, and in the future, when everything is different and when there are different people and no one but God knows about him and Agneta and Claus and the mill anymore, then it will still be now.

  The strip of sky over him has turned dark blue. Now it is clouding over with a velvety gray. Shadows climb down tree trunks, and all at once it’s evening down below. The light above ebbs to a trickle. And then it’s night.

  He weeps. But because no one is there who could help, and because you can actually always weep for only a short while before you run out of strength and tears, he stops.

  He is thirsty. Agneta and Heiner took the skin of beer with them. Heiner strapped it on; no one thought of leaving something here for him to drink. His lips are dry. There must be a stream nearby, but how is he supposed to find it?

  The noises are different now than during the day: different animal sounds, a different wind, even the creaking of the branches is different. He listens. It must be safer up there. He sets about climbing a tree. But it’s hard when you can hardly see anything. Thin branches break, and the cracked bark cuts into his fingers. A shoe slips off his foot; he hears it bang into one branch and then another. Clasping the trunk, he shinnies up and makes it a little higher. Then he can’t go on.

  For a while he hangs. He imagined that he could sleep on a wide limb, leaning against the trunk, but now he realizes that this is impossible. There’s nothing soft on a tree, and you have to cling to it constantly to keep from falling. A branch is pressing against his knee. At first he thinks that it can be endured, yet all at once it’s unbearable. Even the limb he’s sitting on hurts him. He finds himself thinking of the fairy tale about the evil witch and the beautiful daughter and the knight and the golden apple: will he ever find out how it ends?

  He climbs back down. It’s difficult in the dark, but he is skillful and doesn’t slip off and reaches the ground. Only, he can no longer find his shoe. What a good thing that at least the donkey is there. The boy snuggles up to the soft, slightly stinking animal.

  It occurs to him that his mother could come back. If she died on the way home, she could suddenly appear. She could brush past him, whisper something to him, show him her transformed face. The thought makes his blood run cold. Is it really possible to have just a second ago loved a person, but the next moment to die of fright when this person comes back? He thinks of little Gritt, who last year encountered her dead father while gathering mushrooms: he had no eyes and was hovering a hand’s breadth over the ground. And he thinks of the head that Grandmother saw many years ago in the boundary stone behind the Steger farm, lift your skirt, little girl, and there was no one hiding behind the stone, rather the stone all at once had eyes and lips, just lift it already and show what’s underneath! Grandmother told this story when he was little. Now she is long dead. Her body too must have decayed long ago, her eyes turning to stone and her hair to grass. He forbids himself to think of such things, but his effort fails, and there’s one thought above all that he can’t put out of his mind: better for Agneta to be dead, better imprisoned in the deepest eternal hell, than to suddenly step as a ghost out of the bushes.

  The donkey gives a start. Wood cracks nearby. Something is approaching. His breeches fill up with warmth. A massive body brushes past and departs again. His breeches grow cold and heavy. The donkey growls; he felt it too. What was it? Now there’s a greenish gleam between the branches, bigger than a glowworm, yet less bright, and in his fear feverish images come into his head. He is hot, then cold. Then hot again. And despite everything he thinks: Agneta, alive or dead, must not find out that he wet himself, or else there will be blows. And when he sees her lying and whimpering under a bush that is at the same time the ribbon on which the earthly disk hangs from the moon, a remnant of his dissolving rational mind tells him that he must be falling asleep, exhausted by his fear and all the pounding of his heart, mercifully abandoned to his dwindling powers, on the cold ground and in the nocturnal noise of the forest, beside the softly snoring donkey. And so he doesn’t know that his mother is actually lying not far from him on the ground, whimpering and groaning, under a bush, which doesn’t look very different from the one in his dream, a juniper bush with majestically full berries. There she lies, in the darkness, there.

  Agneta and the farmhand took the shortcut because she was too weak for the detour, and so they came too close to the Cold Woman’s clearing. Now Agneta is lying on the ground and has no more strength and barely any voice left to scream, and Heiner is sitting beside her, in his lap the newborn being.

  The farmhand is considering whether to run away. What’s keeping him? This woman will die, and if he is nearby, people will say he is to blame. That’s how it always is. If something happens and a farmhand is nearby, then the farmhand is to blame.

  He could disappear, never to be seen again. Nothing is keeping him on the Reutter farm. The food is not abundant, and the farmer is not good to him; he hits him as often as he hits his own sons. Why not leave mother and child here? The world is big, say the farmhands, new masters are easy to find, there are enough new farms, and something better than death can be found wherever you look.

  He knows that it’s ill-advised to be in the forest at night, and he’s hungry and searingly thirsty, because somewhere along the way he lost the skin of beer. He closes his eyes. That helps. When you close your eyes, you are by yourself, no one else is there to hurt you, you are inside, you yourself are the only one there. He remembers meadows through which he ran when he was a child, he remembers fresh bread better than any he’s had in a long time, and a man who hit him with a stick, perhaps it was his father, he doesn’t know. And so he ran away from the man, and then he was elsewhere. Then he ran away again. Running away is a wonderful thing. There’s no danger you can’t escape when you have fast legs.

  But this time he doesn’t run. He holds the baby, and he holds Agneta’s head too, and when she wants to stand up, he supports her and heaves her upward.

  Nonetheless, Agneta would not have gotten to her feet if she hadn’t remembered the most powerful of all squares. Memorize it, Claus said, use it only in an emergency. You can write it down, only you must never say it aloud! And so she applied the last remainder of clarity in her head to scratching the letters into the ground. It began with Salom Arepo, but she couldn’t recall what came next—writing is triply difficult when you never learned how and it’s dark and you’re bleeding. But then she defied Claus’s instructions and cried hoarse
ly: “Salom Arepo, Salom Arepo!” And, since even fragments exert power, this was enough to bring back her memory, and she knew the rest too.

  S A L O M

  A R E P O

  L E M E L

  O P E R A

  M O L A S

  And this alone, she could feel it, drove back the evil forces, the bleeding abated, and, with pain as though from red-hot irons, the baby slid out of her body.

  She would have liked so much to keep lying on the ground. But she knows that when you’ve lost a lot of blood, if you stay on the ground, you’ll be lying there forever.

  “Give me the baby.”

  He gives her the baby. It’s a girl.

  She can’t see her, the night is so black that she might as well be blind, but when she holds the little being, she feels that she is still alive.

  No one will know about you, she thinks. No one will remember, only I, your mother, and I won’t forget, because I must not forget. For everyone else will forget you.

  She said the same thing to her other three who died at birth. And she really does still know everything there is to know about each of them: the smell, the weight, the shape—each time a little different—in her hands. They didn’t even have names.

  Her knees give way. Heiner holds her. For a moment the temptation to simply lie down again is strong. But she has lost too much blood, the Cold Woman is not far, and the Little People might find her too. She hands Heiner the baby and wants to set off, but immediately she falls and lies on roots and sticks and senses how vast the night is. Why resist anyway? It would be so easy. Just let go. So easy.

  Instead she opens her eyes. She feels the roots under her. She shivers with cold and grasps that she’s still alive.