Tyll Page 6

  Sepp utters terrible curses and begins to climb. He groans. The branches don’t give him a good foothold, and it takes all his strength not to look up at the white apparition.

  “What is going on?” Claus calls up. “What has gotten into you?”

  “The great, great devil,” the boy says cheerfully.

  Sepp climbs back down. Hearing this reply was too much for him. Besides, it came back to him that he threw the boy into the stream, and if the boy remembers it and is angry at him, then now is not the moment to confront him. He reaches the ground and shakes his head.

  “Then you!” Claus says to Heiner.

  But he turns around without a word, walks away, and disappears in the thicket. For a while he can still be heard. Then no longer.

  “Go back up,” Claus says to Sepp.

  “No!”

  “Mutus dedit,” Claus murmurs, now remembering the words of the spell after all, “mutus dedit nomen—”

  “Makes no difference,” says Sepp. “I’m not doing it.”

  There’s a crack in the underbrush, the sound of branches breaking. Heiner is back. It became clear to him that it would soon be night. He can’t be alone in the dark forest; he won’t be able to stand it again. Angrily he fends off flies, leans against a tree trunk, and hums to himself.

  When Claus and Sepp turn away from him, they notice that the boy is standing next to them. Startled, they jump back. How did he get down so quickly? The boy takes off what he was wearing on his head: a piece of fur-covered scalp with two long donkey ears. His hair is encrusted with blood.

  “For God’s sake,” says Claus. “For Mary’s and God’s and the Son’s sake.”

  “It was a long time,” says the boy. “No one came. It was only a joke. And the voices! A big joke.”

  “What voices?”

  Claus looks around. Where is the rest of the donkey’s head? The eyes, the jaw with the teeth, the whole huge skull—where is all that?

  The boy slowly kneels down. Then, laughing, he tips over sideways and stops moving.

  They lift him up, wrap him in a blanket, and make off—away from the wagon, the flour, the blood. For a while they stumble through the darkness, until they feel safe enough to lay the child down. They don’t light a fire and they don’t talk to each other because they don’t want to attract anything. The boy giggles in his sleep. His skin is hot to the touch. Branches crack. The wind whispers. With his eyes closed Claus murmurs prayers and incantations. This helps a little, for they gradually feel better. As he prays, he tries to estimate how much this will cost him: the wagon is wrecked, the donkey dead, above all he will have to replace the flour. Where is he going to get the money?

  In the early morning hours the boy’s fever subsides. When he wakes up, he asks in confusion why his hair is so sticky and why his body is white. Then he shrugs and doesn’t trouble himself further about it, and when they tell him that Agneta is alive, he is happy and laughs. They find a stream. He washes himself. The water is so cold that he trembles all over. Claus wraps him in the blanket again, and they set off. On the way home the boy tells the fairy tale he heard from Agneta. There’s a witch in it and a knight and a golden apple, and in the end everything turns out well, the princess marries the hero, the evil old woman is dead as a doornail.

  Back in the mill, on his straw sack next to the stove that night, the boy sleeps so deeply that it is as if nothing could ever wake him again. He’s the only one who can sleep, for the dead baby returns: only a flicker in the darkness, along with a soft whimpering, more a draft than a voice. For a while she is in the partitioned area in the back where Claus and Agneta are lying, but when she can’t reach her parents’ bed because the pentagrams on the posts keep her away, she appears in the room where the boy and the mill hands have bedded down around the warm stove. She is blind and deaf and understands nothing and knocks over the milk bucket, whirls the freshly washed cloths off the shelf, and gets tangled in the curtain on the window before she disappears—into the limbo where the unbaptized freeze in the icy cold for a million years before the Lord forgives them.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later Claus sends the boy to Ludwig Stelling, the smith, in the village. Claus needs a new hammer, which must not be expensive, however, because ever since he lost the load of flour, he is deep in debt to Martin Reutter.

  On the way the boy picks up three stones. He throws the first up into the air, then the second, then he catches the first and throws it up again, then he throws the third, catches the second and throws it again, then he catches the third and throws it, then the first again—now all three are in the air. His hands make circular movements, and everything takes care of itself. The trick is not to think and not to look sharply at any of the stones. You have to pay close attention and at the same time pretend they aren’t there.

  Thus he walks, the stones whirling around him, past Hanna Krell’s house and across Steger’s field. Outside the smithy he drops the stones into the mud and enters.

  He places two coins on the anvil. He still has two in his pocket, but the smith doesn’t need to know that.

  “Much too little,” says the smith.

  The boy shrugs, takes the two coins, and turns to the door.

  “Wait,” says the smith.

  The boy stops.

  “You do have to give more.”

  The boy shakes his head.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” says the smith. “If you want to buy something, you have to bargain.”

  The boy walks to the door.

  “Wait!”

  The smith is gigantic, his naked belly is hairy, he has a cloth tied around his head, and his face is red and full of pores. Everyone in the village knows that he goes into the bushes at night with Ilse Melkerin, only Ilse’s husband doesn’t know, or maybe he knows and only pretends not to know, for what can anyone do against a smith. When the priest preaches on Sunday about immorality, he always looks at the smith and sometimes at Ilse too. But that doesn’t stop them.

  “That’s too little,” the smith says.

  But the boy knows that he has won. He wipes his forehead. The fire radiates scorching heat. Shadows dance on the wall. He puts his hand on his heart and swears: “This is all I was given, by the salvation of my soul!”

  With an angry expression the smith gives him the hammer. The boy thanks him politely and walks slowly, so that the coins in his pocket don’t jingle, to the door.

  He walks past Jakob Brantner’s cowshed and the Melker house and the Tamm house to the village square. Might Nele be there? And indeed, she is sitting there, in the drizzle, on the little wall of the well.

  “You again,” he says.

  “Then just go away,” she says.

  “You go away.”

  “I was here first.”

  He sits down next to her. They both grin.

  “The merchant was here,” she says. “He said the Kaiser is now having all the noblemen of Bohemia beheaded.”

  “The King too?”

  “The Winter King. Him too. That’s what they call him, because he was king for only a winter after the Bohemians gave him their crown. He was able to flee and will come back, at the head of a large army, because the English king is his wife’s father. He will reconquer Prague, and he will depose the Kaiser and become Kaiser himself.”

  Hanna Krell comes with a bucket and busies herself at the edge of the well. The water is dirty, it’s undrinkable, but it’s needed for washing and for the livestock. When they were little, they drank milk, but for a few years now they have been old enough for small beer. Everyone in the village eats groats and drinks small beer. Even the rich Stegers. For Winter Kings and Kaisers there’s rose water and wine, but simple people drink milk and small beer, from their first day to their
last.

  “Prague,” says the boy.

  “Yes,” says Nele. “Prague!”

  The two of them think about Prague. Precisely because it’s a word, because they know nothing about it, it sounds as full of promise as a place in a fairy tale.

  “How far is Prague?” asks the boy.

  “Very far.”

  He nods as if that were an answer. “And England?”

  “Also very far.”

  “It probably takes a year to journey there.”

  “Longer.”

  “Shall we go?”

  Nele laughs.

  “Why not?” he asks.

  She doesn’t reply, and he knows that they have to be careful now. One wrong word can have consequences. Peter Steger’s youngest son gave Else Brantnerin a wooden pipe last year, and because she accepted the gift, the two of them are now engaged, even though they don’t like each other that much. The matter went all the way to the reeve in the district seat, who in turn passed it on to the diocese court, where it was decided that there was nothing to be done about it: a gift is a promise, and a promise is binding before God. To invite someone on a journey is not yet a gift, but it is almost a promise. The boy knows this, and he knows that Nele knows it too, and they both know that they have to change the subject.

  “How is your father?” asks the boy. “The rheumatism better?”

  She nods. “I don’t know what your father did. But it helped.”

  “Spells and herbs.”

  “Will you learn how to do that? Heal people, will you be able to do it too one day?”

  “I’d rather go to England.”

  Nele laughs.

  He stands up. He has the vague hope that she will hold him back but she doesn’t budge.

  “At the next solstice festival,” he says, “I will jump over the fire like the others.”

  “Me too.”

  “You’re a girl!”

  “And this girl is about to smack you.”

  He sets off without looking back. He knows that this is important, because if he turns around, she has won.

  The hammer is heavy. The wooden footbridge ends at the Steger farm. The boy leaves the path and makes his way through tall grass. This is not entirely without danger, due to the Little People. He thinks of Sepp. Ever since the night in the forest the mill hand has been afraid of him and has kept a safe distance, which has been useful. If only he knew what happened in the forest. He knows that he shouldn’t think about it. Memory is a peculiar thing: it doesn’t simply come and go as it pleases; rather you can light it and extinguish it again like a pitchwood torch. The boy thinks of his mother, who can only just stand up again, and for a moment he thinks of the dead infant too, his sister, whose soul is now in the cold, because she was not baptized.

  He stops and looks up. You would have to stretch the rope over the crowns, from one church tower to the next, from village to village. He spreads his arms out and imagines it. Then he sits down on a rock and watches the clouds parting. It has grown warm, and the air is filling with steam. He is sweating, puts the hammer down next to him. Suddenly he feels sleepy, and he’s hungry, but it’s still many hours until groats. And if you could fly? Flap your arms, leave the rope, rise higher, higher? He plucks a blade of grass and slides it between his lips. It tastes sweet, damp, and a little acrid. He lies down in the grass and closes his eyes so that the sunlight lies warm on his lids. The wetness of the grass penetrates his clothing clammily.

  A shadow falls on him. The boy opens his eyes.

  “Did I frighten you?”

  The boy sits up, shakes his head. There are rarely strangers here. Sometimes the reeve comes from the district capital, and now and then come merchants. But he doesn’t know this stranger. He is young, just barely a man. He has a little goatee, and he is wearing a jerkin, breeches made of good gray material, and high boots. His eyes are bright and curious.

  “Been imagining what it would be like if you could fly?”

  The boy stares at the stranger.

  “No,” says the stranger, “it wasn’t magic. Another person cannot read your thoughts. No one can do that. But when a child spreads his arms and stands on tiptoe and looks up, then he is thinking about flying. He does this because he cannot yet fully believe that he will never fly. That God doesn’t permit us to fly. The birds, yes, but not us.”

  “Eventually we can all fly,” says the boy. “When we’re dead.”

  “When you’re dead, you’re first of all dead. Then you lie in the grave until the Lord returns to judge us.”

  “When will he return?”

  “The priest hasn’t taught you that?”

  The boy shrugs. The priest speaks often in church about these things, of course, the grave, the judgment, the dead, but he has a monotonous voice, and it’s also not rare for him to be drunk.

  “At the end of time,” says the stranger. “Except that the dead cannot experience time, they’re dead, after all, so one can also say: immediately. As soon as you’re dead, the Day of Judgment dawns.”

  “My father said the same thing.”

  “Your father is a scholar?”

  “My father is a miller.”

  “Does he have opinions? Does he read?”

  “He knows a lot,” says the boy. “He helps people.”

  “Helps them?”

  “When they’re ill.”

  “Perhaps he can help me too.”

  “Are you ill?”

  The stranger sits down beside him on the ground. “What do you think, will it stay sunny, or will we have more rain?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “You’re from here, aren’t you?”

  “We’ll have more rain,” says the boy, because it rains most of the time. The weather is almost always bad. Which is why the harvest is so pitiful, which is why the mill doesn’t get enough grain, which is why everyone is hungry. Supposedly it used to be better. The older people remember long summers, but perhaps they’re also imagining it, who can know, they are old.

  “My father thinks,” says the boy, “that angels ride on the rain clouds and look down at us.”

  “Clouds are made of water,” says the stranger. “No one sits on them. The angels have bodies of light and need no conveyance. Nor do demons. They are made of air. That’s why the devil is known as the Lord of the Air.” He pauses as if to hearken to his own sentences, and gazes with an almost curious expression at his fingertips. “And yet,” he then says, “they are nothing but particles of God’s will.”

  “Even the devils?”

  “Naturally.”

  “The devils are God’s will?”

  “God’s will is greater than everything imaginable. It is so great that it is able to negate itself. An old riddle goes: can God make a stone so heavy that he can no longer lift it? It sounds like a paradox. Do you know what that is, a paradox?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  The boy nods.

  “What is it?”

  “You are a paradox, and your rogue of a pimp father is one too.”

  The stranger is silent for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth stretch upward into a thin smile. “It’s actually not a paradox, for the correct answer is: naturally he can. But the stone that he can no longer lift he can then lift effortlessly. God is too encompassing to be one with himself. That’s why the Lord of the Air and his associates exist. That’s why everything that is not God exists. That’s why the world exists.”

  The boy raises a hand in front of his face. The sun is now unobstructed by clouds. A blackbird flits past. Yes, of course, he thinks, you should fly like that, it would be even better than walking on the rope. But if you simply cannot fly, then walking on the
rope is second best.

  “I’d like to meet your father.”

  The boy nods indifferently.

  “You’d better hurry,” says the stranger. “It will be raining in an hour.”

  The boy points to the sun questioningly.

  “Do you see the small clouds back there?” asks the stranger. “And the elongated ones over us? The wind is massing together the ones back there, it’s coming from the east and bringing cold air, and the ones over us are catching it, and then everything cools even more, and the water grows heavy and falls to the earth. There are no angels sitting on the clouds, but it is nonetheless worthwhile to look at them, for they bring water and beauty. What’s your name?”

  The boy tells him.

  “Don’t forget your hammer, Tyll.” The stranger turns away and leaves.

  * * *

  —

  Claus is in a gloomy mood this evening. The fact that he cannot solve the grain problem is weighing on his mind at the table.

  It’s maddening. If you have a heap of grain in front of you and take away one grain, you still have a heap in front of you. Now take another. Is it still a heap? Of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Yes, of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Of course. And so on and so on. It is quite simple: merely by taking a single grain away, you never make a heap of grain into something that is not a heap of grain. Also, by putting on one grain, you never make something that is not a heap of grain into a heap.

  And yet: if you remove grain after grain, the heap is at some point no longer a heap. At some point there will be just a few little grains left on the ground, which by no stretch of the imagination can be called a heap. And if you keep going, the moment will eventually come when you take the last one and there’s nothing left on the floor. Is one grain a heap? Certainly not. And nothing at all? No, nothing at all is not a heap. For nothing at all is nothing at all.

  But which is the grain whose removal causes the heap to cease being a heap? When does it actually happen? Claus has played it through hundreds of times, piling up hundreds of grain heaps in his imagination, then mentally removing individual grains. But he has not found the decisive moment. It has ousted even the moon from his attention and he has no longer been thinking much about the dead baby either.