Tyll Read online

  Dr. Kircher throws his cloak over his shoulders and leaves the priest’s house. In a daze, he stands in the pale light of the early morning. On his right is the church, in front of him the main square with the well and the linden and the platform erected yesterday, next to it the houses of the Tamms, the Henrichs, and the Heinerlings. He now knows all the inhabitants of this village, he has interrogated them, he knows their secrets. Something is moving on the roof of the Henrich house. Instinctively he recoils, but it is probably only a cat. He murmurs a protective blessing and crosses himself three times, go away, evil spirit, desist, I stand under the protection of the Lord and the Virgin and all the saints. Then he sits down, leans against the wall of the priest’s house, and waits with chattering teeth for the sun.

  He realizes that someone is sitting next to him. He must have approached soundlessly, sat down soundlessly. It’s Master Tilman.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Kircher mutters and gives a start. That was a mistake; now Master Tilman might return the greeting.

  To his horror it happens too. “Good morning!”

  Dr. Kircher looks around in all directions. Fortunately there’s no one to be seen, the village is still asleep, no one is observing them.

  “This cold,” says Master Tilman.

  “Yes,” says Dr. Kircher, because he has to say something. “Bad.”

  “And gets worse every year,” says Master Tilman.

  They’re silent.

  Dr. Kircher knows that it would be best not to reply, but the silence is oppressive, so he clears his throat and says: “The world is ending.”

  Master Tilman spits on the ground. “And how much longer?”

  “Probably about a hundred years,” says Dr. Kircher, still looking around uneasily. “Some think a bit sooner, while others believe that it will be around a hundred and twenty.”

  He falls silent, feels a lump in his throat. This happens to him whenever he speaks of the apocalypse. He crosses himself. Master Tilman does the same.

  The poor man, thinks Dr. Kircher. Actually, no hangman need fear the Last Judgment, since the condemned must forgive their executioners before death, but now and then there are stubborn ones who refuse, and occasionally it even happens that someone summons his hangman to the Valley of Josaphat. Everyone knows this curse: I summon you to the Valley of Josaphat. Whoever says that to the hangman accuses him of murder and denies him forgiveness. Has this ever happened to Master Tilman?

  “You’re wondering whether I’m afraid of the Judgment.”

  “No!”

  “Whether anyone has summoned me to the Valley of Josaphat.”

  “No!”

  “Everyone wonders that. You know, I didn’t choose this. I am what I am because my father was what he was. And he was what he was because of his father. And my son will have to be what I am, for a hangman’s son becomes a hangman.” Master Tilman spits again. “My son is a gentle boy. I look at him, he is only eight and very kind, and killing doesn’t suit him. But he has no choice. It didn’t suit me either. And I learned how, and not badly at all.”

  Dr. Kircher is now really worried. By no means may anyone see how he is chatting peacefully with the hangman here.

  Whitish brightness spreads in the sky. On the walls of the houses the colors can now be distinguished. Even the platform is clearly visible over there in front of the linden. Nearby, only a blur in the dawn, stands the horse-drawn wagon of the balladeer who arrived two days ago. So it always happens: when there’s something to see, the traveling people gather.

  “Thank God there’s no tavern in this hole,” says Master Tilman. “Because when there is one, I go there in the evening, but then I sit alone, and everyone peers over and whispers. And even though I know this beforehand, I still go to the tavern, for where else am I supposed to go? I can’t wait to get back to Eichstätt.”

  “Do they treat you better there?”

  “No, but there I’m at home. To be treated badly at home is better than to be treated badly elsewhere.” Master Tilman raises his arms and stretches with a yawn.

  Dr. Kircher jerks sideways. The hangman’s hand is only a few inches away from his shoulder; there must not be any contact. Anyone touched by a hangman, even if only fleetingly, loses his honor. But of course you must not arouse his hostility either. If you anger him, he could grasp you intentionally and accept the punishment. Dr. Kircher curses himself for his own good nature—he never should have let himself be drawn into this conversation.

  Now, to his relief, he hears from inside the house the dry cough of his master. Dr. Tesimond has awoken. With an apologetic gesture he stands up.

  Master Tilman smiles wryly.

  “God be with us on this great day,” says Dr. Kircher.

  But the hangman doesn’t reply. Dr. Kircher goes quickly into the priest’s house to help his master get dressed.

  * * *

  —

  With a measured step and clad in the red robe of the judge, Dr. Tesimond moves toward the platform. Up there stands a table with stacks of paper, weighed down with stones from the millstream, lest the wind carry away a sheet. The sun is approaching its zenith. The light falls shimmering through the crown of the linden. Everyone is here: in front all the members of the Steger family and the smith Stelling with his wife and the farmer Brantner with his family, behind them the baker Holtz with his wife and two daughters and Anselm Melker with his children and wife and sister-in-law and old mother and old mother-in-law and old father-in-law and aunt and next to them Maria Leserin with her beautiful daughter and behind them the Henrichs and the Heinerlings along with their hands and at the very back the mouselike round faces of the Tamms. Master Tilman stands apart, leaning on the trunk of the tree. He is wearing a brown cowl, his face is pale and swollen. Behind the tree the balladeer stands on his wagon, scribbling in a little book.

  Light-footedly, Dr. Tesimond springs onto the platform and stands behind a chair. Despite his youth, Dr. Kircher has a less easy time of it; the platform is high and the robe hampers his climbing. When he is up there, Dr. Tesimond looks at him encouragingly, and Dr. Kircher knows that he is now supposed to speak, but as he looks around, he grows dizzy. The feeling of unreality is so great that he has to hold on to the edge of the table. It’s not the first time this has happened to him. It’s one of the things he must keep secret at all costs. He has only just received the minor orders, he is still far from a full Jesuit, and only men of the best health in body and mind may be members of the Society of Jesus.

  Above all, however, no one must know how muddled time keeps becoming for him. Sometimes he finds himself in a strange place without knowing what has happened in the interim. Recently he forgot for a good hour that he is already grown up; he thought he was a child playing near his parents’ house in the grass, as if the fifteen years since then and the difficult studies in Paderborn were merely the fantasy of a boy wishing to finally be grown up. How fragile the world is. Almost every night he sees Egyptian signs, and increasingly the worry grows in him that he might one day no longer awake from one of these dreams, that he might be imprisoned forever in the colorful hell of a godless land of Pharaohs.

  Hastily he rubs his eyes. Peter Steger and Ludwig Stelling, the assistant judges, have climbed up in black robes to join them, followed by Ludwig von Esch, the administrator and chairman of the local court district, who must deliver the verdict so that it has validity. Spots of sunlight dance on the grass and the well. Despite the brightness it’s so cold that your breath turns into little clouds of vapor. Linden crown, thinks Dr. Kircher. Linden crown, a word like that can get stuck in your head, but this must not happen now, he must not let himself be distracted, he must direct all his strength at the ceremony. Linden king, linden crone, linden crow. No! Not now, no confusion now, everyone is waiting! As the scribe he opens the trial, no one else can do it
, it is his duty, he must fulfill it. To calm himself he looks into the faces of the spectators in front and in the middle, but no sooner has he grown calmer than his gaze meets that of the miller’s boy. He is standing at the very back, next to his mother. His eyes are narrow, cheeks hollow, lips a bit pursed as if he were whistling to himself.

  Try to expunge him from your thoughts. You haven’t taken part in so many spiritual exercises for nothing. It’s the same with the mind as with the eyes: they see what lies in front of them, but you can determine where you direct them. He squints. Only a spot, he thinks, only colors, only a play of light. I don’t see a boy, I see light. I don’t see a face, I see colors. Only colors, light, and shadows.

  And indeed, the boy is no longer of consequence. He simply must not look at him. Their gazes must not meet. As long as that doesn’t happen, everything is all right.

  “Is the judge here?” he asks hoarsely.

  “The judge is here,” replies Dr. Tesimond.

  “The administrator here?”

  “I’m here,” Ludwig von Esch says in an annoyed tone. Under normal circumstances he would be the one leading the trial, but these are not normal circumstances.

  “The first assistant judge here?”

  “Here,” says Peter Steger.

  “The second?”

  Silence. Peter Steger gives Ludwig Stelling a nudge. He looks around in surprise. Peter Steger gives another nudge.

  “Yes, here,” says Ludwig Stelling.

  “The tribunal is assembled,” says Dr. Kircher.

  Inadvertently, he looks at Master Tilman. The hangman is leaning almost casually against the trunk of the linden, rubbing his beard and smiling, but at what? His heart pounding, he looks elsewhere. The impression must by no means be given that he has a mutual understanding with the executioner. So he looks at the balladeer. The day before yesterday he heard him singing. The lute was poorly tuned, the rhymes were rickety, and the outrageous events about which he sang were not so outrageous: a child murder by the Protestants in Magdeburg, a miserable song mocking the Elector Palatine in which bread was rhymed with bent and quivering with belligerents. With unease he thinks about the likelihood that in the ballad that the singer will sing about this trial he too will appear.

  “The tribunal is assembled,” he hears himself saying once again. “Gathered to dispense justice and see justice done before the community, which is to maintain order and peace, from the beginning of the trial until the end, in the name of God.” He clears his throat. Then he calls: “Bring out the condemned!”

  For a while it is so quiet that the wind can be heard, the bees, all the bleating and mooing and yapping of the animals. Then the door of the Brantner cowshed opens. It squeaks because it has just recently been reinforced with iron; the window shutters too have been boarded up. The cows, for whom there is now no more room inside, have been housed in the Steger shed, which caused a quarrel because Peter Steger wanted payment for it and Ludwig Brantner said it wasn’t his fault. In a village nothing is ever simple.

  A pikeman steps outside, yawning, followed by the two accused, blinking, and behind them another two pikemen. They’re elderly warriors on the cusp of withdrawal from service. One of them limps, the other is missing his left hand. Nothing better was sent from Eichstätt.

  And from the appearance of the accused, it can seem as if no more was necessary. With their shorn heads on which, as always when you cut off a person’s hair, all sorts of bumps and dents are visible, they look like the most harmless and weakest of people. Their hands are wrapped in thick bandages so that the crushed fingers cannot be seen, and bloody imprints stretch around their foreheads where Master Tilman applied the leather band. How easily, Dr. Kircher thinks, pity could overcome you, but you must not permit yourself to believe the appearance, for they are in league with the greatest power of the fallen world, and their lord is with them at every moment. That’s why it is so dangerous: during the trial, the devil can always intervene. At any time he can show his strength and free them. Only the courage and purity of the judges can prevent it. Again and again his superiors impressed this on him in the seminary: do not underestimate those who have made a pact with the devil! Never forget that your compassion is their weapon and that they have means at their disposal of which your mind has no inkling.

  The spectators clear a path. The two accused are led to the platform: in front old Hanna Krell, behind her the miller. Both of them walk stooped. They appear abstracted. It remains unclear whether they know who they are or what is happening.

  Don’t underestimate them, Dr. Kircher tells himself, that’s the important thing. Not to underestimate them.

  The tribunal sits down: in the middle Dr. Tesimond, to his right Peter Steger, to his left Ludwig Stelling. And to Stelling’s left—at a slight distance because the court scribe, while responsible for the smooth course of the trial, is not himself part of the tribunal—is the chair for him.

  “Hanna,” says Dr. Tesimond, raising a sheet of paper. “Here is your confession.”

  She is silent. Her lips don’t move, her eyes seem extinguished. She looks like an empty shell, her face a mask that no one is wearing, her arms as if hung wrong at the joints. Better not to think about it, thinks Dr. Kircher, who at the same moment naturally cannot help thinking about what Master Tilman did to those arms to make them hang so wrong. Better not to imagine it. He rubs his eyes and imagines it.

  “You are silent,” says Dr. Tesimond, “so we will read your words from the interrogation. They are written on this sheet of paper. You spoke them, Hanna. Now everyone shall hear them. Now everything shall come to light.” His words seem to echo as if they were spoken in a stone room and not outside under a linden, in whose linden crown the lingering wind—no! Not for the first time Dr. Kircher finds himself thinking about how fortunate he can consider himself and how favored by God he is that Dr. Tesimond chose him as his famulus. He himself did nothing, didn’t volunteer and didn’t thrust himself forward on the occasion when the legendary man came from Vienna to Paderborn, a guest of the superior, an admired traveler passing through, a witness to the true faith, who during an exercise in the church of the order suddenly stood up and approached him. I will question you, my boy, answer quickly. Don’t think about what I want to hear, you cannot guess it, just say what is correct. Whom does God love more—the angels who are without sin or the man who has sinned and repented? Answer more quickly. Are the angels of God’s substance and thus eternal or are they created as we are? Even more quickly. And sin, is it God’s creation, and if so, can he love it as he does all his creatures, and if not, how is it possible that the punishment of the sinner is without end, his pain without end, and his suffering in the fire without end? Speak quickly!

  It went on like this for an hour. He heard himself giving answers, to ever-new questions, and when he didn’t know an answer, he made something up and sometimes even quotations and sources for it. Thomas Aquinas wrote over a hundred volumes, no one knows them all, and he had always been able to rely on his inventiveness. So he spoke and spoke as if someone else were talking through him, and gathered all his strength and didn’t permit his memory to withhold answers, sentences, or names from him, and he was even able to add and subtract and divide the numbers without paying attention to the beating of his heart or the dizziness in his head, and the whole time his brother in faith was looking him in the face with such intensity that to this day it sometimes seems to him as if the questioning were still going on and would go on forever, as if everything since then were a dream. Yet in the end Dr. Tesimond took a step back and said with his eyes closed and as if to himself: “I need you. My German is not good, you must help. I am traveling back to Vienna, holy duties call, you will come with me.”

  And so they have now been on their way for a year. The journey to Vienna is long when there are so many urgent matters on the way;
a man like Dr. Tesimond cannot simply move on when he discovers machinations. In Lippstadt they had to exorcise a demon. Then in Passau a dishonorable priest had to be chased away. They steered clear of Pilsen because the especially raging Protestants there might have arrested Jesuits passing through, and this detour brought them to a little village where the arrest, torture, and condemnation of an evil witch took them six months. Then they received tidings of a dracontological colloquium in Bayreuth. Naturally, they had to travel there to prevent Erhard von Felz, the doctor’s greatest rival, from spouting unchallenged nonsense. The debate between the two of them lasted seven weeks, four days, and three hours. Afterward he fervently hoped that they would now finally reach the imperial city, but when they spent the night at the Collegium Willibaldinum in Eichstätt, the Prince-Bishop summoned them to an audience: “My people are sleepy, Dr. Tesimond, the administrators don’t report enough offenses in the villages, there are more and more witches, no one does anything, I can hardly finance my own Jesuit seminary, because the cathedral canon is against it. Will you help me? I will appoint you ad hoc commissarius of witches, and I will grant you permission to administer capital supplicium to malefactors on the spot, if you will only help me. You will receive every authority.”

  That was why Dr. Kircher hesitated for an entire afternoon when a conversation with a strange boy aroused in him the suspicion that they had once again crossed paths with a warlock. I don’t have to report it, he thought, I can keep silent, I can forget it, it was not at all necessary for me to talk to the boy, after all, it was a chance encounter. But the voice of conscience returned: Talk to your master. There is no such thing as chance, there is only God’s will. And as expected Dr. Tesimond immediately decided that the miller had to be paid a visit, and as expected everything that followed took its usual course. Now they have spent weeks already in this godforsaken village, and Vienna is more distant than ever.