fastus, these days belonging to the legless cripple that rocked painfully along on his buttocks while a cowled figure threw coins at him, belonged to the villain with a monkey in a basket on his back, to the blind beggars with empty bowls, to the dying boy wrapped in a gown and lying in the middle of the street with his false mother squatting beside him receiving alms. Leaning on a rifle that served him as a crutch, Ulrich ascended with long swinging steps to the roof of the central building in order to show Franz the square on the other side, where happy games were played by laughing children. Inflated bladders. Blankets for tossing. Barrels for jumping. Wooden horses. Johnny on the pony. Snap the whip. Franz resisted this scene, although the boy, disconsolate suddenly, pointed to the large open-air table where an old woman kneaded dough for bread. Franz looked back, down the rooftops at the wild boars, the fish, the pigs, at a fat figure in red stockings and blue doublet who sat astride a barrel of beer and with a stiletto pierced the dead mouth of a wild boar’s head. Then the carnival lunatics wearing tight cotton masks that showed the shape of their features without revealing their faces. Franz laughed and jabbed the boy with his elbow. Shaking with deep laughter, he explained to him that the elderly dwarfs were really disguised children, children with charcoal wrinkles drawn under their eyes, with carrot noses. Following the children came a troop of court jesters playing the mandolin, swaying cotton paunches beneath their white gowns, and wearing clusters of onions around their necks. Ulrich tugged on Franz’s sleeve. Happy children could be seen blowing soap bubbles, making lame birds sound again, making dolls. They ran in circles, costumed, wearing hoods. Franz paid no attention to the boy but went on laughing. A thick-legged cook passed with a pie of black crows and a skillet on his head, and behind him came another, even fatter, carrying on his head a table with golden bread and a dwarf dressed like a king in an ermine cape and an Oriental turban. It’s a little boy, Ulrich, Franz said, and so is that devil in red with blue and white stripes down his side. Ulrich released Franz’s hand and looked at him with impatience. Franz felt delight as the false Christ appeared, humped over, disheveled, with a dissolute face, dragged forth from a tent of patched canvas and now permitted to perform miracles, to cure the cripple crawling on his belly with his legs in the air in violent opposition to Lent, drawing himself along by grasping posts and corners and followed by a crowd of brother cripples using canes and crutches. They swarmed round the little stalls where eggs, bread, and fish were sold; they moved toward the barrels and the cooking fires, and behind, from the tall gray cathedral, a pile of pious women and black nuns emerged and turned their backs on the carnival. Ulrich threw his rifle-crutch in the air and slid down the red slate roof like sliding down a cellar door and with a pirouette fell among the playing children. He looked back at Franz and stuck out his tongue. But Franz laughed, for he knew that Ulrich was performing for him, capering in his yellow doublet and scarlet hood with gold bells, the black platter with which he was picking up the bread, fish, and papier-mâché masks that the children would need to save themselves. Ulrich ran to the bramble hedge around the garden. The other boys had climbed up there and were standing on their heads while two double files of girls hopped along the road lifting their knees high. Ulrich raced among the children who were playing blindman’s buff, among those who were riding on each other’s shoulders, among those jousting on stilts. He squeezed between the canes of the blind men. He pulled girls’ hair and jerked his hood down to his nose as he stood jeering before a magician who concealed a treasure under three nutshells and challenged him to guess which one. He performed balancing tricks and gymnastics on a hitching rail for horses. He climbed up the legs and arms of the goblins and rode piggyback. He lifted the flying skirts of the girls even higher, as if he wanted to hide among their petticoats. He climbed trees, he threw down a scrap of awning at a group of children who stood watching him. He spun two tops in his open palms and held them up, offering them to Franz, who was still perched high on the rooftop with the wind in his ear. Ulrich had become the leader they all followed and imitated, whether he put on a circus act or swallowed herring or threw himself into the river or leaped off the cliff to fall among the rocks. And now he went away followed by hundreds of children, pale boys, chubby boys, girls with white ribbons, dogs, mountebanks, and magicians with false noses. Franz stretched out his hand to touch that soft face which above its drowsy eyes had no eyelashes. He reached to touch the silver, blue, green, pale-rose bird’s wing. To touch the lotus flowers, the lilies, the grasses growing beside the river. But the scene changed. An old woman threw out a bucketful of water and hollow-sounding balls hailed down and a blue belt tied to a stick was lonely as it was shaken by the wind. A boy hid behind a window and peeped out, others dove into the river, a girl ran into a house balancing a broom on one finger, caps were tossed high and the littlest girls walked in single file singing with the staves of their music cut out and hanging from a tree branch. From the square where the carnival was proceeding, mountebanks wearing striped gray uniforms on which yellow stars were sewn began to climb toward Franz. In the other square, boys hid in a sand mountain and a girl holding a broken doll peered through a barrel without ends and with her finger pointed at Franz. Children who had been baking bricks began to throw them up at the roof and the gray-clad gymnasts crawled on all fours across the leads and an owl in a loft observed him and solemnly winked. Then the crawling figures attacked him, grabbed him by the neck, the arms, the thighs, the feet. Franz could only stare down at the square with its patches of light and shadow and its sordid merrymaking, the dry earth of dead branches and empty cartons, eggshells, old placards, bones sucked hollow, gray oyster shells, stones that rolled in circles while to the laughter and obscenities of the two kings, Momus and Christ, his attackers wrestled with him and dragged him down among the dwarfs and beggars, the cripples and minstrels, the nuns and the venders, to the center of the square, to the deep well where a spectacled old man in the garb of a priest, after inspecting the bucket, pushed him off the cliff and he fell away from them lying on his back and looking up at the rectangle of sky blocked by the shaven heads of those looking down at his fall. Then the painted curtain was drawn. A scene of infanticides, dogs and knives and guards in armor who slaughtered children and pursued them across a snowy field toward stumps of trees that were also white, covered with ice, while an orchestra played Viennese waltzes, the trumpet sounding clear and loud over the dead of all lands, gathering them all before the throne of judgment. Death and nature would halt astonished while creation rose from the grave to give its answers to the Judge. A written book would be read aloud, all the words and accusations and confessions by which the world must be tried. And thus when the Judge seated himself, all that had been concealed would be open, nothing would go unpunished. And now, there was Ulrich again.