Traveling in time. Such nonsense.
The street lights cast pale patches on the town wall. The church tower is floodlit. The colorless alternation between rooftops and the silhouetted ash trees. Frau Kranz knows it all very well. Once she painted the Berlin Gate from memory, getting every crack in the stones of its arch almost perfectly accurate.
She closes her eyes, and the six women take their first step as if they had practiced doing it at the same time.
Frau Kranz doesn’t see her village, she knows her village.
Her mother called her Ana, so that she wouldn’t have one more “n” than all the other Anas thereabouts.
Omne solum forti patria est. Everywhere is home to the strong.
She would have liked to paint not reality sometime, but something that became real later. But how do you do that?
Frau Kranz would like to paint what no one knows.
Frau Kranz would like to paint the evil in us, but how do you do that?
Frau Kranz would like to paint staying the course, but how do you do that?
And prevention, but how?
Frau Kranz wades through the lake. A duck is startled out of its sleep and scolds helplessly. Its quacking slops over the wall and into the streets. Frau Kranz’s evening dress gets wet.
THE SETTLERS WHO FIRST CAME TO LIVE BESIDE our lakes, hundreds of years ago, found sandy soil that could be worked reasonably well, dense forests in which they killed game and were killed, as well as waters poor in fish but with plenty of fine crayfish in them. The crayfish were considered a specialty in aristocratic circles, although they tasted horrible, until one day someone ventured to say that they did taste horrible, and the fashion for eating them died out at once.
The settlers considered the larger of our two lakes uncanny. Yes, its waters were shallow and a healthy brown color near the banks, but farther out the bed of the lake fell steeply to such black depths that folk said: this is where the Devil washes himself once every thirteen years, this is the Devil’s Bath.
The forest was grubbed up, the cultivated fields grew larger, and where there had once been isolated houses and farms there was now a village. Later it was granted a town charter, and a strong wall to mark it off from the land belonging to the town of Stargard. At first people said that they lived in the vörste velden, the first fields beside the Devil’s Bath — today the name has become Fürstenfelde.
At first, when people wanted to get to the new settlement, the ferryman rowed them across the lake. He capably took them and their belongings on board, and instead of money he often asked strangers to the place for stories as his fee, passing the stories on to the locals at the village inn.
One chilly evening — autumn had set in some time before — the frogs fell silent, the water was calm and the wind died down as if it were holding its breath. Then the bell on the landing stage was rung vigorously, and there stood a weedy little fellow in the twilight, gazing grimly over the lake.
“Tell me, old man,” said the little fellow hoarsely to the ferryman, with his bony finger pointing over the water, “what’s all that nonsense going on over there?”
The ferryman couldn’t see any nonsense, only the farmers busy in their fields with the last of the day’s work. Nor did the little fellow seem to expect an answer; he had already jumped into the boat and said he wanted to be taken across the lake. The ferryman hesitated for only a moment. He felt that there was something uncanny about his passenger, but the man was a passenger and the ferryman would treat him accordingly, so he made the boat ready and rowed away.
On the way, he felt that the ferryboat was getting heavier and heavier. Then the manikin asked whether the ferryman wasn’t finding it hard work to row. But the ferryman was proud, so he shook his head and didn’t show how hard it was. Soon, however, he found that rowing was not just hard work but downright impossible. It was as if his oars were dipping not into water but into thick porridge. The little man asked his question again, and this time the ferryman, gasping for breath, said that he’d never yet failed to row anyone over the lake.
The passenger seemed pleased with his reply. “Then I’ll help you,” he cried, and he tore off one of his legs and threw it overboard. Now the rowing was easier, but soon they were making even slower progress. However hard the ferryman tried, the oars stuck fast in the black water — or was it still water? — and the boat wouldn’t move.
Then the manikin took off his hat, which was adorned with a long, red feather, bent his knee and jumped into the lake. Under the water already, he called back to the ferryman, “Wait for me and you won’t regret it.”
The red feather in the hat cast a flickering light all the way to land. Where the manikin had jumped into the water, horrible tangles of waterweeds wound their way, and gigantic pike swam around. But whenever the manikin came close to one of them, the plants ducked aside and the fish swam off. Only the nasty crayfish felt no fear. The one leg with which the little fellow struck out like a whip as he went diving down did not end in a human foot. Instead of a heel, it had a hoof.
The ferryman’s heart sank. He would happily have gone without his fee, only he was a man who didn’t lightly fail to do his duty, and it was his duty to take passengers safely across the lake. At midnight the little man rose to the surface again, holding the leg he had torn off in his teeth like a valuable catch. He nodded to the ferryman as a sign that their crossing could continue.
After a single stroke of the oars the boat came to land — day was already beginning to dawn. His passenger paid the ferryman a princely sum of money. “And since you did not give up, did not complain, and kept faith with me,” he said, “I will give you a special reward.” So he said, and then he promised to spare the ferryman’s life, but the others who had dared to settle beside his lake, he said, would not live to see harvest. “Unless,” said the little man, winking, “you can persuade them to move away from here.”
The ferryman woke the Mayor to tell him to warn the village. But the Mayor did not care for the ferryman’s stories anyway, so he sent him off without hearing what he had to say.
The innkeeper listened spellbound, but he thought the passenger’s hoof could be true only in a fairy tale, and gave the ferryman a drink for telling such a good story.
And so it went on: the blacksmith advised the ferryman, who had been awake all night, to sleep off his hangover, the farmers in the fields had not noticed any red light out on the lake, and they even swore that the ferryman had come ashore alone in his boat. Some may have believed him, but said defiantly that they were well off here, and no one could drive them away.
While the ferryman was going desperately from one to another, two fellows came to the inn. They wore hoods far down over their faces, and spoke like men in a fever. In the evening the landlord found them dead, their skin disfigured by terrible marks. Soon the landlord himself was feeling unwell, and so were others who had gone to the inn to drink.
The prophecy of the ferryman’s passenger came true. The plague carried people away as fast as the wind. In the daytime the ferryman dug graves and wandered among the empty houses as though he thought that the story might have a different ending if he only looked for it. In the evening he bewailed his fate. But at night he put out on the lake and called his warning again, as if the water and the stars themselves might be persuaded to leave this place.
Much time has passed since then. No Devil carries the plague to our village now. But every thirteen years, on an autumn evening, the frogs fall silent, the wind dies down, the water is still, and you can hear gasping and the sound of heavy oar strokes, and a hoarse voice calling, “Tell me, old man, are you finding it hard to row?”