Also by Daniel Kehlmann
You Should Have Left
F
Fame
Me and Kaminski
Measuring the World
Translation copyright © 2020 by Ross Benjamin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Germany as Tyll by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg, in 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei Hamburg.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kehlmann, Daniel, [date] author. Benjamin, Ross, translator.
Title: Tyll / Daniel Kehlmann ; translated from the German by Ross Benjamin.
Other titles: Tyll. English.
Description: First American edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019014695. ISBN 9781524747466 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9781524747473 (ebook).
Classification: LCC PT2671.E32 T9513 2019 | DDC 833/.914—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2019014695
Ebook ISBN 9781524747473
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
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Contents
Cover
Also by Daniel Kehlmann
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Shoes
Lord of the Air
Zusmarshausen
Kings in Winter
Hunger
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
In the Shaft
Westphalia
A Note About the Author
For A
Shoes
The war had not yet come to us. We lived in fear and hope and tried not to draw God’s wrath down upon our securely walled town, with its hundred and five houses and the church and the cemetery, where our ancestors waited for the Day of Resurrection.
We prayed often to keep the war away. We prayed to the Almighty and to the kind Virgin. We prayed to the Lady of the Forest and to the Little People of Midnight, to Saint Gerwin, to Peter the Gatekeeper, to John the Evangelist—and to be safe we also prayed to Old Mela, who during the Twelve Nights, when the demons are let loose, roams the heavens at the head of her retinue. We prayed to the Horned Ones of ancient days and to Bishop Martin, who shared his cloak with the beggar when the latter was freezing, so that they were then both freezing and pleasing to God, for what’s the use of half a cloak in winter, and of course we prayed to Saint Maurice, who had chosen death with a whole legion rather than betray his faith in the one just God.
Twice a year the tax collector came and always seemed surprised that we were still here. Now and then merchants came, but since we didn’t buy much they soon went on their way, which was all right with us. We needed nothing from the wide world and gave it no thought until one morning a covered wagon, pulled by a donkey, rolled down our main street. It was a Sunday at the beginning of spring, the stream was swollen with meltwater, and in those fields that weren’t lying fallow we had sown the seed.
A red canvas tent was pitched on the wagon. In front of it crouched an old woman. Her body looked like a bag, her face seemed made of leather, her eyes looked like tiny black buttons. A younger woman with freckles and dark hair stood behind her. But on the coach box sat a man we recognized even though he had never been here before, and when the first of us realized who he was and called his name, others too realized, and soon many voices were calling from all directions: “Tyll is here!” “Tyll has come!” “Look, it’s Tyll!” It could be no one else.
Leaflets came even to us. They came through the forest, the wind carried them, merchants brought them—out in the world more of them were printed than anyone could count. They were about the Ship of Fools and the great priestly folly and the evil Pope in Rome and the devilish Martinus Luther of Wittenberg and the sorcerer Horridus and Doctor Faust and the hero Gawain of the Round Table and indeed about him, Tyll Ulenspiegel, who had now come to us himself. We knew his pied jerkin, we knew the battered hood and the calfskin cloak. We knew the gaunt face, the small eyes, the hollow cheeks, and the buckteeth. His breeches were made of good material, his shoes of fine leather, but his hands were a thief’s or a scribe’s hands, which had never done work; his right held the reins, his left the whip. His eyes flashed as he greeted this person and that.
“And what’s your name?” he asked a little girl.
She was speechless, unable to fathom that a person of such renown should be addressing her.
“Well, tell me!”
When she stammered that her name was Martha, he only smiled as if he had always known it.
Then he asked intently: “And how old are you?”
She cleared her throat and told him. In the twelve years of her life she had not seen eyes like his. There might be eyes like these in the free cities of the Empire and at the great courts, but never before had anyone with such eyes come to us. Martha hadn’t known that such strength, such agility of soul could speak from a human face. One day she would tell her husband and then much later her incredulous grandchildren, who would consider Ulenspiegel a figure of old legends, that she had once seen him in the flesh.
In the meantime the wagon had rolled by and his gaze had glided elsewhere, to others on the roadside. Again there were shouts of “Tyll has come!” along the street and “Tyll is here!” from the windows and “It’s Tyll!” from the church square, onto which his wagon now rolled. He cracked the whip and stood up.
With lightning speed the wagon turned into a stage. The two women folded the tent. The young one tied her hair into a knot, put on a little crown, and threw a piece of purple cloth around her, while the old one stood in front of the wagon and began to sing droningly. Her dialect had the sound of the south, of the big cities of Bavaria, and wasn’t easy to understand, but we did glean that the song was about a woman and a man who loved each other and were cruelly separated by a body of water. Tyll Ulenspiegel took a blue sheet, kneeled down, flung it, holding on to one end, away from him so that it unfurled with a crackle. He pulled it back and flung it away again, pulled it back, flung it, and the way he kneeled on one end and the woman on the other and the blue billowed between them, there really seemed to be water there, and the waves went up and down so furiously that it seemed no ship could sail them.
When the woman straightened up and looked at the waves, her face rigid with fright, we suddenly noticed how beautiful she was. As she stood there and stretched her arms toward the sky, she all at once no longer belonged here, and none of us could look away. Only out of the corner of our eyes did we see her beloved leaping and dancing and bustling around and brandishing his sword and battling dragons and foes and witches and evil kings, on the difficult journey to her.
The play lasted into the afternoon. But even though we knew the cows’ udders were hurting, none of us stirred. The old woman performed hour after hour. It seemed impossible that someone could memorize so many verses, and some of us began to suspect she was making them up as she sang. Tyll Ulenspiegel’s body was meanwhile never at rest, his soles seemed hardly to touch the ground; whenever our eyes found him, he was once again elsewhere on the small stage. At the end there was a misunderstanding: The beautiful woman had obtained a potion to feign death and not be forced to marry her evil guardian, but the message to her beloved explaining everything had gone astray and when he, her true bridegroom, the friend of her soul, at last arrived beside her motionless body, the shock struck him like a bolt of lightning. For a long time he stood there as if frozen. The old woman was silent. We heard the wind and the cows mooing for us. No one breathed.