She would have liked so much to keep lying on the ground. But she knows that when you’ve lost a lot of blood, if you stay on the ground, you’ll be lying there forever.
“Give me the baby.”
He gives her the baby. It’s a girl.
She can’t see her, the night is so black that she might as well be blind, but when she holds the little being, she feels that she is still alive.
No one will know about you, she thinks. No one will remember, only I, your mother, and I won’t forget, because I must not forget. For everyone else will forget you.
She said the same thing to her other three who died at birth. And she really does still know everything there is to know about each of them: the smell, the weight, the shape—each time a little different—in her hands. They didn’t even have names.
Her knees give way. Heiner holds her. For a moment the temptation to simply lie down again is strong. But she has lost too much blood, the Cold Woman is not far, and the Little People might find her too. She hands Heiner the baby and wants to set off, but immediately she falls and lies on roots and sticks and senses how vast the night is. Why resist anyway? It would be so easy. Just let go. So easy.
Instead she opens her eyes. She feels the roots under her. She shivers with cold and grasps that she’s still alive.
Again she stands up. Apparently the bleeding has abated. Heiner holds out the baby to her. She takes her and realizes at once that there’s no life left in her, so she gives her back, because she needs both hands to hold on to a tree trunk. He lays the baby on the ground, but Agneta hisses at him, and he picks her back up. For of course they can’t leave her here: moss would grow over her, plants entwine her, bugs live in her limbs. Her spirit would never rest.
And at this moment it happens that a premonition of something wrong creeps up on Claus in the attic room of his mill. He quickly murmurs a prayer, sprinkles a pinch of crushed mandrake into the flame of his weak, smoky lamp. The bad omen is confirmed: instead of flaring up, the flame immediately goes out. A sharp stench fills the room.
In the darkness Claus writes a square of moderate strength on the walclass="underline"
M I L O N
I R A G O
L A M A L
O G A R I
N O L I M
Afterward, to be safe, he says aloud seven times: Nipson anomimata mi monan ospin. He knows that this is Greek. What it means, he doesn’t know, but it reads the same way forward as backward, and sentences of this sort have special power. Then he lies back down on the hard floorboards to continue his work.
Recently he has been observing the course of the moon every night. His sluggish progress is enough to drive him to despair. The moon always rises in a different place than it did the night before; its path never stays the same. And because apparently no one can explain this, Claus decided to clear up the matter himself.
“When there’s something no one knows,” Wolf Hüttner once said to him, “we have to find it out!”
Hüttner, the man who was his teacher, a chiromancer and necromancer of Konstanz, a night watchman by trade. Claus Ulenspiegel spent a winter in his employ, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of him with gratitude. Hüttner showed him the squares, spells, and potent herbs, and Claus hung on every word when Hüttner spoke to him of the Little People and the Big People and the Ancient Ones and the People of the Earthly Depths and the Spirits of the Air and the fact that you couldn’t trust the scholars, for they knew nothing, but they wouldn’t admit it, lest they fall out of favor with their princes, and when Claus moved on after the thaw, he had three books from Hüttner’s collection in his bag. At the time he had not yet known how to read, but a pastor in Augsburg whom he cured of rheumatism taught him, and when he moved on, he took with him three books from the pastor’s library too. All the books were heavy; a dozen of them filled the bag like lead. Soon it became clear to him that he either had to leave the books behind or else settle down somewhere, ideally in a hidden place away from the big roads, for books are expensive and not every owner had parted with his voluntarily, and by a stroke of ill fortune Hüttner himself could suddenly appear outside his door, put a curse on him, and demand back what belonged to him.
When he had amassed so many books that he actually couldn’t remain on the move, fate took its course. A miller’s daughter caught his fancy. She was pretty, and she was funny too, and strong, and a blind man could see that she liked him. To win her wasn’t hard. He was a good dancer, and he knew the right spells and herbs to bind a heart. On the whole he knew more than anyone else in the village. She found that appealing. At first her father had doubts, but none of the other mill hands seemed capable of taking over the mill, so he gave in. And for a while all was well.
Then he sensed her disappointment. First occasionally, then more often. And then all the time. She didn’t like his books, she didn’t like his need to solve the mysteries of the world, and besides, she wasn’t wrong, it’s a huge task, it doesn’t leave much strength for other things, especially not for the daily routine of the mill. Suddenly it seemed like a mistake to Claus too: What am I doing here, what do these clouds of flour have to do with me, or these dull farmers who always try to cheat you when they pay, or these slow-witted mill hands who never do what you instruct them to? On the other hand, he tells himself often, life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange. What really troubles him, however, is the question of whether a person will go to hell for stealing so many books.
But you must simply snatch knowledge wherever it can be found. People are not meant to languish in ignorance. And when you have no one to talk to, it’s not easy. So much preoccupies you, but no one wants to hear it, your thoughts about what the sky is and how stones come into being, and flies, and the teeming life everywhere, and in what language the angels speak with each other, and how the Lord God created himself and still must create himself, day after day, for if he didn’t do so, everything would cease from one moment to the next—who, if not God, should prevent the world from simply not existing?
Some books took Claus months, others years. Some he knows by heart and still doesn’t understand. And at least once a month he returns in perplexity to the thick Latin work he stole from the burning house of a priest in Trier. He wasn’t the one who started the fire, but he was nearby and smelled the smoke and seized the opportunity. Without him the book would have been reduced to ashes. He has a right to it. Yet he cannot read it.
It’s seven hundred sixty-six pages long, closely printed, and some pages contain pictures that seem to come from bad dreams: men with bird heads, a city with battlements and tall towers on a cloud from which rain is falling in thin lines, a horse with two heads in a forest clearing, an insect with long wings, a turtle climbing heavenward on a ray of sun. The first leaf, which must have once had the book’s title on it, is missing; someone also tore out the leaf with pages twenty-three and twenty-four and the one with pages five hundred nineteen and five hundred twenty. Claus has brought the book to the priest three times and asked for help, but each time the priest sent him away brusquely and declared that only educated people were entitled to concern themselves with Latin writings. At first Claus considered saddling him with a mild curse—rheumatism or an infestation of mice or spoiled milk—but then he realized that the poor village priest who drinks too much and is constantly repeating himself in his sermons in truth hardly understands Latin himself. Thus he has nearly reconciled himself to never being able to read this one book that possibly holds the key to everything. For who could teach him Latin here, in a godforsaken mill?