“Eventually we can all fly,” says the boy. “When we’re dead.”
“When you’re dead, you’re first of all dead. Then you lie in the grave until the Lord returns to judge us.”
“When will he return?”
“The priest hasn’t taught you that?”
The boy shrugs. The priest speaks often in church about these things, of course, the grave, the judgment, the dead, but he has a monotonous voice, and it’s also not rare for him to be drunk.
“At the end of time,” says the stranger. “Except that the dead cannot experience time, they’re dead, after all, so one can also say: immediately. As soon as you’re dead, the Day of Judgment dawns.”
“My father said the same thing.”
“Your father is a scholar?”
“My father is a miller.”
“Does he have opinions? Does he read?”
“He knows a lot,” says the boy. “He helps people.”
“Helps them?”
“When they’re ill.”
“Perhaps he can help me too.”
“Are you ill?”
The stranger sits down beside him on the ground. “What do you think, will it stay sunny, or will we have more rain?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You’re from here, aren’t you?”
“We’ll have more rain,” says the boy, because it rains most of the time. The weather is almost always bad. Which is why the harvest is so pitiful, which is why the mill doesn’t get enough grain, which is why everyone is hungry. Supposedly it used to be better. The older people remember long summers, but perhaps they’re also imagining it, who can know, they are old.
“My father thinks,” says the boy, “that angels ride on the rain clouds and look down at us.”
“Clouds are made of water,” says the stranger. “No one sits on them. The angels have bodies of light and need no conveyance. Nor do demons. They are made of air. That’s why the devil is known as the Lord of the Air.” He pauses as if to hearken to his own sentences, and gazes with an almost curious expression at his fingertips. “And yet,” he then says, “they are nothing but particles of God’s will.”
“Even the devils?”
“Naturally.”
“The devils are God’s will?”
“God’s will is greater than everything imaginable. It is so great that it is able to negate itself. An old riddle goes: can God make a stone so heavy that he can no longer lift it? It sounds like a paradox. Do you know what that is, a paradox?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
The boy nods.
“What is it?”
“You are a paradox, and your rogue of a pimp father is one too.”
The stranger is silent for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth stretch upward into a thin smile. “It’s actually not a paradox, for the correct answer is: naturally he can. But the stone that he can no longer lift he can then lift effortlessly. God is too encompassing to be one with himself. That’s why the Lord of the Air and his associates exist. That’s why everything that is not God exists. That’s why the world exists.”
The boy raises a hand in front of his face. The sun is now unobstructed by clouds. A blackbird flits past. Yes, of course, he thinks, you should fly like that, it would be even better than walking on the rope. But if you simply cannot fly, then walking on the rope is second best.
“I’d like to meet your father.”
The boy nods indifferently.
“You’d better hurry,” says the stranger. “It will be raining in an hour.”
The boy points to the sun questioningly.
“Do you see the small clouds back there?” asks the stranger. “And the elongated ones over us? The wind is massing together the ones back there, it’s coming from the east and bringing cold air, and the ones over us are catching it, and then everything cools even more, and the water grows heavy and falls to the earth. There are no angels sitting on the clouds, but it is nonetheless worthwhile to look at them, for they bring water and beauty. What’s your name?”
The boy tells him.
“Don’t forget your hammer, Tyll.” The stranger turns away and leaves.
—
Claus is in a gloomy mood this evening. The fact that he cannot solve the grain problem is weighing on his mind at the table.
It’s maddening. If you have a heap of grain in front of you and take away one grain, you still have a heap in front of you. Now take another. Is it still a heap? Of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Yes, of course. Now take another away. Is it still a heap? Of course. And so on and so on. It is quite simple: merely by taking a single grain away, you never make a heap of grain into something that is not a heap of grain. Also, by putting on one grain, you never make something that is not a heap of grain into a heap.
And yet: if you remove grain after grain, the heap is at some point no longer a heap. At some point there will be just a few little grains left on the ground, which by no stretch of the imagination can be called a heap. And if you keep going, the moment will eventually come when you take the last one and there’s nothing left on the floor. Is one grain a heap? Certainly not. And nothing at all? No, nothing at all is not a heap. For nothing at all is nothing at all.
But which is the grain whose removal causes the heap to cease being a heap? When does it actually happen? Claus has played it through hundreds of times, piling up hundreds of grain heaps in his imagination, then mentally removing individual grains. But he has not found the decisive moment. It has ousted even the moon from his attention and he has no longer been thinking much about the dead baby either.
This afternoon he then tried it in reality. The most difficult part was hauling so much unground grain up to the attic room without losing some in the process, for the day after tomorrow Peter Steger is coming and picking up the flour. Claus had to shout and threaten the mill hands to make them be careful; he cannot afford any more debts. Agneta called him a furry horned animal, whereupon he told her not to meddle in things that are too difficult for women, whereupon she smacked him, whereupon he told her to watch herself, whereupon she slapped him so hard that he had to sit down for a while. This is how it often goes between them. In the beginning he sometimes hit Agneta back, but it never went well for him, he may be stronger, but she is usually angrier, and in every fight whoever is angrier wins, and so he long ago gave up hitting her, for as quickly as her anger comes, it fortunately evaporates just as quickly.
Then he began to work in his attic room. At first deliberate and scrupulous, examining the heap with each grain, but gradually sweating and morose and by late afternoon in sheer despair. On the right side of the room there was eventually a new heap and on the left side something that could perhaps still be called a heap, but perhaps not. And a little while later there was on the left only a handful of grains.
And where, then, was the dividing line? It’s enough to make you cry. He spoons his groats, sighs, and listens to the pelting rain. The groats taste bad as always, but for a while the sound of the rain soothes him. Then it occurs to him that it’s similar with rain: How many drops fewer would have to fall for it to no longer be rain? He groans. Sometimes it seems to him as if it were God’s goal in the way he made the world to confound a poor miller.
Agneta puts her hand on his arm and asks whether he’d like more groats.
He doesn’t want more, but he understands that she feels sorry for him and that it’s a peace offering because of the slaps. “Yes,” he says softly. “Thank you.”
Then there’s a thump at the door.
Claus crosses his fingers for protection. He murmurs a spell, makes signs in the air; only then does he calclass="underline" “Who’s there, in the name of God?” Everyone knows never to say come in before whoever is outside has said his name. The evil spirits are powerful, but the vast majority of them cannot cross the threshold unless they are invited.