The boy has climbed onto the balladeer’s wagon. There he stands, elevated above everyone, on the edge of the wagon, and it’s strange that he doesn’t fall. How is he keeping his balance up there? Dr. Kircher can’t help smiling tensely. The boy doesn’t smile back. Involuntarily Dr. Kircher wonders whether the child too has been touched by Satan, yet in the interrogation there was no sign of it. The wife wept a great deal, the boy was withdrawn into himself, but both of them said everything that was necessary. All at once Dr. Kircher is no longer certain. Were they too careless? The feints of the Lord of the Air are manifold. What if the miller is not the worst warlock at all? Dr. Kircher feels a suspicion stirring in him.
“Did you do it?” Dr. Tesimond asks once again.
The executioner backs away. All listen attentively, stand on tiptoe, lift their heads. Even the wind subsides for a moment as Claus Ulenspiegel draws a breath to finally answer.
III
He didn’t know such good food existed. Never in his life has he encountered anything like it: first a hearty chicken soup with freshly baked wheat bread, then a leg of lamb, spiced with salt and even pepper, then the loin of a fat pig with sauce, finally sweet cherry cake, still warm from the oven, with a strong red wine rising like fog to his head. They must have brought a cook from somewhere. As Claus eats at his small table in the cowshed and feels his stomach filling up with warm, fine things, he thinks that a meal like this is ultimately even worth dying for.
He believed the hangman’s meal was only a figure of speech, never suspecting that a cook was actually called to prepare you food better than any you’d had in your whole life. With your arms chained together it’s hard to hold the meat, the iron chafes, your wrists are sore, but at the moment it doesn’t matter, so good does it taste. And on the whole his hands no longer hurt as much as a week ago. Master Tilman is also a master of healing; Claus has to admit without envy that the executioner knows herbs he has never heard of. Nonetheless, the feeling hasn’t returned to his crushed fingers, and so the meat keeps falling to the ground. He closes his eyes. He hears the chickens scratching in the coop next door, he hears the snoring of the man with the expensive clothing who wanted to be his advocate and is now lying chained up in the straw. As he chews the wonderful pork, he tries to conceive of the fact that he will never learn the outcome of this man’s trial.
For he will be dead by then. Nor will he learn what the weather will be like the day after tomorrow. He will be dead by then. Or whether it will rain again tomorrow night. But it doesn’t matter anyway, who cares about the rain.
Only it really is odd: Now you’re still sitting here and can rattle off all the numbers between one and a thousand, but the day after tomorrow you will be either an ethereal being or else a soul that returns to the world in a person or animal and hardly remembers the miller you still are—but when you are some weasel or a chicken or a sparrow on a branch and don’t even know that you were once a miller who concerned himself with the heavenly course of the moon, indeed, when you are hopping from branch to branch and thinking only about seeds and of course the buzzards you have to escape, what meaning does it actually still have that you were formerly a miller whom you have now completely forgotten?
He remembers that Master Tilman told him he could have more at any time. Just call, let me know, you can have as much as you want, because afterward there won’t be anything else.
So Claus tries it. He calls. He calls while chewing, for he still has meat on his plate, and there’s still cake too, but when you can have more, why wait until everything is gone and until the people outside might change their minds? He calls again, and the door really does open.
“Can I have more?”
“Of everything?”
“Of everything please.”
Master Tilman walks out silently, and Claus tucks into the cake. And while he is chewing up the warm, soft, sweet mass, it suddenly becomes clear to him that he has always been hungry: day and night, evening and morning. Only he no longer knew it was hunger—that feeling of dissatisfaction, the hollowness in everything, the never-abating weakness of the body, which makes the knees and the hands limp and confuses the head. It wasn’t necessary, it didn’t have to be like that, it was just hunger!
The door opens with a creak, and Master Tilman carries in a tray with bowls. Claus sighs with pleasure. Master Tilman, misunderstanding the sigh, sets down the tray and puts his hand on his shoulder.
“It will be all right,” he says.
“I know,” says Claus.
“It happens very quickly. I can do that. I promise you.”
“Thank you,” says Claus.
“Sometimes the condemned anger me. Then it doesn’t happen quickly. Believe me. But you haven’t angered me.”
Claus nods gratefully.
“These are better days. In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you’re standing before the Creator. You’re incinerated afterward, but by then you’re dead, it doesn’t bother you at all, you’ll see.”
“Good,” says Claus.
The two of them look at each other. Master Tilman seems not to want to go. You might think he liked it in the shed.
“You’re not a bad fellow,” says Master Tilman.
“Thank you.”
“For a servant of the devil.”
Claus shrugs.
Master Tilman walks out and laboriously bolts the door.
Claus continues to eat. Again he tries to imagine it: the houses out there, the birds in the sky, the clouds, the brownish green ground with grass and fields and all the molehills in spring, for you’ll never get rid of the moles, not with any herb or spell, and the rain, of course—all this going on without him.
Only he can’t imagine it.
For whenever he pictures a world without Claus Ulenspiegel, his imagination smuggles back in the very Claus Ulenspiegel it is meant to remove—as an invisible man, an eye without a body, a ghost. But when he really thinks himself utterly away, then the world he would like to imagine without Claus Ulenspiegel vanishes with him. However often he tries it, it’s always the same thing. May he conclude from this that he is safe? For he cannot be gone at all, because the world ultimately must not vanish and because without him it would have to vanish?
The pork still tastes wonderful, but, he notices now, Master Tilman didn’t bring more cake, and because the cake was the best of all, Claus gives it a try and calls once again.
The executioner comes in.
“Can I have more cake?”
Master Tilman doesn’t reply and goes out. Claus chews the pork. Now that his hunger is sated, he realizes all the more how good it tastes, how fine and rich, how warm and salty, and a bit sweet too. He contemplates the wall of the shed. If you paint a square on it shortly before midnight and also draw two double circles with some blood on the ground and invoke three times the third of the secret names of the Almighty, then a door will appear, and you can slip away. The only problem would be the chains, for to cast them off you would need horsetail extract; and so he would have to flee in chains and find horsetail on the way, but Claus is tired, and his body hurts, and it’s also not the season for horsetail.
And it’s difficult to begin anew elsewhere. In the past it would have been possible, but now he is older and no longer has the strength to be a dishonorable traveling journeyman again, a despised day laborer on the outskirts of some village, a stranger shunned by everyone. You couldn’t even work as a healer, because that would attract attention.