When evening falls, they are sitting on the ground and listening to the storyteller. He is speaking of poor King Friedrich of Prague, whose reign lasted only a winter, before the Kaiser’s mighty army drove him out. Now the proud city has been laid low and will never recover. He speaks in long sentences in a liltingly beautiful melody, without moving his hands; with his voice alone he ensures that you won’t look elsewhere. All this is true, he says, even what has been made up is true. And Nele, without understanding what that’s supposed to mean, claps.
Gottfried scrawls in his calendar. He didn’t know, he mutters, that Friedrich was deposed again already; now he has to rewrite his song about him.
On Nele’s right the fiddler tunes his instrument with his eyes closed in concentration. Now we belong here, she thinks. Now we are among the traveling people.
Someone taps her on the shoulder. She wheels around.
Behind her crouches the traveling entertainer who winked at her earlier. He’s no longer so young, and his face is very red. Heinrich Tamm had such a red face shortly before he died. Even his eyes are shot through with red. But they are also sharp and alert and shrewd and unkind.
“You two,” he says softly.
Now the boy too turns around.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“Yes,” the boy says without hesitation.
Nele stares at him uncomprehendingly. Didn’t they want to travel with Gottfried, who is good to them, gives them food, led them out of the forest? Gottfried, who could really use the two of them?
“I can really use two people like you,” the entertainer says. “You could use someone like me. I’ll teach you everything.”
“But we’re with him.” Nele points to Gottfried, whose lips are moving as he writes in his little book. The pencil in his hand breaks. He curses softly, keeps scrawling.
“Then you won’t go far,” says the entertainer.
“We don’t know you,” says Nele.
“I am Pirmin,” says the entertainer. “Now you know me.”
“My name is Tyll. This is Nele.”
“I won’t ask again. If you’re not sure, never mind. Then I’ll be gone. Then you can go on with him.”
“We’re coming with you,” says the boy.
Pirmin extends his hand. Tyll grasps it. Pirmin chuckles, his lips twisting, his thick, moist tongue again becoming visible in the corner of his mouth. Nele is loath to travel with him.
Now he extends his hand to her.
She doesn’t move. Behind her the storyteller is speaking of the flight of the Winter King from the burning city—now he is a burden to Europe’s Protestant princes, roams the land with his silly court, still wears purple as if he were one of the great, but the children laugh at him, and the wise men shed tears because they see in him the frailty of all greatness.
Now Gottfried too has noticed it. With a furrowed brow he looks at the fool’s extended hand.
“Come on,” says the boy. “Shake his hand.”
But why should she do what Tyll says? Did she run away in order to obey him instead of her father? What does she owe him, why should he be in charge?
“What’s wrong?” asks Gottfried. “What’s going on here, what is this?”
Pirmin’s hand is still extended. His grin too is unchanging, as if her hesitation didn’t mean anything, as if he had long known what she will decide.
“Well, what’s this all about?” Gottfried asks again.
The hand is fleshy and soft. Nele doesn’t want to touch it. It’s true, of course, that Gottfried can’t do much. But he has been good to them. And she doesn’t like this fellow. There is something not right about him. On the other hand, it’s true, of course: Gottfried will not be able to teach them anything.
On the one hand, on the other hand. Pirmin winks as if he were reading her thoughts.
Tyll jerks his head impatiently. “Come on, Nele!”
She need only extend her arm.
Zusmarshausen
He could not have known, of course, the fat count wrote in his life’s chronicle, penned in the early years of the eighteenth century, when he was already an old man, plagued by gout, syphilis, and the quicksilver poisoning that the treatment of the syphilis brought him—he could not have known, of course, what awaited him when His Majesty dispatched him in the final year of the war to find the famous jester.
At that time Martin von Wolkenstein was not yet twenty-five but already corpulent. As a descendant of the minnesinger Oswald, he had grown up at the Viennese court. His father had once been chief chamberlain under Kaiser Matthias, his grandfather second key bearer of the mad Rudolf. Whoever knew Martin von Wolkenstein liked him; there was something bright surrounding him, a confidence and a friendliness that never failed him, even in the face of adversity. The Kaiser himself had shown him his favor several times, and he had also understood it as a show of favor when Count Trauttmansdorff, the President of the Privy Council, had summoned him and informed him that the Kaiser had heard that the most famous jester in the Empire had found refuge in the half-destroyed Abbey of Andechs. They had seen so much go to ruin, had been forced to allow so much destruction, invaluable things had been lost, but that someone like Tyll Ulenspiegel should simply waste away, whether Protestant or Catholic—for what he actually was, no one seemed to know—that was out of the question.
“I congratulate you, young man,” said Trauttmansdorff. “Take advantage of the occasion, who knows what could come of it.”
Then, as the fat count described it more than fifty years later, he had held out his gloved hand to him for the kiss that was at the time still prescribed by court ceremony—and that was exactly how it had been, he had made up none of it, even though he gladly made things up when there were gaps in his memory, and there were a lot of those, for all this was, by the time he was writing it down, a lifetime ago.
The very next day we ventured forth, he wrote. I rode in good spirits and full of hope, yet not without melancholy, because, for reasons that even now remain obscure unto my understanding, I could not look upon the path before me as one foreordained, eager though I was to behold the undisguised countenance of the red god Mars.
It was not true about the haste; in actuality more than a week had passed. After all, he had still had to write letters conveying his plans, had to say his goodbyes, visit his parents, be blessed by the bishop; he had to drink with his friends once more, had to call once more on his favorite among the court prostitutes, the dainty Aglaia, whom he still remembered decades later with a remorse he himself could not fathom; and of course he had to select the right companions. He chose three battle-tested men from the Lobkowitz dragoon regiment along with a secretary of the Imperial Court Council, Karl von Doder, who had seen the famous jester twenty years earlier at a market near Neulengbach, where the man, as was his way, played a very dirty trick on a woman in the audience and afterward provoked a bad knife fight, to the delight, naturally, of those who were not affected by it, for so it always was when he appeared: Some fared badly, but those who got away enjoyed themselves immensely. At first the secretary didn’t want to come with him. He argued and begged and pleaded and cited an unconquerable abhorrence of violence and of bad weather, but all to no avail. An order was an order; he had to do as he was told. Slightly over a week after the mission was assigned, the fat count thus set off westward with his dragoons and the secretary from the capital city and imperial residence of Vienna.