In his life’s chronicle, the style of which was still beholden to the fashionable tone of his youthful days, that is, of erudite arabesque and florid ornamentation, the fat count depicted in sentences that, precisely due to their exemplary tortuousness, have since found their way into many a schoolbook, the leisurely ride through the green of the Vienna Woods: At Melk we reached the wide blue of the Danube, alighting there at the magnificent abbey to pillow our weary heads for the night.
Once again this was not entirely true; in reality they stayed for a month. His uncle was the prior, and so they ate splendidly and slept well. Karl von Doder, who had always been interested in alchemy, spent many days in the library, absorbed in a book by the sage Athanasius Kircher, the dragoons played cards with the lay brothers, and with his uncle the fat count completed several chess games of such sublime perfection as he would never again attain; it almost seemed to him later as if his subsequent experiences stifled his gift for playing chess. Only during the fourth week of their stay did a letter find him, sent by Count Trauttmansdorff, who believed him to be already at the destination and asked whether they had found Ulenspiegel in Andechs and when their return was to be expected.
His uncle blessed him in parting. The abbot gave him a vial of consecrated oil. They followed the course of the Danube to Pöchlarn, thence turning southwest.
At the beginning of their journey they encountered a steady stream of merchants, vagabonds, monks, and travelers of all sorts. But now the land seemed empty. Even the weather was no longer congenial. Cold winds blew, trees spread bare limbs, almost all the fields lay fallow. The few people they saw were old: hunched women at wells, old men who crouched haggard outside huts, hollow-cheeked faces on the roadside. Nothing indicated whether these people were only resting or rather waiting for their end.
When the fat count spoke to Karl von Doder about it, he only wanted to talk about the book he had been studying in the abbey library, Ars magna lucis et umbrae. You became quite dizzy, you gazed, so to speak, into an abyss of erudition—and no, he had no idea where the younger people were, but if he might venture to surmise, then anyone who could still run had long since run away. But that book expatiated upon lenses and how one could magnify things and moreover upon angels, their form, their color, and upon music and the harmonies of the spheres, and finally upon Egypt too—by God, it was a very peculiar work.
The fat count used this sentence verbatim in his account. But because things became confused for him, he claimed there that it had been he himself who read the Ars magna, and indeed on their journey. He mentioned having tucked the work into his saddlebag, which, to be sure, clearly revealed, as the annotators later noted with mocking objectivity, that he had never held this gigantic book in his hands. The fat count, however, ingenuously described how he had studied Kircher’s memorable descriptions of light, lenses, and angels on various evenings in front of meager campfires, the subtle reflections of the great scholar appearing to him in the strangest contrast to their advance into the more and more ravaged land.
At Altheim the wind became so biting that they had to put on their lined cloaks and pull their hoods down low over their foreheads. At Ranshofen the weather cleared again. In a vacant farmhouse they watched the sunset. No people far and wide. Only a goose that must have fled from someone stood ragged next to a well.
The fat count stretched and yawned. The land was hilly, but there was not another tree to be seen; everything had been cut down. A distant rumble could be heard.
“Oh my,” said the fat count, “not that too, a thunderstorm.”
The dragoons laughed.
The fat count recognized his mistake. He had already realized what it was, he said awkwardly, only compounding his embarrassment. He had spoken in jest.
The goose stared at them with uncomprehending goose eyes. It opened and closed its bill. The dragoon Franz Kärrnbauer aimed his carbine and fired. And although the fat count would soon thereafter witness much more, he would not forget for the rest of his days what horror pierced him to the core when the head of the bird burst. Something about it was almost incomprehensible—how quickly it happened, how from one moment to the next a solid small head was transformed into a spray and into nothing and how the animal took another few waddles and then collapsed into a white mound, in a spreading pool of blood. As he rubbed his eyes and tried to breathe calmly so that he wouldn’t faint, he decided that he had to forget it at all costs. But of course he did not forget it, and when he recalled this journey half a century later while composing his life’s chronicle, it was the image of the bursting goose head that outshone everything else in clarity. In an utterly honest book he would have had to include it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so and took it with him to the grave, and no one learned with what inexpressible disgust he had watched the dragoons dress the bird for dinner: cheerfully, they scraped off the feathers, cut and tore, took out the guts, and roasted the meat over the fire.
That night the fat count slept badly. The wind howled through the empty window frames. He shivered with cold. The dragoon Kärrnbauer snored loudly. Another dragoon, named Stefan Purner, or perhaps it was Konrad Purner—the two of them were brothers, and the fat count mixed them up so often that they later merged into a single figure in the book—gave him a nudge, but he only snored louder.
In the morning they rode on. The village of Markl was completely destroyed: walls full of holes, cracked beams, rubble in the road, a few old people begging for food next to the filthy well. The enemy had been here and had taken everything, and the little that they had been able to hide had been taken afterward by friendly troops, that is, the Elector’s soldiers, and no sooner had these soldiers withdrawn than what the villagers had managed to conceal even from them was in turn taken by more enemy forces.
“Which enemies, then?” the fat count asked worriedly. “Swedes or Frenchmen?”
It was all the same to them, they said. They were so hungry.
The fat count hesitated for a moment. Then he gave the command to ride onward.
It had been quite right not to leave them anything, said Karl von Doder. The travelers didn’t have enough provisions and had to carry out orders from the highest authority. You simply could not help everyone, only God had that power, and he would certainly look after these Christians in his infinite mercy.
All the fields lay fallow; some were in ashes, from great fires. The hills cowered under a leaden sky. In the distance columns of smoke stood against the horizon.
It would be best, said Karl von Doder, to head southward past Altötting, Polling, and Tüssling, far from the country road, in the open field. Whoever had not abandoned the villages by now was armed and mistrustful. A group of riders bearing down on a village could be shot from cover without further ado.
“All right,” said the fat count, who didn’t understand why an Imperial Court Council secretary suddenly had such clear ideas about the conduct required in a war zone. “Agreed!”
“If we’re lucky and don’t encounter any soldiers,” said Karl von Doder, “then we’ll make it to Andechs in two days.”
The fat count nodded and tried to imagine someone seriously shooting at him, aiming over the iron sights. At him, Martin von Wolkenstein, who had never done anyone wrong, with a real bullet made of lead. He looked down at himself. His back hurt, his bottom was sore from the days in the saddle. He stroked his belly and imagined a bullet, he thought of the burst goose head, and he also thought of the metal magic about which Athanasius Kircher had written in his book on magnets: if you carried a magnetic stone of sufficient strength in your pocket, you could deflect the bullets and make a man invulnerable. The legendary scholar himself had tried it. Unfortunately, such strong magnets were very rare and expensive.