When he attempted to reconstruct their journey half a century later, the course of time grew muddled in his mind. To disguise his uncertainty, a florid digression is found at this point, seventeen and a half pages long, about the camaraderie of the men, who go to meet danger in the knowledge that this very danger will either kill them or bind them in friendship for life. The passage became famous, irrespective of the fact that it was fabricated, for in truth none of the men had become his friend. One conversation or another with the Imperial Court Council secretary remained in his memory in fragments, but as for the dragoons, he hardly remembered their names, much less their faces. One of them had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a grayish red plume—this he remembered. Above all he saw loamy paths in front of him and felt, as if it had been yesterday, the patter of the rain on his hood. His cloak had been heavy with water. At the time it struck him that nothing had ever been so wet, that it could not get any wetter.
Some time ago there had been forests here. But when he thought about it while riding, with aching back and sore bottom, he became aware that this knowledge meant nothing to him. The war didn’t seem to him like something manmade, but like wind and rain, like the sea, like the high cliffs of Sicily that he had seen as a child. This war was older than he was. It had at times grown and at times shrunk, it had crept here and there, had laid waste to the north, turned west, had extended one arm eastward and one southward, then heaved its full weight into the south, only to settle again for a while in the north. Naturally, the fat count knew people who still remembered the time before, chief among them his father, who, coughing and good-humored, awaited death in the family’s country seat, Rodenegg in Tyrol, as the fat count himself would await it almost sixty years later, coughing and writing, in the same place and at the same stone table. His father had once spoken with Albrecht von Wallenstein. The tall and dark man had complained about the damp weather in Vienna. His father had responded that one got used to it, to which Wallenstein had replied that he did not want to and would not get used to such foul weather—a statement that his father had been about to parry with an especially witty remark, but Wallenstein had already turned away brusquely. Scarcely a month went by in which his father did not find a reason to talk about it, just as he never forgot to mention that he had several years earlier also encountered the unfortunate Elector Friedrich, who shortly thereafter had accepted the Bohemian crown and provoked the great war, only to be chased off in disgrace after a single winter and finally to perish somewhere on the roadside, without so much as a grave.
That night they found no shelter. They curled up on a bare field and wrapped themselves in their wet cloaks. The rain was too heavy for a fire. Never had the fat count felt so miserable. The wet cloak, which kept getting wetter, was now indescribably sodden, and his body was gradually sinking deeper into the soft loam. Could the mire simply swallow you? He tried to sit up but couldn’t; the loam seemed to hold him down.
Eventually the rain stopped. Coughing, Franz Kärrnbauer piled a few sticks and struck the flints together, again and again, until finally sparks flew, and then he bustled around for another half an eternity and blew on the wood and murmured magic spells until little flames flickered in the darkness. Shivering, they held their hands in the warmth.
The horses shied and whinnied. One of the dragoons stood up, the fat count couldn’t make out which, but he saw that he was leveling the carbine. The fire made their shadows dance.
“Wolves,” whispered Karl von Doder.
They stared into the night. Suddenly the fat count was filled with the conviction that all this must be a dream, indeed this was how he remembered it later, as a dream from which he had awoken in the bright morning, dry and well rested. It could not have happened like that, but instead of grappling with his memory, he inserted twelve pages of artfully nested sentences about his mother. Most of it was pure invention, for he merged his distant and coldhearted mother with the figure of his favorite governess, who had been gentler to him than any other person, except perhaps the thin and beautiful prostitute Aglaia. When his account after this long and fabricated recollection found its way back to the journey, they had already passed Haar, and behind him the dragoons were carrying on a conversation about magic spells that protected you from stray bullets.
“Can’t do anything about a well-aimed one,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.
“Unless you have a really strong spell,” said Konrad Purner. “One of the very secret ones. They can even do something about cannonballs, I’ve seen it myself, at Augsburg. A man next to me used one like that, I thought he was dead, but then he stood up again as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t quite hear the spell, alas.”
“Yes, it can be done with a spell like that,” said Franz Kärrnbauer. “A really expensive one. But the simple spells that you buy at the market, they’re useless.”
“I knew a fellow,” said Stefan Purner, “he fought for the Swedes, and he had an amulet; with it he survived first Magdeburg, then Lützen. Then he drank himself to death.”
“But the amulet,” asked Franz Kärrnbauer. “Who got it, where is it?”
“Yes, if I only knew.” Stefan Purner sighed. “If you had that, then everything would be different.”
“Yes,” Franz Kärrnbauer said prayerfully. “If only you had that!”
At Baierbronn they found the first dead man. He must have been lying there awhile already, for his clothes were covered with a layer of earth, and his hair seemed to have become intertwined with the blades of grass. He was lying facedown, his legs spread, with bare feet.
“That’s normal,” said Konrad Purner. “No one leaves a corpse his boots. If you’re unlucky, you get killed just for the shoes.”
The wind carried small, cold raindrops. All around them were tree stumps, hundreds of them; a whole forest had been cut down here. They passed through a village that had been burned down to its foundation walls, and there they saw a heap of corpses. The fat count averted his eyes and then looked after all. He saw blackened faces, a torso with only one arm, a hand clenched into a claw, two empty eye sockets over an open mouth, and something that looked like a sack but was the remains of a body. An acrid smell hung in the air.
In the late afternoon they reached a village in which there were still people. Yes, Ulenspiegel was in the abbey, said an old woman, he was still alive. And when they encountered a feral-looking man and a small boy pulling a cart together shortly before sunset, they received the same information. “He’s in the abbey,” said the man, staring up at the fat count’s horse. “Keep heading west, past the lake, then you can’t miss it. Do you have food for me and my son, sirs?”
The fat count reached into his saddlebag and gave him a sausage. It was his last, and he knew that it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it, he felt so sorry for the child. In a daze, he asked why they were pulling the wagon.
“It’s all we have.”
“But it’s empty,” said the fat count.
“But it’s all we have.”
Again they slept in the open field; to be safe they didn’t light a fire. The fat count was freezing, but at least it wasn’t raining, and the ground was solid. Shortly after midnight they heard two shots nearby. They listened. In the first morning light Karl von Doder swore he had seen a wolf observing them from not too far away. Hastily they mounted their horses and rode onward.
They encountered a woman. It was hard to tell whether she was old or whether life had just treated her badly, so furrowed was her face, so stooped her gait. Yes, in the abbey, he was still there. No sooner had she spoken of the famous jester than she had to smile. And so it always was, the fat count wrote fifty years later: word of him had reached whomsoever we met; at the mere mention of his name, they indicated the way to his abode; every soul remaining in this wasteland seemed to know his whereabouts.