“Why are you two asking me?”
“Because you’re not like them,” said Tyll Ulenspiegel. “You’re like us.”
Martha held out the stein to him, but he didn’t take it, so she put it on the ground. Her heart was pounding. She thought of her parents and her sister and the house in which she lived, and the hills out beyond the forest and the sound of the wind in the trees, which she couldn’t imagine sounded quite the same anywhere else. And she thought of her mother’s stew.
The famous man’s eyes flashed as he said with a smile: “Think of the old saying: You can find something better than death everywhere.”
Martha shook her head.
“Very well, then,” he said.
She waited, but he said nothing more, and it took her a moment to realize that his interest in her had already died away.
And so she walked back around the wagon and to the people she knew, to us. We were now her life; there was no longer any other life for her. She sat down on the ground. She felt empty. But when we looked up, she did too, for we had all noticed at the same time that something was hanging in the sky.
A black line cut through the blue. We squinted. It was a rope.
On one side it was tied to the window grille of the church tower, on the other to a flagpole jutting out of the wall next to the window of the town hall where the reeve worked, which didn’t happen often, however, because he was lazy. In the window stood the young woman, who must have just knotted the rope—but how, we wondered, had she stretched it? You could be here or there, in this window or in the other, you could easily knot a rope and drop it, but how did you get it back up to the other window to fasten the other end?
We gaped. For a while it seemed to us as if the rope itself were the trick and nothing more were required. A sparrow landed on it, took a small jump, spread its wings, changed its mind, and stayed perched there.
Then Tyll Ulenspiegel appeared in the church tower window. He waved, jumped onto the windowsill, stepped onto the rope. He did it as if it were nothing. He did it as if it were only a step like any other. None of us spoke, none shouted, none moved. We had stopped breathing.
He neither teetered nor tried to find his balance—he simply walked. His arms swinging, he walked the way you walk on the ground, except it looked a bit mincing how he always set one foot precisely in front of the other. You had to look closely to notice how he absorbed the swaying of the rope with small movements of his hips. He took a leap and bent his knees for only a moment when he landed. Then he strolled, his hands folded behind his back, to the middle. The sparrow took off, but it only beat its wings a few times and perched again and turned its head; all was so quiet that we could hear it cheeping and peeping. And of course we heard our cows.
Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly—not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with his right foot lengthwise on the rope, his left crosswise, his knees slightly bent and his fists on his hips. And all of us, looking up, suddenly understood what lightness was. We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.
“Take off your shoes!”
We didn’t know whether we had heard him correctly.
“Take them off,” he shouted. “Everyone, your right shoe. Don’t ask, do it, it will be a lark. Trust me, take them off. Old and young, woman and man! Everyone. Your right shoe.”
We stared at him.
“Haven’t you been enjoying it so far? Don’t you want more? I’ll show you more, take off your shoes, everyone, your right shoe, go on!”
It took us a while to get moving. That’s how it always is with us, we’re unhurried people. The first to obey was the baker, followed by Malte Schopf and then Karl Lamm and then his wife, and then the craftsmen who always thought they were better than everyone else obeyed, and then we all did, every one of us, with the exception of Martha. Tine Krugmann next to her nudged her and pointed to her right foot, but Martha shook her head, and Tyll Ulenspiegel on the rope took another leap, striking his feet together in the air. He jumped so high that he had to spread his arms when he landed to find his balance—only very briefly, but it was enough to remind us that even he had weight and couldn’t fly.
“And now throw,” he cried with a high, clear voice. “Don’t think, don’t ask, don’t hesitate, this will be a great lark. Do what I say. Throw!”
Tine Krugmann was the first to do it. Her shoe flew, rising higher and disappearing in the crowd. Then the next shoe flew, it was Susanne Schopf’s, and then the next, and then dozens flew and then even more and more and more. We all laughed and screamed and shouted: “Watch out!” and “Duck!” and “Heads up!” It was terrific entertainment, and it didn’t matter that some of the shoes hit people’s heads. Curses rang out, a few women scolded, a few children wept, but it wasn’t bad, and Martha even had to laugh when a heavy leather boot only barely missed her, while a woven slipper sailed through the air to land at her feet. He had been right, and some even found it so exhilarating that they threw their left shoes too. And some also threw hats and spoons and jugs, which shattered somewhere, and of course a few threw stones too. But when his voice spoke to us, the noise faded away, and we listened.
“You idiots.”
We squinted. The sun was low in the sky. Those at the back of the square could see him clearly, while for the rest he was only a silhouette.
“You half-wits. You crumb-heads. You tadpoles. You good-for-nothing beetle-brained oafs. Now fetch them again.”
We stared.
“Or are you too stupid? Is the word fetch too much to penetrate your skulls?” He let out a bleating laugh. The sparrow took off, soared over the roofs, was gone.
We looked at each other. We had been derided, but then again his rude mockery was not so sharp that it couldn’t have been meant in jest. He was famous, after all, he could take that liberty.
“Well, what is it?” he asked. “Don’t you need them anymore? Don’t you want them anymore? Don’t you like them anymore? You dolts, fetch your shoes!”
Malte Schopf was the first. He had felt ill at ease the whole time, and so he now ran to where he thought his shoe had flown. He pushed people aside, forcing and jostling his way through the crowd, bending over and rooting around between their legs. On the other side of the square Karl Schönknecht did the same, followed by Elsbeth, the widow of the smith, but old Lembke blocked her and shouted at her to be off, that was his daughter’s shoe. Elsbeth, whose forehead was still hurting from being hit by a boot, shouted back that he was the one who should be off, because she could certainly still recognize her own shoe, Lembke’s daughter by no means had such beautifully embroidered shoes as she did, whereupon old Lembke screamed at her to get out of his way and not to disparage his daughter, whereupon she in turn screamed that he was a stinking shoe thief. Here Lembke’s son intervened: “I’m warning you!” At the same time Lise Schoch and the miller’s wife began to quarrel, because their shoes really did look alike, and their feet were the same size, and Karl Lamm and his brother-in-law also exchanged loud words, and Martha suddenly grasped what was happening here, and she crouched down on the ground and started to crawl.
Above her there was now shoving, rebuking, and jostling. A few, who had found their shoes quickly, slipped away, but among the rest of us a rage broke out with the force of long-pent-up grievance. The carpenter Moritz Blatt and the blacksmith Simon Kern pummeled each other so ferociously that someone who thought they were fighting over shoes could not have understood, since he would not have known that Moritz’s wife had been promised to Simon as a child. Both were bleeding from nose and mouth, both were panting like horses, and no one dared break them up. Lore Pilz and Elsa Kohlschmitt were locked in terrible combat too, but then they had hated each other for so long that even they had forgotten why. It was very well known, however, why the Semmler family and the people from the Grünanger house lashed out at each other; it was because of the disputed field and the unresolved inheritance that went back as far as the days of Prefect Peter, and also because of the Semmler daughter and her child, which was not her husband’s but Karl Schönknecht’s. The rage spread like a fever—wherever you looked people were shrieking and punching, bodies were rolling, and now Martha turned her head and looked up.