In his book the fat count then also briefly depicted the night in the forest, when the fool, all at once becoming talkative, had told him about his time at the court of the Winter King in The Hague and about how he had been buried alive three years ago during the Siege of Brno. First he had been in the town commandant’s bad graces because of a remark about his face, so that the man had stuck him with the miners, and then the shaft had caved in over his unit—here, the scar on his forehead, he got it there. He had been confined in the darkness, deep down, no way out, no air, yet then wondrously saved. It had been an incredible and wild story, the fat count wrote, and the fact that he then abruptly changed the subject, and did not elaborate on how the miraculous salvation under Brno had actually taken place, would later arouse the bewilderment and anger of many a reader.
Ulenspiegel, in any case, was a good storyteller, better than the abbot and better than the fat count too, and his stories distracted the fat count from the throbbing pain in his hand. Don’t worry, said the fool, that night the wolves would find enough to eat.
At the first morning light they set off. They avoided the battlefield, from which a smell wafted to them that the fat count never could have imagined. Then they traversed Schlipsheim, Hainhofen, and Ottmarshausen. Ulenspiegel knew his way around, and he was calm and collected and never once insulted the fat count again.
The empty landscape had filled up with people. Peasants were pulling their possessions in carts. Scattered soldiers were searching for their units and families. The wounded were squatting on the roadside, in makeshift bandages, staring motionless into space. The two of them passed burning Oberhausen to the west and arrived in Augsburg, where the remnants of the Kaiser’s army had assembled. After the defeat, it was no longer large.
The camp outside the city stank even worse than the battlefield. Like visions of hell, the deformed bodies, the festering faces, the open wounds, the heaps of excrement burned themselves into the fat count’s memory. I will never be the same again, he thought, as they pushed their way to the city gate, and: they’re only images, they can’t hurt me, they can’t touch me—only images. And he imagined he was someone else who walked invisibly alongside them and didn’t have to see what he saw.
In the afternoon they reached the gates of the city. Fearfully, the fat count revealed his identity to the guards, and it surprised even him when they believed all he said and let them in without hesitation.
Kings in Winter
I
It was November. The wine supply was exhausted, and because the well in the garden was filthy, they drank nothing but milk. Since they could no longer afford candles, the whole court went to bed in the evening with the sun. The state of affairs was not good, yet there were still princes who would die for Liz. Recently, one of them had been here in The Hague, Christian von Braunschweig, and had promised her to have POUR DIEU ET POUR ELLE embroidered on his standard, and afterward, he had sworn fervently, he would win or die for her. He was an excited hero, so moved by himself that tears came to his eyes. Friedrich had patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, and she had given him her handkerchief, but then he had burst into tears once again, so overwhelmed was he by the thought of possessing a handkerchief of hers. She had given him a royal blessing, and, deeply stirred, he had gone on his way.
Naturally, he would not accomplish it, neither for God nor for her. This prince had few soldiers and no money, nor was he particularly clever. It would take men of a different caliber to defeat Wallenstein, someone like the Swedish king, say, who had recently come down on the Empire like a storm and had so far won all the battles he had fought. He was the one she should have married long ago, according to Papa’s plans, but he hadn’t wanted her.
It was almost twenty years ago that she had instead married her poor Friedrich. Twenty German years, a whirl of events and faces and noise and bad weather and even worse food and completely wretched theater.
She had missed good theater more than anything else, from the beginning, even more than palatable food. In German lands real theater was unknown; there, pitiful players roamed through the rain and screamed and hopped and farted and brawled. This was probably due to the cumbersome language. It was no language for theater, it was a brew of groans and harsh grunts, it was a language that sounded like someone struggling not to choke, like a cow having a coughing fit, like a man with beer coming out his nose. What was a poet supposed to do with this language? She had given German literature a try, first that Opitz and then someone else, whose name she had forgotten; she could not commit to memory these people who were always named Krautbacher or Engelkrämer or Kargholzsteingrömpl, and when you had grown up with Chaucer, and John Donne had dedicated verses to you—“fair phoenix bride,” he had called her, “and from thine eye all lesser birds will take their jollity”—then even with the utmost politeness you could not bring yourself to find any merit in all this German bleating.
She often thought back to the court theater in Whitehall. She thought of the small gestures of the actors, of the long sentences, their ever-varying, nearly musical rhythm, now swift and clattering along, now dying gradually away, now questioning, now bristling with authority. There had been theater performances whenever she came to the court to visit her parents. People stood on the stage and dissembled, but she had grasped at once that this was not so at all and that the dissembling too was merely a mask, for it was not the theater that was false, no, everything else was pretense, disguise, and frippery, everything that was not theater was false. On the stage people were themselves, completely true, fully transparent.
In real life no one spoke in soliloquies. Everyone kept his thoughts to himself, faces could not be read, everyone dragged the dead weight of his secrets. No one stood alone in his room and spoke aloud about his desires and fears, but when Burbage did so on the stage, in his rasping voice, his very thin fingers at eye level, it seemed unnatural that men should forever conceal what transpired within them. And what words he used! Rich words, rare, shimmering like cloth of gold—sentences so perfectly constructed that they were beyond anything you yourself could ever have managed. This is how things should be, the theater told you, this is how you should talk, how you should hold yourself, how you should feel, this is what it would be like to be a true human being.
When the performance was over and the applause faded, the actors returned to the state of paltriness. After taking their bows, they stood like extinguished candles. Then they approached, bending down low, Alleyn and Kemp and the great Burbage himself, to kiss Papa’s hand, and if Papa asked them something, they answered like people whom language resisted and to whom no clear sentences occurred. Burbage’s face was waxy and weary, and there was nothing special anymore about his now rather ugly hands. Hard to believe how quickly the spirit of lightness had abandoned him.
That spirit had itself appeared in one of the plays, which had been performed on Allhallows. It was about an old duke on a magical island, who captured his enemies only to spare them in the end. At the time she had been unable to understand why he had been lenient, and when she thought about it today, she still didn’t understand. If she had Wallenstein or the Kaiser in her power, she would handle things differently! At the conclusion of the play the duke had simply released his ministering spirit, so that he might pass into the clouds, the air, the sunlight, and the blue of the sea, and had remained behind like an old sack of flour, a wrinkly actor who now briefly apologized that he had no more lines. The leading dramatist of the King’s Men had taken on the role himself at the time. He was not one of the great actors, not Kemp and certainly not Burbage. You could even tell by looking at him that he struggled to remember his lines, which none other than he himself had written. After the performance he had kissed her hand with soft lips, and because it had been impressed on her that at such moments she must always ask some question, she had inquired whether he had any children.