There he stood, laughing. Back arched, mouth wide, shoulders heaving. Only his feet stood steadily, and his hips swung with the swaying of the rope. It seemed to Martha as if she only had to look more carefully, then she would understand why he was so delighted—but then a man ran toward her and didn’t see her and his boot struck her chest, and her head hit the ground, and when she inhaled it was as if needles were pricking her. She rolled onto her back. Rope and sky were empty. Tyll Ulenspiegel was gone.
She struggled to her feet. She hobbled past the brawling, rolling, biting, weeping, battering bodies, here and there still recognizing their faces; she hobbled along the street, hunching her shoulders and bowing her head, but just as she reached her front door, she heard the rumble of the covered wagon behind her. She turned around. On the coach box sat the young woman he had called Nele. Next to her the old woman crouched motionless. Why wasn’t anyone stopping them? Why wasn’t anyone following them? The wagon passed Martha. She stared after it. Soon it would be at the elm, then at the city gate, then gone.
And now, when the wagon had almost reached the last houses, someone was running after it, with effortless long strides. The calfskin of the cloak bristled around his neck like something alive.
“I would have taken you with me!” he cried as he ran past Martha. Shortly before the bend of the street, he caught up with the wagon and jumped aboard. The gatekeeper was with the rest of us on the main square; no one held them back.
Slowly Martha went into the house, closed the door behind her, and bolted it. The billy goat was lying next to the stove and looked up at her questioningly. She heard the cows bellowing, and our shouting rang out from the square.
In the end we recovered our tempers. The cows were milked before sundown. Martha’s mother came back, and besides a few scratches not much had happened to her. Her father had lost a tooth, and his ear was torn. Someone had stepped on her sister’s foot so hard that she limped for a few weeks. But the next morning and the next evening came, and life went on. In every house there were bumps and cuts and scratches and sprained arms and missing teeth, but by the next day the main square was clean again, and we were all wearing our shoes.
We never spoke about what had happened. Nor did we speak about Ulenspiegel. Without having arranged it, we stuck to this. Even Hans Semmler, who was so severely injured that from now on he was confined to his bed and could eat nothing but thick soup, pretended it had never been otherwise. And even the widow of Karl Schönknecht, whom we buried the next day in the churchyard, acted as if it had been a blow of fate and as if she didn’t know exactly whose knife it had been in his back. Only the rope still hung for days over the square, trembled in the wind, and was a perch for sparrows and swallows until the priest, who had been roughed up especially badly during the brawl, because we didn’t like his boastfulness and his condescension, could climb up the bell tower again to cut it down.
At the same time, we didn’t forget. What had happened remained between us. It was there while we brought in the harvest, and it was there when we bargained over our grain or assembled on Sunday for the Mass, where the priest had a new facial expression, half wonder and half fear. And it was there especially when we held celebrations on the square and when we looked each other in the face while dancing. Then the air seemed heavier, the water different on our tongues, and the sky, where the rope had hung, not quite itself.
It was a good year later before the war came to us after all. One night we heard whinnying, and then there were many voices laughing outside, and soon we heard the crash of doors being smashed in, and before we were even on the street, armed with useless pitchforks or knives, the flames were flickering.
The soldiers were hungrier than usual, and deeper in their cups. It had been a long time since they entered a town that offered them so much. Old Luise, who had been fast asleep and this time had no presentiment, died in her bed. The priest died standing protectively in front of the church portal. Lise Schoch died trying to conceal a stash of gold coins. The baker and the smith and old Lembke and Moritz Blatt and most of the other men died trying to protect their women. And the women died as women do in war.
Martha died too. She saw the ceiling of the room turn into red heat above her, she smelled the thick smoke before it seized her so tightly that she could make out nothing more, and she heard her sister cry for help, while the future that had a moment ago been hers dissolved: the husband she would never have and the children she would never raise and the grandchildren she would never tell about a famous jester one morning in spring, and the children of these grandchildren, all the people who now would not exist. That’s how quickly it happens, she thought, as if she had penetrated a great secret. And as she heard the roof beams splintering, it occurred to her that Tyll Ulenspiegel was now perhaps the only person who would remember our faces and would know that we had existed.
Indeed the only survivors were the lame Hans Semmler, whose house had not caught fire and who had been overlooked because he couldn’t move, and Elsa Ziegler and Paul Grünanger, who had secretly been in the forest together. When they returned at dawn with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair and found nothing but rubble under curling smoke, they thought for a moment that the Lord God had punished them for their sin by sending them a mad vision. They moved west together, and for a brief time they were happy.
As for the rest of us, we can sometimes be heard here, where we once lived, in the trees. We can be heard in the grass and in the chirping of the crickets, we can be heard when you lean your head against the knothole of the old elm, and at times children think they see our faces in the water of the stream. Our church is no longer standing, but the pebbles polished round and white by the water are still the same, just as the trees are the same. We remember, even if no one remembers us, because we have not yet reconciled ourselves to not being. Death is still new to us, and we are not indifferent to the things that concern the living. For it all happened not long ago.
Lord of the Air
I
He stretched the rope at knee height, from the linden to the old fir. He had to cut notches for it, which was easy to do in the fir, whereas the knife kept slipping off the linden, but in the end he did it. Now he tests the knots, slowly takes off his wooden shoes, climbs onto the rope, falls.
He climbs on again, spreads his arms out, and takes a step, but he can’t keep his balance and falls. He climbs back on, gives it another try, falls once again.
He tries and falls again.
It is not possible to walk on a rope. That is clear. Human feet aren’t made for it. Why attempt it at all?
But he keeps trying. He always starts at the linden. Every time he falls immediately. Hours pass. In the afternoon he successfully takes a step, just one, and by the time it grows dark, he hasn’t managed another. Yet for one moment the rope held him, and he stood on it as if on solid ground.