“A mother had three daughters,” Nele goes on. “They owned a goose. It laid a gilded egg.”
“A what egg?”
“A golden one.”
“You said gilded.”
“It’s the same thing. The daughters were very different from each other. Two were evil, they had black souls, but they were beautiful. The youngest, on the other hand, was good, and her soul was white as snow.”
“Was she beautiful too?”
“The most beautiful of the three. As beautiful as the dawning day.”
“The dawning day?”
“Yes,” she said in annoyance.
“Is that beautiful?”
“Very.”
“The dawning day?”
“Very beautiful. And the evil sisters forced the youngest to work, day and night without cease, and she chafed her fingers bloody, and her feet became sore lumps, and her hair turned gray before its time. One day the golden egg hatched, and a thumbling stepped out and asked: Maiden, what is your wish?”
“Where was the egg the whole time before?”
“I don’t know, it was lying someplace.”
“The whole time?”
“Yes, it was lying someplace.”
“An egg made of gold? And nobody took it?”
“It’s a fairy tale!”
“Did you make it up?”
Nele is silent. The question seems senseless to her. The boy’s silhouette in the forest twilight looks very thin—he walks with a slight stoop, his neck craned forward over his chest, his body scrawny, as if he were a wooden figure brought to life. Did she invent this fairy tale? She herself doesn’t know. She has heard so many told, by her mother and her two aunts and her grandmother, so many about thumblings and golden eggs and wolves and knights and witches and good as well as evil sisters, that she doesn’t have to think; once you have begun, it continues of its own accord, and the parts assemble themselves, sometimes one way and sometimes another, and you have a fairy tale.
“Well, go on,” says the boy.
As she tells him about how the thumbling grants the beautiful sister’s wish and transforms her into a swallow so that she can fly away to the land of milk and honey, where all is well and no one goes hungry, Nele notices that the forest is growing denser and denser. They are supposed to be approaching the city of Augsburg. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Pirmin stops. He spins around, sniffing. Something has attracted his attention. He leans forward and contemplates the trunk of a birch, the white-and-black bark, the cavity of a knothole.
“What is it?” Nele asks, startled at the same moment by her thoughtlessness. She feels the boy stiffen beside her.
Slowly Pirmin turns his large, unshapely head to them. His eyes glint with hostility.
“Go on,” he says.
On her arms and legs she still feels exactly where he has pinched her, and the pain in her shoulder is still almost as bad as it was four or five days ago when he twisted her arm behind her back in a skillful hold. The boy tried to help her, but then he kicked him so hard in the stomach that he couldn’t stand upright for the rest of the day.
And yet Pirmin has never gone too far. He has hurt them, but not too badly, and as often as he has touched Nele, it has never been above the knee or below the navel. Since he knows that the two of them could run away at any time, he keeps them the only way he can: he teaches them what they want to learn.
“Go on,” he says again. “I won’t ask again.”
And Nele, who is still wondering what he might have seen in the knothole, tells them how the thumbling and the swallow reach the gate of the land of milk and honey, where a guard, as tall as a tower, keeps watch. He says: Here you will never be hungry and never thirsty, but you may not enter! They implore him and beg and plead, yet he knows no mercy, the guard has a heart of stone, which weighs heavily in his breast and doesn’t beat, and so he always says: You may not enter! You may not enter!
Nele falls silent. The two of them are looking at her and waiting.
“And?” asks Pirmin.
“They didn’t enter.”
“Never?”
“His heart was made of stone!”
Pirmin stares at her for a moment. Then he laughs out loud and continues walking. The two children follow him. Soon it will be night, and unlike Pirmin, who hardly ever shares, they have nothing left to eat.
Normally Nele bears the hunger better than the boy. At those times she imagines that the pain and the weakness inside her are something that belongs elsewhere and has nothing to do with her. But today it is the boy who manages better. His hunger feels like something light, a throbbing and hovering; it almost seems to him as if he could rise into the air. As the two of them walk along behind Pirmin, his thoughts are still with the lesson from this morning: How do you impersonate someone? How do you go about taking a brief glance at someone’s face and then becoming him—holding your body as he holds his, making your voice sound like his, having the same look in your eyes that he has?
There’s nothing people love as much as this, there’s nothing they laugh at as readily, but you have to get it right, for if you do it wrong, you’re pitiful. To imitate someone, you idiot, you stupid child, you stubborn, talentless stone, it is not enough merely to resemble him, you must resemble him more than he resembles himself, for he can afford to be any which way, but you must be utterly him, and if you can’t do that, then give up, quit, go back to Papa’s mill and don’t waste Pirmin’s time!
It’s about looking, do you understand? That’s the most important thing: Look! Understand people. It’s not so hard. They’re not complicated. They don’t want anything unusual, everyone just wants what he wants in a somewhat different way. And once you understand in what way someone wants something, then you only have to want as he does, and your body will follow, then your voice will change of its own accord, then you will have the correct look in your eyes.
You have to practice, of course. Everything takes practice. Practice and practice and practice. Just as you have to practice dancing on the tightrope or walking on your hands, or as you still have to practice for a long time before you will manage to keep six balls in the air: you always, always have to practice, and to do so with a teacher who doesn’t let you get away with anything, for people always let themselves get away with a great deal, people are not strict with themselves, which is why it is up to the teacher to kick you and hit you and laugh at you and tell you that you’re a wretch who will never be able to do it.
And now the boy is so lost in reflection on how to imitate people that he has almost forgotten his hunger. He imagines the Stegers and the smith and the priest and old Hanna Krell, who he didn’t know was a witch, but now that he knows, many things make new sense. One after another he summons them and imagines how each of them holds himself and speaks; he stoops his shoulders, draws in his chest, moves his lips soundlessly: Help me with the hammer, boy, drive in the nail, and his hand trembles slightly when he raises it, due to rheumatism.
Pirmin stops and orders them to gather dry branches. They know it’s hopeless: after three days of rain the wetness has crept into everything, sparing nothing, leaving nothing dry. But because they don’t want to make Pirmin angry, they bend over and crawl this way and that and reach into the bushes and pretend to be searching.
“How does it end?” the boy whispers. “Do they get into the land of milk and honey?”
“No,” she whispers. “They find a castle in which an evil king reigns, they kill him, and the girl becomes queen.”