The next day it’s pouring rain. He stays indoors and helps his mother. “Hold the cloth taut, stop daydreaming, for Christ’s sake!” And the rain patters on the roof like hundreds of little fingers.
The next day it’s still raining. It’s icy cold, and the rope is clammy, making it impossible to take a step.
The next day, rain again. He climbs on and falls and climbs on again and falls, every time. For a while he lies on the ground, his arms spread, his hair so wet that it’s only a dark blot.
The next day is Sunday, and so he can’t get onto the rope until the afternoon, when the church service is finally over. In the evening he successfully takes three steps, and if the rope hadn’t been wet, it could have been four.
Gradually he comprehends how it can be done. His knees understand, his shoulders carry themselves differently. You have to yield to the swaying, have to soften your knees and hips, have to stay one step ahead of the fall. Heaviness reaches for you, but you’ve already moved on. Tightrope walking: running away from falling.
The following day it’s warmer. Jackdaws are cawing. Bugs and bees are buzzing, and the sun is dispelling the clouds. His breath rises in small puffs of mist into the air. The brightness of the morning carries voices; he hears his father shouting at a mill hand in the house. He sings to himself, the song of the Grim Reaper, they call him Death, his power’s from God on high—the melody is conducive to walking on the rope, but apparently he was too loud, for all at once Agneta, his mother, is standing next to him and asking why he isn’t working.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Water has to be fetched,” she says, “the stove cleaned.”
He spreads his arms out and climbs onto the rope, trying to disregard her bulging belly. Is there really a baby inside her, kicking and thrashing around and listening to them? The thought disturbs him. When God wants to make a person, why does he do it in another person? There’s something ugly in the fact that all beings emerge in obscurity: maggots in dough, flies in excrement, worms in the brown earth. Only very rarely, as his father explained to him, do children grow out of mandrakes and even more rarely infants out of rotten eggs.
“Shall I send Sepp?” she asks. “Do you want me to send Sepp?”
The boy falls off the rope, closes his eyes, spreads his arms out, climbs on again. The next time he looks, his mother is gone.
He hopes that she doesn’t make good on the threat, but after a while Sepp does come. Sepp watches him briefly, then he comes up to the rope and pushes him off: no light nudge, but a push, so hard that the boy falls flat on his face. In his anger he calls Sepp a disgusting ox’s arse who sleeps with his own sister.
That wasn’t wise. Because first of all he has no idea whether Sepp, who like all mill hands came from some unknown place and will move on to some unknown place, even has a sister; secondly, the fellow was only waiting for something like this. Before the boy can get up, Sepp has sat down on the back of his head.
He can’t breathe. Rocks are cutting into his face. He writhes, but it’s no help, because Sepp is twice his age and three times his weight and five times his strength. He pulls himself together so that he doesn’t use up too much air. His tongue tastes like blood. He inhales dirt, chokes, spits. There’s a humming and whistling in his ears, and the ground seems to be rising, sinking, and rising again.
Suddenly the weight is gone. He is rolled onto his back, soil in his mouth, his eyes sticky, a piercing pain in his head. The mill hand drags him to the milclass="underline" over gravel and soil, through grass, over even more soil, over sharp pebbles, past the trees, past the laughing female mill hand, the hay shed, the goat stable. Then he yanks him up, opens the door and shoves him in.
“Well, it’s about time,” says Agneta. “The stove isn’t going to clean itself.”
—
To go from the mill to the village you have to pass through a stretch of forest. At the point where the trees thin and you cross the village farmland—meadows and pastures and fields, a third of them lying fallow, two thirds cultivated and protected by wooden fences—you can already see the top of the church tower. Someone is always lying here in the dirt and mending the fences, which are constantly being broken but have to be maintained, otherwise the livestock will escape, or the forest animals will destroy the grain. Most of the fields belong to Peter Steger. Most of the animals too, which is easy to tell, for they have his brand on their necks.
First you pass Hanna Krell’s house. She sits—what else is she supposed to do?—on her doorstep and patches clothing; thus she earns her daily bread. Then you walk through the narrow gap between the Steger farm and Ludwig Stelling’s smithy, step onto the wooden footbridge that prevents you from sinking into the soft muck, go beyond Jakob Brantner’s cowshed on your right, and find yourself on the main street, which is the only street: Here lives Anselm Melker with wife and children, next door his brother-in-law Ludwig Koller, and in the next house Maria Leserin, whose husband died last year, because someone cursed him. Their daughter is seventeen and very beautiful, and she will marry Peter Steger’s oldest son. On the other side lives Martin Holtz, who bakes the bread, together with his wife and daughters, and next to him are the smaller houses of the Tamms, the Henrichs, and the Heinerling family, from whose windows you often hear quarrels. The Heinerlings are not good people; they have no honor. Besides the smith and the baker, they all have a little land outside, everyone has a few goats, but only Peter Steger, who’s rich, has cows.
Then you’re on the village square with the church, the old village linden, and the well. Next to the church is the priest’s house, next to the priest’s house the house where the steward lives, Paul Steger, Peter Steger’s cousin, who twice a year walks the fields and every third month brings the taxes to the lord.
On the far end of the village square is a fence. After you open the gate and cross the large field, which also belongs to Steger, you’re in the forest again, and if you’re not too afraid of the Cold Woman and keep going, in three hours you will be in the next village, which is not much bigger.
There, however, the boy has never been. He has never been elsewhere. And although several people who have been elsewhere before have told him that it’s exactly the same there as here, he can’t stop wondering where you would end up if you just kept going on and on, not merely to the next village, but farther and farther still.
—
At the head of the table the miller is speaking about the stars. His wife and his son and the mill hands are pretending to listen. There are groats. There were groats yesterday too, and there will be groats again tomorrow, boiled now in more and now in less water; there are groats every day, except on worse days when instead of groats there’s nothing. In the window a thick pane keeps the wind out. Under the stove, which doesn’t emit enough warmth, two cats are scuffling. In the corner of the room lies a goat, which should actually be over in the stable, but no one wants to throw it out, because they’re all tired, and its horns are sharp. Next to the door and around the window pentagrams are carved, to ward off evil spirits.
The miller is describing how, exactly ten thousand seven hundred and three years, five months, and nine days ago, the maelstrom in the heart of the world caught fire. And now the thing that is the world is spinning like a spindle and eternally giving birth to stars, for since time has no beginning it has no end either.
“No end,” he repeats and stops short, having realized that he said something unclear. “No end,” he says softly, “no end.”
Claus Ulenspiegel is from Mölln, up in the Lutheran north. A decade ago, even then no longer young, he arrived in this place, and because he wasn’t from here, he could only be a mill hand. The miller’s trade is not dishonorable like that of the renderer, who disposes of animal remains, or that of the night watchman or even the hangman, but it’s also no better than day labor and far worse than the trade of the craftsmen in their guilds or that of the farmers, who wouldn’t have offered someone like him so much as a handshake. But then the miller’s daughter married him, and soon the miller died, and now he is the miller himself. On the side he heals the farmers, who still won’t shake his hand, for what is not proper is not proper; but when they’re suffering, they come to his door.