Something hits his head, there’s a spray of sparks, the boy’s knees give way. It takes him a moment to realize that Pirmin has thrown something. He touches his forehead. He leans forward—there lies the stone. Once again he is impressed how well Pirmin can aim.
“You rats,” says Pirmin. “Bunglers. Do you think anyone wants to see this? Who wants to stare at playing children? Are you doing this for yourselves? Then go back to your parents, the ones who haven’t been incinerated. Or are you doing it for spectators? Then you have to be better. Better story, better acting, quicker, more power, more wit, more of everything! Then you have to have rehearsed it!”
“His forehead!” Nele cries. “He’s bleeding!”
“But not enough. He should bleed much more. Someone who can’t do his job should bleed all day.”
“You swine!” Nele cries.
Absently Pirmin picks up another stone.
Nele ducks.
“We’ll begin again,” the boy says.
“I’ve had enough for today,” says Pirmin.
“No,” says the boy. “No, no. One more time.”
“I’ve had enough, let it be,” says Pirmin.
So they sit down with him. The fire has burned down to a faint glow. A memory comes to the boy, which he doesn’t know whether he lived or dreamed: nocturnal noise from the thicket, buzzing and cracking and crunching coming from everywhere, and a large animal, the head of a donkey, its eyes open wide, a scream unlike any he has ever heard, and hot streaming blood. He shakes his head, pushes the memory away, reaches for Nele’s hand. Her fingers squeeze his.
Pirmin chuckles. Once again the boy wonders whether this man can read his thoughts. It’s not so hard, Claus explained it to him, you only have to know the right spells.
Actually Pirmin is not a bad fellow. Not entirely bad, in any case, not as thoroughly bad as it would seem at first glance. Sometimes there’s something soft about him, which could almost turn into mildness, if he didn’t have to lead the hard life of the traveling people. He is actually too old to still be moving from place to place, braving the rain and sleeping under trees, but somehow due to bad luck all opportunities for employment with room and board have passed him by, and now no more will arise. Either his knees will hurt so much in a few years that he won’t be able to roam anymore and will have to stay in the first village he comes to, with some farmer who has enough sympathy to take him on as a day laborer, for which, however, he will need a great deal of luck, for no one wants traveling people with them, it brings misfortune and bad weather and causes the neighbors to speak ill of them. Or Pirmin will have to beg, outside the wall of Nuremberg, Augsburg, or Munich, for beggars are not let into the cities. People throw food to the unfortunate, but it’s never enough for all of them, the stronger ones take it. Thus Pirmin will starve.
Or it won’t even come to that. For example, because he stumbles somewhere along the way—damp roots are so treacherous, it’s hard to believe how slippery wet wood can be; or a stone on which he steps while climbing is not as stable as it seems. Then he will lie on the roadside with a broken leg, and anyone passing by will steer clear of the foul fellow in the muck, for what are they supposed to do, carry him? Give him warmth and nourishment, provide for him like a brother? Things like that occur in legends of the saints, not in real life.
What, then, is the best thing that can happen to Pirmin? For his heart to stop. For a pang to shoot through his chest and his innards, during a show on the market square: he looks up at the balls, then an instant of the utmost torment, then it’s all over.
He could bring it about himself. It wouldn’t be hard. Many traveling people do it—they know the mushrooms that guide you gently into sleep. Only, Pirmin confessed to them in a weak moment that he doesn’t have the courage. God opposed it with his severest commandment: he who kills himself may escape the adversity of this world, but he does so at the price of eternal torment in the next. And eternal—that doesn’t mean just a long time. It means that the longest time you can imagine, even if it were a thousand times as many years as it would take a bird to grind away the Brocken mountain with its beak, is merely the very tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction of it. And even though it lasts so long, you don’t get used to the horror, to the loneliness, to the pain. That’s the system. So who can hold it against Pirmin that he is the way he is?
And yet everything could have turned out differently. He has seen good times too. Once upon a time he had a future. In his heyday he made it to London, and whenever the strong beer makes him drunk, that is what he talks about. Then he tells them about the Thames, so wide in the glow of sunset, about the taverns and the bustle on the streets—the city was so huge that you could walk for days and not reach its end! And there were theaters on every corner. He didn’t understand the language, but the grace of the players and the truth in their faces moved him in a way that nothing later did.
He was young in those days. He was one of the many traveling performers who crossed the Channel with the retinue of the young Electoral Prince. The Electoral Prince came to England to marry Princess Elizabeth, and since the English have a high regard for performers, he brought along all his country had to offer: ventriloquists, fire eaters, belchers, puppeteers, pugilists, hand walkers, hunchbacks, picturesque cripples, and indeed also him, Pirmin. On the third day of festivities, in the house of a certain Bacon, Pirmin threw his balls in front of all the great lords and ladies. The tables were bedecked with flowers. The host stood with a clever, wicked smile at the entrance to the hall.
“I can still see them before my eyes,” Pirmin says. “The straitlaced Princess, the bridegroom who doesn’t know what’s hit him. We should hunt him down!”
“What should we do?”
“Hunt him down! It’s said that he moves from land to land and eats the Protestant nobility out of house and home. It’s said that he still acts as if he were king. It’s said that he drags his own little court along with him. But does he have a fool? Perhaps an old court jester is just the thing for a king without a country.”
Pirmin has said this often. It’s another effect of all the beer: he repeats himself, and he doesn’t care. But now by the fire he is chewing on his last piece of dried meat while the children sit hungrily beside him listening to the forest noises. They hold hands and try to think of things that distract them from the hunger.
With some practice it works very well. When you really know hunger, then you also know how to go about stifling it for a while. You must banish every image of edible things, you must clench your fists and pull yourself together and simply not permit it. Instead you can think about juggling, for it can be practiced in your head too—in this way you improve. Or you imagine yourself moving across the rope, wondrously high up, over peaks and clouds. The boy squints into the embers. Hunger makes you lighter. And as he gazes into the red glow, it seems to him as if he were seeing below him the bright vast day, as if the sun were blinding him.
Nele puts her head on his shoulder. My brother, she thinks. He is now all she has left. She thinks about the home she will never see again, about her mother who was usually sad, about her father who hit her worse than Pirmin, and about her siblings and the hands. She thinks about the life that lay ahead of her: the Steger son, the work in the bakery. She doesn’t permit herself to think about the bread, of course—but now that she has thought about how she must not think about it, it has happened after all, and she sees the soft loaf of bread before her eyes, and she can smell it, and she feels it between her teeth.