No end. Claus can’t go on speaking, it preoccupies him too much. How could time cease? On the other hand…He rubs his head. It must have begun. For if it had never begun, how would we have reached this moment? He looks around. An infinite amount of time cannot be over. Therefore it simply must have begun. But before that? A before before time? It makes you dizzy. Just like in the mountains when you look into a ravine.
Once, he now says, he looked into one, in Switzerland. A herdsman had taken him along on the cattle drive up to the alpine pastures. The cows had worn large bells, and the name of the herdsman had been Ruedi. Claus pauses. Then he remembers what he actually wanted to say. So he looked into the ravine, and it was so deep that you couldn’t see the ground. He asked the herdsman, who by the way was named Ruedi—a strange name—well, he asked Ruedi: “How deep is it, then?” In a voice of the greatest weariness, Ruedi replied: “It has no bottom!”
Claus sighs. The spoons scrape in the silence. At first, he continues, he thought it wasn’t possible and the herdsman must be a liar. Then he wondered whether the gorge was perhaps the entrance to hell. But suddenly he realized that it didn’t matter at alclass="underline" Even if this gorge happened to have a bottom, there was a bottomless gorge overhead, you only had to look up. With a heavy hand he scratches his head. A gorge, he murmurs, that just keeps going, farther and farther still, perpetually farther, in which, therefore, all the things in the world fit without filling even the tiniest fraction of its depth, a depth that nullifies everything…He eats a spoonful of groats. This makes you very queasy, he says, just as you also feel ill as soon as you realize that numbers never end! The fact that to every number you can add another, as if there were no God to stem such a tide. Always another! Counting without end, depth without bottom, time before time. Claus shakes his head. And if—
At this moment Sepp cries out. He presses his hands over his mouth. Everyone looks at him, baffled, but above all grateful for the interruption.
Sepp spits out a few brown pebbles that look exactly like the lumps of dough in the groats. It wasn’t easy to smuggle them into his bowl unnoticed. For something like that you have to wait for the right moment, and if necessary, you have to create a diversion yourself: That was why the boy a short while ago kicked Rosa, the female mill hand, in the shin, and when she cried out and told him that he was a stinking rat and he told her she was an ugly cow, and she in turn told him that he was filthier than filth, and his mother told both of them to hush, for God’s sake, or there wouldn’t be any food today, he quickly leaned forward and at the precise moment when everyone was looking at Agneta plopped the stones into Sepp’s bowl. The right moment is quickly missed, but if you’re attentive, you can sense it. Then a unicorn could run through the room without the others noticing.
Sepp feels around in his mouth with his finger, spits a tooth onto the table, lifts his head, and looks at the boy.
That’s not good. The boy was fairly certain that Sepp wouldn’t see through it, but apparently he’s not so stupid after all.
The boy jumps up and runs to the door. Unfortunately, Sepp is not only big but also fast, and he gets hold of him. The boy wants to break free, but he can’t. Sepp draws back his arm and punches him in the face. The blow absorbs all other noises.
He squints. Agneta has jumped up. Rosa is laughing; she likes it when there are beatings. Claus is sitting there with a furrowed brow, caught up in his thoughts. The other two mill hands are wide-eyed with curiosity. The boy hears nothing. The room is spinning. The ceiling is under him. Sepp has thrown him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Then he carries him out, and the boy sees grass above him. Down below arches the sky, streaked with the evening strands of clouds. Now he hears something again: A high tone hangs trembling in the air.
Sepp holds him by the upper arms and stares into his face from up close. The boy can see the red in the mill hand’s beard. Where the tooth is missing it’s bleeding. He could punch the mill hand in the face with all his strength. Sepp would probably drop him, and if he could get to his feet again quickly enough, he could put some distance between them and reach the forest.
But what would be the point? They live in the same mill. If Sepp doesn’t catch him today, he’ll catch him tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the day after. It would be better to get it over with now, while everyone’s watching. Before the eyes of the others Sepp probably won’t kill him.
They’ve all come out of the house: Rosa is standing on tiptoe to be able to see better, she’s still laughing, and the two mill hands next to her are laughing too. Agneta is shouting something; the boy sees her opening her mouth wide and waving her hands, but he can’t hear her. Next to her Claus still looks as if he were thinking about something else.
Now the mill hand has lifted him high over his head. Afraid that Sepp will hurl him onto the hard ground, the boy raises his hands protectively over his forehead. But Sepp takes a step forward, then another and a third, and suddenly the boy’s heart begins to race. His blood throbbing in his ears, he begins to scream. He can’t hear his voice. He screams louder, but he still doesn’t hear it. He knows what Sepp is planning. Do the others know too? They could still intervene, but—not anymore. Sepp has done it. The boy is falling.
He’s still falling. Time seems to be slowing down, he can look around, he feels the plunge, the gliding through the air, and he can even think that the very thing is happening against which he has been warned all his life: Do not step into the stream in front of the wheel, never go in front of it, don’t go in front of the mill wheel, under no circumstances, never go, never, never, never go into the stream in front of the mill wheel! And now, after this has been thought, the plunge still isn’t over, and he’s still falling and falling and still falling, but just as he is forming another thought, namely, that possibly nothing at all will happen and the plunge will last forever, he hits the water with a slap and sinks, and again it takes a moment before the icy cold bites. His chest constricts. Everything goes black.
He feels a fish brush his cheek. He feels the current, feels it flowing faster and faster, feels the suction between his fingers. He knows that he has to hold on to something, but what? Everything is in motion, nothing solid anywhere. Then he feels a movement above him, and he can’t help thinking that he has imagined this all his life, with horror and curiosity, the question of what he should do if he ever really did fall into the stream in front of the mill wheel. Now everything is different, and he can’t do anything at all, and he knows that he will soon be dead, crushed, ground, mashed, but he does remember that he must not come to the surface, there’s no escape up there, up there is the wheel. He has to go down.
But where is that, down?
With all his strength, he makes swimming strokes. Dying is nothing, he understands that. It happens so quickly, it’s no big thing: take one false step, one leap, make one movement, and you’re no longer alive. A blade of grass snaps, a bug is stepped on, a flame goes out, a person dies—it’s nothing! His hands dig into the mud; he made it to the bottom.