And suddenly he knows that he won’t die today. Threads of long grass caressing him, dirt getting in his nose, he feels a cold grasp on the nape of his neck, hears a crunching sound, feels something on his back, then on his heels; he has passed under the mill wheel.
He pushes off from the bottom. As he rises, he briefly sees a pale face. The eyes large and empty, the mouth open, it glows faintly in the darkness of the water, probably the ghost of a child who was at some point less fortunate than he. He makes swimming strokes. Now he has reached the surface. He breathes in and spits mud and coughs and claws at the grass and crawls, gasping, onto the bank.
A dot is moving on thin little legs in front of his right eye. He squints. The dot comes closer. It tickles his eyebrow. He presses his hand against his face, and the dot disappears. Up above, roundly shimmering, hovers a cloud. Someone bends down over him. It’s Claus. He kneels, reaches out his hand and touches his chest, murmurs something that the boy doesn’t understand because the high tone is still hanging in the air and drowning out everything else. But as his father speaks, the tone grows softer and softer. Claus stands up. The tone has gone silent.
Now Agneta’s there too. And Rosa next to her. Every time someone reappears, it takes the boy a moment to recognize the face; something in his head slowed down and is not yet working again. His father is making circles with his hands. He feels his strength returning. He tries to speak, but all that comes out of his throat is croaking.
Agneta strokes his cheek. “Twice,” she says. “You’ve now been baptized twice.”
He doesn’t understand what she means. That’s probably due to the pain in his head, a pain so intense that it fills not only him but also the world itself—all visible things, the earth, the people around him, even the cloud up there, which is still as white as fresh snow.
“Well, come into the house,” says Claus. His voice sounds reproving, as if he had caught him doing something forbidden.
The boy sits up, leans forward, and vomits. Agneta kneels beside him and holds his head.
Then he sees his father draw his arm far back and slap Sepp’s face. Sepp’s upper body pitches forward. He holds his cheek and straightens up again, when the next blow hits him. And then a third, another big swing, the force almost hurling him to the ground. Claus rubs his sore hands together as Sepp staggers. It’s clear to the boy that he’s only pretending: it didn’t hurt him very much; he is substantially stronger than the miller. But even he knows that you have to be punished when you almost kill the child of your employer, just as the miller and everyone else know that they can’t just chase him off, for Claus needs three mill hands, fewer won’t do, and when one of them is missing, it can take weeks before a new wandering mill hand turns up—the farmhands don’t want to work in the mill, it’s too far away from the village, and the trade is not quite honorable, only the desperate are willing to do it.
“Come into the house,” Agneta now says too.
It’s almost dark. Everyone is in a hurry, because no one wants to be outside any longer. Everyone knows what roams the forests at night.
“Baptized twice,” Agneta says again.
He is about to ask her what she means when he realizes that she’s no longer with him. The stream is murmuring behind him. Some light leaks out through the thick curtain of the mill window. Claus must have already lit the tallow candle. Apparently no one took the trouble to drag him inside.
Freezing, the boy stands up. Survived. He survived. The mill wheel. He survived the mill wheel. He feels indescribably light. He takes a leap, but when he lands, his leg gives way, and he falls to his knees with a groan.
A whisper is coming from the forest. He holds his breath and listens. Now it’s a growl, now a hiss, then it stops for a moment, then it begins again. He feels that if only he listened closer, he would make out words. But that’s the last thing he wants. He hobbles hastily to the mill.
—
Weeks pass before his leg allows him to get back on the rope. On the very first day, one of the baker’s daughters appears and sits down in the grass. He knows her by sight; her father often comes to the mill, because ever since Hanna Krell cursed him after a quarrel he has been plagued by rheumatism. The pain won’t let him sleep, which is why he needs Claus’s protective magic.
The boy considers whether to chase her away. But first of all it wouldn’t be nice, and secondly he hasn’t forgotten that she won the stone-throwing contest at the last village festival. She must be very strong, whereas his whole body aches. So he tolerates her presence. Although he sees her only out of the corner of his eye, he notices that she has freckles on her arms and face and that in the sun her eyes are as blue as water.
“Your father,” she says, “told my father there’s no hell.”
“He did not.” He manages four whole steps before he falls.
“Did so.”
“Never,” he says firmly. “I swear.”
He’s fairly certain that she’s right. Although his father could also have said the opposite: we are in hell, forever, and will never get out. Or he could have said that we’re in heaven. He has heard his father say everything that can be said.
“Have you heard?” she asks. “Peter Steger slaughtered a calf at the old tree. The smith said so. It was the three of them. Peter Steger, the smith, and old Heinerling. They went to the willow at night and left the calf there, for the Cold Woman.”
“I was there once too,” he says.
She laughs. She doesn’t believe him, of course, and she’s right, of course, he wasn’t there; no one goes to the willow if he doesn’t have to.
“I swear!” he says. “Believe me, Nele!”
He climbs onto the rope again and stands there without holding on. He can do it now. To strengthen the oath he has sworn he places two fingers of his right hand on his heart. But then he takes the hand away again quickly, because he remembers that little Käthe Leser swore falsely to her parents last year, and two nights later she died. To escape the embarrassment, he pretends to lose his balance and lets himself fall flat on his face in the grass.
“Keep doing it,” she says calmly.
“What?” His face contorted with pain, he stands up.
“The rope. Being able to do something no one else can. That’s good.”
He shrugs. He can’t tell whether she’s mocking him.
“Have to go,” she says, jumps up, and runs off.
As he watches her leave, he rubs his sore shoulder. Then he climbs back onto the rope.
—
The next week they have to bring a cart of flour to the Reutter farm. Martin Reutter brought the grain three days ago, but he can’t fetch the flour because his drawbar broke. His farmhand Heiner came yesterday to let them know.
The situation is complicated. They can’t just send the farmhand with the flour, because he could abscond with it, never to be seen again; you cannot trust a farmhand an inch. But Claus can’t leave the mill, because there’s too much work, so Agneta has to go with Heiner, and because she shouldn’t be alone with him in the forest, since farmhands are capable of anything, the boy comes too.
They set off before sunrise after a night of heavy rain. Fog hangs between the tree trunks, the high branches seem to disappear in the still-dark sky, the meadows are waterlogged. The donkey takes dragging steps, it’s all the same to him. The boy has known him as long as he can remember. He has spent many hours sitting with him in the stable, listening to his soft snorting, stroking him and taking pleasure in the way the animal pressed his always damp muzzle against his cheek. Agneta holds the reins. The boy sits next to her on the box, his eyes half closed, and snuggles up to her. Behind them Heiner is lying on the sacks of flour; sometimes he grunts, and sometimes he laughs to himself; you couldn’t say whether he’s asleep or awake.