As soon as he has fastened the rope at chest height between two trees, he feels better. He tests the firmness. Then he takes off his shoes, climbs on, and walks with outspread arms to the middle. There he stands, in front of the cart and donkey, over the loamy path. He loses his balance, jumps down, immediately climbs back up. A bee rises out of the bushes, descends again, and disappears in the greenery. Slowly the boy starts moving. He almost would have made it to the other end, but then he falls after all.
He stays on the ground for a while. What’s the point of standing up? He rolls onto his back. He feels as if time were coming to a halt. Something has changed: the wind is still whispering, and the leaves are still moving, and the donkey’s stomach is growling, but all this has nothing to do with time. Earlier was now, and now is now, and in the future, when everything is different and when there are different people and no one but God knows about him and Agneta and Claus and the mill anymore, then it will still be now.
The strip of sky over him has turned dark blue. Now it is clouding over with a velvety gray. Shadows climb down tree trunks, and all at once it’s evening down below. The light above ebbs to a trickle. And then it’s night.
He weeps. But because no one is there who could help, and because you can actually always weep for only a short while before you run out of strength and tears, he stops.
He is thirsty. Agneta and Heiner took the skin of beer with them. Heiner strapped it on; no one thought of leaving something here for him to drink. His lips are dry. There must be a stream nearby, but how is he supposed to find it?
The noises are different now than during the day: different animal sounds, a different wind, even the creaking of the branches is different. He listens. It must be safer up there. He sets about climbing a tree. But it’s hard when you can hardly see anything. Thin branches break, and the cracked bark cuts into his fingers. A shoe slips off his foot; he hears it bang into one branch and then another. Clasping the trunk, he shinnies up and makes it a little higher. Then he can’t go on.
For a while he hangs. He imagined that he could sleep on a wide limb, leaning against the trunk, but now he realizes that this is impossible. There’s nothing soft on a tree, and you have to cling to it constantly to keep from falling. A branch is pressing against his knee. At first he thinks that it can be endured, yet all at once it’s unbearable. Even the limb he’s sitting on hurts him. He finds himself thinking of the fairy tale about the evil witch and the beautiful daughter and the knight and the golden apple: will he ever find out how it ends?
He climbs back down. It’s difficult in the dark, but he is skillful and doesn’t slip off and reaches the ground. Only, he can no longer find his shoe. What a good thing that at least the donkey is there. The boy snuggles up to the soft, slightly stinking animal.
It occurs to him that his mother could come back. If she died on the way home, she could suddenly appear. She could brush past him, whisper something to him, show him her transformed face. The thought makes his blood run cold. Is it really possible to have just a second ago loved a person, but the next moment to die of fright when this person comes back? He thinks of little Gritt, who last year encountered her dead father while gathering mushrooms: he had no eyes and was hovering a hand’s breadth over the ground. And he thinks of the head that Grandmother saw many years ago in the boundary stone behind the Steger farm, lift your skirt, little girl, and there was no one hiding behind the stone, rather the stone all at once had eyes and lips, just lift it already and show what’s underneath! Grandmother told this story when he was little. Now she is long dead. Her body too must have decayed long ago, her eyes turning to stone and her hair to grass. He forbids himself to think of such things, but his effort fails, and there’s one thought above all that he can’t put out of his mind: better for Agneta to be dead, better imprisoned in the deepest eternal hell, than to suddenly step as a ghost out of the bushes.
The donkey gives a start. Wood cracks nearby. Something is approaching. His breeches fill up with warmth. A massive body brushes past and departs again. His breeches grow cold and heavy. The donkey growls; he felt it too. What was it? Now there’s a greenish gleam between the branches, bigger than a glowworm, yet less bright, and in his fear feverish images come into his head. He is hot, then cold. Then hot again. And despite everything he thinks: Agneta, alive or dead, must not find out that he wet himself, or else there will be blows. And when he sees her lying and whimpering under a bush that is at the same time the ribbon on which the earthly disk hangs from the moon, a remnant of his dissolving rational mind tells him that he must be falling asleep, exhausted by his fear and all the pounding of his heart, mercifully abandoned to his dwindling powers, on the cold ground and in the nocturnal noise of the forest, beside the softly snoring donkey. And so he doesn’t know that his mother is actually lying not far from him on the ground, whimpering and groaning, under a bush, which doesn’t look very different from the one in his dream, a juniper bush with majestically full berries. There she lies, in the darkness, there.
Agneta and the farmhand took the shortcut because she was too weak for the detour, and so they came too close to the Cold Woman’s clearing. Now Agneta is lying on the ground and has no more strength and barely any voice left to scream, and Heiner is sitting beside her, in his lap the newborn being.
The farmhand is considering whether to run away. What’s keeping him? This woman will die, and if he is nearby, people will say he is to blame. That’s how it always is. If something happens and a farmhand is nearby, then the farmhand is to blame.
He could disappear, never to be seen again. Nothing is keeping him on the Reutter farm. The food is not abundant, and the farmer is not good to him; he hits him as often as he hits his own sons. Why not leave mother and child here? The world is big, say the farmhands, new masters are easy to find, there are enough new farms, and something better than death can be found wherever you look.
He knows that it’s ill-advised to be in the forest at night, and he’s hungry and searingly thirsty, because somewhere along the way he lost the skin of beer. He closes his eyes. That helps. When you close your eyes, you are by yourself, no one else is there to hurt you, you are inside, you yourself are the only one there. He remembers meadows through which he ran when he was a child, he remembers fresh bread better than any he’s had in a long time, and a man who hit him with a stick, perhaps it was his father, he doesn’t know. And so he ran away from the man, and then he was elsewhere. Then he ran away again. Running away is a wonderful thing. There’s no danger you can’t escape when you have fast legs.
But this time he doesn’t run. He holds the baby, and he holds Agneta’s head too, and when she wants to stand up, he supports her and heaves her upward.
Nonetheless, Agneta would not have gotten to her feet if she hadn’t remembered the most powerful of all squares. Memorize it, Claus said, use it only in an emergency. You can write it down, only you must never say it aloud! And so she applied the last remainder of clarity in her head to scratching the letters into the ground. It began with Salom Arepo, but she couldn’t recall what came next—writing is triply difficult when you never learned how and it’s dark and you’re bleeding. But then she defied Claus’s instructions and cried hoarsely: “Salom Arepo, Salom Arepo!” And, since even fragments exert power, this was enough to bring back her memory, and she knew the rest too.
S A L O M
A R E P O
L E M E L
O P E R A
M O L A S
And this alone, she could feel it, drove back the evil forces, the bleeding abated, and, with pain as though from red-hot irons, the baby slid out of her body.