Tyll

Hunger

“Once upon a time,” says Nele.

It’s already their third day in the forest. Now and then light filters through the canopy of leaves, and despite this ceiling of foliage above them they get wet from the rain. They wonder whether the forest will ever end. Pirmin, who walks ahead of them and from time to time scratches the semicircle of his bald head, never turns around to look at them. Sometimes they hear him muttering, sometimes singing in a foreign language. They now know him well enough not to speak to him, for that could make him angry, and once he’s angry, it won’t be long before he hurts them.

“A mother had three daughters,” Nele goes on. “They owned a goose. It laid a gilded egg.”

“A what egg?”

“A golden one.”

“You said gilded.”

“It’s the same thing. The daughters were very different from each other. Two were evil, they had black souls, but they were beautiful. The youngest, on the other hand, was good, and her soul was white as snow.”

“Was she beautiful too?”

“The most beautiful of the three. As beautiful as the dawning day.”

“The dawning day?”

“Yes,” she said in annoyance.

“Is that beautiful?”

“Very.”

“The dawning day?”

“Very beautiful. And the evil sisters forced the youngest to work, day and night without cease, and she chafed her fingers bloody, and her feet became sore lumps, and her hair turned gray before its time. One day the golden egg hatched, and a thumbling stepped out and asked: Maiden, what is your wish?”

“Where was the egg the whole time before?”

“I don’t know, it was lying someplace.”

“The whole time?”

“Yes, it was lying someplace.”

“An egg made of gold? And nobody took it?”

“It’s a fairy tale!”

“Did you make it up?”

Nele is silent. The question seems senseless to her. The boy’s silhouette in the forest twilight looks very thin—he walks with a slight stoop, his neck craned forward over his chest, his body scrawny, as if he were a wooden figure brought to life. Did she invent this fairy tale? She herself doesn’t know. She has heard so many told, by her mother and her two aunts and her grandmother, so many about thumblings and golden eggs and wolves and knights and witches and good as well as evil sisters, that she doesn’t have to think; once you have begun, it continues of its own accord, and the parts assemble themselves, sometimes one way and sometimes another, and you have a fairy tale.

“Well, go on,” says the boy.

As she tells him about how the thumbling grants the beautiful sister’s wish and transforms her into a swallow so that she can fly away to the land of milk and honey, where all is well and no one goes hungry, Nele notices that the forest is growing denser and denser. They are supposed to be approaching the city of Augsburg. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Pirmin stops. He spins around, sniffing. Something has attracted his attention. He leans forward and contemplates the trunk of a birch, the white-and-black bark, the cavity of a knothole.

“What is it?” Nele asks, startled at the same moment by her thoughtlessness. She feels the boy stiffen beside her.

Slowly Pirmin turns his large, unshapely head to them. His eyes glint with hostility.

“Go on,” he says.

On her arms and legs she still feels exactly where he has pinched her, and the pain in her shoulder is still almost as bad as it was four or five days ago when he twisted her arm behind her back in a skillful hold. The boy tried to help her, but then he kicked him so hard in the stomach that he couldn’t stand upright for the rest of the day.

And yet Pirmin has never gone too far. He has hurt them, but not too badly, and as often as he has touched Nele, it has never been above the knee or below the navel. Since he knows that the two of them could run away at any time, he keeps them the only way he can: he teaches them what they want to learn.

“Go on,” he says again. “I won’t ask again.”

And Nele, who is still wondering what he might have seen in the knothole, tells them how the thumbling and the swallow reach the gate of the land of milk and honey, where a guard, as tall as a tower, keeps watch. He says: Here you will never be hungry and never thirsty, but you may not enter! They implore him and beg and plead, yet he knows no mercy, the guard has a heart of stone, which weighs heavily in his breast and doesn’t beat, and so he always says: You may not enter! You may not enter!

Nele falls silent. The two of them are looking at her and waiting.

“And?” asks Pirmin.

“They didn’t enter.”

“Never?”

“His heart was made of stone!”

Pirmin stares at her for a moment. Then he laughs out loud and continues walking. The two children follow him. Soon it will be night, and unlike Pirmin, who hardly ever shares, they have nothing left to eat.

Normally Nele bears the hunger better than the boy. At those times she imagines that the pain and the weakness inside her are something that belongs elsewhere and has nothing to do with her. But today it is the boy who manages better. His hunger feels like something light, a throbbing and hovering; it almost seems to him as if he could rise into the air. As the two of them walk along behind Pirmin, his thoughts are still with the lesson from this morning: How do you impersonate someone? How do you go about taking a brief glance at someone’s face and then becoming him—holding your body as he holds his, making your voice sound like his, having the same look in your eyes that he has?

There’s nothing people love as much as this, there’s nothing they laugh at as readily, but you have to get it right, for if you do it wrong, you’re pitiful. To imitate someone, you idiot, you stupid child, you stubborn, talentless stone, it is not enough merely to resemble him, you must resemble him more than he resembles himself, for he can afford to be any which way, but you must be utterly him, and if you can’t do that, then give up, quit, go back to Papa’s mill and don’t waste Pirmin’s time!

It’s about looking, do you understand? That’s the most important thing: Look! Understand people. It’s not so hard. They’re not complicated. They don’t want anything unusual, everyone just wants what he wants in a somewhat different way. And once you understand in what way someone wants something, then you only have to want as he does, and your body will follow, then your voice will change of its own accord, then you will have the correct look in your eyes.

You have to practice, of course. Everything takes practice. Practice and practice and practice. Just as you have to practice dancing on the tightrope or walking on your hands, or as you still have to practice for a long time before you will manage to keep six balls in the air: you always, always have to practice, and to do so with a teacher who doesn’t let you get away with anything, for people always let themselves get away with a great deal, people are not strict with themselves, which is why it is up to the teacher to kick you and hit you and laugh at you and tell you that you’re a wretch who will never be able to do it.

And now the boy is so lost in reflection on how to imitate people that he has almost forgotten his hunger. He imagines the Stegers and the smith and the priest and old Hanna Krell, who he didn’t know was a witch, but now that he knows, many things make new sense. One after another he summons them and imagines how each of them holds himself and speaks; he stoops his shoulders, draws in his chest, moves his lips soundlessly: Help me with the hammer, boy, drive in the nail, and his hand trembles slightly when he raises it, due to rheumatism.

Pirmin stops and orders them to gather dry branches. They know it’s hopeless: after three days of rain the wetness has crept into everything, sparing nothing, leaving nothing dry. But because they don’t want to make Pirmin angry, they bend over and crawl this way and that and reach into the bushes and pretend to be searching.

“How does it end?” the boy whispers. “Do they get into the land of milk and honey?”

“No,” she whispers. “They find a castle in which an evil king reigns, they kill him, and the girl becomes queen.”

“Does she marry the thumbling?”

Nele laughs.

“Why not?” asks the boy. He himself is surprised that he wants to know, but at the end of a fairy tale there must be a marriage, otherwise it’s not over, otherwise things are not right.

“How is she supposed to marry the thumbling?”

“Why not!”

“He’s a thumbling.”

“If he can do magic, he can make himself big.”

“Well, fine, then he casts a spell on himself and turns into a prince, and they get married, and if they have not died, they are still alive today. Good?”

“Better.”

But when Pirmin sees the damp branches that they bring him, he begins to shout, to hit and to pinch. His hands are quick and strong, and just when you think you have escaped one of them by a leap, the other has already seized you.

“Rats,” he shouts, “sloths, stupid, good-for-nothing filthy slugs, you are useless, no wonder your parents drove you away!”

“Not true,” says Nele. “We ran away.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pirmin shouts, “and his father was incinerated by the executioner, I know, I’ve heard it often.”

“Hanged,” says the boy. “Not incinerated.”

“Did you see it?”

The boy is silent.

“Quite right!” Pirmin laughs. “Bite fight plight, you have no inkling, your brow is wrinkling! When someone is hanged for witchcraft, the corpse is incinerated afterward—that’s what happens, that’s how it’s done. So he was incinerated, and he was hanged as well.”

Pirmin squats down, hums as he fiddles with the wood, rubs sticks together, while saying words under his breath. The boy recognizes a few spells, angel of fire, bring a spark, set this wood alight, kindle the sacred fire, make the flames burn bright; it is an old spell that Claus used too. And indeed it is not long before the boy smells the familiar aroma of burning wood. He opens his eyes and claps his hands. Grinning, Pirmin gives the hint of a bow. He puffs his cheeks and blows air into the fire. The glow of the flames plays on his face. Behind him his shadow, gigantically enlarged, dances on the tree trunks.

“And now perform something for me!”

“We’re tired,” says Nele.

“If you want to eat, perform. That’s how it is now. That’s how it will be until you kick the bucket. You belong to the traveling people, no one protects you, and when it rains, you have no roof. No home. No friends but others like you, who will not like you very much, because food is scarce. That is the price you pay to be free. Not to have to listen to anyone’s rules. The only rules are that you run when you have to run, and that when you’re hungry, you perform.”

“Will you give us food?”

“No, crow, oh woe, no, no!” Laughing, Pirmin shakes his head, then he sits down behind the fire. “Nothing more, not a crumb, not a thumb, and don’t be too loud, for there are soldiers in the forest. Around this time they are very drunk, and they will also be angry because the peasants near Nuremberg have banded together. If they find us, we’re in trouble.”

The two of them hesitate for a moment, for they really are very tired. But in the end that’s why they are here, that’s why they went with Pirmin—to perform, to learn tricks.

First the boy does his tightrope walk. He doesn’t stretch the rope very high up, even though by now he no longer falls down—but you never know what Pirmin will do; he could suddenly throw something or shake the rope. The boy takes a few careful steps to test the tautness of the rope, which he can hardly see anymore in the twilight. Then he gains confidence and walks faster. Then he runs outright. He leaps, spins in the air, lands, and runs backward to the end. He runs back again, bends forward, suddenly is running on his hands, reaches the other end again, somersaults, gets back on his feet, flails his arms only briefly, finds his balance, and bows. He jumps down.

Nele claps her hands wildly.

Pirmin spits. “That was ugly at the end.”

The boy bends down, picks up a stone, throws it into the air, catches it again without looking, and throws it into the air again. While the stone is in the air, he picks up a second one and throws it, catches the first, throws it, picks up a third with lightning speed, catches the second, throws it again, throws the third after it, catches and throws the first and goes down on his knees to take a fourth stone. Ultimately he has five whirling around his head, an up-and-down in the evening light. Nele is holding her breath. Pirmin sits motionless and stares, his eyes narrow slits.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the stones are not the same shape or weight. Hence the hand must adapt to each one, must change its grasp slightly each time. In the case of the heavy ones the arm must yield somewhat more, in the case of the light ones throw harder, so that they all fly at the same speed and on the same course. This is possible only when you have practiced a great deal. But it is also possible only when you forget that it’s you yourself who is throwing the stones. You must to some extent only watch them flying. As soon as you are too involved, you lose the rhythm and can’t do it anymore.

For a little while the boy still manages it. He doesn’t think, keeping himself inwardly on the edge, looking up and seeing the stones above him. Between the leaves he perceives the last light of the darkening sky. He feels drops on his forehead and his lips, he hears the crackling of the flames, and now he senses that it will not be possible for much longer, that in a moment everything will get muddled—and to forestall this, he lets the first stone whirl into the underbrush behind him, then the second, the third, the fourth, and finally the last, and he looks at his empty hands in astonishment: Where did they go? In feigned perplexity he bows.

Nele claps again. Pirmin makes a disparaging hand gesture—but from his silence the boy can tell that he did a good job. Naturally, he would be able to juggle better if Pirmin would lend him his juggling balls. He has six of them, made of thick leather, smooth and easy to handle, each in a different color, so that they turn into a shimmering fountain of hues when you make them fly fast enough. Pirmin has them in the jute sack that he always carries over his shoulder and that the children don’t dare to touch: Try it, just reach in, I’ll break your fingers. The boy has seen Pirmin juggling, in this or that market town. He does it very skillfully but no longer quite as agilely as he must have in the past, and if you pay attention, you can see that due to all the strong beer he is gradually losing his sense of balance. With those balls the boy could probably do it even better. But for that very reason Pirmin will never permit him to use them.

Now it’s time for the play. The boy nods to Nele, she bounds over and begins to narrate: Once two armies assembled outside golden Prague, trumpets blare, the warriors’ armor flashes, and here is the young King, full of courage, in the company of his English wife. Yet nothing is sacred to the Kaiser’s generals. They beat their drums, do you hear them? The doom of Christendom is brewing.

The children change from one role to the next, they alter intonation, voice and language, and since they can speak neither Czech nor French nor Latin, they speak the most exquisite gibberish. The boy is an officer in the Kaiser’s army, he gives the command, he hears the cannons roaring behind him, he sees the Bohemian musketeers aim their weapons at him, he hears the order to retreat, yet he casts it to the wind, you don’t win by retreating! And he advances, the danger is great, but fortune is with him, the musketeers yield to the courage of his regiment, the victory fanfares blare, he can hear them more clearly than the rain, and now he is in the golden throne room of the Kaiser. The sovereign sits mildly on the throne. With a soft hand he drapes a sash of medals over his shoulder: Today you have saved my Empire, Generalissimo! He sees the faces of the noblemen, he inclines his head, they bow in humility. Then a noblewoman comes up to him: A word, I have a mission! He speaks calmly: Whatever it may be, and even if it costs me my life, for I love you. That I know, distinguished lord, she replies, yet you must forget it. Listen to my mission. I want you to—

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.

“Cut it out!” says the boy.

And now she can’t help laughing and wonders how he knows what she was thinking. But it worked; the bread is gone.

Pirmin has sunk forward. He is lying on the ground like a heavy sack, his back is rising and falling, and he is snoring like an animal.

The fearful children look around.

It is cold.

Soon the fire will be out.