Tyll

The Great Art of Light and Shadow

At most times, Adam Olearius, the Gottorf court mathematician, curator of the ducal cabinet of curiosities and author of an account of a grueling mission to Russia and Persia, from which he had returned a few years earlier nearly unscathed, had a quick tongue, yet today in his nervousness he found speaking difficult. For before him, ringed by half a dozen secretaries in black cowls, deliberate, attentive, and bearing his incomprehensible wealth of learning like a light burden, stood none other than Father Athanasius Kircher, professor of the Collegium Romanum.

Although it was their first meeting, they treated each other as if they had known each other for half their lives. This was customary among scholars. Olearius inquired what had brought his venerable colleague here, intentionally leaving unclear whether he meant the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or Holstein or Gottorf Castle towering behind them.

Kircher reflected for a while as if he had to retrieve the answer from the depths of his memory before he replied with a soft and somewhat too-high voice that he had left the Eternal City for the sake of various undertakings, the most important of which was to find a cure for the plague.

“God help us,” said Olearius, “is it in Holstein again?”

Kircher was silent.

Olearius was disconcerted by how young the man standing opposite him was: it was hard to conceive that this head with the soft features had solved the mystery of magnetic force, the mystery of light, the mystery of music, and supposedly even the mystery of the writing of ancient Egypt. Olearius was aware of his own significance and was not known for his modesty. But in the presence of this man his voice threatened to fail.

It went without saying that no religious enmity reigned between scholars. Almost twenty-five years ago, when the great war had begun, it would have been different, but things had changed. In Russia the Protestant Olearius had befriended French monks, and it was no secret that Kircher corresponded with many Calvinist scholars. Except that a short while ago, when Kircher mentioned in passing the death of the Swedish king at the Battle of Lützen and in this connection spoke of the grace of the good Lord, Olearius had to inwardly force himself not to reply that Gustav Adolf’s death had been a catastrophe in which any reasonable person had to recognize the hand of the devil.

“You say that you want to cure the plague.” Olearius, still without an answer, cleared his throat. “And you say that you have come to Holstein for this purpose. So, then, has the plague come back to us?”

Kircher let another moment pass and, as was apparently his wont, contemplated his fingertips before he replied that he naturally would not have come here to find a cure for the plague if the plague were raging in this region, for where it raged was precisely not where to find the means to hinder its spread. God’s goodness had so splendidly decreed that the searcher for a remedy, instead of exposing his life to the danger, should visit the very places to which the disease had not spread. For only there was that which countered it by the force of nature and the will of God to be found.

They were sitting on the only stone bench of the castle park that had not been destroyed and dipping candy canes in diluted wine. Kircher’s six secretaries stood at a respectful distance and observed spellbound.

It was not good wine, and Olearius knew that the park and the castle were not exactly impressive either. Marauders had felled the old trees, the lawn was covered with scorch marks, and the hedges were as damaged as the façade of the building, which was even missing part of its roof. Olearius was old enough to remember days when the castle had been a jewel of the north, the pride of the Jutish dukes. At the time he had still been a child and his father a simple craftsman, but the duke had recognized his talent and allowed him to become a student, and later he had sent him as an envoy to Russia and to distant, dazzling Persia, where he had seen camels and griffins and towers of jade and talking snakes. He would have liked to stay there, but he had sworn allegiance to the duke, and his wife too was waiting at home, or so he believed at least, for he hadn’t known that she had died in the interim. Thus he had returned to the cold Empire, to the war, and to the sad existence of a widower.

Kircher pursed his lips, took another sip of wine, almost imperceptibly screwed up his face, wiped his lips with a red-stained little handkerchief, and went on to explain why he was here.

“An experiment,” he said. “The new way of achieving certainty. One does tests. For example, one ignites a ball of sulfur, bitumen, and coal, and immediately one senses that the sight of the fire provokes anger. If one stays in the same room, one reels with rage. This is due to the fact that the ball reflects qualities of the red planet Mars. In a similar way one can use the watery qualities of Neptune to calm excited tempers or the confusing qualities of the treacherous moon to poison the mind. A sober man need only stay close to a moonlike magnet for a short time to get as drunk as if he had emptied a skin of wine.”

“Magnets make you drunk?”

“Read my book. In my new work there will be even more about it. It’s called Ars magna lucis et umbrae and answers the open questions.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them. As for the ball of sulfur: The experiment gave me the idea of having a decoction of sulfur and snail’s blood administered to a plague victim. For on the one hand the sulfur drives the Martian components of the disease out of him, while on the other hand the snail’s blood as a dracontological substitution sweetens that which sours the humors.”

“Excuse me?”

Kircher again contemplated his fingertips.

“Snail’s blood is a substitute for dragon’s blood?” asked Olearius.

“No,” Kircher said forbearingly, “dragon’s bile.”

“And what brings you here now?”

“The substitution has its limits. The plague victim in the experiment died despite the decoction, which clearly proves that real dragon’s blood would have cured him. Thus we need a dragon, and one of the last dragons of the north lives in Holstein.”

Kircher looked at his hands. His breath formed little vapor clouds. Olearius shivered. Inside the castle it was no warmer, there were no trees left far and wide, and the duke used what little firewood there was for his bedroom.

“Has it been sighted, then, the dragon?”

“Of course not. A dragon that had been sighted would be a dragon that did not possess the most important quality of dragons—that of making itself undetectable. For this very reason one must treat all reports by people of having sighted dragons with extreme skepticism, for a dragon that let itself be sighted would be recognized a priori as a dragon that is no real dragon.”

Olearius rubbed his forehead.

“In this region, evidently, a dragon has never before been witnessed. Hence I am confident that there must be one here.”

“But none have been witnessed in many other places too. So why here in particular?”

“First of all, because the plague has withdrawn from this area. That is a strong sign. Secondly I used a pendulum.”

“But that’s magic!”

“Not if one uses a magnetic pendulum.” Kircher looked at Olearius with gleaming eyes. The slightly disparaging smile disappeared from his face as he leaned forward and asked with a simplicity that astounded Olearius: “Will you help me?”

“Help you do what?”

“Find the dragon.”

Olearius pretended he had to think. Yet it wasn’t a difficult decision. He was no longer young, he had no children, and his wife was dead. He visited her grave every day, and it still happened that he would wake up and begin to weep, so much did he miss her and so heavily did the loneliness weigh on him. Nothing held him here. If, then, the most significant scholar in the world was inviting him on a shared adventure, there was not much to mull over. He drew a breath to reply.

But Kircher beat him to it. He rose and brushed dust off his cowl. “Very well, then we will set off tomorrow morning.”

“I would like to bring my assistant along,” Olearius said, slightly annoyed. “Magister Fleming is knowledgeable and helpful.”

“Yes, excellent,” said Kircher, evidently already thinking about something else. “Tomorrow morning, then, that’s good, we can manage that. Can you take me to the duke now?”

“He is not receiving visitors at the moment.”

“Don’t worry. When he learns who I am, he will consider himself fortunate.”

—

Four coaches rumbled through the countryside. It was cold, morning haze rose pale from the meadows. The rearmost coach was filled from top to bottom with books that Kircher had acquired recently in Hamburg; in the next sat three secretaries copying manuscripts as well as they could in motion; in the next two secretaries were sleeping; and in the front coach Athanasius Kircher, Adam Olearius, and Magister Fleming, Olearius’s traveling companion of many years, were carrying on a conversation that a further secretary, quill and paper on his knees to take it down, was following attentively.

“But what do we do if we find it?” asked Olearius.

“The dragon?” asked Kircher.

For a moment Olearius forgot his reverence and thought: I can’t stand him any longer. “Yes,” he then said. “The dragon.”

Instead of answering, Kircher turned to Magister Fleming. “Do I understand correctly that you are a musician?”

“I am a doctor. Above all, I write poems. And I studied music in Leipzig.”

“Latin poems or French?”

“German.”

“German? Whatever for?”

“What do we do if we find it?” Olearius repeated.

“The dragon?” asked Kircher, and now Olearius would have liked nothing more than to slap his face.

“Yes,” said Olearius. “The dragon!”

“We will soothe it with music. I may presume that the gentlemen have studied my book Musurgia universalis?”

“Musica?” asked Olearius.

“Musurgia.”

“Why not Musica?”

Kircher frowned at Olearius.

“Naturally,” said Fleming. “Everything I know about harmony I learned from your book.”

“I hear that often. Almost all musicians say that. It is an important work. Not my most important, but indisputably important all the same. Several princes want to have a water organ constructed according to my design. And in Braunschweig there are plans to build my cat piano. It astounds me a little. Really I presented the idea mainly as an intellectual game, and I doubt that the results will please the ear.”

“What is a cat piano?” asked Olearius.

“You haven’t read it, then?”

“My memory. I’m no longer so young. Since our arduous journey it does not always obey me.”

“God knows,” said Fleming. “Do you remember what it was like when the wolves surrounded us in Riga?”

“A piano that produces sounds by torturing animals,” said Kircher. “One strikes a note, and instead of a hammer hitting a string, well-dosed pain is inflicted on a small animal—I propose cats, but it would work with voles too, dogs would be too big, crickets too small—so that the animal makes a noise. When one releases the key, the pain stops too, the animal falls silent. By arranging the animals according to their pitches, the most extraordinary music can be produced.”

For a little while it was quiet. Olearius looked into Kircher’s face. Fleming chewed on his lower lip.

“Why, then, do you write your poems in German?” Kircher finally asked.

“I know, it sounds strange,” said Fleming, who had been waiting for this question. “But it can be done! Our language is only just being born. Here we sit, three men from the same country, and we’re speaking Latin. Why? Now German may still be awkward, a boiling brew, a creature still in the midst of development, but one day it will be grown up.”

“Back to the dragon,” Olearius said, to change the subject. He had experienced it often: Once Fleming got on his hobbyhorse, no one else would have a chance to speak for a long time. And it always ended with Fleming, red-faced, reciting poems. They were not bad at all, his poems, they had melody and power. But who wanted to hear poems without warning, and in German to boot?

“Our language is still a confusion of dialects,” said Fleming. “If one is faltering in a sentence, one avails oneself of the appropriate word from Latin or Italian or even French, and one somehow bends the sentences into shape in Latin fashion. But this will change! One must nurture a language, one must help it thrive! And to help it, that means: write poetry.” Fleming’s cheeks had turned red, his mustache was bristling slightly, his eyes were staring. “He who begins a sentence in German should force himself to finish it in German!”

“Isn’t it against God’s will to inflict pain on animals?” asked Olearius.

“Why?” Kircher furrowed his brow. “There’s no difference between God’s animals and God’s things. Animals are finely assembled machines that consist of even more finely assembled machines. Whether I elicit a sound from a column of water or from a kitten, what’s the difference? You surely wouldn’t claim that animals have immortal souls—what a teeming mass that would be in Paradise. One wouldn’t be able to turn around without stepping on a worm!”

“I was a choirboy in Leipzig,” said Fleming. “Every morning at five we stood in the Saint Thomas Church and had to sing. Each voice was supposed to follow its own melodic punctus, and whoever sang out of tune got the switch. It was hard, but one morning, I remember, I understood for the first time what music is. And when later I learned the art of counterpoint, I understood what language is. And how one writes poetry in it—namely, by letting it prevail. Being and seeing, breath and death. The German rhyme: a question and an answer. Pain, rain, and again. Rhyme is no accident of sounds. It exists where ideas fit together.”

“It’s good that you are well acquainted with music,” said Kircher. “I have sheet music for melodies with which a dragon’s blood can be cooled and a dragon’s spirit calmed. Can you play the horn?”

“Not well.”

“Violin?”

“Passably. Where did you get these melodies?”

“I have composed them in accordance with the strictest science. Don’t worry, you won’t need to fiddle anything for the dragon, we will find musicians for that. For reasons of rank alone, it would be unseemly if one of us played the instruments.”

Olearius closed his eyes. For a moment he saw in his head a lizard rising from the field, its head as high as a tower against the sky: this, then, could be the end of me, he thought, after all the dangers I have survived.

“With all due respect to your zeal, young man,” said Kircher, “German has no future. First of all, because it’s an ugly language, viscous and unclean, an idiom for unlearned people who don’t bathe. Secondly, there is no time at all left for such a prolonged period of development. In seventy-six years the Iron Age will end, fire will come over the world, and our Lord will return in glory. One need not be a great astrologer to foresee it. Simple mathematics suffices.”

“What sort of dragon is it anyway?” asked Olearius.

“Probably a very old lindworm. My expertise in dracontology falls short of that of my late master Tesimond, but on a day trip to Hamburg little coiled fly clouds gave me the necessary sign. Have you ever been to Hamburg? It is astonishing, the city has not been destroyed at all.”

“Clouds?” asked Fleming. “How does the dragon cause—”

“Not causality, analogy! As above, so below. The cloud resembles a fly, hence the name fly cloud; the lindworm resembles an earthworm, hence the name lindworm. Worm and fly are insects! Do you see?”

Olearius propped his head up on his hands. He was feeling somewhat queasy. In Russia he had spent thousands of hours in coaches, but that was some time ago now, and he was no longer young. Of course, it could also have had to do with Kircher, who had, in a way that he could not have explained, become hard for him to bear.

“And when the dragon is tranquilized?” asked Fleming. “When we have found it and caught it, what then?”

“We draw its blood. As much as our leather skins can hold. I will bring it to Rome and with my assistants manufacture it into a cure for the Black Death, which will then be administered to the Pope and the Kaiser and the Catholic princes…” He hesitated. “…As well as perhaps to those Protestants who deserve it. To whom exactly will have to be negotiated. In this way, perhaps, we can end the war. It would indeed be fitting if it were I of all people who, with God’s help, put an end to this slaughter. I will duly mention the two of you in my book. Strictly speaking, I have done so already.”

“You have already mentioned us?”

“To save time I have already written the chapter in Rome. Guglielmo, do you have it here?”

The secretary bent down and rummaged, groaning, under his bench.

“As for musicians,” said Olearius, “I would propose that we look for the traveling circus on the Holstein heath. There’s a great deal of talk about it, people come from far away to see it. There will certainly be musicians there.”

His face flushed, the secretary straightened up and produced a stack of paper. He leafed through it for a moment, blew his nose in a no-longer-clean handkerchief with which he then wiped his bald head, apologized softly, and began to read aloud. His Latin had a distinctly Italian melody, and he beat time in a somewhat affected way with his quill. “Thereupon I embarked on the search in the company of German scholars of outstanding merit. The circumstances were unfavorable, the weather rough, the war had withdrawn from the region but still sent this or that squall of adversity, so that one had to be prepared for marauders as much as for bands of robbers and degenerate animals. I did not let it chagrin me, however, having commended my soul to the Almighty who had until now always protected this his humble servant, and erelong I found the dragon, which was at length soothed and defeated by skillful measures. Its warm blood served me as the basis for many an undertaking that I depict elsewhere in this work, and the most terrible pestilence, which had long kept Christendom in distress, could finally be fended off from the great, mighty, and worthy men, so that in the future it may torment only the simple people. And when one day I—”

“Thank you, Guglielmo, that’s enough. I will, of course, insert your names after the words ‘German scholars of outstanding merit.’ No need to thank me. I insist. It’s the least I can do.”

And perhaps, Olearius thought, this really was the immortality meant for him—a mention in Athanasius Kircher’s book. His own travelogue would vanish almost as quickly as the poems poor Fleming now and then had printed. Time devoured almost everything, but it would be powerless against this. About one thing there was no doubt: as long as the world existed, people would read Athanasius Kircher.

—

The next morning they found the circus. The keeper of the inn where they had spent the night had pointed them west; keep following the field path, he had said, then you can’t miss it. And since there were no hills here and all the trees were cleared, they soon saw a flagpole in the distance, on which fluttered a colorful scrap of cloth.

Soon they could make out tents and a semicircle of wooden benches, above which two posts were erected, the thin line of a rope stretching between them—the circus people must have brought along all the timber themselves. Between the tents stood covered wagons. Horses and donkeys were grazing, a few children were playing, a man was sleeping in a hammock, an old woman was washing clothes in a tub.

Kircher squinted. He wasn’t feeling well. He wondered whether it was due to the rocking of the coach or actually due to these two Germans. They were unfriendly, overserious, narrow-minded, they had thick heads, and besides, it was hard to ignore it, they smelled bad. He had not been in the Empire in a long time; he had almost forgotten what a headache it was to be among Germans.

The two of them underestimated him, that was obvious. He was used to it. Even as a child he had been underestimated, first by his parents, then by the teacher in the village school, until the priest had recommended him to the Jesuits. They had let him study, but then he had been underestimated by his fellow seminarians, who had seen in him only a zealous young man. No one had noticed how much more he could achieve—only his master Tesimond had recognized something in him and plucked him from the crowd of the slow-thinking. They had traveled across the land, he had learned a great deal from the old man, but he too had underestimated him, had believed him capable merely of an existence as a famulus, so that he had had to break away from Tesimond, step by step and with the greatest caution, for you should not antagonize someone like that. He had had to act as if the books he wrote were a harmless whim, but secretly he had sent them with letters of dedication to the important people in the Vatican. And indeed Tesimond had not gotten over the fact that his secretary had suddenly been summoned to Rome; he had fallen ill and had refused to give him a parting blessing. Kircher could still see it clearly before his eyes: the room in Vienna, his master wrapped tight in his blanket. The old wreck had mumbled something and pretended not to understand him, and so Kircher had gone unblessed to Rome, where the staff of the great library had welcomed him, only to underestimate him in turn. They had thought he would be good for mending books, cataloging books, studying books, but they had not grasped that he could write a book faster than it took another man to read it, and so he had had to prove it to them, again and again and again, until the Pope finally appointed him to the most important chair of his university and vested him with all the special authorities.

It would always be like this. The confusion of the past lay behind him; he no longer lost himself in time. And yet people didn’t recognize what power dwelled in him, what determination, or what a memory he had. Even now, when he was famous all over the world and no one could study the sciences without being acquainted with the works of Athanasius Kircher, he could not leave Rome without experiencing it: No sooner did he encounter his countrymen than he was scrutinized with the same old disparaging looks. What a mistake to have set off on this journey! One should stay in one place, should work, concentrate one’s powers and disappear behind one’s books. One had to be an incorporeal authority—a voice that the world heeded without wondering what the body looked like from which it came.

He had again given in to a weakness. Actually he had not even been so very concerned with the plague, he had above all needed a reason to search for the dragon. They are the most ancient and intelligent of creatures, Tesimond had said, and when you stand before one, you will be changed, indeed when you hear its voice, nothing will ever be the same again. Kircher had found out so much about the world, but a dragon was still lacking, without a dragon his work was not complete, and if it should really become dangerous, he could still use the last and strongest defense—that magic to which one was permitted to resort only once in one’s life: when the danger is greatest, Tesimond had impressed on him, when the dragon stands before you and all else fails, you can do it once, only once, one single time, so think carefully, only once. First you picture the strongest of the magic squares.

S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S

This is the oldest of all, the most secret, which holds the most power. You must see it before you, close your eyes, see it clearly and speak it with your lips closed, without your voice, letter by letter, and then say aloud, clearly enough for the dragon to hear you, a truth that you have never before disclosed, not to your closest friend, not even in confession. This is the most important thing: it must never have been uttered before. Then a mist will arise, and you can flee. Weakness afflicts the monster’s limbs, leaden oblivion fills its mind, and you run away before it can seize you. When it awakes, it won’t remember you. But don’t forget: you can do it only once!

Kircher contemplated his fingertips. Should the music fail to soothe the dragon, he was resolved to turn to this last resort and flee on one of the coach horses. The dragon would then presumably devour the secretaries—it would be a shame about them, especially Guglielmo, who was very quick and eager to learn—and probably the two Germans too. But he himself would escape, thanks to science; he had nothing to fear.

This journey would be his last. He would not subject himself to travel again. He was simply not suited for such exertions. While traveling he was always queasy, the food was always dreadful, it was always cold, and the dangers were also not to be underestimated: The war may have moved south, but that didn’t mean things up here were pleasant. How ravaged everything was, how wretched the people! He had, it was true, found several books in Hamburg for which he had long been searching—Hartmut Elias Warnick’s Organicon, an edition of Melusina mineralia by Gottfried von Rosenstein, and a few handwritten pages that might have been penned by Simon von Turin—but even this was no consolation for the weeks without his laboratory, where everything was manageable, while everywhere else chaos reigned.

Why did God’s Creation prove to be so recalcitrant, whence came its stubborn tendency to confusion and jaggedness? What was clear within the mind revealed itself outside to be a tangle. Kircher had grasped early on that one had to follow reason without being flustered by the quirks of reality. When one knew how an experiment had to turn out, then the experiment had to turn out like that, and when one possessed a distinct conception of things, then, when one described them, one had to satisfy this conception and not mere observation.

Only because he had learned to trust entirely the Holy Spirit had he been able to accomplish his greatest work, the deciphering of the hieroglyphs. With the old tablet of signs that Cardinal Bembo had once bought he had gotten to the bottom of the mystery: He had plunged deep into the little pictures until he understood. If one combined a wolf and a snake, it had to mean danger, but if there was a dotted wave under it, then God intervened and protected those who deserved his protection, and these three signs side by side meant mercy, and Kircher had fallen to his knees and had thanked heaven for such inspiration. The half-oval open to the left stood for judgment, and if there was a sun too, then it was the Day of Judgment, but if there was a moon, then this meant the torment of the man praying at night and hence the soul of the sinner and sometimes even hell. The little man must have meant person, but if this person had a staff, then it was the working person or work, and the signs behind it indicated what sort of work he did: if there were dots, then he was a sower; if there were dashes, he was a boatman; and if there were circles, he was a priest, and because priests wrote too, he could just as well be a scribe—it depended on whether he was situated at the beginning or at the end of the line, for the priest was always at the beginning, whereas the scribe came after the events that he recorded. Those had been ecstatic weeks. Soon he no longer needed the tablet; he had written in hieroglyphs as if he had never done otherwise. He had no longer been able to sleep at night, because he dreamed in signs. His thoughts consisted of dashes and dots and wedges and waves. So it was when one felt grace. His book, which he would soon have printed under the title Oedipus Aegyptiacus, was the greatest of his achievements: for thousands of years humanity had stood baffled before the mystery, no one had been able to solve it. Now it was solved.

The only irksome thing was that people were so dull-witted. He received letters from brothers in the Orient who informed him of sequences of signs that did not conform to the system described by him, and he had to write back to them that it didn’t make a difference what some oaf had carved into a stone ten thousand years ago, some little scribe who, after all, knew less about this script than an authority like him—what, then, was the point of concerning oneself with his errors? Had that little scribe received a letter of thanks from Caesar? But Kircher boasted one. He had sent the Kaiser a hymn of praise in hieroglyphs; he always carried with him the grateful reply from Vienna, folded and sewn into a silk pouch. Involuntarily he placed his hand on his chest, could feel the parchment through his jerkin, and immediately felt somewhat better.

The coaches had stopped.

“Are you unwell?” asked Olearius. “You’re pale.”

“I’m doing splendidly,” Kircher said in annoyance.

He flung open the door and climbed out. The sweat of the horses was steaming. The meadow too was damp. He squinted and propped himself up against the coach. He was dizzy.

“Eminent men,” said a voice. “Visiting us!”

Over by the tents there were people, and somewhat closer the old woman sat in front of the washtub, but right next to them there was only a donkey. The animal looked up, lowered its head again, and plucked blades of grass.

“Did you hear that too?” asked Fleming.

Olearius, who had climbed out behind him, nodded.

“It’s me,” said the donkey.

“There’s an explanation for this,” said Kircher.

“And what is it?” asked the donkey.

“Ventriloquism,” said Kircher.

“Right,” said the donkey. “I am Origenes.”

“Where is the ventriloquist hiding?” asked Olearius.

“He’s asleep,” said the donkey.

Behind them Fleming and the secretary had climbed out. The other secretaries followed.

“That’s really not bad,” said Fleming.

“He rarely sleeps,” said the donkey. “But now he is dreaming of you.” Its voice sounded deep and strange, as if it were not issuing from a human throat. “Do you want to see the show? The next one is the day after tomorrow. We have a fire eater and a hand walker and a coin swallower, that’s me. Give me coins, I’ll swallow them. Do you want to see? I’ll swallow them all. We have a dancer and a woman to play the female roles and we have a maiden who is buried and remains underground for an hour, and when she is dug up, she is fresh and not suffocated. And we have a dancer, did I say that already? The player and the dancer and the maiden are the same person. And we have a peerless tightrope walker, he is our director. But he is asleep at the moment. We also have a freak—when you look at him, your mind will reel. You can hardly tell where his head is, and not even he himself can find his arms.”

“And you have a ventriloquist,” said Olearius.

“You are a very shrewd man,” said the donkey.

“Do you have musicians?” asked Kircher, who was aware that it could damage his reputation to talk to a donkey before witnesses.

“Certainly,” said the donkey. “Half a dozen. The director and the woman dance, it is the climax, the peak of our performance, how would that be possible without musicians?”

“That’s enough,” said Kircher. “The ventriloquist shall now show himself!”

“I’m here,” said the donkey.

Kircher closed his eyes, exhaled deeply, inhaled. A mistake, he thought, the whole journey, this visit here, all a mistake. He thought of the peace in his study, of his stone desk, of the books on the shelves, he thought of the peeled apple that his assistant brought him every afternoon when the clock struck three, of the red wine in his favorite Venetian crystal glass. He rubbed his eyes and turned away.

“Do you need a barber surgeon?” asked the donkey. “We also sell medicine. Just say the word.”

It’s just a donkey, thought Kircher. But his fists clenched with rage. Now one was being mocked by even the German animals! “Handle this,” he said to Olearius. “Talk to these people.”

Olearius looked at him in astonishment.

Kircher was already stepping over a heap of donkey manure to climb back into the coach, without paying further attention to him. He closed the door and drew the curtains. He heard Olearius and Fleming outside talking to the donkey—undoubtedly they were now laughing at him, all of them, but it didn’t interest him. He didn’t even want to know. To quiet his mind, he tried to think in Egyptian signs.

—

The old woman at the washtub faced Olearius and Fleming as they approached her. Then she stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a whistle. Immediately three men and a woman emerged from one of the tents. The men were unusually stocky. The woman had brown hair, and she was no longer young, but her eyes were bright and piercing.

“Distinguished visitors,” said the woman. “We don’t often have such an honor. Do you want to see our show?”

Olearius tried to answer, yet his voice didn’t obey him.

“My brother is the best tightrope walker, he was court jester for the Winter King. Do you want to see him?”

Olearius’s voice still failed.

“Can’t you talk?”

Olearius cleared his throat. He knew that he was making a fool of himself, but it was no use, he couldn’t speak.

“Certainly we want to see something,” said Fleming.

“These are our acrobats,” said the woman. “Tumblers, show our well-born guests something!”

Without a moment’s hesitation one of the three men fell forward and stood on his hands. The second climbed up him with inhuman speed and did a handstand on the first one’s feet, and now the third man scaled the two of them, only he remained standing upright on the feet of the second, his arms stretched high in the sky, and now, before you knew it, the woman clambered up, and the third man pulled her to him and lifted her over his head. Olearius stared upward, she was hovering over him, in the air.

“Do you want to see more?” she called down.

“We would like to,” said Fleming, “but that’s not why we’re here. We need musicians, we’ll pay well.”

“Your distinguished companion is mute?”

“No,” said Olearius, “not no. Not mute, I mean.”

She laughed. “I’m Nele!”

“I am Magister Fleming.”

“Olearius,” said Olearius. “Court mathematicus in Gottorf.”

“Are you coming back down?” called Fleming. “It’s hard to talk like this!”

As if on command, the human tower crumbled. The man in the middle leaped, the man on top rolled forward, the man on the bottom did a somersault, the woman seemed to fall, but somehow the jumble sorted itself out in midair, and they all landed on their feet and stood upright. Fleming clapped his hands. Olearius stood rigid.

“Don’t clap,” said Nele, “that wasn’t an act. If it had been an act, you’d have to pay.”

“We would like to pay too,” said Olearius. “For your musicians.”

“Then you have to ask them yourselves. All who are with us are free. If they want to go with you, then they shall go. If they want to continue with us, then they will continue with us. You are in Ulenspiegel’s circus only if you want to be in Ulenspiegel’s circus, because there is no better circus. Even the freak is here of his own free will, elsewhere he wouldn’t have it so good.”

“Tyll Ulenspiegel is here?” asked Fleming.

“People come from all over for him,” said one of the acrobats. “I wouldn’t want to leave. But ask the musicians.”

“We have a flutist and a trumpeter and a drummer and a man who plays two fiddles at the same time. Ask them, and if they want to go, we shall part as friends and find other musicians, that won’t be hard, everyone wants to join Ulenspiegel’s circus.”

“Tyll Ulenspiegel?” Fleming asked again.

“None other.”

“And you are his sister?”

She shook her head.

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, sir. He is indeed my brother, but I am not his sister.”

“How is that possible?” asked Olearius.

“Amazing, isn’t it, sir?”

She looked him in the face, her eyes flashing, the wind playing in her hair. Olearius’s throat was dry, and his limbs were weak, as if he had caught an illness along the way.

“You don’t understand it, do you?” She pushed one of the acrobats in the chest and said: “Will you fetch the musicians?”

He nodded, flung himself forward, and walked away on his hands.

“One question.” Fleming pointed at the donkey, which was calmly plucking grass and now and then raising its head and looking at them with dull animal eyes. “Who taught the donkey to—”

“Ventriloquism.”

“But where is the ventriloquist hiding?”

“Ask the donkey,” said the old woman.

“Who are you, then?” asked Fleming. “Are you her mother?”

“God forbid,” said the old woman. “I am just the old woman. I’m no one’s mother, no one’s daughter.”

“Well, you must be someone’s daughter.”

“And if grass has already grown over all the people whose daughter I was? I am Else Kornfass from Stangenriet. I was sitting outside my house and digging my little garden without a thought in my head, when Ulenspiegel and she, Nele, and Origenes came with the cart, and I called, Good day, Tyll, because I recognized him, everyone recognizes him, and suddenly he pulls on the reins so that the wagon stops and says: The day doesn’t need your praise, just come. I didn’t know what he meant, and I told him: Don’t play jokes on old women, first of all they are poor and weak, and secondly they can cast a spell on you so you fall ill, but he says: You don’t belong here. You are one of us. And me: I might have been once, but now I am old! To which he replies: We are all old. And me: If I drop dead along the way, what will you do? His reply: Then we’ll leave you behind, for someone who is dead is no longer my friend. To which I didn’t know what else to say, sir, and that’s why I’m here.”

“Eats us out of house and home,” said Nele. “Doesn’t work much, sleeps a lot, always has an opinion.”

“All true,” said the old woman.

“But she can memorize something,” said Nele. “She delivers the longest ballads, never forgets a line.”

“German ballads?” asked Fleming.

“Certainly,” said the old woman. “Never learned Spanish.”

“Let’s hear,” said Fleming.

“If you pay, I’ll let you hear.”

Fleming rummaged in his pocket. Olearius looked up at the rope. For a moment he thought he saw someone up there, but it was swaying empty in the wind. The acrobat came back, followed by three men with instruments.

“It will cost you,” said the first man.

“We’ll come with you,” said the second, “but we want money.”

“Money and gold,” said the first.

“And a lot of it,” said the third. “Do you want to hear something?”

And without Olearius giving them a command, they struck a pose and began to play. One of them strummed the lute, another puffed his cheeks on the bagpipes, the third whirled two drumsticks, and Nele threw her hair back and began to dance, while the old woman recited a ballad to the rhythm of the music: She didn’t sing, she spoke in a monotone, and her rhythm submitted to that of the melody. It was about two lovers who could not reach each other because a sea separated them, and Fleming squatted down in the grass next to the old woman, lest he miss even a single word.

—

In the coach Kircher held his head and wondered when this horrible noise would finally stop. He had written the most important book on music, but for that very reason his ear was too refined to take pleasure in such popular blaring. All at once the coach seemed to him cramped, the bench hard, and this vulgar music bore witness to a cheerfulness that the whole world shared except him.

He sighed. The sunlight cast thin, cold flames through the gaps in the curtains. For a moment what he saw seemed to him a spawn of his headache and his sore eyes. Only then did he realize that he was not mistaken: someone was sitting opposite him.

Had the time finally come? He had always known that one day Satan himself would appear to him, but strangely the signs were missing. It didn’t smell of sulfur, the fellow had two human feet, and the cross Kircher wore around his neck had not grown warm. Even if Kircher didn’t understand how he had been able to slip in so soundlessly, it was a man sitting there. He was incredibly gaunt, and his eyes were set deep in their sockets. He wore a jerkin with a fur collar, and he was resting his feet in pointed shoes on the bench, which was a boorish impertinence.

The man leaned forward, put one hand on his shoulder in an almost tender gesture, and bolted the door with the other.

“I’d like to ask you something,” he said.

“I don’t have any money,” said Kircher. “Not here in the coach. One of the secretaries outside has it.”

“It’s wonderful that you’re here. I’ve waited for so long, I thought the opportunity would never come, but you must know: every opportunity comes, that’s the wonderful thing, every opportunity comes eventually, and I thought, when I saw you, now I’ll finally find out. They say that you can heal people, I can too, did you know that? The house of the dying in Mainz. Full of plague victims, there was coughing, groaning, wailing, and I said: I have a powder, I’ll sell it to you, it will cure you, and the poor swine cried full of hope: Give it to us, give us the powder! I have to make it first, I said, and they cried: Make the powder, make it, make your powder! And I said: It’s not so easy, I’m missing an ingredient, someone has to die for it. Now it was silent. Now they were astonished. Now no one said anything for the time being. And I exclaimed: I have to kill someone, I’m sorry, you can’t make something out of nothing! For I am an alchemist too, you know. Just like you, I know the secret powers, and the healing spirits obey me too.”

He laughed. Kircher stared at him. Then he reached for the door.

“Don’t do it,” the man said in a voice that made Kircher withdraw his hand. “So I said: Someone has to die, and I will not determine who it shall be, you have to sort it out among yourselves. And they said: How are we supposed to do that? And I said: If it were the sickest, that would be the least regrettable, so see who can still run, take your crutches, start running, and whoever is the last one in the house, I’ll disembowel. And before you could blink, the house was empty. Three corpses were still inside. No living people. You see, I said, you can walk, you aren’t dying, I cured you. Don’t you recognize me, Athanasius?”

Kircher stared at him.

“A long time ago,” said the man. “Many years, a lot of wind in one’s face, a lot of frost, one is burned by the sun, the hunger burns too, in the meantime one looks different. Except here you are, looking exactly the same with your red cheeks.”

“I know who you are,” said Kircher.

From outside the music blared. Kircher wondered whether he should cry for help, but the door was bolted. Even if they heard him, which was unlikely, they would have to break open the door, and one didn’t want to imagine what the fellow could do to him in that time.

“What the book said. He would have so liked to know. He would have given his life for it. And he did. And yet he never found out. But now I could get the answer. I always thought, perhaps I will see the young doctor again, perhaps I will find out, and here you are. Well? What did the Latin book say?”

Kircher began to pray soundlessly.

“It had no binding, but it had pictures. One was of a cricket, another of an animal that doesn’t exist, with two heads and wings, or perhaps it does exist, what do I know. One was of a man in a church, but it had no roof, there were columns above it, I remember that, above the columns were other columns. Claus showed it to me and said: Look, this is the world. I didn’t understand, I don’t think he did either. But if he couldn’t know it, I at least want to know it, and you looked at his things, and you understand Latin too, so tell me—what sort of book was that, who wrote it, what is it called?”

Kircher’s hands trembled. The boy from back then was vividly preserved in his memory, as vividly as the miller, whose final croaks on the gallows he would never forget, as vividly as the confession of the miller’s weeping wife, but in his life he had held so many books in his hands, leafed through so many pages, and seen so much in print that he could no longer keep it all apart. The man must have been referring to a book that the miller had possessed. But it was no use, his memory failed him.

“Do you remember the interrogation?” the thin man asked gently. “The older man, the Father, he kept saying: Don’t worry, we won’t hurt you if you tell the truth.”

“Well, you did so.”

“And he didn’t hurt me either, but he would have if I hadn’t run away.”

“Yes,” said Kircher, “you made the right choice.”

“I never found out what became of my mother. A few people saw her departing, but no one saw her arrive anywhere else.”

“We saved you,” said Kircher. “The devil would have seized you too, one cannot live near him and remain unscathed. When you spoke against your father, he lost his power over you. Your father confessed and repented. God is merciful.”

“I just want to know. The book. You have to tell me. And don’t lie, for I’ll be able to tell. That’s what he kept saying, your old Father: Don’t lie, for I’ll be able to tell. Meanwhile, you were constantly lying to him, and he couldn’t tell.”

The man leaned forward. His nose was now only a hand’s breadth from Kircher’s face; he seemed to be not so much looking at him as smelling him. His eyes were half closed, and Kircher thought he heard him inhaling with a sniff.

“I don’t remember,” said Kircher.

“I don’t believe that.”

“I have forgotten it.”

“But if I still don’t believe it?”

Kircher cleared his throat. “Sator,” he said softly. Then he fell silent. His eyes closed, but they twitched under the lids as if he were looking this way and that. Then he opened them again. A tear ran down his cheek. “You’re right,” he said tonelessly. “I lie a great deal. I lied to Dr. Tesimond, but that’s nothing. I have also lied to His Holiness. And His Majesty the Kaiser. I lie in my books. I lie all the time.”

The professor kept speaking, his voice cracking, but Tyll could not understand him. A strange torpor had come over him. He wiped his forehead, cold sweat ran down his face. The bench in front of him was empty, he was alone in the coach, the door was open. Yawning, he climbed out.

Outside there was thick fog. Billows rolled past, the air was saturated with white. The musicians had stopped playing, shadowy figures loomed—it was the professor’s companions, and that silhouette there must have been Nele. Somewhere a horse whinnied.

Tyll sat down on the ground. The fog was already thinning, a few rays of sun broke through. The coaches and a few tents and the contours of the spectator benches could now be made out. A moment later it was broad daylight. Moisture steamed from the grass, the fog was gone.

The secretaries looked at each other in confusion. One of the two coach horses was no longer there; the drawbar jutted into the air. While everyone was wondering where the fog had suddenly come from, while the acrobats did cartwheels because they couldn’t go long without doing them, while the donkey plucked blades of grass, while the old woman resumed reciting to Fleming, and while Olearius and Nele talked to each other, Tyll sat there motionless, with his eyes narrowed and his nose raised into the wind. And he did not stand up even when one of the secretaries approached and told Olearius that His Excellency Professor Kircher had apparently ridden away without farewell. He had not even left a message.

“We won’t find the dragon without him,” said Olearius.

“Shall we wait?” asked the secretary. “Perhaps he will come back.”

Olearius cast a glance at Nele. “That would probably be best.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Nele, who had walked over to Tyll.

He looked up. “I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

“I’ve forgotten.”

“Juggle for us. Then it will be better.”

Tyll stood up. He groped for the pouch that hung at his side and took out first a yellow leather ball and then a red one and then a blue one and then a green one. Carelessly he began to throw them into the air, and he took out even more balls, another and another and another, until there seemed to be dozens of them leaping over his spread hands. Everyone was watching the rising, falling, rising balls, and even the secretaries couldn’t help smiling.

—

It was early in the morning. Nele had been waiting for quite a while outside the tent. She had been thinking, had been walking up and down, had prayed, torn out grass, wept silently, wrung her hands, and, at length, had pulled herself together.

Now she slipped into the tent. Tyll was asleep, yet as soon as she touched his shoulder, he was wide awake.

She told him that she had spent the night with Olearius, the courtier from Gottorf, out in the field.

“So what?”

“This time it’s different.”

“Didn’t he give you anything nice?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Well, then it’s the same as always.”

“He would like me to come with him.”

Tyll raised his eyebrows in feigned astonishment.

“He wants to marry me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Marry?”

“Yes.”

“You?”

“Me.”

“Why?”

“He means it. He lives in a castle. It’s not a beautiful castle, he says, and in the winter it’s cold, but he has enough to eat and a duke who provides for him, and for this he doesn’t have to do anything but teach the duke’s children and sometimes calculate something and keep an eye on the books.”

“Will they run away otherwise, the books?”

“As I said, he has it good.”

Tyll rolled off his straw sack, got to his feet, stood up. “Then you have to go with him.”

“I don’t like him very much, but he is a good person. And very lonely. His wife died, when he was in Russia. I don’t know where Russia is.”

“Near England.”

“Now we never did make it to England.”

“In England it’s the same as here.”

“And when he came back from Russia, she was dead, and they didn’t have children, and ever since he has been sad. He is still fairly healthy, I could tell, and I think he can be trusted. Someone like this won’t come to me again.”

Tyll sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. Outside the old woman could be heard reciting a ballad. Evidently, Fleming was still sitting with her and having her perform again and again so that he could commit it to memory.

“Someone like this is certainly better than a Steger,” she said.

“Probably he won’t even hit you.”

“It’s possible,” Nele said thoughtfully. “And if he does, I’ll hit back. That will take him by surprise.”

“You can even still have children.”

“I don’t like children. And he is already old. But he will be grateful, with children or without.”

She was silent. The wind rustled the tent, and the old woman started from the beginning.

“I don’t actually want to.”

“But you have to.”

“Why?”

“Because we are no longer young, sister. And we’re not getting any younger. Not by one day. No one who is old and homeless has it good. He lives in a castle.”

“But we belong together.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps he’ll take you along too.”

“That won’t work. I can’t stay in a castle. I wouldn’t be able to stand it. And even if I could stand it, they wouldn’t want to have me there for long. Either they will chase me away, or I’ll burn the castle down. One or the other. But it would be your castle, so I must not burn it down, so nothing will come of it.”

For a while they were quiet.

“Yes, nothing will come of it,” she then said.

“Why does he want you anyway?” asked Tyll. “You’re not even especially beautiful.”

“In a moment I’m going to smack you in the mouth.”

He laughed.

“I think he loves me.”

“What?”

“I know, I know.”

“Loves you.”

“These things happen.”

Outside the donkey made a donkey sound, and the old woman began another ballad.

“If it hadn’t been for the marauders,” said Nele. “That time in the forest.”

“Don’t talk about it.”

She went silent.

“People like him don’t usually take people like you,” he said. “He must be a good man. And even if he’s not a good man—he has a roof overhead and coins in his pouch. Tell him that you’ll come with him, and tell him before he changes his mind.”

Nele began to weep. Tyll took his hand off her shoulder and looked at her. Shortly thereafter, she calmed down.

“Will you come visit me?” she asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Look, how is that supposed to work? He won’t want to be reminded of where he found you. In the castle no one will know, and you yourself won’t want people to know. The years will pass, sister, soon all this will be a distant memory, only your children will be amazed that you can dance and sing so well and catch anything they throw.”

She gave him a kiss on the forehead. Hesitantly she slipped out of the tent, stood up and went over to the coaches to inform the court mathematician that she would accept his offer and move with him to Gottorf.

When she came back, she found Tyll’s tent empty. With lightning speed he had set off and had taken nothing with him but the juggling balls, a long rope, and the donkey. Only Magister Fleming, who had encountered him out in the meadow, had spoken with him. But what Tyll had said he would not reveal.

—

The circus scattered in all directions. The musicians headed south with the acrobats, the fire eater went west with the old woman, the others turned northeast, in the hope of getting far away from war and hunger. The freak was admitted to the Elector of Bavaria’s cabinet of curiosities. Three months later, the secretaries reached the city of Rome, where Athanasius Kircher was impatiently waiting for them. He never again left the city, carried out thousands of experiments, and wrote dozens of books, until he died in high esteem forty years later.

Nele Olearius survived Kircher by three years. She had children and buried her husband, whom she had never loved but always appreciated, because he had treated her well and expected nothing more from her than some kindness. Before her eyes Gottorf Castle blossomed into new splendor, she saw her grandchildren grow up and rocked even her first great-grandson on her lap. No one had an inkling that she had once roamed the land with Tyll Ulenspiegel, but just as he had predicted, her grandchildren were amazed that even in her old age she could still catch anything you threw to her. She was well liked and respected; no one would have suspected that she had ever been anything but an honorable woman. Nor did she tell anyone that she still had the hope that the boy with whom she had once set off from her parents’ village might come back and take her with him.

Only when death was clutching at her, only in the confusion of the final days, did it seem to her as if she could see him. Thin and smiling, he stood by the window; thin and smiling, he came into her room; and smiling, she sat up and said: “It took you a while!”

And the Duke of Gottorf, a son of the duke who had formerly employed her husband, having come to her deathbed to say goodbye to the oldest member of his household, understood that now was not the moment to correct errors, took the stiff little hand that she held out to him, and gave the reply that his instinct provided him: “Yes, but now I am here.”

—

That same year, on the Holstein plain, the last dragon of the north died. He was seventeen thousand years old, and he was tired of hiding.

Thus he buried his head in the heather, lay his body, which had adapted so completely to its background that even eagles could not have made it out, flat in the softness of the grass, sighed, and briefly regretted that it was now over with scent and flowers and wind and that he would no longer see the clouds in a storm, the rising sun, or the curve of the earth’s shadow on the copper-blue moon, which had always especially delighted him.

He closed his four eyes and still growled softly when he felt a sparrow alight on his nose. All was fine with him, for he had seen so much, but still he didn’t know what would happen to someone like him after death. With a sigh, he fell asleep. His life had lasted long. Now it was time to transform.