Tyll

Zusmarshausen

He could not have known, of course, the fat count wrote in his life’s chronicle, penned in the early years of the eighteenth century, when he was already an old man, plagued by gout, syphilis, and the quicksilver poisoning that the treatment of the syphilis brought him—he could not have known, of course, what awaited him when His Majesty dispatched him in the final year of the war to find the famous jester.

At that time Martin von Wolkenstein was not yet twenty-five but already corpulent. As a descendant of the minnesinger Oswald, he had grown up at the Viennese court. His father had once been chief chamberlain under Kaiser Matthias, his grandfather second key bearer of the mad Rudolf. Whoever knew Martin von Wolkenstein liked him; there was something bright surrounding him, a confidence and a friendliness that never failed him, even in the face of adversity. The Kaiser himself had shown him his favor several times, and he had also understood it as a show of favor when Count Trauttmansdorff, the President of the Privy Council, had summoned him and informed him that the Kaiser had heard that the most famous jester in the Empire had found refuge in the half-destroyed Abbey of Andechs. They had seen so much go to ruin, had been forced to allow so much destruction, invaluable things had been lost, but that someone like Tyll Ulenspiegel should simply waste away, whether Protestant or Catholic—for what he actually was, no one seemed to know—that was out of the question.

“I congratulate you, young man,” said Trauttmansdorff. “Take advantage of the occasion, who knows what could come of it.”

Then, as the fat count described it more than fifty years later, he had held out his gloved hand to him for the kiss that was at the time still prescribed by court ceremony—and that was exactly how it had been, he had made up none of it, even though he gladly made things up when there were gaps in his memory, and there were a lot of those, for all this was, by the time he was writing it down, a lifetime ago.

The very next day we ventured forth, he wrote. I rode in good spirits and full of hope, yet not without melancholy, because, for reasons that even now remain obscure unto my understanding, I could not look upon the path before me as one foreordained, eager though I was to behold the undisguised countenance of the red god Mars.

It was not true about the haste; in actuality more than a week had passed. After all, he had still had to write letters conveying his plans, had to say his goodbyes, visit his parents, be blessed by the bishop; he had to drink with his friends once more, had to call once more on his favorite among the court prostitutes, the dainty Aglaia, whom he still remembered decades later with a remorse he himself could not fathom; and of course he had to select the right companions. He chose three battle-tested men from the Lobkowitz dragoon regiment along with a secretary of the Imperial Court Council, Karl von Doder, who had seen the famous jester twenty years earlier at a market near Neulengbach, where the man, as was his way, played a very dirty trick on a woman in the audience and afterward provoked a bad knife fight, to the delight, naturally, of those who were not affected by it, for so it always was when he appeared: Some fared badly, but those who got away enjoyed themselves immensely. At first the secretary didn’t want to come with him. He argued and begged and pleaded and cited an unconquerable abhorrence of violence and of bad weather, but all to no avail. An order was an order; he had to do as he was told. Slightly over a week after the mission was assigned, the fat count thus set off westward with his dragoons and the secretary from the capital city and imperial residence of Vienna.

In his life’s chronicle, the style of which was still beholden to the fashionable tone of his youthful days, that is, of erudite arabesque and florid ornamentation, the fat count depicted in sentences that, precisely due to their exemplary tortuousness, have since found their way into many a schoolbook, the leisurely ride through the green of the Vienna Woods: At Melk we reached the wide blue of the Danube, alighting there at the magnificent abbey to pillow our weary heads for the night.

Once again this was not entirely true; in reality they stayed for a month. His uncle was the prior, and so they ate splendidly and slept well. Karl von Doder, who had always been interested in alchemy, spent many days in the library, absorbed in a book by the sage Athanasius Kircher, the dragoons played cards with the lay brothers, and with his uncle the fat count completed several chess games of such sublime perfection as he would never again attain; it almost seemed to him later as if his subsequent experiences stifled his gift for playing chess. Only during the fourth week of their stay did a letter find him, sent by Count Trauttmansdorff, who believed him to be already at the destination and asked whether they had found Ulenspiegel in Andechs and when their return was to be expected.

His uncle blessed him in parting. The abbot gave him a vial of consecrated oil. They followed the course of the Danube to Pöchlarn, thence turning southwest.

At the beginning of their journey they encountered a steady stream of merchants, vagabonds, monks, and travelers of all sorts. But now the land seemed empty. Even the weather was no longer congenial. Cold winds blew, trees spread bare limbs, almost all the fields lay fallow. The few people they saw were old: hunched women at wells, old men who crouched haggard outside huts, hollow-cheeked faces on the roadside. Nothing indicated whether these people were only resting or rather waiting for their end.

When the fat count spoke to Karl von Doder about it, he only wanted to talk about the book he had been studying in the abbey library, Ars magna lucis et umbrae. You became quite dizzy, you gazed, so to speak, into an abyss of erudition—and no, he had no idea where the younger people were, but if he might venture to surmise, then anyone who could still run had long since run away. But that book expatiated upon lenses and how one could magnify things and moreover upon angels, their form, their color, and upon music and the harmonies of the spheres, and finally upon Egypt too—by God, it was a very peculiar work.

The fat count used this sentence verbatim in his account. But because things became confused for him, he claimed there that it had been he himself who read the Ars magna, and indeed on their journey. He mentioned having tucked the work into his saddlebag, which, to be sure, clearly revealed, as the annotators later noted with mocking objectivity, that he had never held this gigantic book in his hands. The fat count, however, ingenuously described how he had studied Kircher’s memorable descriptions of light, lenses, and angels on various evenings in front of meager campfires, the subtle reflections of the great scholar appearing to him in the strangest contrast to their advance into the more and more ravaged land.

At Altheim the wind became so biting that they had to put on their lined cloaks and pull their hoods down low over their foreheads. At Ranshofen the weather cleared again. In a vacant farmhouse they watched the sunset. No people far and wide. Only a goose that must have fled from someone stood ragged next to a well.

The fat count stretched and yawned. The land was hilly, but there was not another tree to be seen; everything had been cut down. A distant rumble could be heard.

“Oh my,” said the fat count, “not that too, a thunderstorm.”

The dragoons laughed.

The fat count recognized his mistake. He had already realized what it was, he said awkwardly, only compounding his embarrassment. He had spoken in jest.

The goose stared at them with uncomprehending goose eyes. It opened and closed its bill. The dragoon Franz Kärrnbauer aimed his carbine and fired. And although the fat count would soon thereafter witness much more, he would not forget for the rest of his days what horror pierced him to the core when the head of the bird burst. Something about it was almost incomprehensible—how quickly it happened, how from one moment to the next a solid small head was transformed into a spray and into nothing and how the animal took another few waddles and then collapsed into a white mound, in a spreading pool of blood. As he rubbed his eyes and tried to breathe calmly so that he wouldn’t faint, he decided that he had to forget it at all costs. But of course he did not forget it, and when he recalled this journey half a century later while composing his life’s chronicle, it was the image of the bursting goose head that outshone everything else in clarity. In an utterly honest book he would have had to include it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so and took it with him to the grave, and no one learned with what inexpressible disgust he had watched the dragoons dress the bird for dinner: cheerfully, they scraped off the feathers, cut and tore, took out the guts, and roasted the meat over the fire.

That night the fat count slept badly. The wind howled through the empty window frames. He shivered with cold. The dragoon Kärrnbauer snored loudly. Another dragoon, named Stefan Purner, or perhaps it was Konrad Purner—the two of them were brothers, and the fat count mixed them up so often that they later merged into a single figure in the book—gave him a nudge, but he only snored louder.

In the morning they rode on. The village of Markl was completely destroyed: walls full of holes, cracked beams, rubble in the road, a few old people begging for food next to the filthy well. The enemy had been here and had taken everything, and the little that they had been able to hide had been taken afterward by friendly troops, that is, the Elector’s soldiers, and no sooner had these soldiers withdrawn than what the villagers had managed to conceal even from them was in turn taken by more enemy forces.

“Which enemies, then?” the fat count asked worriedly. “Swedes or Frenchmen?”

It was all the same to them, they said. They were so hungry.

The fat count hesitated for a moment. Then he gave the command to ride onward.

It had been quite right not to leave them anything, said Karl von Doder. The travelers didn’t have enough provisions and had to carry out orders from the highest authority. You simply could not help everyone, only God had that power, and he would certainly look after these Christians in his infinite mercy.

All the fields lay fallow; some were in ashes, from great fires. The hills cowered under a leaden sky. In the distance columns of smoke stood against the horizon.

It would be best, said Karl von Doder, to head southward past Altötting, Polling, and Tüssling, far from the country road, in the open field. Whoever had not abandoned the villages by now was armed and mistrustful. A group of riders bearing down on a village could be shot from cover without further ado.

“All right,” said the fat count, who didn’t understand why an Imperial Court Council secretary suddenly had such clear ideas about the conduct required in a war zone. “Agreed!”

“If we’re lucky and don’t encounter any soldiers,” said Karl von Doder, “then we’ll make it to Andechs in two days.”

The fat count nodded and tried to imagine someone seriously shooting at him, aiming over the iron sights. At him, Martin von Wolkenstein, who had never done anyone wrong, with a real bullet made of lead. He looked down at himself. His back hurt, his bottom was sore from the days in the saddle. He stroked his belly and imagined a bullet, he thought of the burst goose head, and he also thought of the metal magic about which Athanasius Kircher had written in his book on magnets: if you carried a magnetic stone of sufficient strength in your pocket, you could deflect the bullets and make a man invulnerable. The legendary scholar himself had tried it. Unfortunately, such strong magnets were very rare and expensive.

When he attempted to reconstruct their journey half a century later, the course of time grew muddled in his mind. To disguise his uncertainty, a florid digression is found at this point, seventeen and a half pages long, about the camaraderie of the men, who go to meet danger in the knowledge that this very danger will either kill them or bind them in friendship for life. The passage became famous, irrespective of the fact that it was fabricated, for in truth none of the men had become his friend. One conversation or another with the Imperial Court Council secretary remained in his memory in fragments, but as for the dragoons, he hardly remembered their names, much less their faces. One of them had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a grayish red plume—this he remembered. Above all he saw loamy paths in front of him and felt, as if it had been yesterday, the patter of the rain on his hood. His cloak had been heavy with water. At the time it struck him that nothing had ever been so wet, that it could not get any wetter.

Some time ago there had been forests here. But when he thought about it while riding, with aching back and sore bottom, he became aware that this knowledge meant nothing to him. The war didn’t seem to him like something manmade, but like wind and rain, like the sea, like the high cliffs of Sicily that he had seen as a child. This war was older than he was. It had at times grown and at times shrunk, it had crept here and there, had laid waste to the north, turned west, had extended one arm eastward and one southward, then heaved its full weight into the south, only to settle again for a while in the north. Naturally, the fat count knew people who still remembered the time before, chief among them his father, who, coughing and good-humored, awaited death in the family’s country seat, Rodenegg in Tyrol, as the fat count himself would await it almost sixty years later, coughing and writing, in the same place and at the same stone table. His father had once spoken with Albrecht von Wallenstein. The tall and dark man had complained about the damp weather in Vienna. His father had responded that one got used to it, to which Wallenstein had replied that he did not want to and would not get used to such foul weather—a statement that his father had been about to parry with an especially witty remark, but Wallenstein had already turned away brusquely. Scarcely a month went by in which his father did not find a reason to talk about it, just as he never forgot to mention that he had several years earlier also encountered the unfortunate Elector Friedrich, who shortly thereafter had accepted the Bohemian crown and provoked the great war, only to be chased off in disgrace after a single winter and finally to perish somewhere on the roadside, without so much as a grave.

That night they found no shelter. They curled up on a bare field and wrapped themselves in their wet cloaks. The rain was too heavy for a fire. Never had the fat count felt so miserable. The wet cloak, which kept getting wetter, was now indescribably sodden, and his body was gradually sinking deeper into the soft loam. Could the mire simply swallow you? He tried to sit up but couldn’t; the loam seemed to hold him down.

Eventually the rain stopped. Coughing, Franz Kärrnbauer piled a few sticks and struck the flints together, again and again, until finally sparks flew, and then he bustled around for another half an eternity and blew on the wood and murmured magic spells until little flames flickered in the darkness. Shivering, they held their hands in the warmth.

The horses shied and whinnied. One of the dragoons stood up, the fat count couldn’t make out which, but he saw that he was leveling the carbine. The fire made their shadows dance.

“Wolves,” whispered Karl von Doder.

They stared into the night. Suddenly the fat count was filled with the conviction that all this must be a dream, indeed this was how he remembered it later, as a dream from which he had awoken in the bright morning, dry and well rested. It could not have happened like that, but instead of grappling with his memory, he inserted twelve pages of artfully nested sentences about his mother. Most of it was pure invention, for he merged his distant and coldhearted mother with the figure of his favorite governess, who had been gentler to him than any other person, except perhaps the thin and beautiful prostitute Aglaia. When his account after this long and fabricated recollection found its way back to the journey, they had already passed Haar, and behind him the dragoons were carrying on a conversation about magic spells that protected you from stray bullets.

“Can’t do anything about a well-aimed one,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.

“Unless you have a really strong spell,” said Konrad Purner. “One of the very secret ones. They can even do something about cannonballs, I’ve seen it myself, at Augsburg. A man next to me used one like that, I thought he was dead, but then he stood up again as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t quite hear the spell, alas.”

“Yes, it can be done with a spell like that,” said Franz Kärrnbauer. “A really expensive one. But the simple spells that you buy at the market, they’re useless.”

“I knew a fellow,” said Stefan Purner, “he fought for the Swedes, and he had an amulet; with it he survived first Magdeburg, then Lützen. Then he drank himself to death.”

“But the amulet,” asked Franz Kärrnbauer. “Who got it, where is it?”

“Yes, if I only knew.” Stefan Purner sighed. “If you had that, then everything would be different.”

“Yes,” Franz Kärrnbauer said prayerfully. “If only you had that!”

At Baierbronn they found the first dead man. He must have been lying there awhile already, for his clothes were covered with a layer of earth, and his hair seemed to have become intertwined with the blades of grass. He was lying facedown, his legs spread, with bare feet.

“That’s normal,” said Konrad Purner. “No one leaves a corpse his boots. If you’re unlucky, you get killed just for the shoes.”

The wind carried small, cold raindrops. All around them were tree stumps, hundreds of them; a whole forest had been cut down here. They passed through a village that had been burned down to its foundation walls, and there they saw a heap of corpses. The fat count averted his eyes and then looked after all. He saw blackened faces, a torso with only one arm, a hand clenched into a claw, two empty eye sockets over an open mouth, and something that looked like a sack but was the remains of a body. An acrid smell hung in the air.

In the late afternoon they reached a village in which there were still people. Yes, Ulenspiegel was in the abbey, said an old woman, he was still alive. And when they encountered a feral-looking man and a small boy pulling a cart together shortly before sunset, they received the same information. “He’s in the abbey,” said the man, staring up at the fat count’s horse. “Keep heading west, past the lake, then you can’t miss it. Do you have food for me and my son, sirs?”

The fat count reached into his saddlebag and gave him a sausage. It was his last, and he knew that it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it, he felt so sorry for the child. In a daze, he asked why they were pulling the wagon.

“It’s all we have.”

“But it’s empty,” said the fat count.

“But it’s all we have.”

Again they slept in the open field; to be safe they didn’t light a fire. The fat count was freezing, but at least it wasn’t raining, and the ground was solid. Shortly after midnight they heard two shots nearby. They listened. In the first morning light Karl von Doder swore he had seen a wolf observing them from not too far away. Hastily they mounted their horses and rode onward.

They encountered a woman. It was hard to tell whether she was old or whether life had just treated her badly, so furrowed was her face, so stooped her gait. Yes, in the abbey, he was still there. No sooner had she spoken of the famous jester than she had to smile. And so it always was, the fat count wrote fifty years later: word of him had reached whomsoever we met; at the mere mention of his name, they indicated the way to his abode; every soul remaining in this wasteland seemed to know his whereabouts.

Toward midday soldiers approached them. First a group of pikemen: feral people with shaggy beards. Some had open wounds, others were dragging sacks full of booty. A smell of sweat, disease, and blood hung over them, and they gazed with small, hostile eyes. They were followed by covered wagons, on which their women and children were sitting. A few of the women were holding infants tight. We saw only the devastation of the bodies, the fat count wrote later, but whether friend or foe could not be discerned, for they carried no standard.

After the pikemen came a good dozen horsemen.

“Godspeed,” said a man who was apparently their leader. “Where are you bound?”

“For the abbey,” said the fat count.

“We’re just coming from there. Nothing to eat there.”

“We’re not looking for food. We’re looking for Tyll Ulenspiegel.”

“Yes, he’s there. We saw him, but we had to make off when the Kaiser’s men came.”

The fat count turned pale.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I’m Hans Kloppmess from Hamburg. I was once one of the Kaiser’s men too. And maybe I’ll be one again, who knows? A soldier has a trade, no less than a carpenter or baker. The army is my guild. There in the wagon I have a wife and children. I have to feed them. At the moment the French aren’t paying anything, but when they do pay, then it will be more than you get from the Kaiser. In Westphalia the great lords are negotiating peace. When the war ends, all the men will get their outstanding pay, you can count on that, because without the pay we would refuse to go home, the lords are afraid of that. Nice horses you have there!”

“Thank you,” said the fat count.

“Could really use them,” said Hans Kloppmess.

Worriedly the fat count turned to look at his dragoons.

“Where are you coming from?” asked Hans Kloppmess.

“Vienna,” the fat count said hoarsely.

“I was almost in Vienna once,” said the horseman next to Hans Kloppmess.

“What, really?” asked Hans Kloppmess. “You, in Vienna?”

“Only almost. Didn’t make it there.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened, I didn’t make it to Vienna.”

“Keep away from Starnberg,” said Hans Kloppmess. “It would be best to head south past Gauting, then toward Herrsching, then from there to the abbey. The road is still open to foot travelers. But hurry. Turenne and Wrangel have already crossed the Danube. Soon sparks will be flying.”

“We’re no foot travelers,” said Karl von Doder.

“Just wait and see.”

No command was necessary, no consultation. All of them spurred their horses. The fat count bent down over the neck of the animal and held on tight, clinging to both reins and mane. He saw the earth spraying under the hooves, he heard shouts behind him, he heard the report of a shot, he resisted the temptation to look back.

They rode and rode, and kept on riding and riding. His back ached unbearably, he had no strength left in his legs, and he didn’t dare turn his head. Alongside him rode Franz Kärrnbauer, in front of him rode Konrad Purner and Karl von Doder, behind him rode Stefan Purner.

Finally they stopped. The horses were steaming with sweat. Everything went black before the fat count’s eyes. He slid out of the saddle. Franz Kärrnbauer supported him and helped him dismount. The soldiers hadn’t followed them. It had begun to snow. Whitish gray flakes drifted in the air. When he caught one of them on his finger, he recognized that it was ash.

Karl von Doder patted his horse’s neck. “South past Gauting, he said, then toward Herrsching. The horses are thirsty, they need water.”

They mounted again. Silently they rode through the falling ash. They no longer encountered anyone, and in the late afternoon they saw above them the tower of the abbey.

Here Martin von Wolkenstein’s life’s chronicle makes a leap: he doesn’t say a word about the steep ascent beyond Herrsching, which cannot have been easy for the horses, nor is there anything about the half-destroyed abbey building and no description of the monks. This was due to his memory, of course, but it was probably due even more to the nervous impatience that came over him while writing. And so readers find him two turbid lines later already opposite the abbot, in the early morning hours of the next day.

They sat on two stools in an empty hall. The furniture had been looted, destroyed, or burned. There had been tapestries too, said the abbot, silver candleholders and a large cross made of gold above the door arch over there. Now the light came from a single pitchwood torch. Father Friesenegger spoke matter-of-factly and tersely; nonetheless, the fat count’s eyes fell shut several times. Again and again he started, only to notice that the gaunt man had meanwhile gone on talking. The fat count would have liked to take a rest, but the abbot wanted to tell him about the past years, he wanted the Kaiser’s envoy to know exactly what the abbey had undergone. When the fat count would write his life’s chronicle in the days of Leopold I, by which time he was constantly mixing up things, people, and years, he would recall with envy Father Friesenegger’s flawless memory.

The hard years had failed to harm the abbot’s mind, he wrote. His eyes had been sharp and attentive, his words well chosen, his sentences long and well formed, yet veracity was not everything: he had been unable to shape the welter of events into stories, and so it had been difficult to follow him. Over the years soldiers had overrun the abbey time and time again: the imperial troops had taken what they needed, then the Protestant troops had come and had taken what they needed. Then the Protestants had withdrawn, and the imperial troops had come back and had taken what they needed: animals and wood and boots. Then the imperial troops had withdrawn, but they had left a contingent of guards there, and then marauding soldiers who belonged to no army had come, and the guards had driven them away, or they had driven the guards away, either one or the other or perhaps one first and the other later, the fat count wasn’t certain, nor did it matter, for the guards had withdrawn again, and either the imperial troops or the Swedes had come to take what they needed: animals and wood and clothes and above all, naturally, boots, if there had been any boots left. The wood too was already gone. The next winter the peasants of the surrounding villages had taken refuge in the abbey. People had lain in all the halls, in all the closets, in even the smallest corridor. The hunger, the contaminated wells, the cold, the wolves!

“Wolves?”

They had penetrated the houses, the abbot said, at first only at night, but soon during the day too. The people had fled into the woods and there had killed and eaten the smaller animals and then cut down the trees to keep from freezing to death—this had made the wolves so hungry that they lost all fear and timidity. Like nightmares come to life they descended on the villages, like monsters out of old fairy tales. With hungry eyes they appeared in rooms and stables, without the slightest fear of knives or pitchforks. On the worst winter days they had even found their way into the abbey. One of the animals had attacked a woman with an infant and torn the child from her hands.

No, this was not exactly what had happened; the abbot had spoken only of the fear for the small children. But for some reason the idea that an infant could be devoured by a wolf before its mother’s eyes had so captivated the fat count, who at this time already had five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, that he believed the abbot might well have told him this too, which was why, amid eloquent apologies for the fact that he did not have the right to spare the reader what followed, he inserted a profoundly gruesome description including cries of pain, horror, the growling of the wolf, sharp teeth, and blood.

And so, the abbot said in his calm voice, it had gone on and on, day after day, year after year. So much hunger. So much disease. The alternation of the armies and marauders. The land had been depopulated. The forests had disappeared, the villages had burned down, the people had fled, God knows where. The past year even the wolves had made off. He leaned forward, put a hand on the fat count’s shoulder, and asked whether he could memorize all that.

“All of it,” said the fat count.

It was important that the court learn of this, said the abbot. The Bavarian Elector as the supreme commander of the imperial troops was, in his wisdom, interested only in the big picture, not in the details. Often they had appealed to him for help, but the truth was that his own troops had wreaked worse havoc than the Swedes. Only if this was remembered had all the suffering had meaning.

The fat count nodded.

The abbot looked him intently in the face.

Composure, he said, as if he had read the mind of the man opposite him. Discipline and inner will. The welfare of the abbey rested on his shoulders, the survival of the brothers.

He crossed himself. The fat count did the same.

This helped a great deal, the abbot said, reaching into the collar of his cowl. And with a horror such as he knew only from fever visions the fat count saw a jute fabric, into which had been woven metal spikes and shards of glass with dried blood.

You got used to it, said the abbot. The first years had been the worst; at that time, he had sometimes taken off the sackcloth and cooled his suppurating upper body with water. But then he had felt ashamed of his weakness, and time after time God had given him the strength to put it back on. There had been moments when the pain had been so intense, had pierced and seared him with such diabolical power, that he had thought he was losing his mind. But prayer had helped. Habit had helped. And his skin had grown thicker. From the fourth year on the constant pain had transformed itself into a friend.

At that moment, the fat count later wrote, sleep must have overpowered him, for when he yawned and rubbed his eyes and took a few moments to remember where he was, someone else was sitting opposite him.

It was a scrawny man with hollow cheeks and a scar that ran from his hairline down to the root of his nose. He was wearing a cowl, and yet it was clearly discernible—even if it couldn’t be said how—that he was not a monk. Never before had the fat count seen such eyes. When he described this conversation, he could not quite remember whether it had really taken place as he had recounted it over the years to friends, acquaintances, and strangers. But he decided to stick with the version that by now too many had heard for him to revise it.

“Here you are at last,” the man had said. “I’ve been waiting for a long time.”

“Are you Tyll Ulenspiegel?”

“One of us is. You’re here to fetch me?”

“On behalf of the Kaiser.”

“Which one? There are many.”

“No, there aren’t! What are you laughing at?”

“I’m not laughing at the Kaiser, I’m laughing at you. Why are you so fat? After all, there’s nothing to eat, how do you do it?”

“Hold your tongue,” said the fat count, immediately annoyed that nothing wittier had occurred to him. And even though for the rest of his days he thought about a better response and even found a whole string of them, he deviated in not a single account from this embarrassing phrase. For these very words seemed to seal the truth of his memory. Would anyone invent something that made him look so bad?

“Or else you’ll hit me? But you won’t do that. You’re soft. Gentle and soft and kindhearted. All this is not for you.”

“War is not for me?”

“It certainly is not.”

“But it is for you?”

“It certainly is.”

“Will you come of your own free will, or do we have to force you?”

“Of course I’ll come. There’s nothing left to eat here, everything is falling apart, the abbot won’t last much longer—that’s why I sent for you.”

“You didn’t send for me.”

“I sent for you, you big dumpling.”

“His Majesty heard—”

“Well, why did His Majesty hear that, then, you giant ball of flesh? His Majesty, His Idiotic Majesty with his golden crown on his golden throne, heard about me because I sent for you. And don’t smack me, I’m allowed to say that, you have heard of fool’s license, haven’t you? If I don’t call His Majesty an idiot, who will? Somebody has to. And you’re not allowed.”

Ulenspiegel grinned. It was a terrible grin, wicked and mocking, and since the fat count couldn’t remember how their conversation had gone on, he used half a dozen sentences to describe this grin, then rhapsodized for a page about the deep, sound, and refreshing sleep he had enjoyed on the floor of an abbey cell until noon the following day: O Morpheus, merciful god of slumbers, bringer of peace, holy guardian of sweet oblivion, in this the night of my most dire need thou didst not fail thy servant but broughtest rest to mine eyelids, and I awoke renewed in flesh and spirit, rejoicing in thy blessings.

This last phrase reflects less the feelings of the young man than the religious doubts of the old, on which he expatiated in moving words in another passage. Out of shame, however, he withheld a detail that even at a distance of fifty years made him blush. For when they met toward noon in the courtyard to take leave of the abbot and three emaciated monks who looked more like ghosts than like real people, they realized that they had forgotten to bring a horse for Ulenspiegel.

Indeed, none of them had thought about what the man they were to bring to Vienna would actually ride on. For of course there were no horses here to buy or borrow, there weren’t even donkeys. All the animals had been eaten or run away.

“Well, then he’ll just mount behind me,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.

“That doesn’t suit me,” said Ulenspiegel. In the light of day he looked even thinner in his monk’s cowl. He stood bent forward, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes were set deep in their sockets. “The Kaiser is my friend. I want a horse of my own.”

“I’ll knock your teeth out,” Franz Kärrnbauer said calmly, “and I’ll break your nose. I’ll do it. Look at me. You know I’ll do it.”

Ulenspiegel looked up at him reflectively for a moment. Then he climbed into the saddle behind Franz Kärrnbauer.

Karl von Doder put a hand on the fat count’s shoulder and whispered: “That’s not him.”

“Pardon me?”

“That’s not him!”

“What’s not whom?”

“I don’t think that’s the man I have seen.”

“What?”

“That time at the fair. I can’t help it. I don’t think it’s him.”

The fat count looked at the secretary for a long moment. “Are you certain?”

“Not completely certain. It was years ago, and he was above me on a rope. Under such circumstances, how can one be certain?”

“Let’s not speak of it again,” said the fat count.

With trembling hands the abbot blessed them and advised them to avoid the cities. The royal seat of Munich had closed its gates against the onslaught of people seeking help, no one else was allowed in, the streets were overflowing with the hungry, the wells were filthy. Things were similar around Nuremberg, where the Protestants were encamped. It was claimed that Wrangel and Turenne were coming with detachments from the northwest; therefore it would be best to steer clear of them by heading northeast in a wide loop, between Augsburg and Ingolstadt. At Rottenburg they could head straight east; from there the way to Lower Austria was clear. The abbot fell silent and scratched his chest—a seemingly ordinary movement, but now that the fat count knew about the sackcloth, he could hardly watch. Rumor had it that both sides were bent on battle before the armistice could be proclaimed in Westphalia. Each side wanted to improve its position first.

“Many thanks,” said the fat count, having hardly absorbed anything. Geography had never been his forte. In his father’s library there were several volumes of Matthäus Merian’s Topographia Germaniae; a few times he had leafed through them with a shudder. What was the point of memorizing all this? What was the point of visiting all these places when you could also just stay in the middle, in the center of the world, in Vienna?

“Go with God,” the abbot said to Ulenspiegel.

“Stay with God,” the fool replied from the horse. He had put his arms around Franz Kärrnbauer and looked so thin and weak that it was hard to imagine how he would keep himself on the horse.

“One day you stood outside our gates,” said the abbot. “We took you in, we didn’t ask your denomination. For more than a year you were here, now you’re leaving again.”

“Nice speech,” said Ulenspiegel.

The abbot made the sign of the cross. The entertainer moved to do the same, but apparently got muddled—his arms got tangled, his hands didn’t end up where they were supposed to go. The abbot turned away. The fat count had to suppress his laughter. Two monks opened the gate.

They didn’t get far. After a mere few hours they found themselves in a downpour such as the fat count had never before experienced. Hurriedly they dismounted and crouched under the horses. The rain poured, pelted, roared around them as if the sky were dissolving.

“But if it’s not Ulenspiegel?” whispered Karl von Doder.

Two things that could not be distinguished were the same thing, said the fat count. Either this man was Ulenspiegel, who had sought refuge in the Abbey of Andechs, or this was a man who had sought refuge in the abbey and called himself Ulenspiegel. God knew, but as long as he didn’t intervene, what was the difference?

At that moment they heard shots nearby. Hastily they mounted their horses, spurred them, and thundered across the open field. The fat count wheezed, his back ached. Raindrops struck his face. It seemed to him an eternity before the dragoons reined their horses.

With unsteady legs he dismounted and patted his horse’s neck. The animal pursed its lips and snorted. To their left was a small river; on the other side the slope rose toward a forest such as the fat count hadn’t seen since Melk.

“That must be Streitheim Forest,” said Karl von Doder.

“Then we’re too far north,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.

“There’s no way that’s Streitheim Forest,” said Stefan Purner.

“It most certainly is,” said Karl von Doder.

“Absolutely not,” said Stefan Purner.

Then they heard music. They held their breath and listened: trumpets and drums, a cheerful march that made you want to dance. The fat count noticed that his shoulders were moving up and down to the beat.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Konrad Purner.

“Not on the horses,” hissed Karl von Doder. “Into the forest!”

“Careful,” said the fat count, trying to at least keep up the pretense that he was the one giving orders here. “Ulenspiegel must be protected.”

“You poor idiots,” the scrawny man said softly. “You cattle. It is I who must protect you.”

The treetops soon closed over them. The fat count could see his horse’s reluctance, but he held the reins tight and patted its damp nostrils, and the animal complied. Before long the underbrush was so dense that the dragoons drew their sabers to clear a path.

They listened again. An indistinct murmur could be heard. Where was it coming from, what was it? Gradually the fat count realized that it was countless voices, an intermingling of singing and shouting and talking from many throats. He sensed his horse’s fear. He stroked its mane. The animal snorted.

Later he could no longer say how long they had walked like this, and so he claimed that it had been two hours. The voices behind us died away, he wrote, the loud silence of the forest enveloped us, birds shrieked, branches broke, and the wind whispered to us from the treetops.

“We have to head east,” said Karl von Doder, “toward Augsburg.”

“The abbot said the cities aren’t letting anyone in,” said the fat count.

“But we are envoys of the Kaiser,” said Karl von Doder.

It occurred to the fat count that he was carrying no paper that proved it: no identification, no charter, no document of any sort. He hadn’t requested papers, and apparently no one in the administration of the imperial palace had felt responsible for issuing such a thing.

“Where’s east?” asked Franz Kärrnbauer.

Stefan Purner pointed somewhere.

“That’s south,” said his brother.

“You really are half-wits,” Ulenspiegel said cheerfully. “You’re utterly incompetent nobodies! West is where we are, thus east is everywhere.”

Franz Kärrnbauer drew back his arm, but Ulenspiegel ducked with a speed of which no one would have thought him capable, and leaped behind a tree trunk. The dragoons followed him, yet Ulenspiegel glided like a shadow around the trunk and disappeared behind another and was no longer to be seen.

“You won’t get me,” they heard him say with a giggle, “I know the forest. I became a forest spirit when I was a small boy.”

“A forest spirit?” the fat count asked uneasily.

“A white forest spirit.” Ulenspiegel stepped out of the bushes with a laugh. “For the great devil.”

They took a rest. Their provisions were almost used up. The horses were nibbling on tree bark. They passed around the bottle of small beer, each of them taking a sip. When it arrived at the fat count, nothing was left.

Wearily they went on. The forest thinned. The trees stood at wider intervals. The underbrush was no longer impassable; the horses could walk without the path having to be cleared. It struck the fat count that no more birds could be heard: not a sparrow, not a blackbird, not a crow. They mounted and rode out of the forest.

“My God,” said Karl von Doder.

“Merciful Lord,” said Stefan Purner.

“Blessed Virgin,” said Franz Kärrnbauer.

When he later tried to depict what they had seen, the fat count discovered that he could not do it. It was beyond his abilities as a rational person: Even at a distance of half a century he found himself incapable of putting it into sentences that had any actual meaning. Naturally, he described the sight nonetheless. It was one of the most important moments of his life, and the fact that he had witnessed the final battle of the Thirty Years’ War defined from then on who he was and what people thought of him—the Lord Steward of the Household experienced firsthand the Battle of Zusmarshausen, it had been said ever since when he was introduced to someone. He fended this off with practiced modesty: “Let’s drop it, it’s not an easy story to tell.”

What sounded like a commonplace was the truth. It was not an easy story to tell. Not for him, at least. From the instant he rode out of the forest on the hill and looked across the river valley and saw the Kaiser’s army stretching to the horizon with its cannon emplacements, entrenched musketeers, and the pikemen standing in orderly groups of a hundred, whose pikes seemed to him a second forest, he felt as if he were experiencing something that did not belong in reality. The fact that so many people could come together in formation seemed so weighty that everything was thrown off balance. The fat count had to seize the mane of the horse to keep from sliding off.

Only then did it become clear to him that he had not only the imperial army before his eyes. To their right the slope fell away sharply. Below it was a wide road on which, silent and without music, so that only the hooves on the stone could be heard, the cavalry of the united crowns of France and Sweden was approaching: one rank behind the other, heading toward a single small bridge.

And at that moment it happened that this very bridge, which had just a second ago still stood there so solidly, dissolved into a small cloud. The fat count almost had to laugh at this magic trick. Bright smoke rose, the bridge was gone, and only now, when the smoke had already begun to drift away in the wind, did the bang reach them. How beautiful, the fat count thought and immediately felt ashamed and a moment later thought again, as if in defiance: No, that was beautiful.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Karl von Doder.

Too late. Time, like rapids, was carrying them along. Over on the other side of the river, small clouds were rising, a few dozen, white and shimmering. Our cannons, thought the fat count, that’s them, our Kaiser’s artillery, yet even before he had finished the thought, more clouds rose from where the musketeers were standing, tiny but countless ones, for a moment still sharply divided from each other, then quickly mixing together into a single cloud, and now the noise came rolling, and the fat count heard the shots ring out, the steam of which he had just seen, and next he saw the enemy’s horsemen, who were still advancing on the river, perform the strangest trick. Swaths were all at once cut in their ranks, one here, another right next to it, one at some distance. While he was still straining his eyes to grasp what he was seeing, he heard a noise like nothing he had ever heard before, a screaming from the air. Franz Kärrnbauer threw himself from his horse; surprised, the fat count watched him rolling through the grass and wondered whether he shouldn’t do the same, but the horse was high and the ground was covered with hard stones. Now Karl von Doder did it first. Only he didn’t jump in one direction but in two, as if he hadn’t been able to decide and had taken both opportunities.

At first the fat count thought that he must have been dreaming, yet then he saw that Karl von Doder was indeed lying in two places: one part to the right of his horse, the other to the left, and the one on the right was still moving. A disgust of monstrous proportions overcame the fat count, and then, to crown it all, he remembered the goose that Franz Kärrnbauer had shot dead days ago; he thought of how he had seen its head explode, and comprehended that he had been so shocked because that event had heralded this one, against the current of time. In the meantime the question of whether he should get off his horse or not had been rendered irrelevant; his horse had lain down, just like that, and when he hit the ground sideways, he noticed that it had begun to rain again, but it was not the usual rain, not water, that made the earth spray, rather invisible flails were threshing the ground. He saw Franz Kärrnbauer crawling on his belly, he saw a horse’s hoof lying in the grass with no horse attached to it, he saw Konrad Purner riding down the slope, he saw that the smoke was now coiling around the ranks of imperial soldiers on the other side of the river too, which he had just a moment ago still been able to make out so clearly. They were gone. In just one place the wind swept away the thick smoke and revealed the men crouching between their pikes, who now stood up, all at the same moment, and with raised weapons walked backward like a single man—how did they make their movements correspond so perfectly? Apparently they were backing away from the cavalry, which was now coming through the water after all. The river seemed to be boiling, horses were rearing, horsemen were falling, but other horsemen reached the riverbank. The water had turned red, and the pikemen walking backward disappeared in thick smoke.

He looked around. The grass stood calmly. The fat count struggled to his feet. His legs obeyed him, only he couldn’t feel his right hand. When he held it in front of his face, he noticed that a finger was missing. He counted again. Indeed, four fingers, something was wrong, one was missing, it was supposed to be five, it was four. He spat blood on the ground. He had to go back into the forest. Only in the forest was there cover, only in—

Shapes assembled themselves, colorful surfaces emerged, and as it became clear to the fat count that he must have fainted and was now coming to, a painful memory seized him, rising as if out of the void. He thought of a girl he had loved at the age of nineteen; at that time she had laughed at him, yet here she was again, and the knowledge that they would never be reunited filled every fiber of his being with sadness. Above him he saw the sky. Far and full of frayed clouds. Someone bent down over him. He didn’t know him—yes, he did know him, now he recognized him.

“Stand up!”

The fat count squinted.

Ulenspiegel drew back his arm and slapped his face.

The fat count stood up. His cheek hurt. His hand hurt even more. The missing finger hurt most of all. Over there lay what was left of Karl von Doder, next to that lay two horses, and nearby was the dead Konrad Purner. Fog hung in the distance, flashes flaring in it. Horsemen were still trotting closer, a swath opened up and closed again—that must have been the work of the twelve-pounder. Horsemen were swarming along the river and impeding each other and brandishing whips, horses were splashing into the water, men were bellowing—but he could tell only by the fact that their mouths were moving, he could not hear them. The river was full of horses and people, more and more of them made it to the riverbank and disappeared in the thick smoke.

Ulenspiegel set off, the fat count following him. The forest was only a few paces away. Ulenspiegel began to run. The fat count ran after him.

The grass sprayed up beside him. Again he heard the scream from earlier, ringing through the air, ringing next to him. Something hit the ground and rolled toward the river with a roar. How can anyone live, he thought, how can anyone stand it when the air is full of metal? At that moment Ulenspiegel threw his arms outward and hurled himself, chest first, onto the meadow.

The fat count bent down over him. Ulenspiegel lay motionless. The back of his cowl was torn, blood was flowing out, he was already lying in a pool of it. The fat count backed away and started to run, but he stumbled and fell down. He struggled to his feet, ran again. Someone was running next to him, the grass was again sprayed up by bullets—why were they shooting in this direction, why not at the enemy, why so wide of the mark, and who was running here at his side? The fat count turned his head.

“Don’t stop,” Ulenspiegel hissed.

They ran into the forest. The trees stifled the thunder. The fat count wanted to stop, he had stabbing pains in his chest, but Ulenspiegel grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the underbrush. There they crouched down. For a while they listened to the cannons. Ulenspiegel carefully took off the torn cowl. The fat count looked at his back: the shirt was smeared with blood, but there was no wound to be seen.

“I don’t understand it,” said the fat count.

“You have to tie off your hand.” Ulenspiegel tore a strip from the cloak and wrapped it around the fat count’s arm.

Even then he sensed that all this would have to be told differently in his book one day. He would not succeed in any description, for everything would elude him, and the sentences he would be able to form would not match the pictures in his memory.

And indeed: that which had happened did not even appear in his dreams. Only occasionally did he recognize in what seemed utterly different dream events a distant echo of those moments when he had come under fire at the edge of Streitheim Forest near Zusmarshausen.

Years later he questioned the unfortunate Count Gronsfeld, whom the Bavarian Elector had had summarily arrested after the defeat. Toothless, weary, and coughing, the former commander of the Bavarian troops named the names and places, he described the strength of the various units and drew deployment maps so that the fat count managed to some extent to account for roughly where he had been and what had befallen him and his companions. Yet the sentences refused to fall into line. And so he stole others.

In a popular novel he found a description he liked, and when people urged him to recount the last battle of the great German war, he told them what he had read in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus. It didn’t quite fit, because that passage was about the Battle of Wittstock, but it didn’t bother anyone, no one ever raised any questions. What the fat count could not have known, however, was that Grimmelshausen, though he did experience the Battle of Wittstock firsthand, had himself been unable to describe it and instead had stolen the sentences of an English novel translated by Martin Opitz, the author of which had never witnessed a battle in his life.

In his book the fat count then also briefly depicted the night in the forest, when the fool, all at once becoming talkative, had told him about his time at the court of the Winter King in The Hague and about how he had been buried alive three years ago during the Siege of Brno. First he had been in the town commandant’s bad graces because of a remark about his face, so that the man had stuck him with the miners, and then the shaft had caved in over his unit—here, the scar on his forehead, he got it there. He had been confined in the darkness, deep down, no way out, no air, yet then wondrously saved. It had been an incredible and wild story, the fat count wrote, and the fact that he then abruptly changed the subject, and did not elaborate on how the miraculous salvation under Brno had actually taken place, would later arouse the bewilderment and anger of many a reader.

Ulenspiegel, in any case, was a good storyteller, better than the abbot and better than the fat count too, and his stories distracted the fat count from the throbbing pain in his hand. Don’t worry, said the fool, that night the wolves would find enough to eat.

At the first morning light they set off. They avoided the battlefield, from which a smell wafted to them that the fat count never could have imagined. Then they traversed Schlipsheim, Hainhofen, and Ottmarshausen. Ulenspiegel knew his way around, and he was calm and collected and never once insulted the fat count again.

The empty landscape had filled up with people. Peasants were pulling their possessions in carts. Scattered soldiers were searching for their units and families. The wounded were squatting on the roadside, in makeshift bandages, staring motionless into space. The two of them passed burning Oberhausen to the west and arrived in Augsburg, where the remnants of the Kaiser’s army had assembled. After the defeat, it was no longer large.

The camp outside the city stank even worse than the battlefield. Like visions of hell, the deformed bodies, the festering faces, the open wounds, the heaps of excrement burned themselves into the fat count’s memory. I will never be the same again, he thought, as they pushed their way to the city gate, and: they’re only images, they can’t hurt me, they can’t touch me—only images. And he imagined he was someone else who walked invisibly alongside them and didn’t have to see what he saw.

In the afternoon they reached the gates of the city. Fearfully, the fat count revealed his identity to the guards, and it surprised even him when they believed all he said and let them in without hesitation.