Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

The two of them threw their arms up, and their movements were in such harmony that they seemed to be not two people but mirror images of each other. We could dance fairly well, we celebrated often, but none of us could dance like them; watching them, you felt as if a human body had no weight and life were not sad and hard.

He sang of the soldier’s life and the beauty of dying in battle, he sang of the whooping joy of each and every man who rode against the enemy on horseback, and we all felt our hearts beat faster. The men among us smiled, the women swayed their heads, the fathers lifted their children onto their shoulders, the mothers looked down at their sons with pride. Only old Luise hissed and jerked her head and muttered so loudly that those standing near her told her to go home, which, however, only prompted her to raise her voice further and shout: Didn’t anyone understand what he was doing here? He was invoking it, he was summoning it!

We understood what life could be like for someone who really did whatever he wanted, who believed in nothing and obeyed no one; we understood what it would be like to be such a person, and we understood that we would never be such people.

The soldiers were hungrier than usual, and deeper in their cups. It had been a long time since they entered a town that offered them so much. Old Luise, who had been fast asleep and this time had no presentiment, died in her bed. The priest died standing protectively in front of the church portal. Lise Schoch died trying to conceal a stash of gold coins. The baker and the smith and old Lembke and Moritz Blatt and most of the other men died trying to protect their women. And the women died as women do in war.

Dying is nothing, he understands that. It happens so quickly, it’s no big thing:

He remembers meadows through which he ran when he was a child, he remembers fresh bread better than any he’s had in a long time, and a man who hit him with a stick, perhaps it was his father, he doesn’t know. And so he ran away from the man, and then he was elsewhere. Then he ran away again. Running away is a wonderful thing. There’s no danger you can’t escape when you have fast legs. But this time he doesn’t run. He holds the baby, and he holds Agneta’s head too, and when she wants to stand up, he supports her and heaves her upward. Nonetheless, Agneta would not have gotten to her feet if she hadn’t remembered the most powerful of all squares. Memorize it, Claus said, use it only in an emergency. You can write it down, only you must never say it aloud! And so she applied the last remainder of clarity in her head to scratching the letters into the ground.

“When there’s something no one knows,” Wolf Hüttner once said to him, “we have to find it out!” Hüttner, the man who was his teacher, a chiromancer and necromancer of Konstanz, a night watchman by trade. Claus Ulenspiegel spent a winter in his employ, and not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of him with gratitude. Hüttner showed him the squares, spells, and potent herbs, and Claus hung on every word when Hüttner spoke to him of the Little People and the Big People and the Ancient Ones and the People of the Earthly Depths and the Spirits of the Air and the fact that you couldn’t trust the scholars, for they knew nothing, but they wouldn’t admit it, lest they fall out of favor with their princes,

When he had amassed so many books that he actually couldn’t remain on the move, fate took its course. A miller’s daughter caught his fancy. She was pretty, and she was funny too, and strong, and a blind man could see that she liked him. To win her wasn’t hard. He was a good dancer, and he knew the right spells and herbs to bind a heart.

Then he sensed her disappointment. First occasionally, then more often. And then all the time. She didn’t like his books, she didn’t like his need to solve the mysteries of the world, and besides, she wasn’t wrong, it’s a huge task, it doesn’t leave much strength for other things, especially not for the daily routine of the mill. Suddenly it seemed like a mistake to Claus too: What am I doing here, what do these clouds of flour have to do with me, or these dull farmers who always try to cheat you when they pay, or these slow-witted mill hands who never do what you instruct them to? On the other hand, he tells himself often, life simply leads you somewhere or other—if you weren’t here, you would be elsewhere, and everything would be just as strange.

whether a person will go to hell for stealing so many books.

“God’s will is greater than everything imaginable. It is so great that it is able to negate itself. An old riddle goes: can God make a stone so heavy that he can no longer lift it? It sounds like a paradox. Do you know what that is, a paradox?”

he may be stronger, but she is usually angrier, and in every fight whoever is angrier wins,

The evil spirits are powerful, but the vast majority of them cannot cross the threshold unless they are invited.

“I should say so,” replies Dr. Tesimond, taking a spoon gingerly. “I am a doctor of medicine and of theology, in addition a chemicus specializing in dracontology. Dr. Kircher concerns himself with occult signs, crystallography, and the nature of music.” He eats some groats, screws up his face, and puts down the spoon.

England, the island of apples and of morning fog.

It is simply not always clear whether a thing is a mountain or not a mountain, a flower or not a flower, a shoe or not a shoe—or, indeed, a table or not a table. That is why, when God wants clarity, he speaks in numbers.”

Gottfried explained the essentials to them: If you ride with a balladeer, you belong to the traveling people. No guild protects you, no authorities. If you’re in a city and there’s a fire, you have to slip away, for people will think you started it. If you’re in a village and something is stolen, slip away then too. If you’re ambushed by robbers, give them everything. Most of the time, however, they don’t take anything but demand a song—then sing for them, as well as you can, for robbers often dance better than the dullards in the villages.

“Many people do it, more than you think! It is part of an upstanding life to stay put, but the land is full of people who didn’t stay put. They have no protection, but they are free. They don’t have to string anyone up. They don’t have to kill anyone.” “Don’t have to marry the Steger son,” said Nele. “Don’t have to be day laborers,” said the boy.

“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.”

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.

it was not the theater that was false, no, everything else was pretense, disguise, and frippery, everything that was not theater was false. On the stage people were themselves, completely true, fully transparent.

In real life no one spoke in soliloquies. Everyone kept his thoughts to himself, faces could not be read, everyone dragged the dead weight of his secrets.

it seemed to Liz in her room as if she now understood something about the nature of time that she had not grasped before: Nothing passed. Everything was. Everything remained.

And even if things changed, it always happened in the one, same, never-changing now.

It doesn’t do any good to be a real man, strong and clever and fearless, because you can lose anyway. Just as someone can be a fellow like you and can win all the same. Anything is possible. I took a risk and won, you took a risk and lost and then what were you supposed to do? Yes, you could have hanged yourself, but that’s not for everyone, and besides, it’s a sin. That’s why you’re still here. Because you have to do something. And so you write letters and make requests and demands and come to audiences and speak and negotiate as if you still had any relevance, but you don’t! England isn’t sending you any troops. The Union isn’t coming to your aid. Your brothers in the Empire have abandoned you. There’s only one person who can give you back the Palatinate, and that’s me. And I’ll give it to you as a fief. When you kneel before me and swear allegiance to me as your lord. So what do you say, Friedrich? What’s it going to be?”

“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.”

“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