Tyll

by Daniel Kehlmann

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.