Otfried Preussler - Krabat

The attic, too, was echoing with the thud and clatter of the machinery of the mill, and it was lucky for the boy that he was worn out. No sooner did he lie down on his straw mattress than he fell asleep, and he slept like a log. He slept and slept, until suddenly he was awakened by a ray of light.

Krabat sat up, and froze with horror.

There were eleven white figures standing around his bed, looking down at him in the light of a stable lantern. Eleven white figures with white faces and white hands.

‘Who are you?’ asked the frightened boy.

‘We are what you will soon be,’ one of the apparitions replied.

‘We won’t hurt you,’ another of them added. ‘We are the miller’s men, we work here.’

‘There are eleven of you?’

‘And you make twelve! What’s your name?’ ‘Krabat. What’s yours?’

‘I am Tonda, the head journeyman. This is Michal, this is Merten, this is Juro …’

Tonda introduced them all by name, and then said, ‘That’s enough for now. Go back to sleep, Krabat. You’ll need all your strength in this mill.’

The miller’s men went to their truckle beds, the last one put out the light, they said good night and soon they were all snoring.

At breakfast the miller’s men assembled in the servants’ hall of the house, where the twelve of them sat around a long wooden table. There was good, thick oatmeal, one large dish to every four men. Krabat was so hungry that he fell on it ravenously. If dinner and supper were as good as breakfast, this mill was not a bad place at all!

Tonda, the head journeyman, was a handsome fellow with thick, iron-gray hair, though judging by his face he could hardly be thirty years old. There was something very grave about Tonda, or more precisely, about his eyes. Krabat trusted him from the first; his calm manner and the friendly way he treated the boy made Krabat take to him at once.

‘I hope we didn’t give you too bad a fright last night,’ said Tonda, turning to him.

‘Not too bad!’ said Krabat.

And when he saw the ‘ghosts’ by daylight, they were just young men like any others. All eleven spoke Wendish, and they were some years older than Krabat. When they looked at him it seemed to him there was pity in their eyes, which surprised him, but he thought no more about it.

What did puzzle him was the way the clothes he found at the end of his bed, though secondhand, fitted as if they had been made for him. He asked the others where they got their things – who had worn them before? But the moment his question was out, the miller’s men put down their spoons and gazed sadly at him.

‘Have I said something wrong?’ asked Krabat.

‘No, no,’ said Tonda. ‘Your clothes … they belonged to the man who was here before you.’

‘Why did he leave?’ asked Krabat. ‘Has he finished his apprenticeship?’

‘Yes,’ said Tonda. ‘Yes … he has finished his apprenticeship.’

At that moment the door flew open, and the Master came in. He was angry, and the miller’s men shrank back from him.

‘No idle chatter here!’ he shouted at them. His one eye fell on Krabat, and he added harshly, ‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions. Repeat that!’

‘It’s a mistake to ask too many questions,’ Krabat stammered.

‘Get that into your head, then!’

And the Master left the servants’ hall, slamming the door behind him.

The men began to eat again, but suddenly Krabat felt he had had enough. He stared down at the table, bewildered. No one was taking any notice of him.

Or were they?

When he looked up, Tonda glanced across the table and nodded to him – very slightly, but the boy was glad of it. He could feel that it was good to have a friend in this mill.

After breakfast the miller’s men went to work. Krabat left the servants’ hall along with the others. The Master was standing in the hall of the house, and he beckoned to Krabat, saying, ‘Come with me!’

Krabat followed the miller out of doors. The sun was shining, it was a cold, still day, with hoarfrost on the trees.

The miller took him behind the mill, to a door at the back of the house, which he opened. They both entered the meal store, a low-ceilinged place with two tiny windows covered with flour dust. Flour covered the floor too, hung on the walls, lay thick on the oak beams of the ceiling.

‘Sweep it out!’ said the Master, pointing to a broom beside the door. He went away, leaving the boy alone.

Krabat set to work, but after wielding his broom a few times he was enveloped in a thick cloud of flour, like dust.

‘I’ll never do it this way,’ he thought. ‘Once I get to the other end of the room it will be as thick as ever back here! I’d better open a window.’

The windows were nailed up from outside, the door bolted. He might rattle it and bang on it as hard as he liked, it was no good. He was a prisoner here.

Krabat began to sweat. The flour stuck to his hair and eyelashes, it tickled his nose, it roughened his throat. It was like an endless nightmare – flour and more flour, great clouds of it, like mist, like flurrying snow.

Krabat was breathing with difficulty; he laid his forehead against a beam. He felt dizzy. Why not give up?

But what would the Master say if he just put down his broom now? Krabat did not want to get into the Master’s bad books, not least because of the good food at this mill. So he forced himself to go on, sweeping from one end of the room to the other without stopping, hour after hour.

Until at last, after half an eternity, someone came and opened the door. It was Tonda.

‘Come along!’ he cried. ‘It’s midday!’

The boy did not wait to be told twice. He staggered out into the fresh air, gasping for breath. The head journey man glanced inside the meal store.

‘Never mind, Krabat,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘No one does any better at the start!’

Muttering some words that Krabat did not catch, he traced something in the air with his hand. At that, the flour in the room rose up in the air, as if a strong wind were driving it out of every nook and cranny. A white, smoky plume swept out of the door and away over Krabat’s head, toward the wood.

The room was swept clean; not a grain of dust was left behind. The boy’s eyes widened in amazement.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

Tonda did not reply, but only said, ‘Let’s go in, Krabat; the soup will be getting cold.’

Krabat had a hard time from then on. The Master worked him unmercifully. It was, ‘Where are you, Krabat? There’s a couple of sacks of grain to be carried to the granary,’ and ‘Come here, Krabat! You’re to turn the grain over, right from the bottom, so it won’t start sprouting!’ or ‘That meal you sifted yesterday is full of husks! You’ll see to it after supper, and no bed for you before it’s clear of them!’