Daniel Kehlmann - F

Meanwhile the landowner was plagued by trouble with his teeth. One after the other, they fell out, and sometimes the pain drove him to the brink of madness. One clammy morning an abscess in the jaw made him so ill that he had to go to bed. Someone he no longer recognized squashed herbs against his face, and they had a stinging smell. Half an hour later he died of blood poisoning and never came back.

His father was made big by the biggest of all wars. At Lüttich he lost three fingers, outside Antwerp an ear, at Prague a hand, but alas not the one already missing the fingers. But he knew how to plunder, he knew where gold was to be found, and when he’d accrued enough he left service with the Swedish king and bought a manor. He married, sired three children, and shortly thereafter fell victim to a band of marauders. It was a long-drawn-out event, because they had all sorts of things they wanted to try out on him; meanwhile his wife and children hid themselves in the cellar. When the intruders left, he was still alive, but his family could barely recognize him anymore; it took him two days to die. He did come back. Even today, there are nightly sightings of what must be his ghost, wandering through the house and looking exhausted.

His mother was an unusual woman. She had vivid dreams, and sometimes she felt she could see the future, or things that were happening far, far away. If she had been a man, many avenues would have been open to her, and she would have had a destiny. One night she dreamed about a one-eyed, one-legged old man, hidden in a shed. He felt his body grow stiff, he felt a cold hand on his neck, and he laughed as if nothing that interesting had ever happened to him. But before he died, she woke up.

She was interested in many things. She secretly dissected corpses, of which there was an ample supply, given that the war had lasted so long that there were old people who had never known peace. She focused on muscles, fibers, nerves; in between times she gave her husband five children, of whom three survived birth, but then a roof tile fell on her head. It wasn’t part of God’s plan, no destiny had willed it, it was just that the roofer was incompetent, and she never came back.

Her father had originally been a highwayman. His mother had abandoned him and he was brought up by a farming couple who needed a cheap laborer. They gave him the minimum to eat, and he left as soon as he could.

He hadn’t imagined the forest could go on forever. It had no governing law, and whoever needed to get through it was protected neither by God nor any ruling prince. For a time he robbed travelers and slept in holes in the ground, but one day, unexpectedly, he found himself face-to-face with a witch: a hideous creature that was all hair and warts, one-third woman, one-third man, and one-third tusked hog. She was eating a small, bloody creature, a fawn perhaps, maybe even a human child, he didn’t dare to look. The witch raised her head. Her eyes were poison green, and the pupils a mere dot. He grasped that she had seen into the very heart of his being and that she wouldn’t forget him. He ran and he ran. His breath rattled, branches struck him in the face, first night came and then day. Utterly exhausted, he finally reached a walled city.

Once there he allowed himself to settle down, and he worked as a guardian of houses, properties, and fields. He had nine children, three of whom — all girls — survived. He made friends and earned money and lived as if he’d forgotten the threat over his head. He taught his daughters as if they were sons, and was proud of them. They married and gave him grandchildren. The family was solidly Catholic because the town was solidly Catholic. Every Sunday he went to church and paid the priest for the salvation of his soul. People said there was going to be war, but he didn’t believe it. And one night the witch appeared before him. He saw her quite clearly, although the room was pitch black and she herself was darker than the darkness. They found him the next morning. He never came back.

His father was a tutor in the household of Count Schulenburg. The count had a daughter. There were secret letters, oaths, and plans to flee overseas, to a country that had just apparently been discovered, but might also be no more than a fairy tale, how could one possibly know? Their fate seemed to the two of them to be so weighty that it must be written down somewhere in a book.

But when the girl became pregnant, two men trapped the tutor on the street and beat him to death with iron bars. She gave birth in secret, the child was given away, and she was forced to marry a local minor nobleman who never knew he wasn’t the first.

After some years, she withdrew from worldly life into the convent at Passau, where she wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s book on clouds. God, she explained, was not outside the world, He was the world, which was thus without either beginning or end. As a consequence one could describe God as neither good nor bad — He was the sum of all things and thus there was neither chance nor stroke of fate, for the world was not a theater. She would be renowned until today, if the manuscript had not been devoured by termites.

The father of the luckless tutor was a priest. That wasn’t so bad. Luther hadn’t yet nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses and the Holy Mother Church wasn’t in an uproar. He had numerous children. He gave last rites to victims of the plague, then he opened their veins, which only brought on death quicker.

It was a quiet time for the Black Death. Bubonic plague was on the wane, the worst outbreaks were occurring farther south, but then he got infected anyway from the blood of the sick. It was not unexpected — almost no one who was involved with victims of the plague survived. He prepared to die with something close to relief. At his bedside there suddenly appeared an old, old man, one-eyed and one-legged, and weather-beaten, who placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and whispered incomprehensible things in his ear. It was as if he had lost the power of human speech. Muttering and hopping, he went on his way.

The father of the priest was a farmer, prosperous, with a lot of land. He was a man with a happy disposition, without ever knowing why. He liked playing with his children. Many of them died, and when he stood at their tiny graves, he thought it would be sensible not to give one’s heart too soon.

He never left his property. He paid his taxes to the authorities without complaint. Sometimes people came by who were from other places and wanted to go who knows where, but they seemed to him to be as unreal as ghosts. One time an old man appeared who had only one eye and only one leg, and who insisted the two of them were related. He stayed for several weeks, eating copiously and frightening the servants at night with his screams. Then he hobbled away on his crutches.

One night the farmer was overcome by a feeling that he’d been cursed by someone, so that he was too afraid to look anyone in the eye, not his wife, not his servants, not his children. For a time he was plagued by lust, but he knew he must resist, in order not to end up in hell. He failed to resist. Then he resisted for a time. Then he failed to resist again. When he was dying, he wept a lot, for fear of hell. His oldest son, who had just been ordained as a priest, would dearly have liked to know how his father’s soul had fared, but his father never came back, and no one knew.

His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.

His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.