It grows warmer, and the painter draws everything he comes across. Insects, plants, trees with blossoms that fall like snow from their branches. The painter sits on a stone and has Martin bring him the first beetles, which he sketches in fine detail before relinquishing them to the rooster to eat.
Martin is not very attentive. He has been jumpy and restless for days now. Spring already contains the entire death of the departing year. He sees harbingers everywhere. The trampled caterpillars. Blue around the edges, with delicate bristles, beneath which the innards spill out. The spiders’ nests, from which thousands of tiny offspring scurry across last year’s dry leaves. Blood in his own urine. Once, they find a dead fox with flies crawling out of its nose and maggots swarming in its abdominal cavity.
He thinks about the horseman a great deal again. Constantly keeping an eye out for a black horse, for a rider in a black cloak.
The painter, meanwhile, digs for edible roots and withered mushrooms at the edge of the forest. Martin continues to scan the sweeping hills. He lies in wait in the shadows for movement. Hoping or fearing. His heart keeps tightening.
‘He’s here somewhere,’ he whispers to the rooster.
‘Who are you talking about?’ the painter asks, his head quite red from bending down so much. ‘Or should I ask: who are you talking to?’
The painter is not stupid, Martin thinks. He answers the first question.
‘The horseman,’ Martin says.
The painter mumbles into the bark and moss of the forest.
‘Don’t you know the story?’ Martin asks.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I saw him.’
‘Him?’
‘Yes. His horse. I ran after him. He took a little girl.’
‘From your village?’
‘I have been searching for him ever since.’
The painter straightens up and bends his back so that the vertebrae crack and a fart escapes him.
‘Boy,’ he finally says. ‘There is no horseman.’
‘But I saw him.’
‘But it’s not just one rider. Not a single one.’
Martin is speechless. He opens and closes his mouth several times, but can’t bring himself to ask for an explanation.
‘How long have you known the story of the horseman?’ the painter asks. Martin thinks. His whole life. ‘And before you, someone else already experienced and told the story. And almost everywhere I go, someone tells me about it. I have even painted a picture of such a rider. It is not one man, not one rider. There are lots of them.’
Martin blinks. ‘And if there are lots of them, then there must be someone they are doing it for.’
The painter points at him with his earthy fingers.
‘Some sort of conspiracy.’
‘Does that make the search easier?’ Martin asks.
‘I, for one, would no longer search where everyone knows the stories.’
Martin stares at the painter. The realisation surges into his chest and fills it up completely.
‘Only in a place where they don’t steal children. Where they are not known. That is the only place they are untouchable.’
The painter grins and scrutinises a crooked root he is holding up to the sun. ‘Yes, yes. This is a good one, and this…’ He tosses a smaller one to Martin. ‘You can have this one.’
Martin turns the root in his hand. It looks like a bird. He must find the rider. Find the riders. Discover the source.
‘Eat,’ the painter says. ‘We live and eat and wander and search. And sometimes we find. Today we eat and tomorrow we move on.’
Martin nods. He is grateful. He chews the root very slowly. Gradually he calms down and thinks of the dead in his village. How some people poisoned themselves with roots. Died with a frothing stomach. They called it the idiotic death. There are quite a few of those: falling from a ladder and breaking your neck. Slipping in the stable and being trampled to death by the frightened animals. Missing the log while splitting wood and chopping your leg so that the blood splashes across the farm like a fountain. Or dying of poisoning.
Alongside this death there is also the unnecessary death, which makes everyone sigh. When children die. Or a woman’s skull is smashed in after the first year of marriage. When someone is caught out by fog and falls down a slope.
But no, Martin corrects himself. In those cases the villagers spoke of a cursed or sinister death. Such a death was preceded by omens. A ghostly figure in the fog. Infants that floated above the cradle. Bleeding frogs. And Lisl, of course, who falls down in a convulsion, and who sometimes bites her tongue so badly during an episode that you can no longer understand her when she speaks.
Martin has never been able to understand the cursed death. He doesn’t believe in ghosts and witches. And he is pretty certain that you fall into a ravine because you are drunk. And that people always talk about Lisl’s convulsions when her son-in-law marches through the village in a good mood, boasting that he had a good time last night. Nothing escapes Martin’s finely tuned senses. But he also knows that all the Glorias and Lisls, the Martins and the children who have disappeared have no one to stand up for them. And if you look at the dead, it is the same thing. They rest in their coffins with limbs that have to be collected from everywhere and they cannot report back.
The painter has brewed himself a foul-smelling broth from the big root, which he downs in one.
Not five minutes later, he goes into a frenzy. He tears the shirt from his body, slurs his words and jumps about enthusiastically through trees and shrubs, shouting at everything that pleases him.
He moves away quickly from Martin, who is having a hard time gathering all his belongings, shouldering the rooster and hurrying after the unhinged man.
The painter takes off at unpredictable intervals. Sometimes he lies crying in the grass and Martin catches up with him. Then, at other times, he runs down the hills so fast that the dust rises behind him, and Martin can only hope not to lose sight of him.
Only when it grows dark does the painter calm down. He waits for the stars to appear and tells Martin about them.
The boy listens to him and tries to remember the most difficult names, while the rooster pecks holes in a sheet of paper, thereby marking the position of the celestial bodies. They gaze up into the glittering darkness, into all this splendour which is not made for man, because he is supposed to be asleep at this time.
The painter seems so calm that Martin thinks the strange magic of the roots has subsided. But when the shooting stars streak across the night sky, the painter screams with excitement several times.
Eventually, however, it seems to be over. Shaking his head, the painter puts his shirt back on. Martin has handed it to him, thinking how much he likes the painter and how he would like to stay with him forever.
He is just about to tell the painter that, when he stretches and yawns and throws out the words: ‘That was a truly nasty dish. The next time I am hungry, I will cook your bloody rooster!’
And that’s when Martin knows that one day he will have to leave the painter. And it hurts him. The painter snores and sleeps off his hangover, while Martin stares into the night for a long time and now realises that only when you love someone do you find the path to pain and fear.