Martin quickly learns that a jester has ways and obligations just like a farmer, waggoner and miller. The sidekicks need to be paid. They need to be admonished, slapped and told when to reconvene. Martin follows him on his rounds. Thomann needs food. He goes to see Hansel. Takes a deep long sniff of a piece of meat.
‘That’s so old it can walk of its own accord,’ he grumbles and goes on to dump a scoop of flour, teeming with maggots, at Hansel’s feet. ‘I want to bake bread, not catch fish.’
Thomann is diligent. He has work to do. In between two errands, he cracks dirty jokes that cause the merchant to grin and show his damaged set of teeth, and the women to blush. He conjures chickens from children’s ears and sausages from their noses. But then he heads back to his home. It seems to be important to him, although he is really only ever seen with his goats. Pottering around and practising in a shelter, he never seems to be anything else but a jester in two-tone trousers. And now he has a home at the end of the road, on the perimeter of the castle. A home and someone waiting for him.
A girl opens the door, perhaps a young woman, Martin can’t really say, she has the face of a scallywag; it is ageless. Her nose is very small, her mouth on the other hand extremely large. Her eyes are black, her ears stick out. Tangled hair around her head. A tiny person. She gives the jester a long hug. Then she hugs Martin.
‘There you two are, at last,’ she says as if she already knows about Martin, as if she hasn’t seen the jester for a long time.
‘This is Marie,’ he introduces her. ‘My sister.’
‘What a beautiful creature you have there,’ Marie says. ‘What is it?’
‘A rooster.’
‘A rooster. How wonderful. Very unusual. Do come in,’ she says.
Martin follows her into the dark room. It is cold. There is no fire in the hearth. Bugs are dripping from the walls.
‘Do take a seat,’ Marie says and offers a chair. But the chair is piled high with all sorts of things. There are things lying around everywhere that don’t seem to make sense. Thomann doesn’t comment on it. Whenever he goes past Marie, she flings her arms around him.
‘I like you so much,’ she sighs.
‘I like you too,’ he says patiently. Every time. He throws Martin a blanket. ‘Marie is scared of fire.’
‘How was your journey?’ Marie asks, and smiles at Martin with her wide mouth from a world that he doesn’t know. A world in which there is only friendliness. Marie chatters. ‘How is the weather where you come from?’ she asks.
‘Cold,’ Martin says.
‘Oh yes. Cold is not nice,’ Marie interjects. ‘You are lucky that you have a pet.’
‘And you have him.’
‘Yes, I am so happy. But sometimes he is gone, and I must wait. Then I am frightened. Oh, how I am frightened! It is not nice.’
Marie’s eyes fill with tears. Thomann comes back over and puts some food on the table. A meal for Marie and one for Martin.
‘Thank you, I am very hungry,’ Marie says and looks at the food. ‘What are we having?’
‘Milk and soaked bread.’
‘Oh, thank you, too kind. I like milk and soaked bread.’ And she never eats anything else, but Martin doesn’t know that yet.
Martin gets sausage and cheese, with an onion on the side. Thomann drinks wine. It is very cold. Marie takes only tiny bites of her food. But she talks.
‘Did everything go well on the journey?’ she asks. And: ‘Did you meet anyone you know?’ She asks: ‘How was the weather?’ She asks: ‘What was the name of the place where you come from?’
Martin tells her the name and thinks nothing of it.
But Marie looks inside herself, into her small, tidy soul, where the few experiences of her life are lined up nicely next to the friendliness, as if they were waiting to be looked at again and again, so that one could chat about them. ‘I’ve heard of that place. We have had a visitor from there before.’
‘Really?’ says Martin and suddenly can’t chew his food. His hands feel like they are stuck to the table. He feels as if the whole room is turning upside down until the wine flows out of the jester’s glass and the milk drips out of Marie’s hair.
‘A very nice man. I remember him well. He had eyes just like yours.’
‘Eyes like mine?’ Martin says.
And the walls dissolve. And the floor slides away.
‘Such a nice man. He wanted to pass the princess’s sleeping test. To save his village. They were in debt. You understand? Hardly anything left to eat on the fields. They drove the cattle into the forests so that they could find something to eat.’
‘Lichen and moss. Bark and mushrooms,’ Martin says quietly. He knows the story.
‘And they had a Lisl in the village, who had seizures and said that the game had to be won once, so that the taxes wouldn’t be so high. And then she never—’
‘—said anything clever again,’ Martin continues her sentence. Sentences that hold his childhood memories. Delicate and unnoticed. Never important and now suddenly in Marie’s mouth. Why?
‘And then he came to play the game.’
‘A poor fool like all the others who try it,’ Thomann says, while Martin’s world disappears behind Marie. Behind Marie’s wide mouth, which talks and – can it be? – speaks of his father.
‘Unfortunately, he didn’t win, did he?’ says Marie, and hovers above Martin like a goddess.
‘No one can win the sleep game,’ Thomann says.
What happened to him, Martin thinks.
‘It was probably too much for him,’ Marie replies. ‘He behaved quite strangely afterwards. He was very scared. They say that he ran all the way home. It must have been very tiring.’
‘He went mad,’ the jester says.
Martin falls off his chair and bangs his head.
‘I am tired too,’ says Marie and lies down next to him. Thomann spreads a blanket over them both.
Marie hugs Martin like his sister probably would have done. She is so innocent that she falls asleep faster than anyone else. She smiles in her sleep. She does not loosen her hold on Martin.
The jester puts on a black cloak, pulls a hood over his head and reaches for the axe. ‘You can stay,’ he says.
‘Who are you now?’ Martin asks weakly.
‘I am the executioner. My father was an executioner too. I have work to do,’ Thomann says. The executioner says.
‘Then you are both?’ Martin says and closes his eyes.
‘Yes, I have plenty to do,’ says the jester. Says the executioner.
And Martin thinks, yes, that makes sense, because it doesn’t make sense and it is all wrong, just like the rest of this damned world.