Spring comes overnight. Because the weather up here is a law unto itself, it arrives quickly, and hardly anyone, not even the oldest in the village, knows what will come next. There’s just a notion that things might improve. But the certainty that it will get worse almost always prevails. Hard winters turn into storms. Snow mixes with rain. Rivulets become streams. Meadows become flooded and everything turns to mud.
It is as if the fairground people brought the weather with them. Martin has never seen fairground performers before. They have tied up the donkey and propped up their cart in the area in front of the church. There is an announcement. A man, two women and the blond boy. The man has wounds and bandages; he must have been in the war. They all look exhausted, as if they have already ridden through misery and blood and have had to give a performance for death itself. Apart from the child. The child looks healthy and chubby.
They are going to perform something, but Martin doesn’t really understand what. Perhaps they will portray Mary and Joseph, the Three Wise Men or an Easter scene. Martin has not attended a service for a long time. He has no notion of holidays.
The villagers gather outside the church gate, where the cart now serves as a stage. Rain trickles down the faces of actors and audience alike. The actors deliver some laboured lines, then the little boy steps forward. Small and strong, sullen underneath his blond curls. A drip of snot swells beneath his nose. But that is forgotten as soon as he starts to sing; his voice flutters down Martin’s back and makes him feel dizzy. That’s how beautiful it is. The child sings as if he were running along sunbeams in the sky.
But when the child is not singing and not on his small stage, he is beastly and kicks other children, dogs and cats. He smokes and drinks warm schnapps. He is probably younger than Martin.
The child has a malicious energy that is quite foreign to Martin and interests him. He is constantly hatching pranks.
It must be down to the food, Martin thinks.
You can only come up with ideas like that if you have too much strength in your bones. And who here has that? Everyone here is glad when the day is over. No one has as much strength as this child. The village children don’t play tricks on anyone. Martin marvels at the child. He is so terribly lively.
Martin wonders if other people in other places are the same and whether one day he will be able to see life somewhere, because it seems to him that everything here in the village is dead.
The village is small, and Martin encounters the child everywhere, as if he were waiting for him, as if they were destined to meet and thereby following an ancient law.
The fairground lad throws poisonous berries into the well; shoots a slingshot at the rooster and strikes it on the neck. The creature topples off Martin’s shoulder, and the child laughs.
The paths are so muddy that one loses shoes and balance, and one’s courage fails.
This morning, someone couldn’t free his ox from the mud. The animal is still immersed up to its shoulders. From time to time, one of the children comes by and feeds the ox.
The mud only comes up to Martin’s ankles, because he doesn’t weigh much. He hasn’t had a dry scrap of clothing on his body for days. The rooster is sick, and Martin carries it under his shirt.
He spots the child yet again. He is crouched on a wall, staring morosely into the mud. He sees Martin and immediately issues a command: ‘You! Come here!’ Martin doesn’t really want to, but he steps closer.
‘Carry me!’ the child demands.
‘Why?’ Martin asks.
‘I don’t want to get wet feet,’ he says.
Martin is astonished that anyone could even choose whether to have wet feet or not. He doesn’t even consider the possibility of turning the child down. So he turns his back to the boy to carry him. The lad jumps onto his back and clamps on tight. Martin stumbles, because the child is much heavier than he looks, or Martin is weaker than he thought himself to be. The boy clings to him with an iron grip. Martin groans. Has he shouldered the devil? Everybody believes the rooster to be the devil himself just because of what it looks like, and the child to be an angel because he looks like one and sings like one.
Martin wonders, not for the first time, how people always know what angels look or sound like. He once asked the painter about it.
‘Boy,’ said the painter. ‘You can be burned at the stake for questions like that.’
‘But aren’t angels shining lights, God’s creatures and pure love?’ Martin asks, because you can ask the painter questions like that. In fact, he is the only one he can talk to.
‘An image of love. Don’t you have an image of love?’
Martin doesn’t understand.
‘Your mother?’ the painter asks. The boy shows no reaction.
‘Siblings?’
But he has locked the memory of his siblings deep inside himself, so that he doesn’t have to think of the axe that his father drove into the little ones.
The painter chews on a hunk of bread while Martin tries to identify an angel inside his head.
‘Franzi,’ he eventually says, quietly.
The painter grins and with a few strokes sketches Martin’s solemn features on an old piece of canvas. He will carry this with him for a long time. Even long after his travels with Martin. Even then he will look at it and think that it is the best sketch he’s ever done and that never again has a child stood before him so pure and unspoiled by being human. And he carries it in the pockets of his trousers, which are full of holes, until the plague takes him and he disintegrates together with the others. The piece of fabric also disintegrates; a few maggots ingest the threads and subsequently transform into a species of butterfly that no one has ever seen before and which will never exist again. And while one of the painter’s pictures, a picture showing the boy with his rooster, will one day be exhibited in a gallery, there is – only a few metres away, in the historical museum, impaled on a wall of butterflies alongside equally dead fellow species – a butterfly that has tasted art, that has been nourished by art and that knows about the boy.
‘Yes,’ says the painter, knowing nothing of all this, otherwise he would give up here and now. ‘Franzi is pretty. Now all your angels look like Franzi.’
The answer does not satisfy Martin. But he likes the fact that the painter has given Holy Mary, Mother of God, Franzi’s features. A strong chin, an upturned nose and full lips. Martin realises that it is not really suitable, but the painter laughs and says the village deserves nothing more than to have an altarpiece that will vex them until the end of their days.
‘Why?’ Martin asks.
‘Because of you,’ the painter says. His own angels have long since assumed Martin’s features.
Fiercely, he presses paint onto the palette and quickly fills in the dark areas of the altarpiece with a few cackling demons, henchmen and arrogant ogres.
Martin remembers this as he lugs the fairground lad around on his back. The child digs his heels into Martin’s ribs so forcefully that they creak. The rooster squirms under Martin’s shirt.
Martin is almost up to his knees in mud. The child is as heavy as lead. He pulls Martin’s hair and throws himself from side to side on his back, jeering, singing and spitting. Martin groans.
The path has long ceased to be a path; it is a swamp now. Suddenly he sinks into a hole, topples over; frightened, he lets go of the manic child and smacks into the mud, which immediately fills his mouth and then swallows up the boy. Gone.
Incredulous, Martin squats in the mud and stares at the spot where the child has disappeared. He could just walk away now and no one would ask. And if someone asked, no one would believe him.
But Martin starts searching. He digs around in the damp earth and manages to grab something. It has to be the child’s head. He gives a hearty tug, but something gives way and shoots towards him.
My God, thinks Martin, I’ve torn his head off. But no, now he sees that he is holding a skull in his hand. A head without flesh, eye sockets filled with mud, protruding teeth.
I know you, Martin thinks. He blinks, reflects and then digs his hands into the mud once more in search of the brat. This time he gets hold of him, pulls him out, falls onto his back holding him, scoops the mud out of his mouth and squeezes it out of his nostrils. And yes, there it is again, the child’s horrid, endless wailing. But Martin is no longer interested in the little demon. He abandons him, takes the skull and leaves, in a strange way exultant, while the child goes on screaming. It feels as if he is holding a piece of the future in his hands. Even if he cannot guess why and how.