Thus at one—for the occasional flunkying was an act of love—the two friends often sat in the overhang room, whose illumination was determined by the sun and the sails of the Matern windmill. They sat side by side on footstools at Grandmother Matern’s feet. Outside it was late afternoon. The wood worms were silent. The shadows of the mill were falling somewhere else. The poultry yard was turned down very low, because the window was closed. Only on the fly paper a fly was dying of too much sweetness and couldn’t stop. Far below the fly, grumpily, as though no ear were good enough for her yarns, Grandma was telling stories, always the same ones. With her bony grandmother’s hands, which indicated all the dimensions that occurred in her tales, she dealt out stories about floods, stories about bewitched cows, the usual stories about eels, the one-eyed blacksmith, the three-legged horse, or how Duke Kynstute’s young daughter went out to dig for mice, and the story about the enormous dolphin that a storm had washed ashore in the exact same year as Napoleon marched into Russia.
But decoyed by Amsel with adroit questions, she always ended up—though the detours could be very long—in the dark passageways and dungeons of the endless tale, endless because it has not been concluded to this day, about the twelve headless nuns and the twelve knights with their heads and helmets under their arms, who in four coaches—two drawn by white, two drawn by black horses—drove through Tiegenhof over resounding cobbles, stopped outside a deserted inn, and twelve and twelve went in: Music broke loose. Woodwinds brasses plucked strings. Tongues fluttered and voices twanged expertly. Sinful songs with sinful refrains from male throats—the heads and helmets under the sharply bent arms of the knights—alternated with the watery litanies of pious women. Then it was the turn of the headless nuns. From heads held out in hands a part song poured forth, obscene words to an obscene tune, and there was dancing and stamping and squealing and reeling. And in between, a humble shuffling procession cast headless shadows twelve and twelve through the windows of the inn and out on the paving stones, until once again leching and retching, roaring and stamping loosened the mortar and the dowels of the house. Finally toward morning, just before cockcrow, the four coaches with black horses and white horses drove up without coachmen. And twelve clanking knights, giving off clouds of rust, veils billowing on top, left the inn at Tiegenhof with maggot-pale nuns’ faces. And twelve nuns, wearing knights’ helmets with closed visors over their habits, left the bin. Into the four coaches, white horses black horses, they mounted six and six and six and six, but not mixed—they had already exchanged heads—and rode through the cowed village, and again the cobblestones resounded. To this day, said Grandma Matern, before spinning the story out some more, directing the coaches to other places and making them draw up outside chapels and castles—they say that to this day pious hymns and blasphemous prayers can be heard farting from the fireplace of that weird inn, where nobody is willing to live.
Thereupon the two friends would gladly have gone to Tiegenhof. But though they started out a number of times, they never got any farther than Steegen or at the farthest Ladekopp. Only in the following winter, which for a builder of scarecrows was naturally bound to be the quiet, truly creative season, did Eduard Amsel find occasion to take the measurements of those headless people: and that was how he came to build his first mechanical scarecrows, an undertaking that used up an appreciable part of the fortune in Matern’s leather pouch.
TWENTIETH MORNING SHIFT
This thaw is drilling a hole in Brauxel’s head. The water is dripping on the zinc ledge outside his window. Since there are windowless rooms available in the administration building, Brauksel could easily avoid this therapy; but Brauchsel stays put and welcomes the hole in his head: celluloid, celluloid—if you’ve got to be a doll, you may as well be a doll with little holes in your dry celluloid forehead. For Brauxel once lived through a thaw and underwent a transformation beneath the water dripping from a dwindling snow man; but before that, many many thaws ago, the Vistula flowed under a thick sheet of ice traversed by horse-drawn sleighs. The young people of the nearby fishing villages tried their hand at sailing on curved skates known as Schlaifjen. Two by two—a bedsheet nailed to roofing laths would fill with wind and send them whipping over the ice. Every mouth steamed. Snow was in the way and had to be shoveled. Behind the dunes, barren and fertile land was topped with the same snow. Snow on both dikes. The snow on the beach blended into the snow on the ice sheet that covered the rimless sea and its fish. Under a crooked snow cap, for the snow was falling from the east, the Matern windmill stood splay-footed on its round white hummock amid white fields distinguishable only by their unyielding fences, and milled. Napoleon’s poplars sugar-coated. A Sunday painter had covered the scrub pines with white sizing fresh from the tube. When the snow turned gray, the mill was stopped for the day and turned out of the wind. Miller and miller’s man went home. The lopsided miller stepped in the miller’s man’s footsteps. Senta the black dog, nervous since her puppies had been sold, was following trails of her own and biting into the snow. Across from the mill, on a fence that they had previously kicked clear of snow with the heels of their boots, sat Walter Matern and Eduard Amsel mufflered and mittened.
For a while they were silent straight ahead. Then they conversed in obscure technical terms. They talked about mills with runners and chasers, Dutch “smock” mills, without jack or tailpole but with three sets of runners and an extra set of burrs. They talked about vanes and sails and stabilizers which adjust themselves to the wind velocity. There were worm drives and rollers and oak levers and rods. There were relationships between drum and brake. Only children sing unwittingly: The mill turns slow, the mill turns faster. Amsel and Walter Matern did not sing, but knew why and when a mill: The mill turns slow and the mill turns faster when the brake puts slight or heavy pressure on the wheel shaft. Even when snow was falling, the mill turned evenly amid the fitful snow squalls, provided the wind kept up a good twenty-five feet a second. Nothing looks quite like a mill turning in a snowfall; not even a fire engine called upon to extinguish a burning water tower in the rain.
But when the mill was stopped for the day and the sails stood silhouetted in the falling snow, it turned out—but only because Amsel screwed up his eyes—that the mill was not yet slated for a rest. Silently the snow, now gray now white now black, drove across from the great dune. The poplars on the highway floated. In Lührmann’s taproom light was burning egg-yellow. No train ringing on the bend. The wind grew biting. Bushes whimpered. Amsel glowed. His friend dozed. Amsel saw something. His friend saw nothing. Amsel’s little fingers rubbed each other in his mittens, slipped out, looked for the right patent-leather shoe in the left-hand pocket of his jacket and found it: He was cooking with gas. Not a single snowflake kept its identity on Amsel’s skin. His lips pursed and into his screwed-up eyes passed more than can be said in one breath: One after the other they drive up. Without coachmen. And the mill motionless. Four sleighs, two with white horses—blending; two with black horses—contrasting—and they help each other out: twelve and twelve, all headless. And a headless knight leads a headless nun into the mill. Altogether twelve headless knights lead twelve nuns without heads into the mill—but knights and nuns alike are carrying their heads under their arms or out in front of them. But on the trampled path things are getting complicated, for despite the likeness of veil and veil, armor and armor, they are still chewing on quarrels dating from the day when they broke up camp in Ragnit. The first nun isn’t speaking to the fourth knight. But both are glad to chat with the knight Fitzwater, who knows Lithuania like the holes in his coat of mail. In May the ninth nun should have been delivered of a child, but wasn’t, because the eighth knight—Engelhard Rabe his name—had cut off the heads and veils not only of the ninth but also of the sixth nun, who had overindulged in cherries summer after summer, with the sword of the tenth knight, the fat one, who was sitting on a beam and gnawing the meat from the bones of a chicken behind closed visor. And all because the embroidery on the ba
nner of St. George wasn’t finished and the River Szeszupe was conveniently frozen over. While the remaining nuns embroidered all the faster—the last red field was almost full—the third waxen nun, who was always following the eleventh knight in the shadows, came bringing the basin to put under the blood. Thereupon the seventh, second, fourth, and fifth nuns laughed, tossed their embroidery behind them, and held out their heads and veils to the eighth knight, the black Engelhard Rabe. He, nothing loath, turned first to the tenth knight, who was relieving himself still squatting on the beam with his chicken behind his visor, and cut off his head, chicken, and helmet with visor, then passed him his sword: and the fat, headless, but nevertheless chewing tenth knight helped the eighth, black knight, helped the second nun, the third waxen nun who had always remained in the shadow, and likewise the fourth and fifth nuns to dispose of their heads and veils and Engelhard Rabe’s head. Laughing, they passed the basin from one to the other. Only a few nuns were embroidering on the banner of St. George, although the Szeszupe was conveniently frozen, although the English under Lancaster were already in the camp, although reports on the state of the roads had come in, although Prince Witold preferred to stand aside and Wallenrod was already summoning the company to table. But now the basin was full and running over. The tenth nun, the fat one—for just as there was a fat knight, there was also a fat nun—had to come waddling; and she was privileged to bring the basin three more times, the last time when the Szeszupe was already free of ice and Ursula, the eighth nun, whom everyone called Tulla affectionately and for short, had to kneel, showing the down on her neck. She had taken her vow only the preceding March and had already broken it twelve times. But she didn’t know with whom or in what order, because the visors had all been closed; and now the English under Henry Derby; freshly arrived in the camp, but already in a dreadful hurry. There was also a Percy among them, but it was Thomas Percy, not Henry. For him Tulla had cunningly embroidered an individual banner, although Wallenrod had forbidden individual banners. Jacob Doutremer and Pege Peegott were planning to follow Percy. In the end Wallenrod bearded Lancaster. He put Thomas Percy’s pocket-sized banner to flight, bade Hattenstein bear the just-finished banner of St. George across the ice-free river, and ordered the eighth nun, known as Tulla, to kneel down while the bridge was being built, in the course of which operation four horses and a squire were drowned. She sang more beautifully than the eleventh and twelfth nuns had sung before her. She was able to twang, to chirp, and at the same time to make her bright-red tongue flutter in the dark-red cavern of her mouth. Lancaster wept behind his visor, for he would rather have stayed home, but he had had a falling out with his family, though he later became king notwithstanding. Suddenly and because no one wanted to cross the Szeszupe any more and all were whimpering to go home, the youngest of the knights jumped out of a tree in which he had been sleeping and took springy little steps toward the down on the neck. He had come all the way from Mörs in the lower Rhineland in the hope of converting the Barts. But the Barts had all been converted, and Bartenstein had already been founded. There was nothing left but Lithuania, but first the down on Tulla’s neck. He smote it above the last vertebra, then tossed his sword in the air and caught it with his own neck. Such was the dexterity of the sixth and youngest knight. The fourth knight, who never spoke to the first nun, tried to imitate him, but had no luck and at the first attempt severed the head of the tenth nun, the fat one, and at the second attempt the sleek stern head of the stern first nun. Thereupon the third knight, who never changed his coat of mail and enjoyed a reputation for wisdom, had to bring the basin, because there wasn’t a single nun left.*
Followed by the bannerless English, by Hattenstein with banner and men-at-arms, the remaining knights with heads took a short trip into trackless Lithuania. Duke Kynstute gurgled in the bogs. Beneath giant ferns his daughter bleated. Croaking on all sides. Horses floundered. In the end Potrimpos was still unburied; Perkunos still had no inclination to burn; and unblinded Pikollos continued to look up from below. Ah! They should have made a movie. Plenty of extras and nature galore. Twelve hundred pair of greaves, crossbows, breastplates, rotting boots, chewed-up harnesses, seventy bolts of stiff linen, twelve inkwells, twenty thousand torches, tallow lamps, currycombs, balls of twine, sticks of licorice wood—the chewing gum of the fourteenth century—sooty armorers, packs of hounds, Teutonic Knights playing drafts, harpists jugglers muteleers, gallons of barley beer, bundles of pennants, arrows, lances, and smokejacks for Simon Bache, Erik Cruse, Clause Schone, Richard Westrall, Spannerle, Tylman and Robert Wendell in the bridge-building scene, in the bridge-crossing scene, in ambush, in the pouring rain: sheaves of lightning, splintered oak trees, horses shy, owls blink, foxes track, arrows whir: the Teutonic Knights are getting nervous; and in the alder thicket the blind seeress cries out: “Wela! Wela!” Back back… but not until the following July were they again to see that little river which to this day the poet Bobrowski darkly sings. Clear flowed the Szeszupe, tinkling over the pebbles along the shore. Old friends in the crowd: there sat the twelve headless nuns, with their left hands holding their heads and veils and with the right hands pouring the water of the Szeszupe on overheated faces. In the background the headless knights stood sullen, refusing to cool themselves off. Thereupon the remaining knights decided to make common cause with those who were already headless. Near Ragnit they lifted off each other’s heads and helmets in unison, harnessed their horses to four crude wagons, and set off with white horses and black horses through territories converted and unconverted. They exalted Potrimpos, dropped Christ, once again blinded Pikollos, but to no avail, and took up the Cross again. They stopped at inns, chapels, and mills and lived it up down through the centuries, terrifying Poles, Hussites, and Swedes. They were at Zorndorf when Seydlitz crossed Saverne Hollow with his squadrons, and when the Corsican had to hurry home, they found four ownerless coaches in his wake. For these they exchanged their crusaders’ wagons, and so it was in carriages with comfortable springs that they witnessed the second battle of Tannenberg, which was not fought at Tannenberg any more than the first. In the van of Budenny’s ferocious cavalry, they had barely time to turn back when, aided by the Virgin Mary, Pilsudski carried the day in a loop of the Vistula. In the years when Amsel was building and selling scarecrows, they had shuttled restlessly back and forth between Tapiau and Neuteich. Twelve and twelve, they were planning to go right on being restless until redemption should come their way and each one of them, or perhaps one should say each neck, should be enabled to carry his, her, or its own individual head.
Most recently they had been seen in Scharpau and Fischer-Babke. The first nun had taken to wearing the fourth knight’s face now and then, but she still wouldn’t speak to him. There they came riding through the fields between the dunes and the Stutthof highway; they stopped—only Amsel saw them—outside the Matern mill and alit. It happens to be the second of February, Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and they are going to celebrate it. They help each other out of the carriages, up the hummock, and into the windmill. A moment later flour loft and sack loft are full of buzzing, quick chatter, sharp screams, witch-sabbath oaths, and prayers said backwards. A chirping is heard and the sound of whistling on iron, while snow falls from the direction of the dune, possibly from the sky. Amsel glows and rubs the patent-leather shoe deep in his pocket, but his friend, aloof and turned inward, is dozing. Time out, for inside they are wallowing in flour, riding the mill post, wedging their fingers between drum and brake, and because it is Candlemas, turning the mill into the wind: slowly it turns, fitfully at first; then twelve heads strike up the sweet sequence: Stabat mater dolorosa—O Perkollos, seven of twelve are still so cold, seven frozen sevenfold—juxta crucem lacrimosa—O Perkunos, all twelve aflame; when I’m burned to ashes, eleven remain—Dum pendebat filius—O Potrimpos, all whitened with flour, we’ll mourn Christ’s blood in this white hour… Then at last, while the millstones jumble the head and helmet of the eighth, black knig
ht with the fat friendly head of the tenth nun, the Matern postmill begins to turn faster and faster, although there is no wind at all. And the youngest, the knight from the lower Rhine, tosses his singing head with wide-open visor to the eighth nun. She affects ignorance, withholds recognition, calls herself Ursula and not Tulla, is quite sufficient to herself, and is riding the cotter that stops the wheel shaft. It begins to quake: The mill turns slow, the mill turns faster; the heads in the hopper howl off-key; staccato gasps on the wooden cotter; crows in the flour, the rafters groan and the bolts wrench loose; upstairs and down, headless forms; from sack loft to flour loft a transubstantiation is under way: amid lecherous grunts and crystalline prayer the old Matern postmill be comes young again and turns—only Amsel with his patent-leather shoe sees it—into a knight with pole on jack, flailing about him and smiting the snowfall; becomes—as only Amsel with his shoe understands—a nun in ample habit, bloated with beans and ecstasy, circling her arms: windmill knight windmill nun: poverty poverty poverty. But fermented mare’s milk is guzzled. Corn cockle juice is distilled. Incisor teeth gnaw at fox bones, while the headless bodies go on starving: Poverty. Sweet simpering. And then nevertheless pulling over, pushing under, heads laid aside; and from the crosswise recumbents rise the pure sounds of ascetic discipline, renunciation limpid as water, the Song of Songs pleasing to God: windmill knight brandishes windmill scourge; windmill scourge strikes windmill nun—Amen—or not yet amen; for while silent and without passion snow falls from the sky, while Amsel with narrowed eyes sits on the fence, feels Hedwig Lau’s right patent-leather shoe in the left-hand pocket of his jacket and is already hatching his little plan, the little flame that slumbers in every windmill has awakened. And after heads had promiscuously found their way to bodies, they left the mill, which was now turning sluggishly, scarcely turning at all. And while they entered four carriages and glided away toward the dunes, it began to burn from the inside outward. Then Amsel slipped off the fence, pulling his friend along with him. “Fire, fire!” they shouted in the direction of the village: but the mill was beyond saving.