they?’ The populace had their suspicions.
‘No, if they’re fresh picked and properly dried and prepared, and if you don’t eat them late at night before you go to bed, they’re fine,’ the girls replied.
‘But if something has death in its name, it can’t be entirely good, since that small piece of it revealed in the name would surely be fatal. Anything that has something bad in its name, especially if it’s death, must be dangerous, and besides, deadly things have their doubles …’
‘But don’t we all?’ the girls asked.
‘That’s true. We good people do have doubles, who to look at aren’t very different from us, although in truth they are evil. And various herbs, too, or zeli – a word that itself contains “evil” – zlo – as well as many sorts of mushrooms, which most people don’t even know about and only a few can recognize – all these things can be very bad for you, fatal even.’
‘But we didn’t eat just mushrooms!’ the girls tried to soften what they had said. ‘We had lots of buckwheat and barley porridge and plenty of things we sautéed in fat; we wrung the necks of chickens, roasted dozens of trout and cooked up a whole bunch of carp. And there was no lack of milk and gruel, cheese and curds. We also ate cabbage and beans, kohlrabi and carrots and, of course, our daily bread.’
‘What did you girls have to eat right before the miller’s death? Mushrooms? And what did the mill hands eat? And her? What did she eat? And what was that story about her children? Or was it only one child? Well, we know about one child for sure. A few months after he was born – it’s been eight years now – the miller’s son, asleep in the crib, released a little trickle of blood.’
‘Is that really true? How did it happen?’ The populace looked at each other.
Indeed, it was true. And nobody knows why the child died. It was she who found him in the crib, already somewhat blue and rigid. The miller lost his head at the time, and whenever it flashed before his eyes how she had come to him pressing his son to her heart with a big black fly buzzing around the boy, he would always give her a few hard smacks. Where in God’s name had she been? How could she have left her newborn baby when by then she had two maidservants to help her? So she didn’t need to be turning the hay or whatever it was she was doing that day. She should have been looking after his son and nothing else, since when the miller grew old it was the boy who would take over the property and care for him in his old age, and in the end give him a decent burial.
At first there had been no son. There had been a daughter, who died the day after she was born. But losing a daughter is different from losing a son. A son bears the master’s seed and carries the family line forward, while a daughter, except for helping her mother with the housekeeping, is nothing but an expense from childhood to marriage (if she doesn’t make a whore of herself first), and to get rid of her you have to prepare a dowry, unless you hire her out on day wages when she’s little. That son, the never-to-be future master of the property, had died suddenly in his crib, and a second never appeared. Well, there was another daughter, but she also died very young when a strange childhood illness was ravaging the region. A little girl in the village died, and her friends came to bid her a last farewell. She was lying in an open coffin on the bier. Her friends sat beside her, caressed her and wept, and, before leaving, kissed her cheek. A week after the funeral, at the Requiem Mass, there were whispers going around that these same three little girls were now sick in bed and that the barber, offering not a shred of hope, had told the parents to summon the priest. One of the girls was the miller’s daughter, and he was shaken by her death. More and more he suspected that his family’s misfortunes were no accident; death, after all, doesn’t just come and strike down for no reason everything that’s his. So he started looking around, watching for whatever, or rather, whoever, was destroying his offspring and bringing misery and death into his home – if he didn’t do something soon, his property would remain without an heir and eventually pass into the hands of strangers. In such situations, even a daughter is welcome: someone marries her with her dowry and moves in, and with the arrival of the bridegroom the name of the house – which went back to God knows what ancestor – does not change.
For the first time in years the miller shed a tear. He took a few kreutzers from his purse and set off to the inn, where he replayed all his troubles, at length and with much repetition, for the company assembled there.
‘You’re right,’ they said, patting his shoulder. ‘Someone is doing this to you on purpose. We’ll track them down together. And, since we’re not animals, we’ll report them to the authorities, and they’ll be judged strictly and fairly. Maybe someone’s jealous of you because you’re a miller and make a good living for yourself and your family. Or maybe they’re jealous because you’re a handsome fellow and in good health. Or maybe they put it all together and came up with the following plan: The miller is doing pretty well for himself with his business and everything he owns. Still, it will be hard to cast a spell that damages his body – he’s strong as an ox – but it might be fun to take it all away from him, then we could find another way to finish him off.’
But who could have such a motive? The count and the authorities, right up to the highest power, would have gone about it differently. Nor did either of his brothers have a motive – the older brother had been impaled by the Turks in the Battle of Sisak in 1593, while the younger, who had mental problems and lived off his charity, would only be harmed by the miller’s death. So who, then?
‘Well, there’s one person in particular who would profit from such wickedness …’
‘But do we need to say who? To say it out loud?’
‘No, no,’ the miller said, holding his head in his hands.
‘So you know?’
‘Yes, but please don’t say out loud what I dread the most – that night after night I am lying in bed with a murderess, and whenever I sire an heir, or fine, an heiress, she kills them, one by one.’
‘So you thought it might be her?’
‘Didn’t you?’ The miller glanced at the men around him.
‘Yes, of course. And really, who else could it be?’
The miller drained his glass and hurled it to the floor, as if to say, that’s exactly what I’ll do to her; I’ll smash her so hard she’ll fly across the floor and blood will flow.
‘You’re right. She’s your wife, and you can do whatever you want to her. And we’ll support you; we’ll testify that you caught her murdering your children and she tried to kill you, too, deviously, from behind, which is hardly surprising since she’s a woman, but at the last moment you turned around and dealt her a deadly blow with your arm.’
Yes, yes, that will be best for everybody. The damned witch! It’s not easy getting rid of these evil women.
The populace loves children. More precisely, the populace doesn’t like people who don’t like children. This has nothing to do with sentimentality, which would require you to hold them in your arms, cuddle them, spoil them with the kind of protective parental love people would know how to show centuries later. The populace loves children because children are the vessels for the seed by which humanity continues into the future. Children are entrusted with the mission of carrying on our traditions and customs, so the more children the better – that way, the populace reasons, we have a better chance of not simply vanishing. What if there’s a terrible plague or some other disease that wipes every last one of us off the face of the earth, as if we never existed and meant nothing at all? Well, our Creator would know about us, but down here on earth nobody would be following our traditions and taking care of our farms, taking care of everything we had made and that, unfortunately, couldn’t take with us after death – debts, diseases and other troubles, of course, we would gladly leave behind in this world. But there would be nobody left to look after our graves. They would soon be overgrown and, a few decades later, cows would be walking and crapping on them, and a few centuries later new settlements would rise on top of our bones, populated by strangers with none of our blood and none of our customs; they would be living on