THE MASON

Translated by Michael Benedikt


The Master Mason: "Come look at these bastions, these buttresses;
they seem to have been built for all eternity."--Schiller, William Tell


The Mason Abraham Knupfer is singing, trowel in hand, scaffolded up so high that, as he examines the gothic inscription on the great cathedral bell, even the soles of his feet stand high above the flying buttresses of this church--all thirty of them, in this town of thirty churches.

He sees gargoyles spewing water from the roof-slates down into the entangled abyss of stone galleries and stained-glass windows, pendants, pinnacles, and spires, rootfops, turrets and timberwork, which the falcon's hovering wing punctuates with its one still point.

He sees the star-shaped outlines of the fortification-walls, the citadel sticking out like a hen's head from inside a piecrust, and the monastery cloisters, where the sun throws shadows that revolve around the pillars.

The imperial guard is quartered at the edge of town. Look!--In the distance, a soldier's drumming! Abraham Knupfer can see his tri-cornered hat, his epaulets stitched with bright red yarn, his cockade crimped with a rosette, and his pigtail tied with a bow.

The next thing he sees are some other soldiers who, in a far-off park surrounded by dense foliage, and standing on broad emerald lawns, are firing with some blunderbusses at a wooden bird nailed to the top of a maypole.

And towards evening, when the echoing nave of the cathedral falls asleep, stretched out with its arms flung out in the shape of a cross, he sees from his lofty ladder an entire village set afire by troops, flaming like a comet in the deep-blue sky.