Author: Gerhard Roth
Translator: Pamela Saur
The Age of Time
- As soon as the city is erected, the salons are decorated with music-making marble busts
- The pretty concubine is undressed and bound to the chair
- An eel escapes out of the sofa
- The country doctor is still brooding about the brother-in-law’s body covered with ulcers
- The rope breaks and the hanged man, disguised as a woman, falls onto the kitchen floor
- The two village musicians cover themselves with buckled-on musical instruments (with the help of which they also are able to fly)
- The widower fulfills his life’s dream when he slays a lion in the starlit night
- Here the people conceive of themselves as emigrants
- Whoever wears a red hat band identifies himself as knowing the Bible
- On the other hand, if someone wears a black one, this shows that he is dead
- Talking leeches are growing in the flower pots
- When the tailor goes to bed he feels a naked woman leaving his body
- To his horror the village pastor beholds a Moor with a head of stone
- In every house one finds a holy strawberry the size of a child and a sooth-saying chicken
- The dogs are kept on chains until they are shot to death by their owners
- In order to protect themselves from swarms of flies the villagers wear wooden shoes
- The Chinese circus people are duty bound to load chunks of rock onto wheelbarrows
- Because the seawater has receded, the mayor now does without a diving suit
- Between dried-up onion braids the pious angels split peas
- The teacher tries to use a beekeeper’s hat and a cane, but he is nevertheless immediately expelled from his dream and back into reality
- The tame rat is black
- At their weddings the virgins wear headdresses made of cow horn, while the bridegroom attaches a sow’s penis to his trousers
- In front of the office of the bank director the butchers take off their boots which were kissed by the housemaids
- The fish nailed onto the posts murmur incantations to heaven, making the earth quake
- The general observed the man who was wearing a wooden prosthesis instead of a head
- In order to express their jubilation the residents strew bouquets of forget-me-nots over the village street
- Because the Sunday organist plays in a white veil the sister presses a garland into her hair and disrobes while dancing
- The circus director has the bodies of those who were shot bound onto house doors and put on display in front of the tent
- If one forgets to forcefeed the turkeys the right number of nuts, then one will see his sister in the morgue
- As soon as the painter in the white coat has renewed the gold on the stucco-work the four apprentices may leave the ladder
- Under the rainbow an iron structure is growing that, when it wilts, will rise like a dandelion seed and fall with a roar of wasp swarms down over playing children.
- The man of a thousand skin-folds that decorate him like plant leaves stretches his hand forth, to everyone’s surprise, and offers a light to the startled resident
- Hubris could be read in the eyes of the man with the pith helmet when he opened his suitcase and offered silverware for sale
- In the mountainous landscape one encounters no one but a sleeping angel
- The traitors are bound onto trees and given over to the termites
- After the men wrapped the head with coverings, they drew a picture of the King of Hearts on the kitchen door
- The skin of the foreigner is made of spider webs, his face without a mouth
- The fleeing hair-man is allowed to hide in the bed of the twin sisters
- The rabid armadillos are hunted, their armor burned up
- As far as the villagers can see, eggs are floating in the lake
- The apostle stands on the bank of the carp pond in the expectation that he will be able to walk over the water
- Illuminated by a bolt of lightning the night provides a glimpse of the magic escape artist who is lying in a straitjacket among the swine
- On All Souls’ Day the veterans distribute crabs to the children of the fallen soldiers
- In order not to insult the dignity of the doves they are plucked before they march into the cook pot
- On the flag of the holy procession there is nothing to be seen but an earthworm
- The rabbits spring out of the forests and eat the fields bare before the break of dawn
- The assistant of the steam-saw owner defends himself from the eagle-sized night moth with the help of a rake
- The village’s first sailor is led in a ceremonious procession to the inn where wine is served in bottles
- The little child in his arms, the baker waits for the delivery of his father’s coffin
- As soon as the hunters are absorbed in their card game they no longer pay attention to the deflection of the compass
- The Andromeda Nebula spreads itself out like a patch of blood on a linen sheet
- When a tornado is raging, the young girls play with the tame vipers
- In the summer, on the other hand, the children wear shirts made of cat fur that protect them from ferruginous rain
- So that they can move forward better in the snow the hunters strap saddles onto their dogs
- During autopsies care is always taken to remove the corpses’ eyelids
- The screeching of the birds is a signal for the villagers to trim their toenails
- The enamel bowls in the attics are full of spiders
- Early in the year glasses of medicinal plants are already put in the windows to ward off epidemics
- If the ground splits asunder, then ultramarine dye is harvested from the wings of butterflies
- In the course of the wedding the bridegroom is not allowed to hide his penis
- With the help of astrology the elder-berry plant blooms; the grasses, on the other hand, turn pale through its influence
- After the carpenter’s son has slain his father, he imitates the barking of a fox in order to set his pursuers on the wrong track
- Only he who has brushed the hair of his cow long enough will find gold dust in the sieve
- The beauty of the leaves drops out of the air of the day
- On Easter Sunday the church hymnals are suddenly printed in Chinese characters
- The slaughtered dogs are the cakes of the poor
- When the apples fall rustling to the earth the old people are shaved with razors
- The whispering of the dead is the color of the flowers
- In the brickworks the hats of the sow-tailors’ apprentices pile up
- But the manufacturers of beer demand as payment mastery over the weather
- The captured Russians decorate the altars with the slain pelicans
- Every soldier receives an iron magnet that allows him to stop the flow of blood
- The drowned man’s wife gives away his possessions so that he will not appear to her again
- The yarrow is holy to every acolyte because without its help the mass bell would not chime
- The jaybird can disguise its voice so that it is taken for a nut tree
- Wherever a toad pops up, he is poisoned to death
- The sole saint in the village lives after his death in the pastor’s house where in the morning he sweeps the ashes out of the stove
- As soon as the ass has died, invisible creatures start to become visible
- The parade of the beekeepers ends in the humming of the wasps
- The cobbler owes the invention of the bicycle to St. Elmo’s fire which deformed his pendulum clock
- In a drop of wine the wise man sees a coffee maker
- Next morning the miller’s arm is covered with brand marks which are interpreted as prophecies
- Salt from the deep wells is dung for the wheat fields
- The appearance of the soldiers suffices for the villagers to attach the fly paper
- The miner’s skeleton will not be discovered until thousands of years later as an impression in stone
- The heavy red light descends onto the sweet hills with their vineyards
- Every piece of land that belongs to no one is measured by unknown polar explorers
- Left behind were an ivory fan, a sewing machine and a zither
- The gravedigger is able to open the coffins in which the dragonfly pupa emit electrical charges
- If a person shows up who has an extra pair of legs in place of a head, the circus director should be notified
- One educates children with the butt of a rifle better than with a pickaxe
- The coin was barely on the counter when the image of a magpie flew off and was replaced by a golden pheasant
- In April, however, it is forbidden on penalty of death to wear white clothing
- It is the right of the first born to refuse to speak
- The country doctor guards the quicksilver while he is asleep
- The first attorney of the village has a transparent skull and is stabbed to death by the mourning maid
- Everyone is secretly happy about the corpse in his basement
- The selected trout are laid on a cloth and seasoned with lemon juice before the musician begins to play the scales on their tails
- From the bony skulls of the stags the canary spells out the alphabet
- The gendarme observes the stranger who is wearing a coat of blue bird feathers
From Landläufiger Tod by Gerhard Roth
© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1984
Translation © Pamela Saur