The Master's Apprentice - Oliver Potzsch Page 0,46

wet, he soon struggled to manage even the simplest tricks.

“Are you trying to insult me?” snarled Tonio. “Watch. This is how you do it.”

The magician produced a deck of cards in one hand, let them slide into his other hand with a sound like a drumroll, fanned them, and suddenly held only kings. Then he closed the fan and opened it again, and now they were all queens. “And now you,” he ordered.

Johann clumsily dropped the entire deck, and the cane came whistling through the air.

Soon Johann’s hands hurt so badly that he couldn’t hold cards any longer, and the master demanded he juggle balls out in the rain. Tonio’s balls were red, blue, and gold and made of hard ash wood. When Johann dropped one of the balls, Tonio hurled it at him. After countless failed attempts, Johann had a huge bump on his head and felt every single muscle in his body.

“Three balls are nothing!” shouted Tonio. “Every peasant can do three. You must master four at least, if not five!”

In the evening they practiced the shell game. This trick was especially important to Tonio, and they spent the largest amount of time on it. Three walnut shells and a pea were lying on a small box in the wagon. The pea went underneath one of the shells, the three shells were shuffled about, and the intended victim had to guess which shell the pea was hidden underneath. Tonio didn’t take his eyes off Johann as he pushed the walnut shells back and forth on the box.

“It’s important you let them win at first,” the magician said. “They must feel sure of themselves before you milk them. You only strike when there’s enough money on the table. Understood?”

Johann was quite good at the shell game, and Tonio soon left him alone about it—though not before reminding him several times to never become complacent. To Johann’s surprise, the magician didn’t ask to be shown the trick with the egg and the blanket again. It seemed to Johann the master begrudged him a trick he didn’t know himself.

Beaten and humiliated, Johann fell asleep beside the fire soon after dark every night, while Tonio read his books, murmuring silent verses as if he was learning entire pages by heart. Johann’s sleep was dreamless and deep. For the first time in a long while he didn’t even dream of Margarethe and Martin. But early in the morning, the torture continued.

They stayed in the forest for nearly two weeks, until Johann had mastered the most important tricks. When the weather improved, they set off again, following the post road to the southeast.

The following days went roughly the same and were almost always accompanied by rain, from drizzle to torrential downpours and everything in between. They always practiced in the late afternoon until long into the night. During the day they rolled along the imperial road toward Ulm, making camp away from the road and getting up at the crack of dawn. The master slept inside the wagon while Johann had to lie by the fire with a threadbare blanket. Throughout each chilly, wet night he’d frequently wake up shivering. He suffered from a terrible cold, his nose running and his head thumping. But the master showed no mercy. Johann was allowed to rest only during the brief hours they traveled along the bumpy road.

Every morning, after a bite of bread and a sip of watered-down wine, Johann had to feed the horse and hitch it to the wagon. Then they set off and drove until they arrived at a village or a larger township. If there was a market square, that’s where they went; if not, they simply parked on the muddy road near the village church, where they’d soon be surrounded first by children, then by the rest of the villagers.

For the next few hours, Tonio would hold court in his wagon while Johann made a lot of noise. He performed his tricks, juggled the balls, and declared loudly that the world-famous astrologer and chiromancer Tonio del Moravia had come to town, a master of the seven arts and keeper of the seven times seven seals, to read the future of anyone who’d like to know. It was never long before there’d be a line outside the wagon. For a few kreuzers, Tonio would read their palms or cast hasty horoscopes for them. In the meantime, Johann would clean out people’s pockets with the shell game. At some point during the afternoon,