The Roll of Wilkeln

by Immanuel Kant, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The Chamber of War and Domains at Königsberg kept, among its many books, one which it called the Roll of the Amt Rossitten, and in this Roll the village of Wilkeln stood on the forty-first leaf, between Pillkoppen above and a meadow-rent below. Nine hearths. Fish-tithe, so many tons of dried bream. Contribution, eleven thalers and some groschen, payable at Martinmas. The entry had been copied in 1748 from an older book, copied again in 1758 for the Russian governors, who wished to know what the province owed and were told, and copied a third time in 1763 when the province was Prussian again and the Russians had gone home with their copy. It was in a clear hand. There was nothing wrong with it except that Wilkeln was no longer there.

Christoph Rautenberg, Calculator to the Chamber, learned this on the fourteenth of November 1764, a little after nine in the morning, from a man who had been waiting on the bench in the corridor since the bells at seven.

A calculator, in the Chamber's usage, was not a man who calculated. Councillors calculated, in the sense that they decided what a thing should cost; a calculator made the columns agree. Rautenberg had held the office for eleven years. He was thirty-six, unmarried, lodged with a glover's widow in the Löbenicht, and had never been farther from Königsberg than Pillau, where he had once gone to count barrels and had been sick on the lagoon both ways. He wore a brown coat that had been his father's, turned. He was known in the Chamber for two habits: he would not sign a column he had not added himself, and he kept a little brass sand-box on his desk which he filled from his own pocket, because he did not like the Chamber's sand, which was coarse and scratched the paper.

The man in the corridor was a fisherman of the Nehrung, the long spit of dunes that lies between the Curonian lagoon and the sea. He gave his name as Ansas Purwins. He had a cap in one hand and a folded paper in the other, and he smelled of tar and smoke and of the cold, which has a smell, as anyone knows who has stood near a man come in from it. The paper was a letter from the pastor at Rossitten, written in German and signed with a flourish, and it said that by the winds of the past three winters the great dune called by the people the White Mountain had passed over the village of Wilkeln, so that of nine dwellings none remained habitable, and it begged the Chamber, of its known mercy, to strike the said village from the Roll and to remit the contribution due this Martinmas, which the inhabitants could in no wise pay.

Rautenberg read it twice. Then he took down the Roll, found the forty-first leaf, and read that too.

"You are of Wilkeln?"

"I was."

"And the others?"

Purwins moved his cap from one hand to the other. "The pastor writes it," he said, and nodded at the letter, as though the letter were a third person in the room and could be asked.

Rautenberg had a rule, which he had never been required to state aloud and therefore had never examined, that a petition is an assertion and not a proof. The pastor at Rossitten asserted that the dune had passed over Wilkeln. The Roll asserted that Wilkeln consisted of nine hearths and owed eleven thalers. Both were written in good German by men who had no reason that Rautenberg knew of to deceive the Chamber, and they could not both be true. It was not his office to decide between them. He carried the letter and the Roll down the corridor to Kriegsrat Brandt.

---

Kriegsrat Brandt was a large, sound man with a cold. He had a fire, which calculators did not have, and a window that looked onto the castle courtyard, where a cart was being unloaded of something in sacks. He read the pastor's letter with his handkerchief at his nose.

"A dune," he said.

"So the pastor writes."

"The pastor at Rossitten has written to this Chamber, to my knowledge, four times in two years. Once about a dune. Once about elk in the rye. Once about the crow-catchers, who he says are drunk on the Sabbath, which is true and is not our business. And once," Brandt said, "to ask for a stove." He handed the letter back. "Sand moves, Rautenberg. It moves onto a village; it moves off again. You cannot strike a place out of the Roll because the wind has been unkind to it for a season. If we struck every village that had sand in its doorway we should have no Nehrung at all on paper, and the Nehrung would still be there, and it would still owe."

"The pastor says none of the dwellings is habitable."

"The pastor says. Has anyone of ours been?"

No one had. The Amtmann at Rossitten, whose business it was, was in bed with a leg.

Brandt blew his nose and considered the fire. "Very well. Write in the margin that the village has been inspected and found lost to the sand, and strike it, and let the man go home. It is eleven thalers. The King will survive it."

Rautenberg did not move.

It must be understood that he was not a brave man, nor a contrary one. He had been told to do things he thought foolish perhaps a thousand times in eleven years, and had done them, because a calculator who substitutes his own wisdom for a councillor's is soon a former calculator, and because in most cases the foolishness was a matter of opinion. This was not a matter of opinion. He had been asked to write a word, and the word meant something, and the thing it meant had not occurred.

"I cannot write inspected, Herr Kriegsrat."

Brandt looked at him over the handkerchief.

"The Roll is used," Rautenberg said, "by the next man who reads it. If he reads inspected he will believe someone went. If calculators write inspected for what has not been inspected, then the word will mean only that a calculator wrote it, and the next man will have to go and look for himself, and so will every man after him, and then there is no use in a Roll." He heard himself say this and was surprised by how long it was. "I would rather write not inspected; struck on the pastor's word. That is true."

"And if I put that before the President he will ask me why I struck a village on a pastor's word, and I shall say, because my calculator would not lie for me, and he will laugh, and he will be right to." Brandt folded the handkerchief. "No. If you will not write it, it stays in. The man owes, and the Martinmas money is already late."

"Then I ask leave to go and look."

"At the Chamber's cost? No."

"At mine."

Brandt regarded him for some time. Outside, the cart had been emptied and the horse stood steaming in the courtyard with its head down.

"Ten days," Brandt said. "Take the post road. Do not drown. If there is a village there, I shall want to know why you went."

---

They left on the fifteenth, before light. The post road to Memel does not, as a stranger might suppose, keep to the mainland. It goes out from Cranz onto the Nehrung and runs the length of it, some thirteen German miles of sand, with the sea on the left hand and the lagoon on the right, and in places the spit is so narrow that a man standing on the ridge can see both waters at once and hear them making two different noises. Rautenberg had known this as a fact about the post road. He had not known it as a fact about his own body, which by the second hour in the open cart had concluded that it did not believe in the Nehrung and wished to be returned.

Purwins sat on the sacks behind him and said nothing for a German mile at a time. He had been in Königsberg, it emerged, eight days, waiting to be seen; he had slept in a fish-merchant's loft by the Holländer Baum. Rautenberg had offered to pay his place on the cart, and Purwins had accepted without thanks, as one accepts a thing that is plainly owed.

The country was not what Rautenberg had pictured, because he had pictured nothing; he had pictured the forty-first leaf. There were pines near Sarkau, low and wind-bent, and then for a long stretch there were none, only a grey grass that hissed, and the stumps of trees cut long ago, standing in the sand like the posts of a fence round nothing. At Rossitten they changed horses. Men were out on the flats with long nets on poles, catching crows; they had a dozen in a basket, wings still going, and a boy was killing them one by one with his teeth, a bite behind the head, very quickly, which Purwins watched with professional indifference and Rautenberg did not watch at all.

The Amtmann was in bed with his leg and did not wish to be disturbed by a calculator. The pastor was at home and did. He gave them soup and a long account of the stove.

They went on in the morning on foot, because the cart went no farther that day and because, Purwins said, the place was not on the road. It was off the road, toward the lagoon, a German half-mile through what Rautenberg first took for a hill and then understood was the thing itself.

---

It is worth saying exactly what he saw, since he took such pains over it afterwards.

The White Mountain was a dune perhaps a hundred and twenty feet high on its lagoon side, which was steep, and very gradual on its seaward side, up which the wind had pushed it. Its surface was pale, almost the colour of ash, and ribbed by the wind into small regular ridges a hand apart, so that it looked like a palate. It was moving. Rautenberg would not afterwards have been able to prove this, since he did not see it move, but grains ran off its crest in a continual low smoke, and on the steep face a line of small slides was always going on, the way water goes on in a gutter.

At the foot of the steep face, on the lagoon side, and running some two hundred paces along it, was what had been Wilkeln.

The sand had come over the village from the west and was now partly past it. On the west side, therefore, the houses were entirely under; there was nothing to show where they had been but the ridge of a roof, here and there, laid along the sand like the spine of a buried animal. On the east side, nearer the water, the dune had not yet finished, and here the houses stood up to their eaves, and one could walk down a slope of sand and look in at an upper window, and see the inside of a room filled to within a foot of the ceiling with a smooth pale floor. In one of them a cradle was hanging from a beam by its ropes, and the sand had come up underneath it and stopped, so that it seemed to be resting on the sand and not hanging at all.

The well-sweep of the village still stood, a tall pole with its cross-arm, rising out of the dune at a slight angle with the bucket-rope blowing.

Rautenberg went over the whole of it twice. He paced the length along the foot of the face and wrote down the paces. He counted roof-ridges, and where a roof was wholly under he asked Purwins whose house had stood there, and Purwins told him, and he wrote the name down and made a mark. Nine. He looked into every window he could reach. Of the nine, two could have been dug out by a strong family in a summer, perhaps, if the dune had then gone away; the dune showed no sign of going away. He wrote down that also, and that it was his opinion and not a measurement.

It took most of the day. The wind did not stop. When he took off his hat to wipe his forehead the sand was in his hair, and when he licked his lip it was on his tongue, fine as flour and faintly salt.

Purwins followed him from house to house and answered every question, and asked none. Only once, at the house with the cradle, he said, "Mine," and went on.

They were turning back toward the road in the late afternoon when Rautenberg, looking north along the lagoon shore to fix the direction of the dune's travel, saw smoke.

---

It came from a low place about a quarter of a mile up the shore, where a stand of alders had survived in the lee of an old, grassed-over dune, the kind that has stopped moving. There were boats drawn up on the beach there. He could count five roofs of reed, new reed, still yellow.

He stood and looked at them for a while. Purwins stood beside him and looked at them too.

"Whose are those?"

"Ours."

"The people of Wilkeln."

"Yes."

"Five hearths."

"Five. Two went to Memel. One died, the old woman Sakuth, before the sand came. The Kuwerts are with the Kuwerts' brother in Pillkoppen." Purwins said it as if reading from a roll of his own.

Rautenberg took out the pastor's letter, though he knew what it said. Of nine dwellings none remained habitable. That was true. He had seen it was true. The inhabitants could in no wise pay. That was the pastor's opinion, and might be true. The letter did not say that the inhabitants had built another village a quarter of a mile away. It did not say that they had not. It did not mention the alders.

"Your petition does not speak of these."

"You did not ask about these."

That was also true. He had asked whether Purwins was of Wilkeln, and whether the dune had covered it, and whose house was whose. He had not asked where they now lived, because it had not occurred to him that they lived anywhere.

It occurred to him now that if he had not looked north he would have gone back to Königsberg with an honest report, every word of which he had verified with his own feet, and the Chamber would have struck Wilkeln from the Roll; and five households would have gone on living a quarter of a mile from where they had lived, and fishing the same water, and owing nothing, and no one in Königsberg would have been told a single lie. He did not find this thought comfortable, and he stood with it until his feet were cold.

"I am asking now," he said.

Purwins turned and looked at him directly, perhaps for the first time since the corridor.

"Five hearths," he said. "Built since Easter. The reed is the Crown's, cut on the Crown's shore. The alders are the Crown's. We did not ask, because the Amtmann has a leg." He put his cap on. "We have three boats. We had five. We will pay. Not this Martinmas."

"Thank you," Rautenberg said, and wrote it down, all of it, the reed and the alders and the boats, standing in the wind with the paper flapping against his hand.

---

He was back in Königsberg on the twenty-second, with sand in the seams of his coat that would still be coming out of it at Easter. He wrote his report that night, by his own candle, in the glover's widow's back room; it ran to four sides. He gave the paces, the roof-ridges, the names, and the opinion clearly marked as an opinion. He described the new settlement and its five hearths and its three boats, and the reed cut from the Crown's shore without leave. He did not recommend anything, because it was not his office to recommend. He noted only, at the end, that the inhabitants had said, unasked, that they would pay, and not this Martinmas, and that he had no reason to doubt them, and that this too was an opinion.

Brandt read it the next morning with his cold much improved. He read the whole of it, which Rautenberg had not expected, and at the end he sat back and looked at the window for some time.

"You know," he said, "that if you had come back and told me the village was gone, I should have struck it, and been glad to, and the five households would have paid nothing for twenty years."

"Yes, Herr Kriegsrat."

"And now they will pay."

"When they can. I have written what they said."

"You have written a great deal." Brandt tapped the last page. "The new place will want a name in the Roll."

"They call it Wilkeln."

Brandt laughed, briefly, and then coughed. "Of course they do." He took a pen and wrote across the foot of the report, in the large hand of a man who did not keep columns: Old village to be struck. New settlement to be entered at five hearths. Contribution remitted three years in consideration of the loss, the reed to be regarded as granted. B. He handed it back. "Enter it."

Rautenberg went back to his desk. He took down the Roll and opened it at the forty-first leaf, and trimmed his pen, and sat for a moment with the pen above the page.

Then he drew a single line through Wilkeln. Nine hearths, a fine line, ruled, so that the words beneath it could still be read by anyone who came after; and in the margin beside it he wrote Lost to the sand, 1762–1764. Inspected 16 November 1764, C. R.; and on the line below, in the same hand, Wilkeln, new built on the lagoon shore N. of the former place. Five hearths, and the rest of it, as the Kriegsrat had written.

He reached for the little brass box, and shook his own fine sand across the wet ink, and watched it settle over both villages alike.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Immanuēle Kantiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Immanuel Kant, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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