Q - Luther Blissett, page 15
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My head drops onto a soft surface, I must have been tied up, no, I move a hand, my legs don't respond, a foot, my limbs feel like they weigh a ton.
Set me free. The words stay in my head, saliva and something solid comes out of my mouth: a broken tooth.
I open one eye and there's the feeling of water on my cheeks. A cloth is cleaning my face.
'I didn't think you'd make it. But judging by your collection of scars you can take care of yourself in a fight.'
A calm voice with the local accent, a blurred shadow on a big window.
I spit clots of coagulated blood and saliva.
'Shit...'
The shadow comes closer. 'Yeah.'
'How did I get here?'
My voice sounds cavernous and stupid.
'They carried you. You were brought you here this morning. It seems that any enemy of the Spanish is a friend of Antwerp. That's why you're alive. And why you're here.'
'Where's here?'
I want to retch, but I hold it back.
'Somewhere the Spaniards and the cops never come.'
I manage to pull myself up into a sitting position.
'Why?'
My head falls on to my chest, I strain to lift it back up.
'Because this is where people with money live. Or rather let's just say that the kind of people who live here are the kind of people who make money. And they're the ones who make a difference, believe me.'
He hands me a jug of water and puts a basin by my feet. I empty the jug over my head, gulp down, spit, my tongue is swollen and cut in several places.
I can just about make him up. He's thin, about forty, grey at the temples, alert expression.
He hands me a rag and I dry my face.
'Is it your house?'
'It belongs to me and anyone who happens to be in trouble,' he points out through the window. 'I was on top of a roof and I saw everything. For once the imperial soldiers got it in the neck.'
He shakes my hand. 'I'm Lodewijck Pruystinck, roofer, but the brethren call me Eloi. What about you?'
'I ended up by chance in the middle of all this, and you can call me whatever you want.'
'Anyone without a name must have had at least a hundred of them,' a curious smile. '... and a story worth listening to.'
'Who says I want to tell anyone?'
He smiles and nods. 'If all you've got is the rags you're wearing, you could accept my money in exchange for a good story.'
'You'd be throwing your money away.'
'Oh no, on the contrary. It would be an investment.'
I've stopped following him. Who the hell am I talking to?
'You really must be a rich fucker.'
'For the time being I'm the one who's tended your wounds, the one who's got you out of the shit you were in.'
We stay there in silence, while I do a roll-call of all the muscles in my body.
Evening is falling on the roofs, I've been unconscious all day.
'I was supposed to be leaving on the ship.'
'Yes, Philipp told me.'
I'd forgotten the limping man.
'...and disappearing for ever. It isn't safe around here. Above all, the rich have a cast-iron memory about the people who've fucked their daughters and made off with their jewels. And then, in the name of God...'
I lie there motionless, thunderstruck, too exhausted to collect my thoughts and work out what to say or do.
His eyes are fixed on me.
'Today Eloi Pruystinck saved the arse of a Sword-Bearer. The ways of the Lord are truly infinite!'
I say nothing. I try to read a threat into the tone of his voice, but it's just irony. He points to my forearm, where until this morning a bandage concealed the brand.
The burnt flesh is dirty, the brand almost indiscernible
'The eye and the sword. I met someone who cut his arm off to escape the scaffold. They say Batenburg ate the hearts of his victims. Is it true?'
Still I say nothing, scrutinising him this time to see what he's getting at.
'There are no limits to people's imaginations.' He lifts a cloth covering a wicker basket. 'Here's something to eat. Try and get your strength back, or you'll never get out of this bed.'
He makes as though to leave.
'I saw his head coming off. He shouted "freedom" before he was killed.'
My voice shakes. I'm very weak.
He turns slowly on his chair, a determined glance.
'The Apocalypse didn't come. What was the point of massacring all those people?'
I slump like an empty sack, almost too tired to breathe. His footsteps move away behind the door.
Chapter 3
Antwerp, 23rd April 1538
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It's a big house. Two vast floors, with rooms opening up on to wide corridors. Half-naked children run up and down the stairs, some women prepare food in great cauldrons in a kitchen filled with all God's gifts. Someone greets me with a nod and a smile, without interrupting his work. They all seem relaxed and calm, as though they all shared in the same happiness. A long table stretches through the middle of what seems to be the biggest room, laid with silver cutlery: a beech-log burns in the fireplace.
I feel the same sensation that you have in certain dreams a moment before you suddenly wake up: the knowledge that you're in a dream and the desire to know what's behind the next door, to reach the end.
Suddenly his voice reaches me from one of the rooms: 'Ah, you've finally decided to get up!'
Eloi is carving a large slice of meat on a marble table.
'Just in time to eat with us. Come on, come on, give me a hand.'
He passes me a carving-fork.
'Hold it tightly, like this.'
He cuts thin slices and arranges them on a plate with a silver crest.
From the corner of his eye he studies my confused expression.
'I expect you're wondering where you've fetched up.'
My mouth is too sticky to get a word out, I reply with a mumble.
'The house has been put at our disposal by Meneer Van Hove, a fish merchant and a good friend of mine. You might meet him when he comes back. Everything you see here used to be his.'
'Used to be?'
He smiles. 'Now it belongs to everyone and no one.'
'You mean everything belongs to everyone?'
'Exactly.'
Two children cross the room chanting a nursery rhyme whose words I can't make out.
'Bette and Sarah: Margarite's daughters. I can never remember which is which.'
He picks up the plate and shouts, 'Dinner time!'
About thirty people flock around the big, laid table. I am seated next to Eloi.
A tall blonde girl serves me a tanker of beer.
'Meet Kathleen. She's been with us for a year.'
The girl smiles. She's extremely beautiful.
Before the meal begins, Eloi rises to his feet and calls for the group's attention.
'Brothers and sisters, listen. A nameless man has arrived among us. A man who's been fighting for a long time, and who has seen much blood spilt. He was dazed and exhausted, and he has received care and attention in accordance with our custom. If he decides to stay with us, he will accept the name that we choose to give him.'
At the end of the table, a red-faced youth with an extravagant blond moustache shouts, 'Let's call him Lot, like the man who didn't turn back!'
An echo of agreement runs through the hall, and Eloi looks at me with satisfaction. 'So be it. We'll call you Lot.'
I start eating with difficulty: my tongue and my teeth hurt, but the meat is tender, first-class.
'I know what you're wondering.'
More beer is poured.
'What?'
'You're wondering how we can afford all this.'
'I imagine it was all supplied by Meneer Van Hove...'
'Not quite. He's not the only one to have opened up his coffers to give his property to the community.'
'You mean there are other rich men who give everything to the poor?'
He laughs: 'We're not poor, Lot. We're free.'
He makes a gesture that encompasses everyone seated around the table. 'Here we have artisans, carpenters, roofers, bricklayers. But also shopkeepers and merchants. What they have in common is nothing other than the Spirit of God. It is what all men and women have in common, in any case.'
I listen to him, and can't tell whether or not he's completely insane.
'Possessions, Lot, money, jewels, merchandise, serve the body so that the spirit may enjoy them. Look at these people: they're happy. They don't have to kill themselves earning a livelihood, they don't have to steal from people who have more than they do, or work for them. And in turn, the man with more has nothing to fear, because he has chosen to live with them. Have you ever wondered how many families could be fed with what Fugger has in his coffers? I think half the world could eat for a whole year without lifting a finger. Have you ever wondered how much time an Antwerp merchant spends accumulating his fortune? Simple: his whole life. His whole life to accumulate it, to fill his safes, his strong-boxes, to build a prison for himself and his own male offspring, and dowries for the females. Why?'
He drains his tankard: his dream was also mine: 'And you want to persuade the merchants down in the port that the best thing for their spirits would be to give everything to you?'
'Not at all. I want to persuade them that a life free of enslavement to money and commodities is a better life.'
'Forget it. I tell you, anyone who is rich has spent his whole life fighting for it.'
He closes his eyes and raises his glass. 'We don't want to fight them, they're too strong.' He gulps down the beer. 'We want to seduce them.'
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The two leather armchairs in the study are very comfortable. I gently sink into them, trying to escape the pains in my ribs. A very long sharpened goose-feather protrudes from a black ink pot on the table. Eloi gives me some liqueur in a little etched glass.
'Officially, Antwerp is faithful to the Church of Rome. The most devout Emperor insists that his officers maintain an allegiance to the true faith, which is to say, to his power. But many people here secretly support Luther's ideas. The merchant classes above all have had enough of the Spanish occupation, and of priests who accuse anyone of heresy if they speak out against Catholicism or its lazy bishops. Merchants produce things, they make money, they construct buildings and build roads. The imperial forces impose taxes and inquisitions. It doesn't add up. Luther preaches the abolition of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and independence from Rome, his German princes have revolted and attacked Charles and the Pope in a formal act of protest. Conclusion: soon or later, Flanders and the Low Countries are going to go up like a powder-keg. With the difference that here instead of princes you've got fat merchants. The only reason they haven't clashed yet is that until a few months ago you crowd were still in the middle.
'What d'you mean?'
'The Anabaptists wanted everything. They wanted the Kingdom: equality, simplicity, fraternity. Neither the Emperor nor the Lutheran merchants were willing to give them to them. Their world is based on competition between states and between commercial companies, on orders and obedience. In the words of Luther, whom I had the displeasure of meeting more than ten years ago: you can put all your goods in common if you really feel like it, but don't think of doing it with the goods of Pilate or Herod. Batenburg was as much of bugbear to the Catholics as he was to the Lutherans. Now that the Anabaptists have been defeated, the two remaining parties in the struggle will soon be at each other's throats.'
I try to work out where he's headed. 'Why are you telling me these things?'
He thinks about it, as though he wasn't expecting the question. 'To give you an idea of the situation here.'
'Why me, though?'
'You've been through the wars. And you lost. You look like someone who's been through hell and come out alive.'
He gets up and goes to the window after pouring himself another glass.
'I don't know if you're the right person. The one I've been trying to find for some time, I mean. I'd like to hear your story before making a judgement.'
Eloi fiddles with his empty glass.
I put mine down on the table. 'It's hard to take the smile off your face.'
'That's a good quality, don't you think?'
'How does a roofer come to be so well-informed, and to talk so shrewdly?'
He shrugs his shoulders. 'You just have to hang around with the right people.'
'You mean the merchants in the port.'
'News circulates around merchandise. As regards knowing how to talk, the friendships that gave me my way with words didn't leave me time to learn Latin, and I'm rather sorry about that.'
'Omnia sunt communia. You knew that one.'
A moment of hesitation that masks the usual half-smile of a man who is privy to some trick or an ancient secret.
'It was the motto of the rebels back in '25. In that year I went to Wittenberg to meet Luther and present my ideas to him. Germany was in chaos. I was too young and full of ideals for a monk fattening himself in the princes' dining rooms.' A grimace. Then, unsure whether he should ask me, he says, 'Were you with the peasants?'
I get up, already too tired to go on, I need to lie down on the bed, my ribs are aching. I look at him and wonder why I was meant to meet this man, without being lucid enough to answer my own question.
'Why should I tell you my story? And forget the offer you made to me. I haven't got anywhere to go, I wouldn't know what to do with your money. I just want to die in peace.
He insists. 'I'm curious. At least start off: when it all began, where.'
It's a deep well: a dull splash in the black water.
The words: 'I've forgotten. The beginning is always an end: the umpteenth Jerusalem, still populated with ghosts and crazed prophets.'
His face fills with horror for a moment, but it must be nothing compared to mine, faced with all those ghosts.
'Holy Christ, were you in Münster?'
I drag myself towards the door, my voice hoarse and thick. 'In this life I've learned only one thing: that hell and heaven do not exist. We carry them within us wherever we go.'
I leave his questions behind me, staggering down the corridor to get back to the bedroom.
Chapter 4
Antwerp, 30th April 1538
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Something still burns inside me. The girl is washing the sheets in the courtyard, the occasional glimpse of a young white body under her dress, belted tightly around the waist.
It isn't spring, not any more, April just makes me scratch my scars: the geographical map of lost battles.
It's Kathleen. She isn't anyone's wife, just as all the children don't seem to have a single mother or a single father, but have many parents. They don't show fear or reverence to the adults, who allow themselves to be teased, and smile at childish jokes. Women with time to play, pregnant bellies, men who never raise their hands in anger, children sitting on their laps. Eloi has built the Garden of Eden and he knows it.
Thirteen years ago he confronted Philip Melanchthon in the presence of Luther. Lean and Chubby both thought he was round the bend, and wrote to the papal authorities in Antwerp telling them to arrest him. A few months later brother Fat Pig would incite the massacre of all of us, the devils incarnate who had dared to challenge their masters. Eloi and I have had the same enemies, and we don't meet till now, now that it's all over.
Kathleen wrings out the washing: still that burning at the pit of my stomach. I've forgotten. The war's obliterated everything, the glory of God, madness, killing: I've forgotten. And yet there's still something there and it can't be obliterated, it's vague and present, lying in wait behind every twisting place in my mind.
She lifts her face and sees me: a smile.
It's a place where you could lock yourself in, far from your troubles, from the black wing of the Cop who's been following me for ever.
You're beautiful. You're alive. You're a life that has slipped in the mud but doesn't want to give up, and still gives me a day of sunlight, and that burning sensation deep in my bowels.
'Gerrit Boekbinder.'
I give a start and turn around quickly, my arm drawn back to shield my body.
A short, stout man, a beard sprinkled with grey, and a resolute expression.
He talks to me seriously. 'Old Gert-of-the-Well. Life really is full of surprises. I could have imagined anything, but not bumping into you again. And here, well...'
I scrutinise this anonymous face. 'You're mixing me up with someone else.'
Now he smiles. 'I don't think so. But it's not all that important, the past doesn't matter here, when I came here I was in a bad way, and merely hearing my name mentioned made me start like a wildcat. You were with Van Geleen, weren't you? I was told you were seen when they took the Council House in Amsterdam...'
I'm trying to work out who I have in front of me, but his features tell me nothing.
'Who are you?'
'Balthasar Merck. I'm not surprised if you don't remember me, but I was in Münster as well.'
Eloi must have told him.
'I really believed in it too. I had a shop in Amsterdam. I abandoned everything to join the Baptist brethren. I admired you, Gert, and it was a severe blow when you left, and not just for me. Rothmann, Bockelson and Knipperdolling were crazy, they took us to the brink of pure madness.'
Names that hurt, but Merck seems sincere and willing to understand.
I look into his eyes. 'How did you get out of there?'
'With young Krechting. They hanged his brother from the shafts of a cart along with the others, but not him, he managed to lead us out just in time, when the bishops' supporters were already entering the city.' A dark shadow falls across his face. 'I left my wife in Münster, she was too weak to follow me, she didn't make it.'
