Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Eltersdorf, January 1526

Vogel’s cow died of fever. I stayed to watch it die, its breath getting slower and slower, a muffled groan, glazed eyes filling with indifference towards the world, towards life.

They say that Magister Thomas, before being condemned, wrote a letter to the citizens of M�hlhausen. They say he invited them to put down their arms, because everything was lost now. I think of the man trying to explain why. Why the Lord abandoned his elect and allowed them to ose everything.

I can see you, Magister, lying in the darkness of your cell, with the marks from your tortures covering your body, waiting for the hangman to bring your journey to an end. But the scourge in your heart must have driven you to make your final message. Not their instruments… they could never have… perhaps it’s because we’ve been thinking about ourselves too much? Perhaps because we’ve been so presumptuous that we’ve shocked the Lord? Because we’ve claimed to interpret His will? Perhaps because we’ve killed, because the rage of the humble was treated the wicked agents of starvation so mercilessly? Is that what you wrote, Magister? Is that what you were thinking during those final moments, as the army of the princes marched to the siege of heroic M�hlhausen?�

One single reason. Not one reason, not even the unfathomable will of the Lord our God, is enough to banish our despair. Because it is still a cry of despair, uttered from the depths of a dark cell. It’s still the profound anguish of defeat that keeps me chained to this bed.

It came to me as clearly as one of those woodcuts made by that great artist of ours, to be more tasteful than you might expect, sometimes quite delicate and skilled. It seemed to burst out of the narrow space between those walls. The houses and the steeples of the churches rising one on top of the other like clusters of mushrooms on a tree trunk.

Of course, that’s just how I could describe my memory of my first entry into M�hlhausen: four horses impelled onwards by our nonsensical shouts, along the road a few miles from the walls of the imperial town, Elias’s thundering laughter and Ottilie’s cries in the wind. Then at a walk, almost martial, approaching the gigantic portal, to give ourselves an air of authority that was undeserved but no less important for that, with a proud, direct gaze on that scorching mid-August day.

We could already glimpse the centre swarming with assorted humanity, like a menagerie designed to contain an example of every species, type, form or deformity within the human race. Animals and carts and noise, confused shouts, echoed curses and swearing. The stench of hops and the lively racket of the Steinweg, with shops and beer-stalls opening on to it. The beer that has enriched the merchants of M�hlhausen more than any other town in Germany.

The word of God uttered on every street corner, the black flag of the Teutonic Knights flying over the buildings; the corruption of the monks who attract curses in the streets, confirming the law of the world: where there is money you’ll always find plenty of priests. In the maze of dry alleyways, dusty from weeks of drought, flanked on either side by the walls of dwellings and shops, inns and construction sites, thick with inscriptions and scratched names, symbols of all kinds, but a number of times glorifying the German Hercules - Luther — just like that, LUTHER was written on every wall of the first path we took towards the church of St James, he went ahead of us and accompanied us with his contempt, which we dutifully returned.

I remember it distinctly, the noise, the stench of sweat and cattle from the market in the big square, which would see very different events a few weeks hence, making us tremble, making our hearts race, while ‘the just invoked the hammer of God’, may it fall implacably upon the heads of those who have usurped His word. A tension that breathed in every alleyway, the strong smell of an injustice that called for retribution and seethed away uneasily beneath the pinnacles of the Cathedral of Our Lady and the big market. As though waiting for a spark.

Big Elias cut a swathe through the crowd. ‘I’ve been here before, to this shithole with its people in rags and its imperial envoys.’ I came along behind him, losing my footing, distracted by shouted arguments of shopkeepers, and the lewd suggestions of women who knew the soldiers in the pay of Duke John better than their own captains did. I found it hard to tear myself away, weeks of lustful dreams were consuming me with the anxious anticipation of pleasure, but there was Ottilie’s caustic smile following me close by to discourage the offers and make my face flush bright red.

‘Welcome to the powder-keg!’

I can still distinctly remember the first smile and the phrase with which he welcomed us. Heinrich Pfeiffer, in the church of St James, near the Felchta gate, a meeting point for the inhabitants of the suburb of St Nicholas. This shifty preacher, the son of a dairy-maid, ex-cook, ex-confessor, ex-friend of the Duke of Saxony, sly supporter of the cause of the humble. And his connection with the duke, which he had used to have a good fifty-six representatives of the people elected on to the Council. His sermons had encouraged the plunder of the property of the Church, and the destruction of sacred images. Without the support of the duke he could never have survived for long in the town. We admired his cunning and intelligence, it wasn’t hard to work out that, together, he and the Magister would be able to achieve great things.

And indeed here they were, already busily engaged in serious discussions about things that needed to be done and incendiary sermons to be delivered for the townspeople and the ragged ones, the disinherited, the people of the region and also the nobles, who ‘will soon be on the receiving end their determination to shove their fat, swinish faces in a steaming plate of excrement’.

Now, from my hidden corner, M�hlhausen seems like a dream town, a spectre that visits you at night and tells you its story, but as though you had never seen it, a pen-and-ink drawing, that’s how I remember it, like something by our brilliant painter, Herr Albrecht D�rer.