Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Antwerp, 30_th__ April 1538_

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 M�nster 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 M�nster, she was too weak to follow me, she didn’t make it.’

‘And you ended up here?’

‘I spent months begging in the street, I even got arrested once, the soldiers, you know, when I’d already got back to Holland. They tortured me’ — he shows his swollen fingers — ‘to make me confess that I’d been a Baptist. But I gave them nothing. It was incredibly painful, I screamed like a madman while they pulled my nails out but I didn’t give them a thing. I thought about my Anja, buried in that ditch. Not a word. They left me alone when they thought I’d completely lost it. Eloi took me with him, he saved my life…’

I turn around to look over the balustrade: Kathleen is putting the sheets in a basin and carrying them away.

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’

I want to reply that at this moment she’s more important than our memories.

He puts his hand on my shoulder for a moment. ‘There are no husbands or wives here.’

I pull a face: ‘I’m old.’

He laughs, a great guffaw, as though I was hearing one for the first time, after abandoning my existence for years. ‘You’re just tired, brother. You’re dead. Gerrit Boekbinder is dead and buried under the walls of M�nster. Here you’re Lot, the one who doesn’t turn around. You just remember that.’

A hand on my shoulder. I watch the children down in the courtyard, as though they were children from a fairy tale. The baby executioners of M�nster are far away, Bockelson’s little monsters, the child inquisitors with blood on their hands.

‘Who are these people, Balthasar?’

‘Free spirits. They’ve conquered purity, they’ve decreed sin to be a lie and established the principle the freedom of their desires, their own happiness.’

He says this quite naturally, as though explaining the order of the cosmos. That burning in my stomach has turned to pain, for me, for this exhausted body, and this simple joy.

The hand presses on my shoulder. ‘The Holy Spirit is in them, as it is everyone. They live in God’s light, they don’t need to take up a sword.’

The light fades from my eyes, it’s as though they almost refuse to see. ‘Do you think that’s how it is? That we lost the Kingdom so that we would find it here?’

He nods: ‘Eloi once told me that the Kingdom of God isn’t something you wait for: there is no yesterday or today, and you won’t get there, not even in a thousand years. It’s an experience of the heart: it exists everywhere, and nowhere… It’s in Kathleen’s smile, in the warmth of her body, in the joy of a child.’

I feel as though I want to weep away the hate, the fear, the desperation, the defeat. But it’s difficult, painful. I have to lean on the balustrade.

‘It’s too late for me.’

‘It’s never too late for anyone. If you stay here you’ll learn that too, brother.’

‘Eloi wants me to tell him my story. Why?’

‘He believes in the simple people, the humblest ones. He believes that Christ can resurrect in each one of us, particularly in those who have been sunk in the mud of defeat.’

‘All I see behind me is a great ocean of horror.’

He sighs, as though he really understood. ‘Let the dead bury their dead, so that the living can be born into new life.’

The lesson of the Saviour.

‘Did he tell you that too?’

‘No. It’s something I worked out as I crossed the threshold into where you are now.’

*

I don’t know how it happened, it just happened naturally, without anyone issuing instructions I suddenly found myself carving fence-posts for the vegetable garden. I started to return everyone’s greetings, and a young carder even asked me advice about the best way to adjust his loom.

I stack up the sharpened stakes in a corner of the garden at the back of the house, the little hatchet is precise and light, it allows me to work sitting down and without a great deal of effort. For a moment I see in my mind’s eye a young man splitting wood in Pastor Vogel’s yard, a thousand years ago, but it’s a memory that I immediately dispel.

The little blonde girl comes over with a gappy smile. ‘Are you Lot?’

It’s still hard for me to frame words.

I stop, so as not to risk hurting her with the splinters. ‘That’s right. And who are you?’

‘Magda.’

She hands me a coloured stone.

‘I painted it for you.’

I roll it around in my hands for a moment. ‘Thanks, Magda, that’s very kind of you.’

‘Have you got a little girl?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I’ve never been asked questions by a child before.

‘I don’t know.’

Her mother suddenly appears, a little bag of seeds in her arms.

‘Magda, come here, we’ve got to sow seeds in the garden.’

That old burning sensation again. The words come out on their own. ‘Is she your daughter?’

‘Yes.’

Kathleen smiles, a smile to light up the day, takes the little girl by the hand and looks at the fence-posts.

‘Thanks for what you’re doing. Without the fence the garden wouldn’t last a day.’

‘Thanks to you for taking me in.’

‘Are you going to stay with us?’

‘I don’t know, I’ve got nowhere to go.’

The little girl takes the bag from her mother’s hands and runs towards the vegetable garden chattering away to herself.

Kathleen’s blue eyes won’t give my stomach peace. Stay.’