Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖
- Author: Luther Blissett
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The name chills the blood, sends memories flashing back, a face, a family.
‘I knew Denck well. I fought with him alongside men who really thought they would put an end to injustice and wickedness on earth. There were thousands of us, we were an army. Our hope was shattered on the plain at Frankenhausen, on the fifteenth of May 1525. Then I abandoned a man to his fate, to the weapons of the landsknechts. I carried with me his bag full of letters, names and hopes. And the suspicion of having been betrayed, sold to the forces of the princes like a herd at a market.’ It’s still hard to utter the name. ‘That man was Thomas M�ntzer.’
I can’t see him, but I sense his astonishment, perhaps the incredulity of someone who thinks he’s talking to a ghost.
His voice is practically a whisper. ‘You really fought with Thomas M�ntzer?’
‘I was young then, too, but alert enough to understand that Luther had betrayed the cause he had given us. We understood that we would have to go on where he had surrendered his weapons The story could have ended like that, on that corpse-covered plain. And instead we survived.’
‘Did Denck die there?’
‘No. His task was to find reinforcements for the battle, but he didn’t show up.’
Remembering is a terrible effort. ‘I died for the first time in Frankenhausen. It wasn’t the last.’
I sip the liqueur to jog my memory. ‘For two years, two endless years, I hid in the home of a Lutheran pastor who secretly sympathised with our cause, while outside the soldiers were combing through the country, region after region, hunting out survivors. I was finished, I had a new name, my friends were dead, the world was populated by ghosts and people ready to betray you if you said one word too many. One day, when it seemed as though work and solitude had subjugated me, they unearthed us, I don’t know how, but they managed to track us down. I had to flee once again.’
I take a breath. ‘Thinking about it now, that sudden flight was a stroke of luck for me, it saved me from a slower, atrocious death.’
Perhaps he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t follow me all the way, but he doesn’t dare to interrupt me, he’s really fascinated by what I might say next.
‘I took the name of a man who happened to have crossed my path. I wandered around for a long time in search of I don’t know what, a place where I could disappear. At the end of the summer of ‘27 I reached Augsburg and met Denck again.
‘The synod of the martyrs…’
He speaks slowly and in a low voice: he knows how to listen to a story.
‘That’s right. The survivors’ reunion. Stupid, useless survivors.’
Augsburg, Bavaria, late July 1527
Lucas Niemanson. Merchant of brocades in Bamberg. Full purse, fine clothes made of tough fabrics, a considerable load of goods and trinkets on a fairly new cart, pulled by two horses, both a bit rough but still young. I am resting my muscles, stiffened by miles of bumping, shouts and curses on the disconnected paths of these moorlands, on a reasonably decent bed in an inn just inside the western gate of the city. Before doing anything else, get a few hours’ sleep to rest the bones; the next day, think of the load, the cart, the weariest of the quadrupeds. Glance around the streets of this crowded imperial city, with hotheads flowing in from all parts of the country to escape the new killing. Like Hans Hut, the prophet-bookseller, who must have founded a community at each staging post, and who delivered accounts of apocalyptic visions as soon as he’d skipped a meal. People say the city will soon be host to a synod of all the representatives of the communities that have come into being over the past few years, crushed in this new vice between Luther and the Pope.
Careful. Don’t fall into the great maw, elude the ubiquitous eye of the enemy.
Observe, be careful, if necessary trust to chance. In the end how I found myself within these walls. Tragedy, fate, unfathomable destiny have supplied both the primary material and the spirit to this situation, in which I would never have imagined myself.
I’ve been in one place for too long. Torpor of the spirit generates torpor of the limbs. I went off wandering the minute I heard voices asking for Vogel. It was over again. Or rather I was off again, headed for who knows where. They’re searching for survivors. Away, twenty-six years. The army of ragged insurgents. To destroy them. So, off again without a word. To a living soul.
A beggar among beggars, with a load of unbearable letters, memories and suspicions.
Chance has dragged my ragged clothes through paths and taverns, villages and inns, markets and barns. Chance joined the bitter and thoughtless fate of the merchant Niemanson with my own, on the twenty-seventh day of June, at the end of infinite and solitary roamings.
He nervously inquired about the safety of the roads towards the south, asking when would be the best time to leave. It was clear that he was transporting precious goods. Beneath his coat the enticing bulge of a pale leather purse: love at first sight. A servant forced to bed for a few days, infected by some whore or other, obliging him to travel on his own, at dawn the next day.
I follow him at a distance for about five miles, until the road takes a wide bend into a wooded zone, low hills, completely isolated. I run up alongside the cart and beckon agitatedly at him to stop.
‘Excuse me, excuse me!’
‘What do you want?’ he asks, scratching his eyebrow and pulling his reins.
‘Your servant, sir…’
‘What’s up, what do you want?’
‘He doesn’t seem as ill as all that. They picked him up this morning trying to sneak out of the inn. He had a big bag full of precious objects that I think may be part of your load,’ and as I say this I show him the bag holding Magister Thomas’s correspondence.
‘The bastard! It can’t be his stuff, he’s skint. Wait there, I’ll come and see.’
He gets down, comes over, I grip the strap of the bag with my left hand, he leans over to look. The stick quickly comes down on the back of his neck.
He goes down like a dry tree.
I block his arms with my knees, three times round him with the rope and a good tight knot.
I liberate the bag from the belt and roll him into a ditch. It’s done.
I cut the tangle of cords holding the load and jump up to take a look; fabrics, rolls of various type and colour. Poor bastard, a bit of a setback to your business. And even your clothes won’t be much use to you for the time being. Or the name that I read carved into the side of the cart: ‘Lucas Niemanson, weaver in Bamberg.’
Augsburg, 3_rd__ August 1527_
Johannes Denck is in Augsburg. I’ve had some news of him along the way, and now I know exactly where to look for him. The most important figure behind the big meeting of the pastors of all the communities, which has been in preparation for the last couple of weeks, is the young veteran of the revolt.
The house pointed out to me is set back off a street of wool-merchants. A tall, slim woman with a baby at her waist opens the door to me, followed by the uncertain running steps of a little girl who immediately hides between her mother’s legs. I’m an old friend of her husband’s, I haven’t seen him for years. I stay in the doorway and the little girl stares at me curiously.
Johannes Denck: a firm embrace and clear eyes filled with disbelief.
He gives me a drink from a flask on his belt and a sincere, silent smile. He touches my arms, my shoulders, as though to be certain that I’m not a ghost re-emerging from the abyss of his worst nightmares. Yes, it’s me. But forget my name unless you want to do the cops a favour. He laughs happily.
‘What should I call you? Lazarus? The Resurrected?’
‘For two years I’ve been Gustav Metzger. Now I’m Lucas Niemanson, textile merchant. Tomorrow, who knows…’
He keeps on staring at me in stupefaction. It’s difficult for both of us to find words, to know how to begin. Then we stay there like that, in silence, for an infinity, thinking about everything. That afternoon M�hlhausen is an island far from the world and far from life, where we both turned up one day, perhaps, in search of the way of the Lord. Coming from distant places and heading for different fates.
‘On your own?’
His voice is heavy and thick with memories.
‘Yes.’
He lowers his head to dredge up a face, an expression, a yell of euphoria and hope echoing into the far distance.
‘How?’
‘Luck, my friend, luck and perhaps a little bit of divine goodness that wanted to help me. What about you?’
His eyes widen with the effort of remembering, as though he’s talking about his childhood. ‘We got bogged down somewhere around Eisenach. I’d managed to recruit about a hundred men and get hold of a small cannon. But we ran into a column of soldiers who forced us to seek refuge in a village whose name I don’t even remember.’ He eyes stare at something over my head. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t make it. I was no help to you.’
He seems more distressed than I am. I think about how many times during those two years he must have felt once more the powerlessness of that day.
‘You’d only have been more cannon-fodder. There were eight thousand of us and I don’t know of anyone who got away.’
‘Except you.’
I give a twisted smile and look for the irony in the disaster. ‘Someone had to tell the story.’
‘And that was you. That’s what counts.’
‘We’ve lost everything.’
His eyes smile, with a wisdom that I hadn’t remembered. ‘Can’t you think of anything that it might be worth losing everything for?’
A grimace of amusement is all I manage to give him. But I know he’s right, and I’d like to be able to blow away the past as easily as he does.
He turns serious, he’s had plenty of time to reflect. ‘When I knew they’d sentenced Magister Thomas and Pfeiffer to death, I too thought it was over. They say another hundred thousand people were killed that in the reprisals after Frankenhausen. I got away, I hid in the woods and tried to save my skin. For months I didn’t sleep in the same bed two nights in a row. But I wasn’t alone, no, I had the hope of making contact with the brethren in the other towns, all my friends and colleagues from university. That kept me alive, it gave me the strength not to sit down on the ground and wait for the final blow. If I’d stopped, I wouldn’t be here to welcome you now.’
We move outside, into the courtyard behind the house, where some moth-eaten chickens are pecking about in the dust, and two boar-skins are drying in the sun like worn old sails.
It’s my turn
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