Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖

Antwerp, 10th May 1538

The vegetable garden’s ready. Everyone compliments me. No one asks any questions; who I really am, what I did before fetching up here… I’m one of their own: one brother among the rest.

Magda, Kathleen’s daughter, still gives me presents; Balthasar asks me after my health at least twice a day, as you would a recovering patient.

‘I’m still alive,’ I tell him, to make him laugh. He’s a good fellow, the old Anabaptist. It seems that his job is to find buyers for the goods manufactured here, and he does it well.’

I don’t ask him any questions either, I’m learning by the day, studying these people’s secrets.

I asked Kathleen about her daughter’s father. She said he boarded a ship two years ago, and then not a word. Shipwrecked, abandoned on some enemy island, or alive and indolent in a palace filled with gold and diamonds, in the kingdoms of the Indies. The same fate that I was after before I ran into these men and women.

Eloi keeps prodding me gently, he wants the next part of the story: clearly he wants to hear about M�nster. The City of Madness has the fascination of fantastic things, it’s the shiver that the name still provokes, a shiver that was once an earthquake. He’s already asked Balthasar all about it, but I followed that path to the end: Gert-of-the-Well was a hero, lieutenant to the great Matthys, the best at carrying out reprisals, at pillaging inside the bishop’s camp, at putting out fliers and the message of the Baptists: Balthasar must have told him that as well.

Yes, Gerrit Boekbinder tempered the iron with his own hands.

Then one day, without a word, he left, tired, sickened, all of a sudden aware of the abyss of horror that had opened up beneath the New Jerusalem.

Gert thinks again about the child judges, their index fingers raised.� He remembers those people who died of hunger, dragging themselves through the snow like white maggots. Once again he feels the pangs of starvation and the relief of that final dash beyond the walls, towards the iniquity of the world, but far from the omnipotent and bloody delirium.

And yet once he was out he didn’t find Eloi Pruystinck waiting for him with open arms, just more blood and fresh visions of glory and death. Gert fell again, recruited for the Last Battle, with the mark of the elect branded on his arm. Once again Gert saw the same banner billowing behind Batenburg the Terrible, and he couldn’t stop. Gert fell in love with that blood and he went on, he went on.

He went on.

Eloi has that expectant look that I know by now; he pours a glass for both of us, which makes the story easier to tell.

I pick up the thread of my memories: ‘We headed northwards, Hofmann and I, following the course of the Rhine, on a merchants’ barge. We passed through Worms, Mainz, Cologne, up to Arnhem. I had managed to impose silence upon my travelling companion until we found ourselves in Frisia: I didn’t want to risk seeing myself being stopped along the way. It was hard for him, but he kept his word. Once we had left the course of the Rhine, we set off on foot and on mules, always heading northwards. We moved from one village to another, along the borders of the Low Countries, towards the countryside of East Frisia. Hofmann had already been in these parts during his long itinerant preachings, and this time, too, he didn’t neglect to instruct the peasants of these moorlands about the obligatory choices that the events of the time required all Christians to make: following Christ in his example of life. He rebaptised them all, like a new St John.

‘Meanwhile he told me about the situation in Emden, our next stop. There were many refugees in that town, most of them Dutch Sacramentists, as he called them, those who no longer accepted the sacraments of the Church of Rome and didn’t believe in transubstantiation. This, he explained to me, pushed them beyond the positions held by Luther, opening them up to the clear promise of the millennium. He described them as stray dogs, waiting for a prophet to bring them the message of hope and the light of renewed faith. He defined that journey as “our desert”, which would temper us, putting our faith to the test and improving the justification of the Lord through absolute obedience to Christ. I indulged him, without trying to extract myself from the fascination that his words managed to exercise over the humble: I was really dumbfounded by that strength. I hadn’t told him that I had fought beside Thomas M�ntzer: his condemnation of violence held me back. He used to reserve a lapidary phrase for me, every time I provoked him by referring to the possibility that Christ would call His army of the elect to Himself, to exterminate the wicked: “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.”

‘We reached Emden in June. It was a cold little town, a stop-over for merchant ships between Hamburg and the Dutch cities. The community of foreigners was a large one, as Hofmann had predicted. The reigning prince, Count Enno II, allowed the ideas of the Church reformers to take their course on his lands, without trying to obstruct them in any way. My Elijah began to preach in the streets from the day we got there, drawing everyone’s attention. It seemed clear that the other preachers wouldn’t have been able to compete with him, he’d have made mincemeat of them. After a few weeks he had rebaptised at least three hundred people, and was in a position to found a community that would bring in discontented people of the most diverse origins and conditions. Above all they had left the papist Church and were dissatisfied with the Lutheran church, which, even without priests and bishops, already boasted a hierarchy of theologians and doctors not much different from the one it had wanted to abolish.

‘The notoriety of the Anabaptists reached us almost immediately, and frightened the city authorities half to death.

‘Events were going on around me, I felt the earth moving under my feet and a strange sensation in the air. No, I hadn’t been infected by my travelling companion: it was the sense of imminent events, the call of the life that Ursula had talked to me about. That was why I decided to leave Hofmann to his preacher’s fate and follow my own path. A path that would take me elsewhere, into the eye of the storm. It’s hard to say whether I was the one who guided my own life towards the boundaries that needed to be crossed, or whether it was the torment itself that pulled me along with it.

‘The authorities in Emden expelled Hofmann as an undesirable troublemaker. He told me he would come back and start writing again, that his task up here was done. He assigned the leadership of the new community to a certain Jan Volkertz, a maker of clogs, known as Trijpmaker. This Dutchman, from Hoorn, was not a great orator, but he knew his Bible, and had the expression of the man who had inspired him, and the same spirit of initiative. I bade farewell to old Melchior Hofmann at the gate of the town, as they escorted him out of the territory of Emden. He was smiling, naive and trusting as ever, confessing to me in a low voice that he was certain that the Day of Judgement would come within three years. I too gave him my last smile. And that’s how I remember him, a distant farewell, as he sways out of my view on a bony old mule.’

*

I’m still not clear about what Eloi is after. He sits in silence behind the table, rapt by the story, perhaps even with his mouth open, in the semi-darkness that prevents me from clearly making out his face.

I continue, having decided by now decided to get to the end and astound him with each page of this unwritten chronicle.

‘I wouldn’t see Melchior Hofmann again until two years later, when he came to Holland to reap what he had sown. But I was telling you about Emden. Trijpmaker and I had stayed there to look after the well-being of the Anabaptist community, and it was almost Christmas when we received the injunction to leave the city. I wasn’t displeased: I felt I had to move on, that I couldn’t stay here in this Northern port. We decided at night, with the determination and the spirit of someone who knows he is confronting a major task: The Low Countries, with the exiles who were slowly managing to cross the border and return to their towns of origin, opened up at our feet like an unexplored territory, ready to receive the message and the challenge that we represented for the governing authorities. Nothing would stop us. For Trijpmaker it was a mission, as it had been for Hofmann. For me it was another push towards the horizon, a way of driving things along, new land, new people.

‘We would make for Amsterdam. Along the way Trijpmaker would teach me a few phrases in Dutch so that I could make myself understood, but he would be the one who did the preaching and the baptising. He started straight away: before leaving Emden he baptised a tailor, a certain Sicke Freerks, who then returned to the town of his birth, Leeuwarden, in Western Frisia, where he had the task of founding a community of brothers, and where instead he was put to death the following year at the hand of the executioner.

‘While we were travelling towards the south-west, passing through Groningen, Assen, and Meppel to Holland, Trijpmaker enlightened me about the situation in his country. The Low Countries were the commercial and manufacturing heart of the Empire, it was from there that the Emperor derived the majority of his income. The port cities enjoyed a certain autonomy, but they had to defend it tooth and claw against the centralising desires of the Emperor. Charles V was still annexing new territories, allowing his troops to roam through the country, doing severe damage to communications and crops. Additionally, the Habsburg seemed to prefer exposed Spain to his native land, and he had placed his officials in many important positions and