Q by Luther Blissett (most recommended books txt) 📖
- Author: Luther Blissett
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During a pause, the pig questions me: ‘What’s a fine little gentleman like you doing in a pig-sty like this?
His full mouth dribbles. He wipes it with his hand and then burps.
Without looking at him, I say, ‘The horse needs to rest and I need to eat.’
‘No, my little chap. What you’re doing in this shithole of a fucking war.’
‘Defending the princes from the rebels…’ I haven’t time to go on.
‘Ah… Right, got you, got you… from a few flea-ridden bums,’ he chews, ‘from a gang of beggars,’ he swallows, ‘ what times we live in, young boys defending the lords from the peasants,’ he burps again. ‘I tell you, my little fellow, this is the shittiest of all the shitty wars that I’ve seen with my one eye. It’s all money, my friend, nothing but money and business as far as those pigs in Rome are concerned. The bishops with all their whores and children to support! Hard cash, listen, the princes, the dukes, the lucky sods, they don’t think about anything else. First they take everything the yokels own, and then they send us in to thrash the living daylights out of anyone who gets pissed off . Maybe I’m too old for all this bollocks. Fucking arseholes! But this time we should’ve turned the cannons on the princes and the Pope’s lickspittles. They really showed what they were made of, the hayseeds did: they burned down the castles and� everything in them, they fucked the countesses up the arse, disembowelled the priests, fuck’s sake! Oh, they’re always going on about God, but they smashed everything, I was that close to joining in as well, but I knew how things would turn out, the poor always get it in the neck. And we always end up with thruppence. This is for that lot.’ He farts, sniggers, swigs. ‘Fuck it!’
�I stop eating, somewhere between surprise and distaste. I like this fat guy, he’s got a mouth like a sewer but he hates the lords. I’m encouraged: they’re made of flesh and blood, not just hard, honed iron.
‘And where were you?’ I ask him.
‘In Eisenach, then Salza, then I got fed up breaking my arms over the backs of the poor creatures. It was really disgusting. I’ve got too old for all that bollocks, I’m forty years of age, fuck’s sake, twenty of them spent on this shit. And what about you, young sir?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘No, no: where have you been?’
‘Frankenhausen.’
‘Bloody hell!!! You’ve been in the middle of the Last Judgement? From what I hear, there’s never been anything like it.’
‘That’s right, mate.’
‘So tell me… That preacher, that prophet, that, um, the tough bloke, what’s his name…? Oh yes: M�ntzer. The Coiner. What happened to him?’
Careful.
‘They got him.’
‘He’s not dead?’
‘No. I saw him being carried away. A member of the troop who caught him told me he fought like a lion, getting him was difficult, the soldiers were intimidated by the look on his face and the words he was coming out with. While they were carrying him away on the cart you could still hear him shouting, “Omnia sunt communia!”’
‘And what the fuck does that mean?’
‘Everything belongs to everyone.’
‘Shit. What a man! And you know Latin?’
He sneers. I lower my eyes.
24 May 1525A few hours’ travel and the hills of the Thuringian Forest were already a luminous patch in the deep grey of the sky behind me. I had just passed the fortress of Coburg, and was making for the inn in the town of Ebern. Another two days of marching, three at the most, along the wooded valleys of High Franconia that were beginning to spread out before me. A wide road, normally crowded with merchants’ carts between the Itz and the Main. That evening in Ebern, the next day in Forschheim, to avoid the prying eyes of Bamberg, then to Nuremberg and finally on to Bibra.
For the first time I felt I’d be able to do it. That exhaustion that’s starting to flood back into me, I’d forgotten it, it was cancelled out by that strength that can drag us over the brink of defeat.
*
They came towards me from the distance, while the sky was filling with clouds: sorrowful, tattered, tragic. A thin mist advanced ahead of them, faint, greyish light mixed with the drizzle that blurs vision and breath, in the clearing in the narrow valley that I was hoping to have passed through by sunset.�
They were moving slowly, they might have covered several hours since dawn, after a night pitched in some unimaginable camp somewhere, and ahead of them lay the unbearable darkness of a journey with no destination.
They had no carts, or oxen or horses. Bags over their shoulders. A torrent of refugees, a deluge of misery passing through the splendid towers of Coburg.
That column of massacred humanity crept onwards, crushed under Heaven’s massive heel. Exhaustedly dragging furniture with them, invalids groaning under sweat-drenched bandages, old people laid on improvised stretchers. Ceaseless litanies and the howls of babies wailing out their woes.
A few women tried to give the shambling bodies some kind of direction: they would pass up and down the wretched line, comforting the wounded or encouraging people to go on whenever they sank beneath the weight of their misfortune. Always with children bound to shoulders, arms and laps; tragic, proud faces. That unimaginable, solemn strength had breathed life into the wretched flesh of who knows what villages, perhaps the very one I passed through days ago, or another one, or another still. Is there a single scrap of the world that has escaped the cataclysm?
I followed the exhaustion of their footsteps, keeping my distance, a few yards away on the right, motionless for a while, an eternity. Every now and again a glance, an imploring lament would pierce me to the quick. Hundreds of men under a single soldier: not a gesture of contempt, not a sign of reaction. Exhausted, all of them, stupefied in the face of their ruin. And it was to me, a runaway got up like a murderer, that they addressed the prayer of the dispossessed.
Then, out of the lifeless mass, a woman’s face turns towards me. Vivid, in its terrible exhaustion, detaching itself from the weeping column, entrusting to other arms the two starving children she was bringing with her.
‘We have nothing, soldier. Nothing but the wounds of the cripples and the tears of our children. What else can you steal from us?’
I had no words to soothe the remorse I feel for my powerlessness and the guilt of being alive, as I stared into those proud eyes, nails driven into my flesh. I should have got down from my horse, picked up her children, given them money and help. I should have helped my people, the army of the elect, lost in mud that they had no way out of. I should have got down and stayed there.
I struck my horse’s flanks, hard. Almost blindly.
Eltersdorf, Franconia, 10 June 1525
This business of earning your daily bread is really sad and wearisome. People come up with the most pious lies about work. It’s just another abominable form of idolatry, a dog licking the rod that beats it: work.
At the axe and chopping block from daybreak. I chop firewood in the courtyard separating the orchard and the stable from Vogel’s garden.
Wolfgang Vogel: as far as everyone’s concerned he’s the pastor of Eltersdorf, Luther’s successor; for Hut he’s excellent help in the distribution of books, leaflets, manifestos; the insurgent peasants know him as ‘Read-the-Bible’, from that phrase he’s always coming out with: ‘Now that God is talking to you in your language, you have to learn to read the Bible on your own. You don’t need teachers to help you.’ ‘Then we don’t need you either,’ was the most common riposte, but he never let it put him off.
And good for Read-the-Bible: a warm welcome, a slap on the back, keen to know who’s alive and who’s dead, and here I am with an axe in my hand, looking at a pile of firewood. I’ve only been here two days and I’ve got to earn my hospitality.
Hut wasn’t in Bibra, the printing-works were closed. They told me he’d passed that way the week before, but had soon set off for northern Franconia, to baptise as many more people as he could. Like a wayfarer arriving at an inn in flames and asking what’s for dinner. When I learned that Vogel was back in Eltersdorf, after I’d changed horses and got hold of some provisions, off I went.
Eltersdorf. I’ve got a room, a plate of soup and a new name: Gustav Metzger. I’m still alive, I don’t know how. I won’t be setting off again for a while.
*
Eltersdorf, summer 1525
Long, unbearable days. Cleaning the stable, stacking wood, filling the pigs’ troughs, waiting for the sow to spawn. Picking the fruit in the little orchard, mending the worn-out tools. Repetitive tasks, movements imposed on the limbs, for the equivalent of a bowl of dog-food.
Meanwhile the news reaching us from outside tells of massacres all over the place: the princes’ retaliation turned out to be more than a match for the gauntlet we threw them. The peasants’ heads are still bowed over their ploughs: they’re no longer the men who used their scythes as swords.
There’s hardly anyone in the village that I can exchange more than a couple of words with. I go to the mill to have Vogel’s grain ground and I bump into someone in the street, a few jokes about Pastor Wolfgang, the only person in the village with any wheat for the miller.
One of the few pleasant things about the day is chatting with Hermann, a slow-witted peasant who tends Vogel’s orchard. He actually does almost all the talking, while axe-blows fall on the logs of wood, because everyone, he says, is born with the hands he deserves, and the ones he was born with had calluses already, and literate people like myself should only touch books. He smiles, his mouth half-toothless, and he swears that this war was won by poor people like himself. He talks about the time they took the count’s castle and for ten days they had themselves served by the count and his men, while at night they fucked the lady and her daughters. That had been their great victory: no one imagines keeping the powerful low for long, apart from anything because if the peasants governed and the lords worked the land, everyone would quickly die of hunger, because everyone gets the hands they deserve… And yet, for a lord, licking the feet of a servant and having to stir some yokel’s porridge is the most devastating defeat of all. For people like Hermann it’s the most sacred of pleasures. He laughs like a madman, spitting and spluttering all over the place, and to please him even more I tell him that, perhaps, the next count will be his own son, and that’s a good way of bringing down the powerful: get their wives up the duff and pollute their stock with plebs.
With Vogel, on the other hand, there isn’t much talking to be done. He’s a fine enough man, but I don’t like him: he says that fate and the supreme will of God decreed that the terrible massacre of defenceless people was something that must take place, that the unfathomable supreme power exhorts us to understand through his signs, even signs
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