by Anne Boileau
We sat on our horses and watched the surface roiling with black shiny backs as they broke the smooth surface of the water.
“It’s beautiful here. So tranquil. And so many fish.”
“Yes, it is beautiful. The ponds were built by monks over three hundred years ago.”
Martin then explained to me the complexities of carp farming. In spring the breeding process has to be managed carefully. His face lit up with enthusiasm as he explained to me how they trick the breeding stock into spawning, something about a special shallow pond and grass tickling their tummies. I did not listen carefully. I feigned interest but really I just watched him talking, the way he moved his hands and flashed his eyes to illustrate the carp, explaining how they bred and grew. He is a man with boundless energy. Whatever task he takes on, he does it to the hilt. I admire him for that.
As he was telling me all this, we saw an elderly man walking slowly towards us along one of the causeways between the ponds, holding a long pole with a net on the end. He must have come out from a little wooden hut on the other side. Martin said to me:
“Will you be all right if I leave you here for a while? I need to walk around the ponds with the warden.”
“I’ll be fine. Leave your horse here.”
Glad to be alone, I dismounted and tied the horses to a post, leaving them to graze. I gazed across the ponds, churning with fish; the air above them was alive with birds and insects and on the margins of the ponds, reeds, rushes and sedge. Beyond the ponds is an area of alder carr and young willows and beyond that I could see the forest proper.
I imagined getting lost in the dark, wet woods at night, like Little Red Riding Hood. Wolves running silently under the moon, wild boar plunging clumsily through the brush, red deer, brown bears, foxes, lynx; all these animals, and so many more, live in the forest, respect each other, avoid each other, prey on each other; they work out an uneasy but viable alliance and equilibrium. We fear the forest and the wild, but they probably fear us too and with reason.
But out there it was warm and bright. A deep sense of tranquillity came over me, on the edge of this wide smooth pond; the air thrumming with insects, herons standing like sentinels on the banks. Two buzzards were circling overhead, and a flock of cranes fly in a phalanx towards the forest, their long legs stretched out behind, their elegant necks stretched out in front, crowns on their heads. A nightingale pours out his repertoire of rattles, bubbles and long liquid notes of gold. I will cherish this moment. I am happy and I know it. I am young and in good health. I have married a man of rare distinction. I have a task to do, and am determined to do it well. Perhaps, God willing, we shall be blessed with children. I feel like the swallows, flittering above me with such palpable joy, meeting and greeting each other in flight.
The two men are walking back towards me on the spit of land between two ponds. The warden is carrying something, and as he approaches me he makes a little bow, and says:
“Good Lady, God bless you and your husband. This fish is for you.”
He holds it up for me to see; its eyes are rolling, its mouth gaping open and shut, its fins quivering. A fine, fat, shiny carp. It must weigh at least eight pounds.
I thank him. He lays it on the grass and from his pocket pulls out a creel, into which he slips the reluctant fish, head first; then he binds it up with sedge, dips it in the stream and says:
“He’ll be fine until you get home. Then just put him in your cleansing tank and wait two weeks. I promise he’ll make a tasty meal for you and your household.”
I laugh and thank the man. Martin tightens his girth and mounts, the warden holding his bridle. Then he hands him up the fish bag, which Martin ties to his saddlebag hook.
The sun is sinking as we ride home, back towards the three towers of Wittenberg: the round tower of Castle Church and the two square towers of the Town Church, silhouetted against a pink and blue streaked sky. The fields are empty now. As we approach the city gates church bells start to ring out across the fields. I am tired and hungry but deeply contented; I feel the warmth of the mare beneath me. We shall eat together, my husband and I. Say that word again: husband. And we shall talk, and tell each other stories.
Chapter 16
Martin a Rock
Wie ein Brief ein Siegel braucht, so braucht der Glaube die Werke.
As a letter needs a seal, so faith needs good deeds.
I soon came to know the pattern of life at the Cloister, the routine and timetables.
On two days a week the collegium biblicum convene in the Doctor’s study; the translation team consists of Melanchthon, Cruciger, Aurogallus and Dr Luther, who presides and has the final say; his secretary Rörer joins them as recorder and scribe. The four theologians pore over the Hebrew Old Testament, teasing out of it the essence of its meaning, putting it into the simplest and purest vernacular.
Their translations are not the first, so why are they so much more resonant than the previous German Bibles? The collegium translate not from the old (and sometimes imprecise) Latin translations but direct from the original Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament. They use as a starting point the Meissen officialese, because there are so many dialects in German, and they had to settle for one; but to make it more accessible, Martin weaves in proverbs and folk songs; he employs rhyme and cadence to make it easier for people to learn by heart and make it more musical for singing and reading aloud. My husband is not only a scholar and learned theologian and linguist, he is also a poet, and this shines through in the beauty of the German text. It sounds smooth and natural, as if it had been easy to translate, but he said once: “Dear God, it is such hard work, and so difficult, to make the Hebrew writers speak German!”
He likes to go into the market or sit quietly in the beer tent at a fair so he can listen to ordinary Saxon folk chatting, exchanging news, views, gossip. It brings him back to earth, and reminds him of how ordinary people really do speak. Of course much of what he writes – papers, essays and so forth – is in Latin for the learned, but when translating the Scriptures into German he is doing it for the common people, and so it needs to be close to the vernacular, in language as accessible and acceptable to the ploughman as it is to the learned and the gentry.
You might ask, why did he defy the Church in the first place, thereby putting himself in mortal danger, and bringing turmoil to the people?
He told me about his Tower Experience. It was after our visit to the Carp Ponds. We ate alone that evening; after the table was cleared, he fetched a flagon of wine. We sat at the table, with just one candle burning, making the red wine glow like garnets; and we talked. Did I ask him about it, or did he just choose to describe to me the moment of his enlightenment? I don’t remember but this was, in essence, what he said to me.
“It was in the winter of 1516; I call it my Tower Experience because it was a revelation and it happened in the Tower Room, which has been my study since I became Professor of Bible. People laugh about it and say I was sitting in the privy battling with constipation. They can laugh. And yes, I suppose it was a sort of constipation, a spiritual blockage to understanding the nature of God and His love for us. But I was not sitting on the privy, I was in my little study. It was a cold, windy night and the fire was smouldering sulkily. My lamp was flickering in the draught and I drew a woollen rug around my shoulders. I should have given up and gone to bed but I was striving to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith.’ I always came to a halt at that expression: ‘the righteousness of God’. I understood the word righteousness to mean God punishing the guilty, administering justice. I had been an exemplary monk, but I still felt guilty and unable to win God’s love and approval. I came to realise that I did not love Him as one should love a Father, but actually hated and feared Him. As a monk I had tried to appease him with self-denial, hairshirts, physical deprivation; but however hard I tried, I never seemed to win hi
s approval or love.
“All that night and the following day I struggled with the text, trying to make out what Saint Paul really meant. This is an extract from his letter to the Romans:
‘Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.’
I read and re-read the whole letter, trying to unravel it, tease out the real meaning. I daresay I forgot to eat or drink; I thought and thought and prayed and prayed. At last, in a flash, I was given God’s grace; the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement: ‘since we are justified by faith’. By believing in Him we are saved! At that point I felt as if I had been reborn and had gone through open doors into Paradise! The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning and ‘the righteousness of God’ was inexpressibly comforting, like a gate into heaven.
“Righteousness is given to the sinner as a gift from God. He meets the conditions and the believer need do nothing other than have complete faith in the promises of Christ. Christ is full of grace, life and salvation. The human soul is full of sin, death and damnation. Now let faith come between them. Sin, death and damnation will then be Christ’s, and grace, life and salvation will be the believer’s.
“It came to me that we are here to enjoy life as children do; to love each other, to wonder at nature and music and mathematics and art; to marry, experience marital love and have children. Extreme austerity is unnecessary, merely self-restraint; we should allow ourselves freedom, joyfulness, appreciation of being alive; and above all faith. Jesus Christ is our Redeemer, through having died for our sins. To us true Christians it is the greatest comfort to know that God the Father so loved the world that he did not spare his only begotten Son, but gave him up for us all, and that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. That was how I came to an understanding of the Scriptures. My anger at God melted away. My whole being was filled with joy.”
“Thank you for telling me that,” I said to Martin, and took his hands in mine. “And surely it was God’s will that you should give up the Law and enter the Monastery, and go on to study Theology. It was your destiny to shed light on the Holy Scriptures and share your revelation with the People.”
We sat quietly together for several minutes, holding hands at the table. The dog snored. An owl hooted in the dark night. I could feel my love for him growing within my very core.
Before I married him, I saw the public face of this great man. And he is a great man, one cannot deny it. But deep down he is fearful, full of doubt and anxiety. When we were first married and shared a bed he was plagued with recurrent nightmares. He would groan and toss about and break out in a sweat. Then he would cry out and sit up staring about him with wide, unseeing eyes. The first time this happened the hair stood up on my head.
“Dear husband, what is it? Wake up, wake up!” I shook him, embraced him, pulled his hair, but he was oblivious of me. I slapped his face, and squeezed his earlobe with my fingernails and this had the magic effect of waking him! Then I hugged him tight and rocked him in my arms like a child.
“Oh Kathe, I had this dreadful dream. I saw a hare running, jigging to and fro, its ears flat on its back. It looked so scared. Then I saw it was being hunted by a pack of silent hounds – they had red eyes and scaly tails, and suddenly I knew that I was the hare, they were after me, and my legs were growing heavy, I couldn’t run any more. It’s a sign, Käthchen, it’s all my fault. The peasants rampaging about, the bandits and angry hordes. I feel responsible. I never meant, I never thought my words could be so misconstrued. How can we cork up the bottle again, how can we stop it happening? The thugs, they roam about attacking castles and manors, stealing stock, killing farmers and abusing their women. They ransack whole villages, you’ve seen all the poor refugees arriving in town, with their possessions in one creaky ox-cart, leaving their homes for fear of such brutal attacks. Then I wrote that pamphlet calling on landowners to kill the peasants when they act aggressively, and now so many are dying and they all blame me. The end of the world is near. I am afraid, for you, for all of us.”
And so it was, two or three nights a week, for several months, I had to release him from his horrific nightmares. They took on different forms, but usually the same sort of thing – he was the quarry, being hunted down. It was not only his mind which was troubled – he suffered from chronic constipation, headaches, fever and sweats and agony from kidney stones. I have tried all sorts of remedies for these various afflictions: prunes for his constipation, ginger tea for indigestion, feverfew for headaches, melilot for his troubled spirit. Only a few weeks ago he was plagued with stones. “What can I get you?” I asked him in consternation, and he said “Give me a fried herring with cold peas and mustard.” I was unsure, but got what he craved, and sure enough, he passed a stone that evening and felt much better. I see that he eats more regularly now; all that fasting in the monastery played havoc with his digestion. His bad dreams have stopped too, thank the Lord. But we are not alone in worrying about Apocalypse.
Albrecht Dürer, the painter from Nürnberg, wrote to Lucas Cranach about a dream he had. He dreamt that a great flood would cover the earth, probably this year; all towns and cities along the valleys would be inundated; in France too, we have heard tell, they have prepared for such an event: an ark has been built and made ready in Villefranche. But in the midst of all this turmoil, the breakdown of law and order, the anticipation of the Second Coming, what can you do? Life must go on. And we in Wittenberg are luckier than many, for this place seems to be comparatively peaceful, thank God. Which is why so many refugees try to settle here, and they have to be strict about who they give residence permits to. Whatever happens in the world, we women have to carry on growing and preparing food, giving birth, looking after our children, our elderly. Anyway, I am happy being married to Martin. Deep down, despite the fear, I am happier than I have ever been before and this is because I know he is too.
Recently at table he said: “Where would we be ourselves if there were no marriage? The world sees only the shortcomings and disadvantages of marriage, she fails to see the great joy and usefulness. We have all crept out of a woman’s womb: emperors, kings, princes. Even Christ himself was not ashamed to be born of woman.”
We have a beautiful new bed. One of the first things I did when we were betrothed and it was acceptable for me to come into the Black Cloister to make things ready, was to throw out Martin’s bed; it was foul and stinking, no more than a sack stuffed with crumbled straw, covered with filthy greasy sheets. I pushed it out of the window into the yard below, ran downstairs and set alight to it with a taper from the kitchen range. It exploded into flames and the bed bugs sizzled and popped! I was reminded of my Stepmother, how she had done the same when she arrived at our own neglected home, and perhaps I forgave her a little.
I spent a whole week scouring and sweeping and throwing things out. I ordered a cartload of sand and strewed all the floors and swept them out, the clean white s
and becoming brown with accumulated filth. I wiped down all the shelves and washed the windows; I scrubbed and washed and mopped, then I shut up each room one by one and fumigated it with baldrian to get rid of fleas and bugs and cockroaches. I set mousetraps in the larders and kitchen and rat traps in all the outbuildings. Finally, I polished all the furniture with beeswax and strewed the clean cupboards with freshly dried lavender.
Coming into the house like this was not without its problems. Dorothea had worked for Martin for five years and resented my intrusion; she took my zealous cleaning as an insult. She and I had a stand up row in the kitchen. She stood with her arms on her hips, shaking her jowls at me.
“This is my kitchen, Fräulein. What do you think you’re doing coming in here turning everything on its head, tipping sand all over my floors, lighting up fires in the yard? I won’t have it.”
“Dorothea, I’m sorry to have to say this. But this will be my house shortly. When I am Frau Doktor Luther I will be mistress of this household. You’ve been in charge here for many years and you’ve done a fine job, but soon I will be coming in to run the house. If you can’t accept me as mistress in this house, I suggest you look for another position. I’m sure the Doctor will give you excellent references.”
So to my consternation and guilt, Dorothea packed her bags, called for a cart, and with a defiant flourish drove away, not even saying where she was going. I felt terrible but Martin wasn’t worried. “She’ll be back. She’s done this before.” To my huge relief, she did indeed return after two weeks, as Martin had predicted. She and I have been friends ever since; we work well together, though not without the occasional storm; I have to stand my ground with her, and she with me.
As I was saying, our new bed is a fine four-poster, carved in the best oak, with a canopy of blue damask drapes bordered in red brocade. The horsehair mattress is new, our sheets are best Irish linen and our quilt is pure goose down; we also have a soft woollen blanket from England. So on our wedding night we lay side by side, in our new bed decorated with honeysuckle and meadow flowers by Barbara and Frau Reichenbach. Lucas and Barbara Cranach, Nikolaus von Amsdorf and the pastor Bugenhagen acted as our witnesses.