In the afternoon we turned southeast into one of the numerous branches the Old Rhine had split off into before it finally headed south. Mulder must indeed have been an experienced boatman, for there were no landmarks, no docks, no villages, no signs by which he could have oriented himself. But I had watched him repeatedly inspecting the water and checking its hue, having his people bring samples aboard in a small wooden bucket, sniffing it, tasting it, and swishing it around in his mouth before spitting it out. In some places the water level was so low that Mulder had the sail taken in and the boats propelled with poles until the shallow area had been overcome and the sail could be set again.
In the evening there was cooked eel with pearl barley. I wolfed down the greasy porridge voraciously, for I had eaten nothing all day but a bit of cold poultry early in the morning, shortly before we had ridden off. The boatmen were quite simple fellows. They ate and drank raucously, farted audibly, and laughed a lot, but they obeyed Mulder’s every word. They cast timid glances at me out of the corners of their eyes. Probably their Kapitein had given them specific instructions and held out the prospect of a thrashing with his riding crop should they pay me undue attention. He brought me a wooden bucket, and I nodded to him gratefully, for I wouldn’t have known how to use the railing to relieve myself; the boatmen had it easier and urinated uninhibitedly into the river. Might Mulder have transported passengers who had come from the tunnel inland before?
“Has a young woman named Renata ever traveled to Cologne with you?” I asked him.
The Kapitein thought for a moment, then shook his head. “When would that have been?” he asked.
“Seven or eight years ago. Or maybe nine or ten.”
“My father was still sailing at that time. But I was usually there. No, I can’t remember any Renata,” he replied.
When it got dark, I retreated into my woven hut and spread my cloak out on the mattress. Cold crept up from the water. I wrapped myself in the thin blanket and all the clothing I had with me. No question, I would have to buy myself a sheepskin.
In the middle of the night I was awakened by angry shouts. It was Mulder’s voice; he was quarreling with someone on the shore and swearing at him. I stuck my head out of my dwelling. The boat had stopped; the sail had been lowered. On both shores were torches, and men with long knives in their hands. An attack? Mulder stood in the bow and swung his horsewhip threateningly, but his adversaries didn’t seem particularly impressed. Next to him crouched one of his men, aiming a crossbow. I withdrew my head, although it was clear to me that the woven rushes didn’t offer me the slightest protection if the opposition was similarly armed. To the extent I could follow the confrontation, however, it seemed to be more a matter of threatening gestures and concrete haggling. Our passage was barred by a chain, and the men on the shore wanted to collect a toll, which Mulder first considered unwarranted and then completely excessive. The highwaymen demanded for each boat a cask of Vinho de Lamego, the Portuguese sweet wine from Oporto, and a barrel of Spanish olives. Finally they agreed to half. The chain was unhooked and lowered. It scraped along the keel, and the journey went on.
After five days we reached the main current, but then the wind abandoned us. Towing was out of the question, for there was no embankment. All around was nothing but forest, impassable flood areas, cut-off stagnant water, bog. Mulder had to moor the boats on a sand bank, perhaps in order to be safe from attacks from the shore. That had the advantage that you could disembark, lie down in the sand, and sunbathe. At night, however, it was bitterly cold. The boatmen caught fish and roasted them on sticks over the fire, which made for more varied meals; since Amsterdam they had invariably consisted of eel and greasy pearl barley.
I gratefully seized the opportunity to escape the stink of the cargo for a few hours, which consisted—along with barrels of whale oil, wine, Portuguese salt, and Spanish olives—of wheels of cheese sealed in beeswax and bedded in straw and a few dozen barrels of salted cod. No one but me seemed to notice the pungent smell. Well, I told myself, these people grew up from childhood in this stench. I would just have to get used to it. It was simply an epoch that was not marked by pleasant aromas, and the cities, Grit had assured me, were worst of all in that respect.
I realized that the people here had a completely different relationship to time. No one was impatient or nervous, not even the captain, although the quality of his merchandise over the days we were stuck wasn’t getting any better. Day came and went—we waited. Eventually the wind would turn west again. The men slept or fished or played dice. At night I gazed at the starry sky and tried to make out the constellations Grandfather had shown me, but in the incredibly bright swarm they could be found only with difficulty.
I practiced diary writing, as Grit had taught me. With the spatula-shaped end of the wooden stylus I smoothed my wax tablet, then wrote down my impressions, visually memorized what I’d written, and smoothed the tablet again for the next page.
After four days the weather changed abruptly. It was still dark when shouts and general commotion woke me. The sky was overcast. Torches had been mounted, blazing and hissing in the gusty wind as if the flames were tugging furiously at the oil-soaked tow. Their unsteady light illuminated the faces of the boatmen and the leafless trees and bushes on the shore. In the east the day dawned. A rain shower approached from the northwest over the water. The men had already raised the mast; the lines were unfastened, and the sail had been hoisted. It filled with a flapping sound. Rigging creaked, and damp wood rubbed together with dull groans. Commands were shouted back to the second boat behind us; it too set off. The vessel rocked and gathered speed, was pushed off the sand bank with long poles and steered out into the river.
A rain shower lashed the deck. The sky was full of dark frayed clouds; the Rhine resembled a scarred leaden expanse between nothing and nowhere. We hugged the shore, where the current wasn’t as strong. In the bare branches of the trees hung driftwood and half-rotten grass from the last flood. Here and there a half-decomposed carcass of a drowned sheep, a goat, or a dog had gotten caught. It smelled of putrefaction and decay.
Boats came toward us and passed. Sometimes they reminded me of junks in Chinese pen-and-ink drawings: men in rush cloaks and rush hats huddled dripping wet on deck or on the heaped-up cargo, which consisted mainly of timber. With loud shouts messages were exchanged and usually answered with obscenities and laughter. The voices carried far over the water. Occasionally sudden sleet showers deluged the sluggishly rolling river and covered it with a pearly shimmer.
But spring wouldn’t be long in coming. In sheltered hollows I spotted wood anemones, snowdrops, daisies, and spring snowflakes, and here and there the first green tinge on the willows. Sometimes I saw a fish attempting in vain to get to another universe.
On the eleventh day the current became perceptible and too strong to sail against. On the embankment horses and towing men stood ready. Lines were thrown aboard and fastened; then we were towed.
On the thirtieth day we finally reached Cologne. From afar I already heard the dull rumbling and crashing and pounding of the fulling mills along the shore, the creaking and squealing of the cranes, and the ringing of countless church bells.
* * *
GRIT HAD ADVISED me to ask first thing on arrival in a city for lodgings in a monastery, perhaps even to find a residence for the duration of my stay, which would enable me to take excursions from there with light baggage and safely deposit my collection. In Cologne I had no luck; wherever I asked, I was coolly refused, in one case even brusquely. Was it due to my southern appearance? That could well have been. For I soon learned that fear and growing unruliness were spreading throughout the convents on the Lower Rhine. Rumor had it that Rome had called for stricter compliance with the rules and was prepared to enforce them. Powers were to be cut back and visitations were in store to uncover irregularities and find legal bases for reshuffling personnel. Thus unknown travelers were eyed with particular suspicion and turned away at the door,
because they could easily have been snoopers at papal behest.
On the whole, the atmosphere in Cologne was poisoned. For decades the conflict had been smoldering between Dietrich von Moers, the archbishop of Cologne, who insisted on ancient rights and as a cunning tactician aspired to expand his position of power, and the city council, the representatives of a prosperous and self-confident citizenry, which sought to shake off old constraints and refused to be dragged into legal matters. It practiced its own politics and strove to prune back the privileges of the clergy.
That created legal uncertainty and an inauspicious aggressive attitude among the citizens, which often erupted in fierce quarrels and outbursts of violence. On top of that there was a latent hysteria, particularly among the simple people, who took their lead from the scholars. Cologne wasn’t Paris, but here too scholastics of various stripes met for their tournaments in shadowboxing and hairsplitting. Even though it had been almost two hundred years since the two Dominicans—Albertus Magnus, the great “doctor universalis,” and Thomas Aquinas, the great “doctor angelicus”—had taught and been active in Cologne, their authority had in the meantime grown even stronger. “The two great windbags of their century,” Leendert de Hooghe, Grit’s acquaintance, had derisively called them. That was certainly unjust and couldn’t be upheld so sweepingly. They had made substantial contributions to ancient knowledge and, in the case of Albertus, in the observation of nature as well. I was acquainted with his De vegetabilibus, for that time a remarkable book on botany, with many precise descriptions. But both had also wreaked much havoc with their tracts on the power of the devil on earth and spawned many disciples in spirit who pedantically discussed the matter of magically induced impotence, the flight of witches, and the different possibilities of sexual intercourse with the devil, whether “incubus” or “succubus”—that is, whether the devil incarnate was on top or bottom during coitus. It was a pernicious seed that had fallen on fertile ground, and it would sprout horribly, when in the 1480s Pope Innocent VIII would issue his bull Summis desiderantes affectibus. But the terrible events were already being foreshadowed now. People feared devilish powers and the dark machinations of his minions. All this presaged the excesses of the witch-hunts that would soon take place in Cologne and its environs. There was a prevailing climate of suspicion, of mutual spying and denunciation that I found oppressive. I decided to leave Cologne as soon as possible and begin my fieldwork.
* * *
IT WAS ON the fifth or sixth day that I witnessed a gruesome execution. A man had robbed a cloth merchant and, when the victim resisted, stabbed him and his twelve-year-old son to death. He was condemned to be quartered.
From the early morning on, spectators had converged on the marketplace, among them many women, youngsters, and children. They mobbed the execution site as if a circus performance were taking place. For me the butchery—even in nanotechnologically achieved distance mode, into which I had prudently fled—was a harrowing experience. In my era—at least in Europe—killing, even the slaughter of animals, had been moved behind the scenes, so to speak. Here it happened conspicuously—and people enjoyed quite unself-consciously the torment of the creature, when that poor human being was reduced with a few strokes of the ax to flesh and blood, bones and brains. It was a scene of profound horror: the bloody cadaver, the bowels pouring out and bones shattering as the joint capsule was hacked with the ax and the ligaments severed, as the executioner took on the spine from the anus upward, cleaving the pelvis until the body lay in four grotesque parts, each with a limb, on the blood-spattered wooden stage; and then a mouth that wouldn’t stop screaming and was still rattling in agony until a final blow opened the skull.
I felt paralyzed as the people all around cheered and rolled their eyes enthusiastically. Small children were held up so that they too could see the spectacle, and youngsters vilified the dismembered corpse and spat on it. They would have seized the body parts and dragged them in triumph through the streets if they had not been driven back with truncheons by the officers in the service of the criminal judge.
I stole away quickly and vomited in an alley. I was trembling all over. At a fountain I rinsed out my mouth and washed my face as if that could rid me of the ghastly images. I tried desperately to get it through my head that in my native world similar mutilations occurred during wartime events, terror attacks, or traffic accidents and plane crashes, but the media, under pressure from the public, largely refrained from showing them. Here the cruelties were a public entertainment, a macabre spectacle. Were these people more animalistic, more indifferent, more insensitive to suffering—the suffering of others and also their own distress in the face of it? Could there really be something like an evolution of civilization, a slow—much too slow—emergence of humanity from barbarity, or did we only increasingly develop the art of cosmetics, in order to offer a more pleasant sight when we looked in the mirror?
Was it the ubiquitous, naked reality of a terrible death that so fortified the belief in the immortality of the soul among the people of that time? The soul was the invulnerable and indestructible pillar to which they attached their hope. It was the guarantor of an existence beyond death. With it every single individual, however insignificant and unworthy, was personally involved in the history of the world and salvation. The soul could not be lost, for on Judgment Day it had to be called to account before God. In all perils and in the face of death, that belief provided the certainty of being more than a vulnerable body. That certainty had gone missing for many of us members of future generations. I sought in vain within myself for that consolation, that assurance.
I was in shock and lay awake all night. Again and again the dreadful images appeared before my eyes. I stared at the dark ceiling, listened to the scurrying and squeaking of the mice and the rustling and crackling of the cockroaches. Gradually I became aware that I had arrived in a strange world, that I had reached my destination planet—far from the sun, gloomy and overcast. Yet I had set out in search of brightness, the untouched and unscathed.
Stick those dreams in your botanical specimen case, I told myself, when morning finally dawned. Wherever human beings had gone, those unpredictable and fiendishly intelligent apes, they had spread filth and death—but always also carried around with them a spark of hope for a better world. I had come here to lend that hope more weight, to salvage and reintroduce some of what indifference and greed, the two worst scourges of our species, had destroyed.
* * *
I HAD FOUND lodging with a widow on Holzgasse, in a shabby half-timbered house with an overhanging story. On the ground floor it had once contained a bakery, which was why it was teeming with mice and cockroaches, which must have still ferreted out leftover flour under the floorboards. The baker’s widow was named Lena: she was a gaunt person who had a swift and sharp tongue, but she treated me from the first moment on with friendliness, even warmth. She was quite active—not so much in her household as in her bed, as I gathered from the nightly noises in her bedchamber next door, and it was not only one lover who enjoyed her favor and offered her comfort in her widowhood, but half a dozen, if you sorted them by temperament and vocal register. She might have gained many a white pfennig mounted at night that she could scarcely have earned during the day at the market, where she sold the bread of a master baker who had his bakery a few houses down. She spent the money lightly on beer and pretty clothes. A few days after I moved in with her she began to give me gifts; she insisted on brushing my hair, plucked at me, and stroked my clothes. I sensed that she might not be exclusively fixated on the opposite sex and that an indulgence of her intimacies could bode disaster.
So I decided to keep the period of “acclimation” insisted on by mission control to a minimum. I commissioned from a coffin maker a lockable chest reinforced with copper. In it I stowed my things that I didn’t necessarily want to drag along with me on my excursions and gave them to Lena for safekeeping. At the livestock market I bought a donkey, which cost one and a half Rhenish
guilders—an already somewhat aged animal, which nonetheless was still steady on his feet. He had a shaggy, gray-and-black-patterned coat and a funny crease in his left ear. I named him Buridan, and he became my patient companion.
I roamed the Cologne Bay and the bordering mountainous area to the extent the terrain allowed it, spending the nights in small villages and on isolated farms, where I slept on straw, and presenting myself as an herbalist in the service of an apothecary. I scrupulously took notes on the location of various plants in order to collect their seeds at the end of the summer. In the cities the people dwelled in oppressively cramped quarters; everywhere was overcrowded. The countryside, however, was devoid of people, frequently uncleared and inaccessible; parts of it were even dangerous, because bears and wolves made the forests unsafe. And people.
At times the stillness overwhelmed me, particularly at midday, when the birds went silent or only a cuckoo called in the distance, when the air was laden with tons of pollen, filled with olfactory mating calls and chemical longings, wasteful abandon and sweet vanquishment, charged with quadrillions of messages in unimaginable redundancy—tiny modular probes, which, jam-packed with blueprints and assembly instructions, expert programs and data files with material requirements, set out in search of their addressees, the specific docking sites of their genetic counterparts. It was a universe of puzzle pieces striving toward one another—in short: springtime.
I kept an eye out for the daisy-leaved toadflax and the Parnassus-leaved water plantain, for the waterwheel plant and the dragonhead, the whorl-leaved waterwort, the saltmarsh sandspurry and the garlic pennycress—all of them creatures that would no longer exist in my century. Sometimes I wished I had Sarah by my side. She had always been absolutely certain of what location she had to survey in order to track down a particular plant. I came across species I couldn’t identify, which I had never before encountered in any index, which had perhaps never borne a name, because they had vanished before they could catch the eye of an interested scientist—plants that had at some point silently taken leave of Creation from one spring to the next, because they had had to make room in the world for other forms.
The Cusanus Game Page 52