I was surprised by the abundance of types of grain. There were dozens of different barleys, ryes, and wheats, for which I knew no name—I decided simply to number them. They usually had a low yield and pitiful growth, but what a wealth of uncharted genetic traits and possibilities! My collection might not be comparable with the treasures of the famous Saint Petersburg archive, but my samples would be alive and germinable, not dusty mummies.
The labeling of the samples caused problems. I had used the ship voyage to cut and sew little pouches of thin canvas, which Wouter had provided me, but it was difficult to write on the material. Grit had recommended using black lead—which wasn’t actually lead but graphite—obtained from England. But in Cologne I hadn’t been able to get hold of any. No one had ever heard of black lead. Probably traders first brought it to the mainland in the second half of the century. The silver styluses I found—actually a mixture of tin and lead—turned out to be too hard and brittle, and inks, even applied very thinly, ran into the material. So I cut labels out of Italian paper, which was quite expensive but good—the far cheaper Lüneburg paper was too soft and came apart when it got damp. I inscribed the labels with quill and ink and sewed them on when I sealed the canvas pouch with awl and thread.
Occasionally I returned to Cologne to buy things that were only available in the city, like cheese, raisins, dates, figs, and—if you were lucky—a lump of cane sugar. What a sour, salty, bitter time it was for someone like me, with a sweet tooth spoiled by the twenty-first century! For sweetness you might at best now and then manage to get some honey, and that was often inadequately spun and full of wax. Still, I devoured it voraciously.
I also never forgot to stock up on salt at the market: coarse-grained bay salt from Normandy, which usually looked gray and smelled stalely of the pig blood and tasted sharply of the alum added during boiling. It could be traded with farmers, who used it to preserve meat, for eggs, bread, nuts, smoked bacon, or lard. For myself I always tried to get Portuguese salt from Setúbal, which, dried in the southern sun, was snow-white and looked appetizing—but cost almost twice as much. And I never neglected to have my little clay jug filled with spirits at the apothecary on the Old Market square, the owner of which was one of the few in the city with a mastery of the art of distilling.
I would visit my room in the house on Holzgasse to store my collection in the chest. Lena always greeted me like a dear family member who comes to visit much too infrequently, but never forgot to remind me about my rent for the shabby little chamber. The baker’s widow might have been avaricious and licentious in her moral conduct, but she cooked the best blancmange I had ever eaten. She prepared the pudding with grated almonds, rice flour, white wine, lard, chopped-up chicken breast, and sugar. With my eyes closed I would often recall the heavenly taste of that delicious treat.
* * *
OVER THE SUMMER I extended my excursions up the Rhine. I proceeded up the Lahn and Main valleys, through which the much-traveled road to Nuremberg ran. But that by no means made it safe—on the contrary: robbers and highwaymen expected richer loot there.
It was best, I soon realized, to journey as a lady of rank, if you wanted to progress quickly and unharmed—on horseback and with escort, equipped with titles and thalers, with letters of reference and signets as well as a lot of luggage and servants. But for the likes of us that was out of the question. The nobility were acquainted with one another, and if they didn’t know much else, they were aware of every bastard and every branch of the clique. And for a botanist it was all the more unthinkable, for why would a noblewoman care what her mount ate or what her dogs pissed on at the roadside, whether they were daisies or coltsfoot?
Grit’s advice to join traveling nuns might have been worth following in subsequent decades or in the sixteenth century, but in the year 1451 this offered, according to my observations, not the slightest protection—on the contrary. The morals of those godly maidens were so loose that cart drivers and grooms were partial to small groups of traveling nuns, because they knew their intentions wouldn’t meet much resistance when they stormed the chambers in the hostel with crude laughter. If a strapping fellow unsheathed, they usually willingly stuck out their little boots toward him and with much squealing, fervent prayer, and exaggerated wriggling let him overcome them, as if it were an unexpected gift from God.
So, I thought to myself, hire a strong donkey driver to protect you from such harassments; but on that very same day, I saw that I had let the fox guard the henhouse. Though well paid, he demanded that evening a ride as a bonus, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, like a ferry fare or bridge toll. I managed to keep him at bay only with the riding crop, and had to strike him a few times before he grasped that he was picking on the wrong person.
But one day I would be caught off guard.
On a hot July day—I had journeyed up the Moselle—I reached Kues. The second mowing on the meadows along the river was over; the aftergrass hung, heaped up into fragrant cones, on erected poles. The river flowed by calmly and gurgled softly in the hollows of the embankment. I was less than fifty yards from the house where Nicolaus Cusanus was born. It stood raised above the riverbank of the Moselle, was built broadly and solidly out of stone, with large windows on the second floor—the most impressive building in the area. It was the house of a wealthy man, the river boatman and wine merchant Johan Cryfftz, the birthplace of the famous cardinal. Directly to its right, somewhat set back and adjoining, rose an older, even taller building, through which an archway led into the village of Kues. This must have been the house his father had bought in addition when Nicolaus came into the world.
A wide vessel was tied to the dock in front of it, a ferry that crossed to Bernkastel on demand. In the garden next to the house a woman was hanging laundry on the line. A housekeeper? His mother was by then long dead. Was the father still alive? If I remembered correctly, he had died around the middle of the century.
Here Nicolaus had played as a child; here he had walked to school on the path along the river, on which a flock of cackling geese was now heading toward the water, and had helped his father with the ferry service. From here he had accompanied him on his trading voyages up the Moselle and down to Koblenz.
A middle-aged man stepped out the front door. He wore black breeches and, despite the warm weather, a black cloak. He walked past me and gave me a sullen look. His doughy face looked unhealthy; thin dark hair hung over his forehead. Was he Nicolaus’s younger brother, Johannes, for whom the cardinal had obtained a parish church in Bernkastel and who would supervise the construction of the foundation Nicolaus would establish here? A certain resemblance was discernible: the broad face, the narrow nose, the prominent chin. The man was heading toward the village along the riverbank path. I followed him at a slow pace to the stone to which I had tied Buridan. The church bell began its midday chimes.
I had a young man bring me across to Bernkastel and rode down into the valley. The air was muggy; hungry mosquitoes assailed Buridan and me. I had not yet reached Zeltingen when a storm reared its head over the mountaintops in the west; its brow and temples quickly darkened. I drove my mount to hurry and kept an eye out for shelter. Soon I found a barn; its double doors opened, and I pulled Buridan in. Just in time, for heavy wind was already blowing the treetops, and the first thick drops struck the slate roof. I looked around in the semidarkness and saw a handcart. A load of hay was heaped up right next to the threshing floor of stamped clay. On the wall hung two flails and a rake; a few sickles were hacked into the beams. Suddenly I heard the clatter of hooves. A rider swung himself off his horse, opened the barn door wider, hesitated when he saw me, and then pulled his animal in and tethered it up.
“Would you permit me?” he asked.
I shrugged. “The barn doesn’t belong to me,” I replied.
The man nodded.
A downpour began, and it rang as if a thousand tiny fists were pounding on the slate slabs of the roof. Thunder rumbled. The wind moved the c
obwebs on the roof beams.
The rider reached into the feedbag on the saddle and pulled out a handful of oats, rolled the grains between his palms, blew away the hulls, and offered me the kernels.
“No, thank you.”
He tossed them into his own mouth and began to chew.
Lightning struck in the meadows on the riverbank, less than a hundred yards away. A crash of thunder followed. The rider scrutinized me. He wore a gray felt cap with two flaps that hung down over his ears.
“Where does that come from?” he asked.
“What?”
“A lightning flash like that.”
“From the sky,” I said with a shrug.
“That’s what I said too, when the scholar I recently rode with asked me. Do you know what he replied?”
“How would I know that?”
“He said, ‘Of course it comes from the sky, or rather from the clouds, but what cause might it have?’ — ‘If you don’t know, my lord, how should I know?’ I replied.”
The rider stopped chewing; hulls hung in his dark beard.
“Do you know what he said to that? He said, ‘Might it not be the case that a balance of light is necessary? When the clouds absorb the light of the sun and withhold it from the earth, don’t they then, in order to avoid an imbalance, have to pass it on to the earth?’ — ‘But some lightning bolts jump from cloud to cloud,’ I pointed out. ‘And some have been seen that flare up to the sky.’ — ‘Yes, indeed,’ he replied. ‘Balance is always necessary, so that equilibrium is maintained in Creation. Wherever you look, balance is being established between oppositions.’ — ‘Your Eminence,’ I ventured to interject, ‘for a simple man it’s better not to think about such things. It could be that they are not pleasing to God. I take Creation as it is. God has certainly done everything right, Your Eminence.’ He then gave me a serious look and said, ‘Indeed he has, but why should it not please God when we reflect on his Creation and examine it more closely in order to grasp its meaning and understand the many wonders in which it reveals itself to us?”
“Your Eminence?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You called him ‘Your Eminence.’ Was the man you rode with a cardinal?”
“Yes, indeed. Our cardinal. He goes by Nicolaus the Cusan. Born very nearby. In Kues. Son of old Cryfftz. He has a high office in Rome. Six years ago he journeyed a lot here on the Rhine and Moselle. Preached a lot. He’s a good preacher. People like to listen to him, even if they don’t always understand everything he says,” the man replied.
“You know Nicolaus Cusanus personally?”
“Everyone here knows him. You don’t know him?”
“How should I? But I’ve heard of him.”
“I thought you were from here.”
“No.”
“I’ve ridden with him twice. From Cologne. But that was a few years ago. This autumn he will be here again, I heard. A synod is to take place in Cologne.”
Another lightning bolt lit up the semidarkness of the barn. A blast of wind slammed the door. The horse shied; the rider yanked it toward him by the rein and tethered it to the handcart. Buridan, who had been plucking at the hay, recoiled in fear and pricked up his ears. The rain, which had in the meantime abated, resumed with renewed violence.
Suddenly an arm wrapped around my neck from behind, choking me. I cried out in shock and tried to wrench myself away, but the fellow squeezed even tighter. He was strong; I had no chance against him.
“The oats make me ardent,” he hissed into my ear. “You won’t regret it.”
He smelled of horse sweat and oiled saddle leather.
“Let me go!” I gasped.
The man pulled my arms behind my back and held them with an iron grip. He drove me to the haystack, pushed me down, flung up my skirts, and forced my legs apart with his knee. I felt his hard member scraping along my thigh, seeking entry. The fellow must have had experience in raping, for I could do nothing against his oppressive weight and his cruelly hard grip, no matter how much I squirmed. He kept his face out of reach of my teeth and with each of my movements came closer to his goal.
Suddenly the weight bearing down on me was gone. Someone must have grabbed the scoundrel by the nape of his neck and flung him off me, but I saw no one. I rolled over in a hurry and got to my knees. Then I saw the groom getting to his feet four yards away, drawing a long knife from his boot and charging with a cry of rage. I tried desperately to get under the handcart; but then I noticed that the attack wasn’t directed at me, but at someone who must have been by the door. The horse reared up in terror and was jerked back by its short rein. Its front hooves thrashed against the wheel of the cart right next to me. And the next instant I saw the groom, knife in hand, with outspread arms, fly five yards through the air and land with a nasty sound on his back on the threshing floor, where he remained lying motionless.
At the door I saw a fleeting movement, but could make out nothing and no one. I seized the chance as long as the nefarious fellow was out of commission—may he have broken his neck or skull—untied Buridan, and pulled him out of the barn.
There was no one in sight far and wide. The rain had darkened the stone walls of the vineyards. The slopes on the right and left of the river now appeared threatening. The air suddenly smelled like autumn. In the east, in the Rhine Valley, where the storm had moved on, distant thunder still rumbled. I drove Buridan to hurry and kept looking around anxiously, because I thought I heard hoofbeats, but no rider was following me.
Had the scoundrel really ridden with Cusanus? Or was he only trying to put on airs and impress me? On the other hand: Could a groom make up such dialogues? Probably not. But would a cardinal have to travel in such company? Probably he had had no idea what a good-for-nothing had been provided him as an escort. Would I encounter the Cusan in Cologne? He was to come in autumn. Would that mean: in October? Perhaps shortly before my departure back to Amsterdam? The chance to encounter the living Cusanus, face-to-face—the man whose cool grave slab in San Pietro in Vincoli I had so often sat on over that hot summer?
The next evening I arrived in Koblenz. The squat tower caps of St. Florin shone in the evening sun.
VII
An Autumn …
Would you render vain all effort, study and toil on books … over which so many great commentators, paraphrasts, glossators, compendiasts, summists, scholiasts, translators, questioners and logicians have racked their brains—on which profound, subtle, golden, magnificent, unassailable, irrefutable, angelic, seraphic, cherubic and divine doctors have established their foundation?… Should we cast them all … into a latrine? Certainly, the world will be well governed if the speculations of so many and such worthy philosophers are to be dismissed and despised.
GIORDANO BRUNO
In August and September I brought in my “harvest.” I visited the places I had committed to memory and filled little canvas pouches with seed samples, leaves, bits of roots, as well as fruit and grain kernels. Having labeled them, I stowed them in the saddlebags. The collection was more extensive than I had hoped. I had managed to gather more than six hundred plant species and their variations, and most of them I’d been able to identify. About three dozen I had had to inscribe with a question mark, because I hadn’t been able to classify them. In any case, with the roughly two hundred canvas pouches already stored in my chest in Cologne, I had compiled almost a thousand samples. It was a beautiful collection. Many of the species and subspecies were already thought to be extinct in the twentieth century and even more in the twenty-first, above all after the Cattenom disaster, which had led to unparalleled species annihilation throughout Central Europe, eliminated countless biotopes, and truncated long evolutionary lineages.
I was quite satisfied with my mission when I returned to Cologne at the end of September. I planned to stay in the city for only a few days and find a good home for Buridan, of whom I had grown fond over the months. After that I would keep an eye out for a passage
downriver in order to be in Amsterdam at some point in October and visit Wouter and finally the reference point for my return home.
When I arrived at the house on Holzgasse and unsaddled Buridan, Lena appeared in the doorway and I knew immediately that something unpleasant had happened. She received me with a shrill lament and accused me of betraying her trust. She forbade me to set foot in her house. I had no idea what Lena was talking about, for what she spewed hysterically was so confused that I turned to the neighbors standing around us for help—nice, friendly people with whom I had spent many an evening in conversation. But now they turned away from me, and some of them even assumed a threatening attitude. A few times the word “herbaria,” herb witch, was spoken, and once I heard from the background a woman snarl “striga,” which could only mean I was suspected of witchcraft. I couldn’t figure out why. Had someone incited these people to turn against me?
“All right,” I said to Lena, “if you won’t let me enter your house, then give me my chest and I’ll move on. You’ll never see me again.”
“I don’t have your chest,” Lena replied.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Did you sell it?”
“I had no idea what witchcraft things you had hidden in there. And under my roof!” she cried, crossing herself.
“What do you mean by witchcraft things, for heaven’s sake?”
“Black magic materials. Pernicious herbs to corrupt animals and people or the seed. Leaves to set on fire and make storms!” shouted the surrounding people. “We won’t tolerate anything like that here. Begone!”
“Where’s my chest, Lena?”
The Cusanus Game Page 53