Q - Luther Blissett (interesting novels to read TXT) 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
- Performer: 0156031965
Book online «Q - Luther Blissett (interesting novels to read TXT) 📗». Author Luther Blissett
As Matthys advances, the impassioned crowds of onlookers on either side of the street merge together behind him and the procession grows. Jan of Haarlem stops, grips the thresher with both hands and points it towards the sky. The chants stop all at once.
‘The Lord is going to sweep his threshing floor!’ he shouts, at first on his own, then with the thunderous accompaniment of hundreds of voices. The long blade swings furiously through the snow.
‘The Lord is going to sweep his threshing floor!’�
His voice is already being echoed by the crowd, who are telling the new arrivals: ‘The prophet, the prophet is here.’
‘He is come!’
‘Jan Matthys, the great Jan Matthys is in M�nster!’
They push their way forward, they crowd towards the central square. Everyone wants to see God’s messenger, tall, gaunt, black, shaggy, barefoot.
Here he is.
Here is Enoch.
He stops, perhaps there’s the hint of a smile, just perhaps.
Bockelson appears before him, open-armed. ‘Master. Brother. Father. Mother Friend. An angel told me you would come today. The angel I saw entering the city beside you, and now flying about your head. Today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Today, now that victory is ours and the enemy is routed. Angel of God. How I love you.’
Matthys comes towards him and delivers a punch to his cheek that knocks him over. Everyone freezes. Bockelson gets back up. He smiles. The two Jans embrace as though they are going to crush each other, they stay like that in their double grip, swaying back and forth for a long time. Bockelson weeps with joy.
I walk over, try to catch his eye: ‘Welcome to M�nster, brother Jan.’
He embraces me too, very firmly, crushes the breath out of me. I hear him murmuring with emotion: ‘My apostles, my sons…’
His eyes are black torches, the same ones which, a thousand months ago, entrusted me with a mission. There’s something wrong, a strange unease: only now do I realise that I haven’t once thought of Matthys all the time we’ve been here. Events have overtaken me. He knows nothing of the struggle and the danger that these people have lived through. We’ve done everything all on our own, but now that he’s here I remember in whose name we came here, with his words on our lips. M�nster has absorbed our energies, it has made us fight, take up arms, risk our lives. How can I explain that to you, Jan, how? You weren’t there.�
I say nothing. I watch him climb up on to the stage, erected alongside the Cathedral. The torches frame his elongated shadow along the fa�ade of the church, a dancing demon gesturing to everyone to join him, grimacing at the crowd. The snow cuts through the light, swirls around above everyone’s heads: an icy shiver.
Taller and thinner than I remembered, he studies the faces one by one, as though trying to remember their features, their names.
�An unreal silence has fallen. Everyone is looking up at him, up through the torches, the breath of hundreds of men and women is suspended the square, along with their lives.
His voice is a profound gurgle, which seems to come from some cleft in the bowels of the earth.
‘Not me. Not me. I am not the one that you adore, O happiest mob of God’s elect. Not me. The fire tonight burns on the altars, it licks at the statues, it burns to hell with everything that has been. And will never be again. The old world is consumed like parchment in the flames. The world, the sky, the earth, the night. Time. None of it will never be again. It is not me that you are raising up to the glory of eternity. Not me. The Word knows not the past, the future, the Word is the present alone. It is living flesh. Everything you knew, knowledge, the rotten common sense of the world that was. Everything. All ashes. It is not me that you are leading to victory. It is not me that you are granting this day of glory. Not me that you are defending, fists clenched, against your enemy. I am not the captain of this war. Not this mouth, these passion-ravaged bones. No. It is the Lord your God. The one they have always forced you to worship in churches, on altars, prone before statues. He is here. God is that blood, those faces, this night. His glory is not the glory of a day, it does not last festivities of a season, but seeks eternity. It seizes it with an iron grip, it grinds, pounds, crushes. Out there, beyond these walls, the world is already finished. I have crossed the void to arrive here. And the fields plunged away behind my footsteps, the rivers dried up, the trees toppled and the snow fell like a rain of fire. And blood, a surging sea of blood. A rising ocean, a wave of fury. Four horsemen galloped by my side, faces of death, pestilence, famine, war. Cities, castles, villages, mountains. Nothing is left. God only stopped by these walls, to call to your souls, your arms and your life. And now He tells you that the Scripture is dead and it is on your flesh that he will etch the new Word, he will write the last testament of the world and engulf it in fire. You, Babylon of mud and lies. You, the last of the earth. You are the first. Everything starts here. With these towers. With this square. Forget your name, your people, your godless merchants, your idolatrous priests. Forget it all. Because the past belongs to the dead. Today you have a new name and that name is Jerusalem. Today you are led into battle by the one who calls you. Guided by your hands, His axe will build the Kingdom, step by step, brick by brick, head by head. All the way to heaven. The humblest dregs, the oppressed people of a distant age, you will fight with no fear of evil, the army of God of the kingdom to come. Because your captain is the Lord.’
I tremble. A frozen moment. Suspended in time, night wipes out the world beyond the square, there’s nothing left, just us, here, brought together in a single breath. United in the terror of the words, the army of Light. His eyes scan the ranks, enlisting us one after another. Fear and pride, and certainty, because nothing else can banish the fear of these words. To be up to the task.
I tremble. We wanted the city. He has placed the Kingdom before us. We wanted the Carnival of freedom. He gave us the Apocalypse.
My God, Jan. My God.
M�nster, 27th February 1534
Are the flames of hell freezing? Will we wait in line half-naked, famished, mute, for Cerberus to hurl us through the gate into the eternal ice of godlessness?
The threshing-floor must be swept.
What ineradicable wickedness marks these weeping children, clutching their disgraced mothers, these terrified old men, pissing in their own rags? Who will tell them why they were banished from Eden?
Head upon head, Enoch ruled. Heads stacked on towers, on the city walls, adorning the battlements, piled up in an orderly fashion, clearly visible to the bishop and the wayfarer, the nun and the soldier, the pious man and the thief, and more than anything else to the army of darkness that will soon besiege the New Jerusalem: that’s what the prophet has ordained.
So it seems an act of clemency for Matthys merely to shout through the blizzard, ‘Depart from here, ye wicked! And never return, enemies of the Father!’
The exodus of old believers creeps quietly away across the mantle of snow. Naked. Eyes to the ground, counting the steps remaining before the freeze. Some of them might hope to reach Telgte, or Anmarsch. No one will make it, perhaps the strongest of the adults might, if anyone, but they won’t abandon their wives, their children, their parents.
‘There must be no delay. The Father wants justice.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘They must die.’ Almost serene as he says it, seraphic, staring straight ahead.
They slip. They weep. They bear their pregnant bellies. Papists, Lutherans: the old world buried in the storm evoked by Matthys. You can read the sign: the will of God.
‘It’s written, that’s all you need to know, is that what you mean? They are damned, they must die. You want to cut everyone’s head off?’
‘This is the chosen place. This is the New Jerusalem: there is no place for the unregenerate. They can still choose, they can convert. But the time has come for the last tolls of the bell. They must be quick.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘They’ll be swept away along with everything that is obsolete.’
‘Then send them away. Let them go at least, let them get back to their fucking bishop, their wretched Lutheran friends.’
The scores are being settled before our eyes. We’ve won, then. But where is the unutterable joy, the life-filled laughter, the desire for bodies to be united, all the bodies of the ordinary women and the men, embracing with abandon in radiant warmth?
Our task is accomplished: time is over, God the Omnipotent will think of all the rest. The Apocalypse is coming from above, it is capturing us in a tragic and terrible pantomime that we cannot escape, unless we are to renounce everything we have fought for, unless we are to lose the very meaning of our presence here, to challenge the world.
We’ve won? Then why does that acrid taste fill my mouth? Why do I avoid the eyes of the brethren like the plague?
‘Let it be a warning, a warning to everyone.’
The curses of the most agitated seem obscene to me, and cruel the spittle that rains down on the defeated, the kicks dished out to them. They are no longer the enemies of the people of M�nster, no longer the people who have oppressed us for centuries, they’re no longer men, women, children, but creatures deformed, monstrous, repulsive. Only their extinction can give us life, can confirm God’s word about the fate that awaits us.
Might I be the defeated of all battles ever?
The Holy Jester of Leyden runs along the row of people, touching their heads gently with a little stick. The counting stops on the head of a little boy. Jan stares at the sky.
‘Why? Why must it be an innocent?’ He falls on his knees, weeping. ‘He’s not to blame! The angel of light is flying around him!’ He beats his breast, shrieks even louder, sighs. ‘Why?’
The little one buries his face in his mother’s skirt. She draws away from the pit of despair, kneels down, embraces the boy and lifts him to her breast, her eyes filled with tears. Then, in a definitive gesture, the woman removes the boy from her and her own death, and implores, ‘Save him. Keep him with you.’
Matthys’ apostle gets up again, touches his beard and, turning back towards the angel, announces: ‘The Father separates the grain from the chaff,’ then lowers his eye to the boy. ‘From today you will be Shear-Jashub, “the returning remnant”, the one who will convert and thus escape punishment. Come.’
He takes him with him, while the gate is already absorbing the exodus of the damned.
The torment obscures my vision like the darkest of omens.
The Carnival is over.
M�nster, 6th March 1534
Things are looking bad. Ruecher, the blacksmith, bolted to
Comments (0)