by Tom Harper
‘Not really,’ said Nick.
‘I was, once. Then I decided I knew better. Now I am not so sure.’
A mournful silence gripped him as he stared at the windows, into some painful corner of the distant past.
‘You said you had something to tell us about Gillian,’ Nick prompted. Olaf didn’t seem to hear.
‘I was fourteen when the war ended.’
Nick did a quick calculation and was surprised by the result. It must have shown on his face.
‘You think I look older than I am.’ Olaf coughed again. ‘I feel older than I am. But I will come to that. For now, imagine me as I was. Old enough to have had a rifle pushed in my hands when Zhukov crossed the Oder; young enough to still have pride in Germany. Even when they told us the truth, all the things that make Germans ashamed today, I had pride. Those things were done by Nazis. I was a German.
‘That is why I became a historian. I wished to reclaim our history from the monsters and foreigners who took it away from us. I went back further and further into the past, trying to escape the poison that had infected us. While my generation built a new future with the Wirtschaftswunder, I wanted to dig its foundation. A new past. A clean past.’
He sighed. ‘You must understand, to be a historian in Germany is to be in thrall to a beautiful woman who has shared herself with everyone but you. There is hardly an archive or a library that has not been looted, burned, destroyed or lost at some point in its history. Sometimes facsimiles of original documents survive; sometimes even the copies have been destroyed. This has always been so – but after the war it was intolerable. A young researcher who wants to make a career needs documents, discoveries he can publish. But all our archives were only smoke and ashes. Until one day, in a convent library looking through old books of receipts, I found what I sought. A treasure.’
‘What was it?’ Emily asked.
‘A letter. A single sheet of paper written in a fifteenth-century hand. In the corner was a device: two shields blazoned with the Greek letters chi and lamda, joined by a noose that yoked the neck of a raven. I knew at once whose it was.’
He glanced up to see he still had their attention.
‘Johann Fust. You know Fust?’ Olaf was too far into the past to wait for their answers. ‘Fust was Johann Gutenberg’s business partner. You know Gutenberg, of course. Everyone knows Gutenberg. Time magazine says he was the Man of the Millennium. But if you came to Mainz five hundred years ago, everyone knew Fust and no one knew Gutenberg. Gutenberg printed one book; Fust and his son Peter Schoeffer printed one hundred and thirty. A letter from Fust is like a letter from St Paul. And I found it.’
‘What did it say?’
The knot of veins pulsed under Olaf’s knuckles as he fretted with the frayed blanket. ‘I should have published it. I should have told the librarian what I found. It would have stopped everything. But I did not.’
He took a furtive look around the church. ‘I stole it. Almost before I knew it, I slipped it into my pocket. At last I had found my princess sleeping in her tower. She would not give herself to me, so I took her. The archive had no security: they thought they had nothing worth taking.’
‘But you didn’t publish?’
‘The letter was just the beginning. It hinted at things much greater. I could have published, of course; I would go back to the archive, pretend to find it again, announce my discovery. But then I risked being left with the hook while someone else walked off with the fish. And I was jealous. I was like an old man with a young wife – except I was twenty-four and she was five hundred years old. I hid her away. My secret.’
While he spoke, he spun one of the threads of his blanket around the knuckle of his index finger, so tight the tip went white. He didn’t seem to notice.
‘I guarded my privacy. But not well enough. I was a young man: I had women to impress, rival scholars – who sometimes were also rivals in love – to outshine. I hinted; I made remarks; I allowed speculation. I was careless. I thought I was very clever.
‘Then one day a man came to see me. A young priest, Father Nevado. He came to my house. He was thin – we all were then, but he was thinner; he had red lips, like a vampire. He told me he had come from Italy, though he was obviously Spanish. From this I deduced he worked for the Vatican. ‘He told me, “I have heard rumours you have made a remarkable discovery.”’
‘“A letter from a man who complains that the Church has stolen something from him,” I said. I was arrogant. “Have you come to give it back?”
‘The priest’s eyes were like black ice. “The letter is the property of the Holy Church.”
‘He looked at me then. I tell you, I had watched dead-eyed Russian soldiers march into our guns until they choked them with their own blood. I had watched them shoot children and rape girls in the street. They had not frightened me as much as this priest did when he looked at me.
‘ “You will give me the letter,” he said. “You will give me all the copies you have made, including translations. You will give me the name of every person you have told about it. You will never mention it again; you will forget it ever existed.”
‘He broke me right there. I was a medieval historian; I knew what the Church could do to its enemies. Even in the twentieth century. It was in his voice. His eyes. I gave him the letter and all my notes.
‘ “If you ever tell anyone of this, you will surely suffer the torments of the damned,” he told me.
‘And so I kept silent. For ten years I devoted myself to my work. I completed my thesis and found a position at a provincial university. I attended seminars and workshops; I invited colleagues to dinner and flattered their wives; I reviewed obsequiously. I married. But my wound never healed.
‘I wrote a book. A small book, interesting only to scholars, if anyone. But I was proud of it. To me, it was vindication. The priest had taken the treasure that would have elevated my career to Olympian heights, but I had clawed myself up nonetheless. And I could not resist a small crow of triumph.
‘It was a footnote. Nothing more: a passing reference, so obscure no reader would even notice it. Just for my own pride.
‘Two weeks before the book was to be published, my editor called me to his office. He polished his spectacles; he was very regretful. He said that very serious allegations of plagiarism had been made against my work.
‘ “But there is no plagiarism in my book,” I protested. You must understand, to an academic it is like being accused of harming your children. I had sweated five years of blood to make that book.
‘ “Surely there is not,” said my editor. “But they are suing us for a large sum of money and if we lose we will be bankrupt. Your book is important, but I cannot risk all our other authors for you.”
‘ “Then what do we do?”
‘ “They require that we recall all copies and pulp them. They are not vindictive men; they have even offered to help pay for the costs of destruction.”
‘ “Who?” I demanded. “Who are these men who say what will or will not be published?” I guessed, of course. “Was it the priest?”
‘My editor played with his pen. “Make sure you bring in the advance copies you have at your house. We must account for every one.”
‘Three days later, I drove home from a dinner party with my wife. It was late, an icy night. Perhaps I had had a little too much schnapps – but in those days, everybody did. I came around a corner. Some fool had skidded and abandoned his car in the middle of the road. I had no chance.’
Olaf folded his hands. ‘My wife died at once. I spent six months in hospital and came out in a wheelchair I have never left.’
‘Did they catch the people who did it?’ said Emily.
‘The car was stolen. The police said it was youths, joyriders who panicked when the car skidded. I did not believe them.
‘After that I abandoned my history. It was too dangerous. I wrote some tourist guides to Mainz; I volunteered at the museum. Those people took away my past, my presen
t, my future. I lived forty years waiting to die. I never spoke of it.’
‘But you told Gillian,’ said Nick.
The old man rocked back in his wheelchair. ‘My second wife died five years ago – from the cancer. I was almost glad: at least I could not blame myself. We have no children. There is nothing more they can take from me. When Gillian Lockhart contacted me, I thought it was my last chance. My wound still has not healed.’
‘How did she find you?’
Olaf chuckled. ‘Do you know the Hawking paradox?’
‘As in Stephen Hawking?’ said Nick. ‘His calculations showed that when matter enters a black hole all information about it is destroyed. But that contradicts a fundamental law of physics: that information cannot be destroyed.’
‘Dr Hawking was proved wrong. Even in a black hole, some information survives. So also with my little book. Somewhere, somehow, a few copies leaked out of the black hole Father Nevado made for them. One sat on a library shelf – who knows where – fifty years. Waiting. Until, it seems, an Internet company started digitising this library’s collection as part of a project to accumulate all knowledge. If Father Nevado knew about it, he would probably tear down all the World Wide Web to get rid of it. But even he cannot police everything. Gillian found it first. Then she found me. I sat in this same church and told her what I have told you. Like me fifty years ago, she was too stubborn to hear the warnings.’
‘You told her about the letter?’
‘About the letter – yes. But for her it was more important to learn about the library.’
‘Which library?’ Nick felt like a drunk wandering across a frozen lake: slipping and skidding, with only the faintest idea of the airless depths beneath.
‘The Bibliotheca Diabolorum. The Library of Devils.’
The blue light seemed to wrap Nick closer. Emily slid along the bench, pressing against him. By the altar, a young priest was reciting a litany.
‘You know of it?’
Nick and Emily shook their heads.
‘Few people have even heard its name. It is a construction, a myth. A hell for condemned books. The last curse of the thwarted scholar when all his efforts to find a book have failed: it must have gone to the Devils’ Library.’
‘Does it exist?’
‘It must.’ Olaf’s hands were trembling. He knitted his fingers together. ‘They almost killed me to protect it. That was the footnote in my book: “We should consider the possibility that some books from Johann Fust’s collection may have been confiscated, perhaps to the so-called Devils’ Library.” That was why they killed my wife.’
‘Was that what Fust’s letter said?’
‘Not precisely. You can see yourself.’
Olaf twisted in his seat and began fiddling with his wheel-chair. It was an old contraption, with wooden armrests screwed to a metal frame. One of the screws was loose. Olaf scrabbled underneath and slid out a piece of paper folded over and over, concertina-style, so as to be no wider than the armrest.
He handed it to Nick. ‘Even in the blackest hole, information survives.’
‘To the Most Reverend Father in Christ, Cardinal Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini:
I am writing in order that I may humbly acquaint your most exalted person with the injustice which diverse blackguards and vagabonds have caused to be perpetrated in the name of the Church; which deeds, if you knew of them, you would surely deplore, as I do, to the depths of your soul. Yesterday, in the afternoon, two men came to my house by the church of St Quintin, the Humbrechthof. They interrupted various works my son was undertaking there, the nature of which need not detain Your Grace, and ransacked the workshop until they had found a certain book they sought. Though small and unremark able in every way, this book had come into my possession from a particular gentleman known to Your Grace.
Despite my heated protestations, these men took the book away with them. Wherefore I pray Your Grace, if you know anything of this outrage, to bend your authority to seeking out the evil-doers and restoring to me my rightful property.
Johann Fust
Humbrechthof, Mainz
Emily stared at the piece of paper, as wrinkled as Olaf’s skin. ‘You remember it word for word?’
‘The priest took all my papers, but he could not take my memory. Even after the accident. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not recited it.’
‘Who was Piccolomini?’ said Nick. ‘A man who rose from a farmer’s son to be a cardinal, and eventually pope. He was also a novelist, a poet, a travel writer and a keen horseman.’
‘A real Renaissance man.’
‘Some decades in advance of the Renaissance itself. It is from him, incidentally, that we have the only eyewitness account of Gutenberg’s famous Bible. He saw it at a fair in Frankfurt and wrote to describe it to a fellow cardinal.’
‘ “A particular gentleman known to your Grace,” Emily read off the page. ‘You think it was Gutenberg?’
‘Gillian thought so.’
Olaf looked up. His eyes were pale, the colour dried up long ago. He fixed them on Emily, then Nick, stretching forward, trying to discern something distant.
‘She was right.’ Emily took the reconstruction out of her bag and gave it to him. The paper shivered in his hands.
He sighed deeply and settled forward in his chair. The wrinkles on his face seemed to sag, as if something inside him was slowly deflating. He murmured to himself in German: to Nick it sounded like, ‘Only the spear that made the wound can heal it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Did Gillian say where she found the reference to this Devils’ Library?’ Emily asked.
‘Here in Mainz – at the Stadtarchiv, the state archive.’
‘I bet it’s gone now,’ said Nick. ‘The men who took your book seem to be pretty good at clearing up after themselves.’
‘By the time she came here, your friend had started to realise this too. So she hid her discovery.’
‘Did she tell you where?’
‘She hid it where she found it,’ said Olaf. For a moment, Nick wondered if his mind had started to wander. ‘The clue – she did not say what it was – she found in an inventory of books from the Benedictine monastery in Eltville. This inventory came in a box which has a bar code for the catalogue. Gillian replaced this with a different bar code. If you look for the Eltville monastery inventory, you will find nothing. If, how ever, you look for a seventeenth-century treatise on agronomy, you may be surprised.’ He wrote the reference on their paper.
‘Did you go and have a look at it.’
Olaf shook his head. ‘It would have been too dangerous. Even now.’
He reached across the pew and grabbed Nick’s arm. Nick flinched, though there was no strength in the withered fingers.
‘I said this library – if it exists – is a hell for condemned books. But books cannot endure torment as humans can. Be careful.’
LXX
Mainz
A sultry day in June. The sun streamed through every crack in the close-packed houses, steaming the limp-hanging laundry and baking the dung on the streets into bricks. Children played in the fountain outside St Christoph’s church, screaming with delight as they splashed each other. Butchers put down their cleavers and wielded horsehair whisks in vain efforts to keep the flies away. The city slumped in a daze, stupefied by the smell and the heat.
I walked down the street from the Gutenberghof towards the Humbrechthof. Behind me, two apprentices hauled a hand cart loaded with small casks. Whatever the neighbours thought we transacted behind the Humbrechthof’s doors and shuttered windows, they knew it was thirsty work. How else to explain all the barrels that rolled down that street?
This was my life’s journey, I thought: a matter of a hundred yards. Past the baker where I had bought sweet pies as a child, the stationer who had sold me my schoolbooks, the sword master who tried to teach me fencing when my father still believed I might become a worthy heir. If I had walked past the Humbrechthof, the sa
me distance would have taken me to the mint where I first glimpsed perfection. I walked more slowly now. The page of my soul bore the imprint of many pressings, some indelible, others written in hard point, invisible to all but the author. The ink was dense, heavy with crossings-out and corrections, new words overwritten on washed-out texts still visible beneath. In places, the nib had nicked tears in the paper. Water had stained it, fire curled the edges.
Today I would start a new page.
In seven months, the Humbrechthof had been transformed. All the walls had been whitewashed against damp. The thatch on the outbuildings had been stripped and replaced with tiles. The weeds in the courtyard had been trampled to dust by the criss-crossing of many feet, and a saw pit dug beside the old pastry kitchen. Stout timbers lay beside it. All the doors brandished new locks, and a heavy block and tackle sprouted from a dormer in the roof. Empty barrels like those that had just arrived stood stacked in a corner waiting to return up the road.
The apprentices unloaded the barrels and prised them open. Inside, large jars of ink lay nestled in straw like eggs. They began to unload, but I gestured them to follow me quickly into the house. Others had seen us arrive and emerged from the outbuildings: the paper shop, the ink store, the tool shed and the refectory. They followed me up the stairs, along the corridor and into the press room.
Everyone was there. Fust, with the haunted look of a soul approaching judgement; Götz, still wearing a leather apron from the forge; Father Günther, whose inky fingers played with the cross around his neck; Saspach, a hammer in his hand ready for any last-minute adjustment; and around them all our assistants and apprentices from both houses, almost twenty men in total. Even Sarum, the ginger cat who kept rats out of the paper store, had wandered in and crouched behind one of the table legs. And in the middle of them all, the press.
It stood like a gate in the centre of the room: two thick uprights, joined at the top and again halfway down by heavy crosspieces. The posts had been nailed into the ceiling and bolted to the floor, so that the whole instrument was knitted into the fabric of the house. A screw descended through the middle and held the platen over a long table that stuck out like an apron between the posts. That supported a flat carriage on runners, which could be slid under the press or pulled out to change the paper and the type. It was far removed from the wobbly device we had first erected in Andreas Dritzehn’s cellar a dozen years earlier.
