People of the Book

by David Stacton

  These were their pleasures of that town. As for Frau Larsen, on Thursdays she went to count her money with the usurer, a picturesque old fur-bearing Jew named Salterbaum, Erasmus Salterbaum, who instructed her in the profits to be made on a cautious risk, and handled her money with a jeweler’s reverence. He didn’t care what it was worth. But he was totally absorbed in what could be done with it.

  This was unwise of her, but the profits were large, and his was a name she had heard once and kept to herself for years. And now, the waiting had been worth it, she had met him at last. She had brought him her capital, and it had not been too little, he had not turned her away.

  She was content.

  II.20.1: Among the dictates laid down by nature, as lawful and just, and which the ancient Philosophers called the law of Rhadamanthus, the following maxim may be placed, THAT IT IS RIGHT FOR EVERYONE TO SUFFER EVIL PROPORTIONED TO THAT WHICH HE HAS DONE …. What has been said of the inseparable connection of a penalty with every offense is similar to the remark of Augustin, “that to make a punishment JUST it must be inflicted for some crime.”

  9

  With the promulgation of the Leipzig Manifesto, the Snow King had been forced to change his tactics. There were only two princes in Germany strong enough to oppose the Emperor, John George of Saxony and Maximilian of Bavaria. The one meant well, the other was greedy, and therefore meant worse; the one was Protestant, the other Catholic.

  John George, himself a giant, but a drunken giant, though he wished to win refused to risk a battle. He settled for a qualified declaration of war, and sapped Gustavus’ allies to his own side. He declared himself the true savior of Germany, but was dilatory in raising an army. Two weeks later the Emperor informed him he would not be allowed to recruit Protestant troops.

  Without John George to support him, Gustavus was forced to march in the opposite direction, in order to consolidate his rear. He therefore set out along the Oder, his goal Frankfort, with 18,000 men, 200 pieces of cannon, and a portable, dismantled bridge 180 feet long. Frankfort was in Imperial hands, and therefore a threat to the success of his strategy.

  At the beginning of April, Tieffenbach, the Imperial commander, set fire to the suburbs, the country houses, the mills, the vineyards, and the orchards up to the walls, so as to have no cover left around the town. These smoked for several days and lit the world at night, like something from the Peasants’ War, by way of Grünewald and Bosch, Hans Baldung Grün, or Breughel.

  It was just beginning to be spring. In Frau Larsen’s walled orchard all the little lost flowers had sprung up to be counted, and a man had come only two weeks before to paint white socks on the black tree boles, and to do some grafting (Frau Larsen refused to waste a tree: it might be old, but it could still bear).

  Each pod was glistening, green as a grasshopper new shucked and still damp from rebirth. He fingers the bough, swaying, and then he leaps.

  “Oh look,” said Hannale, with the easy reverence of a child, and while they looked, soldiers with billhooks pulled the walls down, and they could see those fields burning of which they had already smelled the smoke.

  Frau Larsen went into the house and began to put the shutters up.

  10

  There had been no talk recently of apprenticing Lars to a baker. Frau Larsen seemed to have forgotten about it. But though he refused to be a baker, he would run away first, Lars had made friends with the man. He was a prosperous baker. He was also a good one. He had a cheerful, flour-faced wife and several doughy children and a house of his own to prove it. You cannot bake bread without some daily sense of reverence, and of all the arts, those who bake have the least admired gift. So if Lars was willing to admire, he was welcome.

  The ovens were fired by two A.M., and had reached their proper heat by four. The bakehouse was a stone cavern in the town wall, near the main gate. Lars went there to get warm when he woke early, but also because he took the baker for an alchemist. That place was a philosophy, and had the ruddy glow of life. In large wooden tubs, bound with iron, the dough began to lift its stiff white cloth. Prometheus stole us fire, Bacchus honey, but what god knifed off a chunk of manna raw and brought us yeast? The baker did not know. A Vulcan of the edible (gout had given him a limp), he stomped about gloomily, bossed his assistants, sang, took up great wads of the stuff, pummeled it into shape on a floured board, and saw it sliced into exactly calculated loaves. He grunted when the work went well. He knew to a smidgeon what each should weigh.

  Like children everywhere, Lars had a partiality for raw dough, snuck from the chopper’s sliced leavings. When younger, he had been a privileged licker of pudding-batter bowls, an eater of the soggy centers of cakes which hadn’t raised properly, the first to steal the twenty-fifth raw currant bun off a flat that will hold twenty-four, but there would have been a place for it if the maid had really tried.

  There was a drowsy smell of safe childhood here, the only time we’re not spoilt, we’re just favored. He could half remember it. The best batter was when the baker made Pentecost cakes. There was in particular one of glacé fruit packed into a coffin. But mostly it was the hot miracle of bread. Nothing has the slimy glister of risen dough, unless it be frogs’ eggs taken fresh from the pond, and they have not the same golden sheen. The slime on risen dough is like the mucus on the about-to-be-born. For it is forgotten we are all pulled out of the womb wet; beast or baby, it is much the same: the spring is brief.

  Everything in the bakeshop contradicted the sermons of Pastor Mysendonck. Not every oven that burns at night belches hell-fire. The old gods have shrunk, but work done at night, in the bowels of Trollheim, is not the devil’s work. It is we Christians who get lost in the böyg, not the old gods. Our own gods are beyond good and evil.

  The baker placed the bread on paddles and shoved it into the stove by means of a long handle. The motion was the same as that of muzzle-loading a cannon. Cannon in those days had not breeches, but the oven door unbolted like one and swung aside, and out came the loaves, transubstantiated by divine heat into the holiness of hot bread.

  The size and shape of loaves was strictly regulated by the Town Council. But the baker made for himself another kind of bread, of a sort Lars had seen nowhere else. It was a little bun on top of a bigger bun. The crust was tense and flaky, and kept its heat longer than an ordinary loaf. You screwed off the top bun and poured in butter, replacing the top. The butter ran down through the coarse, friable, slightly gray meat within. And that was breakfast. The cap had usually a strong streamer, like a buttered parsnip, and that you ate first.

  The baker had a fondness for these loaves. So had Lars.

  Old walls have secret ways. Taking his loaf, Lars slipped away into the shadows, through an arch, and, finding the stairs, began to climb the tower. There was a dead sparrow on one of the treads. It was a climb of a hundred steps to the top. There was a breeze blowing when he came out on the platform, but it had not dissipated the mists yet. He began to eat his bread. Inside the town the steep shingled roofs were damp with dawn.

  Outside the walls, the böyg covered everything, a cloud of unknowing, more like an ocean than a mist. The landscape was flooded. Here and there a scorched treetop stuck up.

  Lars knew from sea fog that the böyg is part of existence. He did not find it alarming. No more is the sailor afraid of the sea which will kill him. It is one of the facts he accepts. If the vessel is bad and leaks, he mans the pumps. If the vessel is well calked, he waits until next time.

  The böyg is that mist with which the bad gods confuse the ambitions of men, hoping that since they will poke on anyhow, by this means they may be led astray. Strange things lurk in the böyg, the worst of them the glory, our own image cast on a cloud, bigger, surrounded by a roiling nimbus, menacing.

  In this case the böyg was tule fog. It rose up out of the marsh gasses and the river sedges an hour before dawn and lay there, clammy and damp, until the sun removed it, had the sun free passage that day. It was more dangerous than a sea fog
, because you want to run. In a sea fog you know you cannot run, so you don’t.

  Marooned above it, Lars ate his loaf and watched and shivered in his elkskin shorts. Within the town a bell tolled. It was six. There was a clatter of the devout going to church; today was Palm Sunday. A blue pennant emerged in a trough of the mist and then disappeared. He watched it idly, not realizing what it was. It was kissing the moon, and was not long visible. The movements of the mist were as contrary as easterlies. The air was damp as a crypt. A segment of fog swung heavily aside, like a canal lock, to reveal a bank of the Oder. Then it closed and filled with mist again. On the bank, in the interim, a parade of toy soldiers went by. At least, they would have been toys had they not been working. They were dressed in blue and yellow, the blue of a winter sky, the yellow of a winter sun in the high latitudes. They were Swedish troops.

  As a man bent down from his horse, the mist closed in again. In the middle of the böyg, a bugle blew. You could hear now, while cocks sent the word around like sentries, a hushed metallic clanking and sometimes a splash. The clanking was beneath the tower.

  At eight the mist suddenly heaved up, a streaming iceberg, and melted two ways into thin air, leaving only dirty patches in the hollows, a kind of lingering snow. It was now possible to see what the böyg contained.

  Lars, who had never before seen a war drawn up in front of him, looked down. It was a toy box filled with rich men’s toys, for war is the royal game, it is even more diverse than chess. Its dispositions on the map have beauty. And Lars, like the great commanders of the day, was too far off to see either the vermin or the blood. These people were not people. They were counters, as solid, as heavy, and as mysterious as the lead chessmen of the Isle of Wight. Birds of passage ought to think of leaving. But he could not move.

  Gustavus had ordered his troops the previous day. They now began to move up.

  As for those in the town, it was the week before the Frankfort fair. Everyone was in his best clothes, except refugees who had fled in to the walls this past week with their carts. They were poor refugees. In time of trouble the poor flee first, they have no property to tie them down; and as for the rich, they were warned, they left in orderly fashion long before trouble came. When the smoke clears, they can be seen chatting with the general staff, on the winning side.

  These tiny soldiers had the pathos of far distance, precise and harmless. The rising sun caught the glint of pikes. The only man mounted among them was death on a white horse, though from time to time a courier rode in, and there were cavalry stationed far behind, upon the hills.

  The garrison of the town had not disturbed itself. At this hour it was probably drunk, from a night of drinking. Not much was known of the Swedes as yet, except by the Dutch who sold them the trappings of the modern world at good commission. But since they were neither Hapsburg nor Bourbon, clearly they were recent brutes, and like Alaric and Attila, would go away in time. It was beneath one’s dignity to take them seriously: they did not know the rules; and the comity of Europe fought only the enemy within. It was six hundred years since the last great migrations, so how was the Imperial General Staff to know that the real conqueror comes always from without, and so makes his own rules?

  General Schomberg, a man of good family, caused a wild goose to be hung on the ramparts, to intimate that northern birds ought now to think of leaving. The beast was hung live and honking, but soon fluttered dead in its noose, where it dangled dirty. Having seen its final struggles, Gustav’s Scots troops said that for their own part they hoped soon to see an Imperial goose well roasted and well sauced. This pleased the King.

  Seeing the solemn flap of the clergy going around the battle formations, Lars went home to breakfast and then to church, for when the clergy comes, you may be sure that nothing is happening.

  At church, though the congregation had a nervous smell, there was nothing to do but look at the hatchments and wait until the hourglass was reversed and the last sands of the sermon had run down. Over the altar hung a late medieval Christus, its flesh green. In it you might see a truth to which the preacher did not allude, that the victim wants to be tortured. There is a masochism in the athlete, and if he wins long enough, he will live to lose. It is a process and needs no name. We want to have done to us what we have done to others. We want to know what it is like. So these bony muscular Christs of the North are like dangerous old men who know too much. You will be next, they say, so stone me.

  Lars tried not to look at it.

  After service Frau Larsen took the children home. General Schomberg, who had not attended mass (the town had churches of each sort), went on eating his noon dinner, a feast which usually faded imperceptibly into supper and continued until his body servants carried him to bed stinking of the best Rhenish.

  Lars went back to the bakeshop tower. As he climbed the stairs, the church bells began to sound a tocsin which completely drowned out Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. The greatest commander of his day had come to teach the world a lesson. Lars rushed up the last steps and out upon the platform. From over the parapet came an horripilating skirl, the bagpipes of the Scots pipers, a sound not heard before in these parts. It turned your bowels to water. It was as remorseless as a coronach, and came right toward you.

  Two attacks were made simultaneously, one on the suburb near Frau Larsen’s house, one on the Guben gate, below Lars. Cannon shattered it. Whoever was in charge had forgotten to lower the portcullis, which allowed General Banér to storm inside and to cut down such Imperial troops as were assembled. One had merely to cross to the inner side of the tower, to watch.

  Up till now, Lars had seen death only in the singular. In the plural it loses its meaning. One learns it does not matter, except to us. Seen from above, it is even comic. This makes it no less glittering and terrible. It is not reassuring to discover that life’s one inevitable event signifies nothing. One might as well be forking hay. Yet your man who finds conscience a burden lives solely for a general slaughter. If you want to see how self-justified a piece of putty can be, go look at the vacuous rheumy eyes of retired veterans, stiff-legged as senile dogs. They don’t remember the death. They remember the freedom.

  Thirty-seven hundred men died that day. General Schomberg rose for once from dinner, and with Tieffenbach and one Montecuculi, scampered across the Oder bridge, not to stop until he had gone sixty miles inside Silesia. He had a hard time of it, for the streets were clogged with people fleeing, they did not know where.

  The town was choked with goods consigned to the coming fair, and the troops had had a hard winter. Since he could not restrain them, Gustavus benevolently gave them exceptional license to plunder, until such time as he could once more bring them under control.

  Thirty thousand pounds’ worth of goods were taken. The only man of importance to lose his life was a Syndic who made the mistake of telling the riffraff they were riffraff. Nobody likes to hear the truth, so he was not given the opportunity of saying the same thing twice. Jews were not counted in the statistics, which were based upon Christian souls, and those they had not. In any census, they were lumped at the end, among necessary animals.

  Seeing a small child darting among the soldiers’ feet, Lars remembered Hannale and clattered down the stairs toward home.

  Frau Larsen’s house was in the Custin quarter, where Butler the Younger, not knowing the Imperial commanders had already fled, was vigorously defending their property. The soldiers of both sides were hampered by a group of women freshly come from church who stood in the street shrieking and could not be gotten out of the way. One of them, sobbing senselessly, beat the nearest Imperial soldier over the head with her rosary beads, which were made of pewter. She was a Catholic, but did not recognize her defenders. More likely she had no idea of what she was doing. She had cut open half a dozen faces so far. Lars wriggled under the wheels of an abandoned wagon, piled, as it happened, with furs, and scrambled to the house.

  There were Swedish troops to Butler’s rear, as well a
s in front of him. Frau Larsen stood in the middle of the hall, while looters moved around her. No, she did not know where Hannale was. She did not seem to know who she was, either. Glancing out a window, she gasped and made a dart for the door.

  A plump little man in a fur-lined caftan and an indoor cap, with rings on his fingers, and grizzled hair much too long, was galloping down the street, pursued by baying boys in uniform as fresh-faced as though this were a paper chase. They meant no more than to have their fun with him, and perhaps a ring or two as well. It was Erasmus Salterbaum.

  Frau Larsen picked up her skirts and charged.

  “You let him go,” she shrieked. “That’s my Jew.”

  Erasmus gave a startled look over his shoulder and then sagged. The boys closed around him at once, in a greedy scrimmage. She beat their backs, and when this produced no effect, kicked them.

  “You give me back my Jew,” she screamed.

  “Take him, lady,” said the pleasantest of the young soldiers, straightening up. “We don’t want him. He’s dead.” And picking it up by the scruff of its caftan, he flung the body at her, minus its rings and one finger which had had to be cut, the ring on it would not come off.

  Erasmus had had a heart attack. Since Gustavus’ discipline was strict, the thugs took off. Since their faces were not memorable, except for the shimmer of youth, there was no danger of their being caught.

  The body, more graceful in death than in life, made a half turn on its toes, the arms flapping, and collapsed in the mud, splashing Frau Larsen to the waist.

  Lars went back the way he had come. Hannale knew the bakeshop was one of his refuges. She might have gone there.

  The refugees had by now abandoned for some hours their carts, which stood about the streets in a smashed log jam, among the dead bodies. Gustavus had established order, but there is nothing to say a soldier cannot loot another soldier. So there were squabbles, hand on hip. Sexual hysteria is part of any engagement. The townswomen were not behaving well. The rest was cordite and silence and a heavy smoke in the air. It was getting on toward evening, and one of those green and rose sunsets peculiar to the Germanies, where the air looks charred.