Operation Wandering Soul

by Richard Powers

  . . . occupational rescue work in a dark time—the stopgaps that a people summon at the moment of collapse—would make a profitable study. The psychology of decline, the realization that progress has reversed and that history is entering upon a long, perhaps terminal decay, must be one of the most revealing of civilization’s convictions. But such speculation lies beyond the scope of this endeavor. . . .

  . . . a narrow span of nine years in the Europe of the early sixteenth century. Few periods have been more ambivalently explosive than the years 1527 to 1535. The dissemination of printed matter through movable type, rapid expansion of trade, advances in medicine led by Paracelsus’s epochal surgical manual, a density of artistic genius such as the world never again produced, and the daily exodus of ships embarking westward on a salubrious footrace of nations were cause for the highest optimism.

  Yet the underside of the era’s developments more than kept pace. The scale of political intrigue and social dislocation stripped conviction from even the age’s most gifted. Signs and portents—the comet of 1531, the Gnostic calculations pointing to the fifteenth centennial of the Savior’s death, Columbus’s prophetic fulfillment in gathering together the globe’s scattered races (a collision from which the world has yet to recover)—become the basis for a more substantive chiliasm. The renewed Turkish incursions, Müntzer’s Peasants’ Uprising, the endless roles of famine and crop failure, returns of Plague, horrific distribution of wealth, the sundering of the sole institution that had held Europe alive for the thousand years since the collapse of the Western Empire, and Luther’s new timetable for the perpetually impending Visit all attest to a climate of frightened expectation.

  For one highly cultivated, multinational confederation the size of Western Europe, these years truly were the end of history. Pizarro and his two hundred soldiers sprung their ambush in Cajamarca town square, captured the Incan emperor, and slaughtered his four-thousand-man bodyguard. The Cuzco hegemony fell, and an empire as remarkable as any the world has seen vanished into legend.

  From the home ports, a fabulous, golden land seemed to rise up from the sea in the nick of time expressly to solve intractable over-population, inflation, stagnation, unemployment, and restless violence. Yet the overnight infusion of new goods—tobacco, tubers, maize, gold, human lives—only increased the disruption of populations. By 1527, all Europe was crisscrossing the seas in carracks and caravels. Assembling a fleet became a nation’s rite of passage, a frenzied, peripatetic hunt for commodities and resources. But by a process that has become historical law, a sudden, often inflationary increase in the material stakes brought about a proportional expansion in the risk of disastrous . . .

  (A passage obscured here by vigorous Crayola spirals, scarlet, canary-yellow, Adriatic blue-green.)

  . . . had angered Charles with the Cognac maneuverings. The emperor’s response was to incite a force of mercenaries under Frundsberg. We are fortunate to possess, almost intact, the diary of Michael Klotz, a Lutheran lance commander in the condottiere’s band, a remarkable document providing, like Cellini’s on the other side, a firsthand account of the Sack. Klotz writes of the devastation the Landsknechte cut on the way through Lombardy, where they merged with the duke of Bourbon’s army for a combined drive down the Via Emilia upon the Eternal City.

  Privately, Klotz favored the last-minute attempts to patch up a truce between pope and emperor. But the terms offered by Clement and accepted by Charles’s agent were too niggling for the twenty thousand German and Spanish troops, stoked by promises of pillage and booty. Klotz could no more sway his own brigade than Frundsberg or Bourbon could restrain the force as a whole. The army now advanced on the capital of Christendom with an independent will.

  By April, Rome at last realized that it was the object of the march. On Easter, a crazed recluse ran through the streets, calling on the bastard children of Sodom to repent or be destroyed. Desperate defense preparations commenced, but these came too late. The pope’s guard were outnumbered at least five to one. Skillful use of the walls and existing artillery managed to thin the attacking squares. Soon, however, the pope was forced back upon the Castel Sant’Angelo. Cellini tells us how he single-handedly . . .

  (Two more pages of florid Crayola, now a jeweled, sunken garden through which float disembodied figurines, boats, fireworks, and several uppercase Hs and Os, alongside a chorus line of amorphous shepherd’s crooks.)

  The task of safeguarding the endless inventories of artistic splendor in the papal treasuries fell to the younger Antonio da Sangallo. Antonio, nephew of the great Sangallo architect brothers, then headed the building project whose funding schemes—excessive taxations, selling of papal indulgences, and the like—had precipitated the calamitous unraveling of the Western world. . . .

  Many of the treasury objects were melted down rather than allowed to fall into the hands of the Northern invaders. Cellini himself (who derided Antonio as a tasteless woodworker) personally destroyed unique masterworks of his own art, as well as works by his greatest contemporaries and predecessors.

  But Sangallo had another plan, equally outlandish, one that meant to preserve the achievements of civilization from the storm. The shape of the secret measures emerges only from gaps in the record. The master builder worked around the clock in the confines of the Vatican, packing sandbags to fill Sixtus’s private chapel, hoping to protect the Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandajo frescoes from falling mortar and to absorb the bombardment’s shocks to Michelangelo’s already world-famous tabernacle to Creation. Antonio worked steadily and without much hope to preserve the triumphs of the imagination from reality’s latest onslaught, stacking sand in the full knowledge that this was neither the first, nor the last, nor even the most senseless of politics’ annihilating sieges.

  Antonio’s daring plan was carried out on the night of May 6, as the invaders poured through the breached walls in a turmoil of fog and artillery fire. He assembled, in the now-barricaded papal apartments, as many of the quarter’s juvenile homeless as he could find. Street urchins were the ideal cover, the last bodies that a pillaging mercenary would think to shake down. On his own initiative, Sangallo doled out priceless medallions, cameos, portraits, reliquaries, vessels, precious glass, and jewelry to this band of cutthroat children, instructing them to carry the fortunes away and threatening them with God’s eternal damnation if they should fail to return so little as a single piece of sacred art after the danger subsided.

  And so it came about that a considerable part of the richest collection of artifacts in Europe passed into the impoverished streets inside the torn shirt seams of children, not one of them privileged enough ever to have attended school. . . .

  Klotz relates, with fascinated horror, the events of those eight days. His professional soldiers degenerated into a blood-drinking mob, killing at random for sheer pleasure, ransacking churches and libraries and palazzi, destroying the university, starting fires with irreplaceable manuscripts, looting anything that looked pawnable, carrying off all movable painted surfaces and destroying much of the immovable out of spite, torturing eminences, parading about in cardinals’ vestments, desecrating altars, proclaiming Luther the pope, forcing nuns and young women and girls into the Piazza del Popolo at sword point for a promiscuous carnival of violation.

  (The word “promiscuous” clumsily circled by crude exclamation points.)

  In one senseless indulgence, marauders entered the orphanage of Santo Spirito Hospital and slaughtered all the helpless who had assumed sanctuary there. The pope was held prisoner in the Castello; law and decency had come to an end. It is little wonder that the Sage of Rotterdam saw in the Sack “not the destruction of a single city, but of the entire world.”

  Klotz’s share of the spoils, if we credit his account, was modest. He spent the first two days attempting to restore decorum. As papal resistance dissolved, he roamed the streets trying to reduce the brutality of his men. He writes at length about rescuing a tiny boy and girl from the hands of a loo
t-incensed cavalier. The soldier had discovered brooches in the children’s possession—an encrusted filigree pin, a Romanesque silver winged grotesque, and a Florentine terra-cotta. Klotz killed the molesting soldier with some evident satisfaction.

  There follows a long, sometimes pathetic passage in which Klotz describes taking the children under his private protection during the fierce, waning days of the Sack. His harrowing inner battle between the altruistic impulse to protect these wartime refugees, followed by what seem to have been repeated, ungovernable bouts of baser . . .

  (Two pages cleanly excised by razor blade or moral equivalent.)

  . . . upon Klotz’s return to Germany and his rise through the ranks of the imperial armies. Eight years after the Sack of Rome he was involved in another siege. This time, he was deployed against the Catholic capital’s very opposite: the Anabaptist stronghold of Münster, the protestant New Jerusalem.

  The Anabaptist movement, a loose uprising of millennial sects, gained momentum in Germany and the Low Countries during the troubled late 1520s and early 1530s. Hans Hut, a bookbinder turned prophet, died mysteriously in an Augsburg prison in 1527, having prophesied Christ’s return for the following year. The wandering visionary Melchior Hofmann gathered a wide following, preaching a period of woes that would culminate in revelation in 1533. And in that year, mass expectation of the End began to turn the prosperous Hanse town of Münster into a grotesque parody of the City of God on Earth.

  In early February 1534, the merchant Knipperdollinck and the Dutchman Jan Beuckelson (John of Leiden) ran screaming through the city’s streets calling on people to repent. They managed to provoke an armed uprising of converted Anabaptists, who took over the town hall. The council, weakened by infighting and filled with Lutherans eager to protect their own freedom of worship, did nothing to oppose the revolt. Assisted by the arrival of his spiritual master, the gaunt, bearded ascetic Jan Matthys of Haarlem, Beuckelson rapidly took over. Armed mobs ejected all misbelievers from the town, appropriating their property and condemning to a February snowstorm a stream of dispossessed, including expectant mothers and infants.

  The Dutch proclaimers of the Second Coming were left to establish an absolute theocracy, a divinely inspired island of the Chosen amid history’s final deluge. Matthys began implementing the utopian communalism that would for a few months turn the city insane. Private money was abolished, and property was commonly distributed. All books except the Bible were set ablaze on a pyre in the cathedral square. Public execution of dissenting voices took place to the accompaniment of hymns.

  To restore order, the bishop of Münster threw up earthworks around the town. But his forces were too weak to lay a fully effective siege. On Easter, Matthys, now absolute dictator of the city, claiming divine assurance of success, rode out with a handful of men to scatter the besieging army. Matthys and his suicidal squad were sliced apart without mercy.

  Back inside the walls, the cloak of leadership fell to Beuckelson. Obeying mystic revelations, he implemented a strict rotation of labor and appointed a governing body of twelve elders. He instituted polygamy and compelled all women under a certain age to marry. By year’s end, polygamy had devolved into a kind of mandatory, rampant promiscuity. Beuckelson so inflamed his little garrison of two thousand men that they repeatedly withstood the attacks of episcopal forces several times their size.

  In September, a goldsmith named Dusentschur stood in the Prinzipalmarkt and announced that God had chosen Beuckelson as king of kings, ruler of all the nations of earth, and Messiah of the Last Days. Such was Beuckelson promptly ordained, to increasing murmurs among the fanfare. Streets, gates, days of the week, even children were all given new names. An ornamental coinage was struck, and Beuckelson surrounded himself with the trappings of an ornate fantasy court. While requisitioning goods from the poor to pay for this splendor, the new king assured them that the day was at hand when stones would be turned to bread and mud into gold. The Third Age was here, when the Children of God would inherit an earth richer than their wildest dreams.

  Sympathetic Anabaptist uprisings erupted across the North. At last realizing the scale of events at Münster, the states of the empire joined together in sending money and soldiers to topple Beuckelson’s messianic kingdom. By the time Klotz arrived to seal off the blockade in January of 1535, life inside the city had descended into a last, macabre nightmare. Fantastic feats of stagecraft were devised for the starving populace—athletic tournaments, masques, obscene masses performed in the cathedral. Trumpeters went about delivering concerted blasts at all hours, the signal for townsfolk to assemble in the square, under penalty of death, and listen to the king’s latest inspirations.

  Much of what Klotz describes, however fantastic, is corroborated by sources inside the walls. In May, Beuckelson began resorting to mass executions of his starving, hysterical subjects. Many believers were ready to be transported up to heaven along with him. At first, those who came to their senses were allowed to leave the city, but the imperial forces refused to let them through the siege lines. Klotz describes how these creatures crawled about like animals in the moat between the city walls and the besieging earthworks, grazing on grass, begging to be put to death. These were the lucky ones; subsequent defectors were quartered and nailed up about town.

  Klotz’s task was to shell the northern ramparts along the Buddenturm with cannonades of leaflets, imploring the citizens of the town to turn on their king and thus avoid a massacre. He reports that by the siege’s gruesome end, the desperate garrison had been whittled down to starved children. When the besiegers finally pierced the city and overcame the last, fanatical defense, they had to pick their way through carnage beyond imagining. Stacks of corpses lined the streets, most so mutilated by execution, scavenging, or disease that the aged could not be told from the young.

  The surviving Anabaptist leaders, Beuckelson and Knipperdollinck, were singed to death with red-hot irons. Klotz reports that the king made no sound during his torture, nor did he recant. Their bodies were hung in lead cages from the spire of the Lambertikirche.

  At precisely this time Michelangelo, old and misanthropic, embittered by history, returned to the Sistine Chapel, now free of Sangallo’s sandbagging, to add to his ceiling’s Creation a transforming footnote: the horrifying Last Judgment, that most pitiless work in Western art. . . .

  (Crayola flowers, houses, their chimneys curly with Prussian-blue smoke, some simple words, a girl’s stick face, a fighter airplane spewing pudgy, rainbow caterpillars of bullets . . .)

  Well, yes: of course. Through the arabesques of innocence’s syllogisms, the conclusion grows obvious to him. Her insight shines as brightly as the pool of early reader flashlight under the covers at night. Kraft backtracks through the steps of her logic. And she has it weirdly right. Still adept, Joy infers what he has missed. The codger in the Dodger cap is not a little boy propelled into a sensationally aged body. Exactly the reverse. The new kid on the block is the Laotian myth-equivalent of Methuselah, a spirit older than entire generations who perversely refuses to detach himself from boyhood.

  The explanation she comes up with is simpler, closer to the bone. A child shriveling from the husk inward still stays green in the core. She asks the boy’s name. Kraft tells her, as if he, like Linda, has known the tag all along. He sees her roll the clinical syllables around on her tongue. She tries the name out loud: “Nicolino.” Beyond doubt, one of the lost boys. Fell out of the perambulator in Kensington Gardens. Corroded by time in outward stuff, while remaining essentially untouched. All children, except one, grow up. I’ve seen him; he’s just flown in the window of the ward.

  “That book you gave me . . .” He knows what she struggles to protest: every word of it, the literal, documentary truth.

  Kraft considers giving her Hutchinson-Gilford disease to add to the pile of homework assignments she keeps by the side of her bed. Progeria’s Pan, the ward’s most fantastic invalid ever, might outdo all the study texts she has so metic
ulously assembled. The boy who never grew up: brutal practicality leaves her no fiercer a fairy tale. Joy will need myth much more outrageous—absurdly, magically more—to live through the mystery ahead of her.

  She will need to believe far worse, and wilder. Kraft can’t even compose faith’s prerequisite list, so deeply has measurement encroached on his own credence. She will need to hope that escalating pain has some surprise, hidden by design until the redeeming twist. She will have to keep believing that the physician she adores is not poisoning her for pleasure with sloe nausea fizzes and chemo chasers. Let her believe. Let her escape the exam constraints this once, buy in, subscribe to any prognostic faith that helps her account for the nursery damned. Believe any transparency at all rather than come to the one unskirtable truth Kraft himself would still deny if he could: that all children will grow up, except this believing one.

  And forty-eight hours suffice to prove that her take on the new boy is in every way superior to Kraft’s own. Nicolino is not a child; he is a phenomenon, a hell-raiser of perverse proportions impossible for anyone under retirement age on what Linda still insists on calling God’s earth to achieve. He moves in with both overnight bags blazing, and before the week is out, he not only owns the ward, he’s backdated the deed. After ten days, he’s ruling the rotting, disease-infested roost as if that’s the way things have been since time out of mind.

  Joy is right: this is no geriatric boy. He’s an incontestable old-timer, hanging on to the sandlot by his gnarled claws. Linda’s not the only one to get solicited. The better part—and Kraft has to admire the squib’s taste—of the female staff assembles with bewildered frequency at the ward nurses’ station comparing incredulities. Did that kid say what I think he said?