The Book of Secrets

XVI

Basle, 1432-3

My father once said there is no change a man cannot get used to given a fortnight. Not in his soul, perhaps, but in his actions and routines, his choices and expectations. The first night of my journey with Aeneas, I slept on the floor of the inn and ate only bread. Midway through the second night, I crawled into the common bed and wrapped myself in a corner of a blanket. On the third night, I ate as much as any other man in the tavern, drank my fill and thought nothing of sleeping on straw rather than earth. Aeneas paid a barber to cut my hair and my beard, and that alone shaved ten years from my face. An hour’s scrubbing in a bathhouse removed another five.

‘Although,’ Aeneas told me, ‘you should certainly seek out the Holy Baths in Basle. They think nothing there of men and women bathing together quite promiscuously. The sights you see…’ He made an obscene gesture with his hand; I tried not to shudder. Some memories take more than a fortnight to heal.

By the time we reached Basle I was a new man. I had a new pair of boots, a new hat and a tunic that Aeneas had bought for three pennies from a French merchant. Even so, the city terrified me. It reminded me of Mainz: a rich town by the Rhine, a city of tall houses and high towers whose weathercocks and crosses sparkled like dew in the dawn sun. A ring of stout walls circled it, beyond which its tributary villages stretched almost unbroken in every direction.

The city was crammed to its rooftops with men there for the council, but Aeneas’ silver tongue soon found me lodgings in a monastery. He took me there, then excused himself – having been away for two months, he had much to learn and report to his masters. I lay on my pallet shivering, feeling abandoned in that strange city; I thought I must run down to the river and leap on the first barge that would carry me back to my hut in the forest. But the terror passed, I slept, and the next morning Aeneas bounded in, beaming with excitement.

‘A splendid opportunity,’ he enthused. ‘A countryman of yours, a most remarkable man. His secretary has just eloped with a girl from the bathhouse.’ He winked. ‘I told you they were promiscuous. But he is a prolific thinker: if he does not find a scribe to tap his words soon they will flood his mind until it bursts. I saw him this morning – no sooner had I mentioned your name than he told me to fetch you without a moment’s delay.’

One of Aeneas’ most appealing traits, then, was his utter lack of inhibition. He had as fine an instinct for politics as any man I ever knew, but he could praise others with unthinking generosity. I had no doubt that in his description I had become the greatest scribe since St Paul. I only feared that I could not possibly satisfy my prospective employer if he believed even half of what Aeneas said.

The man in question inhabited a small room on the upper level of a whitewashed courtyard at the house of the Augustinians. Aeneas did not wait for an answer to his knock, but pushed straight through. I followed more tentatively.

There was little in the room except a bed and a desk. The desk was the larger. Two candlesticks gave it the appearance of a sacred altar. Sheaves of paper covered every inch of its surface, weighted down with anything that came to hand: a penknife, a candle end, a Bible, even a brown apple core. There were three inkpots for red, black and blue ink, a selection of reed and goose-quill pens, a bull’s-eye glass for magnification and a half-drunk cup of wine with a dead fly in it. Stacks of books surrounded the desk like ramparts – more than I had ever seen in one room. And behind it, the lord of this paper kingdom, the man we had come to see.

He barely seemed to notice us, but stared at an icon of Christ that hung on a nail on the wall. His eyes were pale blue and pure as water. There was something ageless about him, though in the course of my employment I learned he was actually a few months younger than me. His head was shaved bare, revealing an angular skull whose bones seemed to press out against the skin. I remembered Aeneas’ joke about his mind bursting with words, and wondered if it might be true. Ink stained the white sleeves of his cassock, though his hands were surprisingly clean.

Aeneas did not wait. ‘This is Johann who I told you about. Johann, it is my honour to introduce Nicholas Cusanus.’

I gave a small bow and steeled myself for the inevitable questions about my past.

‘Can you write?’

‘He knows Latin better than Cicero,’ Aeneas insisted. ‘Do you know the first thing he said to me after he fished me out of the river? He said-’

‘Take a pen and write what I dictate.’ Nicholas pushed back his chair and stood. Barely looking, he picked up the cup and sipped it. I did not see whether he drank the fly. I took his chair, sharpened one of the pens with the knife and then made a clean cut in the point. My hands were shaking so much I almost sliced it in half.

Nicholas walked around the desk and stood with his back to me, still contemplating the icon.

‘Because God is perfect form, in which all differences are united and all contradictions are reconciled, it is impossible for a diversity of forms to exist in him.’

He waited while I wrote. There was something profound in his silence which hushed even Aeneas. The only sound in the room was the scratch of my pen. My cheeks pricked with sweat as I tried to remember how to form the words. I had barely picked up a pen in ten years. As for remembering what he had actually said, I felt as if I was stumbling blind. Absolute. The words hemmed me in like a fog.

The instant I put down my pen Nicholas spun around and picked up the paper.

‘Because God is perfectly form in which all differences are different and all contradictions united, it is impossible for him to exist.’ He threw the paper aside. ‘Do you know what my words mean?’

I shook my head. I felt hot: all I wanted was to be back in the river, feeling the cold current close over me.

‘It means that God is the unity of all things. Therefore there can be no diversity in God – and certainly no diversity when we write about God. Diversity leads to error, and error to sin.’ He turned to Aeneas. ‘I need a man who can record my words as if my tongue itself was writing on the page.’

Aeneas looked crestfallen. But he was not a man to abandon his enthusiasm so easily. ‘There are saints in heaven who would struggle to grasp your words. Johann is out of practice and overawed by your intellect. Let him try again.’

Nicholas turned back to face the icon. Without even waiting to see if I was ready, he began:

Lord, to see you is to love; and as your gaze watches over me from a great distance and never deviates, so does your love. And because your love is always with me – you whose love is nothing other than yourself, who loves me – thus you are always with me. You do not desert me, Lord, but guard me at every turn with the most tender care.

He might have continued, but my pen had stopped moving. It rested forgotten above a half-completed sentence while tears streamed down my face. I felt like a fool – worse than a fool – but I could not help myself. Nicholas’s words were like a hammer, shattering the walls I had built around my soul with a single blow. The echoes reverberated through me, shaking loose the foundation stones of my being. I felt naked before God.

In the corner of the room, Aeneas looked surprised but not angry. Nicholas was harder to read. Though he could be passionate in his faith, he struggled with emotions on the lowly human scale. I saw the shock in his eyes, his struggle to find an appropriate response. In the end he took refuge in procedure. He slid the piece of paper off the table and read it quickly. There was not much to look at. I waited for him to discard it again, and me with it.

He frowned. ‘This is better. Not perfect – you misspelled amandus on the third line – but definitely improved. Perhaps even promising.’

I looked up at him. Hope shone in my tear-rimmed eyes. ‘I will retain you for one week. If your work satisfies me, then I will keep you on for as long as the council sits.’

Aeneas clapped his hands. ‘I told you he would not disappoint you.’

And that was how I – a thief, a liar and a debaucher – came to work for one of the holiest men that ever lived.

For the churchmen at the council, I suppose it was not a happy time. They did not lack ambition – many of them, including Aeneas, wanted nothing less than the complete subordination of the papacy to the decisions of the council. But that goal remained elusive. They met in committees and debated resolutions; they passed those to the general congregation to be ratified, and they in turn sent them to the Pope. The number of couriers crossing back and forth that autumn must have worn a new pass in the Alps. But I never saw anything to change the impression of my first day in Basle: that there were too many beggars and not enough rich men to make it matter.

I did not care. Nicholas had offered me work while the council sat, and I would have been happy for them to deliberate until Judgement Day. I was satisfied with my lot, simple though it was. Every day I went to Nicholas’s study and dutifully recorded whatever he dictated; every evening I returned to my room and read, or prayed. Occasionally I met Aeneas in a tavern, but not often. He was a busy man, constantly on some errand in the service of his ambition. I enjoyed hearing his stories, and did not begrudge him his progress. I felt a serenity, a feeling that the great tides that tossed me in the world had ebbed.

The council ground on through the winter. Blocks of ice appeared in the river, hard as stone: one cold morning I saw a lump strike a coal barge and smash it in two. In Nicholas’s study, I wrapped rags around my hands so that my fingers could grip the pen. My master never seemed to notice the cold. Day after day he stood staring at his icon, his only concession to the season a fur stole over his cassock.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Do you know where it went wrong, Johann?’

As he got used to me, his lectures became more conversational, using me as an anvil for hammering out his ideas. Like the anvil, I could not understand the intricacy of the work being made on my back – but I served my purpose.

‘The Fall? The serpent in Eden?’

‘For mankind, undoubtedly. But Adam’s sin was disobedience, not ignorance.’ He moved across to the window, silhouetted against its harsh cold light. ‘The greatest blow the Word suffered, when the world was young, was the disaster at Babel. When men could no longer understand each other, how could they understand the Word?’

‘I thought the tower of Babel was an affront to God.’

‘It brought its builders closer to God. The sin He punished was not ambition but overambition. And now look how the legacy spreads. What is the first fruit of the heresy that the Hussites and Wycliffites preach?’

I kept silent. That too was part of my job.

‘They preach that the Bible itself should be split apart – rendered in English or Czech or German or whichever language they prefer it. Imagine the errors, the bitter confusion and the arguments that would follow.’ He glanced out of the window, towards the spire of the cathedral where the general congregation of the council met. ‘God knows we find enough to quarrel over already.’

He looked back to the icon. ‘God is perfection. As I told you once before, there can be no diversity in him. So why do we tolerate diversity in the Church? We cannot even agree on a liturgy. Every diocese has its own devotions and ceremonies, and strives to make its own rite more splendid than its neighbour’s. They think thereby they will obtain greater favour with God – when in fact all they do is fissure his Church.’

My pen still hovered over the desk, dripping drops of ink on the page. ‘Shall I write that?’

He sighed. ‘No. Write: “We must make allowances for the weak nesses of men, unless it works contrary to eternal salvation.”’

He dismissed me at noon for my dinner. I had arranged to meet Aeneas that day – we had not spoken in a fortnight – and hurried through the streets to the tavern at the sign of the dancing bear. It was a busy, cheerful place, buried in the cellars beneath a cloth warehouse near the river. Laughter and songs echoed off its vaulted ceiling; in the hearth, a pig turned on a spit. Fat dripped into the fire and flared into smoke.

I searched through the various rooms for Aeneas but did not find him. He was often delayed, though no one ever bore it against him. I bought a mug of beer and perched on the end of a bench. A group of merchants from Strassburg occupied most of the table: they greeted me briefly, then ignored me. A single glance at my dress told them I had nothing profitable to sell.

I watched the crowd while I waited. There were a few men I recognised – a priest from Lyons, two Italian brothers who sold the paper that my master used so freely – but none I wanted to speak to. The cellar was warm, the beer mixed with herbs and honey.

And then I saw him. He was sitting on a bench two tables away, on the fringes of a conversation with a group of goldsmiths. One hand clutched a mug of beer; with the other, he fed himself bites of an enormous pork chop. The fat smeared around his lips glistened in the candlelight; his puffy eyes scanned the room with a suspicious resentment that a decade had not dimmed since he beat me in Konrad Schmidt’s workshop. Gerhard.

I should have dropped my gaze at once and hoped he would not notice, but shock had me in its grip. All I could do was stare, like a rabbit in a trap. The lank hair had receded, leaving a patch of red skin like a blister on the top of his head; his back had developed a stoop, perhaps from too many years bending in front of a furnace. But it was certainly him. And if I could recognise him, he could surely do the same to me.

Our eyes met. I cursed myself for shaving my beard, which might have been enough of a disguise; I touched the pilgrim mirror that I kept in my purse and prayed that a decade of suffering might have aged my face to the point where he did not remember it. But Aeneas had restored my life too well. Stupefied, I watched surprise give way to disbelief, then harden into certainty. And triumph.

He pushed back the bench and rose. I looked at the hearth, at the spitted pig twisting in the flames and the fat oozing out of its body. I knew what would happen to me if Gerhard reported my crime.

A maid with a tray of mugs crossed in front of Gerhard, blocking his path. He stumbled back a step and in that moment I made my decision. I jumped up from my seat and ran to the stairs, careless of the attention I drew. Hot fat spat onto my hand as I passed the fire and I flinched – but my greater fear was meeting Aeneas. I could not bear for him to learn what sort of man he had helped.

I reached the street and ran up a narrow alley towards the cathedral. When I reached the market in the square, I ducked behind a tanner’s stall and doubled back on myself, down a narrow row of shops towards the river. It was almost deserted. If Gerhard had followed me, he would certainly have no difficulty seeing me now.

I came out on a wharf just below the bridge. Few boats dared risk the river that early in the season but, to my shining relief, there was one at the foot of the steps, a small barge whose captain was just casting off the ropes. I skidded to a halt at the edge of the wharf.

‘Where are you going?’ I shouted down.

‘To Aachen, and then to Paris.’

It was not the captain who answered but one of the passengers. He wore a short travelling cloak and a hood, and carried a long walking staff – though if the barge was taking him all the way to Aachen, he would not have to walk a step for weeks. A small knot of men and women stood around him on the bow, all dressed for a pilgrimage.

I glanced nervously over my shoulder. Was Gerhard even now summoning the guard, telling them what manner of criminal they harboured in their city?

‘Can I join you?’

The pilgrim consulted with his companions a moment, then looked at the captain, who shrugged.

‘If you have two silver pennies to contribute to the costs of the journey.’

I scampered down the steps and leaped aboard. I rummaged in my purse and found the two coins – most of what it held. I did not even have a hat with me.

The bargeman gave me a curious look but said nothing. He cast off the ropes and poled the vessel away from the landing, until the current picked it up and began to drive it forward. I sat on the bow with my back to the city and did not look back.