He pointed to a section of text halfway down the page.
God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered togethere he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
‘If you put the hyphen in the margin, the weight of the text will be more evenly spread. More pleasing to the eye.’
I glanced at Kaspar. The mesh of scars on his face puckered as anger took hold of him. Before he could react, I said, ‘We will have to see. It is not like taking a pen and simply adding a stroke to the end of the line.’
Kaspar threw the boy a murderous look. Günther the priest prudently changed the subject. ‘How many Bibles will we be making?’
‘One hundred and fifty. Thirty on vellum, the rest on paper. I calculate we can manage two pages of the whole edition each day. Less in winter. We will have two presses, which Saspach will build there.’ I pointed across the courtyard, to the first floor of the house. ‘We will put them in the hall and the parlour.’
‘We will need to strengthen the floors,’ Saspach noted.
‘Brick pillars in the rooms below. We will use these as our paper store. Once you’re done with the presses, you can build a hoist to bring the paper directly up to the press rooms.’
‘What about the press in the Gutenberghof?’ Götz asked.
‘Too small. We will keep that to produce indulgences, grammar books, whatever else we can sell. There will be plenty of offcuts and scraps from the Bible we can reuse.’
Fust raised a stern hand. ‘There will not. Whatever is bought for the Bible goes to the Bible.’ He swung his stick in an arc around the courtyard, indicating the house while fixing each man there with a severe look. ‘Do you understand? This is our joint venture. I do not want my investment entering by one door only to steal out through another. I know many of you will often have cause to be at the Gutenberghof; some of you live there. What you do with your own time or your own materials is your concern. But every penny that is paid into this project will stay in it. Not one scrap of paper, not one letter of type, not one drop of ink.’
‘Nothing will be taken away from your investment in the project,’ I assured him quickly. ‘Everything will be accounted for, down to the last comma. As surely as they count every coin in the mint.’
‘As you know, I would prefer that you concentrated all your energies on this business.’
‘I have given you my word that nothing will delay it. But it will be months, God willing, before we are ready even to start pressing here, and a year until we reach full capacity. Even if all goes well, it will need two more years for the Bibles to be complete. Running the Gutenberghof press will provide income through these lean years, and a good place to train new apprentices.’
I walked across the courtyard to the stairs.
‘Let me show you where it will happen.’
LXIX
Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
They spent the night in the motel. They’d paid in advance, and their hoard of euros was running out. When bedtime came they undressed and crept under the blankets together without discussion. They slept wrapped around each other, their naked skin the only warmth in the room. At seven, they rose and left.
A thick fog had come down on the heels of the snow, leaving the world a damp and lonely place. They crossed the Rhine at dawn and barely saw it, then turned north. Emily had the laptop out on her knees but didn’t open it; the white silence seemed to possess her completely. The only cars they passed were ghostly wrecks abandoned at the side of the road.
‘Mainz was Gutenberg’s home.’ Emily’s voice was hardly audible over the ineffectual clatter of the heater. ‘I wonder if that’s why Olaf chose it.’
Olaf had set the meeting for eleven o’clock at St Stephan’s church, a whitewashed building trimmed in red sandstone, capped by a bullet-nosed dome. It stood at the top of the hill behind the city: looking back from the terrace outside, Nick saw a snowy forest of roofs and aerials sloping down into the fog. For a moment he felt a powerful sense of dread, of unseen enemies sniffing for his trail in the snow. He shook it off and went inside.
It was like stepping into a fish tank. A soft blue light filled the church like water, so thick it was almost tangible. It came from the windows, a nebula of swirling blues speckled with white: birds in a cloudless sky, a starcloth, souls flitting into heaven.
Only at the back of the church, behind the altar, did the blue become a canvas for more literal illustrations. Nick walked up to examine them. An angel with fairy wings carried up a body that had swooned into its arms. A naked Adam and Eve considered an apple, while a blue serpent twined through the tree. A golden angel reading a book turned somersaults over a lighted menorah.
‘The windows are new. The church burned in the war.’
Nick turned sharply. A straight-backed old man wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket had rolled up behind him in a wheel-chair. His hooded eyes looked old enough to have seen the church’s devastation first hand. His lips curled in and hid whatever teeth he had left, while tufts of grey hair poked from under his battered hat.
‘The new windows are by Chagall,’ the old man continued. His tone was precise, unhurried. Nick guessed he didn’t have much to do other than collar unsuspecting tourists. Nick and Emily might be his only catch that day. ‘We were very proud in Mainz when so great an artist agreed to devote his work to our little church.’
‘They’re good.’ Nick tried to steal a glance over the old man’s shoulder. Olaf had refused to say how they would recognise him. Nick was terrified of missing him.
‘But I liked the medieval windows too. I saw them in my childhood, before the war. Very beautiful – and so exotic. Stags, lions and bears, birds…’
‘Flowers.’ Nick stared at him and tried to remember. ‘Wild men.’
‘Indeed. The medieval symbolism, so dense, you know? If you start to look close you never know where you go. ’
Emily took the plunge. ‘Are you Olaf?’
The old man coughed loudly. A nun kneeling in the front pew looked up from her prayers and frowned. ‘My name is most certainly not Olaf. But it serves. Let us find somewhere to talk.’
He waved away Nick’s offer to push him and led them to a pew at the back of the church.
‘I’m glad we found you,’ Nick said. ‘It was a clever trick, the way you hid your phone number.’
Olaf gave him a shrewd look. ‘You mean you are surprised a man of my age can even read email, let alone have heard of an IP address. But I have always sought knowledge. Many ways of finding it have come and gone in my lifetime.’
He manoeuvred his wheelchair against the end of a pew, leaning forward as if about to launch into prayer. Nick and Emily slid onto the bench beside him. He pointed to the wall, where a mounted photograph showed pyramids of flame leaping out of the burning church. All that could be seen of the building was a row of steep gable ends standing tall and black like witches’ hats.
‘God’s beauty is infinite,’ he said inscrutably. ‘Churches can be rebuilt, maybe more beautiful than before. But history. You cannot hire Chagall to restore that.’ He gave a heavy sigh. ‘Are you believers? Christians?’
‘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.