1635-The Tangled Web Read online

  Menig suddenly realized one horrible thing. Now that the stencils had arrived, he would have to figure out how to use the duplicating machine.

  At least, his son Emrich had already put the machine together. Emrich was just barely fourteen. He was only starting to learn the art of making paper. But with these new devices that were appearing all over the place, all the time it seemed, he was better than his father.

  Emrich had figured out how to put the machine together.

  Maybe Emrich could figure out how to use it.

  Jodocus certainly hoped Emrich could figure out how to use the stencils. He was expected to produce several hundred placards and pamphlets within the next two weeks.

  He was not a printer. He had never planned to be a printer. He had never asked for a duplicating machine. He had never asked to be involved in his lord's politics.

  "Put not your trust in princes." He should have known that when the Ritter offered to invest in expanding the business, he would be calling in favors.

  * * *

  If the Ritter wanted pamphlets and placards, he would get them. Jodocus and Bonifacius agreed on this principle solemnly. They sat in the front Stube of the paper mill, drinking beer and discussing eligible widows. They solemnly assured one another that they were much too old dogs to be expected to learn new tricks, either of them.

  "There has to be something that I just don't understand," Emrich Menig complained. "Every single time I run the tray through the rollers, to transfer the ink through the stencil to the paper, I get some ink coming through onto the top roller. Not a lot, but enough to make smears on the back of the next copy."

  "You didn't complain when we were running off the placards." Liesel Bodamer, just two months older than Emrich, stopped cranking the rollers and came round to the other side of the duplicating machine.

  "It didn't make any difference when we were doing the placards. They are just one-sided, to be tacked up to doors and posts and things. It doesn't matter if they have some ink smears on the back. But for the pamphlets, we're supposed to run the paper through on one side, let the ink dry, and then run it through on the other side. So if there are smears on the back of the first run, people won't be able to read the printing we put there during the second run."

  "Let me look at the manual."

  "If I have to release the top roller and clean it for every single sheet of paper we run, we'll never get these done on time."

  "Give me the manual, Emrich!" Liesel swatted his arm. "Hand it over. Now."

  "It doesn't say anything."

  "Something has to be wrong with the instructions. They must have left something out."

  Emrich stared at her, shocked to the core of his faith. "The manual for putting together the duplicating machine was exactly right."

  "Maybe two different people wrote them. Maybe the printer just left a line out when he was setting type. There's all sorts of things that could go wrong. We just have to think."

  "All right. I'll clean the top roller again while you're looking."

  "While you're cleaning, think. If they really haven't told us how to fix this problem, you're going to have to figure out a way to fix it yourself."

  "In this illustration, the picture of the duplicating machine doesn't match the text." Liesel handed the manual back to Emrich.

  "Yeah." Emrich sat there for a while, staring at the duplicating machine.

  "Are you expecting it to talk to you?"

  "Sort of. Did we take everything out of the envelope that the stencils came in?"

  "No. I've been taking them out one at a time, so we don't mix them up."

  "Take a look, will you. Are there any extra sheets of the waxed paper, without any stencil holes in them?"

  "No."

  "I think we need a solid waxed sheet, on top of the paper we're printing, to protect the roller."

  Liesel looked. "I don't know if that's what the picture was supposed to show, but I think it would work. It's not as if you have a paper shortage around here. Do you have any wax?"

  "Some candle stubs, probably. Wherever Vati puts them to give back to the candlemaker when we buy more."

  "Let's look in the kitchen."

  Emrich didn't know his way around the kitchen very well. It took quite a while to find a flat baking pan with edges high enough to melt a layer of wax in it. They never did find one large enough to lay a whole piece of paper flat.

  "We'll have to do it part at a time," Liesel said. "Where's your fire-starter? I need to melt the candle stubs."

  Two hours later, they determined that putting the extra sheet of waxed paper on top of the tray did keep the roller clean.

  They were also getting hungry.

  Their fathers were getting drunk. More precisely, had already gotten there.

  "Do you have anything to eat, here?" Liesel asked.

  "Bread, but it's a little moldy. Sausage, kind of dried out. And Papa won't like it if we eat it up and don't leave any for him."

  "Well, ratzen-fratzen-snatzen-matzen to him. Here." Liesel dug into her pocket. "I have a couple of Heller. Run over to Barracktown and ask Sergeant Hartke's wife if we can have some eggs. She has three laying hens as well as the pullets, I know, because she bought them from Bachmann's widow. We already started the fire to melt the candle wax. I'll cut up the sausage and soften it in boiling water while you're gone and try to scrape the mold off the bread and toast it over the fire. I can make an omelet with sausage and toast cubes in it."

  "What do you suppose those children are doing?" Dagmar asked a few evenings later. "Emrich Menig has been over here every noon for the past four days asking to buy something to eat. Doesn't Menig feed him? And why is Liesel there?"

  "Bodamer is there, too," Jeffie Garand answered. "I've seen him around. Menig must have a big order on hand. They're probably too busy to pay any attention to the kids."

  He looked at Gertrud and winked.

  "Perhaps we should go outside and take a stroll up in the direction of the paper mill, just to check that they are okay."

  They got all the way up there, knocked on the door, and were admitted by Liesel, who said that everything was all right, thank you. She seemed to be telling the truth, so they went back at a leisurely pace that included a couple of detours.

  "I think," Liesel said, "that it would be better to stamp the woodcuts into the squares before we fold the pages of the pamphlets and sew them together."

  "Sew them together?"

  "Just in and out with the needle and then knot the thread on the outside. It doesn't have to be fancy. That's what keeps pamphlets from falling apart."

  "How do you know?"

  "Lorenz Mangold, the councilman from Fulda, gave my Papa another pamphlet while he was in Fulda yesterday. He brought it back and was showing it to your Papa. Mangold got it from somewhere else. It's printed, I think, but he wants your Papa to make stencils and make more copies of it for him. It's sewed together like that. I can't think of any other way to keep the pages from falling apart. Mangold is coming out here tomorrow, Papa said."

  "No," Emrich groaned. "No. Papa isn't going to make stencils. Papa isn't going to make pamphlets for Mangold. Liesel, we—you and me—are going to be cranking this duplicating machine until the day we die."

  "Well, clean it up now. We can stop cranking until we finish stamping this batch. And pull the tray out. We'll have to use the ink pad in it for stamping the woodcuts, because they didn't think to send us a separate one."

  "Emrich?" Liesel sounded a little doubtful. She was a country girl and quite familiar with the way that animals mated.

  "Umm?"

  "What the snake with the forked tongue is doing there, in the woodcut showing the woman Clara and the nun named Salome and the abbot. Is that possible?"

  Emrich took stock of his limited knowledge of male anatomy, both human and serpentine. "I don't think so. I'm pretty sure not, even."

  "That's what I thought. Is there any more of the sauerkraut left?"


  Gelnhausen, June 1633

  "It's not doing any good, Uncle Meier. Honestly. Thank you for coming, but it isn't helping."

  "David," his father said, "it is not your place to be talking. The family is consulting about your future."

  His uncle Salman ben Aron, called Samuel zur Krone, frowned a little and started to speak. His wife, Aunt Daertze—not just Aunt Daertze because she had married his uncle but because she was Daertze Zons, his mother's sister—put her hand on his arm to hush him.

  "He has a right to some voice in his own future," Uncle Meier said.

  "Not when the future he wants is so unimaginably and incomprehensibly wrong-headed." Samuel Wohl was sitting next to David's father. "The very idea that you would even consider letting him apply to become a postal courier is ridiculous."

  Then Jachant Wohl was sitting there. Then her mother. Her mother and his mother, who was next, had their arms linked together.

  They were all agreeing.

  Jachant opened her mouth. "I refuse to even consider having a husband who would spend so much time as a vagrant."

  "A postal courier is not a vagrant," David protested.

  "David," his father said. "It is not your place to be talking."

  "A postal courier is not a vagrant," someone else said. That was Zorline Neumark, his Uncle Meier's wife. "And they make reasonably good money. I know that Crispin's brother-in-law does."

  The row of people on the other side of the table glared at her. Crispin, the grandson of the apostate. His grandfather had changed his name from Neumark to Neumann. How could Zorline admit that she still spoke with that branch of the family?

  They all thought it. Hindle Kalman, Jachant's mother, said it.

  Der dicke Meier defended his wife.

  Jachant opened her mouth again. "You look like a rabbit, Meier ben Aron. And so does David Kronberg."

  Her parents stared at her.

  "It's true."

  Everyone stared at her.

  Except David, who took the chance to leave the room.

  "He's leaving," Zorline Neumark told Hindle Kalman. Zivka, the wife of Simon zur Sichel, stood quietly in the back of the shop, listening. "David. Today. He says that he is going before he has an irretrievable fight with his parents. Meier suggested that he should come to Frankfurt with us, but he refuses to become another point of contention between brothers. He says that he is going to Fulda. So that is what your daughter Jachant and her runaway tongue have accomplished for us."

  "To the up-timers?"

  "He says that according to their 'constitution,' a religious test for holding public office is forbidden. He is going to apply to work as a postal courier there, somewhere in the New United States. Just walk in and apply, without even a letter of introduction."

  Zivka had not missed the direction in which her daughter Riffa's eyes sometimes wandered. She went home.

  "Oh," Riffa said. "I think that's the bravest and most daring thing that I ever heard of any man doing."

  "I," Zivka said, "am going for water. After that, I may visit the bath. I certainly will not be back for two hours at least; possibly three."

  * * *

  "Riffa," David said. "Why are you here? Outside of the walls?"

  He had never been so close to her. He dreamed about her, but he had never approached her, because he knew that his parents would never agree that he could have her honorably, under the canopy. So he should not look. Even though he had looked, of course.

  "I wanted to say something to you before you left."

  "What do we have to say to each other?"

  "I wanted you to know that I would be proud to be married to you. Even if Jachant Wohl will not. I just thought that I would like you to know that before you went away."

  Now he looked up.

  "Jachant Wohl won't take you, you know. Not if you leave. Her parents won't let you have her, either. Have you thought what you are doing? She's the best match in Gelnhausen. Pretty. Rich."

  "You're prettier." The tone of David's voice carried full conviction.

  Riffa had been about to say something else. Her mouth had been open. After a few seconds, she closed it, trying to remember what she had planned to say.

  "Not richer. Is it true that you are going to the New United States?"

  "To Fulda, yes. To talk to the up-timers there. I'm pretty sure that I can't get a job with the municipal couriers here in Gelnhausen. The messengers are all one another's relatives. They look out for each other. But I've spent enough time watching, all these years. I know as much about what they do as anyone could who hasn't actually done it."

  "All by yourself, someone said. Without even a letter of introduction."

  "I'm not quite that foolhardy, no matter what some people think. Martin Wackernagel, the courier, gave me a recommendation to a Major Derek Utt. Wackernagel is acquainted with some of the people there."

  "There's no Jewish community in Fulda."

  "I know."

  "How will you live, then?"

  "Without one, I guess."

  "Have you ever talked to my father?"

  "No. Should I have?"

  "He's a peddler, you know. That's why families like yours look down on him. After the Jews were expelled from Hanau in 1592, my grandfather went peddling. Unvergleidet, without a charter of protection from any Christian lord. My father did, too. When the duke let the Jews come back in 1603, my grandfather and father didn't come back. They kept peddling, from Denmark to Switzerland. Not far east, but sometimes west into Alsace. I was born on the road. There was no mikvah for my mother to cleanse herself in forty days. Not for over a year. I don't remember it well. I was eight when he obtained permission for my mother and me to stay in Gelnhausen when he is traveling. You could have asked him, some time when he was here. Asked him what it will be like for you now."

  David looked at her. "Even if you don't remember it, you must have heard them talking. Would you live that way?"

  "If I were with you," Riffa said. "If I could go to Fulda with you . . . In the New United States, I have heard, we do not need to be vergleidet. Or, we are vergleidet by their 'constitution' itself, and not by any prince."

  David looked at her with some surprise.

  "My father brings home newspapers."

  "When I get a job there, as soon as I can, I will come back for you. What will your parents do when you go with me?"

  Riffa shook her head. "I don't know. Come with us, perhaps."

  "That would be nice."

  She smiled down at him. Then she went back home to the cottage marked with the sickle and he went to Fulda, invisible fireworks bursting within his head.

  Ups and Downs

  Schlitz, June 1633

  Bonifacius Bodamer was standing outside his grist mill, waiting for the mail.

  It was Martin Wackernagel's opinion that Bodamer was usually standing outside his mill waiting for something, while his men did the heavy work inside. Maybe he had worked harder at an earlier stage of his life, when he was a mill hand rather than a mill owner. In any case, he also served as steward of the Ritter, Karl von Schlitz, along this part of the route. To get from Eisenach to Fulda, a person went through Schlitz. That was just how the road ran.

  This morning, Bodamer had other men with him.

  Wackernagel perceived signs of rank. Just as a precaution, rather than simply handing the packet over to Bodamer, he pulled up his horse, dismounted, and bowed with what he hoped was the appropriate amount of respect for whomever they might be.

  The two older men ignored him. The two younger men gave him a look which said that they were willing to ignore him now that he had made a reasonably appropriate obeisance, but would not have ignored him if he had failed to do so.

  There were a lot of people like that around.

  The two older, unidentified, men were chuckling to one another. Bodamer chuckled with them, obsequiously. He forgot to take the packet of mail that Wackernagel was still offering to him.

  Li
esel, Bodamer's daughter, came out of the mill and took the packet.

  "May I water your horse?" she asked.

  Wackernagel was still dismounted. "I would be grateful, ordinarily, but this monster is a bit frisky. I'm afraid that the millrace coming out of the pond is likely to spook him, so he will have to wait for a while."

  "We have a barrel and leather bucket, right in the back of the building."

  "Angel of mercy." He bowed to the girl with a flourish. "Show me where your barrel is, if you would be so kind, and I will lead him around."

  "Who is with your father?" he asked once they were safely out of sight.

  "Herr von Schlitz, our ruler, with his two sons."

  That explained the arrogance.

  "The other man, the one in green, is Lorenz Mangold. He is a city councilman in Fulda. He has been here several times, lately, talking to my father."

  The chuckling that had been going on in front of the mill expanded into uproarious laughter.

  "Something's funny."

  "It's a pamphlet," Liesel said. "A satire. They are enjoying it a lot."

  By the time they were done with the horse, the knight and his two sons were gone. Mangold was still standing there, waving some pieces of paper at Bodamer.

  There was no reason for Wackernagel to go back and talk to them. The only words he heard were, "I wrote this one myself and I am very proud of it. I'll be happy to cover the costs, given how reasonable they are turning out to be."

  Barracktown bei Fulda

  At supper time, Martin turned in to the Hartke cottage. Dagmar the Dane always picked up anything he had for Barracktown when he came by. She always fed him, too.

  A certain scurrilous pamphlet was the topic of the day.

  "I tell you," Dagmar was saying. "According to my husband, Mr. Wesley Jenkins, the civilian administrator, was truly furious. He ordered all the placards torn down and sent soldiers to Neuenburg to bring the members of the Special Commission back to Fulda."