‘- but what matters is that we do it. Like monks saying their services, the unchanging cycle holds a mirror to God.’
‘And a fine monk you’d have made, no doubt,’ said Kaspar cruelly. ‘If I wanted to live a flat and repetitious life I’d have become a farmer: plough, sow, reap; plough, sow, reap; ploughing the same old rut until it furrowed my grave.’ The scars on his face throbbed. ‘But I can do more, and so can you. More than pulling a lever to make another copy of your book, like a miller grinding flour.’
The next time he quit his post, as inevitably he did, I let him go. To avoid making the situation worse I gave the job to Keffer, but this only embarrassed him and offended Schoeffer, for both knew that Schoeffer was the better candidate. I paid Kaspar’s wages, but he had no place in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes – rarely – he would visit, drifting around the house and setting me on edge until he left. I think he enjoyed inflicting disorder on our work. The rest of the time he stayed in the Gutenberghof, taking work as an illuminator to occupy himself.
I was sad, though it had become inevitable. Somewhere in our journey, it had stopped being our art and become mine.
In April, things began to change. Longer days relieved the pressure to use every scrap of daylight; men saw their tasks with fresh eyes not wearied from squinting through the gloom. Shivering hands that had flinched to pick up the icy metal types now plucked them nimbly and set them in their rows. A rhythm established itself, beaten out every day by the clack of types in their racks, the creak of the press, the rattle of hand-carts bringing fresh ink. When Fust greeted me with, ‘How many pages?’ the answers no longer made him scowl.
I had told Kaspar we were like monks, and it was true. Like a monastery, we were locked away from the world. Men in the street could hear the sounds from within and wonder, but they never saw what passed behind our gates. The work of the books was our monastic rule. The fetching of paper and ink in the morning was our prime; the morning assembly, where we gathered in the print room to allocate the day’s tasks, our chapter – and so through to vespers, when we washed the ink off the forms and the presses, unscrewed the frames and returned the letters to the type room, to be sorted for the next day. We worked together, we ate together, we argued and laughed together: we were a brotherhood.
Most of my days were occupied far from the press: answering questions, solving disputes, settling payments and accounts. But there were moments of peace, times when the whole house turned in ordered motion, like the orbit of the planets around the earth. Those were the hours I was most happy. I walked through the house, observing the world I had brought into being and marvelling at the daily acts of creation under its roof.
Of course it was not all sunshine. Men quarrelled; presses broke; errors emerged, usually just after we had broken apart the offending page and scattered its type. Stores went missing, occasioning furious arguments with Fust. As time passed, the burden of our enterprise began to tell on me. I lay awake in my bed, alone, obsessively counting the pages printed, pages set, pages yet to come. No longer flush with the adventure’s promise, instead I longed for it to end. Each time I crossed the threshold of the Gutenberghof I glanced up at the stone pilgrim, bent double under his invisible burden, and felt a twinge of sympathy.
But I cannot complain. After all that had come before, and what happened after, these were good days.
LXXV
Oberwinter
Nobody disembarked at Oberwinter except Nick and Emily. The boat barely paused: by the time they reached the end of the pier, all they could see were running lights receding up the river. They crossed the empty highway, walked through a culvert under the railway tracks and entered the village through a stone gateway. Crooked houses leaned over them, as if the timbers within still preserved some vestigial memory of the trees they had once been. There were no cars, no people, not even footprints in the snow. If not for the wilting Christmas lights still draped between the houses, they could have been back in the Middle Ages.
They passed several guesthouses along the riverfront walls, but all were shuttered and dark. Paper notices pinned on doors said most wouldn’t reopen until Easter. Nick’s feet ached with the cold; he began to worry they wouldn’t find anywhere, but wander this deserted town until they froze to death.
The high street ended in an irregular town square. A wide three-storey building with a roof like a gingerbread house towered over it, and a legend painted on the plasterwork in tangled Gothic letters announced the Drei Könige Hotel. To Nick’s unbounded relief, the lights were on.
The hotel was almost as cold inside as out. They rang a bell and waited. Nick eyed the rows of keys on hooks behind the desk.
‘Looks like they should be able to give us a room.’
Emily shivered. ‘I’ll take a cupboard as long as it’s got hot water and a duvet.’
The back door opened and a man came out. He was wearing a dressing gown and smoking a filterless cigarette so low Nick worried it would set his moustache on fire. He was the only living soul they’d seen in Oberwinter, but he didn’t seem the least surprised to see them.
He took a key from the wall and pointed upstairs. ‘Room seven, second floor.’
It wasn’t much: a few pieces of heavily varnished furniture marked with cigarette burns, a threadbare rug slung across the floorboards. When Nick touched the desk his finger came away damp from condensation. A freezing draught blew against his shoulder from the open bathroom door. He glanced in. Snow gathered on the sill where one of the windowpanes was missing. Perhaps he could stop it up with a towel.
The moment he stepped inside the bathroom he felt a dizzy wave of recognition. Reality blurred and the room seemed to darken. Instead of a bathroom, he was staring at a pixellated window in a living room thousands of miles away. A scene he had replayed in his head every day since. There was the mirror, the same shower curtain with the Christmas-tree stencils. But the wall was white. In the video it had been brown – he was certain.
He rushed out of the room onto the landing.
‘Where are you going?’ Emily called after him. He ignored her. There were five rooms on this floor, all with their doors cracked ajar in the forlorn hopes of welcoming a guest, and a door marked PRIVAT. One by one, he tiptoed into the rooms and examined the bathrooms. None of them was brown.
He went back out on the landing. On a hunch, he examined the door with the sign more closely. The frame was new, bare wood, while the lock must have been about the shiniest thing in the hotel. In the middle of the door, four dimples showed where screw holes had been filled in with putty. When Nick stepped back, he could see the ghost of the number 14 preserved in the faded paint.
He tried the handle. Locked. He looked back. Emily was standing on the landing outside their room, looking at him in confusion.
‘What are you doing?’
Nick crept down to the lobby and counted the keys behind the desk. Thirteen plus a gap where theirs had come from. He listened a moment. All he heard was the distant roar of a soccer match coming out of a television in the back room.
Heart racing, he darted round and lifted the last key off its hook. There was no number on the fob, but the brass was shiny as a new penny, no scratches on its smooth surface. He palmed it against his leg so it didn’t jangle and tiptoed back up the stairs.
‘If anyone comes, stop them,’ he told a by-now utterly bewildered Emily.
He approached the door. Nightmarish visions taunted his imagination. The key slotted into the lock and turned with a whisper. As the door creaked open he felt a shiver, as if a ghost had just passed through him.