Gutenberg's Apprentice (22 page)

“That’s how I see it, yes.” The gray, lined face began to lift into a smile.

Which is how the crew spent miseries of days and weeks in numbing labor, filing down the letters. The type was cast on shanks they had made slightly larger for their first, aborted missal. Now they could shave off a tiny sliver top and bottom, thus reducing space between the lines. It took three weeks and endless bellyaching from the men. Even Ruppel, with his fists like hams, was made to wield a file. Ingrates, scoffed the master: better fingerless than starved. When they had planed enough to make the page that followed, Peter set it up and Ruppel pulled a proof.

As he set it, he was filled with great foreboding. The text itself told of the fall from grace through greed and pride, and man’s expulsion from the Garden. And still man’s perfidy went on, and Cain slew Abel. Peter took the printed proof from Ruppel with a sickness in his heart.

And yet—O wonder—when he laid the proof beside its facing page, no difference could be spied. But to his scribal eye, that second page, for all its tale of woe, was even lovelier than the one it lay beside. The text was tighter, blacker, more a forceful mesh than airy vines. Peter stared at it, quite disbelieving. He looked up and met the master’s eye. “How did you know?”

“Ha,” he said. “Blind faith.” He gave his doggy grin. “Should cut the paper by a tenth.”

The wells beneath his eyes were dark with filing and fatigue, for he had whittled right beside them. To anyone outside he would have looked demented. Yet there was method in his madness, Peter had to grudgingly admit. He did not entertain despair: he did not even let it enter the same room. The man just kept on plowing, probing, pushing—almost seemed to relish how the matter twisted and resisted him. He had more patience for raw matter than for men, that much was clear—and even then some things were sacred, others must be shed. Peter learned this from him, for himself, when it came time to print the separate red lines.

Fust could hardly wait to see those printed rubricating lines. It would amaze his buyers, once they understood that they were inked not by a pen but by a press. The carmine ink the master mixed himself: oil of linseed boiled to varnish, mixed with powdered copper, cinnabar, some carbonate of lead. This yielded a glossy orange red. The oil was key; Fust nodded: he had seen that telltale shimmer in the new Dutch paintings at the fair. He trundled off then to the Kaufhaus, humming to himself, while they made up the
forme
.

At first, God smiled. The red lines starting Jerome’s prologue printed perfectly. Simple enough: they topped the column. The second red line, though, sat halfway down the facing page. Peter measured, tried to place the thing just right. They proofed it, tinkered, shifted the line up, then right, then left. Each time they peeled the proof sheet off they cursed, and wiggled it some more. Sometimes it overlapped the black, sometimes it stuck out past the margin. It took six tries—six wasted sheets, a quarter of a guilder—to get the damned thing right.

The whole time Gutenberg looked on, silently for once, eyes narrowed into slits. He’d let them fail all by themselves, thought Peter bitterly. Finally he just reset the whole cursed column, then took away the lines they had already printed black. One hundred thirty-five red lines went through the press that second hellish day, which stretched far in the night.

Fust had come in halfway through, then left; Gutenberg, too, waited to say anything until the run was done. It was past ten when Peter hung up his apron. Wiegand had informed him that the master wanted him upstairs. The boy shot off, no doubt to haul Fust back. Slowly Peter wiped the scarlet from his hands and dragged his body up the treads.

Gutenberg stood at the window, staring out across the lane on to the synagogue. He nodded briefly. “We’ll wait for him,” he said. Peter sat. His stomach growled. At length the master came and sat beside him at the table. “You tried it every way you could.” His voice was calm and uninflected.

Peter made a motion of disgust. “Without success.”

“Success is only ever an equation. Time invested, plus materials, equals the true price.”

They heard Fust’s tread then on the stairs. Gutenberg looked long at Peter, as if weighing something. When Fust appeared, he started speaking. “The red must go. Or it will ruin us, or kill us—maybe both.”

Fust’s face lost all animation. His eyes went flat, moving between his partner and his son. He strode to where the sheets lay waiting.

“This one looks marvelous.” He riffled lightly through the pile. “And this. And this.” Again his eyes rose, past the printer’s head, searching out his son’s.

“Barely half are fine,” the master shortly answered. “It took two days, and what—ten sheets, fifteen?—of waste.” He too turned, his eyes resting on his lead compositor.

Peter tried to sit up straighter in the chair. His eyeballs ached, his fingers, shoulders. But what hurt most was that he’d failed. He reached and pulled a sheet toward him and tried to shake the blackness that he felt.

“A Calvary,” he said, almost to himself. He looked at Gutenberg, gave a short nod. He could not meet his father’s eyes.

“We can’t reset each page, nor build another press, just for the red.” The master’s voice had softened. Even he knew Fust would feel it as a blow. “The only sane thing is to drop it.”

Peter felt his father stiffen. He raised his head, saw Fust shake his. “We had agreed.”

Surely, Fust said, turning now to Gutenberg, it was a matter of more thought, more calculation. “This was to be the crowning glory.”

“‘Who against hope believed in hope,’” the master said in answer. “I wish it were not so.” He put a hand out to his partner.

But Fust had twisted brusquely toward his son. “I can’t believe that you agree.”

“These lines took sixteen hours alone.” It pained him, but he saw no choice. “I don’t see how—though I regret it.”

Fust looked between them for a long time: from master to apprentice, both alike in filth and weariness.

“It would take half again as long,” the master said. “There is a rubric every third, fourth page.”

“We knew that from the start.” Fust’s mouth was set, his eyes more gray than blue. The look he gave his son was like a boot. “I thought we planned to make a fine and mighty thing,” he said, and set the page back down. More perfect than the most perfect manuscript it was always meant to be.

Fust faced the two of them with bitter eyes, as if they’d forged some dark, satanic bond against him.

“We have to gain more speed.” Gutenberg leaned toward his partner. Attend, he said: at this rate they took two months for each quire. “We need another man, it seems to me.”

Fust’s mouth twitched. Then he harshly laughed. The sound was forced, unpleasant. “First you kick me, then you strip me bare.”

CHAPTER 8

JOURNEYMEN

        
[3 quires of 65]

        
December 1452

T
HE ADVENT SEASON came, and with it the relief and warmth of firesides and candles, of drawing close in the community of Christ. Peter had been courting Anna all that autumn, walking with her while the married men of Mainz slept off their Sunday lunch. He’d toss a pebble at her window, and they’d steal away into the little lanes or walk among the bare boughs of the orchards. As it got colder, they would slip into an empty chapel and warm themselves in some back pew. Quite early on she’d asked if he would read to her; she brought him block books she collected for the pictures. Though these were crude, she listened raptly as he read their message of salvation. In the dimness he sought other verses, psalms that she had learned by heart, and traced her fine cold fingers on the words.

The Christ’s mass gift that he might give her sprang to mind this way. He made a little book of stories she would know, lettered in his simplest cursive: the parable of Dives and the beggar; the raising up of Lazarus; the Pater Noster and her favorite psalms. He has this book still, locked in a small chest inside his big new house in Frankfurt. He still can see her shining face and how she clapped her hands in wonder.
The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands.

Her gift to him was likewise from her hands. She painted him a portrait of Saint Peter at the gate, with Peter’s own brown beard, his narrow, sober face. “Heresy,” he said, laughing, and brought her fingers to his lips. They met in secret, though of course her parents knew. A few months in, Klaus cornered him and plainly asked him his intention. Marriage, Peter answered, and Klaus frowned and fingered his thick beard. They both knew Fust would not approve without a fight.

Peter watched and waited for a likely moment, but his father’s mood was not improved. He was still angry over the lost ruby lines—disgruntled, too, to see how fast his guilders gushed. They paid dues to carpenters and smiths and tanners, butchers, bakers, brewers, although he drew the line at tipping off the painters who worked hand in glove with scribes. He wasn’t just some pig to stick and bleed, he growled—although the new man, too, in due course did arrive, another mouth that he must pay and feed and house.

This fellow hailed from Alsace like the others, though Johann Mentelin was not a smith, praise God. Peter was delighted to discover he had been a clerk in Strassburg’s bishopric. Nor was he a mere notary: he specialized in gilding letters and had a flowing, calligraphic hand. How in God’s name had Gutenberg seduced him? Peter wondered underneath his breath as they all stood to greet him. Hans shook his rippled forehead and just laughed.

The new compositor swore his oath of secrecy on the first page of their Bible. A sum of money passed into the master’s hand: the training fee, which Mentelin would pay half at John the Baptist, half at the Solemnity of Mary. His coming raised the level of the talk inside the shop. His Latin was impeccable; he’d studied in Erfurt a few years ahead of Peter. At noon he’d bow his ginger head, recite the readings with his eyes closed from the book stored in his mind. The jokes were ribald, naturally, when the master said where he would start. He’d pick up setting where they broke the book into a second volume: Proverbs, followed by the Canticum Canticorum, the randy, lovesick Song of Songs.

They numbered nine or so that first Yule at Fust’s table—the master and apprentices and journeymen, plus the boys they’d dubbed their devils. His father had convened them on the feast of the Three Patriarchs, those Hebrew men of staunch, unyielding faith. The groaning board was meant to mark their first full year of common labor, he declared. Exceptionally, the workingmen had bathed. Their eyes went wide at the long table draped in Flemish lace, the beeswax flames reflected in the silver platters. Pork haunch with cherries, ducks with sage clamped in their yellow bills, heaps of greens and tubers—and that was nothing to the Riesling and the Spätburgunder. Along the sideboard Grede had ranged a deadly chorus of assorted brandies. The master stood and tapped his goblet with a knife and bid them shut their gabbling mouths.

“I give you Johann Fust,” he roared. Already he had had a few. The men began to drum their feet upon the floor. His father smiled and whispered something in Grede’s ear, and rose.

“It’s been a long year, but a good one,” he began. “We’re making slow but steady progress.” His eyes went all around the table; when they came to Peter, he paused slightly, then moved on.

The master leaned, and cracked: “We’re out of Kings, is what he means, and into Proverbs. Though I am sorry to report that Peter is still wandering the Garden.” The mugs flew up, and Keffer yelled “Hear! Hear!” Peter stood, and took a little bow, then raised his own.

“To Johann Fust and Johann Gutenberg,” he cried, “and Tubalcain.” To their blank looks, he grinned. “The son of Sella, great-great grandson of Cain,” he said, and quoted out of Genesis: “‘who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron.’”

The drumming of the workers’ feet drowned out all other sound. “As custom holds, therefore,” his father called above the din, “each one will be rewarded.”

Gutenberg began to hand out gifts. The journeymen and apprentices he gave a little paper roll. The young ones and the servants each received a pilgrim mirror. How very like the skinflint, Peter thought, smiling. He skimmed the ribbon off his roll. The square of linen bore a single sentence in the master’s sloping hand: “To be redeemed, with the Lord’s aid and grace, against one copy of the
Biblia latina
, created without help of pen or reed by a new and secret art in the golden city of Maguncia, Christ’s mass: Anno 1452.”

Gutenberg was grinning like a cat. “A gauge of our respect and faith.”

The devil. Peter had to laugh.

“Consider it,” the master added, “payment against wages.”

“The devil.” Peter whispered it this time to Hans. “To bind us even tighter in the harness.”

“Worth its weight though.” Hans peered closely at his scroll.

The man was diabolical, in truth: offering the fruit when every bough was bare and nowhere near to budding. Sheer evil genius, Peter thought: a paper Bible was worth twice, three times, what any craftsman earned in a whole year. And yet—he looked back at the scrap—how fine, how marvelous. He pictured it upon a lectern in a home where he would bring his bride; he saw it bright with red and running titles, filled with tiny, brilliant scenes, penned and painted by their two laced hands.

The snow was falling in thick clots when they staggered out toward the Christmas market. The tented canvas lifted, orange and glowing, like a galleon on the market square. They ducked inside: the stalls were wedged so tightly that the flakes were trapped and melted overhead, or else died hissing in the flaming torches, sizzling in the chestnut barrels. Keffer grasped Ruppel by the scruff of his thick neck, steering him around the stands of glassware. They wove past wooden toys and crystal candy toward the kegs along the edge. Nearby a hand-cranked organ shrieked; a crone in rags pressed her hard cup in Peter’s ribs. He smelled the rankness of her breath and pressed a penny in her hand. The rich were all shut up in their great mansions draped with fir, their candles sketching steeples on the glass.