6

Kartoffelkrieg

The Fair circled east with the next spring, going through Paderborn and Holzminder, past Hoxter and over the Hills of Harz. Philbert made Hermann’s ointments and liniments, held sick-bowls and chopped vegetables for Maulwerf, brushed his velvet waistcoats until they shone and sang like silk. He washed Frau Fettleheim’s stinking feet, learned to roll up the canvas on demand for paying customers, for she was so gigantic she could no longer move from the cart. He patched her ever-expanding clothes and slid open the lid of the water closet over which she sat, gaining the strength and timing needed for such a task. Best of all for Philbert were the moments when he dangled his toes in numerous clear-running streams, Lita at his side, telling him of her life, all fifteen long years of it. She told him of the doctor who’d found her on some sunny Adriatic shore and promised to take her to Rome to see the brilliant doctors there who would make her grow. She wept when she told him how she’d said goodbye to her mother and father, brothers and sister; how she’d packed her small bag and given the doctor all the family’s money to pay her way; how she’d left with him and gone to Rome as promised, but not for treatment. Instead he set her up as a side-show, charging the Signores and Signoras umpteen lira to watch her dance, curtsey and prance at their knees, claiming she was the cousin of the famous Sicilian Fairy; carting her on to Florence, Venice, Turin, Milan, Zurich and then Munich. He tied her hair in ribbons, taught her how to whistle like a bird; bought her pretty dresses and slept too close to her at night; tried to make her drink strong liquor, which she refused, and then had shouted and slapped her hard across the face until she finally ran.

‘Ran just like my Little Maus,’ she whispered, and hung her arm around his neck, for just like her Little Maus Puppelita had run and found the Fair.

It was in fact not one Fair but many, all connected, though separate, like a bunch of grapes. In Philbert’s part were the Marvellous Marvels: Little Lita, Hermann, Tomaso, Frau Fettleheim and The Carneous Mole. Then there were the food-and-drink men, and the pedlars who came and went as they chose, sometimes with the Fair, sometimes away, always carrying cases bulging with strange tools and inventions: books and beads, knives and ornaments, knick-knacks of diverse descriptions. Also were the dedicated merchants who rolled out great widths of wool and cotton and occasionally, more ­exotically, embroidered silks; there were the card-men who set up betting games: skittles, reverso, nine men’s morris, spot-the-jack. And the artisans who made jewellery, studded belts, embroidered dresses, sharpened knives, sewed gloves, hammered copper, made wheels and mended carts. Lastly were the actors and singers who put on plays and pageants, running dancing troupes throughout the streets, reciting bawdy ballads, disseminating the topical news from one town to the next. All were many and various, attaching themselves to the Fair one day and then gone the next, staying a week or a month before choosing a different path to a different town.

And it was the arrival of one such band one ordinary day, with such normal quotidian occurrence, that caused that day to end with Philbert’s neck in a noose and someone pulling tight upon the rope. They’d no licence, that small group of stragglers joining the Fair somewhere outside Belzig, though every town a person passed through demanded one. Not so onerous in the smaller ones – a few coins to the Mayor or the Bürgermeister or the Schupo, depending on who was the richer, held the most power, or ran the most influential guild. Maulwerf’s Fair rarely had problems, for he was well known, had been travelling more or less the same routes regularly for many years and carried a small leather satchel stashed full of introductory letters and high recommendations, one of which would be enough to let him and his Fair pass. But carnivals are loose things, with many threads dangling from their skirts, and people came and went as they pleased. The taxes had been hard those last months in those parts; the winter bad and, as at Staßburg a couple of years before, people had eaten their storehouses inside out with nothing left until the next harvest, only a few sacks of mouldy peas or corn-heads, some spills of flour swept up from the threshing floors mixed with mouse droppings and the tails of dead rats. As the year dragged over from ’46 to ’47, empty stomachs grumbled and grew bleak with discontent.

Berlin had seen the worst of it, where starving peasants had erected barricades throughout the town, smashing the boots they hadn’t boiled for stew through shop windows, storming the storehouses of the rich. The Potato Revolution, as it was known, didn’t last long. Men were weak, soldiers stronger. The peasants got the pleasure of breaking down the walls of the crown prince’s palace before having their heads stamped into the frosty ground and filthy pavements of Berlin, or got themselves strung up ten at a time on gibbets that scarcely trembled under their combined and paltry weight. The Kartoffelkrieg was over almost before it had begun, but ideas are slippery as eels and move just as quickly and like fire can sneak off into the undergrowth, feeding on subterranean sources, flaring up in unexpected places, and soon all the towns around Berlin had their own little revolutions and their own little parties of rope and wood, and yet still some escaped, and on they went.

The leader of the straggly band Philbert’s Fair bumped into was a woman. She’d lost her husband, her father, her brothers and two sons. Several daughters and daughters-in-law had gone missing along the way every time they passed a troop of ­soldiers, and what happened to them didn’t bear thinking about. And so this was a woman with anger sewn right into her bones, and a brace of ugly little grandchildren sucking greedily at her drooping breasts. They melded into the Fair’s protection, extras in the semi-permanent acting troupe that had been thinned out, as was normal, by winter, disease and desertion. But they brought a posse of Schupo mercenaries on their heels who ­swaggered into the camp one evening, blazing pistols and ­blunderbusses. The Fair was already set up and going well; the village they’d stopped upon still had a few coins to bandy about and a few scrawny goats to roast, so one night out of their lives didn’t seem too much to squander for the villagers’ entertainment.

‘Roll up! Roll up!’ Philbert was already shouting at the top of his pipsqueak voice, and Maulwerf already had his table out and laid. Lita was pirouetting on Frau Fettleheim’s knees and singing her songs, giant and dwarf complementing each other’s size, all of which had drawn the crowds. Across the temporary stage the acting troupe were scraping out their steps, the laughter rising at their farces and antics and the latest popular ballads about princes with necks like chickens and beaks of gold. The night was sparkling with embers blown free from fires by the wind, and the goats had had their throats sliced and haunches skinned and were sizzling on their spits.

The screams, when they started, were only somewhat out of place, and nobody took much notice until that anger-spun woman came yelling through the mud and carts, her children’s children hanging like an overweight necklace from her thin shoulders, cursing with all her might the iniquities of the state and the scourge of taxes and the wickedness of the world that had taken so much from her and left her with only poverty and starvation for companions. There was no doubting the woman had gone mad on her trek out from Berlin, drawing that pack of soldiers behind her like hornets after honey. The men on horseback had been sent scouring for the troublemakers and had not far to look. They sent a few shots into the crowd to discourage any upstarts who might complain, killing one man stone dead as he raised his fist to throw nothing more ­iniquitous than his dice; they sent a lance through one of the dancers because she was wearing an unpatriotic combination of colours, sending the rest of them skittering from the stage, sliding on her blood; they broke up the painted backboards because they depicted a rural idyll with no sign of prince or palace, skewered several of the old woman’s followers to its splintered remains because they started flinging handfuls of sugared sweets at the soldiers in feeble protestation.

That woman’s voice was hoarse as a boar’s by the time she skidded into the mud at Philbert’s feet, her throat still wobbling with all the words she could no longer get out, shaking with frustration as she tried to pick herself up, untangle her legs from her skirts and grandchildren as the soldiers came crashing along the cartways, knocking people over, upsetting stalls, sending gaming boards flying, spilling all their tiny counters and carved wooden figures into the ruck of wet grass and mud.

Philbert scooped up one of the woman’s dropped grand­children as the hooves hove into view, the sweat and froth of the wild-eyed horses trampling the other child beneath them as they got that woman nicely caught between their flanks, her fists still flailing, her hair all gone wild and getting into her mouth as she found the strength again to scream about injustice and starvation and the families that had been butchered on the streets of Berlin. It didn’t last long, those men having done all this before, and they caught her up by her hair and hauled her behind one of the horses with a rope, firing a few more shots at random into the air until her fellow Berliners came forward one by one, eking themselves out from the rest of the Fair, not wanting the people who had taken them in to hang with them.

‘My baby,’ the woman whispered as she was dragged around the course and came to land back where she’d started, and the soldiers misunderstood and looped their rope around the closest child’s neck, ready to throttle her last remaining family before her eyes. Philbert’s eyeballs were almost squeezed from his head with the pressure of it, Maulwerf hurrying forward, scrabbling for Philbert’s arm as the man on the horse began to haul Philbert up, his feet kicking and struggling, into the air.

‘It’s the wrong boy!’ Maulwerf was shouting, and the baby Philbert had dropped started squalling where it lay and the woman reached out her fingers to touch her.

‘The last one,’ she managed to whisper, and the soldier laughed as Philbert’s feet cleared the ground, coming level with the underbelly of his horse.

‘The last one,’ she croaked again, and started to crawl away from the horse towards the fallen child, and then at last the man saw the little body towards which the woman was squirming and let go the rope, sending Philbert crashing to the ground between the great iron-shod hooves of his horse.

‘I see you, woman,’ he said, no colour to his voice, no anger, nor compassion or regret. He merely took his pistol from his belt and shot the child through the belly, the woman he had pursued so far feeling its hot little body’s blood running out through her fingers while he slowly reloaded, finally bringing an end to the drama by firing a shot through the back of her neck.

Many years later, Philbert could still recall lying there beside the woman and her child, looking at the dappled, mud-­splattered underside of that great horse, the twist at the right side of the girth-strap, the shine of the man’s boots and the neat tie of their buckles, the soft leather of his gaiters reaching from heel to knee, the harsh catch of new breath as Maulwerf hauled him by the rope to one side and sliced through the knot with his knife, the enormity of the following barrage of shots and the sudden release of the noose making his ears bleed, so that all that he could hear as the soldiers cleared out was a subdued wave of outrage, men and women weeping as they dragged the Berliners’ corpses to one side, the sharp slice and thud of spades going through grass as their collective grave was dug.

Such were the times in which they lived, and all this happened again and again before the real revolution began. Philbert couldn’t know then that he would play a small but vital part in that revolution, as the trigger is a small but vital part of a gun. And it was such a small thing he would do, such a small ­mistake, yet it sent other men in other towns upon his heels with their own ropes in their hands and their own pistols at the ready on their belts, pursuing him far harder and more relentlessly than ever they had done this woman from Berlin.

A single flake of snow can start an avalanche, so goes the saying, and for every deluge there must, of necessity, be a first drop of rain to set it off. Snow and rain, so was Philbert. The start of snow and rain.