Pilgermann Read online

  To Esmé

  … and after the fire a still small voice.

  I Kings 19:12

  Yea, the stork in the heaven

  Knoweth her appointed times;

  And the turtle and the swallow

  and the crane

  Observe the time of their coming;

  But My people know not

  The ordinance of the LORD.

  Jeremiah 8:7

  And being questioned by the Pharisees

  when comes the kingdom of God,

  he answered them and said: Comes not

  the kingdom of God with observation,

  nor will they say: Behold, here or:

  there; behold for the kingdom of God

  within you is.

  Luke 17:20,21

  Nay, but man doth

  Transgress all bounds,

  In that he looketh

  Upon himself as self-sufficient.

  Quran, Sura 96:6,7

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Quotes and References

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  Pilgermann here. I call myself Pilgermann, it’s a convenience. What my name was when I was walking around in the shape of a man I don’t know, I simply can’t remember. What I am now is waves and particles, I don’t need to walk around, I just go. When I want to appear I turn up as an owl. When I see myself in my mind I see myself flying silently across the face of a full moon that is wreathed in luminous clouds; heath and swamp and wood below me, silvered rooftops, sleeping chimneys glide. Pilgermann the owl. The owl has always been big in my mind. Once as a boy I was in a ruin of some kind, old fire-blackened stones and burnt and rotted timbers. Twilight it was, the dying day shivering a little and huddling itself up in its cloak. Suddenly there came flying towards me with a mouse dangling from its beak an owl, what is called a veiled owl, with a limp mouse dangling from its cryptic heart-shaped face. ‘Hear, O Israel!’ I cried: ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is One!’

  Ah! the flickering in the darkness, the passage of what is called time!

  I don’t know what I am now. A whispering out of the dust. Dried blood on a sword and the sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of the steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.

  I speak from where I am; I speak from between the pieces; I speak from where Abram heard the voice of God:

  And it came to pass, that,

  when the sun went down, and

  there was thick darkness,

  behold a smoking furnace,

  and a flaming torch that

  passed between these pieces.

  In that day the LORD made

  a covenant with Abram…

  A covenant with God is made from between the pieces of oneself; it’s the only place where a covenant can happen, no covenant is possible until one has divided the heifer, the she-goat, the ram of oneself. The turtle-dove and the young pigeon being the heart and soul one of course does not divide them. When Abram sacrificed the animals of himself as instructed by God a deep sleep fell upon him, and the dread and the great darkness from which God spoke. Then came the thick darkness after the sun went down, and in that darkness were the smoking furnace and the flaming torch that passed between the pieces. So here already was shown the main theme of the people of Abraham: the furnace and the torch; the consuming fire and the onward flame.

  If you measure with what is called time it’s a long way from here back to Abram’s pieces. But still there is the division of the animals of us, still the thick darkness, the smoking furnace, the flaming torch. And still there are covenants to be made between the pieces, between one fire and another. I am only the waves and particles of such as I was but I have a covenant with the Lord, the terms of it are simple: everything is required of me, for ever.

  2

  So. From wherever and from whatever I am now in what is called the present moment my being goes back to the year 1096 in the Christian calendar which was the year 4856 in the Jewish calendar. My being goes back to a particular morning in that year, the morning of the thirty-first of July which was for Jews the Ninth of Av, Tisha b’Av, the morning of that day when Jews who have already been fasting since the evening before sit on low stools or on the floor of the synagogue and mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples; they mourn other disasters as well, among them that day when the twelve spies returned from Canaan and Joshua and Caleb rent their clothes because the children of Israel listened only to the evil report and turned aside from the land of milk and honey.

  I no longer have a mouth with which to smile wryly but I think that the waves and particles of me must be arranged in something like a wry smile as I remember that land of milk and honey from which I did not turn aside on the Eve of the Ninth of Av, that land of milk and honey from which I was returning in the freshness of the summer dawn.

  I was on my way home from the house of the tax-collector. I say tax-collector, it sounds right, but in fact I’m not certain what he was; he may well have been, may still be, something else. I know that he was an official of some kind, something of authority, a man of exactions, of that certain sort of neck, not actually fat, that in a more modern time bulges over the stiff uniform collar. The smell of such a man’s freshly shaven face is oppressive across the centuries. It is a law of nature that such a man will have a wife of exquisite gentility and superb figure. A woman of regal buttocks and nervous, equine grace. A face of mercy and sweet goodness. That this man should have the management of such a woman is absolutely scientific in its manifestation of that asymmetry without which there would be no motion in the universe. Yes, such a coupling imparts spin to the cosmos, it creates action, it utterly negates stasis.

  Such a man as that Herr Steuerjäger or Gerichtsvollzieher or whatever, such a man as that cannot live without a Jew to be other than. If there were no Jews he would invent them, he would dress up as a Jew and flog himself. He is like that act one sees in cabaret in which a woman is half-costumed as a gorilla with whom she dances and to whose advances she ultimately yields. What was it that he did, did he impose a candle tax on Jews because they were reading too much? Or was it that he required all circumcision knives to be inspected by his brother-in-law the butchery inspector, with an exorbitant fee to be paid for the stamp of approval? Or was it simply that he started the tale that Jews kept little live toads in their phylacteries for sorcery? It doesn’t matter, if it wasn’t one thing it was another.

  Myself, I think I may have been a tailor or a surgeon or something of that sort. Whatever I was, my services had so far never been required by that man or his household; least of all that service I longed to render upon the body of that incomparable and to me unapproachable woman. Her name is Sophia: Wisdom. There’s allegory for you, the vision of naked Wisdom and the Jew lusting after her. And such nakedness! It continues in my eye, splendouring. It will always be there, an image of such power as to confer unending Now upon the mind that holds it. Always now the great dark house in the Keinjudenstrasse late at night. Always now I, the solitary late-night Jew walking where he is not wanted. In the nights of the days before Tisha b’Av I walk there. I see late at night the dark house. Suddenly in an upper window I see a triangle of dim golden light, becoming a narrow oblong of dim golden light in which bulks the da
rk shape of a man in a nightshirt. The man moves away and there stands revealed, farther back within the room, the woman naked with her back to the window. Her shoulders are shaking, she has her hands up to her face. How I love her!

  Never again! Always and for ever again and again. In my mind I see the night sky, I see three stars burning between the Virgin and the Lion, they are like a gesture, a Jewish gesture, the hand flung up, fingers spread: Well, then! What are your intentions, will you block the road for ever?

  There she is, glorious and pathetic in that dim golden light. The splendid form of her contains her name as a candle contains its wick, her name still unknown to me, when I know it it will flame for me. Gone! the great dark house all black again.

  Sophia! name unknown to me! Name that will burn in my mind like a candle flame burning straight up in still air above its translucent column of white wax.

  Jews are known to be clever but I did nothing clever; I simply hung about the Keinjudenstrasse day and night with no thought for anything else until that bulging-necked man climbed heavily on to his horse and rode away. I bribed no servants, I asked no one how long he would be gone, I felt honour bound to take my naked chance. I came as one who seeks a miracle; caution seemed sacrilegious.

  Nightfall, and he had not come back. I hear the hooting of an owl, I hear the wind sighing, the summer wind in the trees of the garden. Outside the forbidden garden of the great dark house I wait. This is perhaps the centre of time for me, this waiting in expectation of a miracle, this waiting in a state of transcendental desire, in a state of sin made holy by its purity.

  The hours pass, the first-quarter moon appears in the sky like a password, I go into the garden. There is of course a ladder there; for the Jew desirous of Wisdom there is always a ladder. The house is all dark, there is no light showing anywhere. I have no plan, I lean the ladder up against the house and I climb up.

  The shutters are open, the casement is open, I feel on my face the warm breath of the dark window, there is a scent of oranges, of bitter aloes, of lions, of tawniness, there is a scent of the nakedness of the unseen woman within. Suddenly she is there, glimmering in her nakedness like a glimmering fish in the river of night. I feel as if I am falling, falling backward with a silent scream into the garden. Has she pushed away the ladder? She has not pushed away the ladder, I am not falling, her two hands grip my wrists, she is pulling me into the window, she is whispering, ‘Thou Jew! My Jew!’

  ‘Thou Jew! My Jew!’ The miracle has happened, no explanations are necessary. With a miracle one is immediately thou and the rest follows, the rest has already been going on before one arrived, the moment is prepared and ready.

  The centre of time is, as I have said, the waiting. This is now off the centre, this is the motion of the everything, the action of the universe, the destined world-line of the soul, the living heart of the mystery.

  There are few words between us. I say, over and over again, ‘Thou beautiful, thou beautiful!’ She says, Thou Jew! My Jew!’ Only one other thing does she say, her name when I ask it: her name is Sophia. Then I say, again and again in that wondrous warm breathy darkness, her name. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia.

  3

  See me, the Jew fresh from the attainment of Wisdom, the Jew returning with the dawn of the Ninth of Av. See me as a bird might see me, as might that stork that slowly flaps its way over the huddled roofs and chimneys, over the narrow twisting streets of morning. What might this stork see looking down? Here the Jew comes, turning this way, turning that way, threading his homeward path and drawing closer, closer to those others hurrying towards him, turning this way, turning that way as if by careful prearrangement, these others with billhooks and pitchforks following a sow who wears a scarlet cross. The sow has her snout uplifted and is grunting loudly. ‘A Jew! A Jew!’ shouts the man who holds her rope, ‘She smells a Jew!’ Here they come running towards me, reeking of cow dung, sweat, beer, pigs, shouting, ‘A Jew! A Jew!’

  They hurl themselves upon me, they throw me to the cobblestones, some of them sit on my chest, some of them hold my arms and legs. My tunic is pulled up, my hose are pulled down. O God! I feel the cool air of dawn on my nakedness. O God! I know what they are going to do and I cannot move a limb to help myself.

  ‘The covenant!’ cries some lout. ‘The mark of the covenant!’

  ‘Cut it off and make a Christian of him,’ says the man with the sow.

  ‘Look at that thing,’ says someone else. ‘You can be sure he’s had Christian women with it, filthy brute.’

  ‘He won’t have them any more,’ says the man with the sow.

  O God! I pray in my mind. O God! Don’t let this happen! I feel the knife on me. I think of Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradyon martyred in the Hadrianic persecutions, wrapped in the Scroll of the Law and burned at the stake. As he died he said that he saw the parchments burning but the letters of the Torah flying up out of the fire. I too now see the black letters shimmering and twisting as they rise on the heated air, soaring above the flames like birds of holy speech to the blue sky. I see the black letters writhing round the holy nakedness of Sophia going up, up, out of sight into the blue morning.

  How can I be brave, strong, a real man, a hero? All I can do is not give them a screaming Jew to laugh at. ‘God wills it!’ they cry with stinking breath as they cut off my manhood. I vomit but I do not scream.

  ‘Finish him off,’ says someone.

  ‘Let him live,’ says another sort of voice. It is the tax-collector on his horse at the head of the town militia.

  ‘God wills it!’ shouts the man with the sow.

  ‘This also,’ says the officer of the watch, and he prods the sow with his pike. She squeals and runs off with the peasant soldiers of Christ followed by the town militia. The tax-collector, high above me on his horse that snorts and prances and paws the cobbles, looks down at me with a pale face then looks back over his shoulder. I hear voices approaching: ‘Jews, Jews! Give us more Jews!’

  ‘Pray for me,’ says the tax-collector. ‘This way!’ he shouts to the approaching peasants. With a scraping of hooves horse and rider plunge away, leading the peasants away from where I am, leading them towards the town gate.

  Pray for him! Did he actually say that, did I hear him right? ‘Betet für mich.’ What else could it have been? ‘Tretet mich’? ‘Kick me’? Ridiculous; that man could not possibly have asked me either to pray for him or to kick him. I have a sudden hysterical vision of the two cherubim leaning towards each other over the Ark of the Covenant, the one saying, ‘Pray for me’ and the other, ‘Kick me’. I don’t know what to make of it: this man, this husband of Sophia, this man whom I have just cuckolded, has saved my life, such as it now is.

  I am lying on my back alone on the cobblestones, my tunic stuffed into my wound. It is broad day, above me arches the blue sky. High overhead, so very, very, high in the sky, circle a drift of storks, a meditation of storks, circling like those intersecting circles of tiny writing sometimes done by copyists with texts of the Holy Scriptures. They are so high, those storks, that one couldn’t say what they are unless one knows, as I do, that every year faithfully come these great dignified black-and-white birds to nest on our rooftops and to circle high in the sky over our town, returning each year in their season.

  I smell burning, there is smoke drifting between me and the sky; that will be from the synagogue. Here I must say that I had never been a devout Jew. I owned a skullcap and a prayer shawl and phylacteries; I always turned up at the synagogue for the High Holy Days and I had never before missed Tisha b’Av but my observances were mostly for the sake of appearances; in between I went my own way. God was to me as a parent to whom I had given little obedience and from whom I expected no inheritance.

  Now, lying on the cobblestones looking up at the blue sky and smelling the burning I cry out to God in my agony: ‘O God!’ I say, ‘Why is this? What’s the use of it? What good is it to anybody?’

  God says nothing to me.

  ‘Hear
, O Israel,’ I cry: ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he hath created according to his will. What are we? What is our life? What is our piety? What is our righteousness? What our helpfulness? What our strength? What our might? What shall we say before thee, O Lord our God and God of our fathers? Are not all the mighty men as nought before thee, the men of renown as though they had not been, the wise as if without knowledge, and the men of understanding as if without discernment? For most of their works are void, and the days of their lives are vanity before thee, and the pre-eminence of man over the beast is nought, for all is vanity.’

  Still no word from God. The blue sky is perfectly blank, the smoke of the burning synagogue drifts in the still morning air; it’s going to be a hot day.

  ‘God!’ I cry, ‘Whatever you are and whatever I am, speak to me! O Lord, do it for thy name’s sake. Do it for the sake of thy truth; do it for the sake of thy covenant; do it for the sake of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; do it for the sake of Moses and Aaron; do it for the sake of David and Solomon. Do it for the sake of Jerusalem, thy holy city; do it for the sake of Zion, the tabernacle of thy glory, do it for the sake of thy Temple’s desolation; do it for the sake of the destruction of thy altar; do it for the sake of those slain for thy holy name; do it for the sake of those slaughtered for thy Unity; do it for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of thy name. Do it for the sake of sucklings who have not sinned; do it for the sake of weanlings who have not transgressed; do it for the sake of the school-children.

  ‘Answer us, O Lord, answer us; answer us, O our God, answer us; answer us, O our Father, answer us …’

  It was then that the air began to shimmer and Christ appeared to me. He was tall, lean, and sinewy. One of those fair Jews with his hair further lightened by the bleaching of the sun. Very light blue eyes, perfectly intrepid eyes drooping a little towards the outside of the face, the eyes of a fighter, the eyes of a lion. He was wearing a patched robe, his sandals were worn, his feet looked hard and hard-travelled. He stood there with a silence flung down in front of him. He was no one in whom I had any belief but there he was and there was no mistaking who he was.