Pilgermann Read online

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Why should I. You can see anything you like in the sky, anything at all. And what it means is anything at all.’

  ‘That man who killed you,’ I said. ‘What do you think he’s doing now?’

  ‘He’s looking for another bear,’ said the bear. ‘He’s hopeless, he’s incapable of learning.’

  ‘You think you’re quite the thing, don’t you,’ said Udo the relic-gatherer to the bear. ‘You think you’re better than us. I seen you slipping through the woods now and again when you been alive. You wouldn’t say nothing to us then, you wouldn’t stop and pass the time of day, you were too good for us.’

  ‘If I’d stopped you’d have shot me full of arrows,’ said the bear.

  ‘Yes I would,’ said Udo. ‘Yes I would just because you wouldn’t stop and talk. If you’d talked with me we could have been friends, you could have showed me where the honey trees were.’

  ‘Another one,’ said the bear.

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me,’ said Udo. ‘How much honey have you had in your life and how much have I had in mine?’

  ‘Whatever I’ve had I’ve found for myself,’ said the bear.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Udo. ‘Naturally. The wood is your village, isn’t it. So you know where to find things the same as I did in my village. If you’d come to my village looking for the well or the inn or whatever I’d have shown you where to find it, I’d have had time to stop and talk, wouldn’t I. But when I come to your wood a runaway and a stranger trying to stay uncaught for my year and a day it’s not a word from you I get, is it. It’s nothing, nothing, nothing I get from everybody. The lord and his lot they treat you like an animal till you run off and you think at least if the animals will treat you like an animal that’s not so bad, you’ll be a brother to them. But they won’t, they turn their backs on you. Die, serf! Die, slave! Into the ground with you and give the maggots what they’re waiting for.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the headless tax-collector. A thrill ran through me when I heard his voice, the voice of my brother in Sophia, the voice of my brother pilgrim whose temple I had destroyed, whose world I had blackened and made empty. These new colleagues of mine, these dead men and animals, all of them appeared to me as I had last seen them. So the tax-collector was of course naked and headless and writhing with the terrible swift energy of the maggots that continually consumed him but never diminished his dreadful corpse. I couldn’t bear to look at him but my eyes were again and again magnetically drawn to the horror of him while in my mouth I tasted writhing maggots.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the tax-collector to Udo. ‘I don’t want to offend a respectable murderer but when you talk of giving the maggots what they’re waiting for, then I really must say something, I really must put in a word, must mention that you were eager enough to give me to the maggots. You seem to feel very sorry for yourself but you didn’t feel sorry for me when you caught me with your wire and took my head off with your sword.’

  ‘That were business,’ said Udo. ‘I never wished you nothing ill. Anyhow what’s one pilgrim more or less; you’ve died on the road but here’s Herr Keinpimmel will go to Jerusalem for you; he’ll make the journey for you and say however many prayers you like. So there’s nothing lost, you’ve give the world up for Jesus and I say well done and Amen.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said the tax-collector. ‘My good friend Herr Keinpimmel, the illustrious Jew adulterer. The one takes my wife and the other takes my life. And my head will bear the name of that one who washed his hands and said that he was innocent of the blood of Christ. What more could I ask for? I am happy, I am content to dance with the maggots until …’

  ‘Judgment Day?’ I said. I couldn’t keep silence, I had to speak to his absent face, I had to look at where his face would have been if he had had a head.

  ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘At last! The first words spoken by you to me! And it is the Day of Judgment about which you speak to me. It is with this thought, this question, that you break your silence. You cannot look me in the eye because my head is elsewhere but I think that even if my head were here you might not be able to look me in the eye, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s true enough. But might not you also find it difficult to look me in the eye? Me and a few other Jews who lost their lives to the soldiers of Christ.’

  ‘I have already begged your forgiveness, have I not,’ said the tax-collector. ‘In front of your synagogue under the open sky in the sight of God have I humbled myself to the Jews.’

  ‘We were under the open sky because there was no roof to stand under,’ I said. ‘The synagogue had been burnt to the ground, and there were many Jews who could not attend because they were busy dancing with the maggots.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Please, please forgive me. I would do it again if I had the chance.’

  ‘Do what?’ I said.

  ‘What I did,’ he said.

  ‘Ah!’ I said, ‘Do you now tell me that you brought those peasants to our town?’

  ‘Naturally I did,’ he said. ‘How was I not to do it?’

  ‘It was because of you that there were all those dead Jews on the cobblestones!’ I said, listening with dread and with fascination for the words that I knew must come next.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Because of me and because of you.’

  Hearing this I found that my throat was affected in such a way that I could not swallow. My mouth was so dry, my tongue so thick that I could scarcely speak. ‘Because of what I did,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are that Jew who finished me off. You are the last in a long succession of Jews who took away my life. Do you shake your head? No, you don’t, you know what I’m talking about. I was already dead some little while before this lout here took my head off, dead and Jew-killed. I saw you hanging about in the Keinjudenstrasse, I knew what was in your mind, I knew what would happen when I rode away. I made my arrangements, and once you were on that ladder death was on its way to the Jews of our town.’

  ‘Why the others?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me?’

  ‘Killing you alone wouldn’t have been enough,’ he said. ‘Did you think you were the only one? There were always Jews, they were like owls that one hears calling in the dark: one close by, one farther away; you never see them but they know where you are. They smelt out Sophia the way Bodwild smelt you out, they smelt her lust and her appetite for the other, for the circumcised, for the lurking Jew. Could you possibly have thought you were the first one?’

  Looking at that headless mass of maggots I felt the stare of his absent eyes, I began to see in the empty air the eyes of the dead man, his desperate eyes looking into my desperate eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I thought that I was the first one.’

  ‘You weren’t,’ he said. ‘I could smell them always, smell them on her skin and on the silk she wore next to her skin, I could smell them in the bedclothes and in the folds of curtains, I could smell them in the passages of my house. They required no words, she and they, they made their wants known without language, like animals that go on all fours. Only a look, only a smell and they followed, like dogs running to mount a bitch in heat. A bitch in heat or a wild ass:

  ‘A wild ass used to the wilderness,

  That snuffeth up the wind in her desire;

  Her lust, who can hinder it?

  All they that seek her will not weary themselves;

  In her month they shall find her.’

  That desperate man with no head had found the right words, the words that with a rush made Sophia freshly real in my mind, the desert animalness of her in the hidden flesh, the covered nakedness. Gone from me for ever, I knew that I was never to see her again. For a moment the loss of her closed in upon me so crushingly that I thought I might kill myself on the spot; it seemed all at once that there was no space, no time for me to live in. Yet here before me was her husband: he too had lost her and death had given him no rest; the memory of her was a wheel on wh
ich he was broken again and again. When was there an end of pain, I wondered. Never. The cup was golden and it would not pass from me. While I was alive I should have to drink it empty and when I was dead it would be there to drink afresh. And still I drink it now, newly bitter after all the centuries. But the pain is the life, the pain is what separates the animate from the inanimate, the human from the stone. What is human may long for the stone of its innocence, the stone of its ease, of no pain; but the pain is the life. Even after death the pain is the life. This pain is not a simple one, it is complex.

  Was there pain before there was a world? Was the world brought forth in pain? Yes, I am sure of this, I am convinced that it is so. What knowledge can there be of this? As these words come on to the paper by way of what goes by the name of Pilgermann I note that theoretical science has worked its way back deductively to the very first moments of the universe and the bursting forth of everything from the time-space singularity which had contained it just before that moment. All of this is imprinted on the waves and particles of me, it is in the mystical black letters that rise above all flames, it is the Word that is at once the birth-scream and the death-cry of the cosmic animal that is God, the It that is both creator and created. How should there not be pain? One has only to listen to music run backwards to sense the reversing cycles of consummation and creation, the continual ordering and reordering of the disturbance that is the endless idea that continually thinks itself into and out of the manyness of its being.

  It is not from the loss of Sophia, the loss of Christ and the loss of God as He that the pain comes, no. It is from the pain that God comes, that Christ with his lion-eyes comes, that Sophia in all her beauty, her splendour, and her passion comes. It is from the cosmic intolerable of the nothing-in-everything alternating with the everything-in-nothing that all things come. This great pain, this ur-pain, swims its monstrous bulk in deeps far down, down, down below that agony of loss in which I grind my teeth remembering the golden bell of Sophia’s nakedness and the sharpness of the knife of joy.

  Knife of joy. At this thought almost do the waves and particles of me laugh. Perhaps this almost-laugh is seen somewhere as the shaking of a leaf in the evening wind, the shaking of a leaf seen in the light of a street lamp under a humpbacked moon in a modern place where the few trees speak to the dry stone. ‘Knife of joy,’ I said, and immediately there came to mind the knife of unjoy, the knife that drew the line for me. Now of course I know what I did not know then: I know that the pain waits in the joy as the dragonfly waits in the nymph. Almost I sense that the joy, as the nymph to the dragonfly, is a necessary stage in the development of the pain.

  With my dead colleagues I was on the road to Jerusalem: with the sow Bodwild and her peasant master Konrad; with the bear shot full of arrows by his worshipper; with Udo the relic-gatherer; with the tax-collector the husband of Sophia, and with us was Bruder Pförtner in his appearances and his disappearances. And now I became aware of perhaps someone else, it was only the faintest light and shadow as it were sketched on the air, a ghostly chiaroscuro walking familiarly with the rest of us as if by right. This sketchy figure was in truth familiar, uncertain of feature as it was: it was immediately recognizable to me as an early state of my death. I felt drawn to it as a father to a son. This simulacrum was in no way childlike, it was a fully-grown duplicate of me but not yet fully defined, not yet fully realized, and therefore it was to me as a child to be looked after.

  Child! Looking at my immature death, feeling protective towards it as if it were my son, I found myself thinking: What if Sophia and I have made a child! What if in her womb is growing new life from our sin, our adultery, our triumph! I laughed aloud as this thought leapt up in me. I looked sidewise at the tax-collector, my brother in Sophia. ‘In her month they shall find her,’ I said.

  Strange, talking to a headless dead man. No face to look at, but from somewhere he was staring at me hard. ‘Judgment Day,’ he said. ‘You spoke of it just a little while ago. You must know in your heart, as I knew in my heart while I was alive, that the Day of Judgment is the only day there is. In our mortal life we play at dividing this one everlasting day into many tiny days and we say, “Tomorrow I shall perhaps do better.” But there is only this one day in which we live our whole lives and from which we fade as consciousness fades. It is where I am now but in a little while I shall fade out of it and be gone while you for as long as you live must remain in it.’

  ‘Is that why you told those peasants to let me live?’ I said. ‘So that I could suffer it continually?’

  ‘I told them to let you live because I felt myself judged in that moment when I looked down at you lying in your blood and vomit,’ he said.

  We said nothing more. Bruder Pförtner was with us again, he was walking close beside my young death and fondling it from time to time.

  Walking the road to Jerusalem I find myself weeping. This is because my mind has shown me a connexion that it was just beginning to perceive when I was leaning against the tree in the little dark wood after I killed Udo the relic-gatherer. It was then that there came into my mind the great dome that I had never seen, the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Ah! now as I walk I know that there is no separateness in the world, I know that the souls of things and the souls of people are inextricably commingled; I know that the dome and the woman both are manifestations of something elemental that is both beauty and wisdom and it is for ever in danger, for ever being lost, torn out of our hands, violated. It is impossible to keep it safe. That heaven shapen by human hands, that blue dome hung with lights and lustres, starred with flames and dim with incense, that spirit-bowl, that God-mother and Mother Goddess, that Wisdom of stone and gold, how should it not be violated, how should rough hands not be laid upon it, how should the holy silence not be broken by the thudding of hooves, how should war horses not be ridden up to that altar, how should the altar not be smashed? Altars are made for smashing. That thing in us that waits to jump up and smash, it stands looking over our shoulder as we build the altar. It rages, it smiles, it laughs deep in its belly, it dances on cloven hooves at the consecration of the altar, it looks ahead to the time of the smashing. More, more is there in this: that of which the dome is a visible aspect, the great Wisdom, golden Wisdom itself, is the mother of both the altar and the thing that smashes the altar. The Wisdom in its wisdom thus provides that beauty and wisdom shall never be within our grasp, shall only be a light upon our eyes and passing.

  Passing, passing! Echah! O how! O how is the beauty passing, how is it departed, gone, gone! It is gone because the Wisdom in its wisdom has ordained that beauty is that which passes, it is that which will not stay; beauty is a continual departing, a continual going away. Sophia is one with the dome in my mind that arches over me like the Egyptian sky goddess arching over her earth-god brother who penetrates her and must be separated from her.

  In the making of Sophia’s beauty was the violation of it by separation, by departure, by shouts of impiety under the great dome of it, by the castration of its consort and the beheading of its protector. The great dome echoes with the clatter and the clamour of the horsemen, with the smashing of the altar, the tearing of the silken hangings. Listen, listen to the trampling of impious feet on sacred books, listen to this trampling that is the most constant road in history, the trampling of murderous feet on sacred books. In the writing, in the copying, in the binding of the books, in the very ink and paper, in the blood and bones of the original writer and in the blood and bones of every copyist thereafter lives coevally the trampler and the burner of the books of God and the God of books, lives the trampler and the burner of books and people, of beauty and domes.

  I am on the road to Jerusalem with my dead colleagues, with Bruder Pförtner, with my death that is not yet ripened to term. The year is 1096 in the Christian calendar, Anno Mundi 4857, two thousand, four hundred and eight years since Moses brought down from the mountain the second tablets on the tenth day of Tishri. It will not be until A.D. 1
204 that violent men mouthing Christ will sail from Venice to sack Constantinople. In the adzes and hammers of Venetian shipwrights not yet born, in their blood and bones, in the blood and bones of their mothers who will bear them waits to be born the sack of Constantinople and the fall of an emperor unborn, and all of this is under the dome of that Sophia who is or is not carrying my child, that Sophia who revealed her nakedness to me, gave it splendidly and lavishly to me, that Sophia, that nakedness that I shall no more see. Echah!

  The above is my kina, my dirge, my lament that is suddenly in my mind as I recall walking with my colleagues on the road to Jerusalem. In my mind at the end of my lament on the inseparability of Sophia and Hagia Sophia is another thought: the enemy matters nothing; truly it is not the apparent enemy that sacks Constantinople, it is that which crouches always at the feet of beauty and in its season leaps up to destroy. It is the impulse that leaps up, and it gathers to itself whoever comes to hand whether it be Christians or Muslims; it clothes itself with whatever costume it finds. The fall of Constantinople that begins in 1204 with the French and the Flemings is consummated by the Turks in 1453; what is required is not that a particular enemy shall attack the dome, only that by sword and fire beauty shall be brought low, only that the holy books shall be trampled. Echah!

  9

  Now must I begin to speak of war, now must I make ready for dust and blood, for the smoke and flame of siege and battle, for the ringing of dinted iron, the quivering of severed limbs. Now must I see in my mind the secret colours of entrails sliding from the opened bellies of warriors while their eyes look down in disbelief. Now must I see Bruder Pförtner and his ready companions making sport while swords clang and arrows hiss all round them; now must I hear them screaming in their pleasure as they have the tumbling of heroes Christian and Muslim both.

  What a ponderous labour is war, what preparations must be made years and years before the first blow is struck! Decades before the first battle must the first engines of war be brought into play: the first engines of war are men and women, they are the hammer and the anvil that in the heat of their action make soldiers. In order that the dead may be heaped on the walls and roofs and in the streets and houses of Jerusalem in 1099 there must be heavy coupling from about 1060 onwards among Christians and Muslims both. For the making of each soldier must a man and a woman labour in their lust, for the making of each soldier must an egg and a sperm conjoin to write their word of flesh, must a woman carry that word for nine months until her great-grown belly fulfils its term and is delivered of a man-child. Then must the boy be given suck, must he be kept alive to grow strong and active, must he be led safely past the ills of infancy and the perils of childhood to the day when he can take in his hands the weapons of war and go out to the place of killing.