Pilgermann (30 page)

‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘For myself I don’t care, I’m
quite ready to die. It’s my son, you see—he’s only a very little fellow and he needs me badly, and his mother, if I can find her perhaps she needn’t die in Jerusalem.’

‘Yes,’ says Bruder Pförtner, ‘I
do
understand, you’ve no idea how often I hear this sort of thing. So many people are urgently needed elsewhere when the time comes. And what about me, eh? Have you perhaps a little thought for me? I am like a diligent housewife who cleans the house and cooks the meal and lays the table, all is in readiness but the expected guest suddenly can’t be bothered to come. Only in this case I’ve cleaned the house and cooked the meal and laid the table of history, and one can’t take liberties with history; it isn’t possible, the complexity of the energy exchanges is absolutely staggering.’

‘History!’ I say, ‘I’m talking about human lives!’

‘And I’m talking about human deaths,’ says Bruder Pförtner. ‘Tonight is the fall of Antioch and I need all the Jews and Muslims I can lay my hands on. You have no more time for rushing about, this must be the whole world for you in the time you have left.’ With that he disappears. When I turn back to my young death he also is gone.

I dress and go to Bembel Rudzuk’s room but he isn’t there. I go to the roof: not there. Should I run to Yaghi-Siyan and tell him that I have been told by Bruder Pförtner that Antioch will fall to the Franks tonight? I think that he will believe me but he may well have my head cut off as his first act of preparation for the attack. Should I tell Firouz? Ever since Yaghi-Siyan gave me his sword he looks at me as if he wishes me dead; he would probably accuse me and Bruder Pförtner of being spies. To whom can I give this news? To whom can I say that Death has told me that Antioch will fall tonight? Meanwhile Sophia and our son are either on their way to Jerusalem or are already there. I must find them, I must get out of Antioch.

Seeking Bembel Rudzuk I go to Hidden Lion. It is desolate in the summer dawn. Here are gathered Bruder Pförtner and his fellows. No more do they present themselves as loutish creatures of lust; now they are serious, respectable, they wear breastplates, helmets, cloaks. They are grouped like generals around a huge map that Pförtner has spread out on the tiles. With a baton he points here and there, the others nod. People
and movement flow around Hidden Lion as water flows around an island, no one takes any notice. These bony generals stand out with startling clarity in the foreground of the picture in my eyes, they are sharply defined by the space between them and the houses, domes, and minarets and by the particles of colour on the morning air that in the eye combine to form Mount Silpius tawny and empurpled. The mu’addhin has long since sounded the call to prayer and the prayers have risen in the dawnlight, in the freshness of those cool dim tones with which the world is first sketched in each day. As the sun ascends the morning shadow of the eastern slopes of Silpius withdraws from the city like a transparent purple robe trailed across a floor.

There on the mountain climb Justinian’s walls of the four hundred towers, each correctly casting its morning shadow; there on the mountain is the citadel with its tawny stone catching the light of the sun, its green-and-gold banner rippling in the morning breeze; there in the cleft of Silpius is the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate where in the winter runs Onopniktes the donkey-drowner, roaring, bellowing, grinding its stones in its caverns under the city.

This, under the inescapable reality of Mount Silpius, is the first of Tammuz, the month named for the Babylonian god who is also the Sumerian Dumuzi. Down, down under the earth into the nether world goes he in the winter for he is the corn god. For him does the Goddess Inanna make her famous descent, anointing her eyes with the ointment ‘Let him come, let him come’:

From the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the
   ‘great below’,

The goddess, from the ‘great above’ she set her mind
   toward the ‘great below’.

The new moon of the risen Tammuz hangs in the morning sky but I feel intimations of the great descent, the dark and chill of winter in the light and heat of summer. Inside the earth the waiting darkness trembles. Standing on the barren tiles of Hidden Lion and looking at that always surprising mountain, that simple mountain that so shockingly asserts the actuality of its strangeness, that mountain that now for me is truly and
finally the dreadful mountain of the Law, I curse the infirmity of purpose that has kept me here in Antioch. Turning and turning in my mind my thoughts of what to do next I turn physically, making myself dizzy on this repetition of twisting serpents, shifting pyramids, and occulting lions. There burns in my mind that vision more real than Mount Silpius, more real than anything else in the world, of the violated ivory nakedness of dead Sophia and the animal watchfulness of our little son making his way alone through the dogs, through the dead. I have spent my time playing with patterns and it has come to this. There leaps up in me hatred for Bembel Rudzuk.

I looked up at the tower and saw him standing at the top of it, a solitary dark figure against the morning sky. I looked away. How could I hate Bembel Rudzuk? Overcome by love and shame I went to him.

‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

‘This is the last day of my life,’ I said.

‘All the more reason for looking your best,’ he said. ‘This is the last day of my life as well. How do I look?’

‘Dreadful,’ I said. We embraced each other sadly.

‘Before we talk of other matters,’ he said, ‘I must tell you how it is that I am called Bembel Rudzuk.’

‘I don’t think I can take the time to listen to that now,’ I said, ‘I must.go to Jerusalem.’

‘Don’t you believe Bruder Pförtner when he tells you there’s no longer anywhere for you to go?’ he said.

‘How do you know he told me that?’ I said.

‘He spoke to me as well,’ he said.

‘As Bruder Pförtner or in some other manifestation?’ I said.

‘As Bruder Pförtner,’ he said. ‘I suppose he didn’t bother to change because we’re friends. Are you offended?’

‘No,’ I said but of course I was. I was ashamed to have such stupid feelings at such a time but there they were.

‘Pförtner likes to affect a playful manner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but he means what he says. I don’t think he’ll let you leave Antioch, and if you try I think it will only make our last day more difficult.’

Our
last day! I had come to Hidden Lion seeking Bembel Rudzuk’s counsel for
my
last day, mine alone. I didn’t want to
have to think about anyone else’s last day, not even that of my dearest friend; and that his last day should now be the same day as mine seemed tactless of him, inconsiderate, even pushing. I no longer wanted to talk to Bembel Rudzuk but I wanted him to know how things stood with me. ‘Everything’s different now,’ I said: ‘I have travelled through space and time to the fall of Jerusalem. I have seen Sophia dead and violated, I have seen our son wandering alone among the dead and the dogs. All this has not yet happened and it must not happen, I must do something to prevent it.’

‘I too have seen them,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘You too have made a night journey to the fall of Jerusalem?’ I said. ‘You too have seen’ (I was going to say ‘my wife’) ‘Sophia and our son?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘How can this be?’ I said.

‘How can what be?’ he said.

‘That you have seen them in the sack of Jerusalem,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If they were there to be raped and killed and orphaned then why not to be seen?’

I was so choked with rage that I could hardly find a voice to speak with. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Are you trying to teach me some kind of lesson?’

‘How could I?’ he said. ‘I am no wiser than you and I have nothing to teach. And being thus without wisdom I can’t help wondering why it is that all this time you have felt no need for action and now suddenly you want to change history.’

I thought I should go mad. Silpius continued to offer itself in its unaccountable simplicity to the eye; Bruder Pförtner and his generals continued to confer. Their pretensions disgusted me; I had seen them being themselves with those pilgrim children on the road. History! I felt myself impaled on history, my own and the world’s. The horror, the horror of cause and effect! The horror of the pitiless and implacable chain of one thing following another from the beginning of the world to the end of it with never a pause, never a year of Jubilee, never a clearing of the record! O God! to come so far and to end with so little. Now it was like that torture in which the victim, his belly opened up and one end of his entrails tied to a post, is made to walk round
and round the post unwinding his guts. So walked my mind round its post while the images in it unwound, from the naked Sophia seen in the window to the naked Sophia dead and our son alone in the sack of Jerusalem. I wanted to smash every one of the tiles of Hidden Lion, every one of the bricks of the tower, I wanted Antioch and Onopniktes and Mount Silpius to disappear from my experience, to become unknown to me. I wanted to wind my time back into me, I wanted to be once more at the Eve of the Ninth of Av in the Christian year of 1096.1 would sin again but I would be fierce and strong in my sin, I would go armed and wary in my sin, I would kill for it, would claim Sophia against all odds, I would die fighting if necessary but I would die complete, not a eunuch. What a fool I had been, neither a sheep nor a goat, suffering the loss of goodness without the rewards of badness, Aiyee! But what if Sophia hadn’t wanted to be claimed by me? What if she wanted her Jew for one night only?

Bembel Rudzuk had been watching my face attentively. ‘Is this perhaps the moment,’ he said, ‘when I can tell you how I come to be called Bembel Rudzuk?’

‘If you must,’ I said.

‘This that I tell happened forty years ago,’ he said, ‘when I was trading for a big house in Tripoli—not as a partner, I was what we call a “boy”. We’d come from Tabriz to Aleppo with a three-hundred camel caravan but coming out of Aleppo there were only nine of us—five merchants and four camel-drivers—with twelve camels. We were a day out of Aleppo when there appeared on an empty stretch of road six robbers who put their horses straight at us, three of them passing on either side and shooting arrows as they galloped past; it happened so fast that one simply couldn’t believe it. And their accuracy, shooting at full gallop! A moment before there had been nine of us and now as they wheeled their horses for the second pass six of our party already lay dead.

‘By then the other three of us had put arrow to string and we got two of them on their next rush. Then it was four against three; they were wild with rage, they couldn’t believe that merchants would stand up to them. Of the first six they had killed four were mounted merchants and two were camel-drivers on foot. The two surviving camel-drivers leapt on to horses and tried to get
away but they were quickly brought down by arrows. My horse was killed under me and I was nearly ridden down by the robber who did it. There was no time to think, I leapt at him and in the next moment he was rolling on the ground and I was bent over his horse’s neck and galloping for my life.

‘I was heading for some high ground and big rocks and I was already among the rocks when Tssss, thwock! Off I came with an arrow in my left shoulder, but as soon as I hit the ground I was in behind the rocks and climbing, they couldn’t get a shot at me and they had to get off their horses to follow me.

‘Up I went; I found a little opening between two big tall rocks and I squeezed through. It wasn’t a cave; the rocks were about twenty feet high and there was a space between them open to the sky. I didn’t know whether I was better or worse off than before. I had my sword and my dagger but I had dropped my bow when I leapt at the robber and in any case my quiver was empty. My wound was burning like fire; the arrow had gone right through my shoulder and the head was sticking out in front so that I was able to break it off and pull out the shaft.

‘I had no time to do more than that before there appeared a robber between me and the sky in the opening at the top of the rocks. He laughed and was just reaching for an arrow from his quiver when I threw a stone and caught him full in the face with it. That’s when I knew I was lucky because he lost his balance and fell, not backwards but forwards; he toppled from his perch, landed with a thump beside me and got my dagger in him for his pains.

‘So then I had a bow and arrows: three arrows there were in the quiver, and when the next robber showed himself in the opening above me he got one of the arrows in his throat. That left me with two arrows and two more robbers if the one I’d pulled off his horse had taken up the chase; I assumed that he had, so I looked alternately up at the opening above me and down at the one I had squeezed through and waited for what would come next. This was in the spring, I could hear a bird saying, “Plink, plink!” like drops of water falling into a basin. Above me the sky was blue, there was a fresh breeze blowing.

‘I could hear some movement on the rocks and a voice said, “You go in after him, I’ll be right behind you.” Of course I
knew that was meant for my ears so I was waiting for them to come at me at the same time from above and below. I knew by then that whoever climbed to the opening above was unable to do it with an arrow on the string, he would have to pause for a moment at the top to reach for an arrow. And if he was going to time his attack with that of the other robber he would probably make a sound. So I aimed an arrow at the space I had squeezed through, I thought that was where I’d first see movement.

‘You know how it is at even the most desperate moments, even in matters of life and death—part of your mind is busy with its own affairs, perhaps making pictures, perhaps making words or singing a song while the rest of your mind takes care of the business at hand. Part of my mind was singing a little song, it hadn’t much tune, it was just something the mind had made up by itself, there were no proper words, it just went:

‘Tsitsa tsitsa bem, tsitsa tsitsa bem,
Tsitsa tsitsa bembel bembel bembel bembel bem.