Pilgermann (32 page)

From wherever the tax-collector’s voice lived came a long sigh, ‘Ahhhhhhh!’ He assumed the necessary position over the bucket and emptied his bowels with a torrent like Onopniktes, I half expected dead donkeys to come out of him turning over and over in that disgusting flood. This is metaphorical illusion, I told myself, dismiss it from your mind; have other illusions, better ones; see Sophia. But Sophia would not come, even Bodwild would not come. My young death, I thought, surely
he
will come, I am like a father to him, I
am
his father—let us at least have a proper leavetaking before he goes out into the world to seek his fortune, let there be a fond embrace, a manly clasping of hands, a tear or two would be nothing to be ashamed of. But no, he would not come. Comfortless I sat on the floor with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.

‘Ahhhhhh!’ sighed the tax-collector again. He must have left the bucket because now he was returning to it to relieve himself once more with the same torrential rush and with a noise that was like the bursting of the Unseen into the seen, which of course in its own way it was. Surely, I thought, this is no proper epiphany; surely if God is gone I shall at least see Christ one more time, I deserve at least that much.

Pffffffttttt! went the tax-collector. The stench was no longer within the limits of what could be called a smell, it had become something in the nature of a metaphysical premise. The grotesquerie of the tax-collector’s appearing without a head while thus emptying himself of the waste of a lifetime, perhaps of more than one lifetime! Really, I thought, how much can be expected of my forbearance, my civility? After all, if this is illusion I must have something to say about it. ‘If you’re going to keep doing that at least you must accept responsibility for it!’ I shouted. ‘At least you can show your face!’

‘What did you say?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘Say!’ I said. ‘Who can say anything with this constant noise, this unbearable stench!’

‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and I haven’t been noticing the smell for a while.’

‘Everything’s all right with you then, is it?’ I said. ‘With you there’s nothing to complain of?’

‘I’ve already told you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve had a good life and I’ve had enough of it and I’m ready to go. Why should I have any complaints?’

‘This smell,’ I said, ‘this smell isn’t illusion, it’s a real stink, it’s a stench of actuality.’

‘Where I am there’s not that much of a stench,’ he said.

‘There’s no need to be insulting,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Here we have an opportunity for preparation, we have a little quiet time in which there is nothing for us to do, nothing is required of us; it is like a silent desert in which we are not far from the track that will take us to that farthest lote-tree that is shrouded in unutterable mystery. All we need is a little patience, a little quietness of mind as we look for the track in the silent desert.’

‘You!’ I said. ‘You are attached to nothing, you care for no one.’

‘The one doesn’t necessarily follow from the other,’ he said. ‘I am attached to nothing but I care for you and I have cared for others in my time.’

‘Always you make me ashamed,’ I said.

‘Stop disquieting yourself and stop being ashamed,’ he said. ‘Use this time to find the track in the desert.’

‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ said the tax-collector returning to the bucket.

It seems now to be much later although I don’t know how much time has passed, I don’t know whether I’ve been asleep or not. The little stone room is full of darkness, but it seems to me that beyond the stench of the bucket I can smell the dawn that is coming. There enters my mind the thought that the bucket in the corner has been put there for Elijah. I don’t want Elijah to come here and relieve himself in that bucket, I want to see Elijah running ahead of Ahab’s chariot, running beautifully
under a black sky in the rain and the wind, running in the thought of God to Jezreel.

Something is happening below us on the wall, there are footsteps and voices, there are armed men running, men shouting,
‘Deus le volt!’
The Franks are in Antioch and we are locked up in this little room of stone.

Bembel Rudzuk, whose silent stillness in the darkness suggests not sleep but contemplation, now says, ‘If you stand on my shoulders you can empty that bucket out of the window.’

This bucket-emptying is not a simple thing; there is no chair or table that I can use as a mounting platform, and one hand is of course required for the bucket. But Bembel Rudzuk at sixty-two is still a strong man. Facing the wall he kneels on one knee below the window. I step on to his broad shoulders and with one hand touching the wall I maintain my balance as he rises to his feet.

Bembel Rudzuk bracing himself with his hands against the wall is as steady as a rock. I am just high enough so that I can see the little crescent of the new moon of Tammuz and feel the freshness of the night on my eyes. From the sounds I hear I judge that our window overlooks the walkway on the top of the wall, and it is from this walkway that the shouts of the Franks are coming. There are cries and groans from the Turks; someone exclaims, clearly and distinctly as if required by history to bear audible witness, ‘We are betrayed!’

‘Bohemond!’ goes up the shout, ‘Bohemond! Bohemond! Bohemond!’

With my right hand under the bucket I slide it very slowly, very carefully up the wall to the window, keeping my balance with my face against the wall while I bring my left hand over to grasp the handle. There is in my mind an ardent prayer as I bring the bucket up over the window sill.

‘Deus le volt!’
I shout as I empty the bucket and hurl it after its contents. From below there comes a wild cry of rage as startling and primitive as the roar of a lion.

‘Allah The Finder,’ says Bembel Rudzuk.

At that moment the door opens and in the candlelight from a sconce on the stairs we see Firouz. He lays our bags and weapons on the floor. ‘Forgive me if you can,’ he says. In the
doorway is my young death also, his face shining with love as he points to my sword that used to belong to Firouz. Bembel Rudzuk and I as one man stretch out our hands for our swords, we have no need of anything else now.

Pell-mell down the stairs we go to the walkway on the wall; there are dead Turks there, we step over them, we hurry down the next stairs to the ground.

‘Hidden Lion!’ says Bembel Rudzuk. Yes, yes, I know what is in his mind as we run. The little crescent hangs in the sky so delicate and slender, shouts and screams run through the darkness like fire through stubble; the mu’addhin will not sound the call to prayer in the new morning, there will be a great silence where there used to be the prayer of many. Stronger grows the smell of the dawn that is coming, that alchemy by which substance of darkness becomes substance of light in which are bodied forth all forms moving and still; the disquietude of the invaded houses, domes, and minarets, the continual surprise of Silpius that waits to manifest itself tawny and empurpled, unsurprised at the heaped bodies of the dead, surprised only that there should be world at all and itself in the world.

Dawn has not yet come but everything is Now and the actuality of it illuminates the night in my eyes so that I seem to see whatever is before me in the purple-blue crystalline vibrations in which I first saw the upside-down body of the tax-collector in the little wood of night.

Dim and yellow against the vibrations of the purple-blue shudders the faltering light of a lantern that stands on the tiles of Hidden Lion. And here is Questing the death-hound, here is Elijah for whom Firouz has opened the door, here is Messiah following on Elijah, here is the giant Bohemond foul and stinking with excrement that stains his scarlet cross as he stands on Hidden Lion lifting his sword vertically with both hands and plunging it down again and again like a man breaking ground for a post-hole. All around him are broken tiles and among them are heaped the gold and silver coins that were mortared into the tiles.

Now I see what I have seen before in the darkness and the brightness in my mind, I see leaping and still like a butterfly
transfixed by lightning the elegance of Bembel Rudzuk as he attacks Bohemond; I see the great Frankish sword that has been going up and down like a post-hole digger suddenly leap like a live thing as Bohemond shifts his grip and now a track of brightness horizontally cleaves the darkness, cleaves the purple-blue, cleaves with its savage arc the body of Bembel Rudzuk; now in two pieces falls the body of Bembel Rudzuk to the broken tiles of Hidden Lion.

Here now before me is Bohemond. This is the great moment when I shall see the face of this man who has become my world and my Jerusalem. His fouled and stinking mail shirt glitters in the purple-blue luminosity of Now, his helmet flashes as if wreathed in lightnings; the iron nasal of his helmet makes other than human this face that I strain to see but I cannot, I shall never see it, I see instead the face of that veiled owl of my childhood.

I raise my arm, I strike with my sword, I see it shatter like shards of ice as the great sword of Bohemond makes a rainbow in the night, in the dawn that is coming. I stare into the brilliance, I see the Virgin and the Lion wheeling in the darkness, in the light. I see the sun-points dazzling on the sea, the alchemy of the triangular sail changing from the hot and dry to the cold and wet; I smell the salt breath of Bruder Pförtner.

But I cannot see Bohemond in this night and dawn of brilliance, of purple-blue luminosity. No, as the great sword makes another rainbow in the pale dawn where hangs the new moon of Tammuz, the last thing that I see with my mortal eyes, very, very high in the sky and circling in the overlapping patterns of the Law, is that drifting meditation of storks that I have known from my childhood, each year returning in their season to their wonted place.

All Old Testament quotes except those on pp. 61, 62,112 and 113 are from
The Holy Scriptures,
Jewish Publication Society of America, 1955. The quotes on pp. 61 and 62 are from
The Jerusalem Bible,
Koren Publishers, Jerusalem, 1977. The quote on pp. 112 and 113 is from
The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament
in Greek and English, translated by Sir Launcelot Lee Brenton, Samuel Bagster and Sons, London.

All New Testament quotes are from
The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament
translated by Reverend Dr Alfred Marshall, Samuel Bagster and Sons, London, 1958.

All Quran quotes are from
The Holy Quran,
translated and with commentary by A. Yusuf Ali, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Kashmiri Bazar, Lahore, Pakistan, 1977.

Page
11. Deuteronomy 6:4

12. Genesis 15:17,18

19. Deuteronomy 6:4 Mourner’s Kaddish, p. 80,
The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth of Nations,
translated by Rev. S. Singer, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1962 Morning Service, ibid. p. 9.

19,20. Selichot for the First Day, pp. 18, 19,
Selichot, Authorised Hebrew and English Edition for the Whole Year,
translated and annotated by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld, The Judaica Press, New York, 1979.

22. Hebrews 12:18-21

24. Morning Service for the Ninth of Av, pp. 77, 78,
Kinot, Authorised for the Ninth of Av,
translated and annotated
by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld, The Judaica Press, New York, 1979.

25. The fig tree: see Matthew 21:19, Mark 11:13 Matthew 19:12

37. Matthew 10:29

39. John 11:25, 26 Matthew 27:25

40. John 11:25

41. The Shechinah: The Divine manifestation through which God’s presence is felt by man’,
Gateway to Judaism,
Volume One, p. 300, by Albert M. Shulman, Thomas Yoseloff, 1972

43. Matthew 27:22, 24, 25

48. Psalm 8:4

52. Mourner’s Kaddish, p. 80,
The Authorised Daily Prayer Book,
op. cit.

61. Deuteronomy 32:18

62. Deuteronomy 32:15-18

70. Mark 14:22

71. John 13:26, 27 Mark 14:22

72. John 11:48, 50-3

73. Matthew 26:50 Luke 22:48

74. Luke 22:48 Matthew 26:50

75. Mark 14:67, 68

76. Matthew 27:24

86. Jeremiah 2:24

94. Full quittance: see Ruth, p. 15, Volume Four,
The Midrash Rabbah,
edited by Rabbi Dr H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, The Soncino Press, London, 1977. This part is translated by Rabbi Dr L. Rabbinowitz.

95. Isaiah 26:19

106. The red heifer: see Numbers 19.

108. Abraham and the fiery furnace: see Genesis p. 311, Volume One,
The Midrash Rabbah,
op. cit. The sulphur-mercury process: see pp. 89, 90,
Islamic Cosmological Doctrines
by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Thames and Hudson, London, 1978.

112. Psalm 137:5 Esaias 56:3-5,
The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament
, op. cit.

113. Isaiah 56:5 Bembel Rudzuk’s remark about the pattern going on for ever: this derives from Richard Ettinghausen’s caption on p. 72 of his Chapter Two, ‘The Man-Made Setting’, in
The World of Islam,
edited by Bernard Lewis, Thames and Hudson, London, 1976.

129. Tower Gate’s reference to the Quran: see Sura 4:79,
The Holy Quran,
op. cit.

132. Deuteronomy 23:2

133. The castration of Noah: See Genesis, pp. 291, 293, Volume One,
The Midrash Rabbah,
op. cit. The Genesis volume is translated by Rabbi Dr H. Freedman.

135. The she-camel: see Suras VII, 73-9; XI 61-8; XXVI 141-59; XXVII 45-53,
The Holy Quran,
op. cit.

162. Genesis 21:17-18 Genesis, p. 473, Volume One,
The Midrash Rabbah,
op. cit.

175. Ezekiel 24:6-9

177. Hebrews 1:11-12

177-179. Sura 81:1-14,
The Holy Quran,
op. cit.; see notes 5973, 5974.

196. Bohemond and the stirrup: see Chapter I,
Medieval Technology and Social Change
by Lynn White Jr, Oxford University Press, 1962.

207. Timaeus, 57E,
Plato, the Collected Dialogues,
edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1961.