by Gerald Kersh
‘You knew Phanok, the cutler, in Tarsus? Well, once he showed me something knotty and black and heavy. “Isn’t it lovely?” he asks. I say: “Is it?” “Yes,” says he. “But, my dear fellow, it has no form, no shape!” I cry. But he assures me: “Quality is shape, m’ lord Afranius – once upon a time there was a time when even you were a mess to wipe away with a napkin between piss and dung, begging your pardon.” I say: “Pardon granted, where’s your quality?” He answers: “Why, m’ lord, you have got to put something fine in before something fine comes out! Ask your mother.” “You are an impudent rascal,” I tell him, remembering my saintly mother and disgusted to think of her in heat; and so I leave Phanok with his bloated boy blowing his charcoal, while he smelts that veinous pig of black English iron. Two weeks later he shows me a knife, double-edged and a foot long, a sweet knife tempered to split a hair, ridged in the centre and darkly shining. A haft of plain ivory. “With this, you can shave a face, transplant a bud, or cut a throat – in any case, it’s a beauty,” he says.
‘So it was, and so I bought it for an exorbitant price. Phanok says to me, putting away the money: “Pretty, eh? Sweet, no?” – holding out his spiky hands like bundles of black twigs – “These filthy hands of Phanok forged that nice clean knife while your fat-arsed bugger-boy fuffed the fire; and I hardened it with stale piss and sweat – oh ay, myself, one-eyed Phanok! Not for nothing the gods made Cyclops with a lonely eye: you’ve got to take aim to make an edge, and who takes aim with two eyes? All the same, the virtue of the blade is in the iron and me!” (One of Phanok’s eyes really had been jabbed out in a brawl, as you know.) But let me cut this short: it was the best and the most beautiful knife I ever owned, but I never used it. I detest the squalor of origins. “In this blade I live!” said the cutler. Yes, yes; but I want a knife, not a life. I subscribe to no artisan’s conceit …
‘Well, some cyclopean god banged Paulus out of the black dirt, and if quality is form he is transcendent. Quality of what? Ask me some different question. There are many gods, and who knows which of them touches the lips of the baby when he is twisted and squeezed out into the acrid daylight? O, bloody birth! O, misery, to be born a man like little Paul foredamned to have for ever in his mouth the astringency of the piss in his biting temper!
‘It is not for me to speculate, Diomed, but to report – I report, of Paulus, a kind of dementia of over-elaborate officialdom. You know how a man may rationalise himself into this kind of condition. So may it be said of Paulus as he goes about his business.
‘A proper Jew, as you know, may not wear a mixture of fabrics, such as linsey-woolsey, for example, so Paulus wears clothes all of one cloth. Still, there are wools rarer than fine silk, and such he wears, and linens likewise, out of what they call “spider-flax” from Egypt. Jehovah insists furthermore upon certain fringes at the corners of a man’s garments; but there are fringes and fringes, and even a thread has a certain quality and value – if the Law says a fringe must be of wool and custom requires a blue fringe, there is no legitimate argument against sapphires, it seems.
‘Uncarved with living likenesses, the curtains of Paulus’s litter clatter and tinkle with gems, while the second and third fingers of both hands are so splayed with rings that he cannot but make the Jewish triangle of blessing when he lifts them. The collar of his shawl is gold and pearl; he binds his head-dress with rubies, wears silver and moonstone in his belt, walks hard-backed and stiff-necked in case of base shadows, with pattens on his feet to save him from the common dust. And he is fastidious as forceps in the fingers, having always a man after him with a silver ewer and basin, and another with a perforated silver ball of spices for his nose.
‘For what? To make deep diplomacy of common business, as I guess. For so he goes about by day, throwing good money down the drain – not Rome’s money, not Caesar’s money, for Paulus’s books will balance, or I am a fool – his own money and his father’s, my dear Diomed; his own perquisites, his own commissions!
‘Call me a dog if I lie; he is buying good-will. Whose? That of the master-men, the priests and the crowd-pleasers, the land-holders and the contractors, the merchants and suppliers. They go to him with long faces, voluble with guilt, and as full of explanation as so many heavy-eyed girls with grass-stained shoulders. And out they come, almost dancing, virtuous, all weighed and paid and legitimate. Saul, their Saul, has made honest men of them.
‘But, come the afternoon, official business finished, our Paulus comes out bathed plain, a Judge in Israel – only staccato, in a manner he must have picked up from you – and with a mouth of iron. And this Paulus I fear: the crystalled eye of the Shofetim, the monotonous voice of the judges. You know, perhaps – or do you not? – that at his present rate of procedure Paulus cannot live six months. He eats almost nothing; he is full before he sits down; and he is consumed with impatience at the thought of sitting down – does so because he must, and then with only half of his arse while his knuckly toes move with exacerbated impatience between the straps of his sandals. Diomed, you have stronger spirit than I ever had if you can, as you do, tolerate with humour this nightmare that walks like a Roman, this scratchy edge that impinges beyond hearing-point.
‘He is his own unnaturally jealous husband: he is always half shamefacedly holding hands with himself and, when he thinks nobody is looking, inflicting upon the inside of his own mouth a furtive little lover’s bite: and believe me, when he leaves himself alone for a little while, it is only that he may come up behind himself and surprise himself. It is odd, but I find it hard to discuss Paulus except in terms of torment; and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, out of torment comes a certain malice, a self-justifying evil. A whole man is a whole spirit: “whole cripple” is a contradiction in the term. And Paulus’s is a crippled spirit, although physically he is of a piece, if somewhat wolfish.
‘He makes me think of my servant Junius’s left arm. “But Afranius,” you protest, “your servant Junius has no left arm!”
‘Here is the point, my dear Diomed. Old Junius is friend and servant to me, as your Pugnax is to you; and Junius and Pugnax are, as it happens, friends much as you and I are. Junius lost his arm at the battle of Arinic’s Ford, a quarter of a century ago. But it still troubles him, although it is not there. He says: “Master, when the wound festered, I tied a thong round it above the red part, and I said to my old comrade Maseratus: ‘Put an edge on your sword, old boy, and strike as at an enemy’ – and so he did, and that was that. It didn’t hurt, he having one of the strongest back-hand cuts in the army…. But oh, my Master, the misery of that arm which wasn’t there! The fire unquenchable, and the itch, the itch, the unscratchable itch!” And in the winter and the spring, when this non-existent arm burns and itches worst, poor Junius sometimes growls: “Oh, say, this is not the rage of the gods! For if a little arm is so uneasy when it is gone, what of the head and body when they are separated?” And he says: “For the corrupt part, when it was dead and rotten, had no feeling at all! Only that which lives knows grief; but being gone, what right has the void to suffer?” To which I always say: “Ask Terpsicles” – there is, of course, no such person as Terpsicles.
‘Paulus wears two faces and both of them are real, but where the one begins and the other ends it is impossible to say. Official business finished in the late afternoon, he slips without pause into another day and another world, a world of smoky lamplight inhabited by creatures of the shadows: pimps, beggars, whores, informers, runaway slaves, absentee soldiers, wanted men. By “wanted” I mean, of course, unwanted: Society wants them as you or I want a louse in the hair, to crack it and be rid of it. And now Paulus puts aside his finery; no jewels now; stout sandals and a robe of unbleached wool girt with a strap and, for his wand of office, a strong stick straight but with a tormented grain and studded with a thousand thorny knots, knobbed with a formidable root and shot with copper.
‘One might mistake him at first glance for a plain traveller – but only at first glance, my friend
! Indeed, to anyone who has travelled as widely as I and seen as much of dangerous men and beasts, there should be no such thing as a first glance but only cautious scrutiny. At first glance a crocodile is a dead log, at first glance an adder is a green stick, at first glance a crouching lion is a hummock of sand. And, I repeat, at first glance our Paulus in the twilight is a quiet traveller going about some serious but innocent business – business of a petty nature, something to do with the conveying of a vineyard, say. Then he looks at you, very slowly, and says something (no matter what), and there comes over you a sensation which I can only describe as of helplessness. Diomed, don’t laugh – or yes, laugh, and when we meet again on your gracious terrace in kindly Tarsus, I will laugh with you – but it is not funny here and now.
‘Here in the heart of this sun-rotted and sand-blasted land, Paulus inspires a distressing mixture of emotions. It is some quality of the spirit. If he says anything even so trivial as “I shall wash my hands”, it is not a passing remark, it is an unalterable decision; if a locked phalanx stood between Paulus and a wash-basin, still he would get through and wash his hands. With him, everything is a matter of life and death. He makes opposition something not worth while: life is too short for argument with his kind. And so his merest affirmative nod fills one with a ridiculously disproportionate sense of relief, as if some bloody catastrophe has been narrowly averted, or a peace treaty sealed. No ewer-and-basin man, or perfume-carrier attends him in the evening, unless he has made himself splendid for some secret session at a great man’s house – no, only I accompany him.
‘A small, compact guard follows at a discreet distance; and behind them, in single file, the three most heart-freezing creatures in all Asia. The first of these is a man whose very name is not mentioned because it brings bad luck. He has a nickname, however: Little Azrael. Azrael is the Jewish Angel of Death, and it is his stern duty to separate the soul from the body; a melancholy angel, himself under a death sentence, because one day death will be no more, and God will slay Azrael. Little Azrael is a public executioner, trained in the mystery and craft of burning, strangling, scourging and beheading; he knows also the technique of stoning, which requires skilful supervision, as I shall tell you later. His like has not been seen since the time of Herod the Great – that is to say, he has not been equalled in strength and dexterity. But now, his is an unenviable position: all men shun him, and he has no regular income, but is paid by the job, and executions in the Mosaic style are infrequent nowadays.
‘There is no everyday work for which he is considered fit. They will not let him be a slaughterer of beasts, having an unpleasant feeling about having this fellow bleed their beeves and sheep. In any case, he has no licence to do so. He is not employed even to dig graves, except in the unhallowed barrens around the gallows. Sometimes he earns a coin or two dragging away the most offensive kinds of garbage, and now and then, for fear of the evil eye, someone throws him a few coppers or a bit of bread. He eats offal, is ostentatiously punctual in his prayers, and is completely indifferent to the swarms of great, greasy green flies that always buzz about his head. Superstition has it that these slaughter-house flies bring him news of the dead – and who, one asks, is more appropriately designed to receive such news than Little Azrael? He is squat and square, yet somehow emaciated, this sepulchral outcast, a creature of horn and cartilage; his nose is a claw, his mouth a gristly beak, and even his heavy eyelids appear to have the quality of great blunt finger-nails.
‘He will not beg. There are two others who beg for him, and always follow him, one behind the other. The first of these is a woman, called Ada the Mourner. I know other places in Asia where she would be killed out of hand as a ghoul, for she loves death, follows all the funerals, and loiters after dark in graveyards. But here they pity her, and give her alms. She wears only black sackcloth, sour and filthy, always smudged at the knees with fresh mould. Her hair and face are plastered with white ashes through which her constantly flowing tears have cut two fantastically shaped dark channels, from her drowned and bloated red eyes, around her starting cheek-bones, down into the caverns of her cheeks and so into the corners of her chewed mouth, where she licks them away with a quick dart of her rough, earth-coloured tongue.
‘They say she was beautiful once, and ready to be married to a fine young man. But the night before her wedding she began to weep, and has been weeping for the past thirty years, eaten up with some nameless, inexpressible, meaningless grief. She is in love with Death, in the person of Little Azrael, whom she follows, as I have said, sometimes calling to him, in something like a dog’s voice in the night: “Take me, Azrael, O beautiful Azrael, take me to your house!” An unappetising thought. In their rear, last of all, creeps the one they call It.
‘Born a man but unsexed by smallpox when he was a child, always going on tiptoe with the mincing steps of a eunuch, It can, with impunity, handle the pustular bodies of people smitten with the sickness that struck him monstrous either to wash them or put them in their graves. He is invulnerable also to the black cholera, is an opener of buboes and a disposer of pus. I shall provide you with none of the disgusting details. His blasted countenance is hairless, grey-white, blistery here and pitted there, like boiling porridge. In place of a nose he has a split thing like a peeled chestnut, and one of his eyes is sightless and glairy white, a kind of half-open oyster. Only his mouth is distinguishable as a human feature, and this is red, moist, and – most horrid of all! – voluptuous. As he creeps, he whispers to himself, and they say that he is praying for a plague like the one they had forty years ago, when he made money and grew fat.
‘And there you have the tail of the procession Paulus heads by night: Death looking for employment, Grief lusting after Death, and Corruption praying for Pestilence. He, She, and It – a horrid allegory, as it might be, grouped to lend terror to the skinny little prowler with the daemon on his back.
‘And what is the purpose of these nightly jaunts? I will tell you what happens …’
7
I MUST have been deeply engrossed, or she must have moved like a shadow, for I have ears like a dog, but I was not aware that Dionë had come in until I looked up from Afranius’s writing and saw her sitting on a cushion an arm’s length away.
‘That is an evil book you are reading,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘You go tat-tat-tat like a bird pecking worms, and your face is black as thunder.’
‘I cannot imagine why,’ I said. ‘But if you interrupt me again, I shall have you beaten with a stick.’ I smiled to myself at the idea: one might as well thrash a kitten or flog a flower.
‘If you do, I shall kill myself,’ she said.
‘I will bet that you would not,’ I said, glad, after all, of the interruption.
‘How much will you bet?’
I said: ‘Let me see. I will have you beaten now. If you kill yourself immediately, I will marry you tomorrow. If you do not, I won’t.’
‘I hate that book you are reading. Is it a sad book?’
‘How do I know until I have read it?’
‘Is there any love in it?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘there is, among other things, the story of how Solomon the Wise, King of the Jews, made a queen come to his bed.’
Dionë clapped her hands. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’
So I told her about the salty dinner and the empty water-pitchers. I told the story in the tantalising, cumulative way that children love:
‘… And so she went to the White Chamber, and what do you think she found there? … And then she went to the Blue Chamber, and imagine what she saw there! …’ Repeated, with additions and variations, this silly story gave my poor little Dionë pleasure for years to come, although she knew it by heart. Or because she knew it by heart. Nothing pleases like the familiar story. There is no new thing under the sun because that which is new makes men think twice, and this they hate, except in play. If I were inspired to make a new philosophy I should introduce it in the form of a
game.
The story ended, she sighed deeply and, after some meditation, said: ‘But this King Solomon was also a ruler of demons!’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then if I had been Solomon I should have called a demon and said: “Demon, fetch me that woman.”’
‘That wouldn’t have been the same thing. She had to come to him of her own accord.’
‘But she didn’t come to him, she came to the water.’
‘Let us not split hairs.’
‘If she made herself so different from a thousand other women, I suppose she put a charm on him,’ said Dionë gravely. ‘My mother learned such a charm. She learned it from a woman who was a hundred years old, but who could make young men think she was beautiful. It is easy to make the powder, of which you need only a pinch, but you must say the words the right way.’
‘And thus, no doubt, your mother found herself a king for a husband,’ I said.
Her eyes filled with tears as she answered: ‘She died.’ Then, instantly recovering her spirits: ‘But I have used the charm,’ she said, laughing.
‘Upon me, presumably?’
‘Yes. You only think I am Dionë. Really, my name is Kakmara, and I am sixty-seven years old; I have only one tooth, my breasts are like cakes of dry cow-dung, and between my thighs is a withered apricot. Only I have cast a spell–’
‘Go to your room!’ I said, unreasonably angry. ‘Go now. I am reading.’ She left, downcast, and I was sorry.
