by Sheri Holman
“The name of this town, Ramleh,” Elphahallo says, “means lofty. Look how far you can see, Failisk. And over there, the patch where they grow your melons.”
Indeed, brothers, Ramleh is a green, fertile place, and everything here is cheap, sweet, and exceedingly good, save only its citizens, who are evil-minded and bear an especial hatred to Christians. When we arrived, they would not suffer us to ride our donkeys into town but commanded us to dismount and carry our luggage on our backs like pack slaves. Bad boys sat on the hospice rooftop, while we celebrated divine service in the courtyard, and hindered our worship by hooting and laughing and twisting their fingers with an ill meaning. We looked in our turn with serious countenances at these boys and signed to them to go down, which only after much joking did they do.
One cannot appreciate the foreignness of the Saracens until one has dwelt for a few days among them, brothers. They wear hermaphroditic clothing, so that from the back it is difficult to distinguish their sex, and upon their heads turbans, after the fashion of the drunken god Dionysus, who bound his head against the headache after too much drinking. The Saracens’ false prophet, Mahomet, followed the tradition of Dionysus, both in turban wearing and in excessive imbibing, until one day he committed homicide while inebriated and forever after swore off drink for himself and his followers. The turbans, however, he allowed to remain.
Elphahallo, Cassa, and the many Saracens we meet, from the Sultan’s officials to the humble food merchants who feed us every day, seem genuinely helpful, yet we mustn’t forget their manifest heresies. Elphahallo and his kind declare that God cannot have a Son, because He has no wife, and that He does not live because He does not eat! Cassa believes Christ was not God, only a good man, and calls him merely Rucholla, the Breath of God. Our food merchants might be accomplished in their cooking of eggs, but as for their understanding of Creation, they are mooncalves! Imagine believing that Heaven is made of vapor, which is called an exhalation of the sea, and that in the Beginning there was no distinction between night and day! Saracens also enjoin a plurality of wives and do not scruple to recognize sodomy.
Beside me, Elphahallo rises, and as if to keep the world in balance the last kernel of sun drops behind the hills. From the high round steeple tower across the street, a long atonal howl startles me from my third slice of melon. I once read that Saracens fear the twilight and will bellow to keep the sun awake so he won’t over-sleep and forget them in the morning. I ask Elphahallo if this is true, and he laughs.
“No, Failisk.” He orients a red rug away from the setting sun. “That is our priest, and he is giving us our call to prayer. You must excuse us for a few moments, while we give thanks to God.”
And lo, brothers, even while I watch, these Saracens bow their heads and bodies down to earth and remain awhile in this position, while their priest stands atop his tower and performs the office of bells, uttering his profession of faith. Such a noise you never did hear, but that it sounds like goats and calves, for it is known the world over that Easterns cannot sing. In musical notation, their prayer goes like this:
Watching these Saracens pray together like monks all of one order, I grow sad and disquieted of heart. I compare these utterly lost men who only aggravate their damnation with the gravity and devotion of their prayers, provoking against themselves the wrath of God by methodically dishonoring His saints and angels with their blasphemous prayers, to the wretched Christians downstairs who, though redeemed by Christ’s blood, would rather consort with wanton Saracen women than keep their faith! And when compelled to pray, how often do they offer those prayers with levity and unspeakable lukewarmness and wandering thoughts? I fear many Christians pass the whole day without any adoration of God or prayer to Him, which thing you would never find among the Saracens, Turks, Jews, or Barbarians.
“Calinus,” I ask him, when the Saracens are finished with their prayers, “are you not worried about damning yourself even further with your great seriousness of faith, understanding as you do that your people are consigned to Hell for not knowing the Savior, Jesus Christ?”
Elphahallo shakes his head and hands me yet one more slice of delicious melon. “You are not the first pilgrim to fret over my immortal soul, Friar Failisk. I once escorted a good German knight to Sinai who loved me so dearly, and worried so much about my damnation, that he kidnapped me and took me to the court of your Emperor and Pope. I will tell you what I told the vicar of your Church, before he grew so frustrated by my stubbornness that he sent me home.
“A man might only be saved in the faith to which he is born, I said, provided he keeps it pure. To me, the only men worthy of damnation are those who become enchanted by what they are not: those Saracens who embrace Christ, or Christians who embrace Mahomet. Though the Mamelukes have converted to Islam, the faith of my father and grandfather, in my opinion every one of them is damned, because, as I see it, the renunciation of one’s own native God is the only unpardonable sin.”
“You said that to the Pope?” I wonder that a man more than eighty years of age, an upright Saracen of seeming moral virtue, could have so little knowledge of the truth.
“Yes.” Elphahallo smiles at his Saracen companions as though sharing a rich joke. “Then he weighed me down with presents and sent me back to my family.”
I pensively chew my melon. “Calinus,” I ask, “you say you escorted that pilgrim to Sinai? What do you know of Saint Katherine’s Monastery there?”
“I know a good deal,” he says, gently wiping away a black melon seed that was caught in my beard. “I have crossed the desert many times in my life.”
“And you have survived,” I marvel.
“Many times I thought I would not.” He laughs.
“What do you know of the monastery’s current condition?” I ask. “We were told it has been burned to the ground.”
Elphahallo confers with his Saracen companions, who shake their white-turbaned heads emphatically. Several of them look upon me kindly, and one holds out a plate to collect my stack of gnawed melon rinds.
“My cousins confirm what I thought,” Elphahallo says. “We heard the monastery was attacked last year, but no one believes it was destroyed. If you have vowed to go, Failisk, you may keep that vow.”
I thank the Calinus and agree, out of courtesy, to take several more slices of melon back to my pallet. I eat them mechanically, in a quandary of self-doubt, brothers. Here I have been presented the means of fulfilling my most solemn vow, and yet for the first time in my entire wretched life I wonder if I still have the desire to go. No one else knows that Saint Katherine’s Monastery still stands, that it is attainable with the help of this Calinus, and so it would be no public shame to abide by Lord Tucher’s wishes, returning with the other pilgrims to Swabia. It would require only my silence, which, you, Abbot Fuchs, remind me I indulge all too infrequently.
O God, save me from these doubts.
Why, when now I think upon Katherine, the chaste bride of my youth, do I see her as some pawed village slut, swinging her allegiance from one grimy man to another? Why does she expose her flesh and invite any and all to handle those delicate bones I have venerated for lo these twenty years?
I lie back under these strange stars in this strange country and wonder what has become of Felix Fabri, husband to Katherine, brother of Ulm, son to Abbot Ludwig Fuchs, that he could think upon Sinai without the slightest excitement—that he could think upon it even, I blush to confess, with dread.
THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM SUMMER 1483
A Holy City
Cassa, my ass driver, points out many things along the tooth-jarring, dust-choked, arduous ride into Jerusalem.
“Shoof,” he says.
A palm tree split in two by lightning.
“Shoof.”
A large rock shaped like a sheep.
“Shoof.” On and on, he points. Objects that need no language. As the sun rises and the day grows hotter, Cassa and I devise a game to help us forget the heat. He points out an object
—say, a fence or a statue—and says its name for me in Arabic. I repeat what he says, adding its name in German, whereupon Cassa gives it back to me in German and finds a new word in Arabic. In this way, we braid together a conversation of sorts, though I often feel bad for Cassa in his inability to reproduce our sounds. I have no problem at all with his language, but say each word correctly on the first try.
This morning we took our leave of the comfortable hospice at Ramleh and fixed our sights on the blessed road to Jerusalem. Once more, we hefted our trunks and shuffled through the dusty streets, kicking up a cloud so thick we could not have recognized the man next to us, be he our own brother. I suffered especially from having committed excesses in eating too greedily of melons the night before, which thing I did to my own hurt. How grateful I was to see Cassa and my comfortable ass at the edge of town!
Now we have been traveling in the hot sun for hours, three abreast, flanked by Mameluke and Saracen guards. The heat and crush and rocky terrain have conspired to incite the tempers of the duller pilgrims, for to those unread in Scripture, Palestine appears a nation cursed by God. I will provide but one example of how the Devil grabs hold of our donkeys’ tails and rides with us into Jerusalem:
“Augsburg is a much better place than this,” complained one very belligerent knight, a man whom I had often seen, while still on the ship, lift above his head heavy casks of the cook’s vinegar, merely to advertise his strength. “At least you see a fucking stream every now and then.”
Abdullah, the German Mameluke, who rode next to me as part of the regiment assigned to protect us from Arab attacks on the road, cut his eyes at this new sacrilege. “How can you compare a reeking German cesspool to our Lord’s land of milk and honey?” asked he contemptuously.
“By Lord, do you mean God or Allah?” sneered the knight. “Show me the Lord’s milk. Show me His honey! This land is as dried up as your mother’s apostate cunt.”
See, brothers, how the Devil dogs this pilgrimage?
Contarini’s ladies, several rows ahead, pricked their asses and trotted ahead. Abdullah spun his horse around, logjamming the rest of us.
“What did you call my mother?”
To my horror, the Mameluke leapt from his horse and unsheathed his sword. Pilgrims scattered, breaking ranks with their asses, knocking their drivers to the ground. Only one pilgrim retained his countenance; from the corner of my eye, I saw Ser Niccolo standing apart, silently observing the riot. As if about to lay a wager, he sized up the combatants: the Mameluke was certainly the more fearsome of the two, with his wild blond mustache and blue-veined neck. The knight of Augsburg met Abdullah’s sword with a ludicrously small branch, prohibited as he was by Article Thirteen from carrying a blade. Though greatly overpowered, he would not keep silent.
“If there is any manna falling from these heavens, it’s Allah shaking his prick on the likes of you, Mameluke,” he said, or something equally obscene.
“You impious fuck!” shouted Abdullah. He lunged and jabbed at the knight’s shoulder. Knight Augsburg spun, and the sword just missed Cassa’s eye. To his credit, my ass driver barely flinched, believing, as do all Easterns, that his day of dying is set and is therefore unavoidable.
O contentious, murderous, sinful pilgrims! Even at the gates of Jerusalem you desire to shed blood! What is it about this land that inspires violence, when minds should be fixed on peace; that breeds intolerance when Christ selflessly died upon it to save each one of you? I know now why the word pilgrim is translated “stranger,” for you are all strangers to the Truth, trespassers against God’s commandments! All this and more I said in my heart, praying not to have another homicide before we reached the Holy Sepulchre. Even as Abdullah took a second pass, Ser Niccolo maneuvered his donkey between the combatants and put his mouth to the Mameluke’s ear. What he said, I still do not know: perhaps having just lost a sister, he pleaded not to lose a friend; perhaps he impressed upon the Mameluke the holiness of this site and the great damage that his soul would endure should he profane it. Whatever the case, Knight Augsburg used this opportunity to slash Abdullah across the cheek with his feckless stick.
And even as I thought the end had come, that Abdullah would return blow for blow and our pilgrimage would be stained with yet more wasted blood, a miracle occurred. The Mameluke, having listened intently to what Ser Niccolo had to say, sheathed his sword and angrily remounted his horse. Knight Augsburg was left flailing his branch, cursing at no one, until several of his companions stepped in and led him away.
Ursus Tucher trots up beside me to glower at the still-seething Mameluke.
“Ursus.” I smile, realizing the boy has never met this strangely dressed creature beside me. “Let me introduce you to Peter Ber. His Mameluke name is Abdullah, but he is from outside of Augsburg.”
“How do you do, Herr Mameluke?” murmurs Ursus.
“Fine, thank you, son.” The Mameluke in his turn ignores the boy, straining to find Ser Niccolo in the surging crowd ahead.
“If I were a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre,” Ursus says suddenly, rudely, “I would have to fight you as an enemy of our Faith.”
“That you would, son.” Abdullah agrees, and spurs his horse to overtake the translator.
“Wretched Infidel.” The boy practices his swagger on me, but I am unimpressed.
Lo, my brothers! Even as I am about to list for Ursus the proper sentiments a knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre should inspire, the boy turns his eyes eastward toward the swelling land and puts his hand upon my arm. Perched upon the next high mountain’s top, we spy an octagonal marble church, whereupon we marvel and call to Elphahallo, asking what place of worship that might be.
“Behold, pilgrims,” says this venerable Saracen, “though nearer to you than this mountain, you cannot yet see your holy city. Your first glimpse of Jerusalem is the Mount of Olives, and atop it the Church of the Ascension, from which your Savior was translated into heaven.”
Oh, God, Oh, God, my brothers! We spring from our asses, two hundred exhausted pilgrims suddenly rejuvenated, and pray toward that holy mountain: Jerusalem beyond maps and others’ accounts; Jerusalem transcending portraits, icons, books. My fat tears wet her holy cheeks, my spittle drips onto her bosom. We leap back upon our donkeys, kicking our heels into their sides like bad children, and beg our drivers to make haste for the city. We’ve gone less than half a German mile when we stop again.
“Cassa, why are we still?” I demand, ready to combust at the delay. He points to where the pilgrims up ahead have dismounted and are wandering toward a dry stone wall behind an abandoned castle.
“What’s this?” I race up front, peering over the heads of Contarini’s old ladies.
“Castle Emmaus,” whispers one of the white-hairs. “The inn that received our Lord on the day of his Resurrection.”
What a welcome for the bone-weary traveler! Here the resurrected Jesus, disguised as a pilgrim, broke bread with his disciples Luke and Cleophas, who knew him not. We feel Christ, in the same dusty pilgrim garb as we, has come out of His city to greet us. You go in, He says, embracing us. Witness my passion. I have my own pilgrimage to make—I’m off to my Father’s house. How we kiss this spot, my brothers, and here receive indulgences. (††)
For the duration of my stay in the Holy Land, brothers, I will use the symbol (††) to designate the places we prayed and thereby received indulgences.
After marveling for a while at this place, we remount our asses and climb up out of the Valley of Terebinth toward the south. Gradually, the earth becomes greener, and even the Augsburg knight finds vegetation in which to delight. We trot past terra-cotta pots of herbs set out to sun atop a stone fence and into an orchard of ripening fig trees. I reach up for the boughs above my head to pluck a green fig when Cassa shakes me suddenly.
“Shoof!”
We see it, all at once.
Blue-and-white Jerusalem, shining in the sun.
How to describe the most Holy City, my brothers? Can I
even see it through my tears? It is a wavy city, a blurry city, one obscured by salt and wet lashes and thick-coming sobs. It is a city seen from the ground, seen in shy glimpses through the fingertips of hands that cover an open, shaking mouth. Only birth and the winning of hard races bring about this sort of unconsolable joy. From halfway across the world we’ve run to this place—Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Spaniards—we outran death and seasickness, anger and intrigue, to finish our race at Christ’s home on earth.
“Te Deum laudamus.” I struggle through the tightness in my throat. “Te Dominum confitemur.”
Up ahead Lord Tucher joins in, softly singing Saint Ambrose’s hymn of thanksgiving. John Lazinus feelingly begins the first few chords before realizing his order in Hungary sings the Te Deum to a different tune. No matter. His voice joins ours cacophonously, encouraging other monks, from other orders, to weave in their melodies, each according to the notation of their choirs at home. Never have you heard such a joyous, polyphonal, heartfelt song, for even the laypersons join in—some knowing the tune but not the words, some knowing neither but humming loudly some prayer of their own. How the sight of Jerusalem changes these contentious, grasping, chatty men! I see pilgrims lie powerless on the ground, as by an excess of devotion, sapped of reason. I see others wandering among the asses, beating their breasts like those pursued by evil spirits. Others drop to their knees and extend their arms in the shape of the cross; others shriek aloud as though in labor. A few pilgrims lose all command of themselves and, out of immoderate zeal to please God, make strange and childish gestures, jabbering in a language that I think not of this earth.
My brothers, had you been through the hardships we’ve endured, and gazed for yourselves upon the longed-for Holy City, I do not think you could have stanched a flood of tears. Witness: Some young Saracen shepherds who left their flocks to mock us, when they saw the deep earnestness of the pilgrims, went quietly away. And some of them remained and wept with us.
