Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  The feeble lamp-glimmers of the coast shifted subtly in our passing and were swallowed in obscurity. I looked up at the sky but the Virgin and the Lion were not to be seen, there were no stars, the night was opaque; this was already November and the rainy season. ‘Would the Virgin and the Lion be visible if the sky were clear?’ I asked Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘they are below the horizon now.’

  Towards morning it began to rain, and it was in the grey rainlight that Suwaydiyya offered to us the shapes of dawn all dark and huddled, the low waterside buildings curtained with rain, the water of the harbour leaping up in points to meet the downpour, the dawn boats rocking to the morning slap of the water on their sides, furled sails wet with dawn and rain and still heavy with night, crews sheltering under awnings, the smoke of their breakfast fires ghostly in the rain. And as always all of it, the whole picture in the eyes, had without seeming to come closer grown smoothly bigger in that particular way in which things reveal themselves when approached by sea, opening to the approacher more and more detail, more and more imminence of what is to come. And always, thus approaching, one feels the new day, the new place, coming forward to read the face of the approacher. Always the held breath, the questioning look of the grey morning, the seclusion of the rain.

  On boarding Bembel Rudzuk’s dhow I had noticed the name painted on the bows in Arabic characters but I had not asked what that name was; I didn’t want to know. Having already been transferred from the Balena to Nineveh and having so far proclaimed nothing whatever on behalf of the Lord I preferred not to be aware of any further names of significance for a time; I wished if possible to be reabsorbed into the ordinary. But no sooner had we stepped ashore than I noticed again the Arabic characters painted on the bows, my mouth opened and was already asking Bembel Rudzuk what the name was before I could stop it.

  ‘Sophia,’ he said.

  Horses were brought and we rode to Antioch, a dozen or so miles up the Orontes. The rain lessened into a dull brightness, that particular dull brightness that is always a little frightening in its blank revelation: one perceives that there is nowhere anything ordinary; there is only the extraordinary. It was from miles away that I first saw Mount Silpius and the many-towered walls ascending from the plain where stood the houses, domes, and minarets of Antioch on the River Orontes. Bigger and bigger in my eyes grew the mountain and the towered walls, the tawny towered walls and high up on the mountain the tawny citadel with its green-and-gold banner hanging motionless in the dull brightness. The mountain itself was browny purple, then blue-green tawny. Everything in that land was tawny either over or under whatever colour else it had. A lion-coloured land.

  The mountain! Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself. The first sight of any mountain is the actuality of its strangeness. Let Mount Silpius stand for all strange mountains as it manifests itself in the grey light of morning, as it shows its purple shadows and its tawny dust darkened by the rain, as it shows its strangeness and its dread. That Moses was given the Tables of the Law on a mountain is significant: every mountain is the dreadful mountain of the Law, there move over it the thunder and the lightnings, there move on it the smoke and fire, there sounds from it the trumpet of the dreadful summons. The dread is that now is Now, that here is Here, that everything that is actually is, and everything is irrevocably moving.

  With the mountain continually in my eyes I entered that city quick with life, with sound and motion and colour; that city quick with wealth, quick with thought. I understood immediately what it was: it was what in one form or another comes between the pilgrim and Jerusalem. One says, ‘“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem!”’ and then one forgets Jerusalem and life for a time is sweet in Antioch. I wanted to embrace everything—domes and minarets and the shadows of awnings, even the cynical camels with their swaying loads of the goods of this world. In my heart I embraced the Mittelteufel, I said, ‘Perhaps there is no Jerusalem, perhaps nothing is required of me. Perhaps there is only Antioch.’

  Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘There is Jerusalem, and whatever is required of you is required; but in this present moment is Antioch and you are here to do what will be done by you here.’ The air in the courtyard of Bembel Rudzuk’s house was misted by a fountain, passing, passing, not for ever. ‘We are brothers,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, and embraced me.

  ‘What am I?’ I said. ‘I am a eunuch, I am cut off from my generations, I am not a man, I am nothing.’ I wept by the silvery plashing of the fountain.

  Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘What say your Holy Scriptures? “Let not the eunuch say, I am a dry tree.”’

  ‘But I am a dry tree,’ I said.

  ‘Listen!’ said Bembel Rudzuk. He had got a Greek Bible and was reading to me:

  ‘Thus saith the Lord to the eunuchs,

  as many as shall keep my sabbaths,

  and choose the things which I take pleasure in,

  and take hold of my covenant; I will give to them

  in my house and within my walls an honourable place,

  better than sons and daughters: I will give them an everlasting

  name, and it shall not fail.’

  ‘In the Hebrew it doesn’t say “fail”,’ I said. ‘In the Hebrew it says “be cut off”:

  ‘Even unto them will I give in my house

  and within my walls a monument and a memorial

  better than sons and daughters;

  I will give them an everlasting memorial,

  that shall not be cut off.

  ‘Tell me if you can, what everlasting memorial is there better than sons and daughters? And how shall it not be cut off?’

  ‘Better than sons and daughters is to be with the stillness that is always becoming motion,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘And in being with this stillness-into-motion there is a continuity that is not cut off.’

  The words rattled on my head like pebbles on a roof. ‘Where am I?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘In the dark wood with murderers, with the headless corpse of the tax-collector and the maggots I knew where I was,’ I said. ‘I had a whereness to be in. Now I don’t know where I am, I don’t have where to be.’

  ‘Let me show you something,’ he said. Taking me into the house he pointed to a geometric pattern of tiles ornamenting the front of a dais. ‘Look,’ he said.

  I looked. The pattern went its way as such patterns do.

  ‘This pattern is contiguous with infinity,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Once the mode of repetition is established the thing goes on for ever. It is apparently stopped by its border but in actuality it never stops.’

  I said, ‘You mean in potentiality, don’t you? Potentially it could continue although actually it stops.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where does one draw the line between potentiality and actuality? It isn’t as if we’re looking at a rain cloud and we say, “Potentially it could rain but actually it isn’t raining.” This is something else: with patterns when you say what can be, you’re describing what already is. Patterns cannot be originated, they can only be taken notice of. When a pattern shows itself in tiles or on paper or in your mind and says, “This is the mode of my repetition; in this manner can I extend myself to infinity,” it has already done so, it has already been infinite from the very first moment of its being; the potentiality and the actuality are one thing. If two and two can be four then they already are four, you can only perceive it, you have no part in making it happen by writing it down in numbers or telling it out in pebbles. When we draw on paper or lay out in tiles a pattern that we have not seen before we are only recording something that has always been happening; the air all around us, the earth we stand on, the very particles of our being are continually active with an unimaginable multiplicity of patterns, all of them contiguous with infinity.’

  That’s no help to me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘It’s a great help to everyone.’

  �
�How?’ I said.

  ‘For one thing it gives you a whereness to be in,’ he said. ‘The patterns traversing one place intersect the patterns traversing another place, and by this webbing of pattern all places are connected. Wherever you are at this moment you are connected with all places where you have ever been, all places where you will ever be, and all places where you never have been and never will be.’

  I held out my hand in front of me and looked at it. I thought of the patterns of veins and arteries, of muscles and bones beneath the skin. I thought of the patterns within the bone and muscle, I thought of the patterns contained in the sperm and the egg and the pattern of their combination, the thought of God, the word of flesh.

  ‘People also are connected,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘all people of every time and every place.’

  I thought of Sophia, I thought of the way in which we could never again be connected. ‘You and I,’ I said, ‘how are we connected?’

  ‘We are brothers,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but how was it that we became brothers? You’ve said that you want to avail yourself of the action of my mind for a work you’ve had in your mind. Can you now tell me what this work is?’

  ‘I want you to devise a pattern,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of a pattern?’ I said.

  ‘With tiles,’ he said.

  ‘A pattern with tiles,’ I said. ‘For this have you come to the slave market in Tripoli to find yourself a castrated Jew.’

  ‘That’s not how it was,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I was there on my ordinary business, receiving a cargo and trading in the markets. Having done my business I came to the slave market as one does, strolling here and there. Prodigality was shouting, “Jerusalem pilgrims! Jerusalem pilgrims! Very lucky! Don’t miss this chance!”

  ‘I said to him, “How are Jerusalem pilgrims lucky?”

  ‘He said, “They’ll bring luck.”

  ‘I said, “How?”

  ‘He said, “Who am I to know such things?”

  ‘I said, “Why, then? Why do you say they’ll bring luck?”

  ‘He said, “Only think! Possessed by their Christ, driven by a mystical force, they swim rivers, they climb mountains, they strive with brigands who would take their lives, all to travel to Jerusalem! Buy a Jerusalem pilgrim and all this mystical force can be yours!”

  ‘I said, “Won’t it rather bring ill luck, to come like this between a pilgrim and his goal?”

  ‘“Not at all,” said Prodigality. “Obviously the Christ of these pilgrims has willed that they should become the slaves of the believers of the one true faith.”

  ‘Walking slowly and pondering these things,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘I found myself standing before you. It was then that there came to me the words that I spoke to you.’

  I said, ‘But why do you want me to make a pattern with tiles?’

  He said, ‘This idea came into my mind. An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God.’

  ‘Is that really so?’ I said. ‘The idea of murdering someone comes into the mind of the murderer; is this also an eye given by God for the seeing of God?’

  ‘The murderer too sees God,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and perhaps more than others. In any case this idea cannot possibly harm anyone as far as I can see. Can you see any harm in it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I cannot.’

  This conversation was taking place at the close of day, after the sunset prayer. Behind Bembel Rudzuk’s words I heard the falling water of the fountain, the cooing of doves. There came into my mind the twilight at Manzikert on the day of the battle in 1071, the year of my birth. This twilight I knew in my soul, I knew it to be Bruder Pförtner’s courtyard, the quiet place where plashes the fountain of his reverie. At the close of that August day at Manzikert the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes must have felt what he had become as the day waned: no longer a man but a line on a map, the ebbing tide-line of Byzantium, ebbing from the sharp edge of the present like blood from a knife. Andronicus and the rear line gone and the Turks all round like murderous stinging bees. Romanus must have smelt Bruder Pförtner’s breath, fresh and salty like the wind from the sea, he must have felt himself at that turning centre of all things where stillness revolves into motion and motion into stillness. Aiyee! must have cried the life in him as his blinding and his death moved towards him in that twilight at Manzikert. As Byzantium receded with him towards the allness of everything.

  I found myself weeping for Romanus Diogenes and for that Jew who was made to be his executioner. In that twilight in the courtyard of Bembel Rudzuk in Antioch I thought also of Alexius Comnenus, now in 1096 Emperor of Byzantium. The reality of his empire presented itself to me all at once like a naked idiot: he was emperor of the passing of Byzantium, his empire was becoming moment by moment the illusion of, the non-reality of, the unpotentiality of Byzantium. At some point the naked idiot of this actuality became the naked truth of it and I saw, or perhaps I am only just now seeing, or perhaps I have not yet seen and I am at some time going to see that the names of things, of times, of places, of events, are useful for reference and they have some subjective meaning but as often as not they obscure the actuality of the thing they attempt to describe. Now as I think about it I see that we don’t always know what it is that we are putting a name to. We are, for example, clever enough to know that a year is a measure of passage, not permanence; we call the seasons spring, summer, autumn, and winter, knowing that they are continually passing one into the other. We are not surprised at this but when we give to seasons of another sort the names Rome, Byzantium, Islam, or Mongol Empire we are astonished to see that each one refuses to remain what it is.

  ‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.

  ‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘Where is this tile pattern to be done?’ I said.

  ‘I have bought a piece of land just inside the wall at the foot of Mount Silpius not far from the Tower of the Two Sisters,’ he said.

  ‘And you’re having a house built on it?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have had it prepared as a plane for tiling. I have had the ground cleared and paved with stone so that it’s perfectly flat. It’s one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and twenty feet.’

  ‘That’s fourteen thousand four hundred square feet of pattern,’ I said. ‘Why does it have to be so big?’

  ‘Ask rather why it’s no bigger,’ he said. ‘And the answer to that is that this was the biggest piece of land available within the wall. Ideally the plane would extend to the horizon on all sides.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I said.

  ‘Because in this case the ideal is the maximum effort possible,’ he said, ‘and the horizon is the outer limit of how much of the pattern can be taken in by the eye.’

  ‘It wouldn’t do to draw it on a piece of paper to hold in the hand?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘As you must know in your heart, it is not only the apparent quantity of a thing that changes with the degree of effort, the manifest character of it changes also as Thing-in-Itself reveals more of itself.’

  ‘Is that what the pattern is for?’ I said: ‘To show Thing-in-Itself?’

  ‘You know as well as I do,’ he said, ‘that Thing-in-Itself is not to be seen nor is it to be sought directly. My desires are modest; there are simply one or two things I should like to observe, one or two things I should like to think about.’

  ‘Can you tell me what they are?’ I said.

  ‘Motion is one of them,’ he said. ‘There is transitive motion and there is intransitive motion: the motion of a galloping horse is transitive, it passes through our field of vision and continues on to wherever it is going; the motion in a tile pattern is intransitive, it does not pass; it moves but it stays in our field of vision. It arises from stillness, and I should like to think about the point at which stillness becomes motion. Another thing I should l
ike to think about is the point at which pattern becomes consciousness.’

  ‘Does it?’ I said. ‘Can this be proved?’

  ‘I know in my innermost being that it does,’ he said, ‘and I know that we ourselves are the proof of it, but whether this proof can be demonstrated I don’t know. It may well be that the proof is being demonstrated constantly but in our ignorance we cannot recognize it.’

  ‘This design that you want me to make,’ I said, ‘how should it look?’

  ‘That will come from you,’ he said. ‘It will come from your hand at the moment when you begin to draw. Try not to think about it beforehand, don’t let your mind become busy with it.’

  ‘My mind is already busy with it,’ I said. ‘How could it not be?’

  ‘In that case you should do it now,’ he said, ‘and we must go to the place where it is to be done.’ From a cabinet he took a straight-edge and a large wooden compass fitted with a piece of chalk and we left the house.

  Through the darkening murmurous evening, past the lamps of evening and the smells of cooking we made our way to the paved space at the foot of Mount Silpius near the Tower of the Two Sisters. The town was still murmurous but all the voices of the day that had been close were now distant. Before us Mount Silpius gathered itself into night. The lamplight in the windows of the towers made the stone around them bulk darker against the sky. Someone was playing an oud, someone was singing; it was a woman’s voice rising and falling in a pattern of repetition contiguous with infinity. Warm and sad the voice, a woman of flesh and bone, contiguous with infinity! On Bembel Rudzuk’s paved square some boys were kicking a blown-up bladder that rasped with a skittering rush across the stone, each thump of the kicking like the unsequent beat of a disembodied heart; the voices of the boys appeared at sudden places in the gathering night, now near, now far; their feet scuffled mysteriously on the stone.

  That evening Bembel Rudzuk and I felt ourselves to be inside the walls of Antioch, how could we not? There were the walls of stone all strong and thick and guarded by soldiers, there were the towers with their lamplit windows girdling the city in the encircling night. Yet even then, so contiguous was my mind, is my mind, with infinity that my thoughts found themselves here in this present space in which only broken remnants of those strong walls stand and the inside is seen to be one with the outside. My consciousness that evening in 1096 came forward to the present and the toothless broken stones of now, and my present consciousness goes back to the great thick towered walls forty feet high and paced by weaponed men.