Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  ‘I no longer have any questions that require answers,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘It is not in our power to know very much nor to understand very much. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to learn to encounter what comes without pissing ourselves.’ He said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘The heads of the Christians were slung over the wall but not the bodies. Do you know why?’

  I knew why. Sometimes when the wind was blowing from the Franks to us I had smelled the smoke of their cooking. I listened to the twittering of sparrows, the crowing of cocks, I saw in my mind the blood on the tiles of Hidden Lion.

  ‘“And all as a garment will become old,”’ said Bembel Rudzuk,’ “and as a mantle thou wilt roll up them, as a garment also they will be changed …” This is the earth and the heavens being spoken of, the work of God’s hands, they will grow old and be folded up like a garment. You and I have read this together in the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews in the New Testament of the Christians, but for me it is no longer a matter of words; I can feel it in the air, I can feel the fabric of the world and its time collapsing upon itself like the folds of a tired garment.’ Bembel Rudzuk stood there solidly in the grey light with his arms folded, his moustaches as heroic as ever, his bearing as upright; but he looked like a deserted village.

  ‘In the Quran also one reads of this folding up,’ he said. ‘This too we have read together, in Sura 81, Takwir, The Folding Up:

  ‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

  1. When the sun

  (With its spacious light)

  Is folded up;

  2. When the starsbra

  Fall, losing their lustre;

  3. When the mountains vanish

  (Like a mirage);

  4. When the she-camels Ten months with young,

  Are left untended;

  (‘And you must know,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that the camel being the jewel of the Arab’s eye and his special pet, the she camel almost come to her time is most especially precious; so when we speak of a time when such animals will be neglected we are speaking of the collapse of all things, the true and actual final folding up.)

  ‘5. When the wild beasts

  Are herded together

  (In human habitations);

  (‘In this extremity,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘the animals will no longer be afraid of humans, the animals and the humans will be folded up together at the end of all things.)

  ‘6. When the oceans

  Boil over with a swell;

  7. When the souls

  Are sorted out

  (Being joined, like with like);

  (‘I no longer know what to think about this matter of the sorting of souls,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Is there more than one kind of soul, do you think? Is the soul of Yaghi-Siyan different from your soul and my soul? Wait, hear more before we talk.)

  ‘8. When the female (infant)

  Buried alive, is questioned—

  9. For what crime

  she was killed;

  (‘There have been,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘Arabs who buried their baby daughters alive; they didn’t want to have to provide for them or be burdened with protecting their honour. These are only words and one can speak them but if one thinks of the actuality then one must look at what is intolerable to look at. I am thinking now of your Abraham and Isaac who are Ibrahim and Isma’il in Muslim tradition. Never before have I dared to say aloud these words that I am going to say now: the fundamental flaw in God is that He will say that He requires the sacrifice of Isaac/Isma’il; the fundamental flaw in man is that he takes his knife in hand to do God’s bidding. This story of God’s testing of Abraham has become an easy thing to read, an easy thing to say in words, an easy point of reference; but if you let it become real in your mind then you have to look at a boy tied hand and foot by his father whose knife is at his throat. Think of it! There lies the boy trussed like an animal, he lies on the firewood that he has borne on his own back to the place where the fire will consume him when he has been murdered by his father whom he has trusted all his life. Murder in the name of God! And Abraham has no hesitation! He is completely willing to murder his son because a voice in his head has made him mad. If I had ever in my life come upon such a scene, if I had ever come upon such a madman with his knife upraised over a child I should have killed that man before God had a chance to speak again. Wouldn’t you? See it in your mind! Be that father and look down into the eyes of your son while you raise the knife. What are you at this moment that is one moment away from murder, from human sacrifice? Will you call yourself the hand of God? Why should Yaghi-Siyan not call himself the hand of God a hundred times over? Word of God! If God is everywhere then every word is the Word of God, Yaghi-Siyan’s word as well as Muhammad’s. Wait, listen to more of this Sura of the folding-up:)

  ‘10. When the Scrolls

  Are laid open;

  11. When the World on High

  Is unveiled:

  12. When the Blazing Fire

  Is kindled to fierce heat;

  13. And when the Garden

  Is brought near;—

  14. (Then) shall each soul know

  What it has put forward.

  ‘Here I have been quoting verses of the Holy Quran and I cannot even properly call myself a Muslim,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘I don’t believe in a Last Day that will be different from any other day; I believe that the Last Day is every day; I believe that the Garden and the Fire are in each of us every day of our lives and we are in one or the other or somewhere between the two depending on our actions. I believe that every soul knows very well from one moment to another what it has put forward—do I not know what I have put forward with this Hidden Lion that I have called up? Do I not know how far I have overstepped the bounds of what is permitted in one’s approach to the Unseen?’

  ‘Why do you keep saying “I”?’ I said. ‘Whatever has been done with Hidden Lion has been done by the two of us; was it not I who drew the first unit of the pattern on the stone?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘You see! You are trying to share the burden of blame because you know that there is a burden of blame!’

  I thought of Hidden Lion, of its tawny triangles, its red and its black but as soon as the triangles came into my mind they were covered first by blood then by the terrified feet of the hundred chosen for death by Firouz. What should I have done in his place? Useless to ask such a question—he did what he did that day, I did what I did, each of us in our own place. It is so very, very easy to live one day longer than one ought.

  ‘You don’t deny what I have just said,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘you don’t deny that we have overstepped the bounds.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t deny it. Everywhere there are patterns of tiles to be seen, most of them far more ambitious in their complexity and finish than Hidden Lion, but I think one may say that they were done in innocence.’

  ‘They were done without presumption,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘they were done modestly and with no other purpose than that of ornamentation. They were done without intent to observe the Unseen, without intent to violate its privacy; they harmlessly adorn buildings, walls, floors; they were not made for the sole purpose of seeing the Unseeable. We have done that which ought not to be done although you are not to blame; it was I who asked you to make the design, I with my stupid ideas of sulphur and mercury and triangles, I with my greed for the Unseen. And yesterday the Unseen said, “Do you still pursue me with your tiles? I have shown you, have I net, twisting serpents, moving pyramids, disappearing lions; I have shown you the surge of Me that is like a river of power, and still you crave more; very well then, I will show you more.”’

  ‘Can you really believe that?’ I said. ‘Can you really believe that Hidden Lion has called down this terrible thing upon itself?’ Think,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘what we have done. We have made a provocation and an insult. We have used the names of God and the habitation of the Unseen and we have made a good-luck charm with ou
r tiles. We have made an idolatry for ignorant people to whom prayer is only a kind of begging, we have put the rubbish of the seeable and the touchable between them and Allah, we have sped them on their way from any hope of the Garden, we have pointed them towards the Fire.’

  ‘Have we truly done so much evil?’ I said.

  ‘Only consider,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘if the pattern of Hidden Lion is contiguous with infinity (and there can be no doubt of this, in our very souls we know it to be so) then everything about it is contiguous with infinity. If our action in making it was wrong (and we both know now that it was) then that wrong action is contiguous with infinity; its connexions extend to things and places we know not of, we cannot imagine the vastness of the web to which Hidden Lion is an entrance and a passageway.’

  ‘All things being contiguous,’ I said, ‘Hidden Lion can as well be an effect as a cause; it cannot be proved to be the beginning of a chain of evil.’

  ‘Sophistry cannot help us,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘every action has its consequences and the consequences of the action of making Hidden Lion cannot be without evil.’

  At that moment from the minaret there came the call of the mu’addhin. Bembel Rudzuk began his prayers and I drew a little apart from him and stood looking out over the city that I seemed to be approaching by sea in the grey dawn. Again I saw in my mind the terrified feet of the Syrian and Armenian Christians on the tawny, the red, and the black triangles and I wondered in what way any of what was happening could possibly have been willed by God in any of His or Its aspects. How far back would one have to go to find the cause from which this effect had arisen? All things being contiguous, one was driven back to the original bursting into being of the universe: immediately from that moment existed the possibility of everything that could possibly happen on this earth. From that moment two and two made four, and all else that could be until the end of time already was; on one or another, on a few or on many of the planes of virtuality and actuality that might at some time intersect, everything that could be already was. The choices that would have to be made by people who would not be born for thousands of millions of years were already forming with the galaxies and the nebulae, with the Virgin and the Lion. As far as I could see, the will of God was simply that everything possible would indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice was ours, the reckoning His. And He was in us, one couldn’t get away from Him, that was the Fire of it, that was the Garden of it, at the centre of every soul and contiguous with infinity. The possibilities of choice were beyond all calculation and the probability of wrong choice so high as to be almost a certainty. Only God could think of such a game, and only humans would bother to play it.

  Refreshed and desperate from my meditation I turned and saw another figure on the roof with us. My heart leapt in me; it was my young death. This was the very first time he had appeared to me since I had crossed the sea to come here. He was naked and he was standing by the parapet with his back to me but I recognized him at once. He was full-grown but there was that about the way he was standing that made me think of a child who cannot sleep or has had perhaps a bad dream and comes to be comforted. How my heart went out to him!

  He turned to me, his face somehow obscure, not to be held in the eye. I looked to see if he had all his parts. He had, he was a complete man. He looked at me for a moment only, then he walked slowly to the stairs and was gone, his face still obscure in my mind, not to be recalled.

  13

  Soon must I tell of the fall of Antioch but not yet. Mortal life is a difficult proposition because hardly anything can be experienced as what it actually is; everything is time-distorted. In childhood we wait for things that seem too long in coming, we wait for treats, for presents, for festivals and holidays, we wait for growing up. There is so much waiting that suddenly childhood itself is gone with all that was being waited for. As grown-ups we find ourselves pitched headlong down a steep and slippery slide with everything hurtling towards us at great speed; some things smash us full in the face, others streak past half-glimpsed or unseen; everything has happened before we were ready for it. Only after the hurly-burly of mortal life is over can one have a really good look at what has happened; unburdened by choice and unthreatened by consequences one is able to sort through the half-glimpses of a lifetime and find perhaps one or two workable fragments of recognition.

  So it is that only now in this little space of centuries since my death have I been able not so much to understand anything as simply to look carefully at everything to see if this fragment and that fragment which do not fit together may yet both belong to a shape which might be recognizable if seen entire.

  I have in mind the deeds of the Franks and the Turks, such as I was able to see or hear about; I have in mind how men would sometimes rush forward, sometimes back, some on horseback, some on foot. I have in mind one particular night of the winter rains of 1097, it was soon after Christmas. At that time I was often on the walls of Antioch in the small hours of the night; I was in a state in which I could feel the passage of time as if I were an hourglass through which the sand was running more and more swiftly. It was well towards morning on this night that I am speaking of; it had been raining steadily but the rain had stopped, and now in the dim cloudlight I saw what seemed to be thousands of Frankish horsemen moving out of their encampment and heading up the valley of the Orontes.

  Bembel Rudzuk came and stood with me. We were on that part of the wall by the Aleppo Gate that overlooked the sector of Bohemond of Taranto. On the hill behind his encampment the Franks had built a tower that we called Evil Eye; now we saw lanterns moving on the top of it while between us and it the dark horsemen slowly rode away into the fading darkness. Stubbornly stood the sodden and threadbare tents they left behind; in some of them glimmered the dim light of candles. We had no idea how many had gone but from other watchers we heard that more than half of the Franks remained to keep the siege. Many of them were starving and by now were regularly drinking the blood of their horses; we guessed that this moving-out of the thousands was a foraging expedition and the size of it indicated to us that they intended to move deep into hostile territory.

  The next night there was again no rain nor was there a moon; the darkness of the sky was opaque. ‘This night will bring out Yaghi-Siyan,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. We went up on to the wall over the bridge gate and waited there for hours, equally expecting Turks to go out or Franks to come in. Even from what little we knew of the Franks there was nothing that they could have done that would have surprised us; starving as they were and faced with impregnable walls they might yet at any moment storm those walls. In moments of quiet like this it seemed to us that any sortie by the Turks could well provoke a counterattack that would bring the Franks raging into the city.

  Bembel Rudzuk and I had no doubt whatever that a night would come when the Franks, whatever the odds against them, would take Antioch; it seemed to us that it was simply in the nature of things. And of course when that night came it would bring certain death to the Muslims and the Jews of Antioch.

  It would have been easy enough to leave the city—Mount Silpius, as I have said, kept a back door open—so that we might live yet awhile and do our dying elsewhere but neither of us wanted to. It was in Antioch that a readiness to die had come upon us and now we felt committed to that place; to take our dying elsewhere would have seemed frivolous and disloyal. Both of us admitted to a certain vanity about dying: we preferred to do it as handsomely as possible; but we agreed to be guided by the circumstances and not, when the proper moment came, to refuse a lesser death in the hope of winning a greater one some other time.

  My original idea of attaining Jerusalem before it was too late, before Jesus withdrew from any further possibility of manifestation and the world was left with the bleakness of what he had called ‘the straight action and no more dressing up’ now seemed like those fond hopes of childhood that even a child recognizes as being made of that kind of mental sugar-candy that melts in the hard
sunlight of reality.

  The siege as the months passed had developed, as does everything, its own particular rhythm and mode of being. When the Franks had first appeared outside the walls of Antioch Yaghi-Siyan had at every moment expected a major assault. He quadrupled the watch on the walls; he kept the citadel on constant alert; and he mobilized every male young and old who was capable of lifting so much as a stick or a stone against the enemy. All civilians were organized into a militia who in the event of an attack would respond to a trumpet call and would be under the command of an officer of the garrison. The months had passed; the attack had not come. This condition of no-attack became more and more a condition of no-attack, like a very thin-shelled egg that grew bigger and bigger, older and older until, enormous and rotten, it now hung suspended above us.

  This night that I am speaking of, this winter night without rain and without a moon—I have called its darkness opaque but I was not being accurate: there was some light in the sky, it was not utterly black. It was a night of obscurity, yes, obscurity is the word I want; it is this that makes that night such a paradigm of the rushing forward, the rushing back, that so much of history is made of.

  In this obscurity we stood and into it we looked across the river towards the encampment of the Franks. Some of the tents with candles burning in them were like dim and feeble lanterns. Between those few dim lanterns and us ran with a strong rushing, with a heavy running, the river heavy with the rains, darkly rushing, gurgling, like a giant animal that drinks blood. Mingling with the rush of the river was the subterranean echoing rumbling grinding rolling roar of Onopniktes. These strong rushing-water sounds made the dim and feeble lantern-tents seem even dimmer and feebler and farther away. In the quietness of the Frankish camp a man began to sing. His voice rose and fell sadly, there was no word that I could understand except the oft-repeated name of Jesus, Jesu. There was no accompanying instrument but the manner of the song was suggestive of a lute. After a time someone shouted, the singing stopped, there was only the running of the river, the roar of Onopniktes.