Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  From the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the

  ‘great below’,

  The goddess, from the ‘great above’ she set her mind

  toward the ‘great below’.

  The new moon of the risen Tammuz hangs in the morning sky but I feel intimations of the great descent, the dark and chill of winter in the light and heat of summer. Inside the earth the waiting darkness trembles. Standing on the barren tiles of Hidden Lion and looking at that always surprising mountain, that simple mountain that so shockingly asserts the actuality of its strangeness, that mountain that now for me is truly and finally the dreadful mountain of the Law, I curse the infirmity of purpose that has kept me here in Antioch. Turning and turning in my mind my thoughts of what to do next I turn physically, making myself dizzy on this repetition of twisting serpents, shifting pyramids, and occulting lions. There burns in my mind that vision more real than Mount Silpius, more real than anything else in the world, of the violated ivory nakedness of dead Sophia and the animal watchfulness of our little son making his way alone through the dogs, through the dead. I have spent my time playing with patterns and it has come to this. There leaps up in me hatred for Bembel Rudzuk.

  I looked up at the tower and saw him standing at the top of it, a solitary dark figure against the morning sky. I looked away. How could I hate Bembel Rudzuk? Overcome by love and shame I went to him.

  ‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

  ‘This is the last day of my life,’ I said.

  ‘All the more reason for looking your best,’ he said. ‘This is the last day of my life as well. How do I look?’

  ‘Dreadful,’ I said. We embraced each other sadly.

  ‘Before we talk of other matters,’ he said, ‘I must tell you how it is that I am called Bembel Rudzuk.’

  ‘I don’t think I can take the time to listen to that now,’ I said, ‘I must.go to Jerusalem.’

  ‘Don’t you believe Bruder Pförtner when he tells you there’s no longer anywhere for you to go?’ he said.

  ‘How do you know he told me that?’ I said.

  ‘He spoke to me as well,’ he said.

  ‘As Bruder Pförtner or in some other manifestation?’ I said.

  ‘As Bruder Pförtner,’ he said. ‘I suppose he didn’t bother to change because we’re friends. Are you offended?’

  ‘No,’ I said but of course I was. I was ashamed to have such stupid feelings at such a time but there they were.

  ‘Pförtner likes to affect a playful manner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but he means what he says. I don’t think he’ll let you leave Antioch, and if you try I think it will only make our last day more difficult.’

  Our last day! I had come to Hidden Lion seeking Bembel Rudzuk’s counsel for my last day, mine alone. I didn’t want to have to think about anyone else’s last day, not even that of my dearest friend; and that his last day should now be the same day as mine seemed tactless of him, inconsiderate, even pushing. I no longer wanted to talk to Bembel Rudzuk but I wanted him to know how things stood with me. ‘Everything’s different now,’ I said: ‘I have travelled through space and time to the fall of Jerusalem. I have seen Sophia dead and violated, I have seen our son wandering alone among the dead and the dogs. All this has not yet happened and it must not happen, I must do something to prevent it.’

  ‘I too have seen them,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘You too have made a night journey to the fall of Jerusalem?’ I said. ‘You too have seen’ (I was going to say ‘my wife’) ‘Sophia and our son?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘How can this be?’ I said.

  ‘How can what be?’ he said.

  ‘That you have seen them in the sack of Jerusalem,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If they were there to be raped and killed and orphaned then why not to be seen?’

  I was so choked with rage that I could hardly find a voice to speak with. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Are you trying to teach me some kind of lesson?’

  ‘How could I?’ he said. ‘I am no wiser than you and I have nothing to teach. And being thus without wisdom I can’t help wondering why it is that all this time you have felt no need for action and now suddenly you want to change history.’

  I thought I should go mad. Silpius continued to offer itself in its unaccountable simplicity to the eye; Bruder Pförtner and his generals continued to confer. Their pretensions disgusted me; I had seen them being themselves with those pilgrim children on the road. History! I felt myself impaled on history, my own and the world’s. The horror, the horror of cause and effect! The horror of the pitiless and implacable chain of one thing following another from the beginning of the world to the end of it with never a pause, never a year of Jubilee, never a clearing of the record! O God! to come so far and to end with so little. Now it was like that torture in which the victim, his belly opened up and one end of his entrails tied to a post, is made to walk round and round the post unwinding his guts. So walked my mind round its post while the images in it unwound, from the naked Sophia seen in the window to the naked Sophia dead and our son alone in the sack of Jerusalem. I wanted to smash every one of the tiles of Hidden Lion, every one of the bricks of the tower, I wanted Antioch and Onopniktes and Mount Silpius to disappear from my experience, to become unknown to me. I wanted to wind my time back into me, I wanted to be once more at the Eve of the Ninth of Av in the Christian year of 1096.1 would sin again but I would be fierce and strong in my sin, I would go armed and wary in my sin, I would kill for it, would claim Sophia against all odds, I would die fighting if necessary but I would die complete, not a eunuch. What a fool I had been, neither a sheep nor a goat, suffering the loss of goodness without the rewards of badness, Aiyee! But what if Sophia hadn’t wanted to be claimed by me? What if she wanted her Jew for one night only?

  Bembel Rudzuk had been watching my face attentively. ‘Is this perhaps the moment,’ he said, ‘when I can tell you how I come to be called Bembel Rudzuk?’

  ‘If you must,’ I said.

  ‘This that I tell happened forty years ago,’ he said, ‘when I was trading for a big house in Tripoli—not as a partner, I was what we call a “boy”. We’d come from Tabriz to Aleppo with a three-hundred camel caravan but coming out of Aleppo there were only nine of us—five merchants and four camel-drivers—with twelve camels. We were a day out of Aleppo when there appeared on an empty stretch of road six robbers who put their horses straight at us, three of them passing on either side and shooting arrows as they galloped past; it happened so fast that one simply couldn’t believe it. And their accuracy, shooting at full gallop! A moment before there had been nine of us and now as they wheeled their horses for the second pass six of our party already lay dead.

  ‘By then the other three of us had put arrow to string and we got two of them on their next rush. Then it was four against three; they were wild with rage, they couldn’t believe that merchants would stand up to them. Of the first six they had killed four were mounted merchants and two were camel-drivers on foot. The two surviving camel-drivers leapt on to horses and tried to get away but they were quickly brought down by arrows. My horse was killed under me and I was nearly ridden down by the robber who did it. There was no time to think, I leapt at him and in the next moment he was rolling on the ground and I was bent over his horse’s neck and galloping for my life.

  ‘I was heading for some high ground and big rocks and I was already among the rocks when Tssss, thwock! Off I came with an arrow in my left shoulder, but as soon as I hit the ground I was in behind the rocks and climbing, they couldn’t get a shot at me and they had to get off their horses to follow me.

  ‘Up I went; I found a little opening between two big tall rocks and I squeezed through. It wasn’t a cave; the rocks were about twenty feet high and there was a space between them open to the sky. I didn’t know whether I was better or worse off than before. I had my sword and my dagger but I had dropped my bow when I leapt at the robber and
in any case my quiver was empty. My wound was burning like fire; the arrow had gone right through my shoulder and the head was sticking out in front so that I was able to break it off and pull out the shaft.

  ‘I had no time to do more than that before there appeared a robber between me and the sky in the opening at the top of the rocks. He laughed and was just reaching for an arrow from his quiver when I threw a stone and caught him full in the face with it. That’s when I knew I was lucky because he lost his balance and fell, not backwards but forwards; he toppled from his perch, landed with a thump beside me and got my dagger in him for his pains.

  ‘So then I had a bow and arrows: three arrows there were in the quiver, and when the next robber showed himself in the opening above me he got one of the arrows in his throat. That left me with two arrows and two more robbers if the one I’d pulled off his horse had taken up the chase; I assumed that he had, so I looked alternately up at the opening above me and down at the one I had squeezed through and waited for what would come next. This was in the spring, I could hear a bird saying, “Plink, plink!” like drops of water falling into a basin. Above me the sky was blue, there was a fresh breeze blowing.

  ‘I could hear some movement on the rocks and a voice said, “You go in after him, I’ll be right behind you.” Of course I knew that was meant for my ears so I was waiting for them to come at me at the same time from above and below. I knew by then that whoever climbed to the opening above was unable to do it with an arrow on the string, he would have to pause for a moment at the top to reach for an arrow. And if he was going to time his attack with that of the other robber he would probably make a sound. So I aimed an arrow at the space I had squeezed through, I thought that was where I’d first see movement.

  ‘You know how it is at even the most desperate moments, even in matters of life and death—part of your mind is busy with its own affairs, perhaps making pictures, perhaps making words or singing a song while the rest of your mind takes care of the business at hand. Part of my mind was singing a little song, it hadn’t much tune, it was just something the mind had made up by itself, there were no proper words, it just went:

  ‘Tsitsa tsitsa bem, tsitsa tsitsa bem,

  Tsitsa tsitsa bembel bembel bembel bembel bem.

  ‘Like that over and over again. When I saw movement in the space I’d squeezed through I loosed my arrow and I heard a grunt. There was a little sound from above as if in reply and when the last robber appeared against the sky my last arrow found him and that finished the business of the day.

  ‘So that was that. For a little while I just sat there leaning against a rock, looking up at the sky, listening to the bird, feeling the breeze on my face—just being alive and not dead. My mind was still busy with its song, now it was singing:

  ‘Rukh, rukh, rudz, rudzl, rudzl, rudzuk.

  ‘I was thinking what a lot of bems and rudzes there are in the universe, what an altogether bembelish and rudzukal thing it is, to say nothing of the tsitsas. I was glad for me that I was alive and sorry for the robbers that they were dead—it was such a good day to be alive in. I recognized that it could just as easily have been the robbers alive and I dead and that would have been fair enough, one mustn’t be greedy, one can’t always win the prize, the action goes on for ever but the actors come and go.

  ‘It was then that I noticed sitting beside me and leaning back against the same rock our bony friend, all got up for the occasion like a true son of the desert with quite a princely robe and kaffiya and jewelled daggers. “You’re a good boy,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I like you; you move well and you don’t hang back when things warm up a little. You’ll be lucky, you’ll have a good life and years enough of it. One thing though you must never forget: you must never forget whose child you are, and when I say it’s time for bed you must come promptly and cheerfully; you might as well do it with a good grace because in any case you’ll have to come—no one can say no to me.”

  ‘With that he whistled and there came not a black horse and not a white one but a dappled grey stallion. Such a horse, a horse of dreams, that one! Almost I wanted to go with Death at that very moment just to feel that horse under me. With a whoop he leapt to the stallion’s back and galloped away like a thunderbolt, what a man! It struck me suddenly, there’s no one more alive than Death; how could there be, he’ll outlive us all!

  ‘From that moment I called myself Bembel Rudzuk so that I should never forget the bembelish and rudzukal nature of the universe and whose child I was.

  ‘When I came down from the rocks I found the robbers’ horses tied to a thornbush and with them was the one I had ridden to the rocks. She was one of those clever little mares that can go all day and never miss her footing anywhere, I had her for years after that, she always reminded me of that ride. What a day that was!

  ‘I found the camels all grazing where the robbers had attacked us and grazing with them were the other horses, both the robbers’ and ours. Two of the horses had been killed but that still left me with four horses more than we had started the day with, and of course the six robber horses were all first-class, much better than ours; robbers can’t afford to ride rubbish.

  ‘Even better than the horses was what I found in the robbers’ saddlebags: two thousand and forty-two dinars! I couldn’t believe it—all that gold and still they went on trying for more! I suppose they were for ever unsatisfied and that’s why they had to be robbers.

  ‘I rode back to the rocks and collected the four dead robbers there then I loaded all six robbers and my dead colleagues and the camel-drivers on to the horses and continued on my way to Tripoli with the carpets we had bought in Tabriz. On my return all the dead were buried with the proper observances. We did well in the market and altogether my employers were well pleased with me. As I had been travelling for them when I acquired the robbers’ treasure I offered to share it equally with them but they refused to take so much as a single dinar. They wanted to make me a partner but I preferred to set up in business for myself under my new name and I came to Antioch to do it. I had always liked the look of the place, particularly the look of Mount Silpius in the dawn, and I had heard that long ago there was a statue of the Goddess of Luck here. I’ve never found the place where the statue used to be but I’ve always been as lucky as I needed to be.

  ‘I have had a good life, I have spent my time as I wanted to spend it, and although I have never grown wise I have through trial and error come closer and closer to Thing-in-Itself, so that when my time comes I expect I shan’t have too much of a jump to make from this state to the next one. I can understand your present bitterness and your regret that you have stayed so long in Antioch but for me what we have done with Hidden Lion was time as well spent as time ever is. To me it seems that the best we can hope for in life is honesty of error; more than that is not to be expected. Sometimes we can see what is wrong action but that doesn’t make everything other than that right action. I have said enough; I have lived enough. I do not forget whose child I am and I am ready to go when called.’

  ‘You say that Bruder Pförtner has spoken to you,’ I said. ‘Have you also seen your young death?’

  ‘I have seen only Pförtner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘on his dappled stallion: that for me is the sign. I have seen him and spoken with him many times since that first time forty years ago but never until this morning has he ridden that particular horse again; it has been understood between us that the horse would be the sign.’

  ‘I wonder how it is that you also have travelled to the fall of Jerusalem and seen Sophia and my son,’ I said.

  ‘You have a woman and a child to love,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I have only you and I have been eating the scraps from your table.’

  ‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Whenever I think that I have seen the boundaries of my stupidity there suddenly open up new territories before me.’

  We both looked across the tiles to where Bruder Pförtner and his generals were. He was now strutting back and forth and ma
king some kind of oration. The sky had become dull and grey. Silpius was intensified in the greyness, became the mountain wholly strange and never to be known, the mountain showing the traveller from afar how far he had come to find that nothing whatever could be known about anything at all. The nakedness of dead Sophia was as if printed on my eyes; I looked through it at the mountain as one looks through a transparent figured curtain. The watchful face of our son was as big as the world.

  ‘We must do what we can,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. We looked at each other and the images printed on my eyes seemed to double in intensity.

  ‘Are they in your eyes also, Sophia and my son?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, I can’t help it.’

  ‘We’ll try together then to leave Antioch?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we must at least try.’

  ‘Ought we to warn anyone before we go?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Those who had in mind to leave have already gone and I don’t think that the others will be moved to act on what we have seen in our night journey. What is more likely is that we shall be taken for spies.’

  We went back to the house and armed and provisioned ourselves. We were going to make the attempt on foot—in the present circumstances it was our best chance of going unseen and unheard and acting as the moment required. With a bag and a bow slung on my shoulder, with a quiver of arrows on one side and Firouz’s sword on the other I paused to look at the fountain in the courtyard and to listen to the plashing of the silvery water, thirsting for it with my eyes.

  When we came out into the street the very air seemed strange, apocalyptic. I doubted my own reality, I was surprised to hear footfalls and voices around me, surprised to smell the hot and pungent smells of every day. I waited for the earth to shake but it did not, I expected everyone to stare open-mouthed at us but they did not, then I thought that perhaps we might be invisible to them and I wanted to shout but I did not.