Pilgrim

by Timothy Findley

  Pilgrim placed the letter, the velvet pouch and the photographs in his pocket and drew the cover from the cage.

  It seemed as if the pigeons knew him. They began at once to croon and to display their feathers. Greys—bricks—purples—whites—the combinations of colours on every bird were perfectly balanced and entrancing.

  “Bring them into the light,” Pilgrim said to Kessler. “Take them into the light.”

  Kessler, boot in hand, came and carried the cage into the bedroom. Pilgrim lingered long enough in the sitting-room to fold his letter and place it in the desk, where he turned and pocketed the key.

  He then drew the photographs from their envelope and glanced at them one by one. Right side—left side—full face. Moustache—bowler hat—neat, trim figure, standing somewhere in the sunlight.

  H. Fowler.

  Undoubtedly, someone he knew.

  But equally, someone he did not—or had forgotten.

  H.

  That could be Howard, Henry, Herbert or Harry.

  A fowler is one who hunts birds, sells birds, keeps birds…

  An image rose in Pilgrim’s mind of a dovecote.

  We used to keep birds—someone and I together—in a garden somewhere…

  Cheyne Walk.

  Pilgrim placed his fingers over the moustache in the full-faced view of Fowler.

  What were their names—those people at Cheyne Walk?

  There was a woman—Mrs Something—and a boy named Fred. Not Fred—no. Alfred. Alfred.

  Pilgrim looked out the window towards the mountains.

  Mountains.

  Perhaps the woman’s name was Matterhorn.

  No. Not Matterhorn. Matter-something-else.

  Matheson.

  Mrs Matheson. Alfred. And a dog named Aggie. Agga. Agamemnon!

  Yes. Yes. Yes. And a man called Fowler.

  Pilgrim stood up and went to the window to achieve more light.

  Howard Harry Henry Herbert Fowler.

  “Henry?” he said aloud.

  He gazed again at the photograph, masking the man’s moustache.

  He squinted.

  “Forster,” he said.

  Everything fell into place. Somewhere out there, a man was waiting to help him. Henry Forster, who would come and rescue him. There would be an end to prison.

  No more prisons—ever.

  He placed the photographs in his pocket.

  10

  At seven-thirty on the morning of Wednesday, June 19th, Emma came and stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Carl Gustav?”

  He turned to her out of sleep.

  She came and hovered beside his bed.

  “Let go of your pillows,” she said—and reached for his hands. “You have already ruined your pyjamas. You have torn away your buttons. Here—you must allow me…”

  She reached for his fingers and forced them open. “This is not the Titanic,” she told him. “You are not drowning. Wake up.”

  Not only were his hands, arms and shoulders rigid, but also his legs and toes.

  “I can’t breathe,” he said.

  “You are breathing. All is well.”

  “What happened?”

  “How am I to know? I am no longer your comrade. You must have dreamt. You cried aloud.”

  Jung sat up. He looked at his wife.

  “Are you going to leave me?” he said all at once, not knowing it was there to be said.

  “Never, Carl Gustav,” said Emma. “I am bound to you for life. But you, I have now discovered, live only for your own life and in no way for mine.”

  She sat at the foot of the bed and drew her robe about her. She had been sleeping in the guest room—pleasant enough, but usually reserved for her mother’s visits. Frau Rauschenbach was overly fond of flowers and the wallpaper, drapes and bedspread were like indoor gardens, ablaze with roses, irises and peonies. This could be tiring on the eyes, but Emma kept a minimum of lamps alight and the effect was not so overwhelming.

  “I have prayed for your death,” she told Jung in a grey voice. “I thought you should know. I have prayed for your death and dreamt of a life you will never know: the life of a loving parent and a caring companion. I simply thought you should know. I see that you are in trouble. I watch and listen to you. I want to help, but you won’t let me. So be it. I only thought you should know. I love you still, but I no longer like you. Do what you will, I shall watch over you—but come what may, there will be no more love. Take your illness to your patients. Apply it there. Let it spread. I no longer care. You have lost your dancer. Blavinskeya is dead. Your doing, Carl Gustav. Yours. I retract what I said before. I have been thinking—and now I realize that she was abandoned by Carl Gustav Jung precisely as I was abandoned—and his children—because he had interests elsewhere.”

  “Emma…”

  “No, Carl Gustav. No. Go your own way. The rest of us will survive without you.”

  Emma rose and left the room.

  Jung fell back against the pillows.

  Seven forty-five. Birdsong. Blowing curtains.

  A new day. A new life. But was it a life he wanted?

  Jung arrived at Suite 306 at 10 a.m. as promised.

  “Well, and how are we this morning?” he asked.

  “Please,” Pilgrim said, “do not call me we.”

  “It’s only a figure of speech.” Jung smiled.

  “It may well be,” Pilgrim said testily, “but I am not a figure of speech. My name is Pilgrim.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It’s bad enough that Kessler refers to we and to us with sickening regularity, but you of all people should know better. Kessler at least has the excuse of stupidity. You do not.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I will believe you when you address me by name.”

  “Mister Pilgrim,” Jung said, and gave a curt bow.

  They were both standing.

  “Will you sit down?” Pilgrim said, and seated himself. He was wearing a dark suit, neither black nor blue but a woven combination of the two. His cravat was yellow. There was also a matching yellow handkerchief in his breast pocket, looking somewhat like a mangled flower. Pilgrim delighted in such things—in flaunting his distaste of good taste while managing never to be less than impeccable. The art of presenting oneself, he had once told Sybil, lies in creating an immediate shock which is countered by a slow retreat into custom. People never quite recover from my cravats, but they will never find the equal of my tailor. To be memorable is all, when it comes to dress.

  Jung, in his tweeds and white smock, seemed perversely sombre by contrast. And the fact that he had slept so badly had left him looking grey and worn. Nonetheless, he attempted to raise some energy and give the appearance at least of being up to the session that lay before them.

  “Kessler tells me you have received a gift of pigeons.”

  “That is correct.”

  “May I ask from whom?”

  “From a fowler.”

  “I’m afraid you have struck a word I do not know. A fowler?”

  “A fowler hunts, sells or keeps birds.”

  “I see. So this would be an anonymous fellow?”

  “Yes. Anonymous. Just a fowler.”

  “Can you explain why he might have sent them?”

  “No. Perhaps he had heard of my predicament.”

  “Which is?”

  “My imprisonment. After all, even when caged, birds are a symbol of freedom.”

  “And how do you suppose this anonymous fowler person might have heard of your predicament, Mister Pilgrim?”

  “It is obvious. I am no longer in the world.”

  Jung said: “you do not consider this the world?”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course. It is where I spend more than half my life.”

  “And the other half? Where?”

  “At home.”

  “I think what you mean is at large, Doctor. If this is where you spend more than half
your life, please remember it is where I spend the whole of mine.”

  “And you resent that, of course.”

  “I won’t even comment.”

  “Why do you speak of imprisonment?”

  “Am I free to go?”

  “When you are well, yes. Of course.”

  “And when will I be well? When I say so—or when you say so?”

  “When I say so—which is as it should be. I am a better judge of your mental health than you are at this moment.”

  “What on earth is mental health? It sounds like a disease.”

  Jung laughed. “I suppose, in the case of some people, it is,” he said.

  “Who, for instance?”

  “People whose lives are excessively dull because they have no imagination.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” Jung asked.

  “And when you speak of my mental health, whose mental health will you match it with? These people who lead excessively dull lives? I trust not.”

  “I will match it with your own potential to be fulfilled.”

  “I have no potential to be fulfilled—and could not care less. Except in one instance. I would be happy if I could die.”

  “In that case, you are not well.”

  Pilgrim looked away.

  “Are you never weary, Doctor?” he said. “Are you never tired?”

  “I have my moments. Of course.”

  “I have no moments. It is constant. I have tried to indicate to you by every means at my disposal that I have lived forever—and you don’t—you will not believe me. That in itself is overwhelmingly weary-making…”

  Jung stood up and went to look from the windows.

  “Why,” he said, “when you have such talents and such potential for greatness, do you not want to live?”

  “I have no potential for any such thing.”

  “You do, you know.”

  “Once, maybe. Not now. Not any longer. And I do not care for it. My only ambition is death.”

  “And you say you have lived forever.”

  “I have.”

  “But how can you possibly believe such a thing?”

  “It is not a question of believing. It is a question of knowing.”

  Jung sighed. “Then tell me this,” he said, and turned back to Pilgrim. “If your immortality has taken the form of living many different lives—which is what you have said on previous occasions—why do you think that ending this life will end the whole parade of other lives? Will you not simply reappear as someone else? Or is it that you wish only to end this life?”

  Pilgrim’s gaze was fixed on his hands. At first, he said nothing. Then: “for some time, all I have been able to do is to hope. To hope and to pray that one death might be the final death. The absolute. The end. Now, I have more than hope. I have reason to believe that a true ending may be possible.”

  “What reason?”

  Pilgrim looked up at Jung. “I am sure you would not have given me Sybil’s letter if you, yourself, had not read it. And if you have read it, you will know that she has been recalled.”

  “Recalled?”

  “Summoned. Called back. The Envoys came to deliver the message. Her mission is over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Her mission was to be my witness. My protector. My link with the Others. And if there is no longer a need for any of these roles, then the obvious conclusion is that I, too, may soon be recalled.”

  Jung decided to take another tack.

  “Were you in love with Lady Quartermaine?”

  “In a way, yes. Though it wasn’t physical. She was my equal in so many ways, our relationship was inevitable.”

  “Can you explain what you mean by that?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Will you try?”

  “I shall do my best.”

  Pilgrim adjusted his position in the chair.

  “In a sense,” he said, “she was my sister. She was the first human being I knew—in fact, the first human being I met in this incarnation, though I disapprove of the word incarnation. Some are reborn. Others, such as myself, merely exchange one life for another. We basically remain the same person and our lives go on forever. It is—it has always been a continuous process. One wakes—one sleeps—one wakes again. One day, one wakes as a blind old man, the next as a Spanish shepherd, the next as an English schoolboy. Which is why one wishes to die and put an end to it all. Our birth is but a sleep, Doctor Jung, a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting; and cometh from afar…I say this kindness of Mister Wordsworth, who had it right. He also said: the world is too much with us; late and soon—and again he had it right. The world has been too much with me. And I have been too much with the world.”

  Jung had by no means failed to take note of the reference to a Spanish shepherd. And yet, Manolo had never been mentioned between them, Jung having maintained his silence about the journals.

  “You speak of a Spanish shepherd and an old blind man. Can you tell me who these people are—or were?”

  “The old blind man you will know. His name—my name—was Tiresias. The shepherd? I barely remember him, but I do remember his name. Manolo.”

  Jung’s mind contracted with numbing apprehension. He was forced to turn away.

  “You have a problem, Doctor Jung?” Pilgrim said, after a moment.

  Jung closed his eyes. Tiresias had been sentenced by the gods to live forever. And, like Cassandra, he had been a seer—but blind.

  A seer—but blind.

  As if reading Jung’s mind, Pilgrim said: “the priestesses at Delphi were blinded by smoke. It was deliberate. They sat on pans above the fire below and offered up the voices of the gods, most especially, Apollo. Cassandra, on the other hand, was sighted, and as a consequence, no one trusted her pronouncements. She was condemned never to be believed, even though time and time again, she was proved to be right. I know that. She was my friend.”

  No, Jung thought. This cannot be. It’s a story. An intricate, bedeviled, clever story. Dementia.

  “And you,” he said, “were you condemned never to be believed?”

  Pilgrim’s answer was both casual and earnest—as if they were engaged in a perfectly ordinary conversation. “I was condemned several times. It is all too easy to displease the Others. To be summoned into their presence. They condemned me to live forever because in trying not to offend one by telling the truth, I offended another. Consequently, I have had to suffer an eternity of disbelief. The same disbelief you now so evidently feel about my history—the disbelief that has always met my pronouncements. I was equally condemned to experience women’s lives as well as men’s—simply because—as a young man of eighteen—by chance I happened to witness the mating of the Sacred Serpents in the Sacred Grove—and this was against all the rules set down for mortals by the gods. It was a form of sacrilege.”

  Jung wondered if he should be taking notes. The Sacred Grove. Was that what Lady Quartermaine had meant in her letter, in referring to the Grove? Both of them, quite mad…

  Pilgrim seemed lost in time. “The war,” he said. “The first of all the wars I have seen. It is with me, still.” He smiled as he closed his eyes. “Throughout the Greek siege of Troy, we Trojans had a reputation for decadence. While parties of aristocrats gathered on the battlements to watch the killing, tea would be served by slaves in white jackets. Tea, and buttered biscuits filled with raisins and honey. Tea and what we now call cocktails—distilled liquors and many kinds of wine—poured from silvered pitchers into Venetian goblets and Chinese porcelain cups.”

  Jung stared at him, wordless—then looked away.

  Pilgrim continued: “and though we never gathered at the height of battle, we met on the ramparts beneath our parasols when amusing skirmishes were taking place and always when two heroes were to meet in combat, man to man—or, as some would have it, god to god. This is how I saw the death of Hector. It rained
, you know, when he died. A torrent. Achilles tied him by his heels to the rear of a chariot and drove away with Hector’s arms flung back and his long black hair spread out behind him in the mud…And we never saw him again. I remember that as if it had been yesterday.”

  Jung then regarded Pilgrim briefly, Pilgrim now with his head turned towards the sunlit bedroom and the cage of birds.

  Dark suit. Yellow tie. Impeccable. Beautiful long-fingered hands—buffed nails, well manicured. Square knees, thin ankles, spare but shapely thighs. Wide shoulders (the better for supporting wings, Kessler would have said), a long neck, a strong chin, a gaunt, chiselled face with prominent nose and cheekbones, wide forehead and brooding eyes. His hair, still falling like a snowdrift across his brow, was whiter now than it had been in April when he had arrived. Understandable. Entirely.

  “I once had black teeth,” Pilgrim said reflectively, still watching the birdcage. “Stained glass, you know. The lead. Poisons a person. Everything turns black—your teeth, your nails, your skin—and then you die.”

  “But you cannot die,” Jung said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  “I cannot—but others did.”

  “What have you to do with stained glass?”

  “Chartres. You have been there?”

  “No. My wife has seen it, but I have not.”

  “Your wife is fortunate. You are a fool. It is the greatest wonder of the western world.” Pilgrim gave a smile. They were still not looking at one another. “I was a shaper there. I took the glass that others had cut and folded it in lead. Many of us worked together. It was amongst the more exhilarating things I did—over time.”

  “And when might this have been?”

  “In what you call the eleventh century.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean by what I call the eleventh century.”

  “I predate the Christian calendar, Doctor Jung. In both its foolish forms.”

  “Foolish?”

  “Was the birth of Jesus Christ the be-all and end-all of time?”

  “Some would say so.”

  “Some are madmen,” Pilgrim said, turning to Jung with a fixed stare. “And some are not.”

  “You are extremely adamant today, Mister Pilgrim.”