Pilgermann

10

‘Now help me, Memory!’ Only a little space from here have I heard myself speak these words. But as the words and pictures of my thoughts go out on those few millimetres of waveband assigned to me I begin to understand that I myself am a tiny particle of Memory. I am a microscopic chip in that vast circuitry in which are recorded all of the variations and permutations thus far. Not all of my experience is available for recall by my Pilgermann identity, only that in which the energy of the input was above a certain level. Thus it is that I can at any time call up that veiled owl to whom I said, ‘Hear, O Israel!’ but most of my education is lost to me.

Like any parent I wanted the best for my death, I remember that well. Walking beside me he was scarcely more visible than breath on glass but the manifestation of him was continually more detailed and refined although his face was obscure. He was not as yet ready to speak, perhaps he never would speak, but he looked at me with a look that said plainly, ‘I know that I can trust you to do the right thing.’ I nodded with a false heartiness, trying to look reliable. When the time came I did the best I could. I don’t know where he is now, I don’t know what’s become of him. One does what one can; the rest is a matter of luck and chance.

My recall is offering me Antioch but the last dot was still in Germany. How did I get to Antioch? Pirates. I was on a ship from Genoa bound for Jaffa when they appeared. Even now I must smile when I see with the eye of the mind the hungry triangle of that red sail cleaving the white dazzle of the sunlight on the dark blue sea. Larger, larger and more and more urgent it becomes and I smile because there is no surprise in it, perhaps even I am not unwilling that this should happen.

When I came down to Genoa out of the north there was the sea dividing with its horizon the picture in my eyes. Everything on this side of the horizon was in the world of HERE, everything beyond it was THERE. Here was a fresh and salty breeze from the sea, here were the clustered masts nodding in the harbour and the gulls soaring, circling, crying, crying, ‘Where are you going, Herr Keinpimmel? What is Jerusalem, that you should go from HERE to THERE?’ This of course was the voice of the Mittelteufel, the halfway devil; I came to know it later but at that time I had not yet learned to recognize it. I was suddenly cowed by the overwhelming and undeniable reality of the sea, I was reduced to nothing by the objectivity of the gulls, I could not think why I wanted to go anywhere or do anything. In that particular Now that comes just before one embarks only the sea seemed real; not Christ; not God; not sin. I looked round for Bodwild and Konrad, for the bear, for Udo, for the tax-collector and my young death and Bruder Pförtner. There was no one, I was utterly alone.

In front of me stood a fat brown-faced shipmaster with a gold circlet in one ear, a look of contempt on his face, and his palm outstretched. He looked as if he might, after taking their money, chop one lot of pilgrims into pieces and salt them away in barrels for the feeding of the next lot. Behind him were the sea and the circling gulls and his ship tied up at the quay. The ship was a wallowing-shaped thing with its brown sail furled on the yard and its deck all a-clutter with wineskins, bales and bundles, chickens, pigs, and goats. I looked to see what the name of it was: Balena, Whale.’ If this ship is a whale,’ I said to the master in Italian (I had studied medicine in Salerno), ‘I hope that doesn’t make me … ’

The master laid his finger across his lips. ‘Don’t say it,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’

I paid him fifty ducats and abandoned all hope. That is, I thought that I had abandoned all hope until I went below decks and smelled the smell there; then I found that there was yet more hope to abandon. I paid five more ducats to be allowed to sleep on deck with the chickens and the pigs and the goats.

When it was time to sail the seamen all lurched aboard fit for nothing but vomiting and sleeping. Some did one, some did both. When woken up to raise the sail and haul up the anchor they all began to sing. Their singing had that peculiar falseness sometimes heard in the choruses of provincial opera companies; it made one lose all confidence in any kind of human effort whatever; it made one doubt that the ship, the anchor, the ocean or indeed the world was real. The ocean proved to be real enough and the ship wallowed in it in a way that was sickening as only reality can be.

So it was that when that red sail appeared three days out I nodded with a sense of the fitness of things. Clearly such a ship as that Balena, such a master as that one, and such a crew as that crew had never been meant, in the general design of things, to move a load of pilgrims from an unholy to a Holy Land. There were about fifty pilgrims on board, and when some of the more experienced ones said that they thought the fast-moving red sail might be pirates we all asked the master for weapons with which to defend ourselves and the ship. ‘Softly, softly, good sirs,’ he said. ‘Be tranquil, there’s no use pissing into the wind.’ The crew then produced swords, pikes, and clubs and herded us into the after part of the ship where we watched the red sail growing ever larger until the pirates closed with us, lines were thrown from them to us, and the two ships linked arms like strolling sweethearts.

The pirate captain then came aboard without much ostentation but it was clear that he was accustomed to being treated with respect. He was a tall lean Muslim and as he stood facing the short fat Christian master of our vessel he seemed to embody some necessary complementarity; together they were obviously spin-maintainers. The two of them exchanged greetings with great civility and then began to haggle spiritedly in Arabic. We pilgrims naturally watched and listened with some interest, and it seemed to us that the master of the Balena was saying that we were very valuable while the pirate captain thought perhaps that we were not so very valuable. The negotiations concluded, money changed hands and we pilgrims changed ships. As we stepped over into the pirate vessel the pilgrim just ahead of me turned to me and said, ‘What’s the name of this ship, did you notice?’

‘Nineveh,’ I said, pleased with my own joke; I had noticed the name but could not read the Arabic characters. But later I asked a Greek-speaking pirate what the name was.

‘Nineveh,’ he said.

To be sold for a slave is a startling experience. The rest of the world knows so little about one and yet it is they who set the price. We were all stripped and examined and relieved of our luggage and whatever was in our pockets or sewn into our clothes. The pirate captain was delighted to find that I was a eunuch in good condition; he made that gesture of kissing the fingers made by all vendors who reckon that they have something especially fine to sell. In the slave market in Tripoli, standing in the cool and coloured shade of awnings, smelling the smoke of water pipes and a variety of Middle Eastern cooking that invited one to abandon introspection and embrace such pleasures of the senses as now offered, hearing Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Turkish, and Greek spoken all round me I was not so distressed as one might think; it had never before happened to me that I was valued, and highly valued, for my visible qualities alone. It occurred to me that I might be bought for harem duty and I felt a little stir of pleasure; orchards are pleasant even if one can’t climb the trees.

A succession of prospective buyers stood before me and tilted their heads to one side, trying, I suppose, to imagine me in their houses as one imagines a table or a chair or a wall hanging. Would I go with the rest of it. A variety of people-buying faces looked at me from under turbans, fezzes, and kaffiyas. The pirate captain found many things to say about me, none of which I understood because he spoke in Arabic. He was at pains to show interested viewers that I had good teeth and he seemed particularly pleased by the arch of my foot, drawing attention to it frequently. In my mind I saw myself standing hour after hour outside the closed doors of a harem listening to laughter and low murmurings while little by little my feet grew flat.

There was standing before me a tall and noble-looking Turk with heroic moustaches, a red fez, a scarlet and purple jacket worked with gold. I judged him to be sixty or so. He put a large hand on my shoulder and drew me a few steps away from the others. He looked at me in such a way that I knew he was going to say something that would make me his friend. He said to me in Greek, ‘What if I say to you that the universe is a three-legged horse, eh? What then? What will you say to me?’

I said to him, ‘It is because the universe is a three-legged horse that the journey to the red heifer is so slow.’

‘Ah!’ he said, ‘You’re a Jew then.’

‘How does that follow?’ I said.

‘A Jew will consider anything,’ he said. ‘Are you or aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ I said.

‘I need you,’ he said. ‘Do you need me?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Done!’ he said. My price was twenty-five dinars but he counted out fifty gold dinars and gave them to the pirate captain.

‘This is twice as much as I have asked,’ said the pirate captain in Greek to the Turk. This pirate’s name, by the way, was Prodigality. He had formerly been a slave named Thrift who had in trading for his merchant master put by enough money to buy his freedom, and having done so he changed his name and went into piracy. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said to the Turk.

‘I am afraid not to,’ said my new owner. ‘I want Allah to take notice that I am taking notice of my good fortune.’

‘If Allah’s taking notice I don’t want to look bad,’ said Prodigality, and counting out twenty-five dinars he put them into my hand.

Both men looked at me with expectation.

‘Can I buy myself back?’ I said to my new owner.

‘Just as you like,’ he said. Prodigality wrote out a bill of sale to him and he wrote out a bill of sale to me. I then gave him the gold that Prodigality had given me.

‘Now you’re a free man,’ said my former owner. ‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll come with you freely,’ I said, ‘as we need each other.’

‘Thus does the will of Allah manifest itself in human transactions,’ said my new friend.

‘Wait!’ said Prodigality as we turned to go, and taking my hand he put into it the remaining twenty-five dinars of the double payment.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘Allah wills what Allah wills,’ said Prodigality. ‘Let it be altogether circular.’

‘I am obedient to the will of Allah,’ I said, and put the gold back into the hand from which it had originally come.

‘Let it be noticed by all who have eyes to see,’ said my new friend as he received the gold, ‘that Allah has taken notice.’

‘It’s a pleasure doing business with you,’ said Prodigality. ‘It’s spiritually refreshing. It’s only a pity I can’t afford this sort of thing more often.’

With many expressions of mutual esteem we parted, and as I walked away with my former owner and new friend I marvelled at how Prodigality had been able to rise above the practical considerations of commerce. Certainly with my gold and diamonds and the plunder from the other pilgrims in his coffers he could afford to be generous but even so it seemed remarkable to me that gold and silver and gems could produce in him that degree of moral sensitivity that enabled him to behave so handsomely.

My new friend’s name was Bembel Rudzuk; he was a wealthy merchant who lived in Antioch. I went with him to the khan where he and his party were staying, and the next morning we departed for Suwaydiyya on one of his dhows. ‘How strange that was yesterday!’ I said to him. ‘How extraordinary!’

‘Now more than other things,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘To me everything is extraordinary and nothing is. Aeschylus was killed when he was hit on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle but that’s not extraordinary when you consider that he was sitting directly below the eagle when it dropped the tortoise from a considerable height. On the other hand, that there was Aeschylus, that to me is extraordinary: that the world appeared in his eyes, that the world lived in him like the light in a lantern, that there are continually new lanterns for the world to live in, that you and I are two of them, yes, that to me is extraordinary.’

‘That the universe should be a three-legged horse,’ I said, ‘is that extraordinary, do you think?’

‘I don’t know what to think about that,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Although I said those words and know them to be true I have no idea what they signify. They came into my head when I first saw you yesterday. Perhaps they signify that for us our meeting is the fourth leg. What colour is the horse for you?’

‘Red,’ I said, ‘like the heifer.’

‘For me also it is red,’ he said.

‘Why do you need a Jew?’ I said.

‘Do you know that story of Abraham that is not to be found in the Holy Scriptures?’ he said. ‘How Nimrod put him into the fiery furnace and God took him out?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know that story.’

‘Do you perceive,’ he said, ‘that there is alchemy in this story?’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘He was put into the furnace, he was taken out again.’

‘He will go in again,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘And when will his base metal be transmuted to gold, how long will that take?’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘It’s the metal of those who put him into the fire that must be transmuted.’

‘Are there years enough for that?’ I said.

‘Whether there are or there aren’t,’ he said, ‘that’s nothing I can do anything about. But I’m curious about Abraham. Have you heard of the sulphur-mercury process?’

‘I think I’ve seen diagrams of two triangles point to point,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘In the diagrams one sees them point to point — the sulphur triangle with its hotness and dryness, the mercury triangle with its coldness and wetness. Look!’ He flung out his arm towards the sea where the sun-points danced. ‘The hot and dry is dancing on the cold and wet; in everything can we see these combinations working. These two triangles that we see in the diagrams, they want to mingle their natures as they did in that veiled story in which the cold and wet of Abraham’s water-nature was activated to neutralize the hot and dry of his fire-nature. Abraham, you know, is claimed by Jews and Arabs both. I myself believe that in this story he personifies the elemental complementarity that moves the universe. It is in the Holy Scriptures of your people that Abraham is first written of, and for this reason I want to avail myself of the action of your mind.’

‘How?’ I said.

‘There is a work that I have been thinking about for some time,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to talk about it quite yet.’

‘Are you an alchemist?’ I said.

‘You mean with pots and furnaces?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That to me is greedy, it is a sweating after something to hold in the hand and look at, it is not a true giving, it is not an honest offering of the self to the Unity from which all multiplicity comes.’

‘But your two triangles,’ I said, ‘your sulphur-mercury process?’

‘Look!’ he said again. The crew were wearing the vessel round before the wind. The helmsman put the tiller over to bring the wind aft, the great triangle of the mainsail was let fly, the old windward shrouds were eased off and the new windward shrouds set up as we came about; the mainsail was sheeted home again and we filled away on the new tack. ‘Wind alchemy,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘The triangle of the sail fills first on one side then on the other to drive us forward. Two triangles. My alchemy seeks no yellow metal; it is a continual offering to the Unity at the heart of the multiplicity. It makes no distinction between what is called something and what is called nothing, it knows such words to be without meaning.’ The sail swelled as if with the breath of God, the dhow pitched forward and reared back as if nodding in agreement with the words of Bembel Rudzuk, the sun-points danced on the water, the dark crew, some in white and some in faded colours, ranged themselves along the windward rail. I felt such a Nowness in the light of the day that Christ leapt into my mind like the visual echo of his unheard voice. ‘Ah!’ I said, ‘This, this, this!’ He was gone, there were only the sun-points on the water, the breath of God in the sail.

‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘you see!’

We made our way up the coast in short stages, calling at Tortosa, Marquiya, Baniyas, and Ladhiqiyya to discharge and take on a variety of cargoes. Each port in the changing lights of the day would grow smoothly and mysteriously larger and more detailed in the eye as we approached: first the massed groupings of light and shadow of the moored vessels, the low waterside buildings, the domes and minarets of the town behind; then the slow shifting of the grouped lights and shadows into separate and varied lights and shadows growing larger, more clear, becoming individually defined masts and sails and rigging, painted boats rocking at their moorings, figures aboard them standing and moving, faces looking across the green and sheltered, the shining and the shadowed water above which drifted the smells of cooking, the smoke of charcoal fires against a background of warehouse roofs and windows and open doors, cordage and tackle, bales, barrels, carts and wagons of the waterside. And always in front of this the motion of vessels arriving, vessels departing, and aboard these vessels faces passing, passing, locked in unknownness, growing smaller, becoming unseen.

Although our business in Ladhiqiyya was finished early in the evening we did not leave until much later; Suwaydiyya was only three or four hours away and Bembel Rudzuk wanted to arrive with the dawn rather than in the middle of the night. ‘Dawn is the best time for coming into port,’ he said, ‘and I always allow myself this pleasure when coming home.’

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 like 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.

Strong walls, always have strong walls been walked by weaponed men. And those who came and took Antioch, such stones they captured in their strong places up and down the land, such stones they put together in their Latin Kingdom, those strong men and those who came after them! As Pilgermann the owl I fly on silent wings above them looking down. Lion-stones, warrior stones, now they have peace. How they sing in their silence, how they are easy, the great strong stones, the lion-stones, the tawny. Even they, the strong stones of the great Jew-killers, even they have longed for ruin and the stillness, for the wind sighing over them, for the grass growing on roofless walls and alone-standing arches. Even when the arrows hissed from the loopholes the stones were singing the stillness to come, the clopping of cows’ hooves up and down the stone steps where those iron-ringing men walked in their time. Now the stones have arrived at the strong life of the stillness of them, their strong song, their stillness dancing in the sun.

Warrior lords, those great and fierce men, recruiters of stone, of walls and towers on high ground, of strongholds commanding borders, river crossings, approaches. They said to the stones, as other warrior lords before them had said to the stones of Antioch, ‘Be thou firm against the enemy.’ And what did the stones say? The stones said, ‘We have no enemy.’ Lying in the sun they sing the stillness; toppling and rolling they shout, ‘God is motion!’

So. Bembel Rudzuk and I in the deepening night in Antioch. Bats fretting the darkness into little points and the woman’s voice rising and falling in her song as we stood on the stone paving that was waiting for my design.

The centre of the square was marked by a wooden rod standing upright in the stone. It seemed to me that I could feel the power of the centre there, feel the radii going out from it and coming into it. There was no moon, there were no stars but we could see well enough for our purpose. We had brought no lantern nor did I want one; it seemed right that the design should come out of obscurity, and I wanted to be unobserved, I wanted the shelter of the dark.

Bembel Rudzuk was saying very quietly in Arabic:

‘Labbaika, Allahumma, labbaika.’

Then he said to me in Greek, ‘What I said was: “At Thy service, O Lord, at Thy service.” These words are to be spoken only on pilgrimage to Mecca but I could not refrain from saying them.’ He took the rod out of its socket, inserted a wooden plug that he had brought with him, and stepped back.

I opened the legs of the compass, stuck the point of the centre leg into the plug and swept the outer leg round to make my first circle. It went just like that; I had no hesitation in deciding on the length of the radius; one action followed another, and as the compass leg swept round there followed it obediently through the darkness a white chalk line that closed itself into a circle as if the impulse had been already there waiting in the stone until, now summoned by the compass, it rose up to the surface.

Keeping the same radius I made the overlapping circles that divided the circumference of my first circle into six parts and produced a flower of six petals luminous in the white chalk. Connecting the points of the petals made a hexagon. From the six points of the hexagon came the two interlocking triangles of the six-pointed star within the hexagon. Connecting the points of intersection divided the two interlocking triangles into twelve small triangles. Extending the lines of the hexagon made the two large interlocking triangles of a second six-pointed star that contained the hexagon containing the first six-pointed star. Lines balanced on the points of the outer star gave an outer hexagon in which eighteen equilateral triangles enclosed the inner hexagon. This completed the unit that would repeat itself in my tile pattern.

‘What is the name of this design?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Think on it,’ he said. ‘It will come to you.’

We went back to Bembel Rudzuk’s house. He gave me paper and coloured inks and drawing instruments and I made a drawing in which I repeated the unit twelve times in the pattern in which the tiles would be arranged. Then I coloured it, making the large and small triangles of the large and small six-pointed stars alternately red and black. The triangles contiguous with the right-hand sides of the star-points (which, going round like the blades of a waterwheel, became left-hand sides then right-hand sides again) were coloured red or black in contrast to the star-points. All other triangles were tawny-coloured.

My pattern was certainly a simple one, primitive even; I was surprised therefore to see how much action there was in it and how many different kinds of action there were: there were twisting serpents, there were shadowed pyramids, and when I tilted my head at the necessary angle the twelve small triangles of the inner stars became the deeply shadowed face of a red lion. When I tilted my head back to the vertical the triangles went blank, an empty mask looked at me instead of a lion. However one looked at the pattern there could be no doubt that the stillness had become motion but I hadn’t noticed at what point it had happened. Sometimes the larger triangles revolved around the inner stars, sometimes they took angular courses, pausing occasionally to group themselves in pyramids before continuing on their way. The pattern was altogether regular and predictable but from time to time there came to the eye enclaves of apparent disorder that in a moment disappeared; this had to do with the alternation of the red and the black; the periodicity of the colours was not synchronized with that of the shapes.

‘Can you tell me now what the name of this design is?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

I tilted my head, the shadowed lion looked at me; I tilted my head back, the triangles went blank. ‘The name of this design is Hidden Lion,’ I said. There leapt up in me a wild surge of terror and joy as virtuality, correctly named, leapt into actuality.