Pilgermann

4

There arises the question of the tax-collector. Drifting in my oriental-carpet patterns I see him high above me, sitting on his horse and looking down at me the bloody and castrated Jew, the mutilated and unmanned thing that has cuckolded him and entered the golden Jerusalem of his wife. Although he has never taken any notice of me he has seen me often enough in the town, he has me on his records, he knows me for a Jew. Famous as he is for his hatred and loathing of Jews, why has he saved my life? It is true that it is my castrated life that he has saved. Can there be some meaning, some message in this? Can he possibly know what has happened between his wife and me? Impossible. It happened only a few hours before he saw me, at a time when he was somewhere else altogether, there was no time for him to be told of it. But is it possible that he never left the town, that he became suspicious of the lurking Jew, pretended to go away but circled back unseen to see what happened? Possible. Or might he simply have instructed a servant to observe carefully and report to him in whatever place he has gone to? Even more possible. Well, which is it then — does he know or doesn’t he know? I have no idea. No, I don’t believe that he knows, I don’t think that he has been suspicious, I don’t think that it would ever occur to him as a possibility that a Jew should enter where he has entered.

But wait, maybe he dreams of such a thing constantly; maybe he is utterly consumed by the thought of a Jew by night creeping in through the window to enjoy his wife, maybe it burns in him like a constant lamp, maybe it is the one thing wanting for his happiness and peace. He sees me hanging about, sees the possibility, absents himself in hope. The wife opens the Jerusalem of her body to the lusting Jew, then as an unexpected treat the Jew is caught by the peasant soldiers of Christ, he is flung to the cobbles, stripped, castrated, he lies there shuddering in his blood and vomit while his penis and testicles are eaten by a sow. His fading lust renewed, the husband returns as a giant refreshed to the guilty and submissive wife whose only thought is to anticipate and satisfy his every demand. Is that how it is? God knows.

Can there be, there must be, some reasonable explanation, but what can it be? Here is a Jew, one of the people this man hates, lying bloody on the cobblestones, his death only a moment away. Why should the tax-collector have any interest whatever in saving the life of this man? And why should he say either ‘Pray for me’ or ‘Kick me’?

When I become exhausted with thinking about the tax-collector my mind, like an automaton that cannot be stopped, returns again and again to the castration itself: if only I had taken another way home, if only I had turned and run, if only I had fought harder. Those faces above me in that dawn, I have seen such faces centuries later in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Ah, the tax-collector again! I have seen his face, his particular face, in a particular painting by Bosch, a painting of Christ being crowned with thorns. The tax-collector is that man wearing the spiked red leather collar and a black astrakhan hat on which there is a sprig of oak leaves with an acorn. In his left hand he holds a staff, his right hand is on Christ’s right shoulder; almost comforting and consoling that hand seems: ‘Bear up, old fellow; be brave; it’ll all be over soon’ might be the message of that hand. Maybe that man with the tax-collector’s face is Pontius Pilate and he’s saying, ‘I find no fault in you but this is how it must be; I wish it could be otherwise.’ A troubled man, Pontius Pilate; he died by his own hand some years later — that same hand, probably, that rests on Christ’s shoulder in the painting. There it was on the end of his arm year after year: feeding him, writing letters, caressing his wife, holding whatever there was in life for him to hold. Suddenly it lets go of everything and jumps up and kills him. For how many years did that thought lurk in the hand? Always, perhaps. In this way are human hands made by God; they carry in them always a last mortal judgment. Perhaps it was to protect himself from that hand that Pilate wore such a spiked collar. Is this then a clue to the tax-collector’s strange behaviour towards me? Did some time, perhaps in the dead of night, his hand leap up and take him by the throat and say, ‘Jews also must live!’ Perhaps his hand said this on the very same night that my hand took hold of his naked wife! Only now, as these thoughts move among the waves and particles of me, do I perceive that every hand is the hand of God: hands doing good and hands doing evil, are not they all His (Its) work? Think of the constant action of all the hands of all the world, gathering and scattering, building and destroying and praying, holding on and letting go.

So. And what of my hand, also a hand of God? Did my hand perhaps carry in it a judgment? Did my right hand and its fellow cover my ears and my eyes so that I should be in ignorance of what was happening in the world at the time I climbed that ladder? They did not; I knew that the Pope’s appeal had inspired peasants as well as knights to shed the blood of Jews and I knew that we in our town might at any time find ourselves in the path of trouble. Was I then vigilant on behalf of my fellow Jews and myself? Did I keep watch early and late, did I arm myself to defend the Scroll of the Law and God’s children in the land of their exile? No. The only weapon I took in hand was the one with which I forgot thee, O Jerusalem, and entered the strange Jerusalem of the tax-collector’s wife. Having done what I did in the great house in the Keinjudenstrasse did I then take myself in hand with prudence and with caution to make my way home? I did not; one hand pushed me from behind while the other pointed like a signpost to strange and unlucky streets where I would not have walked the day before; one hand showed the conquering hero the world that lay before him while the other patted him on the back in congratulation. And here I am: the waves and particles of a eunuch.

I talk and I talk and words come out of me in an unending stream but I cannot say the plain truth: I have done wrong, O God. Forgive me for climbing that ladder. For God’s sake, Pilgermann, say it straight out: Forgive me, O God, for lusting after Sophia, for loving her, for consummating that love and lust. Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I’d do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: it bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don’t know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one’s proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who’d have wanted to know about them? They’d have stayed in their garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they’d have been like a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God made us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn’t done it. God would never have bothered to make a man and a woman to live out their days dreaming in a garden.

And yet, and yet! I have done wrong, O God, I know it. I made that tax-collector poorer when I enjoyed his wife, I know that. Maybe only on her glorious body could he pray, maybe only with her could he be with you, and I came between him and his prayer. But he was holding on then, wasn’t he, being so attached to her, and Jesus said that holding on was no good. No, it’s no use, no matter how I try to squirm out of it I’ve done wrong and reparation must be made. Because I violated that man’s privacy, because I burst in upon his quietness. Not that he was all that good a man, certainly I never knew anyone to have a good word to say for him. Maybe his first good action was saving my life that day, maybe that was the first time he’d ever looked kindly upon a Jew, and it only happened after I’d had his wife. Ah! what’s the use of twisting and turning, there’s something required of me: what? What should I do, where should I go? ‘Jerusalem! Thou pilgrim Jew!’ I did not speak those words, it was a voice that spoke within me: not so much a voice as the daughter of a voice, what is called in Hebrew a Bath Kol. There was about it the scent of Sophia’s voice but I knew that it was expressing God’s intention. ‘Jerusalem! Thou pilgrim Jew!’

I, a pilgrim! To Jerusalem! This thought entered me, I could already feel the road under my feet. A name, a word, has substance; the word Jerusalem colours the air. Yerushalayim! I say it, and I that have no face, I feel where there used to be a face, I feel that sharp sensation in the nasal passages, the ache in the throat as the tears start into the eyes of that face I no longer have. Yerushalayim! Flesh made word, soul made word, world made word. Yerushalayim! What longings come to a point in that name! Spin, world; be born, people, and die whoring after false gods, shrinking from the one true one. Speak, prophets, and be stoned by the unhearing. Yerushalayim; spinning domes of gold in the sea of the one mind that is God. Ineffable.

Knights in mail, peasants with billhooks were going to Jerusalem. What were the pictures, what were the words in their minds? I could feel the pull as one who stands at the water’s edge feels the sea pulling at his feet. The figure of Christ loomed gigantic in my mind, a figure of gold at the heart of a black mountain. The word, the name of Jerusalem revolving in my mind sent out its glints of gold, and my mind revolving with it found a thread of gold spun out into my road away that beckoned me.

Now I knew what Jesus had meant when he said, ‘After me it’s the straight action and no more dressing up.’ God was already gone from us. How much longer would Jesus be with us? If others had done as I had done the time might not be long. There came to me the thought that the world is full of mysterious, unseen, fragile temples; it was in these many temples that God used to dwell among us; they are easily destroyed, these temples, as I had destroyed the temple of the tax-collector’s privacy in his wife. How many of them still remained? How many temples between us and Christ’s last day, between us and the eternal faceless action of God as It? Quickly, quickly must something be done before all the temples were gone. Now I understood why everyone was rushing to Jerusalem, now I knew why this was a time unique in history: this was the time when people everywhere had all at once had the same thought that I had just had. Perhaps even the Bath Kol had spoken to each of them as it had spoken to me, and all of us were now hurrying to Jerusalem to make with the gathered power of our hearts’ desire a church of all souls craving Jesus, a place of rebirth in the place of holy sepulchre and resurrection. True, it was a pope who had first called for this great going of multitudes to Jerusalem but no pope could have moved so many people had not God truly willed it. I determined to begin my pilgrimage as soon as I was strong enough, and when my wound had healed sufficiently I began to walk a little every day to get my strength back.

When I came out once more into the streets I saw everything very small, very sharp. How impossibly small was the blackened stump of the synagogue! How could even one whole Jew have fitted into it! Sometimes all the spaces where I walked seemed empty and I felt left behind, like horse dung on the cobbles. Many of the shops in the Jewish quarter had shut down; the butcher had become a vegetarian, the bookseller had been burnt to the ground. There were not many Jews to be seen; those who remained looked at one another with faces full of shame as if they had been caught in the practice of an unspeakable vice. Everyone wondered what was coming next, or rather when and in what manner would come that same thing that always came.

It was at this time that the Jewish population of the town were astonished — astonished is too weak a word, they were absolutely knocked over — by the appearance in the Jewish quarter of the tax-collector in a long coarse tunic, a scrip hanging from his shoulder and a staff in his hand. Nobody could believe it: the Jews were not called to assemble at the Town Hall to hear his words; he came alone and on foot and humbly asked the Rabbi (the son-in-law of our old Rabbi who had been killed by the sow-led peasants) whether we would be kind enough to come with him to the ruin of the synagogue where, under the open sky and in the plain sight of God, he had a few words he wished to say to us.

To me it was like something in a dream or like something seen in another life. His face as he spoke was no longer closed to us and hard, it was open and trusting. For the first time he looked at us as one looks at other human beings. As he spoke his hand kept straying to his throat. ‘Townspeople,’ he said, ‘friends, if I may call you that although until now I have never been a friend to you, I am here to say that I am truly sorry for any harm that I have done you. The candle tax is hereby abolished and the inspection and stamp of approval for circumcision knives will no longer be required. Any words of mine that may have injured you I take back with my whole heart and I ask God’s forgiveness and yours; I have already retracted those words publicly at the Town Hall. I am leaving you now to go on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I will pray for you and I hope that you can find it in your hearts to pray for me. Goodbye and fare you well, may God be with you and keep you from all harm.’

Having said those words the pilgrim tax-collector departed as he had arrived, humbly and on foot. All of us were deeply moved and deeply grateful, and yet even while the figure of our new friend was receding humbly in the distance there appeared almost visible question marks in the air over our heads; and in front of the question marks there were questions: What? Why? How? What had brought about this sudden change of heart in a man who had until now been solidly convinced of the rightness of oppressing Jews? Why did he suddenly feel guilty for what he had done over the years? Or was there something new for him to feel guilty about? I saw again his pale face looking down at me as I lay on the cobblestones. He had come so close on the heels of those peasants with the sow; if only he had arrived a little sooner! Perhaps when he saw what they had done … but with that thought still unfinished there came another thought: what if he had brought them to our town? Those had not been peasants anyone had seen before on market days nor had there been any word, in the days before their arrival, of armed peasants moving towards us.

Yes, that was undoubtedly what had happened: the tax-collector had brought the peasants to our town and then, seeing what they had done, was overcome with remorse. And I had been reproaching myself for destroying the temple of that man’s privacy with his wife! Ah! if only I could do it again and again and again! My guilt leapt from my shoulders, there surged up in me the virtue, the power, the innocence of the injured party.

But wait. Our God, the God of the Jews, works in strange ways. What if God, looking down at his world in the days before my castration, has noticed Pilgermann. Maybe Satan also, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it, has noticed Pilgermann lusting after the forbidden Gentile woman, has seen him moving through the darkness towards the forbidden garden. ‘Well,’ says Satan to God, ‘there’s one of your chosen down there. What do you think he’ll do? Perhaps you’d like to make a little bet?’

‘Of course he’ll climb the ladder,’ says God. ‘That’s nothing to bet on; any man with balls would climb that ladder, I make them that way to keep the race going. The thing is, will he climb the ladder if God tells him not to?’

‘That’s nothing to bet on either,’ says Satan. ‘Of course if he hears your voice he’ll do as you say, nobody is going to say no to YHWH if he hears your proper voice.’

‘Maybe a Bath Kol,’ says God.

‘Same thing,’ says Satan. ‘No bet.’

‘A thought,’ says God.

‘No visions,’ says Satan, ‘just a thought.’

‘A thought is all it takes,’ says God. ‘To a Jew a thought from God is as a thousand brazen trumpets. The thought of God is as the voice of God, and the voice of God will be obeyed.’

‘So what are you betting?’ says Satan.

‘Anything you like,’ says God.

‘If you’ll excuse my saying so,’ says Satan, ‘you could well be leaning on a reed.’

‘If he’s a Jewish reed he’ll hear, and if he’ll hear he’ll obey,’ says God.

‘Will you bet half of the congregation of his town on it?’ says Satan.

‘Done!’ says God.

It sounds like a joke when I tell it that way but it could well be how all those Jews in my town ended up dead that morning. Some may ask how God in his omniscience could be such a fool as to bet on Pilgermann. And how is it that God who is no longer even manifesting himself as He can have a conversation with Satan? Obviously God in his omnipotence can be absent as a world manifestation while being present in the individual or the collective mind as he chooses. As to his foolishness, it is just by this very willingness to lean on a reed that he shows his divinity, his difference from his mortal children: God does not learn from experience, he has never become cynical, he is innocent as only God can be. He approaches every mortal testing with a clean slate, always expecting from each of us the right action that is in us along with the evil impulse. So. God asked for right, I gave him wrong, and the guilt is back on me again.

I am not alone in my guilt, and it is perhaps at this point that I should begin to widen my narrative by bringing in figures from the great world beyond the gates of my town. Now, while the surviving Jews of the town are active with prayer shawls and with phylacteries in which there are no toads and before my onward road unrolling before me bears me away, I must tell of the Pope’s dream. The pope I speak of is of course the very famous one who called for soldiers of Christ to save Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre from the Turks. His name is Urgent III or Umbral V, it’s just on the tip of what used to be my tongue. Unguent, that’s it. Unguent VII. How strange must be the life of such a man who happens to stand at a juncture of virtualities, an impending of immensities: perhaps this man is thinking that he would like to have a little more sky over his garden, and he is thinking this thought at a time when the sky is just getting ready to fall; he pulls at a little corner of the sky, the whole thing comes down, and he is known thereafter as the one who called for a skyfall.

Unguent had his practical side; he undoubtedly had political reasons for calling for the rescue of eastern Christendom, but once the thing had got itself moving his feelings went somewhat deeper: Unguent had a dream. I know about the dream because the waves and particles of me drifted into it. Not at the time when he first dreamt it but much later, quite recently. This dream goes on continuously, and in one corner of it, kneeling with clasped hands and looking upward, is Unguent, very small, like a donor in a painting.

This is the dream: in it are Unguent, a sparrow, and the great golden dome of the Church of the World. This dome is seen only in dreams, it is not to be found in ordinary daily life. The sparrow is sitting like a weathercock on a perch at the top of the dome and like a weathercock it is turning in the wind. It is the only sparrow in the world and Unguent knows it. A great golden voice resounds from the dome, it says, ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ Unguent has a sling in one hand and a pebble in the other. He puts the pebble in the sling, he whirls the sling knowing that he cannot possibly hit the sparrow, that nobody can be that accurate with a sling at that distance; at the same time he is weeping because he knows that he is going to hit the sparrow. He looses the pebble, sees it hit the sparrow, sees the sparrow topple from its perch, strike the golden dome, slide down the great golden curve of it and disappear. Unguent is flooded with an inexpressible surge of black eternal grief. This black grief is so vast that all of what we call time is included in it; this black grief is what we call space. Unguent has become a great round universe enclosing all the black space. At this moment it comes to him that it was not a pebble that he slung at the sparrow, it was his gold seal-ring on which was engraved Saint Peter in a boat fishing.

For me the centre of this dream is Unguent whirling the sling and weeping. There I find it impossible not to feel for him.