Pilgermann (10 page)

Peter and the maidservant are on one side of the roof of the porch of the rood-screen doorway; on the other side are two soldiers of the watch. Underneath them in the rood-screen doorway and twice as large as they is Christ crucified, Mary on one side of him and John on the other.

After the maidservant and Peter and the soldiers of the watch here is Jesus before Pilate. Oh! that meekness of Jesus, that stone meekness. It is the meekness of plutonium. He is so very docile, like some absent-minded celebrity asked to pose in a group photograph. ‘Here? Is this all right, is this where you want me to stand?’ Waiting patiently for the time when he will explode himself upon the world. Pilate holds out his left hand while a servant pours water over it into a basin. Pilate is thunderstruck and so is the servant; to both of them at once has
come the realization that this moment is what it is for ever—it has never been before, it will never be again; it is Now and they are living it, never in life, never in death to escape from it. Pilate’s mouth is open wide, it is as if a great thick invisible vine is growing out of it; or a snake. ‘Innocent I am from the blood of this man,’ he says; ‘ye will see to it.’ Of the two faces that of the servant shows the deeper feeling; Pilate’s perception of this moment is confused by his official identity but the servant can take it in just as it is and he knows that never in the history of the human race will there be any going back from this moment. Here is the hump of the story, here is the last of the uphill part; after this it rolls like a monstrous and implacable wheel through the ages, crushing everything in its path and preparing the way of the Lord, the gone, the never-again-coming.

Christ is scourged then, and in the next and last scene of the rood-loft reliefs he goes off dragging his cross. These last two scenes, like the Crucifixion below, are not from the hand of the master who carved the first five scenes; it was the destiny of the original stone of the last two scenes not to endure with those other faces and gestures that are fixed for us upon the mirror of time. These last two scenes and the Crucifixion, all of them in wood and by a centuries-later hand, have not the power of the original stone. As I have said, Christ has a special way of being with stone and the Naumburg master knew how to let that special way of being happen.

I am on the road, this road through time and space to Jerusalem, but I am no longer alone: the sow I killed and her peasant master now walk with me; they are my new colleagues, and not only they: the bear who was slain by his worshipper also walks with me; Udo the relic-gatherer whom I killed in the wood is here, and the tax-collector. Yes, the tax-collector—how not?

The sow is walking upright, she minces on her trotters like a heavy woman in tiny shoes, her flesh shaking and wobbling erotically, her flesh that is naked among us; there is a scarlet necklace of beaded drops round her throat and a thin trickle of blood from her mouth. She is confused by her present
condition and shakes her head as she walks. ‘Little love!’ she says to her peasant master. ‘O my treasure!’ she says, pressing close to him, ‘What gives it here?’

‘He killed you, this one,’ says the peasant. ‘Smell him. Is he a Jew?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I can tell the difference any more.’ She turns to me. ‘Ay!’ she says, ‘how the life rushed out of me on to your blade, it was like an orgasm. Such a knifeman are you, such a thruster!’

‘Such a sow are you,’ I say. ‘Such a Jew-finder, such a leaver-behind of dead bodies.’

‘How sweet she is!’ This is Bruder Pförtner, he too is with us. ‘How I love her!’ He throws himself upon the dead sow, forcing her down on all fours and entering her zestfully.

‘Ah!’ cries the sow to Pförtner, ‘you were always the best, you were always the most man of them all!’

‘Get off her,’ says the peasant to Pförtner. ‘She’s mine.’

‘There’s enough of her for everybody,’ says Pförtner contentedly. ‘She’s inexhaustible. You must be patient and wait your turn.’ He reaches orgasm quickly, screams with joy as the sow squeals under him, then falls off her and lies snoring in the road behind us as we go on.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ I say to the sow. ‘Tell me your story.’

‘Ah!’ she says. ‘There’s so much to tell! There’s more to tell than even I myself know. You know of course that I’m descended from the Moon Goddess, from Diana herself; yes, everyone knows that. That’s why, you see, I’m so eternally desirable—I have that quality of virginity. Every time a man takes me it feels to him as if it’s my very first time; it makes him feel so outrageous, so naughty, so triumphantly and impeccably male. Why don’t you have me, you’ll see what I mean.’

‘Not just now,’ I said. ‘I want to hear more about you.’ Wondering at the same time whether a penis and testicles might have such a thing as a ghost, and whether a live eunuch might couple with a dead sow by means of the ghost of a penis. Never in my life had there been so many sexual invitations as now when I was castrated.

‘My sowhood,’ said the sow, ‘has not been like that of other
sows. I am fecund, I am fertile, but I have never farrowed. I have not multiplied, have not increased myself; my essential virtue is intact, I have not gone beyond the original limits of myself. Only men have known me, I have never felt upon me the rough and bristly weight of a boar.’

‘How was that?’ I said, remembering suddenly that it was probably she who had eaten the lost parts of me. There she was mincing beside me on her little trotters, looking at me sidelong from under her blonde eyelashes. The trickle of blood from her mouth and the red line round her throat made her seem a creature enslaved by lust.

‘I seen to that,’ said the peasant. He was a big man, dirty, tattered, patched, and unshaven. In his face was a darkness other than the dirt and beard. The darkness of his eye sockets was such that his eyes could not be distinctly seen. I thought of all the years of his life in which he had looked at the world from out of that darkness. ‘I seen to that,’ he said. ‘I kept her safe. I made for her a harness with spikes on it. I knowed early on I weren’t never going to have no wife, I knowed I’d have to provide for myself the best I could. I seen her when she were only a little thing and I fancied her.’

‘Fancy!’ said the sow with a snort. ‘It was more than fancy, it was love; it was the same as what the high-born folk make songs about and play on lutes. Say it right out: it was love. Ah! what a little enchantress I was in those first days!’

‘But you became a huntress,’ I said. ‘You became a smeller-out of Jews.’

‘How that happened,’ said the peasant, ‘it were like this: it were three or four year back the spring crop failed and the autumn as well. We run out of grain and beans, we run out of everything. Bodwild here, I had to keep her hid or she’d have been ate sure. There been a little girl went missing from the next village and folk were saying one thing and another, most of them thought that girl been ate. Such things been heard of before and it were always Jews done it. Sacrifices, you see. They drunk them children’s blood for their rituals. A dog in our village dug up some bones, they was from a human child.’

‘There were folk in our village looking at my little Konrad and muttering this and that,’ said Bodwild. ‘He’d always lived
alone and kept to himself. They knew we were in love and they begrudged us our happiness.’

‘Like I said,’ said Konrad, ‘I had to keep Bodwild hid or she’d have been turning on someone’s spit. I found a hole in amongst some big rocks it were in the wood by the common. I put some straw in there for her, I done my best to keep her comfortable. Mind you, I weren’t too comfortable myself what with people pointing the finger at me like they was because of them bones and some said they seen me burning that little girl’s clothes. There’s always people will try to take away your good name but they couldn’t prove nothing.’

‘How well I remember that time!’ said Bodwild. ‘How well I remember a particular November evening: it was dusk, it was raining; I remember the smell of the rain on the dead leaves, I remember the smell of the damp straw. Suddenly there came a fresh smell: it was strong, it was sharp, it excited me, it made me want to nip and cuddle, it made me quiver with lust. There crept into the hole with me a man, such white skin he had, such black hair, such red cheeks!’

‘He were a clipcock,’ said Konrad. ‘He were some kind of Jew magician, he had papers on him with that kind of secret writing they do. He weren’t from our part of the country; some of them in our village they seen him sneaking through the wood and they begun to chase him.’

‘It was his fear I smelt,’ said Bodwild. ‘So strong and sharp it was, almost like doppelkorn, almost like schnapps. It made me wild with desire. I kissed him and called him sweet names, I pressed close to him and offered myself, my pinkness and the sugar of me, I was like marzipan; who could refuse me?’

‘They won’t get near pork,’ said Konrad, ‘them children of darkness, them Jewish devils. They call up Asmodeus, they drink the blood of Christian children, they say the Lord’s Prayer backwards, them Christ-killers. He pushed her away.’

‘Me!’ said Bodwild. ‘He pushed
me
away. Men have paid good money to sleep with me, but he pushed me away.’

‘They haven’t paid money but they’d give me a sausage or maybe a chicken or some doppelkorn,’ said Konrad.

‘I was outraged,’ said Bodwild. ‘I had never been insulted like that, I wept bitterly.’

‘She were squealing her head off,’ said Konrad. ‘I heard her half a mile away and I come running. We burnt the Jew that night, there were human child bones found in his pouch.’

‘Clever little Konrad!’ said Bodwild. ‘It all worked out so well, everyone was satisfied. How he writhed and crackled in the flames, his bones cracked and the marrow boiled out. I remembered the smell of his fear as I saw him twisting in the flames, it was almost better than making love. Watching him burn I came again and again.’

‘I had you under my cloak and I was playing with you,’ said Konrad. ‘I could feel how you loved it, how hot you were.’

‘Did you smell the Jew’s fear when he was burning?’ I asked Bodwild.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I had to remember it from before to call up my excitement. He was singing but that did nothing for me.’

‘He were trying to save his self with his Jew magic what they call up devils with,’ said Konrad. ‘There’s a spell they sing, it’s called “Schemmah Yisrowail”; I’ve heard it often when I’ve caught Jews. They sing it when they’re burning but it never puts out the fire.’

‘Do you remember when you smelled me out?’ I said to Bodwild. ‘Do you remember when you told the others to castrate me?’ I said to Konrad.

‘I
thought
it were you!’ said Konrad. ‘I
thought
I remembered your ugly Jew face looking up at me when we had you spread out on the ground. Well, you won’t be making no more little Jew brats, will you.’

Bodwild came close to me, nuzzling and sniffing me. At her touch I felt the ghost of an erection spring up, I felt myself rocking like a chip on the torrent of lust that flowed through the first Sophia, the second Sophia, and this sow with her scarlet necklace of blood. Even now as I have these words in my mind I am confused by the presence among them of my lost God, my remembered Christ. How I am flooded with the humming and the roaring of great waters, with the music of the great currents in which rock and dance the Great Mother, the Father, the Son, the Virgin and the Lion! Unseen! Chosen I am, chosen are my people to be the thrall of the multitudinous, of the humming and roaring unseen manyness that whirled the Jews like a bull-roarer round
the head of its manifestation as YHWH, made of them a sounding of the unseeable, the unknowable, the utterly ungraspable. How it raged, that idea, when it was YHWH and the Jews whored after stocks and stones and golden calves! How it would not tolerate any limitation of form, of image, of substance! How the everythingness of it commands every flash and glimmer of the mind, how all thoughts that ever were or ever will be run beneath its hand like sheep beneath the hand of the shepherd! Lion-sheep, star-sheep, ocean-sheep!
‘Now
I remember you!’ murmured Bodwild with her snout brushing my ear. ‘Now I remember the smell of your fear, it was dark and full, it was like music and strong drink to me. I didn’t smell it when I saw you in the inn yard just before you killed me; you had no fear then, I smelled nothing.’

‘So it was the fear you smelled when you hunted Jews,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t the Jewishness.’

‘It’s all the same,’ said Konrad. ‘When you’re hunting Jews and you smell fear that’ll be a Jew sure enough.’

‘If they don’t know you’re hunting them they won’t be afraid,’ I said.

‘They know that a time will come when they will be hunted,’ said Bodwild; ‘that was what I could always smell.’

‘It doesn’t seem to bother you any more that I’m a Jew,’ I said.

‘Everything seems different now that I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m letting go of things. And I’ve told you I wanted to make love with that first Jew; I’ve wanted to make love with all of them but I’ve had to content myself with their dying. I’m just like anyone else, I take my pleasure where I can.’

‘Here we’re talking like old friends,’ I said, ‘and yet you must be full of rage because I killed you.’

‘Why should I be full of rage more than you?’ she said. ‘I sniffed you out, they castrated you and I ate your male parts. So you killed me, that’s reasonable. A little time one way or the other, it seems a big thing when you’re alive but when you’re dead you wonder what all the fuss was about. When I was alive we hunted you down; now we’re dead and you’re alive and already we’re friends. Very soon you’ll be dead also and you too will wonder why it ever mattered so much who was what and who did what.’

‘And you?’ I said to Konrad. ‘You were the master of this sow, it was you who used her to sniff out the Jews that you tortured and killed. What have you to say for yourself?’

‘What have I to say for myself?’ said Konrad. ‘You lousy Jew eunuch with your soft white hands, in your whole life you probably never done nothing heavier than count your money. You’re all usurers, the whole filthy lot of you, trying to get the whole world in your pocket. Knights going to Jerusalem, they have to pawn their castles to you. Many’s the Christian lady you’ve crept into bed with, I’ll bet, and her lawful husband gone to fight the heathen. Not that it don’t serve them right, they’re nothing but thieves and murderers and their foot on the neck of the poor from the time we’re born till the time we die. Look at my hands next to yours, eh? Mine are more like hooves, ain’t they. They’re that hard. Here I am dead from your Jew magic and how much did I ever have in these hands. Tools to work another man’s land with mostly. Heavy soil and a heavy plough and a six-ox team, you probably wouldn’t have the strength in them white hands of yours to turn a plough like that. How much Christian blood have you drunk?’