Pilgermann (8 page)

Nor mountains steep
Nor waters deep
Turn back the faithful soul;
Nor fire nor sword,
Christ Jesus Lord,
Jerusalem our goal.

So feeble, so wan those voices, like a candle flame in the sunlight. The dry and dusty road was ascending the brow of the horizontal head of Christ; the children would not be in sight until I reached the top of the hill. Long and long I toiled up the brow of Christ in the heat and the stillness of the day. When I reached the top I saw the children. They were moving very slowly in the glimmering heat and in the dust that rose up from their going. Peasant boys and girls they were, between twenty and thirty of them, the oldest of them twelve or thirteen but most of them younger, all of them thin and ragged, carrying their pitiful little bundles and singing thinly as they walked in the dry and dusty road.

As I watched them I heard again that bony and brutish chuckle: not only Bruder Pförtner but a whole company of him, a bony mob of him came trotting past me throwing off their monks’ robes and showing the tattered parchment of their skins stretched taut over their bones. All of them had great long bony members wagging erect before them so that it was difficult for them to run; all of them were giggling and chuckling as they stretched out their bony hands towards the children. When they reached the children they pushed them down on to their hands and knees in the dusty road, mounted them like dogs and coupled with them, grunting in their ardour, screaming in their orgasms. The children crept forward slowly on their hands and knees, singing as they were violated:

Christ Jesus mild,
Sweet Mary’s child
That hung upon the tree,
Thy cross we bear,
Thy death we share,
To rise again with thee.

When the skeletons had sated their lust they fell away from the children and lay sighing and snoring in the road with limbs outflung. The children, their hands and knees bloody, stood up again and trudged on.

Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful,
and hast forgotten God that formed thee.

This has come into my mind as I ascend the stone brow, the horizontal broken rock of Christ who is of the broken Rock of God, the Rock that was shattered by the unfaith of its people, the Rock that was drained of its strength by the lust for the seen and by the whoring after no-gods. I remember how our old Rabbi has said that only once in the Holy Scriptures is the unpronounceable tetragrammation of God written with a small
yod,
and it is here in Deuteronomy that it is written so to show God’s loss of strength from Yeshurun’s disrespect:

But Yeshurun grew fat, and kicked:
thou art grown fat, thou art become thick,
thou art covered with fatness;
then he forsook God who made him,
and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.
They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods,
with abominations they provoked him to anger.
They sacrificed to powerless spirits;
to gods whom they knew not,
to new gods that came newly up,
whom your fathers feared not.
Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful,
and hast forgotten God that formed thee.

What is called time passes and yet all time is present; one has only to turn one’s head to see the happening of all tilings: there I am going up the ladder while Satan smiles and God perhaps weeps. God being omnipotent has the power, even while apparently absent, to manifest the idea of a weeping God. But God as It, God without personification—can it truly be that this God can be lessened and made weak by any human action, by my disrespect, by my adultery? I don’t know, I am full of doubt and worry as I ascend the broken rock of the horizontal brow of Christ.

When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened—whatever that thing might be—that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.

And God, we think that because he is all-powerful the amount of available power is always the same; but it changes, it wavers, it shifts from the kinetic to the potential, varying with the action of the universe, the action of the world, the
action of the individual. Earlier I have had the thought of many mysterious unseen fragile temples in which God used to dwell among us; now I perceive that these temples are each of us however unreliable, each of us for good or ill, each of us as the total of our actions and our being. It is because of such as I that God is absent and Christ horizontal; it is because of such as I that these children are raped by skeletons on the road to Jerusalem.

I hurry to catch up with the children, I kick snoring skeletons out of my way, I trample their mouldy bones and filthy parchment skins, I tread on their great phalli and their ponderous testicles. They don’t care, they grunt and sigh and roll over in their sleep.

The children with bloody hands and knees trudge on. They are so very thin, their arms and legs are like sticks, their cheeks are hollow, their eyes sunken, truly they seem Death’s own children as they sing:

Our faith our shield,
Thy word we wield
Of love and Christian pity.
The seas will part
That pure in heart
May reach Thy golden city.

‘Brother pilgrim!’ cry the children when they see me, ‘Brother pilgrim! Have you anything to eat?’ I give them all the food I have, sausage and bread; it isn’t very much for so many. A boy who seems to be the leader thanks me and divides it with great precision. There is no more than a mouthful for everyone, they chew it slowly and with great care.

‘Have you nothing more?’ says the boy. ‘You can have, you know, any one of us you like.’

‘Look at your bloody hands, your bloody knees!’ I cry. ‘Look where your clothes are torn! You’ve just now been had by skeletons!’

The boy looks at his hands, his knees. ‘It’s a rough road,’ he says. ‘One stumbles.’

‘Selling yourselves for food,’ I say, ‘is that how you’ve been making your way to Jerusalem?’

‘We beg, we steal, we sell what we have to sell,’ says the boy. ‘God wills it.’

‘How can God will such a thing as that?’ I say.

‘If God wills that we should be on the road to Jerusalem then He wills the rest of it as well,’ says the boy. ‘Dead people can’t walk to Jerusalem, and one must eat to live.’

‘Do you know where Jerusalem is?’ I say to him. ‘Do you know how far it is to Jerusalem?’

The boy turns his face towards me and looks at me for a moment without saying anything. Looking at me out of his eyes I see the lion-eyes of Christ, and I am frightened. I hold my head because I know that when he speaks his voice will be a woodwind voice that comes from inside my head and resonates there. ‘Jerusalem will be wherever we are when we come to the end.’

I look away, ashamed. I look down at the tawny dusty road. I feel as I did when as a child I was ill and did not go to my lessons. Lying in my bed I heard the voices of the other children as they passed my window. Over those voices I now hear the singing of these Christian children:

Christ Jesus sweet,
Guide thou our feet,
Our light in darkness be.
Make straight the way
By night, by day,
That brings us, Lord, to thee.

I walk on quickly, the children are left behind, the voices fade away. The road continues on high ground; below me I see peasants making hay, their voices float up to me singing and talking. Beyond them is a wood, a hamlet, houses, a church, a village green, a craggy height, the river winding in the distance. Men and women pass me with baskets of fruit and vegetables on their heads. For them this road does not go to Jerusalem, it goes to farm and cottage, to ease at the day’s end, the evening meal and a good night’s sleep, nothing required the next day but the next day’s work in the same sure place. See the man on top of the hay-wain: for him at this moment the world is soft and fragrant. Perhaps not. Perhaps in his soul he walks barefoot on sharp stones.

‘Rubbish,’ says Bruder Pförtner at my elbow. ‘Do you see that
woman with the rake, the one that’s bending over? In his soul he’s lifting her skirt and he’s giving it to her, Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!’ Pförtner is grunting and he’s thrusting with his great bony pimmel as he thinks about what he thinks the peasant is thinking about.

‘That’s not in his soul,’ I say. ‘That’s in his mind.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ he says, ‘that man hasn’t got a mind, he’s perfectly healthy; minds are a sickness. All he’s got is a soul and his soul is in his scrotum.’

‘Filthy brute,’ I say. ‘Is that all you think of?’

‘It’s my whole purpose in life,’ he says. ‘I like to do it with thin girls best, you can get closer to them. Ah! I’m getting excited thinking about it!’ His monstrous member is stiff again, he strokes it lovingly.

‘Those children you’ve just done it with, they’ll die now, won’t they?’ I say.

‘My seed is in them,’ he says. ‘They’ll give birth when the death in them comes full term.’ He begins to sing and dance, stamping his bony feet and raising the dust on the dry road:

‘Golden, golden, ring the bell,
Go to Heaven, go to Hell,
Go on land and go on sea,
Go with Jesus, come with me.’

‘You’re so full of jokes and fun,’ I say. ‘What happened to your more dignified manifestation as Goodman Death riding slowly on your pale horse with the slowly ringing bell?’

‘That’s for strangers,’ he says. ‘You’re not a stranger now. I’ll see you at the inn.’ And he’s gone again.

Through the long day I walk my road to Jerusalem while the world on both sides of me makes hay, drinks beer, mends thatch, shoes horses, draws water, carries burdens, crows from its dunghill, grunts in its sty, grazes on its hillside. With evening I arrive at an inn, The Black Boar. In the inn yard are horses, carts, wagons, sledges, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks, dogs, peasants, pilgrims, and a sow wearing a red cross.

The sow is looking at me from under her blonde eyelashes. She turns her snout towards me and begins to grunt urgently, perhaps ecstatically. I say ecstatically because I note that she
has been mounted by the ever-potent Bruder Pförtner who is himself grunting ardently as he makes love to her. ‘Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!’ grunts Bruder Pförtner. ‘Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh!’ grunts the sow. The sow is on one end of a rope; on the other end is that peasant who said, ‘Cut it off and make a Christian of him.’ He is looking at me narrowly as if trying to remember where he has seen me before.

I kneel beside the sow listening attentively to her grunts. ‘Quick!’ I say to the peasant, ‘Get a basin!’

‘What for?’ he says.

‘To catch the blood,’ I say as I cut the sow’s throat. Her blood spurts out and in the same moment with her dying squeal I hear Bruder Pförtner screaming as he comes. The peasant grabs a billhook but before he can take a step towards me Bruder Pförtner, his great bony pimmel still erect, has leapt upon him and is enjoying him. The peasant utters a choked cry, gives birth to his death immediately, and falls on his face on the ground.

I am left standing there with the knife of the second Sophia in my hand and in my mind the thought: Jerusalem is wherever I am when the end comes. The other peasants are looking from the dead man to me and back again. They make the sign one makes against the evil eye. The pilgrims as well are looking at the dead man and looking at me.

I look at them from one to the next. I look at them all. In the air in front of me I draw the two mingled triangles of a six-pointed star. I don’t know why I do this, it simply comes to me to do it. They look at what I have drawn in the air, I wait for them to take up their knives, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks and staves and kill me. No one moves, no one says a word.

‘You saw me listening to the sow,’ I say. ‘She was confessing to me, she was telling me her last will and testament. She was telling me of her many sins, how she repented of them; she had no wish to go on living. She leaves her corporeal being, her bacon, her ribs, her chops, her crackling, all of her sweet flesh and nourishing juices to you her countrymen and to you her fellow pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, that golden city that is at the same time in the Holy Land far away and in the heart of each of us. May Jesus Christ how savoury be with you and keep you from all harm.’

I let my eyes pass over all of them. I do not expect to leave this place alive. No one moves, no one says a word. Stepping very carefully, as if I am walking on crystal goblets, I go out of the inn yard and back to the road.

‘Jesus Christ how savoury’! Almost I said, ‘Jesus Christ our Saviour’, almost those words leapt out of my mouth. Strange, how eager those words are to be said, and stranger still how busy is the idea of being saved. As a boy I was told that there is a big book in which every deed is recorded; on the Day of Judgment one is shown this record, must examine it carefully and sign it. I was told that the righteous go to Gan Eden and the wicked to Gehinnom but even as a child I never believed it; even as a child I sensed that the arrangement of one place for the good souls and another place for the bad ones was simply not such a thing as would happen in a universe of sun and moon and stars, of night and day and the wheel of the seasons. God said a great many things in the time when it was manifesting itself as YHWH; some of them may well have been misunderstood or written down wrong. Or it may be that he put things in a very simple and vivid way so as not to require too much of the general understanding. Space and time have in them no Gan Eden and Gehinnom, no Heaven and Hell as what could be called places, and I cannot believe that anyone can now take seriously the idea of a soul that is simply righteous or wicked. Even the souls of such creatures as Torquemada and Hitler are not simply wicked although the weight of their actions is mostly in the gehinnom of things—I use the word as one might say right or left, up or down, plus or minus. It is in the rotation of eden and gehinnom that we feel the cosmic dance that is the motion of the universe, and in the play of these energies come punishment and reward. My punishment is that such evil as I have done has tuned me to
the gehinnom frequency where I vibrate to the memories of all who have done evil; I share their being as well as their memories, and what I remember I remember as a doer remembers. My reward for being no worse than I am is that I remember no more than I do.