Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen him.’

‘Did you get any relics of him?’ she says.

‘I’m not joking,’ I say.‘I really saw him.’

‘How?’ she says. ‘Had you a vision?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘ wasn’t quite myself at the time. I was leaning on him, he was holding me up.’

‘Did he have a smell?’ she says.

I put my mind back to when I was with Jesus. ‘He smells of stone and sweat and fire,’ I say.

‘Then Jesus he wasn’t,’ she says. ‘Jesus wouldn’t have a smell, that’s how you’d know him.’

‘Everybody has some kind of a smell,’ I say.

‘Well I know it,’ she says. ‘That’s just why Jesus would be different; he’s the Son of God, isn’t he? Do you think things came out of him like out of ordinary people when he was on earth? Do you think he made turds?’

I say, ‘Well, he ate and he drank and he bled so I suppose he must have done the rest of it as well the same as anyone else.’

‘There you show your heathen ignorance, thou child of darkness,’ she says. ‘If Jesus had made turds they’d never have corrupted like ordinary ones and they’d be in little golden jewelled caskets in churches.’

This also I ponder.

‘Maybe I should come with you,’ she says. ‘It isn’t safe to travel alone these days.’

I look at her. She’s not at all a bad-looking woman, she’s certainly strong enough to be a helpful companion on the road and she’s good company as well. It’s true that she’s a murderess but in these times that’s perfectly acceptable to me as long as she’s murdering for me and not against me.

‘You owe me something, you know,’ she says. ‘After all, it was you that widowed me.’

‘And it was you that almost made me a relic,’ I say. I want her to come with me but it would be a kind of holding on; my pilgrimage requires to be a solitary journey; it is a private matter between Jesus and me and the tax-collector. ‘I can’t take you with me,’ I say, ‘I’ve made a vow.’

‘Of what?’ she says. ‘Chastity?’

‘A vow to go alone,’ I say. ‘You won’t be without a man long, a woman like you. You can find yourself a real man instead of a eunuch.’

‘Give me that ring on your finger then,’ she says. ‘For remembrance.’

I look at my hand. There it is, the tax-collector’s wedding ring. I put it on her finger.

‘If you had your proper parts you’d have taken me,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to do without me once you’d had me.’

When she says that it comes to me suddenly that if I had my proper parts I’d not be in this wood, I’d not be on this pilgrimage. If I’d been more careful about what streets I walked in I might still be climbing that ladder while the tax-collector completed his metamorphosis into Pontius Pilate. It occurs to me then that it might have been my castration as much as anything else that started him on his penitential pilgrimage.

The poor maggoty stump of his corpse is still lying on the ground by the lightning-blasted tree while his head hangs from the tripod in the hut. That the head is either assuming or re-assuming the identity of Pontius Pilate seems to me a destiny that is not for me to interfere with. To the body, however, I surely owe a burial.

‘Why was he hung up like that?’ I say.

‘I don’t know,’ says the woman. ‘Udo did that, the one you killed. He didn’t like the look of him.’

The woman has of course a shovel among the tools and implements of her trade and with it I dig the grave. We put the body into the grave and I hear the words of the Kaddish coming out of my mouth, I see the black Hebrew letters rising in the morning air: ‘Yisgaddal v’yiskadash sh’may rabbo … Magnified and sanctified be his great name ’

Hearing the words, seeing the black letters rising in the air, I find myself paying attention to what I am saying, paying attention to the first words of the prayer:

Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world which he hath created according to his will.

As I say these words I am looking at a spider’s web pearled with the morning dew; the morning sunlight shining through it illuminates every droplet and every strand of the web; the spider, like an initial letter, witnesses the prayer and the fresh morning darkness of the oak leaves above it. My partnership with the tax-collector makes continual astonishment in me: it seems to me that never before have I noticed how much detail there is in the world which he hath created according to his will. That this headless stump with the absent face of Pontius Pilate should lie writhing with maggots under the freshly turned earth while each perfectly-formed drop of dew shines on the purposeful strands of the spider’s web and the spider itself is a percipient witness and the oak leaves tremble in awareness of the morning air — all this is as the hand of God upon my eyes even though I know that God will never again limit its manifestation to any such thing as might have a hand to lay upon my eyes.

In the mounded earth of the tax-collector’s grave I plant his pilgrim staff and to the staff I tie a sprig of oak leaves. I find myself wondering about the boundaries, the limits of the tax-collector. I find myself wondering whether his face might appear on more than one person. I go to the body of the man I killed, Udo. He is lying on his face where he fell. I turn him over and have a good look. It is not the face of the tax-collector.

‘You want to remember him?’ says the woman.

‘I want to remember everything,’ I say.

‘You want to remember me also?’ she says.

‘You also,’ I say.

‘Here,’ she says, giving me her knife and taking Udo’s knife for herself. ‘It’ll bring you luck.’

We stand looking down at Udo. ‘What about him?’ I say. ‘John the Baptist maybe? The prophet Elijah?’

She shakes her head. ‘He never was any good for anything but being Udo,’ she says.

We bury him and I go. As I’m walking away into the morning I turn and look at her. A big strong murdering woman, but alone.

‘What’s your name?’ I say.

‘Sophia,’ she says.

In a red and smoky dream of Hell full of cranes and scaffolding and ladders, in a dream of Hell where demons and sinners labour constantly to build their flaming towers, Unguent VII, carrying a hod of bricks, climbs a shaky ladder made of bloody bones torn out of live Jews. Once on his scaffolding of stiff Jewish corpses he picks up his trowel, a Jewish shoulder-blade, and lays yet another course to make the wall of his circular tower one brick higher.

Within the circle of his wall rises the circumcised member of Christ Erect. With bricks and mortar made of the clay of Jews, made of the straw, lime, sand, water, and blood of Jews Unguent is trying to build the tower high enough so that he can put a foreskin made of flayed Jews on the member of Christ. As the tower rises so does the member but Unguent toils faster and faster.

Just as he is about to put the foreskin on and tie it down with a rope made of Jewish entrails the bricks dissolve into a sea of Jewish blood in which Unguent swims for thousands of years until he sees under that everlasting red and smoky night the lighthouse of Christ Lucent. It is an iron lighthouse, it is white-hot and the sea boils round it but Unguent must needs cling to it or drown.

Unguent clings and drowns, clings and drowns in the boiling sea of blood for thousands of years more until the sea recedes to reveal the endless empty desert in which rises the pillar of the Salt Christ. Not until Unguent licks the salt pillar down to the ground will the rain fall to slake his thirst. When the rain falls it is the blood of Jews. That is as far as Unguent has got in this dream in all the times he has dreamt it. Like the dream of Unguent related earlier this one goes on all the time and Unguent the donor, modestly small, kneels praying in a corner of it.