Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

‘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.’