Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

Never again! Always and for ever again and again. In my mind I see the night sky, I see three stars burning between the Virgin and the Lion, they are like a gesture, a Jewish gesture, the hand flung up, fingers spread: Well, then! What are your intentions, will you block the road for ever?

There she is, glorious and pathetic in that dim golden light. The splendid form of her contains her name as a candle contains its wick, her name still unknown to me, when I know it it will flame for me. Gone! the great dark house all black again.

Sophia! name unknown to me! Name that will burn in my mind like a candle flame burning straight up in still air above its translucent column of white wax.

Jews are known to be clever but I did nothing clever; I simply hung about the Keinjudenstrasse day and night with no thought for anything else until that bulging-necked man climbed heavily on to his horse and rode away. I bribed no servants, I asked no one how long he would be gone, I felt honour bound to take my naked chance. I came as one who seeks a miracle; caution seemed sacrilegious.

Nightfall, and he had not come back. I hear the hooting of an owl, I hear the wind sighing, the summer wind in the trees of the garden. Outside the forbidden garden of the great dark house I wait. This is perhaps the centre of time for me, this waiting in expectation of a miracle, this waiting in a state of transcendental desire, in a state of sin made holy by its purity.

The hours pass, the first-quarter moon appears in the sky like a password, I go into the garden. There is of course a ladder there; for the Jew desirous of Wisdom there is always a ladder. The house is all dark, there is no light showing anywhere. I have no plan, I lean the ladder up against the house and I climb up.

The shutters are open, the casement is open, I feel on my face the warm breath of the dark window, there is a scent of oranges, of bitter aloes, of lions, of tawniness, there is a scent of the nakedness of the unseen woman within. Suddenly she is there, glimmering in her nakedness like a glimmering fish in the river of night. I feel as if I am falling, falling backward with a silent scream into the garden. Has she pushed away the ladder? She has not pushed away the ladder, I am not falling, her two hands grip my wrists, she is pulling me into the window, she is whispering, ‘Thou Jew! My Jew!’

‘Thou Jew! My Jew!’ The miracle has happened, no explanations are necessary. With a miracle one is immediately thou and the rest follows, the rest has already been going on before one arrived, the moment is prepared and ready.

The centre of time is, as I have said, the waiting. This is now off the centre, this is the motion of the everything, the action of the universe, the destined world-line of the soul, the living heart of the mystery.

There are few words between us. I say, over and over again, ‘Thou beautiful, thou beautiful!’ She says, Thou Jew! My Jew!’ Only one other thing does she say, her name when I ask it: her name is Sophia. Then I say, again and again in that wondrous warm breathy darkness, her name. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia.

See me, the Jew fresh from the attainment of Wisdom, the Jew returning with the dawn of the Ninth of Av. See me as a bird might see me, as might that stork that slowly flaps its way over the huddled roofs and chimneys, over the narrow twisting streets of morning. What might this stork see looking down? Here the Jew comes, turning this way, turning that way, threading his homeward path and drawing closer, closer to those others hurrying towards him, turning this way, turning that way as if by careful prearrangement, these others with billhooks and pitchforks following a sow who wears a scarlet cross. The sow has her snout uplifted and is grunting loudly. ‘A Jew! A Jew!’ shouts the man who holds her rope, ‘She smells a Jew!’ Here they come running towards me, reeking of cow dung, sweat, beer, pigs, shouting, ‘A Jew! A Jew!’

They hurl themselves upon me, they throw me to the cobblestones, some of them sit on my chest, some of them hold my arms and legs. My tunic is pulled up, my hose are pulled down. O God! I feel the cool air of dawn on my nakedness. O God! I know what they are going to do and I cannot move a limb to help myself.

‘The covenant!’ cries some lout. ‘The mark of the covenant!’

‘Cut it off and make a Christian of him,’ says the man with the sow.

‘Look at that thing,’ says someone else. ‘You can be sure he’s had Christian women with it, filthy brute.’

‘He won’t have them any more,’ says the man with the sow.

O God! I pray in my mind. O God! Don’t let this happen! I feel the knife on me. I think of Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradyon martyred in the Hadrianic persecutions, wrapped in the Scroll of the Law and burned at the stake. As he died he said that he saw the parchments burning but the letters of the Torah flying up out of the fire. I too now see the black letters shimmering and twisting as they rise on the heated air, soaring above the flames like birds of holy speech to the blue sky. I see the black letters writhing round the holy nakedness of Sophia going up, up, out of sight into the blue morning.

How can I be brave, strong, a real man, a hero? All I can do is not give them a screaming Jew to laugh at. ‘God wills it!’ they cry with stinking breath as they cut off my manhood. I vomit but I do not scream.

‘Finish him off,’ says someone.

‘Let him live,’ says another sort of voice. It is the tax-collector on his horse at the head of the town militia.

‘God wills it!’ shouts the man with the sow.

‘This also,’ says the officer of the watch, and he prods the sow with his pike. She squeals and runs off with the peasant soldiers of Christ followed by the town militia. The tax-collector, high above me on his horse that snorts and prances and paws the cobbles, looks down at me with a pale face then looks back over his shoulder. I hear voices approaching: ‘Jews, Jews! Give us more Jews!’

‘Pray for me,’ says the tax-collector. ‘This way!’ he shouts to the approaching peasants. With a scraping of hooves horse and rider plunge away, leading the peasants away from where I am, leading them towards the town gate.

Pray for him! Did he actually say that, did I hear him right? ‘Betet für mich.’ What else could it have been? ‘Tretet mich’ ? ‘Kick me’? Ridiculous; that man could not possibly have asked me either to pray for him or to kick him. I have a sudden hysterical vision of the two cherubim leaning towards each other over the Ark of the Covenant, the one saying, ‘Pray for me’ and the other, ‘Kick me’. I don’t know what to make of it: this man, this husband of Sophia, this man whom I have just cuckolded, has saved my life, such as it now is.

I am lying on my back alone on the cobblestones, my tunic stuffed into my wound. It is broad day, above me arches the blue sky. High overhead, so very, very, high in the sky, circle a drift of storks, a meditation of storks, circling like those intersecting circles of tiny writing sometimes done by copyists with texts of the Holy Scriptures. They are so high, those storks, that one couldn’t say what they are unless one knows, as I do, that every year faithfully come these great dignified black-and-white birds to nest on our rooftops and to circle high in the sky over our town, returning each year in their season.

I smell burning, there is smoke drifting between me and the sky; that will be from the synagogue. Here I must say that I had never been a devout Jew. I owned a skullcap and a prayer shawl and phylacteries; I always turned up at the synagogue for the High Holy Days and I had never before missed Tisha b’Av but my observances were mostly for the sake of appearances; in between I went my own way. God was to me as a parent to whom I had given little obedience and from whom I expected no inheritance.