Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘This pattern,’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this square of yours, it’s not to be the floor of a building or the courtyard of a khan or anything like that, is it?’

‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it’s just to be itself, it’s not a part of something else.’

Tower Gate tilted his head to one side and made with his mouth a sound expressive of doubt, misgiving, and deprecation. ‘That’s it, you see,’ he said. ‘That’s what gives me pause, that’s what’s putting the wind up me. Any other pattern I’ve seen has been ornamenting something, it’s been part of something, it has not in itself been something. Do you see what I mean? To incorporate a pattern of infinity in a house is not immodest, one’s eyes are in a sense averted from the nakedness of Thing-in-Itself. But here you’re doing something else altogether: you’re making this pattern with no other purpose than to look at Thing-in-Itself. This to me seems unlucky.’

‘On the other hand,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who has put this idea into my head if not Allah? And who has guided the hand of my friend if not Allah?’

‘What a question!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Do we not read in the Quran that whatever good happens to thee is from Allah but whatever evil happens to thee is from thy own soul?’

‘And from where does my soul come if not from Allah?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

‘What do we know? Who are we to say?’ said Tower Gate’s hands. With his voice he said nothing.

As we walked home through the rain Bembel Rudzuk seemed to be carrying on an interior conversation with himself. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he nodded, sometimes he shrugged.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘This matter of the tiles,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing simple about it — one can so easily go about it the wrong way. At first I had in mind to make them of sun-dried mud; I wanted nothing too permanent, I wanted clay from the river bank that would endure only its little season as artifact before it returned to itself. Then there came to me a dream: I was standing on Hidden Lion near the centre of it. The pattern was complete. At the centre of it stood a little tower and at the top of the tower stood a hooded figure who pointed with his finger to the tiles. They were fired and glazed. This hooded personage said nothing but in my mind were the words: “They have lasted this long because they have passed through the fire.”’

How strange it was to me, that rainy season through which passed the year 1096 into the year 1097. It was strange in the way in which it associated itself with a name and an image. Through the winter rains there echoed cavernously under the main street of Antioch a great rolling rush of waters in which could be heard the heavy sliding of earth and sand and gravel. This was the winter torrent that little by little was carrying Mount Silpius away into the river and the sea. Down through the cleft in Silpius ran the torrent, through the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate, then under the city it rumbled through its vaulted channel to the Orontes. Onopniktes was the name of this torrent: Onopniktes, the Donkey-Drowner. When I first heard that name a thrill of recognition ran through me, there appeared in my mind the dark and echoing caverns of that churning flood in which rolled over and over dead donkeys in the wild foam. Because of its name, because of the idea of those dead donkeys rolling in the racing flood, because of the idea of the mountain rushing particle by particle under the city to the river and the sea, Onopniktes became in my mind one with the rush of history and the rising of a darkness in the name of Christ.

While that greater Onopniktes that coursed its wild way under the cities of the world brought the Franks upon its flood to Antioch, Bembel Rudzuk carried on his business from day to day but ranged less widely than he used to, both in his shipments and in his travels; he was wealthy enough to be as busy or as unbusy as he chose, and for the present he confined his trading to the stretch of coast from Suwaydiyya south to Ghaza. Professionally well-informed by his correspondents, he noted that pirates were active more than usual; he also had news of the departures of the various armies of Christ on their way to our part of the world. Bembel Rudzuk traded mostly in silk and he found the rise and fall of the price of a standard bale a reliable index to the Mediterranean state of mind. ‘Today the market is like a firm and well-shaped pair of buttocks,’ he said, ‘but tomorrow it could be like burnt stubble. Risk is salt to the meat of commerce but I don’t like the smell of the world just now; it has the smell of disorder, it has the smell of a leaking ship in which sea water has got into the silk and the crew have opened the wineskins and are looting the cargo; it has the smell of mildew and rotting oranges.’

Strolling in his warehouse, snuffing up the scents of commerce from the corded canvas bales, Bembel Rudzuk clinked in his hand a sealed purse of gold dinars. on, some say it was his own son, Ham,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that this Noah who built the ark, who also built the first altar, this big shipper and worshipper, he ended up like you but we don’t hear anything about his being thrown out of the congregation. I myself think that the crux of the matter is whether you start out as a eunuch or only end up as one. Did you start out complete?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At least physically.’

‘Think,’ he said, buttoning me on to his hard blue eye as if I were a buttonhole, ‘think of this tradition of a castrated Noah. What do you think about it?’

‘I’m not yet able to take it in,’ I said. I imagined thunder and lightning, the ark rolling in heavy seas, Noah naked with blood streaming from his castration, Noah shaking his first at God. I wanted to put my hands on the Rabbi’s throat and cut off the supply of wind with which he continually made words.

Tradition,’ he said with his red hair standing out all round his face like Saint Elmo’s fire, ‘puts things together like a good cook: a little of this and a little of that. Tradition is a balancer, a bookkeeper, an accountant. Debits and credits, yes?’

‘Which?’ I said.

‘This is why Noah, who was given so much, has something taken away,’ said the Rabbi, and folded his arms across his chest as does a man who has utterly dried up his opponent in debate.

‘And to what conclusion does this bring us?’ I said.

‘That is for you alone to know,’ said the Rabbi. ‘I cannot tell you because I don’t know what the Lord has given you in exchange for what has been taken from you.’

I opened my mouth to speak. What could I tell him? That God was no longer He and had become It? That from Jesus himself came the seed that gave life to Jesus? Could I tell him about the tiny dead golden body of Christ in the mouth of the Lion of the World? Could I tell him of the maggot-writhing headless tax-collector and the other companions of my road? Could I tell him of Sophia?

‘You don’t have to say it aloud,’ said the Rabbi; ‘I don’t have to know; God already knows and if you also know then that’s enough.’

‘So what do you want from me?’ I said.

‘I want you to come to the synagogue and pray with your fellow Jews,’ he said.

The Nagid had so far been maintaining a dignified silence as befitted someone who was not a seeker-out of others but the sought-out of many; none the less it was a bustling kind of silence. This Nagid, whom I think of as Worldly ben Worldly although he had a name that I ought to remember, was a tall, grand-looking man who seemed to embody the principle of making arangements and the idea that the ponderous wheel of time and history might not roll too crushingly on if one knew the right people. Now he made with his hands that gesture of holding a large invisible melon or model world so characteristic of top arrangers everywhere — I have often thought that the idea of the roundness of the world first came to scientific observers from seeing this gesture, so suggestive of a Platonic ideal that the existence of a physically real counterpart could not seriously be doubted — and said, ‘We Jews are scattered over the face of the earth; let us at least be united in those places to which we have been scattered.’