Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

I put my hand on the wall that separated me from the space where the shofar had sounded that day as it had all through the month of Elul. The heat of the day had gone out of the wall, it was cool. As I stood there a man named Mordechai Salzedo, a merchant friend of Bembel Rudzuk, came to me and said, ‘From the roof of the synagogue we have seen the new moon; now the new year can begin.’

‘Good luck to it,’ I said.

At this irreverence he raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to favour, I suppose, the analytical side of his brain while he looked at me carefully. Having done this he put one hand on my shoulder and lifted the index finger of the other.’ “Where he is” eh?’ he said. ‘“Where he is.’”

What a remarkable Salzedo this was! When he said those words it was as if there came through the cool thick wall of the synagogue, through my hand and arm and into my heart the New Year’s Days of time past when our Rabbi had read those very words from Chapter 21 of Genesis, where it tells of Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, Hagar weeping because she thinks that her son will die:

And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her: ‘What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him fast by thy hand; for I will make him a great nation.’ And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.

Our Rabbi had always been fond of citing the Midrash Rabbah on these verses:

WHERE HE IS connotes for his own sake, for a sick person’s prayers on his own behalf are more efficacious than those of anyone else.

WHERE HE IS. R. Simon said: The ministering angels hastened to indict him, exclaiming, ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Wilt Thou bring up a well for one who will one day slay Thy children with thirst?’ ‘What is he now?’ He demanded. ‘Righteous,’ was the answer. ‘I judge man only as he is at the moment,’ said He.

Wonderful. So WHERE WAS I? Could it be said of me that at this moment I was righteous? I couldn’t think of any harm that I was doing just then. What about my pilgrimage, my road to Jerusalem that went on now without me? At this distance I believe that I am telling the truth when I say that it was not the Mittelteufel that kept me in Antioch. I had begun my pilgrimage wanting to save the many mysterious, unseen, fragile temples of the world so that Christ would not leave us as God had done when he ceased to be He. Now as I thought about it I found that Christ as a limited identity had already departed from my perception and been absorbed into the manifold idea of himself. And what for me had been Jerusalem was equally to be found wherever I joined the motion of the hidden lion. I remembered those poor hungry death-ridden children whom I had met on the road and I heard again in my mind the voice of that boy who had said, ‘Jerusalem will be wherever we are when we come to the end.’

Salzedo was no longer standing before me, I was alone. The door through which the light had come was closed. In the darkness my hand was still touching the wall of the synagogue but now when I thought of the sound of the shofar it seemed to jar on the silence.

One day has followed another with the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the cry of the mu’addhin. It is the winter of 1097. The walls of Antioch, those great mountain-ascending walls with their four hundred towers, those strong stones left from Justinian’s strong time, those stones that have no enemy, now they look down on the tents of the Franks. Antioch has been under siege since October but it is the besiegers who are starving. How strange they are, these scarecrow conquerors, these soldiers of Christ who refuse to learn how to fight the Turks, who at Dorylaeum won the day by their very stupidity when the half of their divided host with whom they had lost contact came out of nowhere like miraculous saviours to astonish and defeat Qilij-Arslan’s mounted bowmen. They walk, starving as they are, like victors; they walk as if they shake the ground, believing themselves to be invincible, believing that God wills it that they should win. The arrogance of those coloured tents of the Frankish knights! Through successive dawns they stand more frightening in their presumption than shouts and battlecries and the thundering of hooves, these tents in which these unturning men dare to sleep before the enemy walls, dare to sleep in their unclever and unshakable courage and the expectation of victory.

Soldiers of Christ! The marvel, the continual surprise of Christ is that he includes everything that attributes itself to the idea of him. Because I have seen Christ, have talked with him, have heard the strange woodwind of his voice inside my head, have looked into his lion eyes, I know that there looks out of his eyes, as out of the eyes of Vermeer’s young girl with the pearl earring, the intolerable bursting of the beginning of all things. From that unimaginable violence which is God as It has come all that there is: all the world, all the universe. I know this in many ways but I need to know it in more ways, I need to put myself where the Idea of It is, I need to move at the same speed as It, become altogether one with It so that there is no jump to be made, this jump that we so much fear at the time of death. I must become as advanced as possible in this because I sense that my time is fast approaching, that time when my young death will be full-grown and ready to go out into the world, leaving me, the fond and used-up parent, behind.

I know that my death will be ready soon because now in this winter of 1097 I have seen the tax-collector again for the first time since I came to this part of the world. Suddenly one morning he was there, his naked headless body still writhing with maggots, his member tumescent with bloat, his naked feet moving over the triangles of Hidden Lion. He was gesturing with his hand as if making a speech or admonishing someone or possibly counting, possibly reckoning up something. I tried to make myself not hear his voice while at the same time I strained to hear it. I did hear it, I heard his voice and I heard the words he was saying with utter clarity but even as I heard I forgot; it was like waking up from a dream with everything still in the mind but as you sit up in bed it is gone.

After that he was always there, always walking through the sounds and smells, the colour and motion of the Hidden Lion bazaar like someone with a fixed idea, like a madman who talks to himself; always did he gesture with his hand in that particular way; always did I forget what he was saying as soon as I heard it but one thing became inescapable: it was I that he was talking about, it was my account that he was reckoning up.

None of the others had turned up yet: not Udo the relic-gatherer, not the bear shot full of arrows, not Bodwild and Konrad, not Bruder Pförtner, not my young death. I understood that the tax-collector had come to give me notice that my life would soon be required of me but I did not think that the final stage of things would begin until I saw my young death once more. When last I saw him he had looked at me, as I have said, trustingly. It was my constant fear that I should fall short of his expectations — I wanted so much to do my best for him, I wanted so much to do my uttermost possible. More and more it was not the face of Sophia and her naked body that my mind offered me in its pictures: it was the obscure face of my young death; it was the shadowy form of actuality to come. I persevered with my martial exercises.

So. Now I walk a little differently from the way I used to, and I stand on the wall and look down at the enemy as one who will not die without making trouble.