Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

Neither Bembel Rudzuk nor I sought death again that day. I knew that my time was coming soon, I knew that I must be alert to recognize the time and the place so that my death might be the best possible, the most useful possible. But even as that thought moved through my mind it was hurried on its way by another thought coming behind it. This second thought asked whether it might not be only vanity and a striving after wind to want so much for one’s death; whether it might not be better to require nothing whatever of it or for it but simply to welcome it whenever and however it might come, to welcome it as one welcomes the stranger to whom one must always show hospitality.

As soon as I had taken in this second thought a wave of ease spread through me, a strong feeling that I had found the right way to be. With that feeling came an understanding that from then on every moment would be — indeed always had been — as the last moment. This wants to be made perfectly clear, it may be the only thing I have to say that matters; this idea has for me both the brilliance of the heart of the diamond of the universe and the inverse brilliance of the heart of the blackness in which that diamond lives: this moment that is every moment is always the last moment and it came into being with the first moment; it is that moment of creation in which there comes into being the possibility of all things and the end of all things; it is the blossoming jewel at the heart of the explosion, the calm quiet dawn at the centre of the bursting. This moment that is every moment — to see it whole is to synchronize one’s being with the whole of time, to be everywhere in it at the same time. It is to be with everything by letting go of everything. It is through this awareness that my present state of being has come about. It is associated with that purple-blue of indescribable luminosity of which I have spoken before.

There are not three hundred Christians gathered here on Hidden Lion; there are one hundred; Yaghi-Siyan has said that he will balance justice with mercy, he will do to these Christians only what those Christians outside the walls have done to the Turks whose heads are in the mule-cart. That a human being should in this fashion show mercy is to me an equal horror with the rest of what is happening. Once only I look at the faces of the Christians as they are herded on to the tiles, then I look away, I look at their feet.

Now at this moment and then at that moment, in this same moment that will continue for the duration of the universe, in this same luminosity of purple-blue, in this same heart of the diamond, I see the gathering of the Christians on Hidden Lion. The presentness of it, the nowness and for everness of it, is intolerable, and for this that is happening I curse God as Him, I curse God as It, that he made us, whether as He or as It. That he made us what we are, to sling heads over a wall from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside. This is what He has done with His omnipotence: this feeble masturbation in a dark and ill-smelling place.

And yet, so are we made and such is the action of the everything in this one moment that is every moment, that another thought flickers over and under my first thought: what style God has! What a truly godlike extravagance, to burst out all at once with a universe in which everything is going at once and humankind is let run with nothing to stop it from doing anything at all. And to make this running-loose creature with a mind that knows what it is doing and a soul in which Hell burns always and Heaven is grasped so rarely and so briefly that it lives in us as a continual yearning for what can never be held on to, for what must always be lost — what invention!

The sacred is not to be imaged, there is no image to put to what God is nor is there any reason to want an image of such a thing. The evil that he has created is also in its inexplicable way sacred and not to be described beyond a certain point. Suddenly are these long-legged shore birds, these gleaners of the tideline, netted. Suddenly, with their dark faces, their speechless mouths, their uncircumcised members, their frozenness into such time as there will be until the end of time.

That is as far as I shall go with these words and the images they bring. What happened, happened.

Afterwards the bodies are taken away in wagons. There remains of course the blood on the tiles, on the red and black and tawny triangles of Hidden Lion. It is darker than the tawny, darker than the red, lighter than the black. The same people who stood looking on while the Christians were being beheaded now stand looking at the blood. The butcher and his helper from the shop near by bring a bucket of sand, two buckets of water, a scrubbing brush.

‘No,’ says Bembel Rudzuk. ‘This blood is not to be washed away. It is now part of the pattern and it is obviously the will of Allah that it should be so.’

‘Perhaps you don’t remember,’ says the butcher, ‘but one of the tiles with blood on it is mine. My money is mortared into it and it is inscribed with the name of Allah The Truth, He whose existence has no change.’

‘I remember,’ says Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but this blood is not going to be washed away.’ He stands there with his arms folded on his chest. The butcher and the butcher’s helper look at him attentively, then walk away with their bucket of sand, their two buckets of water, and their scrubbing brush.

In twos and threes the people drift away. Still Bembel Rudzuk stands there like a man of stone. He and I have read the Holy Scriptures together, and I know that those verses of Ezekiel that are now in my mind must be in his mind as well:

Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD:

Woe to the bloody city, to the pot

whose filth is therein, and whose filth

is not gone out of it! bring it out

piece by piece; no lot is fallen upon it.

For her blood is in the midst of her;

she set it upon the bare rock;

she poured it not upon the ground,

to cover it with dust; that it might

cause fury to come up, that vengeance

might be taken, I have set her blood

upon the bare rock, that it should not

be covered. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD:

Woe to the bloody city!

After a time Bembel Rudzuk ceases to stand like a stone man, he begins to walk the boundaries of the square, then moves in a little, walking in progressively smaller squares, moving a little closer to the centre each time, walking slowly in concentric squares as if threading a labyrinth. When he reaches the tower he walks hexagonally around it, then walks from there outwards in concentric squares again to the outer limits of Hidden Lion. The tax-collector with his eyes that are elsewhere stands watching quietly with me. The sky is growing pale. Bembel Rudzuk and I go home; the tax-collector remains on Hidden Lion.

Bembel Rudzuk and I went up to the roof of his house and waited there for the day to come. It was unseasonably warm, the air was close and heavy, the morning seemed to hold its breath in the dull grey before-dawn light. In this light was something of that grey and rainy dawn in which I first had come to Suwaydiyya with Bembel Rudzuk. The port with its topography of morning, its long shadows, its low buildings, its boats rocking to the morning slap of the water on their sides, furled sails still heavy with night, crews moving slowly on their decks, the smell of cooking-fires — all this had without seeming to move grown smoothly bigger in my eyes in that particular way in which things reveal themselves when approached by sea, opening to the approacher more and more detail, more and more imminence of what is to come. And always, thus approaching, one feels the new day, the new place, coming forward to read the face of the approacher. Always the held breath, the questioning look of the grey morning.