Russell Hoban - Pilgermann

I nod. ‘Tonight!’ I say. I am ready, even eager. As comradely as I am with Bembel Rudzuk, as close as our friendship is, yet am I closer to these dead. As a pilgrim acquires merit by making the journey to Jerusalem, so have these acquired not only merit but magical power by completing the journey to the end of themselves, to the fullness of their action. In death they are intensified, they are more than themselves, they are more than philosophies; they are geographies, histories, they are sciences and guides for a soul sore troubled and perplexed. Where they are, where Sophia is, there would I be.

But Sophia is not standing before me with the other dead. Suddenly I recall that she is not dead. Jerusalem has not yet fallen to the Franks, this is not yet the year 1099, it is still 1098. Sophia is alive! Our little son is not alone among dogs and corpses. There is the delicate crescent of the new moon of Tammuz still in the morning sky. The evil decree is not yet upon us.

Tonight’ is the word shaped by the lips of my young death. This is the last day of my life! Only a moment ago I was eager to join the dead but now everything is different, I am not a dry tree, I have a son, I am needed by my child and the mother of my child, I must find them. Life is calling me now, not death.

I look at my young death, I shake my head and with my mouth I shape the words, ‘Not yet.’

‘Tonight!’ Again the word appears on his lips. I look away, I don’t want to see him now. The tax-collector and the others have gone, I am alone with my young death.

I am on my feet, I pick up my curved Turkish sword, Firouz’s sword that Yaghi-Siyan has given me. My young death looks at me sadly; in his face I see the face of my little son alone among the dogs, among the dead. I raise the sword to strike but it is as if an iron bar has dropped across my arm. This has happened to me once before when I tried to save the life of the bear, and now as then it is the bony arm of Bruder Pförtner that has stopped me.

‘You don’t mean to do that,’ he says, breathing upon me with his breath that is like the fresh salt wind by the sea. ‘It simply isn’t done.’

‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘For myself I don’t care, I’m quite ready to die. It’s my son, you see — he’s only a very little fellow and he needs me badly, and his mother, if I can find her perhaps she needn’t die in Jerusalem.’

‘Yes,’ says Bruder Pförtner, ‘I do understand, you’ve no idea how often I hear this sort of thing. So many people are urgently needed elsewhere when the time comes. And what about me, eh? Have you perhaps a little thought for me? I am like a diligent housewife who cleans the house and cooks the meal and lays the table, all is in readiness but the expected guest suddenly can’t be bothered to come. Only in this case I’ve cleaned the house and cooked the meal and laid the table of history, and one can’t take liberties with history; it isn’t possible, the complexity of the energy exchanges is absolutely staggering.’

‘History!’ I say, ‘I’m talking about human lives!’

‘And I’m talking about human deaths,’ says Bruder Pförtner. ‘Tonight is the fall of Antioch and I need all the Jews and Muslims I can lay my hands on. You have no more time for rushing about, this must be the whole world for you in the time you have left.’ With that he disappears. When I turn back to my young death he also is gone.

I dress and go to Bembel Rudzuk’s room but he isn’t there. I go to the roof: not there. Should I run to Yaghi-Siyan and tell him that I have been told by Bruder Pförtner that Antioch will fall to the Franks tonight? I think that he will believe me but he may well have my head cut off as his first act of preparation for the attack. Should I tell Firouz? Ever since Yaghi-Siyan gave me his sword he looks at me as if he wishes me dead; he would probably accuse me and Bruder Pförtner of being spies. To whom can I give this news? To whom can I say that Death has told me that Antioch will fall tonight? Meanwhile Sophia and our son are either on their way to Jerusalem or are already there. I must find them, I must get out of Antioch.

Seeking Bembel Rudzuk I go to Hidden Lion. It is desolate in the summer dawn. Here are gathered Bruder Pförtner and his fellows. No more do they present themselves as loutish creatures of lust; now they are serious, respectable, they wear breastplates, helmets, cloaks. They are grouped like generals around a huge map that Pförtner has spread out on the tiles. With a baton he points here and there, the others nod. People and movement flow around Hidden Lion as water flows around an island, no one takes any notice. These bony generals stand out with startling clarity in the foreground of the picture in my eyes, they are sharply defined by the space between them and the houses, domes, and minarets and by the particles of colour on the morning air that in the eye combine to form Mount Silpius tawny and empurpled. The mu’addhin has long since sounded the call to prayer and the prayers have risen in the dawnlight, in the freshness of those cool dim tones with which the world is first sketched in each day. As the sun ascends the morning shadow of the eastern slopes of Silpius withdraws from the city like a transparent purple robe trailed across a floor.

There on the mountain climb Justinian’s walls of the four hundred towers, each correctly casting its morning shadow; there on the mountain is the citadel with its tawny stone catching the light of the sun, its green-and-gold banner rippling in the morning breeze; there in the cleft of Silpius is the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate where in the winter runs Onopniktes the donkey-drowner, roaring, bellowing, grinding its stones in its caverns under the city.

This, under the inescapable reality of Mount Silpius, is the first of Tammuz, the month named for the Babylonian god who is also the Sumerian Dumuzi. Down, down under the earth into the nether world goes he in the winter for he is the corn god. For him does the Goddess Inanna make her famous descent, anointing her eyes with the ointment ‘Let him come, let him come’:

From the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the

‘great below’,

The goddess, from the ‘great above’ she set her mind

toward the ‘great below’.

The new moon of the risen Tammuz hangs in the morning sky but I feel intimations of the great descent, the dark and chill of winter in the light and heat of summer. Inside the earth the waiting darkness trembles. Standing on the barren tiles of Hidden Lion and looking at that always surprising mountain, that simple mountain that so shockingly asserts the actuality of its strangeness, that mountain that now for me is truly and finally the dreadful mountain of the Law, I curse the infirmity of purpose that has kept me here in Antioch. Turning and turning in my mind my thoughts of what to do next I turn physically, making myself dizzy on this repetition of twisting serpents, shifting pyramids, and occulting lions. There burns in my mind that vision more real than Mount Silpius, more real than anything else in the world, of the violated ivory nakedness of dead Sophia and the animal watchfulness of our little son making his way alone through the dogs, through the dead. I have spent my time playing with patterns and it has come to this. There leaps up in me hatred for Bembel Rudzuk.

I looked up at the tower and saw him standing at the top of it, a solitary dark figure against the morning sky. I looked away. How could I hate Bembel Rudzuk? Overcome by love and shame I went to him.

‘You look dreadful,’ he said.

‘This is the last day of my life,’ I said.

‘All the more reason for looking your best,’ he said. ‘This is the last day of my life as well. How do I look?’