Conrad Aiken - The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

“Why, what do you mean?” he stammered.

“What do I mean! You ask me what do I mean! Ah, my God! Do I have to drag it all out of you like this? You have no honesty, no seriousness, no repentance? You are Judas. You were born in the Island of Kerioth. You murdered your father and married your mother. Pilate! Pilate! Do you hear? You kept books for Pilate. You cheated him. And then you went looking for Jesus, because you thought He could forgive you for incest. Ha! And you cheated Him too; you stole from Him. You kept back the moneys. Your passion came on you—you wanted gold and silver. You stole from the shepherds in the market place—you stole from the other Disciples. Finally, because your fingers itched, you sold Jesus. What’s the good of denying it? I can see that you remember it—you knew it all the time. It’s Easter Eve, and you’ve come back again. I knew you were coming—I know everything.”

The Jew stepped back with a gesture of triumph, dropping his hand. He squared his high peaked shoulders as if in a paroxysm of righteousness. His coarse face was radiant—transfigured.

“Well,” said Dace, in a small voice, but clearly, “suppose I am Judas—suppose I do admit it. Suppose I admit even that I knew it before I came here, and came here with the sole purpose of revealing myself to you. You know everything—so I suppose I’ll have to grant you that I even knew that the set of the Twelve Disciples was the password—which, I take it, we’re in the habit of exchanging, in this extraordinary fashion, every Easter Eve. Is this Easter Eve? I didn’t know it. I suppose I’m allowed a respite from Hell on Easter Eve—is that it?… But, supposing that all this is true—what about it?”

“Ah,” the Jew cried, “you’re incorrigible.… Why do you always make it so—difficult for me! If only once, once, you would admit it all—tell me everything from your heart—help me to sound the horror of the world, instead of leaving me to sound it alone! Only once!” He sank into his chair, flung his head back, and regarded Dace pityingly as from an immense moral distance.

“Listen!” said Dace. “I want you to believe me when I tell you that I’m not trying to deceive you or make it hard for you. I’m honestly trying to tell you everything I know. If there are some things I don’t know which you think I ought to know—well, it’s because there’s some barrier which I don’t understand, some barrier. Do you see?… For example, I suppose I ought to know—since I’ve met you so often—who you are. But I don’t!… Who are you?”

“I am Ahasver—the eternal Jew.”

“Oh! You are—I see. And we meet every Easter Eve.”

“Every Easter Eve.”

“You are eternal—of course, I’ve heard of you. As for me, I suppose I’m just, for the moment, reincarnated.”

“Reincarnated.”

“That, I suppose, is why you can remember me, but I can’t remember you.”

“You must remember!”

“I don’t. I remember nothing.”

“Try! Think of last year.”

“I don’t remember last year.”

“Salt Lake City! It was in Salt Lake City. Do you remember?”

“No, I’ve never been to Salt Lake City.”

“You have—you were there last year. My shop was in Myrtle Street. We met outside it, just as six o’clock struck. You were smoking a pipe. When I asked you who you were, you said your name was O’Grady.”

“Oh! Did I?”

“Yes. You said at first that you wanted to pawn something—your watch. You looked very different. You had a beard. Then, we were inside the shop, and the door was shut—”

“Ah! I asked for a peculiar set of chessmen!”

“You remember! You remember!… And the year before it was at Buenos Aires.… My shop was on the second floor, over a colonnade. I had a sign hanging outside—with my name on it, Juan Espera en Dios.… You were a little Portuguese Jew named Gomez—your skin was very yellow, you were suffering from the jaundice. Do you remember?”

“No—I’ve never been to Buenos Aires. Never.”

“Ah, you shameless liar!… Liar!… You lie merely to make me suffer. Don’t! Don’t! And the year before that—”

“My dear fellow, do you remember them all?”

“Every one. It was on the Ponte Vecchio—my name was over the door, Butta Deus. A very small shop, with bracelets and filigree necklaces. Ah, you were very droll that time—and very shabby, poor. A poor tailor, you said your name was Fantini. You had no thumb on your left hand, and said it didn’t interfere with your work—you showed me how flexible and cunning were your fingers. And ah, my God, how stubborn you were, how you denied it! But you always deny it, you always torture me.… It is my punishment.”

The Jew covered his eyes with one hand and sank into an absorbed silence. He looked as if he were praying. Dace examined him in astonishment—observed the tufts of grizzled hair in his ears, the gray sparse whorls of beard under the edges of the jaw, the greasy old-fashioned black stock under the lowered chin. Three heavy gold rings were on the fourth finger, one of them set with a coarse peach-agate.… Behind him in the tumbled room somewhere a clock struck seven in a small sweet voice, then another, nearer at hand, more briskly and loudly, then two others, simultaneously, their voices, one brazen and one treble, infelicitously mingling. Seven o’clock? But to Dace the world semed timeless; and he felt extraordinarily, with a bright translucence, that made him bodiless, that he was existing separately, at one and the same time, in Salt Lake City, Buenos Aires, Florence—and where else? He seemed to know himself perfectly as O’Grady—he was tall and bearded, smoked a pipe, walked, in the warm, clear dusk, into Myrtle Street, where, sure enough, the Jew awaited him. But what was the Jew’s name there? He had forgotten to say.… Certainly, as Gomez he had had the jaundice, as Fantini had lost his left thumb. Absurd! And this ghostly multiple career extended back, troubled, passionate, full of sinister echoes, for eighteen hundred and thirty-five years. And the unchanging secret in him, through all this harlequinade, was Judas! These hands were the hands of Judas—the hands of the parricide, the thief, the betrayer.… And what, in all this amazing nightmare, so profoundly actual, did the Jew want of him? Sympathy? An exchange of understanding?… He tried to remember what it was that the Jew had done, what offense it was that his eternal wanderings were a punishment for. Perhaps if he closed his eyes it would come back to him. For a moment he would submit a little, allow this extraordinary influence—Ah! It began to come back to him. It was something outrageous, something revolting—there was a crowd—Jesus was passing, carrying something—and the shopkeeper—Ahasver—what was it he did? He leaned forward out of the crowd and spat at Jesus and said something—that was it. Something hateful.

“What was it you said?” Dace asked.

“On the Ponte Vecchio?”

“No—on Golgotha.”

“Ah, I won’t repeat it—every time you ask me to repeat it! And you know as well as I do!”

“I know you said something—I don’t know what you said.”

The Jew leaped to his feet, his face flushed with fury. He made a gesture of curved hands towards Dace’s throat, as if he would like to strangle him.

“Hypocrite! You sit there and pretend you know nothing—you, my only friend! Well, I’ll tell you what I did—I spat in His face, that’s what I did! Yes! I leaned over and spat right in His face, and said in a loud ugly voice: ‘Go on quicker!’ And He stopped and looked at me—ah, you can see Him stopping—and answered—‘I go; but thou shalt wait till My return!’… That’s what happened, Judas!… And you, where were you? On Olivet, with an old bit of rope, the halter of an ass! But it did you no good. No. You were merely doing what you’d have to do over and over again. For you, too, were included in the words: ‘There be some of those that stand here which shall in no wise taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom!’”