Pilgermann (3 page)

‘Whatever I am,’ says Jesus, ‘I’m the one you talk to from now on.’

I think: O God, what if he’s right? What if God’s gone and I never really had a chance to talk to him. Forgotten prayers crowd my head, I look away from Jesus, I look up to the sky. ‘Answer us, O Lord!’ I cry, ‘answer us on the Fast day of our Affliction, for we are in great trouble; turn not to our wickedness, and hide not thy presence from us, nor conceal thyself from our supplication; be near, we pray, to our cry, let thy kindness we beg, comfort us; answer us, even before we call unto thee, according to that which is said: “And it shall come to pass that, before they call, I will answer; while they are speaking, I will hear!” For thou, O Lord, art the one that answerest in time of trouble, redeemest and deliverest in all times of trouble and distress! Blessed art thou, O Lord (Blessed be he and blessed be his name!) who answerest in time of trouble. (Amen!)’

There was a long silence after my prayer, then Jesus said, ‘Did you feel that prayer going anywhere or did it just go out of you?’

‘It just went out of me,’ I said.

‘You’re shaking an empty tree,’ said Jesus. ‘You’re letting down your bucket in a dry well. There was no answer when the knife was on your flesh and there’ll be no answer now. And for
what do you pray now? The thing has already been done and you are cut off from your generations.’

Thou Christ!’ I say, remembering suddenly whom I’m talking to, Thou Christ who fed the hungry, cast out demons, healed the sick and raised the dead! Surely thou wilt restore me to my manhood!’

Jesus shook his head. The fig tree stayed barren,’ he said, ‘and you will stay a eunuch; it is what you wished.’

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right, I couldn’t believe what he was saying. When he said this we were not walking, I was in my bed, dispersed in two-dimensional sunlit patterns like an infinitely extending oriental carpet. I seemed to have been there for some time. ‘What did you say?’ I said.

Jesus said, ‘I said it is what you wished.’

I said, ‘Can you have seen Sophia and say that? I am young, the blood in me runs hot, I lust but I am unmanned. I lust, I long, I yearn, I hunger, I hum like a tuning fork, I flutter like a torn banner in the wind. That which I was I can never be again, that which I am is intolerable, that which I shall be I cannot imagine. I glimmer like a distant candle, I mottle like the sunlight on the carpet, like the shadows of leaves. I am something, I am nothing, I am here, I am gone.’

‘It is what you wished,’ said Jesus. ‘Only now do you hum, flutter, glimmer, mottle, be something, be nothing, be here, be gone with me. Only now are you tuned to me.’

‘Never did I wish to be a eunuch,’ I said, ‘and never did I wish to be tuned to you.’

Jesus said, ‘And there are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs on account of the kingdom of the heavens. The one being able to grasp it let him grasp.’

I said, ‘I never made myself a eunuch.’

Jesus said, ‘Life moves by exchanges; loss is the price of gain. Some pay with one thing, some with another; whatever is most dear, that is my price.’

I said, ‘Why is that your price?’

Jesus said, ‘What is dear is what is held dear, and there can be no holding by those who go my road; there can be no holding by those who will be here with me and gone with me.’

I said, ‘Never did I ask to go that road, never did I wish to be here with you, gone with you.’

Jesus said, ‘Always you wished it, and most of all when you put hand and foot to that ladder of love and pleasure. In your soul you called to me, you longed for me when you climbed that ladder. With eager hands you reached for pleasure and held it fast but whoever holds on wishes to let go because attachment is not wholeness: the only wholeness is in being with everything and attached to nothing; the only wholeness is in letting go, and I am the letting go.’

I said, ‘I know nothing of all this.’

‘You will know,’ said Jesus, ‘and your knowing in time to come will make you know it now.’

‘What is between us, you and me?’ I said.

‘Everything,’ said Jesus.

‘Why me?’ I said.

‘Why not you?’ said Jesus.

I, Pilgermann, poor bare tuned fork, humming with the for-everness of the Word that is always Now. Unbearing the Unbearable, intolerating the Intolerable, being not enough for the Too-Muchness. I, poor harp of a Jew twanging incessantly in the mouth of Jesus, in the lion-mouth of Christ Pandamator, Christ All-Subduer. There is a point where pattern becomes motion; the pattern has found me and I must move, must be aware of moving, must be a motion, an action of the Word. Poor bare tuned fork.

‘Blessed are they that are tuned to me,’ said Jesus.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Because they shall move,’ said Jesus. ‘They shall go, they shall have action.’

While he was saying that I was thinking: I, poor eunuch of my Lord, neither sheep nor goat, neither of the left hand nor of the right, subject always to Christ the redeemer, the ransom, the sacrifice, victim, torturer, murderer, bringer of death. Iesous Christous Thanatophoros. Kyrios.

Jesus said, ‘I am the light of day. Do you believe?’

‘I believe,’ I said.

Jesus said, ‘I am the energy that will not be still. I am a
movement and a rest but at the same time I am all movement and no rest and you will have no rest but in the constant motion of me. Do you believe?’

‘I believe,’ I said.

‘Why do you believe?’ said Jesus.

‘No belief is necessary,’ I said. ‘It manifests itself.’

Jesus said, ‘Why in your mind do you call me bringer of death? Why in your mind am I Iesous Christous Thanatophoros?’

I said, ‘How can I not think of you as Thanatophoros? Whoever wants to kill a Jew does it in your name. In your name they kill the seed that gave you life.’

Jesus said, ‘From me came the seed that gave me life.’

There arises the question of the tax-collector. Drifting in my oriental-carpet patterns I see him high above me, sitting on his horse and looking down at me the bloody and castrated Jew, the mutilated and unmanned thing that has cuckolded him and entered the golden Jerusalem of his wife. Although he has never taken any notice of me he has seen me often enough in the town, he has me on his records, he knows me for a Jew. Famous as he is for his hatred and loathing of Jews, why has he saved my life? It is true that it is my
castrated
life that he has saved. Can there be some meaning, some message in this? Can he possibly know what has happened between his wife and me? Impossible. It happened only a few hours before he saw me, at a time when he was somewhere else altogether, there was no time for him to be told of it. But is it possible that he never left the town, that he became suspicious of the lurking Jew, pretended to go away but circled back unseen to see what happened? Possible. Or might he simply have instructed a servant to observe carefully and report to him in whatever place he has gone to? Even more possible. Well, which is it then—does he know or doesn’t he know? I have no idea. No, I don’t believe that he knows, I don’t think that he has been suspicious, I don’t think that it would ever occur to him as a possibility that a Jew should enter where he has entered.

But wait, maybe he dreams of such a thing constantly; maybe he is utterly consumed by the thought of a Jew by night creeping in through the window to enjoy his wife, maybe it burns in him like a constant lamp, maybe it is the one thing wanting for
his happiness and peace. He sees me hanging about, sees the possibility, absents himself in hope. The wife opens the Jerusalem of her body to the lusting Jew, then as an unexpected treat the Jew is caught by the peasant soldiers of Christ, he is flung to the cobbles, stripped, castrated, he lies there shuddering in his blood and vomit while his penis and testicles are eaten by a sow. His fading lust renewed, the husband returns as a giant refreshed to the guilty and submissive wife whose only thought is to anticipate and satisfy his every demand. Is that how it is? God knows.

Can there be, there must be, some reasonable explanation, but what can it be? Here is a Jew, one of the people this man hates, lying bloody on the cobblestones, his death only a moment away. Why should the tax-collector have any interest whatever in saving the life of this man? And why should he say either ‘Pray for me’ or ‘Kick me’?

When I become exhausted with thinking about the tax-collector my mind, like an automaton that cannot be stopped, returns again and again to the castration itself: if only I had taken another way home, if only I had turned and run, if only I had fought harder. Those faces above me in that dawn, I have seen such faces centuries later in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Ah, the tax-collector again! I have seen his face, his particular face, in a particular painting by Bosch, a painting of Christ being crowned with thorns. The tax-collector is that man wearing the spiked red leather collar and a black astrakhan hat on which there is a sprig of oak leaves with an acorn. In his left hand he holds a staff, his right hand is on Christ’s right shoulder; almost comforting and consoling that hand seems: ‘Bear up, old fellow; be brave; it’ll all be over soon’ might be the message of that hand. Maybe that man with the tax-collector’s face is Pontius Pilate and he’s saying, ‘I find no fault in you but this is how it must be; I wish it could be otherwise.’ A troubled man, Pontius Pilate; he died by his own hand some years later—that same hand, probably, that rests on Christ’s shoulder in the painting. There it was on the end of his arm year after year: feeding him, writing letters, caressing his wife, holding whatever there was in life for him to hold. Suddenly it lets go of everything and jumps up and kills him. For how
many years did that thought lurk in the hand? Always, perhaps. In this way are human hands made by God; they carry in them always a last mortal judgment. Perhaps it was to protect himself from that hand that Pilate wore such a spiked collar. Is this then a clue to the tax-collector’s strange behaviour towards me? Did some time, perhaps in the dead of night, his hand leap up and take him by the throat and say, ‘Jews also must live!’ Perhaps his hand said this on the very same night that my hand took hold of his naked wife! Only now, as these thoughts move among the waves and particles of me, do I perceive that every hand is the hand of God: hands doing good and hands doing evil, are not they all His (Its) work? Think of the constant action of all the hands of all the world, gathering and scattering, building and destroying and praying, holding on and letting go.

So. And what of my hand, also a hand of God? Did my hand perhaps carry in it a judgment? Did my right hand and its fellow cover my ears and my eyes so that I should be in ignorance of what was happening in the world at the time I climbed that ladder? They did not; I knew that the Pope’s appeal had inspired peasants as well as knights to shed the blood of Jews and I knew that we in our town might at any time find ourselves in the path of trouble. Was I then vigilant on behalf of my fellow Jews and myself? Did I keep watch early and late, did I arm myself to defend the Scroll of the Law and God’s children in the land of their exile? No. The only weapon I took in hand was the one with which I forgot thee, O Jerusalem, and entered the strange Jerusalem of the tax-collector’s wife. Having done what I did in the great house in the Keinjudenstrasse did I then take myself in hand with prudence and with caution to make my way home? I did not; one hand pushed me from behind while the other pointed like a signpost to strange and unlucky streets where I would not have walked the day before; one hand showed the conquering hero the world that lay before him while the other patted him on the back in congratulation. And here I am: the waves and particles of a eunuch.

I talk and I talk and words come out of me in an unending stream but I cannot say the plain truth: I have done wrong, O God. Forgive me for climbing that ladder. For God’s sake, Pilgermann, say it straight out: Forgive me, O God, for lusting
after Sophia, for loving her, for consummating that love and lust. Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I’d do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: it bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don’t know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one’s proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who’d have wanted to know about them? They’d have stayed in their garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight of God, they’d have been like a picture that is hung on the wall and after a time not looked at any more. God
made
us such that we would eat of that fruit, God would have been ashamed of us if we hadn’t done it. God would never have bothered to make a man and a woman to live out their days dreaming in a garden.

And yet, and yet! I have done wrong, O God, I know it. I made that tax-collector poorer when I enjoyed his wife, I know that. Maybe only on her glorious body could he pray, maybe only with her could he be with you, and I came between him and his prayer. But he was holding on then, wasn’t he, being so attached to her, and Jesus said that holding on was no good. No, it’s no use, no matter how I try to squirm out of it I’ve done wrong and reparation must be made. Because I violated that man’s privacy, because I burst in upon his quietness. Not that he was all that good a man, certainly I never knew anyone to have a good word to say for him. Maybe his first good action was
saving my life that day, maybe that was the first time he’d ever looked kindly upon a Jew, and it only happened after I’d had his wife. Ah! what’s the use of twisting and turning, there’s something required of me: what? What should I do, where should I go? ‘Jerusalem! Thou pilgrim Jew!’ I did not speak those words, it was a voice that spoke within me: not so much a voice as the daughter of a voice, what is called in Hebrew a Bath Kol. There was about it the scent of Sophia’s voice but I knew that it was expressing God’s intention. ‘Jerusalem! Thou pilgrim Jew!’