Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  Strong walls, always have strong walls been walked by weaponed men. And those who came and took Antioch, such stones they captured in their strong places up and down the land, such stones they put together in their Latin Kingdom, those strong men and those who came after them! As Pilgermann the owl I fly on silent wings above them looking down. Lion-stones, warrior stones, now they have peace. How they sing in their silence, how they are easy, the great strong stones, the lion-stones, the tawny. Even they, the strong stones of the great Jew-killers, even they have longed for ruin and the stillness, for the wind sighing over them, for the grass growing on roofless walls and alone-standing arches. Even when the arrows hissed from the loopholes the stones were singing the stillness to come, the clopping of cows’ hooves up and down the stone steps where those iron-ringing men walked in their time. Now the stones have arrived at the strong life of the stillness of them, their strong song, their stillness dancing in the sun.

  Warrior lords, those great and fierce men, recruiters of stone, of walls and towers on high ground, of strongholds commanding borders, river crossings, approaches. They said to the stones, as other warrior lords before them had said to the stones of Antioch, ‘Be thou firm against the enemy.’ And what did the stones say? The stones said, ‘We have no enemy.’ Lying in the sun they sing the stillness; toppling and rolling they shout, ‘God is motion!’

  So. Bembel Rudzuk and I in the deepening night in Antioch. Bats fretting the darkness into little points and the woman’s voice rising and falling in her song as we stood on the stone paving that was waiting for my design.

  The centre of the square was marked by a wooden rod standing upright in the stone. It seemed to me that I could feel the power of the centre there, feel the radii going out from it and coming into it. There was no moon, there were no stars but we could see well enough for our purpose. We had brought no lantern nor did I want one; it seemed right that the design should come out of obscurity, and I wanted to be unobserved, I wanted the shelter of the dark.

  Bembel Rudzuk was saying very quietly in Arabic:

  ‘Labbaika, Allahumma, labbaika.’

  Then he said to me in Greek, ‘What I said was: “At Thy service, O Lord, at Thy service.” These words are to be spoken only on pilgrimage to Mecca but I could not refrain from saying them.’ He took the rod out of its socket, inserted a wooden plug that he had brought with him, and stepped back.

  I opened the legs of the compass, stuck the point of the centre leg into the plug and swept the outer leg round to make my first circle. It went just like that; I had no hesitation in deciding on the length of the radius; one action followed another, and as the compass leg swept round there followed it obediently through the darkness a white chalk line that closed itself into a circle as if the impulse had been already there waiting in the stone until, now summoned by the compass, it rose up to the surface.

  Keeping the same radius I made the overlapping circles that divided the circumference of my first circle into six parts and produced a flower of six petals luminous in the white chalk. Connecting the points of the petals made a hexagon. From the six points of the hexagon came the two interlocking triangles of the six-pointed star within the hexagon. Connecting the points of intersection divided the two interlocking triangles into twelve small triangles. Extending the lines of the hexagon made the two large interlocking triangles of a second six-pointed star that contained the hexagon containing the first six-pointed star. Lines balanced on the points of the outer star gave an outer hexagon in which eighteen equilateral triangles enclosed the inner hexagon. This completed the unit that would repeat itself in my tile pattern.

  ‘What is the name of this design?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Think on it,’ he said. ‘It will come to you.’

  We went back to Bembel Rudzuk’s house. He gave me paper and coloured inks and drawing instruments and I made a drawing in which I repeated the unit twelve times in the pattern in which the tiles would be arranged. Then I coloured it, making the large and small triangles of the large and small six-pointed stars alternately red and black. The triangles contiguous with the right-hand sides of the star-points (which, going round like the blades of a waterwheel, became left-hand sides then right-hand sides again) were coloured red or black in contrast to the star-points. All other triangles were tawny-coloured.

  My pattern was certainly a simple one, primitive even; I was surprised therefore to see how much action there was in it and how many different kinds of action there were: there were twisting serpents, there were shadowed pyramids, and when I tilted my head at the necessary angle the twelve small triangles of the inner stars became the deeply shadowed face of a red lion. When I tilted my head back to the vertical the triangles went blank, an empty mask looked at me instead of a lion. However one looked at the pattern there could be no doubt that the stillness had become motion but I hadn’t noticed at what point it had happened. Sometimes the larger triangles revolved around the inner stars, sometimes they took angular courses, pausing occasionally to group themselves in pyramids before continuing on their way. The pattern was altogether regular and predictable but from time to time there came to the eye enclaves of apparent disorder that in a moment disappeared; this had to do with the alternation of the red and the black; the periodicity of the colours was not synchronized with that of the shapes.

  ‘Can you tell me now what the name of this design is?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  I tilted my head, the shadowed lion looked at me; I tilted my head back, the triangles went blank. ‘The name of this design is Hidden Lion,’ I said. There leapt up in me a wild surge of terror and joy as virtuality, correctly named, leapt into actuality.

  11

  One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then must it with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one’s lot.

  Every morning when I woke up I had perforce to put on the identity of Eunuch. I had to make to myself a little oration that always began with,‘Yes, but …’. As the raw being of me drew back from the identity that was offered I would say, ‘Yes, but still there are things to be done, still there is life and world, still there is action required of me.’ On the morning after drawing Hidden Lion on the stone and on the paper I woke up and said, ‘Yes, but there is Hidden Lion,’ and just at that moment there came moving upon the morning air the call of the mu’addhin. It seemed to me that his voice, contiguous with infinity, was tracing on the air the pattern I had drawn upon the stone and upon the paper, and I moved forward eagerly into the day.

  The hum of the day arose from the city, the work of the day began: the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the voices of buying and selling. Through these streets of the action of every day we walked to our paved square of stillness that was waiting to become what it would become. The morning sun slanted its light across the paving-stones, the wooden rod in the centre with its morning shadow told the time. The chalk lines drawn by me in darkness were shocking in the light of morning, strange and surprising in their actuality, like a mountain.

  ‘Does it seem to you,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that this design was already waiting in the stone for the time when it would become visible?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think that all possible pa
tterns were in these stones even before they were cut and dressed and made into paving-stones.’

  We both stood looking at the chalk lines on the tawny stone. Having spoken the words we had just spoken we now found in our minds the next thought: the actions that would take place on those tiles that were not yet made, were those actions also waiting in the paving-stones that would then be under the tiles?

  Bembel Rudzuk measured the three different triangles that in their multiples made up Hidden Lion and wrote down his measurements on a sheet of paper which he put into his document case.

  ‘When can we start?’ I said.

  As I spoke the shadow of the wooden rod faded into the tawniness of the stone. We both looked up at the grey sky.

  ‘In the spring,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘when the rains are over.’

  I felt like a child deprived of a treat. I wanted something to happen immediately, I felt that such manhood as now remained to me could only live so long as there was action to nourish it. I stretched out my arms towards the corners of the stone square, trying to pull into myself the power that radiated from the centre and passed beyond the outer limits of the paving to infinity.

  A small boy walked on to the stone at a corner of the square. He looked sharp and hungry, like a fox. Like a fox, wary and watchful, he came slowly step by step from the corner towards the centre, walking as one walks on thin ice; perhaps he was counting. At a certain point he stopped, knelt on the stone, and began to draw on it, first with a bit of charcoal then with red ochre. What he drew was a triangle with a short base and long sides; it was irregularly divided into pointed red and black shapes, some triangular, some diamond-shaped, unevenly massed and drawn all skewed and crooked, like scales on a deformed serpent; from base to apex there ran up the middle, like spines, a line of black diamond shapes. Near the triangle he drew a lopsided circle made up of other black and red shapes, masses of black, slivers of red; it suggested the giant eye of an unimagined insect. From this eye emanated red and black arrows.

  I walked over to the boy. I had learned to say in Arabic, ‘What is this called?’ and now I pointed to his design and said this to him.

  He looked up at me attentively and shook his head.

  I said in Greek, ‘What is this called? What is it meant to be?’

  Again he shook his head, still looking at me attentively.

  ‘Did you understand me?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘Are you able to speak?’ I said.

  He shook his head. Had his speech been castrated? Had his tongue been cut out? I didn’t want to ask why he was unable to speak. Had he made a vow of silence?

  Still looking at me with that same serious attention he held out his left hand with the fingers outspread and curved as if holding a sphere, then he slowly rotated his wrist. Having done this he stood up and walked back as he had come: first to the corner of the paved square then away into the town.

  Then the grey sky opened and down came the rain. As it poured down and drenched me to the skin my heart leapt up to meet it, I didn’t know why. That rain, the prospect of which had only a moment before filled me with despair, was now bringing me ease and refreshment.

  Under that drenching rain we went to the brickyard. There was little to be seen but an expanse of mud leaping up in points, a little square mud-brick building with a dome, and two or three little square ziggurats that I took to be kilns. In the doorway of the mud-brick building lounged a little moon-faced man of fifty or so; his face was contemplative and serene.

  ‘This brickmaster,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this lord of the bricks, his name is Bab el-Burj, Tower Gate. He used to be a slave and his name was Efficiency.’

  ‘Why is his name now Tower Gate?’ I said. ‘I prefer to avoid people and boats with symbolic names if I can.’

  ‘There’s no symbolism in it that I know of,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘he simply liked the wordplay of Bab el-Tower, that’s all.’

  ‘No bricks,’ said Tower Gate when we stood before him. ‘As you see, I have no bricks whatever, I have only the emptiness left behind by a great many bricks. I am contemplating this emptiness.’

  ‘May we contemplate it as well?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘I don’t think there’s enough for the three of us,’ said Tower Gate. ‘Let me offer you rather some coffee.’

  The interior of the little mud-brick building was sumptuously carpeted and adorned with gorgeous hangings and cushions. Bembel Rudzuk and I sat down while a puddle formed around us and Tower Gate prepared coffee. He had no servant with him nor were there any workmen to be seen.

  ‘Strange, is it not,’ said Tower Gate, ‘that in the Quran there is no chapter called “The Kiln” or “The Oven”? It’s such a good metaphor, it lends itself so well to metaphysics.’

  ‘There’s the Jonas chapter,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘he went into the whale and came out of the whale as a brick goes into and comes out of the kiln.’

  ‘Jonas was half-baked,’ said Tower Gate; ‘he was still unfinished and without wisdom when the whale vomited him up. No, as a metaphor Jonas is not in a class with bricks.’ Tower Gate was given to making what might be called ‘Aha!’ and ‘Oho!’ gestures with his hands, and so he gestured now. ‘Neither is bread,’ he said (‘Oho!’ said his hands): ‘bread is baked and eaten and becomes excrement. Brick, which is bread of earth, bread of our origins, is also baked—like Abraham it is put into the fire and like him it emerges hard and enduring, ready to shelter the humble and the mighty both.’ (‘Aha!’ said his hands.) ‘It is eaten by time but only slowly, slowly through the alternating dawns and darks of this continuous demonstration that we call the world. No excrement.’

  ‘You have given me so much to think about that I cannot remember what I came to see you about,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘Bricks?’ said Tower Gate.

  ‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘You read my mind.’ He took out of his document case the drawing in which I had repeated the Hidden Lion pattern and showed it to Tower Gate.

  ‘Oho!’ said Tower Gate with his voice and his hands both. ‘The Willing Virgin!’

  ‘What willing virgin?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘This pattern that you show me,’ said Tower Gate, ‘it’s called “The Willing Virgin”.’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because the next time you look there’s something different about it,’ he said. ‘Of course that’s true of many patterns but this is the one with that name. Had you another name for it?’

  ‘Hidden Lion,’ I said. I wasn’t able not to say it although I had wanted the name to be known only to Bembel Rudzuk and me.

  ‘Aha!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Very good indeed! The lion is hidden in the willing virgin; after all who can say no to a lion?’

  All of us pondered this for several moments.

  ‘How big are the big triangles?’ said Tower Gate.

  ‘Nine and a half inches to a side,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  Tower Gate took my right hand, spread it out, and measured the span with an ivory ruler. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Nine and a half inches! Had you noticed that?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Your design?’ he said to me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re going to put this pattern on that empty square of yours?’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘It’s good that you come to me now,’ said Tower Gate. ‘I can think about it over the winter and I’ll tell you in the spring.’

  ‘Tell us what?’I said.

  ‘Whether I want to have anything to do with it,’ he said.

  ‘Why does it need so much thinking?’ I said.

  Tower Gate looked at me as if he thought that talking to me might be a waste of time. ‘You’re dealing with infinity,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘This pattern,’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this square of yours, it’
s not to be the floor of a building or the courtyard of a khan or anything like that, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it’s just to be itself, it’s not a part of something else.’

  Tower Gate tilted his head to one side and made with his mouth a sound expressive of doubt, misgiving, and deprecation. ‘That’s it, you see,’ he said. ‘That’s what gives me pause, that’s what’s putting the wind up me. Any other pattern I’ve seen has been ornamenting something, it’s been part of something, it has not in itself been something. Do you see what I mean? To incorporate a pattern of infinity in a house is not immodest, one’s eyes are in a sense averted from the nakedness of Thing-in-Itself. But here you’re doing something else altogether: you’re making this pattern with no other purpose than to look at Thing-in-Itself. This to me seems unlucky.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who has put this idea into my head if not Allah? And who has guided the hand of my friend if not Allah?’

  ‘What a question!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Do we not read in the Quran that whatever good happens to thee is from Allah but whatever evil happens to thee is from thy own soul?’

  ‘And from where does my soul come if not from Allah?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘What do we know? Who are we to say?’ said Tower Gate’s hands. With his voice he said nothing.

  As we walked home through the rain Bembel Rudzuk seemed to be carrying on an interior conversation with himself. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he nodded, sometimes he shrugged.