Pilgermann

by Russell Hoban

  Firouz of course remained attentive to our activities. Seeing people give money to Bembel Rudzuk and seeing the money then mortared into the tiles he said to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘What is this commerce that you do with your geomancy? What do you give for this money that you take?’

  Bembel Rudzuk said, ‘It is not a commerce of my choosing but I don’t know how to stop it; to refuse this money that is offered gratefully to Allah would be to deny the giver a part in the pattern.’

  ‘Will you accept money from me as well?’ said Firouz.

  ‘For what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘What have you had from this pattern?’ He didn’t say the pattern’s name, we only used that between us. To everyone else it was simply ‘the pattern’.

  ‘One night I stood at the top of your tower,’ said Firouz, ‘and there came to me a thought of great profundity.’

  I didn’t like to think of Firouz at the top of our tower, I didn’t like to think of any thought that might have come to him there. Clearly Bembel Rudzuk didn’t want to take the money, he didn’t want to accept Firouz into the membership of Hidden Lion but he didn’t feel easy about saying no. ‘Your profound thought,’ he said to Firouz, ‘surely it would have come to you anywhere.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Firouz; ‘it came to me while I was contemplating the inwardness and outwardness of this particular pattern; I am convinced that it could not have come to me anywhere else. You have taken money from anyone who has offered it to you, I have seen you do it. Am I alone to be excluded from this multiplicity of people who have become unified with your pattern?’

  ‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk miserably, ‘I have no wish to exclude you.’

  Firouz took Bembel Rudzuk’s hand and pressed a piece of gold into it. ‘You see how I value this,’ he said. ‘To have my own tile in this great pattern! Tell me, what is the name of it?’

  ‘The name of what?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘The name of this pattern,’ said Firouz. ‘This design that is so mystical in the simplicity of its complexity, surely it has a name?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who am I to put a name to a pattern? Let each person who looks at it think of it with or without a name as Allah wills.’

  ‘Your humility is overwhelming,’ said Firouz. ‘It flattens me utterly. And yet, modest as you are, probably when you think of this pattern you think of it with a name.’

  Bembel Rudzuk shrugged. ‘Mostly I don’t think of it, I simply become absorbed in it thoughtlessly.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Firouz. ‘Thoughtless absorption! Yes, yes, I understand that absolutely: one simply becomes one with the everything, one is free for a time from the burden of one’s self. What bliss! And yet, and yet—returning to the world and its burdens one puts names to things. So it is that I have lost myself in this pattern, but returning to the world I look at this abstraction with which I have merged; I turn my head this way and that way, I see twisting serpents, moving pyramids; suddenly there leaps forward the face of a lion, then it is gone again. “Ah!” say I, “I have been with Hidden Lion!’” With that he did his regular heel-turn and walked turningly away, but stopped after only a few steps and turned back towards us. ‘I was forgetting to ask,’ he said, ‘what name of Allah you’ll be writing on the underside of my tile.’

  ‘The Watchful,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘He who observes all creatures, and every action is under His control.’

  ‘Why that one?’ said Firouz. ‘Why that particular one for me?’

  ‘It came into my mind when you asked, so I assume that it was put there by Allah,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘“Every action is under His control,”’ said Firouz. ‘How can that be, really? Think of the dreadful things that are done in this world every day.’

  ‘The child is under the control of the parents, is it not,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘yet must the child creep on its hands and knees before it can walk, and when it first walks it can go only a step or two before it falls.’

  ‘True, true,’ said Firouz. ‘That’s all we are: little children creeping on our hands and knees. The parent, however, doesn’t punish the child for falling, while Allah The Watchful will surely punish the sinner, will he not?’

  ‘The child who falls when learning to walk has not the choice,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but the sinner has.’

  ‘That what was the use of bringing the child into it at all?’ said Firouz. ‘It’s a useless analogy, it’s no help whatever.’

  ‘It’s a perfectly useful analogy,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘the consequence of not being able to walk is to fall and the consequence of not being able to maintain moral balance is also to fall. How could it be otherwise?’

  ‘To be in a fallen state,’ said Firouz, ‘that isn’t so dreadful; all sorts of fallen people ride about on good horses wearing fine clothes and who can tell the difference? I’m thinking about later, I’m thinking about the Fire where one burns and burns and is given molten brass to drink. Do you think that’s really how it is?’

  ‘I think that the Fire is in the soul of each of us,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘those of us consigned to the Fire burn every day and every night.’

  ‘You don’t burn though, do you?’ said Firouz. ‘You’re cool and easy, your soul dwells in the Garden of its self-delight.’

  ‘Where my soul dwells is between Allah and me, not between, you and me,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘You’re so comfortable!’ said Firouz. ‘You’re so easy, you’re like a cat that purrs before a dish of the milk of your own wisdom that is so delicious to you.’

  ‘I am as Allah made me,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and certainly I never asked you to drink from that dish.’

  ‘Always a clever answer,’ said Firouz. He turned to me. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘what name of Allah would you write on the tile?’

  ‘God for me is nameless,’ I said.

  ‘Ah!’ said Firouz. ‘Profundity! How could I have expected otherwise!’ Again he executed his heel-turn and I thought that we had perhaps seen the last of him for that day but no, here he was turning yet again to speak to us once more.

  ‘How many tiles will there be in Hidden Lion when it is complete?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘We haven’t calculated that.’

  ‘How many tiles are there in it so far?’ said Firouz.

  ‘We have not counted,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Allah is The Reckoner.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Firouz. ‘This is part of the milk of your wisdom, is it not. And yet if the Governor should impose a tax on paving-tiles then you with all your piety would have to do some reckoning.’

  The workmen were just then unloading a camel and two of them now approached the advancing edge of the pattern with a four-handled basket full of tiles. Firouz walked turningly towards them with his features composed in an official expression as if he were going to confiscate the tiles. The workmen stopped in their tracks and looked at him with fear and uncertainty.

  It was at that moment that the Governor Yaghi-Siyan appeared, riding a horse and flanked by six of his bodyguard. At the edge of the stone square he dismounted and approached us. When he came to the outermost edge of Hidden Lion he ostentatiously took off his shoes and walked barefoot across the tiles to us. Bembel Rudzuk and I took off our shoes as well and made him a little bow. Firouz whirled round to face the Governor and seeing us all barefoot hurried to take off his shoes. He flung out a hand to steady himself against the basket that the two workmen were still holding between them; perhaps he leant on it too heavily or perhaps the workmen, already nervous and fearful of him, were startled by his sudden movement and let go of the basket—in any case it fell with its heavy load of tiles and there was a howl of pain from Firouz who had somehow contrived to have his foot under it.

  The terrified workmen lifted the basket clear and while Firouz composed himself heroically I examined his foot and ascertained that the metatarsal bone was broken. A man was sent for bandages while I set the bone and bound
it temporarily with my kaffiya. As I was doing this Firouz said to me, ‘I know that this design has come from your hand and not that of Bembel Rudzuk. It is your Hidden Lion, Jew.’

  ‘This Hidden Lion belongs to no one person more than to any other,’ I said. ‘It is simply the lion that remains hidden until it reveals itself.’

  Yaghi-Siyan seemed unmoved by Firouz’s suffering. He looked down at him and said, ‘Tell me, Firouz, what have you done to this load of tiles that it should fall upon you like this, eh? Did it attack you or was it acting in self-defence? Were you perhaps threatening it? Or were you attempting to extort money from it?’

  Firouz drew back his lips from his teeth in a ghastly smile. ‘This was a didactic load of tiles,’ he said. ‘It was teaching us that what is clay can fall.’

  ‘Also,’ said Yaghi-Siyan, ‘it was teaching you to step carefully.’ He looked steadily at Firouz until Firouz looked away; no more was said between them.

  When I had properly bandaged Firouz’s foot I had the thought of further immobilizing the broken bone by stiffening the bandage with clay from the riverbank to enclose the foot in a mud-brick shell. This being done Firouz was set aside to dry in the sun.

  ‘Will you now write a name of Allah upon me?’ said Firouz to Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Will you fit me into your design?’

  ‘The tiles in this pattern,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘have not only been dried in the sun; they have also passed through the fire.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Firouz, but he said no more than that.

  Yaghi-Siyan was standing before Bembel Rudzuk with a kind of aggressive humility, impatient for him to leave off paying attention to Firouz. ‘I am told,’ he said, ‘that this tiling is done for its own sake alone.’

  ‘Your Excellency,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this that we do here is only a kind of foolishness, a kind of vanity. It is done to be looked at.’

  ‘I don’t think it is foolishness,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘I sense here the presence of Allah.’

  ‘That may well be due to your own virtue rather than to anything in the work itself,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘I think not,’ said Yaghi-Siyan. ‘I think that this is something out of the usual run, something extraordinary, even inspired. Most things are a kind of commerce, even most piety: one gives something, one gets something. But this is original, this is abstract; it simply becomes itself, asking nothing.’

  ‘To hear your Excellency say this of course gives me great pleasure,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.

  ‘You’re being polite,’ said Yaghi-Siyan; ‘you’re being careful, you’re being closed. Say something careless to me, something open, something abstract.’

  ‘This is my abstraction,’ said Bembel Rudzuk indicating Hidden Lion with a sweep of his arm. ‘This is my openness, my carelessness, my impoliteness.’

  ‘May I climb your tower?’ said Yaghi-Siyan.

  ‘This tower is of course yours, Excellency,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘It is my privilege to invite you to make use of it.’

  Yaghi-Siyan went to the tower and now I was able to see the profundity of Tower Gate’s design: towers are naturally dramatic structures that intensify the image of any figure that is to be seen looking down from them. Particularly do they do this when the figure disappears into a doorway at the bottom and then reappears looking over a parapet at the top. But here the stairs round the outside of the tower kept the figure unremarkable by making visible the effort of going from the bottom to the top; at the top the low parapet continued this objectivity. There were to be seen only a little tower, only an ordinary man.

  From this nameless tower did Yaghi-Siyan look down on Hidden Lion. Not a breath of air stirred his white burnous, the blue sky was utterly without a sign of anything. At just such an unheralded moment, I thought, might marvels appear to a watcher on a tower: the earth opening up; the kraken rising to the surface of the sea; the mountain lifting itself into the air over the city. It occurred to me that the Unseen might at any moment make use of any pair of eyes to see everything in an altogether different way, a way never thought of before. I felt the earth leap like a fish beneath me. An immeasurable time passed, perhaps it was only a moment, perhaps it is still continuing: the dark face of Yaghi-Siyan; the white burnous; the blue sky; the leaping earth.

  When Yaghi-Siyan came down from the tower he looked up to where he had stood, then he looked down at the tiles he was standing on. ‘From there I saw the motion,’ he said; ‘from here I see the stillness. What is it, what is it that moves us? We were the wild horsemen out of the east, Byzantium drew back before us. Now I stand here in this city with a wall around it but the inside is continually rushing to join the outside. Almost I am dizzy with it.’ He began to weep; weeping he bowed his head to the tiles. Then he stood up, walked back to his shoes, put them on, mounted his horse, and rode back to the Governor’s Palace.

  12

  Time, it seems, has passed. The triangular tiles of Hidden Lion have covered all of Bembel Rudzuk’s stone square, but the pattern has in its turn been so covered by people, by stalls, by booths and tents and awnings that the surge of its action is obscured by the action of every day; the twisting serpents, the shifting pyramids, the appearing and disappearing lions are mostly hidden.

  It happened by degrees. I have already told how men, women, and children walked on Hidden Lion in special ways, how they danced on it with particular things in mind, how they gave money which was put into the tiles. Without anyone’s being told the name became known; people used it in giving directions. Hidden Lion became a meeting-place, and in time a man asked permission to establish a coffee stand in the noon shadow of the tower at the centre. Permission was given, and the fragrance of coffee became part of the pattern. Other applicants were quick to follow, and stallholders appeared selling cooked food, melons and oranges, pots and pans, carpets, caged birds, jewelry and weapons. They occupied their spaces rent-free; since the completion of the tiling Bembel Rudzuk had accepted no more money.

  Hidden Lion became not only the liveliest of bazaars but also a good-luck place almost sacred to those who had experienced its power. There were lovers who had sworn to each other on a particular tile and by the appropriate names of Allah; there were children at whose birth money had been put into tiles inscribed will the names of Allah The Guide, The Preventer, The Enricher. Bargains were struck, partnerships founded, parents honoured and the dead remembered in the tiles of Hidden Lion.

  Every day has a dawn, every day a midnight: sometimes we mark by the one, sometimes by the other. Came the month of July and its days marched like a procession of penitents towards the Ninth of Av; then did I count the days by the nights. When there came the first anniversary of my night with Sophia I paced the roof of Bembel Rudzuk’s house feeling as if I were wrapped in the burning scroll of my love, my lust, my sin, my wisdom, my transcendent mortality. God was poor, I thought, to be immortal.

  Towards the middle of August came Ramadhan. The city was like an oven. The sounds of the street withdrew into the silence of exhaustion and the continual growling murmur of the Quran. From that time before dawn when a white thread could be distinguished from a black one the Muslims fasted until sunset, when the call of the mu’addhin like the darkness eased the city into night, prayer, food, and more reciting of the Quran.

  The twenty-seventh of Ramadhan, the Lailat al-Qadr, the Night of Power on which Muhammad received his first revelation, was to Bembel Rudzuk an especially important night. ‘The Quran tells us that this Night of Power is better than a thousand months,’ he said: ‘it is all time, it is no time, it is beyond the bounds of reckoning and measurement. It may be that even the idea of it puts the mind into a special state: always on this night I have a dream that is not like the dreams of other nights; always on this night comes a strong way-showing dream.’ His face looked young, it was so full of eagerness and excitement.

  As on many nights that summer we were sleeping on the roof. We stayed up late talking, and I looked for but could not find th
e Virgin and the Lion among the stars. ‘Only part of the Lion can be seen now,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. He tried to show me where it was but I could only recognize the Lion when together with the Virgin it made that gesture that had so imprinted itself on my mind.

  Towards dawn I was awakened by a thumping on the roof: it was Bembel Rudzuk dancing in his nightdress. His eyes were closed; he was dancing in his sleep. It was a shuffling, stamping dance in which there were many formal turnings of the body, many hieratic movements of the arms close to the body. It was an earthy dance, nothing of it moved up into the air; it was as if earth had formed itself into a man and the man was dancing himself back into the earth. Bembel Rudzuk danced more and more slowly and more and more deeply until the body that I saw before me stood motionless like the nymphal shell left behind by a dragonfly. But Bembel Rudzuk, unlike the dragonfly, seemed not to have flown away into the air but to have danced himself out of his body into the earth.

  The shell of Bembel Rudzuk opened its eyes and Bembel Rudzuk looked out of them.

  ‘Was this your dream?’ I said. ‘Were you dancing your dream?’

  ‘Earth,’ he said. ‘I was dancing earth.’ ‘Are you awake?’ I said.

  ‘Which is the dream?’ he said.

  After the Lailat al-Qadr I began to think of preparing myself a little for the days that were coming. Now when I say that I see in my mind those stubborn Frankish tents before the walls of Antioch, I see the arrogance of the Franks in the way they walk, in the way they sit their horses. At that time I had seen nothing of them, I only sensed their approach, and this awareness of them moving towards us mingled with the picture that was always in my mind of the sprawled bodies of the dead Jews of our town, most of whom had never in their lives held a sword in their hands. I did not care for that style of dying, and accordingly I asked Bembel Rudzuk to instruct me in horsemanship and the use of weapons.