I was thinking about the bear, how good it would have been to have him with me, how I should have heard the padding of his feet and seen out of the corner of my eye his shaggy brown back rocking along beside me through the long miles. Big and strong he was too, a match for half a dozen men in a fight; one would feel easy anywhere with such a friend. Perhaps he might even have danced a little now and then for our supper and a night’s lodging. Pilgermann and his bear would have become famous on the pilgrim road.
There was a low chuckle in my ear and a hard hand clapped me on the shoulder in great good fellowship. It was that bony personage who had been riding his horse in the wood where the headless body of the tax-collector was hanging from the tree. This time he was on foot; he was dressed as a monk and like me he carried a pilgrim’s staff. It was very shadowy under his hood, one couldn’t properly say that there were eyes in the eyeholes of his skull-face but there was definitely a look fixed upon me; it was that peculiarly attentive sidelong look seen in self-portraits.
‘Am I a mirror in which you see yourself?’ I said.
‘Everybody is,’ he said. ‘I am so infinitely varied that I never tire of myself. Mortals looking in a mirror see only me but I see all the faces that ever were and I love myself in all of them.’
‘You think well of yourself!’ I said.
He hugged himself in a transport of self-delight. ‘When I say, “Sleep with me!” nobody says no,’ he said. ‘Kings and queens, I have them all, no inch of them is forbidden to me; nuns and popes, ah! There’s good loving! I am the world’s great lover, that’s a simple fact though I say it myself. Well, there’s no need for me to blow my own trumpet — you’ll see when you sleep with me.’
He kept turning his face to me as he spoke, and his breath did not reek of corruption as one might suppose: it was like the morning wind by the sea. ‘Call me Bruder Pförtner,’ he said, ‘it’s a name I fancy: Brother Gatekeeper. It has a kind of monastic humility but at the same time it goes with a swing.’
‘Bruder Pförtner,’ I said. I thought about the gates he kept.
‘You’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘No idea at all.’ He made a graceful gesture and there opened upon my vision the brilliant lucent purple-blue of the crystalline vibrations of Now. His arm swept back, the gate was closed, the day seemed dark. We went on a little way in silence. His face was looking straight ahead and I saw only his cowl moving companionably beside me. ‘You know why I was chuckling when I first appeared to you?’ he said.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘I was chuckling at your bear thoughts,’ he said. ‘Really, you’re no better than that other fellow, you know. Had the bear been your friend you’d not have been content to let him be, you’d have had him dancing for your supper, and you with all that money on you. That’s how people are: they’re trade-minded, they can’t let anything be simply what it is. It was I that knocked your arm down when you tried to stop that fellow from shooting the bear.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘That bear was finished,’ he said. ‘He had nothing left to live with. Did you understand what he was saying when he made his little speech?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘This is what he said to that man,’ said Bruder Pförtner: ‘“I never wanted to be anything but a friend to you. The only use I wanted to make of you was to be with you sometimes; nothing more than that, and I didn’t want any use to be made of me more than that. The first time I gave you honey it was just because honey was there, so we both had some of it, sharing like friends. But then you had to boast to everyone that you had a bear who found honey for you and I had to boast to everyone that I had a man who followed me to where the honey was. Then I showed you where the silence was and you thought I was God and I let you think it. We corrupted each other and so there had to be an end to it. Now I don’t think I can even find the silence for myself, I don’t think I even know how to be simply myself any more, and I want to go away and not be with anybody.” That’s what the bear said just before the man shot him.’
‘Poor fellow,’ I said.
‘People can’t let anything be,’ said Bruder Pförtner.said Bruder Pförtner. They can’t even let me be.’ even let me be.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘This very moment while we’re talking,’ he said, ‘you’re feeling more and more friendly towards me. Very soon you’ll be wanting to call me thou; next thing you’ll be wanting me to dance for your supper. Have no fear, I’ll dance for you; but not yet, not yet a little while. You mustn’t presume on this slight acquaintance just because I said you were going to sleep with me, you mustn’t become too familiar. Friendly, yes; but not too familiar.’ With that he disappeared.
I thought about Bruder Pförtner a little. I thought him visible again, trudging beside me companionably. ‘Why am I here?’ he said.
‘I just want you to know how things stand between us,’ I said. ‘I have no control over your actions but I am master of your appearances to me; my perception is the substance of your apparition, so you too must mind your manners if you want to go on being seen by me.’
Bruder Pförtner chuckled. Quite a remarkable sound, his chuckle: bony and brutish. ‘Anything you like,’ he said, and disappeared again. The manner of his chuckling made me unsure that I was master of his appearances to me; I thought him visible again but he did not appear, only his bony chuckle returned to jog along with me.
Ahead of me I heard the thin and straggling voices of children singing:
Christ Jesus sweet,
Guide thou our feet,
Our light in darkness be;
Make straight the way
By night, by day
That brings us, Lord, to thee.
The day, as I have said, was hot and still. Behind me in that heat and stillness were the dead bear and the crying man; farther back in the little dark wood in a shallow grave rotted the maggoty headless corpse of the tax-collector while the second Sophia prepared his head for the role of Pontius Pilate; in another grave lay the relic-gatherer whose life I had gathered up; and ahead of me the children sang with silvery voices in the dust of the dry road.
The humps and hollows of the landscape tend always towards the human: on this day the horizontal head of Christ was clearly visible in woods and fields and rocky outcrops. It was the head of the dead Christ brought down from the cross, his eyes closed, his passion complete. I sensed that it was important not to tilt my own head to the horizontal the better to see his face; while I had no wish to make with the vertical of my head and the horizontal of his a cross, neither could I in good conscience avoid it.
Nor mountains steep
Nor waters deep
Turn back the faithful soul;
Nor fire nor sword,
Christ Jesus Lord,
Jerusalem our goal.
So feeble, so wan those voices, like a candle flame in the sunlight. The dry and dusty road was ascending the brow of the horizontal head of Christ; the children would not be in sight until I reached the top of the hill. Long and long I toiled up the brow of Christ in the heat and the stillness of the day. When I reached the top I saw the children. They were moving very slowly in the glimmering heat and in the dust that rose up from their going. Peasant boys and girls they were, between twenty and thirty of them, the oldest of them twelve or thirteen but most of them younger, all of them thin and ragged, carrying their pitiful little bundles and singing thinly as they walked in the dry and dusty road.