As I watched them I heard again that bony and brutish chuckle: not only Bruder Pförtner but a whole company of him, a bony mob of him came trotting past me throwing off their monks’ robes and showing the tattered parchment of their skins stretched taut over their bones. All of them had great long bony members wagging erect before them so that it was difficult for them to run; all of them were giggling and chuckling as they stretched out their bony hands towards the children. When they reached the children they pushed them down on to their hands and knees in the dusty road, mounted them like dogs and coupled with them, grunting in their ardour, screaming in their orgasms. The children crept forward slowly on their hands and knees, singing as they were violated:
Christ Jesus mild,
Sweet Mary’s child
That hung upon the tree,
Thy cross we bear,
Thy death we share,
To rise again with thee.
When the skeletons had sated their lust they fell away from the children and lay sighing and snoring in the road with limbs outflung. The children, their hands and knees bloody, stood up again and trudged on.
Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful,
and hast forgotten God that formed thee.
This has come into my mind as I ascend the stone brow, the horizontal broken rock of Christ who is of the broken Rock of God, the Rock that was shattered by the unfaith of its people, the Rock that was drained of its strength by the lust for the seen and by the whoring after no-gods. I remember how our old Rabbi has said that only once in the Holy Scriptures is the unpronounceable tetragrammation of God written with a small yod, and it is here in Deuteronomy that it is written so to show God’s loss of strength from Yeshurun’s disrespect:
But Yeshurun grew fat, and kicked:
thou art grown fat, thou art become thick,
thou art covered with fatness;
then he forsook God who made him,
and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.
They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods,
with abominations they provoked him to anger.
They sacrificed to powerless spirits;
to gods whom they knew not,
to new gods that came newly up,
whom your fathers feared not.
Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful,
and hast forgotten God that formed thee.
What is called time passes and yet all time is present; one has only to turn one’s head to see the happening of all tilings: there I am going up the ladder while Satan smiles and God perhaps weeps. God being omnipotent has the power, even while apparently absent, to manifest the idea of a weeping God. But God as It, God without personification — can it truly be that this God can be lessened and made weak by any human action, by my disrespect, by my adultery? I don’t know, I am full of doubt and worry as I ascend the broken rock of the horizontal brow of Christ.
When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened — whatever that thing might be — that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.
And God, we think that because he is all-powerful the amount of available power is always the same; but it changes, it wavers, it shifts from the kinetic to the potential, varying with the action of the universe, the action of the world, the action of the individual. Earlier I have had the thought of many mysterious unseen fragile temples in which God used to dwell among us; now I perceive that these temples are each of us however unreliable, each of us for good or ill, each of us as the total of our actions and our being. It is because of such as I that God is absent and Christ horizontal; it is because of such as I that these children are raped by skeletons on the road to Jerusalem.
I hurry to catch up with the children, I kick snoring skeletons out of my way, I trample their mouldy bones and filthy parchment skins, I tread on their great phalli and their ponderous testicles. They don’t care, they grunt and sigh and roll over in their sleep.
The children with bloody hands and knees trudge on. They are so very thin, their arms and legs are like sticks, their cheeks are hollow, their eyes sunken, truly they seem Death’s own children as they sing:
Our faith our shield,
Thy word we wield
Of love and Christian pity.
The seas will part
That pure in heart
May reach Thy golden city.
‘Brother pilgrim!’ cry the children when they see me, ‘Brother pilgrim! Have you anything to eat?’ I give them all the food I have, sausage and bread; it isn’t very much for so many. A boy who seems to be the leader thanks me and divides it with great precision. There is no more than a mouthful for everyone, they chew it slowly and with great care.
‘Have you nothing more?’ says the boy. ‘You can have, you know, any one of us you like.’
‘Look at your bloody hands, your bloody knees!’ I cry. ‘Look where your clothes are torn! You’ve just now been had by skeletons!’
The boy looks at his hands, his knees. ‘It’s a rough road,’ he says. ‘One stumbles.’
‘Selling yourselves for food,’ I say, ‘is that how you’ve been making your way to Jerusalem?’
‘We beg, we steal, we sell what we have to sell,’ says the boy. ‘God wills it.’
‘How can God will such a thing as that?’ I say.
‘If God wills that we should be on the road to Jerusalem then He wills the rest of it as well,’ says the boy. ‘Dead people can’t walk to Jerusalem, and one must eat to live.’
‘Do you know where Jerusalem is?’ I say to him. ‘Do you know how far it is to Jerusalem?’
The boy turns his face towards me and looks at me for a moment without saying anything. Looking at me out of his eyes I see the lion-eyes of Christ, and I am frightened. I hold my head because I know that when he speaks his voice will be a woodwind voice that comes from inside my head and resonates there. ‘Jerusalem will be wherever we are when we come to the end.’
I look away, ashamed. I look down at the tawny dusty road. I feel as I did when as a child I was ill and did not go to my lessons. Lying in my bed I heard the voices of the other children as they passed my window. Over those voices I now hear the singing of these Christian children:
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.
I walk on quickly, the children are left behind, the voices fade away. The road continues on high ground; below me I see peasants making hay, their voices float up to me singing and talking. Beyond them is a wood, a hamlet, houses, a church, a village green, a craggy height, the river winding in the distance. Men and women pass me with baskets of fruit and vegetables on their heads. For them this road does not go to Jerusalem, it goes to farm and cottage, to ease at the day’s end, the evening meal and a good night’s sleep, nothing required the next day but the next day’s work in the same sure place. See the man on top of the hay-wain: for him at this moment the world is soft and fragrant. Perhaps not. Perhaps in his soul he walks barefoot on sharp stones.