‘Rubbish,’ says Bruder Pförtner at my elbow. ‘Do you see that woman with the rake, the one that’s bending over? In his soul he’s lifting her skirt and he’s giving it to her, Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!’ Pförtner is grunting and he’s thrusting with his great bony pimmel as he thinks about what he thinks the peasant is thinking about.
‘That’s not in his soul,’ I say. ‘That’s in his mind.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ he says, ‘that man hasn’t got a mind, he’s perfectly healthy; minds are a sickness. All he’s got is a soul and his soul is in his scrotum.’
‘Filthy brute,’ I say. ‘Is that all you think of?’
‘It’s my whole purpose in life,’ he says. ‘I like to do it with thin girls best, you can get closer to them. Ah! I’m getting excited thinking about it!’ His monstrous member is stiff again, he strokes it lovingly.
‘Those children you’ve just done it with, they’ll die now, won’t they?’ I say.
‘My seed is in them,’ he says. ‘They’ll give birth when the death in them comes full term.’ He begins to sing and dance, stamping his bony feet and raising the dust on the dry road:
‘Golden, golden, ring the bell,
Go to Heaven, go to Hell,
Go on land and go on sea,
Go with Jesus, come with me.’
‘You’re so full of jokes and fun,’ I say. ‘What happened to your more dignified manifestation as Goodman Death riding slowly on your pale horse with the slowly ringing bell?’
‘That’s for strangers,’ he says. ‘You’re not a stranger now. I’ll see you at the inn.’ And he’s gone again.
Through the long day I walk my road to Jerusalem while the world on both sides of me makes hay, drinks beer, mends thatch, shoes horses, draws water, carries burdens, crows from its dunghill, grunts in its sty, grazes on its hillside. With evening I arrive at an inn, The Black Boar. In the inn yard are horses, carts, wagons, sledges, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks, dogs, peasants, pilgrims, and a sow wearing a red cross.
The sow is looking at me from under her blonde eyelashes. She turns her snout towards me and begins to grunt urgently, perhaps ecstatically. I say ecstatically because I note that she has been mounted by the ever-potent Bruder Pförtner who is himself grunting ardently as he makes love to her. ‘Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!’ grunts Bruder Pförtner. ‘Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh! Hoogh!’ grunts the sow. The sow is on one end of a rope; on the other end is that peasant who said, ‘Cut it off and make a Christian of him.’ He is looking at me narrowly as if trying to remember where he has seen me before.
I kneel beside the sow listening attentively to her grunts. ‘Quick!’ I say to the peasant, ‘Get a basin!’
‘What for?’ he says.
‘To catch the blood,’ I say as I cut the sow’s throat. Her blood spurts out and in the same moment with her dying squeal I hear Bruder Pförtner screaming as he comes. The peasant grabs a billhook but before he can take a step towards me Bruder Pförtner, his great bony pimmel still erect, has leapt upon him and is enjoying him. The peasant utters a choked cry, gives birth to his death immediately, and falls on his face on the ground.
I am left standing there with the knife of the second Sophia in my hand and in my mind the thought: Jerusalem is wherever I am when the end comes. The other peasants are looking from the dead man to me and back again. They make the sign one makes against the evil eye. The pilgrims as well are looking at the dead man and looking at me.
I look at them from one to the next. I look at them all. In the air in front of me I draw the two mingled triangles of a six-pointed star. I don’t know why I do this, it simply comes to me to do it. They look at what I have drawn in the air, I wait for them to take up their knives, billhooks, scythes, rakes, pitchforks and staves and kill me. No one moves, no one says a word.
‘You saw me listening to the sow,’ I say. ‘She was confessing to me, she was telling me her last will and testament. She was telling me of her many sins, how she repented of them; she had no wish to go on living. She leaves her corporeal being, her bacon, her ribs, her chops, her crackling, all of her sweet flesh and nourishing juices to you her countrymen and to you her fellow pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, that golden city that is at the same time in the Holy Land far away and in the heart of each of us. May Jesus Christ how savoury be with you and keep you from all harm.’
I let my eyes pass over all of them. I do not expect to leave this place alive. No one moves, no one says a word. Stepping very carefully, as if I am walking on crystal goblets, I go out of the inn yard and back to the road.
8
‘Jesus Christ how savoury’! Almost I said, ‘Jesus Christ our Saviour’, almost those words leapt out of my mouth. Strange, how eager those words are to be said, and stranger still how busy is the idea of being saved. As a boy I was told that there is a big book in which every deed is recorded; on the Day of Judgment one is shown this record, must examine it carefully and sign it. I was told that the righteous go to Gan Eden and the wicked to Gehinnom but even as a child I never believed it; even as a child I sensed that the arrangement of one place for the good souls and another place for the bad ones was simply not such a thing as would happen in a universe of sun and moon and stars, of night and day and the wheel of the seasons. God said a great many things in the time when it was manifesting itself as YHWH; some of them may well have been misunderstood or written down wrong. Or it may be that he put things in a very simple and vivid way so as not to require too much of the general understanding. Space and time have in them no Gan Eden and Gehinnom, no Heaven and Hell as what could be called places, and I cannot believe that anyone can now take seriously the idea of a soul that is simply righteous or wicked. Even the souls of such creatures as Torquemada and Hitler are not simply wicked although the weight of their actions is mostly in the gehinnom of things — I use the word as one might say right or left, up or down, plus or minus. It is in the rotation of eden and gehinnom that we feel the cosmic dance that is the motion of the universe, and in the play of these energies come punishment and reward. My punishment is that such evil as I have done has tuned me to the gehinnom frequency where I vibrate to the memories of all who have done evil; I share their being as well as their memories, and what I remember I remember as a doer remembers. My reward for being no worse than I am is that I remember no more than I do.
And what is this I that speaks now? Only a fiction, a name of convenience, a poste restante for whatever addresses itself to the persistence of memory and the force of idea: there is no Pilgermann distinct from anything else; why should there be? It is difficult for me now to understand why anyone should want a continuance of identity in a life after death. All those ancient mouldering kings entombed with their murdered wives, with their servants and soldiers and horses, with their weapons and chariots, their stone bread, their stony dregs of long-departed wine! Imagine the burial of a mouse with weapons, an ant with concubines! The arrogance, the greed of it! Even now the space all round me is thick with the fat globules of undissolved souls blinking and bleeping their greed for more! more! until the signals fade to silence and the lights go dark. More indeed! Not only human souls — the dying Earth itself moans like a stunned ox; the deeps of space are clamorous with its panting, its unwillingness to be absorbed into the allness from which it came. I have lost my humanity, I have been waves and particles too long to feel what humans feel. And yet, and yet … I remember with something like a pang how I wanted God to come back, how I wanted Jesus not to go away.