That’s no help to me,’ I said.
‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘It’s a great help to everyone.’
‘How?’ I said.
‘For one thing it gives you a whereness to be in,’ he said. ‘The patterns traversing one place intersect the patterns traversing another place, and by this webbing of pattern all places are connected. Wherever you are at this moment you are connected with all places where you have ever been, all places where you will ever be, and all places where you never have been and never will be.’
I held out my hand in front of me and looked at it. I thought of the patterns of veins and arteries, of muscles and bones beneath the skin. I thought of the patterns within the bone and muscle, I thought of the patterns contained in the sperm and the egg and the pattern of their combination, the thought of God, the word of flesh.
‘People also are connected,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘all people of every time and every place.’
I thought of Sophia, I thought of the way in which we could never again be connected. ‘You and I,’ I said, ‘how are we connected?’
‘We are brothers,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but how was it that we became brothers? You’ve said that you want to avail yourself of the action of my mind for a work you’ve had in your mind. Can you now tell me what this work is?’
‘I want you to devise a pattern,’ he said.
‘What kind of a pattern?’ I said.
‘With tiles,’ he said.
‘A pattern with tiles,’ I said. ‘For this have you come to the slave market in Tripoli to find yourself a castrated Jew.’
‘That’s not how it was,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I was there on my ordinary business, receiving a cargo and trading in the markets. Having done my business I came to the slave market as one does, strolling here and there. Prodigality was shouting, “Jerusalem pilgrims! Jerusalem pilgrims! Very lucky! Don’t miss this chance!”
‘I said to him, “How are Jerusalem pilgrims lucky?”
‘He said, “They’ll bring luck.”
‘I said, “How?”
‘He said, “Who am I to know such things?”
‘I said, “Why, then? Why do you say they’ll bring luck?”
‘He said, “Only think! Possessed by their Christ, driven by a mystical force, they swim rivers, they climb mountains, they strive with brigands who would take their lives, all to travel to Jerusalem! Buy a Jerusalem pilgrim and all this mystical force can be yours!”
‘I said, “Won’t it rather bring ill luck, to come like this between a pilgrim and his goal?”
‘“Not at all,” said Prodigality. “Obviously the Christ of these pilgrims has willed that they should become the slaves of the believers of the one true faith.”
‘Walking slowly and pondering these things,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘I found myself standing before you. It was then that there came to me the words that I spoke to you.’
I said, ‘But why do you want me to make a pattern with tiles?’
He said, ‘This idea came into my mind. An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God.’
‘Is that really so?’ I said. ‘The idea of murdering someone comes into the mind of the murderer; is this also an eye given by God for the seeing of God?’
‘The murderer too sees God,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and perhaps more than others. In any case this idea cannot possibly harm anyone as far as I can see. Can you see any harm in it?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I cannot.’
This conversation was taking place at the close of day, after the sunset prayer. Behind Bembel Rudzuk’s words I heard the falling water of the fountain, the cooing of doves. There came into my mind the twilight at Manzikert on the day of the battle in 1071, the year of my birth. This twilight I knew in my soul, I knew it to be Bruder Pförtner’s courtyard, the quiet place where plashes the fountain of his reverie. At the close of that August day at Manzikert the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes must have felt what he had become as the day waned: no longer a man but a line on a map, the ebbing tide-line of Byzantium, ebbing from the sharp edge of the present like blood from a knife. Andronicus and the rear line gone and the Turks all round like murderous stinging bees. Romanus must have smelt Bruder Pförtner’s breath, fresh and salty like the wind from the sea, he must have felt himself at that turning centre of all things where stillness revolves into motion and motion into stillness. Aiyee! must have cried the life in him as his blinding and his death moved towards him in that twilight at Manzikert. As Byzantium receded with him towards the allness of everything.
I found myself weeping for Romanus Diogenes and for that Jew who was made to be his executioner. In that twilight in the courtyard of Bembel Rudzuk in Antioch I thought also of Alexius Comnenus, now in 1096 Emperor of Byzantium. The reality of his empire presented itself to me all at once like a naked idiot: he was emperor of the passing of Byzantium, his empire was becoming moment by moment the illusion of, the non-reality of, the unpotentiality of Byzantium. At some point the naked idiot of this actuality became the naked truth of it and I saw, or perhaps I am only just now seeing, or perhaps I have not yet seen and I am at some time going to see that the names of things, of times, of places, of events, are useful for reference and they have some subjective meaning but as often as not they obscure the actuality of the thing they attempt to describe. Now as I think about it I see that we don’t always know what it is that we are putting a name to. We are, for example, clever enough to know that a year is a measure of passage, not permanence; we call the seasons spring, summer, autumn, and winter, knowing that they are continually passing one into the other. We are not surprised at this but when we give to seasons of another sort the names Rome, Byzantium, Islam, or Mongol Empire we are astonished to see that each one refuses to remain what it is.
‘Why are you weeping?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I am suffering from an attack of history,’ I said.
‘It will pass,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Where is this tile pattern to be done?’ I said.
‘I have bought a piece of land just inside the wall at the foot of Mount Silpius not far from the Tower of the Two Sisters,’ he said.
‘And you’re having a house built on it?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I have had it prepared as a plane for tiling. I have had the ground cleared and paved with stone so that it’s perfectly flat. It’s one hundred and twenty feet by one hundred and twenty feet.’
‘That’s fourteen thousand four hundred square feet of pattern,’ I said. ‘Why does it have to be so big?’
‘Ask rather why it’s no bigger,’ he said. ‘And the answer to that is that this was the biggest piece of land available within the wall. Ideally the plane would extend to the horizon on all sides.’