‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Think on it,’ he said. ‘It will come to you.’
We went back to Bembel Rudzuk’s house. He gave me paper and coloured inks and drawing instruments and I made a drawing in which I repeated the unit twelve times in the pattern in which the tiles would be arranged. Then I coloured it, making the large and small triangles of the large and small six-pointed stars alternately red and black. The triangles contiguous with the right-hand sides of the star-points (which, going round like the blades of a waterwheel, became left-hand sides then right-hand sides again) were coloured red or black in contrast to the star-points. All other triangles were tawny-coloured.
My pattern was certainly a simple one, primitive even; I was surprised therefore to see how much action there was in it and how many different kinds of action there were: there were twisting serpents, there were shadowed pyramids, and when I tilted my head at the necessary angle the twelve small triangles of the inner stars became the deeply shadowed face of a red lion. When I tilted my head back to the vertical the triangles went blank, an empty mask looked at me instead of a lion. However one looked at the pattern there could be no doubt that the stillness had become motion but I hadn’t noticed at what point it had happened. Sometimes the larger triangles revolved around the inner stars, sometimes they took angular courses, pausing occasionally to group themselves in pyramids before continuing on their way. The pattern was altogether regular and predictable but from time to time there came to the eye enclaves of apparent disorder that in a moment disappeared; this had to do with the alternation of the red and the black; the periodicity of the colours was not synchronized with that of the shapes.
‘Can you tell me now what the name of this design is?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
I tilted my head, the shadowed lion looked at me; I tilted my head back, the triangles went blank. ‘The name of this design is Hidden Lion,’ I said. There leapt up in me a wild surge of terror and joy as virtuality, correctly named, leapt into actuality.
11
One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then must it with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one’s lot.
Every morning when I woke up I had perforce to put on the identity of Eunuch. I had to make to myself a little oration that always began with,‘Yes, but …’. As the raw being of me drew back from the identity that was offered I would say, ‘Yes, but still there are things to be done, still there is life and world, still there is action required of me.’ On the morning after drawing Hidden Lion on the stone and on the paper I woke up and said, ‘Yes, but there is Hidden Lion,’ and just at that moment there came moving upon the morning air the call of the mu’addhin. It seemed to me that his voice, contiguous with infinity, was tracing on the air the pattern I had drawn upon the stone and upon the paper, and I moved forward eagerly into the day.
The hum of the day arose from the city, the work of the day began: the beating of hammers, the baking of bread, the voices of buying and selling. Through these streets of the action of every day we walked to our paved square of stillness that was waiting to become what it would become. The morning sun slanted its light across the paving-stones, the wooden rod in the centre with its morning shadow told the time. The chalk lines drawn by me in darkness were shocking in the light of morning, strange and surprising in their actuality, like a mountain.
‘Does it seem to you,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that this design was already waiting in the stone for the time when it would become visible?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think that all possible patterns were in these stones even before they were cut and dressed and made into paving-stones.’
We both stood looking at the chalk lines on the tawny stone. Having spoken the words we had just spoken we now found in our minds the next thought: the actions that would take place on those tiles that were not yet made, were those actions also waiting in the paving-stones that would then be under the tiles?
Bembel Rudzuk measured the three different triangles that in their multiples made up Hidden Lion and wrote down his measurements on a sheet of paper which he put into his document case.
‘When can we start?’ I said.
As I spoke the shadow of the wooden rod faded into the tawniness of the stone. We both looked up at the grey sky.
‘In the spring,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘when the rains are over.’
I felt like a child deprived of a treat. I wanted something to happen immediately, I felt that such manhood as now remained to me could only live so long as there was action to nourish it. I stretched out my arms towards the corners of the stone square, trying to pull into myself the power that radiated from the centre and passed beyond the outer limits of the paving to infinity.
A small boy walked on to the stone at a corner of the square. He looked sharp and hungry, like a fox. Like a fox, wary and watchful, he came slowly step by step from the corner towards the centre, walking as one walks on thin ice; perhaps he was counting. At a certain point he stopped, knelt on the stone, and began to draw on it, first with a bit of charcoal then with red ochre. What he drew was a triangle with a short base and long sides; it was irregularly divided into pointed red and black shapes, some triangular, some diamond-shaped, unevenly massed and drawn all skewed and crooked, like scales on a deformed serpent; from base to apex there ran up the middle, like spines, a line of black diamond shapes. Near the triangle he drew a lopsided circle made up of other black and red shapes, masses of black, slivers of red; it suggested the giant eye of an unimagined insect. From this eye emanated red and black arrows.
I walked over to the boy. I had learned to say in Arabic, ‘What is this called?’ and now I pointed to his design and said this to him.
He looked up at me attentively and shook his head.
I said in Greek, ‘What is this called? What is it meant to be?’
Again he shook his head, still looking at me attentively.
‘Did you understand me?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘Are you able to speak?’ I said.
He shook his head. Had his speech been castrated? Had his tongue been cut out? I didn’t want to ask why he was unable to speak. Had he made a vow of silence?
Still looking at me with that same serious attention he held out his left hand with the fingers outspread and curved as if holding a sphere, then he slowly rotated his wrist. Having done this he stood up and walked back as he had come: first to the corner of the paved square then away into the town.
Then the grey sky opened and down came the rain. As it poured down and drenched me to the skin my heart leapt up to meet it, I didn’t know why. That rain, the prospect of which had only a moment before filled me with despair, was now bringing me ease and refreshment.
Under that drenching rain we went to the brickyard. There was little to be seen but an expanse of mud leaping up in points, a little square mud-brick building with a dome, and two or three little square ziggurats that I took to be kilns. In the doorway of the mud-brick building lounged a little moon-faced man of fifty or so; his face was contemplative and serene.