‘This brickmaster,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this lord of the bricks, his name is Bab el-Burj, Tower Gate. He used to be a slave and his name was Efficiency.’
‘Why is his name now Tower Gate?’ I said. ‘I prefer to avoid people and boats with symbolic names if I can.’
‘There’s no symbolism in it that I know of,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘he simply liked the wordplay of Bab el-Tower, that’s all.’
‘No bricks,’ said Tower Gate when we stood before him. ‘As you see, I have no bricks whatever, I have only the emptiness left behind by a great many bricks. I am contemplating this emptiness.’
‘May we contemplate it as well?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I don’t think there’s enough for the three of us,’ said Tower Gate. ‘Let me offer you rather some coffee.’
The interior of the little mud-brick building was sumptuously carpeted and adorned with gorgeous hangings and cushions. Bembel Rudzuk and I sat down while a puddle formed around us and Tower Gate prepared coffee. He had no servant with him nor were there any workmen to be seen.
‘Strange, is it not,’ said Tower Gate, ‘that in the Quran there is no chapter called “The Kiln” or “The Oven”? It’s such a good metaphor, it lends itself so well to metaphysics.’
‘There’s the Jonas chapter,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘he went into the whale and came out of the whale as a brick goes into and comes out of the kiln.’
‘Jonas was half-baked,’ said Tower Gate; ‘he was still unfinished and without wisdom when the whale vomited him up. No, as a metaphor Jonas is not in a class with bricks.’ Tower Gate was given to making what might be called ‘Aha!’ and ‘Oho!’ gestures with his hands, and so he gestured now. ‘Neither is bread,’ he said (‘Oho!’ said his hands): ‘bread is baked and eaten and becomes excrement. Brick, which is bread of earth, bread of our origins, is also baked — like Abraham it is put into the fire and like him it emerges hard and enduring, ready to shelter the humble and the mighty both.’ (‘Aha!’ said his hands.) ‘It is eaten by time but only slowly, slowly through the alternating dawns and darks of this continuous demonstration that we call the world. No excrement.’
‘You have given me so much to think about that I cannot remember what I came to see you about,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Bricks?’ said Tower Gate.
‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘You read my mind.’ He took out of his document case the drawing in which I had repeated the Hidden Lion pattern and showed it to Tower Gate.
‘Oho!’ said Tower Gate with his voice and his hands both. ‘The Willing Virgin!’
‘What willing virgin?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘This pattern that you show me,’ said Tower Gate, ‘it’s called “The Willing Virgin”.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Because the next time you look there’s something different about it,’ he said. ‘Of course that’s true of many patterns but this is the one with that name. Had you another name for it?’
‘Hidden Lion,’ I said. I wasn’t able not to say it although I had wanted the name to be known only to Bembel Rudzuk and me.
‘Aha!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Very good indeed! The lion is hidden in the willing virgin; after all who can say no to a lion?’
All of us pondered this for several moments.
‘How big are the big triangles?’ said Tower Gate.
‘Nine and a half inches to a side,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
Tower Gate took my right hand, spread it out, and measured the span with an ivory ruler. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Nine and a half inches! Had you noticed that?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Your design?’ he said to me.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re going to put this pattern on that empty square of yours?’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘It’s good that you come to me now,’ said Tower Gate. ‘I can think about it over the winter and I’ll tell you in the spring.’
‘Tell us what?’I said.
‘Whether I want to have anything to do with it,’ he said.
‘Why does it need so much thinking?’ I said.
Tower Gate looked at me as if he thought that talking to me might be a waste of time. ‘You’re dealing with infinity,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘This pattern,’ said Tower Gate to Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this square of yours, it’s not to be the floor of a building or the courtyard of a khan or anything like that, is it?’
‘No,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it’s just to be itself, it’s not a part of something else.’
Tower Gate tilted his head to one side and made with his mouth a sound expressive of doubt, misgiving, and deprecation. ‘That’s it, you see,’ he said. ‘That’s what gives me pause, that’s what’s putting the wind up me. Any other pattern I’ve seen has been ornamenting something, it’s been part of something, it has not in itself been something. Do you see what I mean? To incorporate a pattern of infinity in a house is not immodest, one’s eyes are in a sense averted from the nakedness of Thing-in-Itself. But here you’re doing something else altogether: you’re making this pattern with no other purpose than to look at Thing-in-Itself. This to me seems unlucky.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘who has put this idea into my head if not Allah? And who has guided the hand of my friend if not Allah?’
‘What a question!’ said Tower Gate. ‘Do we not read in the Quran that whatever good happens to thee is from Allah but whatever evil happens to thee is from thy own soul?’
‘And from where does my soul come if not from Allah?’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘What do we know? Who are we to say?’ said Tower Gate’s hands. With his voice he said nothing.
As we walked home through the rain Bembel Rudzuk seemed to be carrying on an interior conversation with himself. Sometimes he shook his head, sometimes he nodded, sometimes he shrugged.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘This matter of the tiles,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing simple about it — one can so easily go about it the wrong way. At first I had in mind to make them of sun-dried mud; I wanted nothing too permanent, I wanted clay from the river bank that would endure only its little season as artifact before it returned to itself. Then there came to me a dream: I was standing on Hidden Lion near the centre of it. The pattern was complete. At the centre of it stood a little tower and at the top of the tower stood a hooded figure who pointed with his finger to the tiles. They were fired and glazed. This hooded personage said nothing but in my mind were the words: “They have lasted this long because they have passed through the fire.”’
How strange it was to me, that rainy season through which passed the year 1096 into the year 1097. It was strange in the way in which it associated itself with a name and an image. Through the winter rains there echoed cavernously under the main street of Antioch a great rolling rush of waters in which could be heard the heavy sliding of earth and sand and gravel. This was the winter torrent that little by little was carrying Mount Silpius away into the river and the sea. Down through the cleft in Silpius ran the torrent, through the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate, then under the city it rumbled through its vaulted channel to the Orontes. Onopniktes was the name of this torrent: Onopniktes, the Donkey-Drowner. When I first heard that name a thrill of recognition ran through me, there appeared in my mind the dark and echoing caverns of that churning flood in which rolled over and over dead donkeys in the wild foam. Because of its name, because of the idea of those dead donkeys rolling in the racing flood, because of the idea of the mountain rushing particle by particle under the city to the river and the sea, Onopniktes became in my mind one with the rush of history and the rising of a darkness in the name of Christ.