And yet, so are we made and such is the action of the everything in this one moment that is every moment, that another thought flickers over and under my first thought: what style God has! What a truly godlike extravagance, to burst out all at once with a universe in which everything is going at once and humankind is let run with nothing to stop it from doing anything at all. And to make this running-loose creature with a mind that knows what it is doing and a soul in which Hell burns always and Heaven is grasped so rarely and so briefly that it lives in us as a continual yearning for what can never be held on to, for what must always be lost — what invention!
The sacred is not to be imaged, there is no image to put to what God is nor is there any reason to want an image of such a thing. The evil that he has created is also in its inexplicable way sacred and not to be described beyond a certain point. Suddenly are these long-legged shore birds, these gleaners of the tideline, netted. Suddenly, with their dark faces, their speechless mouths, their uncircumcised members, their frozenness into such time as there will be until the end of time.
That is as far as I shall go with these words and the images they bring. What happened, happened.
Afterwards the bodies are taken away in wagons. There remains of course the blood on the tiles, on the red and black and tawny triangles of Hidden Lion. It is darker than the tawny, darker than the red, lighter than the black. The same people who stood looking on while the Christians were being beheaded now stand looking at the blood. The butcher and his helper from the shop near by bring a bucket of sand, two buckets of water, a scrubbing brush.
‘No,’ says Bembel Rudzuk. ‘This blood is not to be washed away. It is now part of the pattern and it is obviously the will of Allah that it should be so.’
‘Perhaps you don’t remember,’ says the butcher, ‘but one of the tiles with blood on it is mine. My money is mortared into it and it is inscribed with the name of Allah The Truth, He whose existence has no change.’
‘I remember,’ says Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but this blood is not going to be washed away.’ He stands there with his arms folded on his chest. The butcher and the butcher’s helper look at him attentively, then walk away with their bucket of sand, their two buckets of water, and their scrubbing brush.
In twos and threes the people drift away. Still Bembel Rudzuk stands there like a man of stone. He and I have read the Holy Scriptures together, and I know that those verses of Ezekiel that are now in my mind must be in his mind as welclass="underline"
Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD:
Woe to the bloody city, to the pot
whose filth is therein, and whose filth
is not gone out of it! bring it out
piece by piece; no lot is fallen upon it.
For her blood is in the midst of her;
she set it upon the bare rock;
she poured it not upon the ground,
to cover it with dust; that it might
cause fury to come up, that vengeance
might be taken, I have set her blood
upon the bare rock, that it should not
be covered. Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD:
Woe to the bloody city!
After a time Bembel Rudzuk ceases to stand like a stone man, he begins to walk the boundaries of the square, then moves in a little, walking in progressively smaller squares, moving a little closer to the centre each time, walking slowly in concentric squares as if threading a labyrinth. When he reaches the tower he walks hexagonally around it, then walks from there outwards in concentric squares again to the outer limits of Hidden Lion. The tax-collector with his eyes that are elsewhere stands watching quietly with me. The sky is growing pale. Bembel Rudzuk and I go home; the tax-collector remains on Hidden Lion.
Bembel Rudzuk and I went up to the roof of his house and waited there for the day to come. It was unseasonably warm, the air was close and heavy, the morning seemed to hold its breath in the dull grey before-dawn light. In this light was something of that grey and rainy dawn in which I first had come to Suwaydiyya with Bembel Rudzuk. The port with its topography of morning, its long shadows, its low buildings, its boats rocking to the morning slap of the water on their sides, furled sails still heavy with night, crews moving slowly on their decks, the smell of cooking-fires — all this had without seeming to move grown smoothly bigger in my eyes in that particular way in which things reveal themselves when approached by sea, opening to the approacher more and more detail, more and more imminence of what is to come. And always, thus approaching, one feels the new day, the new place, coming forward to read the face of the approacher. Always the held breath, the questioning look of the grey morning.
‘I no longer have any questions that require answers,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘It is not in our power to know very much nor to understand very much. Perhaps the most we can hope for is to learn to encounter what comes without pissing ourselves.’ He said nothing for a while, then he said, ‘The heads of the Christians were slung over the wall but not the bodies. Do you know why?’
I knew why. Sometimes when the wind was blowing from the Franks to us I had smelled the smoke of their cooking. I listened to the twittering of sparrows, the crowing of cocks, I saw in my mind the blood on the tiles of Hidden Lion.
‘“And all as a garment will become old,”’ said Bembel Rudzuk,’ “and as a mantle thou wilt roll up them, as a garment also they will be changed …” This is the earth and the heavens being spoken of, the work of God’s hands, they will grow old and be folded up like a garment. You and I have read this together in the Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews in the New Testament of the Christians, but for me it is no longer a matter of words; I can feel it in the air, I can feel the fabric of the world and its time collapsing upon itself like the folds of a tired garment.’ Bembel Rudzuk stood there solidly in the grey light with his arms folded, his moustaches as heroic as ever, his bearing as upright; but he looked like a deserted village.
‘In the Quran also one reads of this folding up,’ he said. ‘This too we have read together, in Sura 81, Takwir, The Folding Up:
‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful
1. When the sun
(With its spacious light)
Is folded up;
2. When the starsbra
Fall, losing their lustre;
3. When the mountains vanish
(Like a mirage);
4. When the she-camels Ten months with young,
Are left untended;
(‘And you must know,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘that the camel being the jewel of the Arab’s eye and his special pet, the she camel almost come to her time is most especially precious; so when we speak of a time when such animals will be neglected we are speaking of the collapse of all things, the true and actual final folding up.)
‘5. When the wild beasts
Are herded together
(In human habitations);
(‘In this extremity,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘the animals will no longer be afraid of humans, the animals and the humans will be folded up together at the end of all things.)
‘6. When the oceans
Boil over with a swell;
7. When the souls
Are sorted out
(Being joined, like with like);
(‘I no longer know what to think about this matter of the sorting of souls,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘Is there more than one kind of soul, do you think? Is the soul of Yaghi-Siyan different from your soul and my soul? Wait, hear more before we talk.)