To this has my late-night walking in the Keinjudenstrasse brought me. And yet each step of the way had nothing surprising in it. There was the garden, there was the ladder; up I climbed to that naked and incomparable Sophia and here I am.
This castration that I have suffered, has it a use, has it a value? What was I before I was castrated? I was already castrated, was I not, by mortality? All of us are castrated by mortality, we are unmanned, unwomanned, we are made nothing because all we have is this so little space of time with a blackness before and after it (that I speak out of this blackness as Pilgermann is only a borrowing; it is to unself and the namelessness of potential being that I must return when I have said what I have to say). How to live then in this little space in which we have a self and a name, this little space in which we are allowed to accumulate our tiny history of tiny days, this moment that is at once the first moment and the last moment, this moment that contains our universe and such space/time as is unwound in the working of it?
We don’t want to know about our mortal castration. We throw ourselves into the work of each day, the beating of hammers, the baking of bread; we find ourselves a spouse, we gather children around us to keep out the dark, we keep the Sabbath, pray to God, hope that all will be well. Ah, but there is more! Not for this alone was there smoke and fire and a quaking on the mountain while the voice of the horn sounded louder and louder. No, there is a mystery that even God cannot fathom, nor can he give the law of it on two stone tablets. He cannot speak what there are no words for; he needs divers to dive into it, he needs wrestlers to wrestle with it, singers to sing it, lovers to love it. He cannot deal with it alone, he must find helpers, and for this does he blind some and maim others. ‘Look,’ God has said to me, ‘what must I do to make you play the man? I have already castrated you with mortality but you pay no attention to it. So now let it be done with a knife, then let’s see what happens. Let’s see if you’ll grow yourself some new balls and jump into the mystery with me.’
‘But what’s it all about?’ I cry.
‘If I could tell you that it wouldn’t be a mystery,’ says God. ‘Let it be enough that I ask for your help.’ (God has of course not actually been speaking here because he is no longer manifesting himself as He; but God as It has put these words into my mind.)
This is then the value and the use of my castration; with this must I be content. If even God in his omniscience doesn’t know the answer then each of us must help however possible. And think how it would be if God could give the answer, if God could say, ‘All right, here it is: the answer is this and this and this and this; now you know the answer.’ Who would then have any respect for God, who would even have any interest in Him? ‘What!’ we should say, ‘Is this the best you can do? Is there to be no mystery then? Feh!’
‘I know what you mean,’ says the man in front of me in Turkish with an Italian accent. While thinking the thoughts that I have just been telling of I have been pacing my stretch of wall and I have come face to face with this remarkable Mordechai Salzedo of whom I have spoken once before: it was he who cited from Genesis the words, ‘Where he is’ when we met in the street by the synagogue before Rosh Hashanah.
This Salzedo has come to Antioch by a route even less direct than mine. He was born in Barbastro in Spain and as a child of seven he escaped from the town when it was sacked by the French in 1064. Those Christian armies dealt with the Muslims and Jews of Barbastro in the traditional way, and when his mother lay dead with her skirt over her head and his father with his guts wound round a post young Salzedo crept away quietly to try his luck elsewhere. He fell in with a company of wine merchants, Italian Jews who were on their way to Barcelona, went with them when they sailed back to La Spezia, was taken into the family of one of the partners, grew up to marry one of the daughters, became a partner in the house, lost his wife when their ship bound from Cagliari in Sardinia to Bizerta in Tunisia sank in a storm, clung to a wineskin and drifted for three days, was picked up by a Neapolitan business associate, decided to go into textiles, came to Antioch to sell wine and buy silks and cottons, fell into conversation with Bembel Rudzuk, was unable to disengage himself, and so set up in business and settled here.
‘What do you mean, you know what I mean?’ I say.
‘I noticed how you were shaking your head,’ he says, ‘and I said to myself: this man has in his mind the same thought that I have in mine.’
‘And what is that thought?’ I say.
‘That to be a Jew is to find yourself doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places,’ he says. ‘Here we are keeping watch against the Franks on a wall built by a Roman emperor around a city now held by Turks.’
‘If I’d kept watch from the wall of my town I might still have a pimmel,’ I say. It comes to me that if I hold my mind right a tremendous thought will illuminate it. This thought is a real treasure too. It is so cunningly and commodiously formed that it contains all other thoughts in a beautiful instantaneous order of total comprehension. I am trying so hard to hold my mind right that I get a crick in my neck. Come, wonderful thought, come! The ladder was presented, yes … Sophia was given, yes … my pimmel and my balls were taken away, yes … Bohemond is given … What? How? Ah! it’s gone, the wonderful thought is gone.
‘What’s going to happen?’ says Salzedo. He has maintained a respectful silence for what seems a very long time while I have been trying to hold my mind right.
‘The Franks will take Antioch,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s the kind of thing that happens. Everyone says that Karbuqa of Mosul will be here soon to relieve us but I doubt that he’ll get here soon enough.’
‘You can still leave Antioch,’ I say. ‘They haven’t got everything completely closed off yet.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother,’ says Salzedo. ‘I’ve already had quite a bit of extra time, and if God needs dead Jews as badly as he seems to I’m ready to go. And you?’
I think of the tax-collector, I think of my young death whom I have seen in the dawning on the roof of Bembel Rudzuk’s house. I think also of Bruder Pförtner and the others whom I’ve not yet seen here in Antioch. I think suddenly of Sophia (she is always in my mind like a continuo above which rise each day’s new thoughts of her) and for the first time there comes to me the question: is she alive or dead? Why should she be dead? She is not a Jewess, no one will rape her and kill her on the cobblestones of our town; she is safe there. But is she there? Until now I have never thought of her as being anywhere else, she has been in my mind a world that continues inviolate while I disappear into chaos; in my mind she has been as static as that other Sophia in Constantinople. Now the curtain of my sight sways before me, the earth seems to move sickeningly beneath me, and in a suddenly clear sky the stars wheel as if the world is spinning like a top. I look up and see, perhaps in the sky, perhaps in my mind, those three stars between the Virgin and the Lion, that Jewish gesture of the upflung hand: What, will you block the road for ever? The whole world is moving, it is walking, it is riding on horses, it is sailing in ships to Jerusalem. Why should she be still, be safe?