‘History!’ I say, ‘I’m talking about human lives!’
‘And I’m talking about human deaths,’ says Bruder Pförtner. ‘Tonight is the fall of Antioch and I need all the Jews and Muslims I can lay my hands on. You have no more time for rushing about, this must be the whole world for you in the time you have left.’ With that he disappears. When I turn back to my young death he also is gone.
I dress and go to Bembel Rudzuk’s room but he isn’t there. I go to the roof: not there. Should I run to Yaghi-Siyan and tell him that I have been told by Bruder Pförtner that Antioch will fall to the Franks tonight? I think that he will believe me but he may well have my head cut off as his first act of preparation for the attack. Should I tell Firouz? Ever since Yaghi-Siyan gave me his sword he looks at me as if he wishes me dead; he would probably accuse me and Bruder Pförtner of being spies. To whom can I give this news? To whom can I say that Death has told me that Antioch will fall tonight? Meanwhile Sophia and our son are either on their way to Jerusalem or are already there. I must find them, I must get out of Antioch.
Seeking Bembel Rudzuk I go to Hidden Lion. It is desolate in the summer dawn. Here are gathered Bruder Pförtner and his fellows. No more do they present themselves as loutish creatures of lust; now they are serious, respectable, they wear breastplates, helmets, cloaks. They are grouped like generals around a huge map that Pförtner has spread out on the tiles. With a baton he points here and there, the others nod. People and movement flow around Hidden Lion as water flows around an island, no one takes any notice. These bony generals stand out with startling clarity in the foreground of the picture in my eyes, they are sharply defined by the space between them and the houses, domes, and minarets and by the particles of colour on the morning air that in the eye combine to form Mount Silpius tawny and empurpled. The mu’addhin has long since sounded the call to prayer and the prayers have risen in the dawnlight, in the freshness of those cool dim tones with which the world is first sketched in each day. As the sun ascends the morning shadow of the eastern slopes of Silpius withdraws from the city like a transparent purple robe trailed across a floor.
There on the mountain climb Justinian’s walls of the four hundred towers, each correctly casting its morning shadow; there on the mountain is the citadel with its tawny stone catching the light of the sun, its green-and-gold banner rippling in the morning breeze; there in the cleft of Silpius is the Bab el-Hadid, the Iron Gate where in the winter runs Onopniktes the donkey-drowner, roaring, bellowing, grinding its stones in its caverns under the city.
This, under the inescapable reality of Mount Silpius, is the first of Tammuz, the month named for the Babylonian god who is also the Sumerian Dumuzi. Down, down under the earth into the nether world goes he in the winter for he is the corn god. For him does the Goddess Inanna make her famous descent, anointing her eyes with the ointment ‘Let him come, let him come’:
From the ‘great above’ she set her mind toward the
‘great below’,
The goddess, from the ‘great above’ she set her mind
toward the ‘great below’.
The new moon of the risen Tammuz hangs in the morning sky but I feel intimations of the great descent, the dark and chill of winter in the light and heat of summer. Inside the earth the waiting darkness trembles. Standing on the barren tiles of Hidden Lion and looking at that always surprising mountain, that simple mountain that so shockingly asserts the actuality of its strangeness, that mountain that now for me is truly and finally the dreadful mountain of the Law, I curse the infirmity of purpose that has kept me here in Antioch. Turning and turning in my mind my thoughts of what to do next I turn physically, making myself dizzy on this repetition of twisting serpents, shifting pyramids, and occulting lions. There burns in my mind that vision more real than Mount Silpius, more real than anything else in the world, of the violated ivory nakedness of dead Sophia and the animal watchfulness of our little son making his way alone through the dogs, through the dead. I have spent my time playing with patterns and it has come to this. There leaps up in me hatred for Bembel Rudzuk.
I looked up at the tower and saw him standing at the top of it, a solitary dark figure against the morning sky. I looked away. How could I hate Bembel Rudzuk? Overcome by love and shame I went to him.
‘You look dreadful,’ he said.
‘This is the last day of my life,’ I said.
‘All the more reason for looking your best,’ he said. ‘This is the last day of my life as well. How do I look?’
‘Dreadful,’ I said. We embraced each other sadly.
‘Before we talk of other matters,’ he said, ‘I must tell you how it is that I am called Bembel Rudzuk.’
‘I don’t think I can take the time to listen to that now,’ I said, ‘I must.go to Jerusalem.’
‘Don’t you believe Bruder Pförtner when he tells you there’s no longer anywhere for you to go?’ he said.
‘How do you know he told me that?’ I said.
‘He spoke to me as well,’ he said.
‘As Bruder Pförtner or in some other manifestation?’ I said.
‘As Bruder Pförtner,’ he said. ‘I suppose he didn’t bother to change because we’re friends. Are you offended?’
‘No,’ I said but of course I was. I was ashamed to have such stupid feelings at such a time but there they were.
‘Pförtner likes to affect a playful manner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘but he means what he says. I don’t think he’ll let you leave Antioch, and if you try I think it will only make our last day more difficult.’
Our last day! I had come to Hidden Lion seeking Bembel Rudzuk’s counsel for my last day, mine alone. I didn’t want to have to think about anyone else’s last day, not even that of my dearest friend; and that his last day should now be the same day as mine seemed tactless of him, inconsiderate, even pushing. I no longer wanted to talk to Bembel Rudzuk but I wanted him to know how things stood with me. ‘Everything’s different now,’ I said: ‘I have travelled through space and time to the fall of Jerusalem. I have seen Sophia dead and violated, I have seen our son wandering alone among the dead and the dogs. All this has not yet happened and it must not happen, I must do something to prevent it.’
‘I too have seen them,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘You too have made a night journey to the fall of Jerusalem?’ I said. ‘You too have seen’ (I was going to say ‘my wife’) ‘Sophia and our son?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How can this be?’ I said.
‘How can what be?’ he said.
‘That you have seen them in the sack of Jerusalem,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If they were there to be raped and killed and orphaned then why not to be seen?’
I was so choked with rage that I could hardly find a voice to speak with. ‘What is this?’ I said. ‘Are you trying to teach me some kind of lesson?’
‘How could I?’ he said. ‘I am no wiser than you and I have nothing to teach. And being thus without wisdom I can’t help wondering why it is that all this time you have felt no need for action and now suddenly you want to change history.’
I thought I should go mad. Silpius continued to offer itself in its unaccountable simplicity to the eye; Bruder Pförtner and his generals continued to confer. Their pretensions disgusted me; I had seen them being themselves with those pilgrim children on the road. History! I felt myself impaled on history, my own and the world’s. The horror, the horror of cause and effect! The horror of the pitiless and implacable chain of one thing following another from the beginning of the world to the end of it with never a pause, never a year of Jubilee, never a clearing of the record! O God! to come so far and to end with so little. Now it was like that torture in which the victim, his belly opened up and one end of his entrails tied to a post, is made to walk round and round the post unwinding his guts. So walked my mind round its post while the images in it unwound, from the naked Sophia seen in the window to the naked Sophia dead and our son alone in the sack of Jerusalem. I wanted to smash every one of the tiles of Hidden Lion, every one of the bricks of the tower, I wanted Antioch and Onopniktes and Mount Silpius to disappear from my experience, to become unknown to me. I wanted to wind my time back into me, I wanted to be once more at the Eve of the Ninth of Av in the Christian year of 1096.1 would sin again but I would be fierce and strong in my sin, I would go armed and wary in my sin, I would kill for it, would claim Sophia against all odds, I would die fighting if necessary but I would die complete, not a eunuch. What a fool I had been, neither a sheep nor a goat, suffering the loss of goodness without the rewards of badness, Aiyee! But what if Sophia hadn’t wanted to be claimed by me? What if she wanted her Jew for one night only?