Pilgermann by Russell Hoban

blood from her mouth. She is confused by her presentcondition and shakes her head as she walks. ‘Little love!’ she says to her peasant master. ‘O my treasure!’ she says, pressing close to him, ‘What gives it here?’
    ‘He killed you, this one,’ says the peasant. ‘Smell him. Is he a Jew?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I can tell the difference any more.’ She turns to me. ‘Ay!’ she says, ‘how the life rushed out of me on to your blade, it was like an orgasm. Such a knifeman are you, such a thruster!’
    ‘Such a sow are you,’ I say. ‘Such a Jew-finder, such a leaver-behind of dead bodies.’
    ‘How sweet she is!’ This is Bruder Pförtner, he too is with us. ‘How I love her!’ He throws himself upon the dead sow, forcing her down on all fours and entering her zestfully.
    ‘Ah!’ cries the sow to Pförtner, ‘you were always the best, you were always the most man of them all!’
    ‘Get off her,’ says the peasant to Pförtner. ‘She’s mine.’
    ‘There’s enough of her for everybody,’ says Pförtner contentedly. ‘She’s inexhaustible. You must be patient and wait your turn.’ He reaches orgasm quickly, screams with joy as the sow squeals under him, then falls off her and lies snoring in the road behind us as we go on.
    ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I say to the sow. ‘Tell me your story.’
    ‘Ah!’ she says. ‘There’s so much to tell! There’s more to tell than even I myself know. You know of course that I’m descended from the Moon Goddess, from Diana herself; yes, everyone knows that. That’s why, you see, I’m so eternally desirable—I have that quality of virginity. Every time a man takes me it feels to him as if it’s my very first time; it makes him feel so outrageous, so naughty, so triumphantly and impeccably male. Why don’t you have me, you’ll see what I mean.’
    ‘Not just now,’ I said. ‘I want to hear more about you.’ Wondering at the same time whether a penis and testicles might have such a thing as a ghost, and whether a live eunuch might couple with a dead sow by means of the ghost of a penis. Never in my life had there been so many sexual invitations as now when I was castrated.
    ‘My sowhood,’ said the sow, ‘has not been like that of othersows. I am fecund, I am fertile, but I have never farrowed. I have not multiplied, have not increased myself; my essential virtue is intact, I have not gone beyond the original limits of myself. Only men have known me, I have never felt upon me the rough and bristly weight of a boar.’
    ‘How was that?’ I said, remembering suddenly that it was probably she who had eaten the lost parts of me. There she was mincing beside me on her little trotters, looking at me sidelong from under her blonde eyelashes. The trickle of blood from her mouth and the red line round her throat made her seem a creature enslaved by lust.
    ‘I seen to that,’ said the peasant. He was a big man, dirty, tattered, patched, and unshaven. In his face was a darkness other than the dirt and beard. The darkness of his eye sockets was such that his eyes could not be distinctly seen. I thought of all the years of his life in which he had looked at the world from out of that darkness. ‘I seen to that,’ he said. ‘I kept her safe. I made for her a harness with spikes on it. I knowed early on I weren’t never going to have no wife, I knowed I’d have to provide for myself the best I could. I seen her when she were only a little thing and I fancied her.’
    ‘Fancy!’ said the sow with a snort. ‘It was more than fancy, it was love; it was the same as what the high-born folk make songs about and play on lutes. Say it right out: it was love. Ah! what a little enchantress I was in those first days!’
    ‘But you became a huntress,’ I said. ‘You became a smeller-out of Jews.’
    ‘How that happened,’ said the peasant, ‘it were like this: it were three or four year back the spring crop failed and