Pilgermann by Russell Hoban Page B

caught Jews. They sing it when they’re burning but it never puts out the fire.’
    ‘Do you remember when you smelled me out?’ I said to Bodwild. ‘Do you remember when you told the others to castrate me?’ I said to Konrad.
    ‘I
thought
it were you!’ said Konrad. ‘I
thought
I remembered your ugly Jew face looking up at me when we had you spread out on the ground. Well, you won’t be making no more little Jew brats, will you.’
    Bodwild came close to me, nuzzling and sniffing me. At her touch I felt the ghost of an erection spring up, I felt myself rocking like a chip on the torrent of lust that flowed through the first Sophia, the second Sophia, and this sow with her scarlet necklace of blood. Even now as I have these words in my mind I am confused by the presence among them of my lost God, my remembered Christ. How I am flooded with the humming and the roaring of great waters, with the music of the great currents in which rock and dance the Great Mother, the Father, the Son, the Virgin and the Lion! Unseen! Chosen I am, chosen are my people to be the thrall of the multitudinous, of the humming and roaring unseen manyness that whirled the Jews like a bull-roarer roundthe head of its manifestation as YHWH, made of them a sounding of the unseeable, the unknowable, the utterly ungraspable. How it raged, that idea, when it was YHWH and the Jews whored after stocks and stones and golden calves! How it would not tolerate any limitation of form, of image, of substance! How the everythingness of it commands every flash and glimmer of the mind, how all thoughts that ever were or ever will be run beneath its hand like sheep beneath the hand of the shepherd! Lion-sheep, star-sheep, ocean-sheep!
‘Now
I remember you!’ murmured Bodwild with her snout brushing my ear. ‘Now I remember the smell of your fear, it was dark and full, it was like music and strong drink to me. I didn’t smell it when I saw you in the inn yard just before you killed me; you had no fear then, I smelled nothing.’
    ‘So it was the fear you smelled when you hunted Jews,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t the Jewishness.’
    ‘It’s all the same,’ said Konrad. ‘When you’re hunting Jews and you smell fear that’ll be a Jew sure enough.’
    ‘If they don’t know you’re hunting them they won’t be afraid,’ I said.
    ‘They know that a time will come when they will be hunted,’ said Bodwild; ‘that was what I could always smell.’
    ‘It doesn’t seem to bother you any more that I’m a Jew,’ I said.
    ‘Everything seems different now that I’m dead,’ she said. ‘I feel as if I’m letting go of things. And I’ve told you I wanted to make love with that first Jew; I’ve wanted to make love with all of them but I’ve had to content myself with their dying. I’m just like anyone else, I take my pleasure where I can.’
    ‘Here we’re talking like old friends,’ I said, ‘and yet you must be full of rage because I killed you.’
    ‘Why should I be full of rage more than you?’ she said. ‘I sniffed you out, they castrated you and I ate your male parts. So you killed me, that’s reasonable. A little time one way or the other, it seems a big thing when you’re alive but when you’re dead you wonder what all the fuss was about. When I was alive we hunted you down; now we’re dead and you’re alive and already we’re friends. Very soon you’ll be dead also and you too will wonder why it ever mattered so much who was what and who did what.’
    ‘And you?’ I said to Konrad. ‘You were the master of this sow, it was you who used her to sniff out the Jews that you tortured and killed. What have you to say for yourself?’
    ‘What have I to say for myself?’ said Konrad. ‘You lousy Jew eunuch with your soft white hands, in your whole life you probably never done nothing heavier than count your money. You’re all usurers, the whole filthy lot of you, trying to get the whole world in your pocket. Knights going to