Pilgermann Read Online Free Page A

your name they kill the seed that gave you life.’
    Jesus said, ‘From me came the seed that gave me life.’

4
    There arises the question of the tax-collector. Drifting in my oriental-carpet patterns I see him high above me, sitting on his horse and looking down at me the bloody and castrated Jew, the mutilated and unmanned thing that has cuckolded him and entered the golden Jerusalem of his wife. Although he has never taken any notice of me he has seen me often enough in the town, he has me on his records, he knows me for a Jew. Famous as he is for his hatred and loathing of Jews, why has he saved my life? It is true that it is my
castrated
life that he has saved. Can there be some meaning, some message in this? Can he possibly know what has happened between his wife and me? Impossible. It happened only a few hours before he saw me, at a time when he was somewhere else altogether, there was no time for him to be told of it. But is it possible that he never left the town, that he became suspicious of the lurking Jew, pretended to go away but circled back unseen to see what happened? Possible. Or might he simply have instructed a servant to observe carefully and report to him in whatever place he has gone to? Even more possible. Well, which is it then—does he know or doesn’t he know? I have no idea. No, I don’t believe that he knows, I don’t think that he has been suspicious, I don’t think that it would ever occur to him as a possibility that a Jew should enter where he has entered.
    But wait, maybe he dreams of such a thing constantly; maybe he is utterly consumed by the thought of a Jew by night creeping in through the window to enjoy his wife, maybe it burns in him like a constant lamp, maybe it is the one thing wanting forhis happiness and peace. He sees me hanging about, sees the possibility, absents himself in hope. The wife opens the Jerusalem of her body to the lusting Jew, then as an unexpected treat the Jew is caught by the peasant soldiers of Christ, he is flung to the cobbles, stripped, castrated, he lies there shuddering in his blood and vomit while his penis and testicles are eaten by a sow. His fading lust renewed, the husband returns as a giant refreshed to the guilty and submissive wife whose only thought is to anticipate and satisfy his every demand. Is that how it is? God knows.
    Can there be, there must be, some reasonable explanation, but what can it be? Here is a Jew, one of the people this man hates, lying bloody on the cobblestones, his death only a moment away. Why should the tax-collector have any interest whatever in saving the life of this man? And why should he say either ‘Pray for me’ or ‘Kick me’?
    When I become exhausted with thinking about the tax-collector my mind, like an automaton that cannot be stopped, returns again and again to the castration itself: if only I had taken another way home, if only I had turned and run, if only I had fought harder. Those faces above me in that dawn, I have seen such faces centuries later in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Ah, the tax-collector again! I have seen his face, his particular face, in a particular painting by Bosch, a painting of Christ being crowned with thorns. The tax-collector is that man wearing the spiked red leather collar and a black astrakhan hat on which there is a sprig of oak leaves with an acorn. In his left hand he holds a staff, his right hand is on Christ’s right shoulder; almost comforting and consoling that hand seems: ‘Bear up, old fellow; be brave; it’ll all be over soon’ might be the message of that hand. Maybe that man with the tax-collector’s face is Pontius Pilate and he’s saying, ‘I find no fault in you but this is how it must be; I wish it could be otherwise.’ A troubled man, Pontius Pilate; he died by his own hand some years later—that same hand, probably, that rests on Christ’s shoulder in the painting. There it was on the end of his arm year after year: feeding him, writing