Pilgermann Read Online Free Page B

letters, caressing his wife, holding whatever there was in life for him to hold. Suddenly it lets go of everything and jumps up and kills him. For howmany years did that thought lurk in the hand? Always, perhaps. In this way are human hands made by God; they carry in them always a last mortal judgment. Perhaps it was to protect himself from that hand that Pilate wore such a spiked collar. Is this then a clue to the tax-collector’s strange behaviour towards me? Did some time, perhaps in the dead of night, his hand leap up and take him by the throat and say, ‘Jews also must live!’ Perhaps his hand said this on the very same night that my hand took hold of his naked wife! Only now, as these thoughts move among the waves and particles of me, do I perceive that every hand is the hand of God: hands doing good and hands doing evil, are not they all His (Its) work? Think of the constant action of all the hands of all the world, gathering and scattering, building and destroying and praying, holding on and letting go.
    So. And what of my hand, also a hand of God? Did my hand perhaps carry in it a judgment? Did my right hand and its fellow cover my ears and my eyes so that I should be in ignorance of what was happening in the world at the time I climbed that ladder? They did not; I knew that the Pope’s appeal had inspired peasants as well as knights to shed the blood of Jews and I knew that we in our town might at any time find ourselves in the path of trouble. Was I then vigilant on behalf of my fellow Jews and myself? Did I keep watch early and late, did I arm myself to defend the Scroll of the Law and God’s children in the land of their exile? No. The only weapon I took in hand was the one with which I forgot thee, O Jerusalem, and entered the strange Jerusalem of the tax-collector’s wife. Having done what I did in the great house in the Keinjudenstrasse did I then take myself in hand with prudence and with caution to make my way home? I did not; one hand pushed me from behind while the other pointed like a signpost to strange and unlucky streets where I would not have walked the day before; one hand showed the conquering hero the world that lay before him while the other patted him on the back in congratulation. And here I am: the waves and particles of a eunuch.
    I talk and I talk and words come out of me in an unending stream but I cannot say the plain truth: I have done wrong, O God. Forgive me for climbing that ladder. For God’s sake, Pilgermann, say it straight out: Forgive me, O God, for lustingafter Sophia, for loving her, for consummating that love and lust. Forgive me that I have sinned, and forgive me that if I had the cock and balls to do it with I’d do it again this minute. O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman. Now I see why there must be a tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden: it bears that fruit which cannot possibly be resisted; God did not make it resistible, it must be eaten so that a mystery will be perpetuated, the mystery of the gaining of loss. Before we eat of the fruit we have no knowledge of loss, we don’t know that there is anything to lose, nothing has any value; only when we are driven out into the world and the cherubim and the bright blade of a revolving sword stand between us and the forbidden garden, only then are we rich in loss, only then have we salt for the meat of life. Life has no value, means nothing until we have paid for it with the sin of disobedience; only after that original sin does one’s proper life begin. What if Adam and Eve hadn’t eaten of the fruit of the tree, what then? No Holy Scriptures, no story to tell. Who’d have wanted to know about them? They’d have stayed in their garden obedient and ignorant, bored to death with life and each other and tiresome in the sight