Pilgrim (16 page)

Nothing happens. A dog barks. One—and then another.

The mob—still silent—watches the woman praying.
Five or six of them, feeling no further need for vengeance, shake their heads and drift back to their fires. For them, the event has concluded.

When it seems she is not to be attacked after all and might be allowed her freedom, the woman at last uncovers her face and reaches into her skirts, from which she draws a piece of bread.

As she begins to eat, she sinks back onto her heels, her vacant gaze on the stones upon which she kneels, and she begins to rock back and forth as if in some kind of ecstasy. Food. To be nourished—to be filled at last—though, of course, what she eats will come nowhere near to filling her. She reaches again into her skirts, where nothing is left but crumbs. Only crumbs—and these she lifts one by one—a final harvest—and places them in her mouth with all the rapture of a woman eating strawberries rolled in sugar and dipped in cream.

One man steps forward. Then another. Neither of them speaks.

More step forward. The woman, her fingers near her lips, looks up.

The choir inside the Church falls silent. There is no amen.

Another—then another and another man steps forward. Now two women. Now a child.

The sparseness of their clothing and their bone-thin bodies place them squarely in the same league of need as the woman they confront. As they increase in numbers, others turn away as before and wander, disconsolate, back to their fires.

Perhaps two hundred people now stand about ten metres from the crouching figure, which stares at them with its mouth open.

Someone raises a cudgel—thick and deadly, encrusted with the stumps of twigs and branches cut away with knives.

There is another shout. And then a cry—the inevitable cry of someone who knows she is going to die.

In the Piazza, the crowd, which up until then has been moving towards the kneeling woman with military precision, all at once breaks ranks. Those who only seconds before have been acting as one, suddenly become a horde of howling individuals. Each in his own or her own way runs forward as though to seize the privilege of striking the first blow. A contest—a race—with a prize to be won.

The woman’s shrieks cannot be distinguished from the triumphant wail of her killers. There is just one inhuman shout—and that is all. In minutes, it is over.

The people turn away, staring at the ground before them—some with their arms hanging down and others clasping themselves in what appears to be pain. They make their silent way to the fires, where those who have taken no part in the killing are waiting for their return.

In the centre of the Piazza, all that appears to remain of the woman are tokens of her clothing—severed sleeves, an undergarment, tumbled skirts, a bodice—all of them mangled, all of them bloodied, all of them empty. She has been rendered—so it seems—invisible.

From the fires, which once again are defined by huddles of human shapes, the dogs creep forward, and with ears laid back and tails between their legs, they make their way to the remnants of cloth, inspect them and turn away.

All but one, who lies upon the ground and sets its head on its paws and mourns, as all dogs do, without a sound.

Jung stopped reading.

A stranger had been killed before his eyes—a stranger in another time so distant from his own he could not have conjured it had Pilgrim not written it so vividly in his journal.

Journal. A daily record.
What Jung had read was in the present tense, as if…

As if Pilgrim himself had been there. Yet how could that be? How could that possibly be?

It couldn’t.
Jung was content with that.

The writing was so cramped and his eyes were so tired, his brain felt as if it might explode.

What was it he was reading?

He flipped the pages of the journal, wondering how much more he was capable of taking in at this hour. Who—including Pilgrim—could have chronicled events in the past with such immediacy? The fires—the woman’s clothing—the choirboys singing—the dogs—the children…Was all this the result of some monumental feat of research? Or was it nothing but a fiction—a novel in progress?

He rubbed his eyes, and was about to light another
cheroot when the door to his study slowly opened.

“Carl Gustav, it is three o’clock. Come to bed.”

Emma stood in the open doorway, her face apparently disembodied, floating in the darkness out of which she was emerging. The sound of her voice had been so unexpected—sepulchral, almost—that Jung snapped the covers of Pilgrim’s journal shut, as if she had caught him looking at his erotic Japanese prints. Behind him, locked beyond glass doors, there were several copies of these which he kept
for technical reasons only, Emmy—only for the sake of one’s profession, only in order to verify the actual possibilities and separate them from the excessive and dangerous sexual fantasies of one’s most deeply disturbed patients. And I…

“What are you reading there?”

“Nothing.”

“You can’t be sitting here reading
nothing
at three o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s just…”

“Yes?”

“It’s only…”

“Only what?” Emma’s attitude was brisk. She had come to return her husband to their bed—not to listen to obfuscations.

Jung smoothed the leather covers under his hand and poured himself another inch of brandy.

“You want some?” he said, waggling the bottle at his wife.

“Of course not.”

“Of course not. Yes. Well…”

“Well?”

“Emmy, you must not interfere in my work.”

“I never have and I never will. Good heavens, I do half your research for you. I check your manuscript pages and correct every one of your multiple errors. Do you call that
interference?”

“I do not make multiple errors.”

“You cannot spell, Carl Gustav. You cannot spell—you know nothing of punctuation and your penmanship is so appalling that if it weren’t for me not a soul on earth could decipher it. Not even you. Good heavens! I can’t begin to count the number of times you’ve come to me and said:
can you tell me what I have written here?
If this constitutes
interference
, I shall give it up at once and concentrate on learning how to cook!”

“You needn’t be angry. I only meant…”

“You only meant you don’t want to tell me what you’re up to.”

“I’m breaking the law.”

Emma came all the way into the room and sat in the patient’s chair facing her husband.

“Breaking the law?” she said, arranging the folds of her robe in her lap. “Breaking the law? In what way? How?”

“Sometimes it is necessary.”

“To break the law? How? Why?”

“Have some brandy. Here.” He held out his glass.

“I’m pregnant, Carl Gustav. I don’t need to drink and do not want to.”

She watched her husband pour another two inches.

“I am waiting,” she said. “How have you broken the
law? Are you going to be arrested? Are you going to go to jail?”

“I hope not.”

“So—what have you done?”

“I have broken a moral law, an ethical law which could—if the wrong people found out about it—place me in jeopardy from a professional point of view. I might be disciplined—I might even lose my position. I simply don’t know.”

“Carl Gustav, stop this walking around the corner and tell me what you have done.”

“This book…” he tapped it with his index finger—“…is the private journal of one of my patients.”

“So?”

“So—I am reading it without his permission.”

“Is he in any condition to give you his permission?”

“No.”

“So—what is your problem?”

Jung beamed. “Emmy,” he said, “I adore you. You have said precisely what I’d hoped you would say.”

“I see. So, when you’re arrested, it will be my fault.”

Now, at last, she laughed, stood up and drew her robe about her.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Come when you will—but don’t blame me if you’re out of sorts in the morning. You have an appointment at nine.”

“Who with?”

“I don’t know. I’m not your secretary—I’m only your wife. Ask Fräulein Unger. All I know is nine o’clock.”

“I’ll try not to be too long.”

“Do what you must. Good night.”

Emma moved to the doorway and turned.

“Carl Gustav,” she said, “a wife knows things no other person knows about a man—even the man himself. If I were Josef Furtwängler’s wife and found him reading someone else’s private papers, I would worry. That I admit. But I am not—thank God in heaven—Heidi Furtwängler. I am Emma Jung, and when I climb back under the covers, I am going to sleep like a baby.” She gave him a comical curtsey. “Good night, my dear one. One day, I trust you will tell me what all of this is about.”

“I will,” he promised. “And soon, because it will require some research from you. Good night.”

She turned away from him back into the darkness. Jung sat listening to her climbing the staircase and briefly closed his eyes.

I am a lucky man,
he thought, and reopened Pilgrim’s journal.

Paddling his fingers amongst the pages, attempting to find his place, he came upon a statement that stopped him cold. In parentheses, Pilgrim had suddenly broken off the narrative and written:
even now, as I write these memoirs, the scene is so well remembered I grip the pen as if to break it in two.

Memoirs…So well remembered.

Curious.

As if what Pilgrim had written was truly something he recalled rather than something conjured from a
reading of history. Something he must have felt he knew from firsthand experience.

But, of course, that was impossible. Impossible.

Or was it?

Jung reached for his own notebook, shoving Pilgrim’s aside. Finding a pen, he wrote:
the life of the psyche requires no space and no time…it works within its own frame
—
limitless. No constraints. No confining. None of the demands of reason.

Go on,
he decided.
Keep reading
. The question of voice would solve itself if he gave it a chance to speak unimpeded. Whether the voice was Pilgrim’s or someone else’s hardly mattered for now. The point was—the voice was there and clearly had its own integrity.

Jung sat forward.

It was four—four-fifteen in the morning.

He would have preferred to pause, reflect and ask more questions, but Pilgrim remained an enigma he could not begin to clarify until more pages had been turned.

The journal was open.

The reading resumed.

4

Now, a wind has risen—a wind that lifts and shifts the banners hung from every window and balcony in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella—scarlet banners displayed in honour of the Papal Nuncio whose mission
to silence Savonarola so recently failed. Some are already ragged, torn by the yearning hands of citizens dying of the cold—and what one sees are merely tatters waving
Goodbye! Go back to Rome!
like windblown men on the decks of a ship that is doomed to sink.

At every distance the bells of all the churches begin to ring. The mighty bell of the Duomo and the tenor bells of Santa Maria Novella—squalls of independent bells, as if the wind itself is shaking them. On all sides of the Piazza, the shrouded figures huddle before their fires, pulling whatever cover they can up over their ears.
Monday, Monday.
Tomorrow, the bells are telling them, is the final day of Carnival, Saint Matthew’s Day, when once we all rejoiced and sang together—feasted and drank and danced. But that tomorrow is now forbidden. By Savonarola’s edict.

Jung instinctively closed his eyes when they encountered this name. Savonarola had been both a saint and a monster, and in Jung’s own view, a good deal more the monster than the saint. That he was a fanatic, there could be no doubt—and fanatics always claim their victims.

He made a note:
Emma research: Savonarola.

Driven by accelerating updraughts, the fires leap higher against the walls, marking them with jagged shadows. The choir inside the church begins to sing louder, as if afraid.

…
Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat,

et cum Lazaro, quondam paupere

aeternam habeas requiem
.

…May the choir of Angels receive thee,

and with Lazarus, once poor

may thou have eternal rest.

A sudden surge of grey horses clatters on a diagonal across the Piazza, their riders nothing more than silhouettes with streaming hair and lashing arms.

And then…a man.

Jung tried to turn the page and failed. He wetted his finger and scrabbled it against the paper. At last he succeeded.

And then a man appeared. Bare-headed, so it seemed at first. Cloaked, with the cloak held tight against his waist. Tall. Substantial. Well-made—heavily clothed. A traveller, perhaps. A pilgrim. Who can tell?

He has entered the Piazza from the northeast, where it gives way to the Via Maronni. His shadow falls at first on the tattered banners above him and behind him, but as he moves forward his shadow runs around in front of him and seems to lay a path at his feet, on which he walks like a prince accustomed to ceremony, gazing without apparent concern at the scene around him.

From the periphery of fire, some dogs come forward, curious but unafraid—tentative but sensing their destination and making for it at a steady pace. The pilgrim—for so he still seems—stops and turns to watch the dogs as they approach him.

There are ten or twelve of them at least. They pause
for a moment in their advance, but they do not retreat.

One dog slowly begins to wag its tail.

Then it must be that the pilgrim speaks, for the dog comes forward at once and greets him by leaning in against him and gazing up into his firelit face.

The man bends down. He crouches. He puts out both his hands. The dogs push forward. A huntsman and his pack.