Pilgrim

  Sybil at last was eating her grapefruit, section by section, quite unconsciously counting them off as she ate…Twelve…Thirteen…Fourteen…

  Neither one looked at the other. They had fallen unaware into an image of domestic habit—a man and woman seated at the breakfast table, discussing a mutual friend’s involvement—or possible involvement—with someone of mystery. At any moment one of them would ask the other to pass the strawberry conserve—accept it without thanks and spoon it onto a plate.

  “About these journals,” Jung began again.

  “Yes? What?”

  “I hesitate to ask…” Jung put another bit of ham in his mouth and ate.

  “But you want to know if there’s any possibility of looking into them yourself.”

  “Exactly.”

  Jung, still watching her, attempted to place more food in his mouth—and failed.

  “You’ve dropped some ham in your lap.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the ham.”

  Jung located the wayward slice and placed it on his plate.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said.

  “Question?”

  “Concerning the journals, and the possibility of my seeing them. If I am to cure Mister Pilgrim…”

  “Nobody asked for a cure, Doctor Jung. I asked for your help. I asked you to help him—not to cure him. There is a difference. A very great difference.”

  “My job…” Jung began.

  “Your job is to do the bidding of those who have hired you.” Sybil picked up her cigarette case and lighter from the table and lighted another cigarette.

  Jung blinked and subsided. The smoke drifted.

  “Lady Quartermaine, you disappoint me. You are an extremely intelligent woman, and yet you seem to have no idea—no notion at all of what the practice of medicine requires of its practitioners. We are not free to turn our backs on the quest for cures. We must do everything in our power to achieve them—patient by patient by patient. That is why I am here. It is what my life—my whole life is about.”

  Sybil fixed him with a stony gaze through her dark glasses. The smoke from her cigarette curled up past her lips and caught a shaft of sunlight above her head. “Mister Pilgrim cannot be cured,” she said without emotion. “We none of us can be cured, Doctor Jung. Not of our lives.”

  Jung sat back and laid aside his utensils. He hardly dared look at her. In what she had said there was too much an echo of what he himself had said of the Countess Blavinskeya: one cannot be cured of the Moon.

  He looked down at the tablecloth and at his hands, which lay there, newly emptied.

  “Help him,” said Lady Quartermaine. “That is all I ask. Help him to survive the sickness of his life. No—not the sickness of it—the conditions under which he must live it. A way must be found to help him survive…survival, Doctor Jung. That is all I ask. One simple ray of hope. A reason—some reason to live.”

  Jung said: “if I could see these journals, Lady Quart ermaine…”

  He waited and said no more.

  Sybil, all at once, stood up. “Very well,” she said. She put out her cigarette and gathered her handbag and Kashmir scarf. Drawing the latter about her shoulders, she added: “I shall see what can be done.”

  Jung got out of his chair and nodded above her extended hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. “And good morning.”

  “Yes. Good morning. And good day.”

  With that, she left.

  Jung sat down and pushed his plate away. In the back of his mind was the thought that, in Pilgrim, he had gained not one but two in need of his attention. Pilgrim himself—and his shadow, Lady Quartermaine.

  As Jung went back to his coffee and lighted a cheroot, he made note of the fact that, laying down their napkins and rising from their chairs, the handsome young couple had abandoned their table near the window and were hurrying from the dining-room towards the lobby.

  Odd.

  Or so he thought. It was almost as if, having seen her depart, they were in pursuit of Lady Quartermaine.

  Thinking back, he remembered that Sybil, on first seeing the young couple, had turned away and immediately put on her dark glasses. Did she know them? Had she wanted to avoid recognition? Or was it all pure coincidence—meaning nothing?

  Jung knew he had a tendency to impose signs and signals on what he observed from time to time, and decided he was reading too much into their sudden departure. It was morning. Everyone was hurrying away to go about their business. That’s all it was. They were simply off to the snowfields, and not in pursuit of Lady Quartermaine at all.

  He, however, was. That he now knew for certain.

  2

  Jung could hardly breathe. The sudden advent of summer heat, for May, was quite extraordinary.

  Midnight, and the windows open, the undeniable smell of spring in the air. And the acrid smell of all the fires extinguished by his own hand. In the salon, bedroom and his study, stoves that had burned through the day had been doused with a watering can.

  Upstairs, Emma was sleeping like a child. Jung had left her in their bed at such an early hour that he could barely believe she was already asleep. But: I am tired, Carl Gustav, after all this evening’s chatter and excitement…

  There she lay, not quite smiling, in her flannel nightdress with its over-generous sleeves and its high-buttoned collar—hands and neck encircled in a siege of cloth, prisoners of her fear of the cold.

  Sunday, May 5th, 1912.

  Spring night—spring morning.

  Jung did not bother to adjust the dating in his notebook—open before him, propped on the desk in his study, where he sat on a cane-backed chair surrounded by papers, matches, bottles, glasses, half-empty boxes of cheroots and half-full ashtrays.

  At the centre of the debris—the scattered, barely civilized salvage of what was usually on his desk—there was an elegant, leatherbound volume of handwritten pages whose frontispiece displayed the squared-off imprimatur of the man whose name was PILGRIM.

  The journal was open at the page selected by Lady Quartermaine and marked with a purple ribbon—in keeping with the chosen palette of her wardrobe. The pages before him, in their leather covers, had been delivered late that afternoon. They had arrived in the silver Daimler, driven by Lady Quartermaine’s Swiss chauffeur, Otto. That his name was Otto, given his occupation, had delighted Sybil. He and the motor car are thus made one, she declared.

  Otto had nothing to say for himself other than the fact that Doctor Jung will recognize the contents of this envelope. No explanation was required.

  Inside the envelope, besides the journal, there had been a letter in Lady Quartermaine’s hand:

  Here is what I have read—and what you may find helpful. I trust you to understand it is both right and necessary that I have not offered volumes other than the one in hand. Access to the remainder may perhaps be discussed later. Under certain conditions. But I warn you here and now, I am unlikely to bend in the direction of generosity.

  You will see that I have marked with my card a passage I believe should be your first reading. This journal, like the others, records different aspects of my friend’s experience of life—his thoughts and his dreams as well as his day-to-day existence. It is the marked passage, however, that will answer some of your immediate questions. In it, you will find the identity of the young man you seek. I will go so far as to tell you his name: Angelo Gherardini. I will also tell you he was born in Florence in the late fifteenth century. To be exact, in 1479. Here, too, you will meet the artist who made young Angelo the subject of his sketches. This much I will tell you now, and nothing more.

  It is vital, I believe, that you discover the rest for yourself. Only then will you be able to comprehend what is written here at length. As I am sure you must be aware, there is all the difference in the world between comprehension and understanding. Merely to understand my friend would be to fail him entirely. Those who car
ry the burden of being understood can too easily be swept away into the corner and condemned to being filed under CASE COMPLETED. You will never have done with Pilgrim unless you begin with the fact that, at present, I am his only true believer. Unless you comprehend this dilemma at the outset, you will be of no use to him whatsoever.

  I have put my trust in you. That is all I have to offer. That, and whatever monies may be required to assure that your efforts in his behalf may be fulfilled to the utmost.

  I remain yours sincerely,

  Sybil Quartermaine

  And now the pages were spread before him.

  He began to read.

  3

  Florence, 1497. A year of Plague—a year of Famine.

  The great church—Santa Maria Novella—rises above the Piazza. There are fires at every corner and restless straggles of people moving between them. At one of the fires a fight has begun. Weapons—mostly sticks—and voices are raised in counterpoint, one and then the other. Someone has stolen something—food, most likely—and a horde of shabby figures has surrounded the thief—a woman.

  Others in the Piazza, also hearing the commotion, have begun to move towards the crowd, by now a mass of dancing arms and swaying clothes whose liquid movement might have been set to music.

  The thief breaks free and tries to cross to the middle of the Piazza. Children follow her, tearing at her skirts, but she throws them off and turns towards the open doors of the church. Sanctuary. If she can reach even the steps, she will be safe.

  But the woman is thin and weak—already exhausted—and a group of young men and boys quickly overtakes her, racing up the far side of the Piazza, followed by a pack of barking dogs and human cries of encouragement. Nearing the church itself, which still exudes its Mass for the Dead, the mob turns and forms a phalanx, depriving the woman of her destination.

  Her skirts by now have been torn and a thin, ragged shawl is her only defence against the cold. She draws this around her and stands irresolute, turning in each direction to gauge the avenues of escape. None is open to her.

  The crowd falls silent and the crackling fires all at once can be heard. The sweet boy-singing of the choir that seemed a moment ago to have no earthly connection to the human race rises beyond the doors.

  The woman gives a cry and raises her arms towards the sky. But there is no one there to save her—none of God’s angels—nothing of God Himself—only the sky beyond the smoke and the stars beyond the sky and the dark beyond the stars. Resigned, she drops to her knees and makes the sign of the cross. She prays and makes the sign again, after which she covers her face with her hands.

  At first, the crowd is silent—almost motionless—watching her the way a vigilant fighter watches his felled opponent to see if he will rise again.

  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?”