Pilgrimage
By the time I got outside, the protest had turned into a party, with hugs and kisses and wine-filled paper cups for everyone who had taken part in the mighty deed. B’s supporters straggled into the night unmolested except for teasing catcalls and jeers. As I watched from across the street, I soon realized that the protesters were doing the same thing I was: keeping an eye on the stage-door alley beside the theater, waiting for B to emerge. After a few minutes a car pulled up—not a limo by any means, just a middle-aged Mercedes sedan. A second later a flying wedge cut through the crowd, muscled its passenger into the backseat, and stood guard as the sedan sped off to the right.
Having missed its chance for a last little coup d’éclat, the crowd quickly lost its buoyant mood and began to break up. Bottles were corked, cups were collected, and naturally everyone had to shake hands with everyone else before departing. While this was going on, the uniformed guard reappeared at the theater entrance to usher out one last patron and lock up behind him. The patron thanked the guard with a nod, flipped up the collar of his topcoat against the night air, then turned to his left and made his way through the crowd into the darkness beyond. He would have been easily recognized had anyone bothered to look. I waited until he had a head start of fifty meters or so, then followed.
Obviously I had no idea where he was leading—if he was leading at all. Less obviously I had no idea why I was following, except that I imagined I’d been invited. At first I thought it likely that the Mercedes would circle the block to pick him up, but I was mistaken. Then I thought it likely that he was headed for some nearby tavern or coffeehouse, but again I was mistaken. He walked on—and on and on—gradually leaving the downtown area of the city behind.
I began to have second and third thoughts about this adventure. If suddenly abandoned, I wouldn’t have an easy time finding my way back to the hotel. The buses were no longer running—or at least not here—and I hadn’t seen a cruising taxicab in half an hour. Even worse, from my point of view, we’d entered an area of the city that I supposed would be called light industrial. There were no apartment buildings, no shops, no cafes, no all-night drugstores with convenient telephones and possibly helpful clerks. This was the home of factories, machine shops, brickyards, and warehouses, inhabited at this hour only by night watchmen and guard dogs.
A reasonable question would be, Why didn’t I catch him up and ask where he was going? I wondered about that. Would that be the ordinary thing to do—or the extraordinary thing? The normal thing or the odd thing?
Thinking about it didn’t help, of course. The natural thing is always the unstudied thing, the unselfconscious thing. This particular thing was something that, if done at all, should have been done right away. What sense would it make to follow blindly for an hour, then rush up and demand to know where he was leading me? It was an absurd situation, which I—being grown-up, male, competent, etc., etc.—should somehow have handled in a different and better way (though even now I can’t say what way that might have been).
Looking up from my gloomy thoughts, I saw that B was entering a small, nondescript building just ahead. It looked like a leftover shed of some kind, sandwiched between a warehouse and a railroad yard. I hurried on, hoping this was B’s destination. I was startled and amused when I reached the door and found an artfully rough sign next to it reading LITTLE BOHEMIA.
* The text of this speech will be found in Chapter 26–The Boiling Frog.
Saturday, May 18 (cont.)
Little Bohemia!
When I opened the door and stepped inside, a laugh burst out of me like a bird startled from a tree. Little Bohemia was a tavern, but a tavern unlike any I’d ever seen, except perhaps in dreams or imagination. It might have been a set designer’s creation for a film biography of Amedeo Modigliani. It was low-ceilinged, full of cobwebs and smoke, and would have been pitch-dark except for a few candles stuck in the necks of wine bottles. The walls were thick with sketches, caricatures, and paintings, most so blackened by smoke that they were little more than post-impressionist smudges. Incongruously—yet somehow perfectly—a rainbow-lit jukebox near the door was hissing its way through an ancient, scratchy Piaf record, which had to be, could only be, and indeed was … “La Vie en Rose.” Spending a million, Disney couldn’t have made it better or more archetypal, though the dust and cobwebs would have been created from antiseptic plastic and the song would have been sung by a clone of Piaf herself, wearing a perfect reproduction of the Sparrow’s famous old sweater.
The clientele, however, weren’t en role, or at least not selfconsciously so. There were no berets, no Basque fisherman’s jerseys, no artistic goatees. These folks, murmuring at their tables or hunched over their chessboards, might have been anything—poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, artists, models—but who knows? Nowadays, public-relations flacks look like artists, artists look like truckers, and truckers look like off-duty soccer champions.
B was seated at a table at the back, and I gathered that he must be an old customer and one of settled habits, for a waitress was already in the act of serving him, not sixty seconds after his arrival. Catching sight of me, he summoned me with a nod to the chair at his right. As I approached, I heard him say to the waitress, “Theda, bring my friend one of these as well, won’t you? He’s had a long walk.” And then to me: “It’s a single-malt Scotch, Lagavulin sixteen-year-old, and will restore the dead to life, if administered within a reasonable amount of time.”
I sat down and looked, probably rather blankly, into his strange, gargoylelike face.
“Well, what did you think of my lecture?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, then added: “I’m not being coy. I’m still working on it.”
“You were at Der Bau.”
“That’s right.”
“But not at Stuttgart or before?”
“No.”
“That’s good. By chance or design, you’ve begun at the beginning of the cycle.”
“It was by chance,” I told him, and he smiled politely, as if it made no great difference.
“What’s your name, by the way?”
I told him, and Theda chose that moment to arrive with my drink, a dark amber liquid in an oversize shot glass. I took a sip and blinked in astonishment at its weighty, charged smokiness.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?”
I nodded, suddenly feeling oddly detached, like a page torn from one book and inserted in another. “And ‘B’?” I asked. “Why are you called B?”
He gave me a twisted smile. “Do you know—I’m not entirely sure! This was a name the crowds chose for me, in answer to some deep, unconscious perception. When the name stuck, I did some research, as much as is possible about something like that. If, in ancient times, you met a man or a woman branded with the letter A, you knew that their sin was …?”
“Adultery.”
“Of course. That wasn’t just Hawthorne’s invention for The Scarlet Letter, you know. If you met someone branded with the letter B, you knew that his sin was blasphemy.”
“And is that in fact your sin?”
“Oh yes. But I can’t believe the crowds chose the letter for that reason—or at least not deliberately.”
“Then why?”
He shrugged. “I simply don’t know.”
“May I ask your real name?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I no longer use it, except on hotel registers.”
“All right. Why did you signal me to follow you?”
He smiled in a new way, as if out of real pleasure. “Do you know the ancient Chinese novel Monkey? It’s the story of a scamp of a stone ape hatched as a sort of divine accident from a stone egg on a mountaintop. After living a carefree life for many years he suddenly became aware that there’s a great deal to learn that he knew nothing of, and he set off across the world to find a teacher. At last he came to a monastery ruled by a famous sage, who let him attend classes with the other novices while serving as a sort of chore
boy. One day after several years the master asked Monkey what sort of wisdom he was searching for. Monkey asked in turn what sorts were available, then proceeded to reject each one as it was described. The master became enraged, cracked Monkey three times over the head with his knuckle-rapper, and stomped off. The other pupils were furious, but Monkey wasn’t dismayed, for he understood the language of secret signs and knew that the master had ordered him to come to his quarters at the third watch. When he arrived, the sage commended Monkey for insisting on a wisdom beyond what others would accept and made a magical revelation so powerful that Monkey received Illumination on the spot.”
Teachings: public and secret
I gave B a minute to go on, and when he didn’t, I asked him if I was a monkey he’d selected for special instruction.
“Possibly,” he said, “but that isn’t why I told the story.”
Go on.
“Why did the sage have two sets of teachings, public and secret?”
“I don’t know.”
B lowered his chin to his chest and gave me an ironical “up-from-under” look. “Give it some thought,” he told me. “Play along with me.”
“Why did the sage have two sets of teachings? I’d say it was because he wouldn’t be much of a sage if he didn’t. The public teachings are the ones that everyone hears, because those are the ones that can be articulated. The secret teachings are the ones that cannot be articulated at all—because they don’t exist.”
B nodded thoughtfully. “A very good, modern answer. The answer of a cynic.”
“I don’t think of myself as a cynic.”
“But you’re quite certain there are no secret teachings.”
“Absolutely certain.”
“Jesus didn’t have any special nuggets for his disciples.”
“No.”
“Nor did Gautama Buddha or Muhammad for theirs.”
“No.”
“You may be right, of course, but this misses the point of my story.”
“Okay. Why did the sage have two different sets of teachings?”
“One was a set of teachings that are easy to disclose, the other a set of teachings that are very difficult to disclose. The first was the public set, of course—the set to which all the novices were exposed. The second was the secret set, the set that only exceptional students can aspire to—or accept.”
“In other words …?”
“In other words: Secret teachings aren’t ones that teachers keep to themselves. Secret teachings are ones that teachers have a hard time giving away.”
I shook my head. I damn well had to shake my head, of course. I’ve never seen it spelled out, but it’s implicit in every text that—aside from forbidden (and probably illusory) lore like witchcraft and necromancy—there are no relevant secrets. There are plenty of things we don’t know and will never know, but everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn’t the case, if Moses or Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad held something back for an inner circle, then revelation is incomplete—and by definition useless.
I said, “I’m not sure how this answers my original question. Why did you invite me here?”
“I invited you for the same reason the sage invited Monkey. I hope to make you take away some of the teachings I can never get to at the podium.”
“I don’t understand. Why can you ‘never get to them’ at the podium?”
My question seemed to defeat him. He sighed, collapsed in on himself, and looked around bleakly in a sort of pantomime of pedagogical despair. “I thought you understood what was going on here.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I did too.”
“Every time Jesus stood up to speak to a group, he was speaking to a thousand years of shared history, shared vision, and shared understanding. The people in his audiences were Jews, after all. They didn’t just speak the same language. Their thoughts had been shaped by the same scriptures, the same legends, the same worldview. He didn’t have to teach them who God was, who Abraham was, who Moses was. He didn’t have to explain concepts like prophet, devil, repentance, baptism, scripture, Sabbath, commandment, heaven, hell, and messiah. These were all commonplace notions in their culture. Whenever he spoke to them, he knew with absolute certainty that his listeners came to him prepared to understand what he had to say.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“Jesus didn’t have to lay a foundation every time he spoke. Others had done that for him through a hundred generations, literally from the time of Abraham. But I do have to do that—with every single audience I face. You’ve heard me in Munich and here in Radenau, but you haven’t heard what I have to teach. All you’ve heard so far is the foundation—and it’s far from finished.”
“But eventually …”
“Yes, I get there eventually, and that’s why crowds call me Blasphemer and Beast and Antichrist. But I never get to the end of what I have to teach—not in public.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no continuity among my listeners from one audience to the next. This means that, in each succeeding audience, fewer and fewer people have been with me from the beginning and more and more of them are getting lost. After five or six lectures it’s pointless to go on. The end is still out there, but I’ve no hope of reaching it with this audience—and even less hope of reaching it with the next audience. I have to go back and begin all over again, which is what I did in Munich.”
Then B nodded in my direction and said: “And I have to wait for the arrival of someone like you.”
I felt a pang of fear at these words, the very same pang I feel when I picture myself falling from a tall building.
The unmasking
We sipped our life-restoring drinks. We listened to Piaf and other singers of her era, all French or German. We inhaled vast quantities of secondhand smoke. After a few minutes I said, “That still doesn’t explain why you chose me in particular.”
B frowned and scratched vaguely at the corner of his right eye—a gesture I would soon get used to seeing. “This clearly troubles you,” he said at last, “and I’m trying to imagine why.” I opened my mouth to deny it, but he stopped me with a shake of his head. “You’re not a good liar, you know.”
I gawked at him.
“Not enough practice, I’d say.”
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
He shook his head again. “Don’t do that, Jared, you’re really terrible at it. Either lie with conviction or speak the truth.”
“You’re right,” I confessed. “I’m not a good liar and I don’t get enough practice. But, even so, what made you decide I was lying?”
“The very persistent trend of your questions—your insistence that my invitation needs to be explained. You’re obviously wondering how you managed to fool me.”
I wasn’t sure he was right about this, but I was too thick-witted—too clogged with smoke and booze—to think about it clearly.
Suddenly there was a third person sitting at our table. I took it in that way: first, that it was a person; second, that it was a woman; third, that it was a woman I’d seen before. It was the woman from Der Bau—the woman who had translated B’s talk into sign language, the woman in the rawhide jacket with the strange butterfly opened across the center of her face. The woman (I suddenly realized) who had exerted a powerful attraction on me from the moment I saw her, with her broad, athletic shoulders, her ranch-hand clothes, and her wild tawny hair.
She was talking to B—with her hands. He was “listening” intently. Suddenly a big smile swept across his face, and he looked at me … and laughed: “A priest!”
I said, “What?”
“You’re a priest?”
I looked at the woman and she met my gaze without expression, as if I were a lizard or a fish.
B said, “She found your breviary.”
I stared at him without comprehension until he added: “In your room at the hotel.” Even then it took me most of a minute to figure it out. He had invited me f
or a hike across Radenau so his assistant would have time to find my hotel, work out which room was mine, and go in. I was grateful she hadn’t found my diary; that travels with me.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt profoundly stupid and incompetent, like a kid who might pick Tiffany’s as a terrific place to make his debut as a shoplifter.
“Are you an assassin,” B asked, “or just a spy?”
The woman laughed—not sarcastically, it seemed to me, but with genuine amusement. I was surprised when she spoke—that she could speak.
“Not an assassin,” she said, looking at me now as if I were a cocker spaniel that someone had just mistaken for a pit bull.
“No, I’m sure you’re right,” B said. “Not an assassin. What then?”
It was almost funny. At that very moment Piaf started singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”—no, I don’t regret anything! I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
The next few minutes passed (as they say) as in a dream. Theda got paid. B and the woman stood up to leave and seemed surprised when I didn’t follow their example.
“Are you going to spend the night?” B asked.
“No.”
“Then come on, we’ll give you a ride back to your hotel.”
Feeling even more idiotic than before, I rode in the backseat of the Mercedes I’d seen earlier outside the theater. The woman drove.
“This is Shirin, by the way,” B told me.
I nodded mutely.
Fifteen minutes later we pulled up outside the hotel. I struggled out of the backseat and thanked them for the ride.