The owner had the following to say: Eight days earlier, Gryphius-a man with sharp features, a nebulous gray beard, and a nondescript black suit-had rented a room above the bar.Finnegan(who generally put the room to a use that Trevira.n.u.s had no difficulty guessing) had named an exorbitant rent; Gryphius had unhesitatingly paid it. He al- most never left the room; he had both lunch and dinner there and hardly ever showed his face in the bar. That night he had come down to Finnegan"s office to make a call. A closed coupe had stopped in front of the tavern. The driver hadn"t left the driver"s seat; some of the customers recalled that he was wearing a bear mask. Two harlequin figures got out of the car; they were short, and no one could fail to notice that they were drunk. They burst into Finnegan"s office, party horns bleating, and threw their arms around Gryphius, who apparently recognized them but greeted them somewhatcoldly. They exchanged a few words in Yiddish-Gryphius in a low, guttural voice, the harlequins in a sort of falsetto-and then all went up to Gryphius" room. Fifteen minutes later the three men came down again, quite happy; Gryphius was staggering, and seemed to be as drunk as the others.
Tall and unsteady, his head apparently spinning, he was in the mid- dle, between the masked harlequins.
(One of the women in the bar recalled the yellow, red, and green lozenges.) Twice he stumbled; twice the harle- quins steadied him. The three men got into the coupe and disappeared in the direction of the nearby pier, with its rectangular water. But just as he stepped on the running board of the car, the last harlequin scrawled an ob- scene figure and a sentence on one of the blackboards in the entryway.
Trevira.n.u.s looked at the sentence, but it was almost predictable:
The last letter of the Name has been written.
Then he examined Gryphius-Ginsburg"s little room. On the floor, there was a brusque star, in blood; in the corners, the remains of cigarettes, Hun- garian; on a bureau, a book in Latin-Leusden"sPhilologus hebrogrcus(i739)-with several handwritten notes. Trevira.n.u.s looked at it indignantly, and sent forLonnrot. Lonnrotdid not take his hat off before plunging into the book, while the commissioner interrogated the contradictory witnesses to the possible kidnapping. At four they left. Out in the twistingrue deToulon, as they walked through the dawn"s dead streamers and confetti, Trevira.n.u.s said: "What if tonight"s story were a sham, a simulacrum?"
ErikLonnrotsmiled and in a grave voice read the commissioner a pas- sage (which had been underlined) from thePhilologus" thirty-third disserta- tion:DiesJudorumincipita solis occasu usque ad soils occasum diei sequentis."Which means," he added, " "The Jewish day begins at sundown and lasts until sundown of the following day." "
The other man made an attempt at irony."And is that the most valuable piece of information you"ve picked up tonight, then?"
"No. The most valuable piece of information is the wordGinsburgused."
The afternoon papers had not overlooked these periodic deaths and disappearances. The Crossand Sword contrasted them with the admirable discipline and order of the last Hermetic congress; ErnstPalastofThe Martyr denounced "the intolerable delays of a clandestine and n.i.g.g.ardlypogrom,which has taken three months to wipe out three Jews"; theYiddischeZeitungrejected the horrifying theory of an anti-Semitic conspiracy, "though many insightful spirits will hear of no other solution for the triple mystery"; the most famous gunman of the Southside, Dandy RedScharlach,swore that in his territory no crime such as that had ever taken place, and he accused Police Commissioner Franz Trevira.n.u.s of criminal negligence.
On March i, this same Trevira.n.u.s received an impressive-looking sealed envelope. He opened it; it contained a letter signed "Baruch Spinoza" and a detailed map of the city, clearly torn out of a Baedeker.
The letter pre- dicted that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime, be- cause the paint factory in the west, the tavern on therue deToulon, and theHotel duNordwere "the perfect points of a mystical, equilateral triangle"; red ink on the map demonstrated its regularity. Trevira.n.u.s read over that argument-by-geometry resignedly and then sent both letter and map toLonnrot"shouse,Lonnrotindisputably being a man who deserved this sort of claptrap.
ErikLonnrotstudied the map and letter. The three locations were in- deed equidistant. Symmetry in time (December 3, January 3, February 3); symmetry in s.p.a.ce, as well...Lonnrotsensed, abruptly, that he was on the brink of solving the riddle. A drawing-compa.s.s and a navigational compa.s.s completed that sudden intuition. He smiled, spoke the word Tetragramma-ton (a word he had recently acquired), and telephoned the commissioner.
"Thanks for that equilateral triangle you sent me last night. It was what I needed to solve the puzzle.
Tomorrow, Friday, the perpetrators will be in prison; we can relax."
"Then they"re not planning a fourth crime?"
"It"s precisely because theyare planning a fourth crime that we can re- lax,"Lonnrotsaid as he hung up.
An hour later, he was riding on a Southern Railway train toward the abandoned Villa Triste-le-Roy.
South of the city of my story flows a sluggish stream of muddy water, choked with refuse and thick with the runoff of tanneries. On the other side is a suburb filled with factories where, under the protection of a Barcelona gangster, gunmen prosper.Lonnrotsmiled to think that the most famous of these criminals- RedScharlach-would have given anything to know about his clandestine visit.Azevedohad been one of Scharlach"s gang;Lonnrotconsidered the remote possibility thatScharlach was...o...b.. the fourth victim, but then rejected it.... He had virtu- ally solved the problem; the mere circ.u.mstances, the reality (names, arrests, faces, the paperwork of trial and imprisonment), held very little interest forhim now. He wanted to go for a walk, he wanted a respite from the three months of sedentary investigation. He reflected that the explanation for the crimes lay in an anonymous triangle and a dusty Greek word. The mystery seemed so crystal clear to him now, he was embarra.s.sed to have spent a hundred days on it.
The train stopped at a silent loading platform.Lonnrotgot off. It was one of those deserted evenings that have the look of dawn. The air of the murky plains was wet and cold.Lonnrotbegan to walk cross-country. He saw dogs, he saw a van or lorry in a dead-end alleyway, he saw the horizon, he saw a silvery horse lapping at the rank water of a puddle. It was growing dark when he saw the rectangular belvedere of Villa Triste-le-Roy, which stood almost as high as the black eucalyptus trees that surrounded it. The thought occurred to him that one dawn and one sunset (an ancient glow in the east and another in the west) were all that separated him from the hour yearned for by the seekers of the Name.
A rusty fence defined the irregular perimeter of the villa"s grounds. The main gate was closed.Lonnrot,with no great expectation of finding a way in, walked all the way around. Back at the impregnable gate, he stuck his hand almost mechanically between the bars and came upon the latch. The creaking of the iron startled him. With laborious pa.s.sivity, the entire gate yielded.
Lonnrotmade his way forward through the eucalyptus trees, treading upon confused generations of stiff red leaves. Seen at closer quarters, the house belonging to the Villa Triste-le-Roy abounded in pointlesssymme- tries and obsessive repet.i.tions; a glacial Diana in a gloomy niche was echoed by a second Diana in a second niche; one balcony was reflected in another; double stairways opened into a double bal.u.s.trade. A two-faced Hermes threw a monstrous shadow.Lonnrotwalked all around the outside of the house as he had made the circuit of the villa"s grounds. He inspected everything; under the level of the terrace, he spotted a narrow shutter.
He pushed at it; two or three marble steps descended into a cellar.Lonnrot,who by now had a sense of the architect"s predilections, guessed that there would be another set of steps in the opposite wall. He found them, climbed them, raised his hands, and opened the trapdoor out.
A glowing light led him toward a window. This he also opened; a round yellow moon defined two leaf-clogged fountains in the dreary garden.Lonnrotexplored the house. Through foyers that opened onto dining rooms and on through galleries, he would emerge into identical courtyards- often the same courtyard. He climbed dusty stairs to circular antechambers;he would recede infinitely in the facing mirrored walls; he wearied of open- ing or half opening windows that revealed to him, outside, the same desolate garden from differing heights and differing angles-inside, the fur- nishings in yellowing covers, chandeliers swathed in muslin. A bedchamber stopped him; there, a single flower in a porcelain vase; at the first brush of his fingertips, the ancient petals crumbled. On the second floor, on the up- permost floor, the house seemed infinite yet still growing.The house isnot so large, he thought.It seems larger because of its dimness, its symmetry, its mirrors, its age, my unfamiliarity with it, and this solitude.
A stairway took him to the belvedere. The moonlight of the evening shone through the lozenges of the windows; they were yellow, red, and green. He was stopped by an astonished, dizzying recollection.
Two fierce, stocky men leaped upon him and disarmed him; another, quite tall, greeted him gravely: "You are so kind. You have saved us a night and a day."
It was RedScharlach.The men tiedLonnrot"shands.Lonnrotat last found his voice.
"Scharlach-youare looking for the secret Name?"
Scharlachstood there, impa.s.sive. He had not partic.i.p.ated in the brief struggle, and now moved only to put out his hand forLonnrot"srevolver. But then he spoke, andLonnrotheard in his voice a tired triumphance, a hatred as large as the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred.
"No," he said. "I am looking for something more fleeting and more per- ishable than that-I am looking for ErikLonnrot.Three years ago, in a gambling den on therue deToulon, you arrested my brother and saw that he was sent to prison. My men rescued me from the shoot-out in a coupe, but not before I"d received a policeman"s bullet in my gut. Nine days and nine nights I lay between life and death in this desolate symmetrical villa, consumed by fever, and that hateful two-faced Ja.n.u.s that looks toward the sunset and the dawn lent horror to my deliriums and my sleeplessness. I came to abominate my own body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces. An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim"s saying: All roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape- for all roads, even if they pretended to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the G.o.d that sees with two faces, and by all the G.o.ds of fever and of mirrors,to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compa.s.s, an eighth-century cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory....
"The first term of the series was given me quite by chance. With some friends of mine-among them DanielAzevedo-I had figured out a way to steal the tetrarch"s sapphires.Azevedo,however, double-crossed us; he got drunk on the money we had advanced him and pulled the job a day early. But then he got lost in that huge hotel, and sometime around two o"clock in the morning he burst into Yarmolinsky"s room. Yarmolinsky, who suffered from insomnia, was sitting at his typewriter typing. As coincidence would have it, he was making some notes, or writing an article perhaps, on the Name of G.o.d; he had just typed the wordsThe first letter of the Name has been written.Azevedotold him to keep quiet; Yarmolinsky put out his hand toward the bell that would wake everyone in thehotel;Azevedostabbed him once in the chest. The movement was almost reflexive; a half century of violence had taught him that the easiest and safest way is simply to kill.... Ten days later I learned from theYiddischeZeitungthat you were trying to find the key to Yarmolinsky"s death among Yarmolinsky"s writings. I readA History of the Hasidim; I learned that the reverent fear of speaking the Name of G.o.d had been the origin of the doctrine that that Name is om- nipotent and occult. I learned that some Hasidim, in the quest for that se- cret Name, had gone so far as to commit human sacrifice.... I realized that you would conjecture that the Hasidim had sacrificed the rabbi; I set about justifying that conjecture.
"MarceloYarmolinsky died on the night of December third; I chose the third of January for the second "sacrifice." Yarmolinsky died in the north; for the second "sacrifice," the death should take place in the west. DanielAzevedowas the necessary victim. He deserved to die; he was a man that acted on impulse and he was a traitor-if he were captured, he could de- stroy my plan. One of my men stabbed him; in order to link his body to the first one, I wroteThe second letter of the Name has been written across the rhombuses of the paint factory.
"The third "crime" was committed on the third of February. It was, as Trevira.n.u.s guessed, a mere sham, a simulacrum. I am Gryphius-Ginzberg-Ginsburg; I spent one interminable week (supplemented by a tissue-thin false beard) in that perverse cubicle on therue deToulon, until my friends kidnapped me.
Standing on the running board of the coupe, one of them scrawled on a pillar the words that you recall: The last letter of the Name hasbeen written.That sentence revealed that this was a series ofthree crimes. At least that was how the man in the street interpreted it-but I had repeatedly dropped clues so thatyou, thereasoning ErikLonnrot,would realize that there were actuallyfour. One sign in the north, two more in the east and west, demand a fourth sign in the south-after all, the Tetragrammaton, the Name of G.o.d, YHVH, consistsof four letters; the harlequins and the paint manufacturer"s emblem suggestfour terms. It was I who underlined that pa.s.sage in Leusden"s book. The pa.s.sage says that Jews compute the day from sunset to sunset; the pa.s.sage therefore gives one to understand that the deaths occurred on the fourth of each month. It was I who sent the equilat- eral triangle to Trevira.n.u.s. I knew you would add the missing point, the point that makes a perfect rhombus, the point that fixes the place where a precise death awaits you. I have done all this, ErikLonnrot,planned all this, in order to draw you to the solitudes of Triste-le-Roy."
Lonnrotavoided Scharlach"s eyes. He looked at the trees and the sky subdivided into murky red, green, and yellow rhombuses. He felt a chill, and an impersonal, almost anonymous sadness. The night was dark now; from the dusty garden there rose the pointless cry of a bird. For the last time,Lonnrotconsidered the problem of the symmetrical, periodic murders.
"There are three lines too many in your labyrinth," he said at last. "I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philoso- phers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well. When you hunt me down in another avatar of our lives,Scharlach,I suggest that you fake (or commit) one crime at A, a sec- ond crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilo- meters from A andBand halfway between them. Then wait for me at D, two kilometers from A and C, once again halfway between them. Kill me at D, as you are about to kill me at Triste-le-Roy."
"The next time I kill you,"Scharlachreplied, "I promise you the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless."
He stepped back a few steps. Then, very carefully, he fired.
1942.
The Secret Miracle
And G.o.d caused him to die for an hundred years, and then raised him to life. And G.o.d said, "How long hast thou waited?"
He said, "I have waited a day or part of a day."
Qur"an,2:261 On the night of March 14, 1939, in an apartment on Prague"s Zeltnerga.s.se, Jaromir Hladik, author of the unfinished tragedyThe Enemies, a book t.i.tledA Vindication of Eternity, and a study of Jakob Boehme"s indirect Jewish sources, dreamed of a long game of chess. The game was played not by two individuals, but by two ill.u.s.trious families; it had been started many cen- turies in the past. No one could say what the forgotten prize was to be, but it was rumored to be vast, perhaps even infinite. The chess pieces and the chessboard themselves were in a secret tower. Jaromir (in the dream) was the firstborn son of one of the contending families; the clocks chimed the hour of the inescapable game; the dreamer was running across the sand of a desert in the rain, but he could recall neither the figures nor the rules of chess. At that point, Hladik awoke. The din of the rain and the terrible clocks ceased. A rhythmic and unanimous sound, punctuated by the bark- ing of orders, rose from the Zeltnerga.s.se. It was sunrise, and the armored vanguard of the Third Reich was rolling into Prague.
On the nineteenth, the authorities received a report from an informer. That same day, toward dusk, Jaromir Hladik was arrested. He was led to a white, aseptic jail on the opposite bank of theMoldau.He was unable to re- fute even one of the Gestapo"s charges: His mother"s family"s name was Jaroslavski, he came of Jewish blood, his article on Boehme dealt with a Jewish subject, his was one of the accusing signatures appended to a protest against the Anschluss. In 1928, he had translated theSefer Yetsirah for Her- mannBarsdorfPublishers; that company"s effusive catalog had exaggerated (as commercial catalogs do) the translator"s renown; the catalog had been perused by Capt. Julius Rothe, one of the officers in whose hands his fate now lay. There is no one who outside his own area of knowledge is not credulous; two or three adjectives inFrakturwere enough to persuade Julius Rothe of Hladik"s preeminence, and therefore that he should be put to death-pour encourager les autres.The date was set for March 29, at 9:00a.m. That delay (whose importance the reader will soon discover) was caused by the administrative desire to work impersonally and deliberately, as vegetables do, or planets.
Hladik"s first emotion was simple terror. He reflected that he wouldn"t have quailed at being hanged, or decapitated, or having his throat slit, but being shot by a firing squad was unbearable. In vain he told himself a thou- sand times that the pure and universal act of dying was what ought to strike fear, not the concrete circ.u.mstances of it, and yet Hladik never wearied of picturing to himself those circ.u.mstances.
Absurdly, he tried to foresee every variation. He antic.i.p.ated the process endlessly, from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious discharge of the rifles. Long before the day that Julius Rothe had set, Hladik died hundreds of deaths-standing in courtyards whose shapes and angles ran the entire gamut of geometry, shot down by soldiers of changing faces and varying numbers who sometimes took aim at him from afar, sometimes from quite near. He faced his imaginary executions with true fear, perhaps with true courage.
Each enactment lasted several seconds; when the circle was closed, Hladik would return, unendingly, to the shivering eve of his death. Then it occurred to him that reality seldom coincides with the way we envision it beforehand; he inferred, with perverse logic, that to foresee any particular detail is in fact to prevent its happening. Trusting in that frail magic, he began to invent horrible details-sothat they would not occur; naturally he wound up fearing that those details might be prophetic. Miserable in the night, he tried to b.u.t.tress his courage somehow on the fleeting stuff of time. He knew that time was rushing toward the morning of March 29; he reasoned aloud:It is now the night of the twenty-second; so long as this night and six more last I am invulnerable, immortal. He mused that the nights he slept were deep, dim cisterns into which he could sink. Sometimes, impatiently, he yearned for the shots that would end his life once and for all, the blast that would redeem him, for good or ill, from his vain imaginings. On the twenty-eighth, as the last rays of the sun were glimmering on the high bars of his window, he was diverted from those ab- ject thoughts by the image of his play,The Enemies.
Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friends and many routines, the problematic pursuit of literature const.i.tuted the whole of his life; like everywriter, he measured other men"s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do. All the books he had sent to the press left him with complex regret. Into his ar- ticles on the work of Boehme, Ibn Ezra, and Fludd, he had poured mere diligence, application; into his translation of theSefer Yetsirah, oversight, weariness, and conjecture. He judgedA Vindication of Eternity to be less un- satisfactory, perhaps. Thefirst volume doc.u.ments the diverse eternities that mankind has invented, from Parmenides" static Being to Hinton"s modifi- able past; the second denies (with Francis Bradley) that all the events of the universe const.i.tute a temporal series. It argues that the number of human- kind"s possible experiences isnot infinite, and that a single "repet.i.tion" is sufficient to prove that time is a fallacy.... Unfortunately, no less fallacious are the arguments that prove that fallacy; Hladik was in the habit of ticking them off with a certain disdainful perplexity. He had also drafted a cycle of expressionist poems; these, to the poet"s confusion, appeared in a 1924 an- thology and there was never a subsequent anthology that didn"t inherit them. With his verse dramaThe Enemies, Hladik believed he could redeem himself from all that equivocal and languid past. (He admired verse in drama because it does not allow the spectators to forget unreality, which is a condition of art.) This play observed the unities of time, place, and action; it took place in Hradcany, in the library of BaronRomerstadt,on one of the last evenings of the nineteenth century. In Act I, Scene I, a stranger pays a visit toRomer- stadt.(A clock strikes seven, a vehemence of last sunlight exalts the window-panes, on a breeze float the ecstatic notes of a familiar Hungarian melody.) This visit is followed by others; the persons who come to importuneRomerstadtare strangers to him, though he has the uneasy sense that he has seen them before, perhaps in a dream. All fawn upon him, but it is clear- first to the play"s audience, then to the baron himself-that they are secret enemies, sworn to his destruction.Romerstadtmanages to check or fend off their complex intrigues; in the dialogue they allude to hisfiancee,JuliadeWeidenau, and to oneJaroslavKubin,who once importuned her with his love.Kubinhas now gone mad, and believes himself to beRomerstadt.... The dangers mount; by the end of the second act,Romerstadtfinds himself forced to kill one of the conspirators. Then the third and last act begins. Lit- tle by little, incoherences multiply; actors come back onstage who had ap- parently been discarded from the plot; for one instant, the man thatRomerstadtkilled returns. Someone points out that the hour has grown no later: the clock strikes seven; upon the high windowpanes the westernsunlight shimmers; the thrilling Hungarian melody floats upon the air. The first interlocutor comes onstage again and repeats the same words he spoke in Act I, Scene I. Without the least surprise or astonishment,Romerstadttalks with him; the audience realizes thatRomerstadtis the pitiableJaroslavKubin.The play has not taken place; it is the circular delirium thatKubinendlessly experiences and re-experiences.
Hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was ba.n.a.l or admirable, carefully plotted or accidental. In the design I have out- lined here, he had intuitively hit upon the best way of hiding his short- comings and giving full play to his strengths, the possibility of rescuing (al- beit symbolically) that which was fundamental to his life. He had finished the first act and one or another scene of the third; the metrical nature of the play allowed him to go over it continually, correcting the hexameters, with- out a ma.n.u.script. It occurred to him that he still had two acts to go, yet very soon he was to die. In the darkness he spoke with G.o.d.If, he prayed,Ido somehow exist, if I am not one of Thy repet.i.tions or errata, then I exist as the author o/The Enemies.In order to complete that play, which can justify me and justify Thee as well, I need one more year. Grant me those days, Thou who art the centuries and time itself. It was the last night, the most monstrous night, but ten minutes later sleep flooded Hladik like some dark ocean.
Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library.What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark gla.s.ses asked him.I"m looking for G.o.d, Hladik replied.
G.o.d, the librarian said, z"sin one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thou- sand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents" parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it. He removed his spec- tacles and Hladik saw his eyes, which were dead. A reader came in to return an atlas.This atlas is worthless, he said, and handed it to Hladik. Hladik opened it at random. He saw a map of India-a dizzying page. Suddenly certain, he touched one of the tiny letters. A voice that was everywhere spoke to him:The time for your labor has been granted. Here Hladik awoke.
He remembered that the dreams of men belong to G.o.d and that Mai-monides had written that the words of a dream, when they are clear and distinct and one cannot see who spoke them, are holy. Hladik puthis clothes on; two soldiers entered the cell and ordered him to follow them.
From inside his cell, Hladik had thought that when he emerged he would see a maze of galleries, stairways, and wings. Reality was not so rich; he and the soldiers made their way down a single iron staircase into a rearyard. Several soldiers-some with their uniforms unb.u.t.toned-were look- ing over a motorcycle, arguing about it. The sergeant looked at his watch; it was eight forty-four. They had to wait until nine. Hladik, feeling more in- significant than ill fortuned, sat down on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the soldiers" eyes avoided his own. To make the wait easier, the sergeant handed him a cigarette.
Hladik did not smoke; he accepted the cigarette out of courtesy, or out of humility. When he lighted it, he saw that his hands were trembling. The day clouded over; the soldiers were speaking in low voices, as though he were already dead. Vainly he tried to recall the woman that JuliadeWeidenau had symbolized....
The firing squad fell in, lined up straight. Hladik, standing against the prison wall, awaited the discharge.
Someone was afraid the wall would be spattered with blood; the prisoner was ordered to come forward a few steps. Absurdly, Hladik was reminded of the preliminary shufflings-about of pho- tographers. A heavy drop of rain grazed Hladik"s temple and rolled slowly down his cheek; the sergeant called out the final order.
The physical universe stopped.
The weapons converged upon Hladik, but the men who were to kill him were immobile. The sergeant"s arm seemed to freeze, eternal, in an in- conclusive gesture. On one of the paving stones of the yard, a bee cast a motionless shadow. As though in a painting, the wind had died. Hladik at- tempted a scream, a syllable, the twisting of a hand. He realized that he was paralyzed. He could hear not the slightest murmur of the halted world.Iam in h.e.l.l, he thought,Iam dead. ThenI am mad, he thought. And then, time has halted. Then he reflected that if that were true, his thoughts would have halted as well. He tried to test this conjecture: he repeated (without moving his lips) Virgil"s mysterious fourth eclogue. He imagined that the now-remote soldiers must be as disturbed by this as he was; he wished he could communicate with them. He was surprised and puzzled to feel neither the slightest weariness nor any faintness from his long immobility. After an in- determinate time, he slept. When he awoke, the world was still motionless and m.u.f.fled. The drop of water still hung on his cheek; on the yard, there still hung the shadow of the bee; in the air the smoke from the cigarette he"d smoked had never wafted away. Another of those "days" pa.s.sed before Hladik understood.
He had asked G.o.d for an entire year in which to finish his work; G.o.d in His omnipotence had granted him a year. G.o.d had performed for him a se- cret miracle: the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, butin Hladik"s mind a year would pa.s.s between the order to fire and the dis- charge of the rifles. From perplexity Hladik moved to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden grat.i.tude.
He had no doc.u.ment but his memory; the fact that he had to learn each hexameter as he added it imposed upon him a providential strictness, unsus- pected by those who essay and then forget vague provisional paragraphs. He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for G.o.d, whose literary prefer- ences were largely unknown to him. Painstakingly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth. He redid the third act twice. He struck out one and another overly obvious symbol- the repeated chimings of the clock, the music. No detail was irksome to him. He cut, condensed, ex- panded; in some cases he decided the original version should stand. He came to love the courtyard, the prison; one of the faces that stood before him altered his conception of Romerstadt"s character. He discovered that the hard-won cacophonies that were so alarming to Flaubert are merevisual superst.i.tions -weaknesses and irritations of the written, not the sounded, word.... He completed his play; only a single epithet was left to be decided upon now. He found it; the drop of water rolled down his cheek.
He began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him.
Jaromir Hladik died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02a.m.
Three Versions of Judas
There seemed a certainty in degradation.
T. E.Lawrence,The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, CIII
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, in the days when Basilides proclaimed that the cosmos was a reckless or malefi- cent improvisation by angels lacking in perfection, NilsRuneberg,with sin- gular intellectual pa.s.sion, would have led one of the gnostic conventicles. Dante might have consigned him to a sepulcher of fire; his name would have helped swell the catalogs of minor heresiarchs, between Satornilus and Carpocrates; one or another fragment of his teachings, bedizened with in- vective, would have been recorded for posterity in the apocryphalLiber ad-versus omnes hcereses or would have perished when the burning of a monastery"s library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma. Instead, G.o.d allotted him the twentieth century and the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition ofKristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his magnum opus,Den hemlige Walsaren.(Of this last-named book there is a German version, translated in 1912 byEmil Schering;it is t.i.tledDer heim- liche Heiland.) Before undertaking an examination of the works mentioned above, it is important to reiterate that NilsRuneberg,a member of the National Evan- gelical Union, was a deeply religious man. Atasoireein Paris or even in Buenos Aires, a man of letters might very well rediscover Runeberg"s theses; those theses, proposed at suchasoiree,would be slight and pointless exer- cises in slovenliness or blasphemy.
ForRuneberg,they were the key that un- locked one of theology"s central mysteries; they were the stuff of study and meditation, of historical and philological controversy, of arrogance, of exul- tation, and of terror.
They justified and destroyed his life. Those who peruse this article should likewise consider that it records only Runeberg"s conclu- sions, not his dialectic or his proofs. It will be said that the conclusion no doubtprecededits "proofs." But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teach- ing he cares naught for?
The first edition ofKristus och Judas bears this categorical epigraph, whose meaning, years afterward, NilsRuneberghimself was monstrously to expatiate upon:It is not one thing, but all the things which legend attributes to Judas Iscariot that are false(de Quincey,1857). Like a certain German before him,deQuincey speculated that Judas had delivered up Christ in order to force Him to declare His divinity and set in motion a vast uprising against Rome"s yoke;Runebergsuggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature. Cleverly, he begins by emphasizing how superfluous Judas" action was. He observes (as Robertson had) that in order to identify a teacher who preached every day in the synagogue and worked miracles in the plain sight of thousands of people, there was no need of betrayal by one of the teacher"s own apostles. That is precisely, however, what occurred. To a.s.sume an error in the Scriptures is intolerable, but it is no less intolerable to as- sume that a random act intruded into the most precious event in the his- tory of the world.Ergo, Judas" betrayal was not a random act, but predetermined, with its own mysterious place in the economy of redemp- tion.Runebergcontinues: The Word, when it was made Flesh, pa.s.sed from omnipresence into s.p.a.ce, from eternity into history, from unlimited joy and happiness into mutability and death; to repay that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in representation of all mankind) make a sacrifice of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man. Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus" secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The Word had stooped to be- come mortal; Judas, a disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an in- former (the most heinous crime that infamy will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable flames. As below, so above; the forms of earth correspond to the forms of heaven; the blotches of the skin are a map of the incorrupt- ible constellations; Judas is somehow a reflection of Jesus. From that con- clusion derive the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; from that conclusion derives the voluntary death, so as even more emphatically to merit reproba- tion. Thus did NilsRunebergexplain the enigma that is Judas.
Theologians of every faith brought forth refutations. Lars PeterEng- stromaccusedRunebergof ignoring the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of rekindling the Docetic heresy, which denied Jesus" humanity; the steely bishop of Lund accused him of contradicting Chapter 22, verse 3 of the Gospel According to St.Luke.
These diverse anathemas did have their influence onRuneberg,whopartially rewrote the reprehended book and modified its doctrine. He aban- doned the theological ground to his adversaries and proposed oblique argu- ments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who could call upon the considerable resources that Omnipotence can offer," had no need of a man to carry out His plan for the redemption of all mankind. Then he reb.u.t.ted those who claimed that we know nothing of the inexplicable betrayer. We know,Runebergsaid, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to herald the kingdom of heaven, to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8, Luke 9:1). The acts of a man thus singled out by the Redeemer merit the most sympathetic interpreta- tion we can give them. To impute his crime to greed (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to settle for the basest motive. NilsRunebergproposed a motive at the opposite extreme: a hyperbolic, even limitless asceticism. The ascetic,admajorem Dei gloriam,debases and mortifies the flesh; Judas de- based and mortified the spirit. He renounced honor, goodness, peace, the kingdom of heaven, as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure.
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"Borelius sarcastically asks:Why did he not renounce renunciation? Why not re- nounce the renunciation of renunciation?
He plotted his sins with terrible lucidity. In adultery, tenderness and abnegation often play a role; in homicide, courage; in blasphemy and profanation, a certain satanic zeal. Judas chose sins unvisited by any virtue: abuse of confidence (John 12:6) and betrayal. He labored with t.i.tanic humility; he believed him - self unworthy of being good. Paul wrote:He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought h.e.l.l because joy in the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like goodness, is a divine at- tribute, which should not be usurped by men.
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In a book unknown toRuneberg, EuclidesdaCunha*notes that in the view of theCanudosheresiarch AntonioConselheiro,*virtue "is a near impiety." The Argen- tine reader will recall a.n.a.logous pa.s.sages in the work of the poet Almafuerte.* In the symbolist journalSju insegel,Runebergpublished an a.s.siduous descriptive poem ti- tled "The Secret Lake"; the first verses narrate the events of a tumultuous day, while the last record the discovery of a glacial "tarn." The poet suggests that the eternity of those silent waters puts right our useless violence and- somehow-both allows it and absolves it. The poem ends with these words: "The water of the forest is happy; we can be evil and in pain."
Many have discovered, after the fact, that in Runeberg"s justifiable be- ginnings lies his extravagant end, and thatDen hemligefvalsarenis a mere perversion or exasperation of hisKristus och Judas. In late 1907,Runebergcompleted and revised the ma.n.u.script text; almost two years pa.s.sed beforehe delivered it to the publisher. In October, 1909, the book appeared with a foreword (lukewarm to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish He- brew scholar Erik Erfjord, and with the following epigraph:He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The book"s general argument is not complex, although its conclusion is monstrous. G.o.d, argues NilsRuneberg,stooped to become man for the redemption of the human race; we might well then presume that the sacri- fice effected by Him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omis- sions. To limit His suffering to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.
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