Pilgrim (53 page)

“I don’t understand.”

“Her mission was to be my witness. My protector. My link with the Others. And if there is no longer a need for any of these roles, then the obvious conclusion is that I, too, may soon be recalled.”

Jung decided to take another tack.

“Were you in love with Lady Quartermaine?”

“In a way, yes. Though it wasn’t physical. She was my equal in so many ways, our relationship was inevitable.”

“Can you explain what you mean by that?”

“I doubt it.”

“Will you try?”

“I shall do my best.”

Pilgrim adjusted his position in the chair.

“In a sense,” he said, “she was my sister. She was the first human being I knew—in fact, the first human being I met in this incarnation, though I disapprove of the word
incarnation
. Some are reborn. Others, such as myself, merely exchange one life for another. We basically remain the same person and our lives go on forever. It is—it has always been a continuous process. One wakes—one sleeps—one wakes again. One day,
one wakes as a blind old man, the next as a Spanish shepherd, the next as an English schoolboy. Which is why one wishes to die and put an end to it all.
Our birth is but a sleep,
Doctor Jung,
a sleep and a forgetting: the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting; and cometh from afar
…I say this kindness of Mister Wordsworth, who had it right. He also said:
the world is too much with us; late and soon
—and again he had it right. The world has been too much with me. And I have been too much with the world.”

Jung had by no means failed to take note of the reference to
a Spanish shepherd
. And yet, Manolo had never been mentioned between them, Jung having maintained his silence about the journals.

“You speak of a Spanish shepherd and an old blind man. Can you tell me who these people are—or were?”

“The old blind man you will know. His name—my name—was Tiresias. The shepherd? I barely remember him, but I do remember his name. Manolo.”

Jung’s mind contracted with numbing apprehension. He was forced to turn away.

“You have a problem, Doctor Jung?” Pilgrim said, after a moment.

Jung closed his eyes. Tiresias had been sentenced by the gods to live forever. And, like Cassandra, he had been a seer—but blind.

A seer—but blind.

As if reading Jung’s mind, Pilgrim said: “the priestesses at Delphi were blinded by smoke. It was deliberate. They sat on pans above the fire below and offered
up the voices of the gods, most especially, Apollo. Cassandra, on the other hand, was sighted, and as a consequence, no one trusted her pronouncements. She was condemned never to be believed, even though time and time again, she was proved to be right. I know that. She was my friend.”

No,
Jung thought.
This cannot be. It’s a story. An intricate, bedeviled, clever story.
Dementia.

“And you,” he said, “were you condemned never to be believed?”

Pilgrim’s answer was both casual and earnest—as if they were engaged in a perfectly ordinary conversation. “I was condemned several times. It is all too easy to displease the Others. To be summoned into their presence. They condemned me to live forever because in trying not to offend one by telling the truth, I offended another. Consequently, I have had to suffer an eternity of disbelief. The same disbelief you now so evidently feel about my history—the disbelief that has always met my pronouncements. I was equally condemned to experience women’s lives as well as men’s—simply because—as a young man of eighteen—by chance I happened to witness the mating of the Sacred Serpents in the Sacred Grove—and this was against all the rules set down for mortals by the gods. It was a form of sacrilege.”

Jung wondered if he should be taking notes.
The Sacred Grove
. Was that what Lady Quartermaine had meant in her letter, in referring to
the Grove
? Both of them, quite mad…

Pilgrim seemed lost in time. “The war,” he said.
“The first of all the wars I have seen. It is with me, still.” He smiled as he closed his eyes. “Throughout the Greek siege of Troy, we Trojans had a reputation for decadence. While parties of aristocrats gathered on the battlements to watch the killing, tea would be served by slaves in white jackets. Tea, and buttered biscuits filled with raisins and honey. Tea and what we now call cocktails—distilled liquors and many kinds of wine—poured from silvered pitchers into Venetian goblets and Chinese porcelain cups.”

Jung stared at him, wordless—then looked away.

Pilgrim continued: “and though we never gathered at the height of battle, we met on the ramparts beneath our parasols when amusing skirmishes were taking place and always when two heroes were to meet in combat, man to man—or, as some would have it, god to god. This is how I saw the death of Hector. It rained, you know, when he died. A torrent. Achilles tied him by his heels to the rear of a chariot and drove away with Hector’s arms flung back and his long black hair spread out behind him in the mud…And we never saw him again. I remember that as if it had been yesterday.”

Jung then regarded Pilgrim briefly, Pilgrim now with his head turned towards the sunlit bedroom and the cage of birds.

Dark suit. Yellow tie. Impeccable. Beautiful long-fingered hands—buffed nails, well manicured. Square knees, thin ankles, spare but shapely thighs. Wide shoulders (
the better for supporting wings
, Kessler would have said), a long neck, a strong chin, a gaunt, chiselled face with prominent nose and cheekbones, wide
forehead and brooding eyes. His hair, still falling like a snowdrift across his brow, was whiter now than it had been in April when he had arrived. Understandable. Entirely.

“I once had black teeth,” Pilgrim said reflectively, still watching the birdcage. “Stained glass, you know. The lead. Poisons a person. Everything turns black—your teeth, your nails, your skin—and then you die.”

“But you cannot die,” Jung said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“I cannot—but others did.”

“What have you to do with stained glass?”

“Chartres. You have been there?”

“No. My wife has seen it, but I have not.”

“Your wife is fortunate. You are a fool. It is the greatest wonder of the western world.” Pilgrim gave a smile. They were still not looking at one another. “I was a shaper there. I took the glass that others had cut and folded it in lead. Many of us worked together. It was amongst the more exhilarating things I did—over time.”

“And when might this have been?”

“In what you call the eleventh century.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by
what I call the eleventh century.”

“I predate the Christian calendar, Doctor Jung. In both its foolish forms.”

“Foolish?”

“Was the birth of Jesus Christ the be-all and end-all of time?”

“Some would say so.”

“Some are madmen,” Pilgrim said, turning to Jung with a fixed stare. “And some are not.”

“You are extremely adamant today, Mister Pilgrim.”

“I have good reason. I shall be leaving you soon.”

“I think not.”

“We shall see.”

“Go back to stained glass. What proof have you that you were there at Chartres and took part in its creation?” Jung prepared to write in his notebook.

“I cut my initials into one of the panes. It was blue, in the window now known as
Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière.”

“Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass.”

“The Virgin. And the Christ Child in her lap.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“
Yes. Of course,
” Pilgrim mimicked Jung’s accented delivery. “
Yes. Of course,
Herr Doktor Dimwit. Who else could it be? I’m sure you pray to her every day. Or do you have some other patron saint?”

“I have no saints.”

“One is tempted to say that you did have, once, but they deserted you. In time, the gods desert us all. They depart—and the skies are empty.”

Jung sat down on the windowsill.

“What might your initials have been, Mister Pilgrim, at that time?” His pen was poised.

“
S.l.J.
Simon le Jeune. I was twenty-two. My father was one of the greatest glass-cutters in France. And a
magician with colour. Nobody—to this day—
nobody
knows how he achieved the blue in that window. It is matchless.”

Doubtless, the names were true. Simon—and his son, his namesake. Jung was thinking:
he’s an art historian. Of course he knows these things. His whole life has been devoted to scholarship—everything he says and knows has been impeccably researched—impeccably imagined.

Then he thought:
he doesn’t seem to realize I’ve had access to his journals—in spite of that unfortunate accident with La Gioconda’s letter. Strange that he has never even mentioned her. I wonder…

Aloud, Jung asked: “All these lives, Mister Pilgrim. By what means do you—in one lifetime—come to know about your past lifetimes?”

“The memories come in exactly the same way as the prophecies—in dreams. Dreams that begin around the age of eighteen, with each new personage. And gradually, the dreams become memories…”

“Surely, you can’t remember everything about every life. Or can you?”

“Of course not—no more than you can remember everything about your own life. But I remember who I’ve been just as you or anyone else remembers who you’ve known over time. And gradually, the memories of past lives begin to cloud the early years of the present life. As it happens, I remember very little about the boy I was—by which I mean the boy, Pilgrim.”

Jung decided to take yet another tack.

“This quest for immortality,” he said. “What prompted you to begin it?”

Pilgrim stared at Jung, incredulous.

“Nothing
prompted
me,” he said. “D
O YOU NEVER LISTEN
!”

Pilgrim stood up, and stared around the room, as if in search of something.

“No wonder we are all mad here,” he said. “No wonder we are all insane. Our doctors refuse to hear us!”

Jung said nothing.

Pilgrim went into the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. He raised it to his lips, tilted his head back and drained the glass dry, after which he flung it to the floor.

Jung did not move.

Pilgrim said: “you
saw
me drink that water. You saw me. But the glass which contained it is shattered. Y
ES
? The truth—my story—is the water. It is in me. The broken glass is your reaction to it.
Also sprach Zarathustra!
”

Pilgrim sat back down in his chair and wiped his lips with the yellow handkerchief, folding it into a ball in his hand.

Finally, Jung said: “tell me who Lady Quartermaine was.”

It was such an absolute non sequitur, Pilgrim paused. Then he said: “all you have to do is think of her name.”

“Sybil?”

“Sybil.”

“A Sybil, Herr Doktor Blockhead, is an oracle—as at Delphi. She was appointed by Apollo to speak in his
voice. Some called them
priestesses
—others,
sayers
. In modern times, we call them
mediums
.”

“I know all this,” Jung said. “I merely wanted to know it was not a coincidental choice of name.”

“Not a coincidental choice. Never. It was given her by the gods. The same gods, doubtless, who called her home.”

“I see.”

Quite mad.

They sat then, silent—Jung on the windowsill, Pilgrim in his chair, his yellow handkerchief still clutched in his hand.

“She is dead, Mister Pilgrim. She was human and she died.”

“So you say.”

“So I say.” And then: “like you, had she lived forever?” Jung’s voice was almost without intonation. He spoke as a priest might have spoken to a penitent—matter-of-factly and without emotion.

Pilgrim picked at the wicker arm of his chair.

“Not for so long,” he said.

“And her death? You see meaning in the fact that she has died?”

Pilgrim leaned forward.

“I pray,” he said, “that it means my days are finally numbered. Perhaps it is true that, at long last, the gods are deserting us and their final gift is death.”

Jung blinked. He looked away.

The man’s pain was real enough. In fact, it was unbearable.

Jung found himself thinking:
to have waited so long…

Then he frowned, and closed his notebook.

He stood up.

“Are you leaving?” Pilgrim asked.

“Yes.”

“I cannot say I’m sorry.”

Jung walked to the door, pausing to collect the music bag and place his notebook inside it.

“Mister Pilgrim,” he said, “I must tell you that I wish with all my heart I could help you. But—at the moment—I cannot.”

Pilgrim said nothing.

With his hand on the doorknob, Jung turned back and looked at the figure sitting in the sunlight.

“I had a dream last night,” he said. “Not a dream—a nightmare. I dreamt the whole world was on fire and that no one could prevent the flames from spreading…”

Pilgrim stared at the hand that held his handkerchief.
And if you understood the prophetic nature of your dream,
he thought,
nobody would believe you, either…

Jung said: “it was more horrifying than I can say, and I thought it would never end. It was the inferno itself. But I did find a way to make it stop.”

“Oh?” said Pilgrim, placing the handkerchief in his pocket. “And how was that?”

“I woke up,” said Jung. “Which is what I am hoping you will do.”

When Jung had gone, Pilgrim sat motionless.

I am an animal,
he thought.
I am an animal without hunters. I have no predators. If only someone would come with a gun. If only some beast not yet named would emerge
from the forest and devour me. If only the gods who continue to protect me would turn away and focus on someone—anyone—else. If only the rivers would rise to drown me or the mountains fall to bury me. If only life were not so tenacious. If only life would let go.