Would that Christ, in a similar way, could take refuge in my heart!
Returning from Mount Athos, I felt for the first time that Christ wanders about hungry and homeless, that He is in danger, and that now it is His turn to be saved—by man.
I was overwhelmed by great sorrow and compassion. Not wanting to return to a life of tranquility and comfort, I took to the road and marched for days and days through the Macedonian mountains, until I found a dark, miserable, woebegone little village-hovels stuccoed over with oxdung, a flock of children and pigs splashing in the mud. The men looked at me with scowling faces; when I greeted them, they did not answer. The women, as soon as they saw me, slammed their doors.
This is just the place for me, I said to myself. O my soul, here in this horrible village of horrible people, you will demonstrate if you are able to endure.
The wounded Campaigner did not leave my thoughts. Wanting to mortify my body, I decided to spend the winter in this village.
After no end of trouble I finally succeeded in making an old shepherd comprehend that I was neither a criminal, Freemason, nor madman. He consented to rent me one corner of his hut and to give me a little milk and bread each day. There being more than enough wood, I sat and read in front of the fire. I had nothing with me except the Gospels and Homer; at times I read Christ’s words of love and humility, at times the immortal verses of the Patriarch of the Greeks. You should be good, peaceful, forbearing; when you are slapped on one cheek you should turn the other; this life on earth has no value, the true life is in heaven—thus dictated the first. You should be strong, should love wine, women, and war; should kill and be killed in order to hold aloft the dignity and pride of man; love this earthly life, better a slave and alive than a king in Hades—thus dictated the second, the grandfather of Greece.
The Achaeans rose to the edge of my mind, the Achaeans with their large noses, their greaves, their broad callused feet, hairy thighs, pointed beards, long greasy mops of hair, their odor of wine and garlic. And there was Helen promenading untouched and immortal on the walls, radiantly pure in the light, with only the arched soles of her feet submerged in blood; and the gods, enthroned reposefully in the clouds above, passing their time by watching men slaughter one another.
Here in my solitude I pricked up my ears and listened to these two Sirens. I listened to them both. Their talons embedded in my entrails, both were deeply bewitching me, and I had no idea to which of these two Sirens’ ghosts I should render up my bones.
There was snow outside; I used to look through the tiny window and watch the falling flakes cover the hamlet’s ugliness. Each morning flocks of sheep passed, waking me with their bells. I jumped out of bed and climbed the snow-covered paths with them, exchanging a few words with the shepherd on the subjects of poverty, the cold, the sheep that died. Never once did I hear a shepherd speak of anything pleasant; it was nothing but poverty, the cold, the sheep that died.
On one particular day when everything had been covered with a plump bed of snow, the village chimes began to toll mournfully; someone must have died. The villagers had locked themselves inside their houses. From time to time a mule’s bell sounded in the motionless air. Through my window I could see famished crows flying back and forth. I had lighted a fire; the warmth clasped me in a tenderhearted embrace, like a mother. I felt that I was completely happy. But then, suddenly, as though joy were treasonous and a great sin, weeping broke out within me—a tranquil, despairing, tender weeping, as from a mother singing a lullaby to her dead son.
This was not the first time I had heard this inner weeping. Whenever I felt sad, it grew a little milder, sounding to me like the remote humming of bees. Whenever I was happy, however, it raged uncontrollably. I used to cry out in fear, “Who is weeping inside me? For what reason? What have I done wrong?”
Night had fallen. As I gazed into the fire my heart resisted. It refused to join the lamentations. Why should I begin to wail and lament? No great sorrow was crushing my soul. I had quiet and warmth, the house’s peasant air smelled of sage and quince, I was sitting before the hearth and reading Homer—I was happy. “I am happy,” I cried. “What do I lack? Nothing! Well then, who or what is weeping inside me? What does he want? What does he want with me?”
For a moment I thought I heard a knock on the door. I got up but found no one. The sky was absolutely clear, the stars burning like lighted coals. I leaned over and searched the snow-covered road in the starlight to see if perchance I might discover human footprints. Nothing. I cupped my ear and listened. A dog was barking lugubriously at the edge of the village; it must have seen Charon roaming over the snow. An aged but robust and seemingly immortal shepherd had fallen into a ravine two days before and had spent this entire day giving up the ghost, the whole village bellowing from the thunderous râles of his death agony. Now he was silent, and nothing could be heard except his dog’s barked lamentations.
He must have died, I said to myself with a shudder. Death angered me. Consoling words about Second Comings and future existences still had not managed to seduce me; but on the other hand, neither had I acquired the strength to confront death fearlessly.
I plunged once more into Homer, as though seeking refuge at the old grandfather’s knees. The immortal verses began to roll like waves again and break over my temples. Across the centuries, I heard the din raised by gods and mortals striking out with their lances; I saw Helen as she walked slowly along the Trojan walls surrounded by the old men of the city, and seeing her, I struggled to forget. But my thoughts were on death. Oh, I said to myself, if only man’s heart were omnipotent, powerful enough to wrestle with death! If only it were like Mary Magdalene—Mary Magdalene the prostitute—and could resurrect the beloved corpse!
I felt stricken at heart. Alas, how could I in my turn manage to resurrect Him and find relief! He, I sensed, was the one lying still dead in my entrails, the one who kept weeping. He was struggling to rise, but could not without man’s help, and on account of this He felt great resentment toward me. How was I to save Him—and be saved?
My grandfather would have boarded his corsair and sailed out to the straits to ram Turkish sloops, since he held Turks and Jews equally responsible for crucifying Christ. He would have vented his spleen in this way and found relief. My father would have mounted his mare and likewise assaulted the infidels, returning from battle at night to hang the gory turbans of Christendom’s foes on our household iconostasis, beneath the icon of the Crucified. In this way he too would have found relief and, in his own fashion, felt Christ being resurrected in his heart. After all, my father was a warrior, and war was his way both of delivering and receiving deliverance.
But what was I, the dregs of our lineage, to do?
High up in the mountains of Crete it sometimes happens, though rarely, that a milksop is born into a family of ogres. The old sire looks him over, looks him over once more, and is at a loss to understand. How the devil did this refuse, this jellyfish, issue from his loins? He calls into council the rest of the beasts he has engendered, his sons, to see what can be done with him. “He is a disgrace to our lineage,” roars the old man. “What are we going to make of him, boys? He can’t be a shepherd; how can he vault into other sheepfolds to steal? He can’t be a fighter; it grieves him to kill. He’s a disgrace to our stock; let’s make him a schoolteacher!”
I, alas, was the schoolteacher of our family. But why resist? I might as well become resigned to it. No matter how much my ancestors might despise me, I too had my weapons, and I would go to war.
It was snowing out. God was mercifully covering the world’s unseemliness with His snow. The rags hanging on the fence around the Macedonian hovel I occupied had become precious white furs, and the dormant thistles had all blossomed. Occasionally you heard a baby’s wail, a dog’s bark, the voice of a man; but everything became immediately mute once more, and then you heard nothing but silence, the voice of God.
Tossing a log onto the fire and also an armful of laurel bra
nches to make the air fragrant, I bent over my Homer again. But my thoughts were no longer with Achaeans, Trojans, and Olympian gods; the sun-washed vision flitted before my eyes like a butterfly and vanished. Once again I heard my entrails weep.
He was lying inside the sepulcher, expecting the Disciples to run, roll back the stone, crouch in the darkness and call Him, whereupon He would rise again to earth. But no one had come. Feeling aggrieved, He was weeping.
As I stared into the dying flames, I saw the panic-stricken Disciples gathered together in an attic. “The Rabbi is dead, he is dead.” They were awaiting nightfall so that they could leave Jerusalem and disperse. But a woman jumped up. She alone refused to accept His death, for Christ had risen within her heart. Barefooted, unkempt, half naked, she ran toward the tomb at the break of day. Certain that she would see Christ, she saw Him; certain that Christ had been resurrected, she resurrected Him. “Rabbi!” she cried, and inside his tomb the Rabbi heard her voice, bounded to his feet, and appeared to her in the dawnlight, walking on the springtime grass.
My brain filled with this vision of resurrection. A slight, extremely sweet fever weighed down my eyelids, and the blood began to throb vigorously at my temples. Just as when a wind blows vigorously, the clouds scatter, reunite, are metamorphosed into men, animals, and ships, so in the same manner inside me, as I huddled next to the fire, my mind blew and the vision within me became dismembered and transformed, turning into human faces clothed in longing and wind. But these faces would likewise quickly disperse into smokelike rings in my head, unless words came—at first timid and uncertain, then continually more impetuous and sure—to jell that which cannot be jelled. I understood: the spermatic, generative wind which had blown into my entrails had taken on substance, become an embryo, and was kicking now in a desire to emerge.
Taking up my pen, I commenced to write and to relieve myself—to give birth.
I did not begin at the beginning. It was Magdalene who sprang out first of all, apprehensive, bathed in tears, her hair undone. She had awakened with a start, before daybreak. She must have seen the Rabbi in her dreams. Like the fowler enticing his prey, she began to call him:
Oh how wonderful! I cannot lift
my head, so fragrant is the air. Arise,
my heart, and beat the ground to force it open!
My earthen shoulders skip like wings, but dawn
is slow in coming, the body oh so heavy.
Do not hasten, soul, before I clothe myself
and go. See, as a bride I dress and preen.
My palms and soles I paint with henna, my eyes
with dilute kohl, and a beauty spot joins my brows.
For as love the earth, so majestic heaven gently
beats my breast, and bowing down, I
accept the Word with joy and lamentation,
as if it were a man. And when by flowering
paths I finally reach your beloved tomb,
like a woman, Christ, forsaken by her lover,
shall I clasp your pallid knees, that never
may you leave me. . . . I shall talk, and clasp
your pallid knees. . . . Though all deny you, Christ,
you will not die, for in my breast I hold
the immortal water; I give it you, and upon the
earth you mount once more and walk with me
in the meadows. I shall sing like the love-struck
bird that sits upon the almond branch in
snowtime and warbles in a rapture, its beak
raised high toward heaven, until the branch sprouts blossoms.
I could not sleep; I was in a terrible hurry, because now that the faces had solidified for an instant, I wanted to be in time to take them—the Apostles, Magdalene, Christ; the mist that becomes corporeal, the lie that becomes truth, the soul that sings from its perch on the highest branch of hope—and stabilize them permanently with sure, firm words.
At the end of a few days and nights the manuscript of the entire drama lay upon my knees. I held it tightly, just as a mother holds her son after childbirth.
Lent had started and Easter was approaching. I began to go for strolls in the fields. The world had become a paradise; the snows of Olympus sparkled in the sunlight while the fields below shone bright green and the returning swallows, like shuttles of a loom, wove spring into the air. Small white and yellow wildflowers, pushing up the soil with their tiny heads, began to emerge into the sunlight in order to see the world above. Someone must have rolled back the earthen tombstones above them: they were being resurrected. Someone? . . . Who? Doubtlessly God, God of the innumerable faces: sometimes a flower, sometimes a bird or a fresh shoot on a grapevine, sometimes wheat.
As I strolled through the blossoming fields, a gentle vertigo transformed time and place around me. I seemed to be walking in Palestine rather than Greece; I could discern the still-fresh traces left by Christ’s feet on the frothy springtime soil, while around me towered the holy mountains of Carmel, Gilboa, and Tabor. These were not stalks of wheat springing from the ground until they reached the height of a man, they were Christ springing from the tomb; those were not red anemones, they were Christ’s holy blood.
Somebody once asked Rabbi Nahman, “What do you mean when you preach that we should go to Palestine? Surely Palestine is simply an idea, a faraway ideal which Jewish souls must someday reach.” Nahman became angry. Driving his staff into the ground, he shouted, “No, no! When I say Palestine, I mean its stones, vegetation, and soil. Palestine is not an idea, it is stones, vegetation, and soil. That is where we must go!”
That is where I must go, I told myself. To see and touch Palestine’s warm body, and not simply to enjoy it in my imagination while sauntering over the mountains and fields of Greece; to breathe the air, tread the ground, touch the stones that Christ breathed, trod, and touched; to follow the drops of blood which marked out His passage among men. Yes, I must leave! Perhaps there in Palestine I will find what I sought in vain at the Holy Mountain.
Once more the wind of embarkment blew across my mind. How long would it continue to do so? God grant until my death! What joy to cast off from dry land and depart! To snip the string which ties us to certitude and depart! To look behind us and see the men and mountains we love receding into the distance!
Holy Week was approaching. Throughout all of Christendom Christ would be crucified; the five immortal wounds would reopen, and the heart—Mary Magdalene—would come once more to wrestle with death. What happiness when a man has a heart still like a child’s and he can suffer during these days: be unable to eat, sleep, or control his tears when at the vigils he sees the lemon-flower-covered body of his God writhing on the cross! What further happiness when, spring entering through the open windows of the church, he is in love with a girl, his first love, and they have promised to meet at noon of Good Friday to do obeisance together by kissing the Crucified’s feet, and he, being so terribly young, trembles because he believes he is committing a sin to join his lips with a woman’s upon the body of God.
Closing my Homer, I kissed the immortal grandfather’s hand, without daring, however, to lift my head and look him straight in the eye. I was ashamed and afraid before him, because I knew only too well that I was betraying him at that moment: leaving him behind me and taking along his great enemy, the Bible.
Neither heaven nor earth had awakened yet—just a cock on a rooftop, craning its neck toward the east and calling the sun (the night had lasted far too long!) finally to appear.
As though afraid the old grandfather might hear me, I opened the door stealthily, like a thief, and took the road to the harbor in order to set sail. Hordes of men and women had come down from their villages to depart like myself for Palestine and do obeisance at the Holy Sepulcher. I shall never forget that evening of embarkment—the tenderness, the sweetness, the compassion of it! There was a gentle, ruthful drizzle, and if you had raised your head to look at the sky, you would have seen God’s face filled with tears.
; On the boat itself, greasy quilts and blankets of many colors had been spread out on deck. Throngs of old women were opening their baskets and chewing; the air smelled of fish roe and onions. In the center stood an elderly man with rose-red cheeks and long gray hair. His torso swaying back and forth, he read the Christ story in a loud, chanting voice—Christ’s life and passion: how the Bridegroom came to Jerusalem, after that how He and the Disciples ate the bitter Lord’s Supper, how the traitorous disciple left hastily, and how Jesus climbed the Mount of Olives, the sweat running from His forehead “like clots of blood.”
The little old black-mantled women sighed, swayed their heads, listened with deep emotion, all the while chewing away calmly and noiselessly, like sheep. God, in their simple hearts, was once more taking on flesh, being crucified, saving mankind. A young shepherd, his back turned toward the women, listened intently as he leaned over, penknife in hand, and whittled the head of a bird on the top of his crook.