“How did you know?” asked Jorgensen, glancing at me with a smile.
The countess laughed. “Because a moment ago when I went out into the garden, I saw you in the distance headed this way, and you were both wrapped in flames!”
How clearly those days in Assisi came back to me, complete in every detail! I had not requested Francis’s aid, yet here he was running to show me the way. If only I could find the strength! When I glimpsed him embracing lepers in the distance, I was overwhelmed with nausea and fright; when I saw him going about barefooted to preach, his face radiant with beatitude as people hooted, drubbed, and stoned him, my heart stood up to resist. Though I was conscious of my abasement, I kept telling myself, Anything but that! Better to perish suddenly in an abrupt martyrdom. . . . To face jeering and derision day in and day out exceeded my endurance.
Direct contact with human beings I had always found irksome. I was eager to help them as much as I could, but from a distance. I did so with great pleasure, I loved them all and sympathized with them all, but from a distance. Whenever I came near, I found it impossible to tolerate them for long, they felt the same about me, and we parted. I have a passionate love for solitude and silence; I can gaze for hours at a fire or the sea without feeling any need for additional companionship. These two have always been my most faithful, most beloved comrades; whenever I fell in love with some woman or idea, it was because in them I found the principal characteristics of fire and the sea.
And furthermore (I told myself in order to justify my incapacity to follow Francis’s ascending road), how can a Poor Man of God—another supernal Don Quixote, with equal artless simplicity, equal purity and love—how can such a man possibly reappear on earth in these times of Mammon and Moloch in which we live?
I said this over and over in order to console myself. I did not know that a new Poor Man of God had already made his appearance on earth; the lepers surrounding this one were Negroes. If I had learned about him during those critical, transitional days in Berlin which were urging me out of Buddhist inaction and into revolutionary action, I would have felt even more ashamed of my cowardice. I learned about him much—very much—later, when it was no longer possible, nor perhaps advisable, for me to change my life; when I had already taken an entirely different road in order to carry out my duty.
I was overcome with emotion on that August afternoon when I took the narrow road leading to the minuscule village of Gunsbach in the Alsatian forests. The Saint Francis of our day opened the door personally when I knocked, and offered me his hand. His voice was deep and peaceful; he looked at me, smiling from beneath his thick gray mustache. I had seen old Cretan warriors just like him—full of kindness and indomitable will.
The moment was well favored by destiny. Our hearts opened to each other. We stayed together until nightfall, talking about Christ, Homer, Africa, lepers, and Bach. In the late afternoon we set out for the village’s tiny church.
“Let us remain silent,” he said to me along the way, deep emotion having suffused his rough face.
He was going to the organ, to play Bach. He sat down. . . . That moment, I believe, was one of the happiest of my life.
On our way back, seeing a wildflower at the edge of the road, I stopped to pick it.
“Don’t!” he said, restraining my hand. “That flower is alive; you must have reverence for life.”
A tiny ant was parading on the lapel of his jacket. He took hold of it with untold tenderness and placed it on the ground, off to one side so that no one would trample it. Though he said nothing, the words “Brother Ant” were on the tip of his tongue, the tender words of his great-grandfather from Assisi.
When night came, we finally parted. I returned to my solitude, but that August day never sank below my mind’s horizon. I was no longer alone. With unshakable assurance, this striver measured out his road in firm, youthful paces at my side. Though his road was not mine, I found it a great comfort and severe lesson to see him mounting his ascent with so much conviction and obstinacy. From that day onward I was convinced that Saint Francis’s life had not been a fairy tale; I felt certain thereafter that man could still bring miracles down to earth. I had seen the miracle, touched it, spoken with it; we had laughed and kept silence together.
After that day my heart could nevermore distinguish between these two deeply enticing figures so far removed in transitory time, so closely united in eternity, that is to say in God’s bosom. They resemble each other like two brothers: Saint Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer.
The same tender, vehement love for nature. The hymn to Brother Sun and to Sisters Moon, Sea, and Fire echoes day and night in their hearts. Both hold the leaf of a tree at their fingertips, and, raising it into the light, see on it the miracle of the entire created universe.
The same tender reverential fellow-feeling for men, snakes, ants—everything that lives and breathes. Both see life as sacred; both shudder with joy as, bent over the eyes of every living thing, they see the Creator reflected there in His entirety. Gazing at the ant, the snake, the human being, they make the joyous discovery that all things are brothers.
The same compassion and kindness (expressed in action) for everything that suffers. Both chose lepers, the deepest and most horrible abysm of wretchedness and pain; one white lepers, the other the black lepers of Africa. I said compassion and kindness, but I should have said Metta; only this Buddhist word faithfully expresses the sentiment engendered in these two brothers by human suffering. In kindness and compassion there are two: the sufferer and he who compassionates the sufferer. In Metta, on the other hand, there is absolute identification. When I see a leper, I feel that I myself am that leper. The ninth-century Mohammedan mystic Sari-al-Sakadi formulated this consummately: “Perfect love exists between two people only when each addresses the other with the words, ‘O myself!’”
The same divine lunacy—renouncing the joys of life, sacrificing the small pearls in order to obtain the Great Pearl, abandoning the level road which leads to an easy happiness, and taking the savage uphill road which mounts between two chasms to divine lunacy. The lunacy of freely choosing the impossible.
The same guileless humor is seen in both: laughter gushing from the depths of a benevolent heart; joy, the dearly beloved daughter of a soul overflowing with riches; power to see and accept the countenance of everyday reality with tenderness and comprehension. The laughterless Spartans raised an altar to the god of laughter; the utmost austerity continually invoked laughter, for this alone is capable of helping a deep soul to endure life. . . . God endowed these two brothers with gleeful hearts, and because He did so, they journey gleefully to the summit of their endeavor, to God.
The same passionate love for music. What Thomas of Celano said about the one applies perfectly to the other: “An extremely thin partition separated Brother Francis from eternity. That is why he always heard the divine melody—through this delicate partition.” Listening to this melody, both feel a jubilation approaching ecstasy. “If the angels who played the viol in my dreams had drawn their bows over the strings just once more, my soul would have torn itself away from my body, so unbearable was the beatitude.” Thus spoke the first; the second, I am sure, must feel the same extremity of beatitude when playing Bach.
Both have in their grasp the philosopher’s stone which transubstantiates the basest of metals into gold, the gold into spiritual essence. They take disease, hunger, cold, injustice, ugliness—reality at its most horrible—and transubstantiate these into a reality yet more real, where the wind of spirit blows. No, not of spirit; of love. And in their hearts, like the sun over great empires, love never sets.
But I learned all this too late; I did not know it during those crucial days in Berlin. When I viewed the human miracle in his tiny Alsatian hamlet, my fingers were already smudged with ink; I had been carried away by the profane mania to convert life into words, similes, and rhymes, had degenerated (I still don’t know how) into a pen-pusher. What befell me was precisely wh
at I most scorned: to satisfy my hunger with paper, like a nanny goat.
These two Poor Men of God were able to help me in only a single respect, the inestimable one of showing me that man is able, and has the duty, to reach the furthest point of the road he has chosen. (Who knows, perhaps at the end of the road all the various strivers will meet.) Thus they became models for me, lofty examples of persistence, patience, and hope. God bless them, for these two heroes of exploit taught me that only by means of hope can we attain what is beyond hope.
Encouraged by them, I made an attempt to conquer my nature; I pursued the path urged upon me by Itka’s compassion, indignation, and smarting words. I did this for quite some time, and I do not regret it. When I returned to my natural path, I felt that my heart had become filled with human suffering and that the sole way to save oneself is to save others. Or to struggle to save others—even that is sufficient. I learned as well that the world is real, not a specter, and that man’s soul is dressed in flesh—not in wind, as expounded to me by Buddha.
But while I toiled to make my decision, I remember, my brain offered great resistance. It was still wrapped in Buddha’s yellow robe. What you intend to do is futile, it kept saying to my heart. The world as you crave it, where no one will suffer from hunger, cold, or injustice, does not exist and never will exist. But I heard my heart answering from deep within me: Though it does not exist, it shall exist because I want it to. I desire it, want it at every beat of my heart. I believe in a world which does not exist, but by believing in it, I create it. We call “nonexistent” whatever we have not desired with sufficient strength.
My heart’s answer threw me into turmoil. If everything it said was true, what a fearful responsibility man bears for all the world’s injustice and opprobrium!
The rhythm of events accelerated before many days had passed, perhaps because my soul was at last ready. Episodes followed one upon the other, pushing me. At any other time I would have considered them mere spectacles; now they were like flesh of my flesh.
One morning before we had gotten up, we heard a vague, boundless clamor, a remote lowing, as though far in the distance a herd of cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse had already felt the red bands around their necks and begun to bellow.
Itka jumped out of bed, wrapped herself in her threadbare overcoat, and without turning to look at me, hurtled down the stairs. The bellowing came continually closer. I flew to the window and opened it. Weightless flakes of snow were falling outside. In Greece the mountains and beaches would have gleamed in the morning sun, but here the light which crept over the snow-covered asphalt was sick and muddy.
Not a person, not a dog; the street completely deserted. Off in the distance, everywhere in the air, this deep bellowing which drew nearer and nearer. I waited. Little by little the street grew lighter. Two crows came and perched on an ice-encrusted tree without uttering a sound. They were waiting too.
Suddenly I saw a tail, bony woman with free-flowing hair dart into the far end of the street. She was not walking; she was leaping as though in a dance, a black banner flapping above her head. All at once behind her an army of men, women, and children appeared, wading through the snow in ordered formation, four abreast, pressing forward. The muddy light struck them. You saw nothing but pale, incensed faces with black holes for eyes, as if a thick army of blind, worm-eaten skulls had risen from the grave.
The light had grown a little stronger now; I was able to see more clearly. Across the street several shopkeepers were taking out their keys to open their stores, but as soon as they caught sight of the savage army, they replaced the keys in their pockets and glued themselves to the wall. The woman saw them. Striding across the sidewalk, she went up to them and flapped the black banner curtly over their heads. A hoarse voice rent the air.
“We are hungry!”
At that same moment she glanced up toward my window and opened her mouth. Divining the words she was about to utter, I became terrified, and without being fully aware of what I was saying, I began to shout, “Quiet! Quiet!”
I slammed the window shut and glued myself against the wall of the room—I was just like the shopkeepers. Completely discomposed, I murmured, “They are hungry . . . they are hungry; the Hunger Army . . .”
That entire day I could not—dared not—go outside for fear that along my way I might meet the woman with Hunger’s black banner. This time she would be quick enough to hurl the grievous, insupportable words at me. I knew what words these would be; that was why I felt afraid and ashamed.
Itka arrived around noontime, pale and out of breath. Tossing her threadbare overcoat on the floor, she began to pace up and down the narrow room. I was huddled in a corner waiting. I could hear her heavy respiration. Turning suddenly, she pointed at me.
“You’re to blame! You!” she screamed. “You and everyone like you: the well-meaning, well-fed—and indifferent. You need to know hunger and cold, to have children who are hungry and cold, to want to work and be refused work! That’s what I expected from you, not this sauntering from city to city to gape at museums and old churches and weep when you look at the stars because they seem so very pretty or frightening. Poor fool, just lower your gaze, look at the child dying at your feet!”
She fell silent for a moment, and then: “You write poems. You speak in your turn—have the effrontery to speak—about poverty, oppression, and villainy. By transforming our pain into beauty you get it out of your system. Damn beauty, when it makes a man forget human suffering!”
Two tears flew from her eyes. I went close; I wanted to touch her, to calm her by resting my hand upon her hair. But she winced, pushed me away, and cried, “Keep your hands off me!”
The glance she gave me was filled not only with resentment and scorn, but with hate.
The blood rose to my head.
“What do you expect me to do?” I cried angrily. “What can I do? . . . Leave me alone!”
“No, I won’t leave you alone! You’d like me to leave you alone, you’d like to escape. But I won’t! You cannot hate, is that it? Well, I’ll teach you. You cannot fight? I’ll teach you.”
An attempt at laughter marred her face. It was not laughter, it was an unbearable convulsion of the flesh. She stepped close to me.
“Do you know the oriental proverb: ‘Whoever mounts a tiger can never again dismount’? You mounted a tiger—me—and I shall never let you dismount!”
Opening a small cupboard, she brought out some bread, a little butter, several apples. She lit the kerosene burner and prepared tea. Not breathing a word, we sat down on two stools (all the room possessed), drew a little table near us, and began to eat. I observed her palpitating eyebrows. She kept lifting her cup in order to drink and then forgetting herself with her arm in mid-air. Her mind was elsewhere; some thought was tormenting her. I chewed away with bowed head, terribly ashamed. For I sensed with humiliation that this woman was stronger than I.
We finished our meal. She raised her head and looked at me. Her eyes were flickering now, her lips had reddened.
“Forgive me for speaking so nastily—but I’ve just come from the Hunger Army.”
Rising, she went to the window and closed the tattered curtains. A peaceful, compassionate light poured into the room. She pushed the little table to one side, making space. Then she went to the divan and drew back the covers. I followed her, out of the corner of my eye. As she was unbuttoning her blouse she turned to glance at me.
“Are you sleepy?” I asked her, laughing.
“No,” she answered. Her voice had grown murky. “Come!”
The next day she rose before dawn and hastily packed her tiny valise. Coming to the divan, she awakened me.
“I’m going,” she said.
I shuddered. “Going? Going where?”
“Far away. Don’t ask. Goodbye until we meet again.”
“When?”
She shrugged her shoulders. Wrapping a scarf tightly around her hair, she stooped and picked up her little valise.
Then she looked at me. Her blue eyes were hard and dry, her thick lips smiling.
“Thanks for all the nights,” she said. “We performed our duty to the flesh very thoroughly. Buddha is done and finished; we exorcised him. . . . Why look at me like that? Are you sorry?”
I said nothing. A most bitter sweetness had settled in my vitals. All those nights and days were mixing together inside me and filling my entrails with joy and anguish.
“Are you sorry?” she asked again.
She had reached the door and was extending her hand to open it.
“Yes, I am sorry,” I replied with irritation. “You demolished Buddha for me; my heart is empty.”
“So you need a master, do you?” She laughed ironically.
“Yes, I do. Better a master than anarchy. Buddha gave a rhythm to my life, a purpose. He put a bridle on the demons inside me. But now . . .”
She wrinkled her brows. She was no longer laughing.
“Comrade,” she said (it was the first time she had called me comrade), “your heart has been emptied and cleansed; it is ready. That’s what I wanted. I have faith in you—don’t listen to what I say when I’m angry. You are an honest man and one who is uneasy. I have faith in you. . . .”
She reflected a moment, then added, “No, not in you but in the Cry of our times. Be quiet and you’ll hear it. Goodbye.”
She opened the door. I heard her hasty steps as she descended the stairs.
“Be quiet and you’ll hear it!” Those words of Itka’s escorted me many days and nights. Keeping quiet, I listened intently, trying to hear. I attended lectures given by the friends of Russia, read their books and pamphlets, wandered late at night through the working-class sections of Berlin. I viewed the poverty and nakedness, heard sinister conversations, breathed in an atmosphere filled with indignation. Sorrow and compassion took possession of me at first, then anger, and finally the bitter certainty that I myself was responsible, that the fiery Jewess was right. The fault was mine! Why? Because I did not rise up to shout, because I saw, pitied, and straightway forgot, because I lay down at night and slept in a warm bed, without thinking of those who lacked a roof over their heads.