Free Pilgrim by Timothy Findley

said.”
    “Thank you.”
    Jung was making for the corridor.
    “Doctor?”
    Jung turned.
    “Before you go, I think I should draw your attention…” Kessler seemed embarrassed. “There’sanother little irregularity regarding Mister Pilgrim, sir. I mean—besides his not speaking and his trying to kill himself…”
    “What is that?”
    “There’s a mark on him, sir. On his backside…”
    “His buttocks, you mean?”
    “No, sir. Right between the shoulder blades.”
    “What sort of mark?”
    “Not unlike a tattoo. You’ve seen a tattoo, I suppose. I mention it, because the sight of it made me wonder, had Mister Pilgrim been to sea. You know how sailors are—drawings all over, some of them.”
    “What does it show, this tattoo?”
    “A butterfly, sir. And one other thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “It is all one colour, Doctor. Red, you see. Most unusual. It has the look of pin pricks—just like someone had pricked it out on Mister Pilgrim’s back with a needle or a pin. Dot—dot. Dot—dot. Dot—dot—dot. You see? Very odd. Not your normal everyday naval tattoo. I just thought you should know. He tried to hide it. Tried to hurry into his shirt before I got to him. But I saw it, nevertheless, in the mirror plain as day. It made me wonder…”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, it made me wonder if maybe it was some kind of—I don’t know—insignia. Like he belonged to some kind of club or secret society. That sort of thing. A sign or a signal for others of his kind.”
    “Thank you, Kessler. All very interesting.”
    “Yes, sir. Same as a person might say that MisterPilgrim himself is all very interesting. Not your average lunatic, so to speak. If you know what I mean.”
    “Yes. Indeed I do. Good morning.”
    “Good morning, Doctor.”
    When Jung had gone and shut the door behind him, Kessler went back to the bed and lifted up Pilgrim’s shirt—stretching its arms as he had before and holding it out to the sunlight streaming through the windows.
    So, angels smell of lemons, do they. Well, well, well. They smell of lemons—and where their wings are fixed, God marks it with a butterfly—right between the shoulder blades.
    Spreading the arms, he watched the wavering sunlight through their folds. And closed—and opened them. And closed—and opened them again—and then again—in angel flight.

12
    Kessler, his mother and his sister Elvire lived in a tall narrow house halfway down the slope between the Clinic and the River Limmat. He was the only son in a family that otherwise boasted six daughters, five of whom had been successfully married. The sixth, Elvire, had been chosen to see her parents through to death—to keep house for them, to run their errands and to act, in his early years, as Johannes Kessler’s nursemaid.
    They were poor. Both parents had worked outside the home—Johannes, Senior, in the flour mill, FrauEda as cook for a lawyer who happened to be a bachelor—a certain Herr Munster. His unmarried status posed no threat, however. Frau Eda would not have tolerated the most understated of advances. She had ambitions for her children and not a hint of scandal would touch them. They would achieve a place in the middle class, which her parents had spent their lives achieving before them.
    Her children’s greatest asset had been her own dowry—the house they lived in, a gift from her dying father. If not for the house, which sat at the centre of a middle-class district, they would have been forced to live at the furthest reaches of the city, where the poor were crowded in hovels and tenements packed in amongst the mills and factories. It was to this place that Johannes, Senior, had to make his way each day, and from which, each day, he returned.
    Young Kessler’s earliest memories were of his father seated alone of an evening, staring exhausted above a bowl of soup, seeing nothing, saying nothing, only lifting a spoon to his mouth and letting it descend until the bowl was empty. At which point Elvire