110
PARTISAN REVIEW
nized a redheaded German woman from the Korona Tavern. (The
only mysterious links between the redheaded German woman and
Lot's wife were the large, white sweat stains circling her armpits and
the fact that Yeshua Krochal had, by his own testimony, "sodom–
ized" her.)
Of the hundred and twenty pages in
The
Road to Canaan,
Ben
Haas left barely a third, bringing together those parts in which a hint
of mythic allegory seemed to lurk, a hint that might be turned into
the Appearance of Substance. The next day, bleary-eyed and ill-tem–
pered, he set off for the Korona with the manuscript of
The Road to
Canaan
in the pocket of his caftan . He found Yeshua Krochal much
afflicted . The young man told him of his doubts: he had come to
realize the
futility
and the
inevitability
of his choice.
If
the Master felt
that
The Road to Canaan
would fail to attain the grace of appropriate
form, he could do nothing but
withdraw.
He pronounced the word in
a highly ambiguous manner, in such a way as to give it a different,
more pernicious meaning from the one it had in
Summer and the Desert.
("If
you are unable to act at the perilous conjunction of contradictory
forces, the moral and the poetic, then withdraw. Water the cabbages
in your garden, and grow roses only in the cemetery. For roses are
fatal to the souL") The man called the Master then took the much–
defaced manuscript from the inside pocket of his silk caftan and laid
it in front of the young man.
"If
I understand correctly," said Yeshua, crushed, "there is
nothing left."
"Quite the contrary," said Ben Haas. "What is left is what can
be given the Appearance of Substance. And the difference between
the Appearance of Substance and Substance is so slight that only the
wisest can perceive it. As the wise are very few-only thirty-six
in
the whole world , according to some-very few will notice it. For the
vast majority, Appearance equals Substance."
Yeshua Krochal's face lit up, because he thought he had
detected a secret idea of his own in the Master's words, his guiding
idea: that all things here below happen under false pretenses, on the
thin and elusive border separating Substance and the Appearance of
Substance, but since no one is able to pinpoint what is one and what
the other (here his idea differed fundamentally from the Master's),
all values, ethical and poetic, are merely a matter of skill and
chance-empty form . Ben Haas sensed his disciple's hidden idea–
for the man called the Master did distinguish Truth from False-
