Ahasuerus's Journey E-Book

Hermann Selchow

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 169

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

“You will go.” With this simple sentence, “Ahasuerus’s Journey” begins a voyage that leads not only through countries, but through centuries and through the uncomfortable questions we usually avoid. In Jerusalem, caught between Roman occupation and religious order, the shoemaker Ahasuerus clings to rules because, for him, order is the only antidote to chaos. But when he refuses water to a condemned man, his sense of security becomes a judgment, and a human being becomes a wanderer who never arrives. What follows is an atmospheric, sweeping novel of a bygone era, full of intense scenes: Ahasuerus is “thrown” into a new age, experiences how “order” suddenly wears a uniform, how faith becomes a battle cry, how progress tastes of soot, and how modern campaigns use frames, images, and guilt to manipulate people. It becomes clear: the real theme is not walking, but seeing. And the question that runs through everything: “What does my certainty do to the other person?” Hermann Selchow, already known for his nuanced philosophical texts, tells "Ahasuerus's Journey" with clear, compelling language and an eye for the moral cracks behind grand ideas. From the stages of a seemingly endless journey emerges a novel about fear and belonging, about ideology and responsibility, and about the inconspicuous decisions through which humanity is often revealed: whether one stops, whether one looks, whether one offers water to another.

Leseprobe

Ahasuerus's Journey

A philosophical Story

© 2026 Hermann Selchow

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Ahasuerus's Journey

A philosophical Story

Table of contents:

Chapter 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Chapter 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Chapter 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Chapter 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Chapter 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Chapter 1

Scene 1

There are days when Jerusalem sounds as if it were nailing itself down: the clacking of sandals on stone, the cries of the merchants, the steady snorting of the animals. On such days the city breathes in a rhythm one knows. And everything one knows can be endured. I have gotten into the habit of paying attention to rhythms.

In my workshop every object is where it belongs. Not out of vanity. Out of necessity. Order is not a pretty cloth laid over everyday life, order is the wooden framework beneath it. Without it everything collapses.

The Romans understand that. One need not love them to see it. Their rules are hard, their punishments harder, but they are predictable. And predictability is the only thing that stands between us and the abyss one calls chaos. God’s law is older, deeper, it is not only about taxes and roads, but about the world itself: what is clean, what unclean, what bears, what corrupts.

I keep to it because I know what happens when one begins to make exceptions.

Leather is patient. It takes the imprint of the foot, whether the foot is Roman or Jewish, whether it is washed or full of dust. But the human being is not patient. The human being looks for loopholes because he believes he is greater than what holds him.

I drew the thread through the pre-punched holes, pulled tight until the edges found each other. A clean seam is a small decision against falling apart.

In the doorframe stood Ruben, the grocer, rubbing his nose with two fingers as if he could wipe the smell of the street out of his head. Outside, already in the morning, hung that mixture of warm stone, filth, and sweet fruit that has lain too long in the sun.

“Ahasver,” he said, and I heard that he had not come because of a new sole.

“Ruben.”

He did not step in at once. He stayed on the threshold, there, where one can quickly be gone again if the words do not go well.

“You reprimanded my boy yesterday,” he began.

“I reminded him.”

Ruben twisted his mouth. “He says you talk as if you stood beside God and the Romans at the same time.”

My hands kept working. I took my time, because haste is the mother of false stitches. “If one lives between the two, one should listen to both.”

“He is young,” Ruben murmured, and in his voice lay that indulgent softness I never understood. “He wants… air.”

Air. A word people use when they want no boundary. “Too much air lets fire grow,” I said. “And fire eats first what burns most easily.”

Ruben wanted to contradict me, but at that moment another shadow slid into the doorframe.

A boy, not from our quarter. You could tell by the way he moved: not cautiously, not with his eyes down, as one learns when one knows the world can stop you at any time. He came in as if the room had been promised to him.

“You are Ahasver,” he said. No greeting. No respect. Only a statement, as if he were inspecting a piece of merchandise.

“That is what they call me.”

His gaze glided over the tools, lingered on the awl, on the knife, on the pitch. On things that separate, connect, hold. Then he looked at the sandals lying on the bench, finished and orderly, like soldiers before inspection.

“I need new shoes,” he said. “But not like that. Not so heavy. Not so… firm.”

The word “firm” he spoke as if it were an insult.

I felt something draw tight inside me. Not anger first. Rather that sharp mistrust that announces itself when someone dances at the edge of an abyss and pretends it is a game.

“Firm is good,” I said. “Firm means: you do not fall.”

He smiled. It was a smile without shame. “Maybe I want to fall.”

Ruben audibly let out his breath, as if the sentence had struck him. I, however, heard something else beneath it: that new, dangerous way of thinking that is spreading in the city like weeds in a crack in the wall. At first it is only small green tips. Then the stone breaks.

“You want to fall,” I repeated, calmly. “Then at least be honest and say: you want others to fall with you. Because that is always how it is. One loosens the cord, the next unties the knot, and in the end everyone is astonished that nothing holds anymore.”

“You’re acting,” the boy said, “as if every step were a sin.”

“Every step has consequences.”

He came closer, and I smelled a foreign oil, sweet, insistent. A smell that did not smell of work, but of significance. He bent over the bench as if it belonged to him.

“I want sandals that won’t betray me,” he said.

“Betray?” I lifted my eyes. “To whom?”

He hesitated for the length of a heartbeat. There was a small flicker in his eyes, something like fear that quickly acquires a mask. “To the wrong ones.”

There it was again: this game with categories, as if one could decide for oneself who is wrong and who is right. As if there were no order, only whims.

“If you fear being recognized,” I said, “then you are doing something that does not want to be seen. And what does not want to be seen rarely has a good reason.”

His jaw tightened. “You sound like a Roman.”

“The Romans have rules,” I said. “And God has rules. Rules mean: tomorrow is not completely different from today. Rules mean: one can work, save, build a house, raise children. Without rules everything is only…” I searched for the word and found the one from which I have kept my hands clean for years: “…an accident.”

He gave a short laugh, but it was no laughter. “You are afraid.”

That hit closer than I wanted to grant him. Not because it was untrue, but because he spoke it so easily. As if fear were something one could simply toss at a man like me.

I pulled the thread tight until the leather creaked. “Fear is a tool,” I said. “It reminds you that you are mortal. That your world is fragile. A wise person uses it, instead of gambling it away.”

“And a coward calls it wise,” he hissed.

Ruben made a movement, half forward, half back, as if he did not know whether he should protect me or push the boy out. That is precisely chaos: when even good people no longer know where they stand.

Outside, suddenly another sound rolled down the street, like a swarm changing direction. Voices. Many. Dense. Not the market cries, not the usual bickering, but something that sounded like pull, like movement, like a crowd heating itself up.

The boy froze for a moment, turned his head toward the alley. His face lost its arrogance, became naked for the span of a breath.

“They are coming,” Ruben murmured.

“Who?”

Ruben did not answer at once, as if he did not want the name in my workshop. Then he said it after all, hurried, quiet: “A preacher. One the people run after.”

“People always run,” I said. “If someone is loud enough.”

But the noise was different. It had that undertow a mass develops when it believes it must see something, experience something, bear witness to something, in order to be able to say later: I was there.

And being there is dangerous. There people lose their own hand on their own arm.

The boy backed away, almost unobtrusively. He looked at me once more, as if he wanted to say something, something that might not be only defiance. But then he pressed his lips together.

“Don’t make my sandals,” he said softly. “You would lace them so that I no longer know who I am.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “you will know it then for the first time.”

He was outside, swallowed by the alley, by the swelling sound, by the bodies streaming past stones like water.

Ruben stayed in the doorframe. His gaze had turned glassy, as if he already saw before him how things would come out of joint.

“Stay inside,” he said. “Once the crowd starts moving, it tramples everything down. Then it doesn’t matter who you are.”

I looked at my workbench. At the seam. At the leather, holding fast what had been separate. I thought of what I possessed: the workshop, the reputation, the certainty that through rule and diligence I had a place in this world. I thought of what I could lose if people began to rise above laws, God’s as well as Rome’s.

Chaos does not mean only noise. Chaos means: the ground under your feet is suddenly no ground anymore.

“Whoever keeps to order,” I said, and I noticed how much I was pulling at each word like at a thread, “has nothing to fear.”

Outside the sound swelled and came nearer, as if the city itself had decided today to found a chaos.

Scene 2

Jerusalem has different kinds of noise. The noise of the market, which sounds like coins. The noise of children, which sounds like future. And the noise of soldiers, which sounds like an end.

On that day the soldiers’ noise came around the corner like a blade. First the metallic clinking, then the hard steps, even, as if the feet had nothing to do with human beings. A call in Latin, short, clipped. After that the murmur of the crowd, that hungry humming that arises when many reassure one another: Something is happening. It is happening now. And we do not want to be the ones who miss it.

The workshop was still open. Too early to close, too late to pretend the street was only street.

Ruben was no longer there. Perhaps he had wriggled away before misfortune acquired a name. Those who are quick call it wisdom.

The shadow of the crowd filled the alley. Heads, shoulders, hands pointing upward as if what was happening could be pinned down with a finger. Between the bodies Romans pushed through, wedges of armor. The smell changed. Less fruit, less spice, more fear, more sweat, more iron.

And then, in the middle, not proud, not upright, rather like something that had been shoved out of order, came the man.

No king. No hero. A body under too much wood. A face that no longer looked like a face because blood and dust had given it other lines. The thorns, one did not see them as a crown, one saw them as mockery. The way one person tells another: We will make you small until you fit into our world.

A soldier shoved him forward with the butt of the spear, not brutally, rather bored. That is how you kick an animal that no longer wants to pull.

The crowd parted at my door as if it were water around a stone. For a moment there was a gap, and the gap looked at me.

His eyes lifted. Not pleading. Not dramatic. Rather as if he were examining me.

“Water,” he said hoarsely. The word was hardly a word, more a trace. “Only… water.”

A part of me wanted to nod automatically. Not out of pity, I rarely indulged myself that word, but out of reflex: you give water to a thirsty person. It is that simple. That is how the world is made, if one does not willfully twist it.

The other part, the larger, the more practiced, saw the consequences at once, how they spread: one step over the threshold, one drop into the mouth, and my door is no longer open only to me, but to the crowd. Then the next one comes. Then come questions. Then come the Romans. Then comes the talk. And talk is like dust: it settles everywhere, eats into wood and cloth, and even if you scrub, a shadow remains.

“On,” I said, without raising my voice.

The man blinked as if he had not understood. Perhaps he had heard the word “on” too often, perhaps it had long since become for him a single sound, like rain on a roof.

“Only a moment,” he forced out. “A sip.”

Behind him a soldier barked something, laughed briefly. The crowd pressed forward, shoved. A child cried. Somewhere a woman screamed his name, or the name of another, it was no longer possible to tell.

The order that usually lay in the alleys like a taut cord had grown thin at this point.

“If you want water,” I said, and my tone suddenly sounded like in the workshop when someone haggles over a price, “then ask those who are leading you.”

He looked over his shoulder as if he had to remember who was leading him. Then back to me. In his eyes there was something that angered me because it did not fit: calm. No submission, no rebellion. Calm.

“You have a door,” he said. “A hand. A vessel.”

The words were plain, almost naive. And precisely that plainness was like a stone against glass: it allowed no escape.

“A door is no invitation,” it spat out of me, faster than I had thought. “And my hand is not meant for heretics.”

The word “heretics” tasted of protection. It pushed him to the other side of a border, to the side where one has no obligation anymore because one tells oneself the duty would become unclean.

A murmur went through the people nearby. Some nodded as if they had been waiting for someone to say the right thing. Others twisted their faces as if I had violated a nuance they secretly liked: the spectacle may be cruel, but please not too close.

The man lowered his gaze briefly, as if he were seeing the threshold not as wood but as a boundary. Then he lifted it again.

“You are afraid,” he said.

That struck me harder than any curse. Not because it was new, but because he spoke it as if fear were not a blemish, but a fact one can acknowledge like hunger.

“I am not afraid,” I said. The crowd was suddenly very quiet in my head, as if someone had stopped the world.

“Yes,” he said. “You fear that everything you cling to will break.”

The Romans behind him shoved. A strap creaked. Wood scraped over stone. His body swayed, caught itself, as if something held him that was not wood.

“What I hold,” I burst out, “holds me. God’s law. The order. Even the Romans, hated as they are, hold the city together. Without them there would be only…”

The sentence snagged, because the word I thought was so large it dries out your mouth: ruin.

“Without them there would be freedom,” a voice from the crowd said mockingly.

Laughter. Short, dangerous laughter. Freedom is a word everyone likes until he realizes it also means that no one protects his door.

The man breathed heavily. He stood too close. His nearness smelled of blood and dust and that metallic something you have in your mouth when you have cut yourself.

“Law,” he murmured, and it did not sound like contempt, rather like grief. “You make a club out of the law. But it was never made to beat people.”

“You know nothing,” I hissed. “You bring only unrest. You speak of a kingdom no one sees, and people lose the ground. They follow words because words are lighter than work.”

A soldier shoved him again. He buckled, one knee on stone. The thorns jerked. A sound, not pain, rather the sound of a body that no longer knows where to put itself.

For a moment there was something in me that wanted to take the step forward. Not heroic. Not grand. Only a step. A cup. A sip.

Then I saw how a Roman lifted his gaze and, over the crowd, fixed on my door as if he were memorizing it. The Romans memorized doors. They memorized faces. And whoever once stood in the memory of the Romans rarely stood there for good reasons.

My hand stayed on the doorpost, as if it had to hold on.

“Get up,” I said harshly. “And go. Make your uproar somewhere else. Not on my threshold.”

The man lifted his head. Blood ran along his temple, slowly, as if it had time.

“Your threshold,” he repeated softly, almost in wonder. “As if you could own it.”

That was it. That was the point at which his calm became provocation. Whoever speaks like that acts as if possession, work, rule, boundaries are only illusions. As if everything were interchangeable. As if one had to protect nothing, because in the end some higher hand would set everything right.

“Go,” I said. “On.”

The soldier laughed, satisfied, as if I had saved him some work. He hauled the man up by the arm, tore him forward. The cross swayed, smacked against back, against shoulder. Wood on flesh. World on human being.

The crowd began moving again, like an animal that has hesitated briefly and then follows its instinct after all. Heads shoved past my door, past me, as if I were air.

Only his eyes stayed with me for the length of a heartbeat.

No hatred in them. No plea. Only that insolent, clear knowledge: You have chosen.

When he was dragged away, the alley did not remain empty. Dust hung in the air. A few women whispered. A man spat, as if he could get what had happened out of his mouth that way. A child stared at me, open, unguarded.

The hand on the doorpost trembled. Not visibly. But it trembled.

In the workshop it suddenly smelled different, though nothing was different: leather, pitch, warm wood. Everything in its place. And yet the order felt as if someone had scratched a fine crack into it. So thin you can overlook it if you want, and so real it runs on even if you look away.

Outside the noise grew smaller, but not lighter. It moved on, toward the city wall, toward the place of execution.

And with every step the crowd took there was a premonition that could no longer be pressed back into the joints: that there are things one cannot nail down with rules. That there are words that settle into you without asking whether you have room.

“You are afraid,” he had said.

Scene 3

Dust is the memory of a crowd. It settles on eyelashes, on tongues, into the folds of clothing, and later, when everything is over, you find it again in the folds of your own hands, as if you yourself had shaped what happened.

The alley in front of my workshop emptied slowly, but not neatly. People did not dissolve like smoke, they remained standing in small groups, talking, pointing, repeating sentences they themselves did not understand. Some looked once more toward my door, as if something had happened there that needed to be judged. A man spat on the stone, half out of disgust, half out of relief. A woman drew her child closer to her, as if she could shield it from looks.