Agrippa's Daughter (21 page)

“They were upset, those scholars,” he continued. “They cried, ‘What has Hillel done with God?’ ‘Is God so ineffectual that I could do this or that with Him?’ Hillel replied.”

“Zeno!” the merchant from Damascus snorted. “Did I come to the House of Hillel to hear the preachments of Zeno?”

“Oh no—no,” the teacher said gently. “We are no Stoics here, and neither was the Rabbi Hillel. For the Stoics said that man can only live in the grandeur of a hero, facing his own fate, his own meaningless existence, recognizing it and living without fear of it. He preached that the good man was the wise man; but Hillel preached that the good man was he who loved his fellow man; and where the Stoics said there was no God but the cold rationale of nature and substance and being, Hillel said that the Almighty Himself is the author of all of nature and being. The Greeks would like God to be reason, but without love reason has no compassion. When the Pharisees demanded that Hillel define God, he did not retreat into a philosophical hole, as does the good Philo of Alexandria, who is entranced with the unknowability of God. These are the games of clever men. The Rabbi Hillel was not clever, only wise, and he said that the nature of God was love; the being of God, compassion.”

He drank water again and then said to the traveler from Damascus, “Stay with us a little. There is so much more—and so many loopholes in what I said that we can spend hours plugging them. We talk a great deal at this school, but we also leam a little—” As he spoke, he walked toward the merchant, his voice dropping so that Berenice could no longer hear what he said. The school, meanwhile, broke up into clusters of men and boys, some in hot discussion, and then the clusters began to coalesce around Hillel Bengamaliel. For some reason, it reminded Berenice of her readings in Plato, and she found herself thinking that the school of Socrates in Athens could not have been too different from this. As the others rose from the ground, she did, too, brushing the dust off her dress. The woman with the two small children, a dark-eyed and comely woman, walked by, nodding at her and smiling slightly. No one asked her who she was or why she was there; and all in all, it appeared to be a place where any and all were welcome and where any and all came.

Now, household slaves or servants—it was difficult for Berenice to determine their status, so easy was their manner and so readily did they talk to others—were bringing tables and benches from the sheds to the shade of the great oak tree and setting them up for the midday meal. The tables consisted of planks laced onto cross-pieces and set on sawhorses, and the benches were of the simplest kind, but four long tables were set up with space enough for half a hundred people to eat. Some of the boys remained; others exploded into freedom and ran whooping from the courtyard; and still others went to the. tables with their own packages of food. Nothing seemed to be planned or ordered, yet everything took place with dispatch and organization. A stream of people were coming through the courtyard gate—field hands burnt by the sun and glistening with the sweat of their work; shepherds; the women whom Berenice had seen washing clothes in the stream, now carrying huge baskets of the wash balanced on their heads; housemaids bowed with the weight of fresh-water buckets; and, strangely enough, two of the lean, hard, and dirty bandits whom she had met in the band of Zealots earlier this day—neither swaggering nor diffident, but coming matter-of-factly to take their places at the table.

The tables were no longer empty. A stream of slaves brought an unending stream of edibles from the kitchen—platters of cucumbers and leeks, great bowls of fruit, trays piled high with smoked fish, bowls of dates and figs and grapes and olives and onions, and warm, sweet-smelling stacks of the round, pancakelike bread—and wine and water.

Standing, watching, Berenice told herself that not even a king, not even her brother could set such a table as a matter of routine, probably day in and day out. What then, she wondered, was this strange House of Hillel, nestling here in this fruitful valley only a few miles from Tiberias?

As if to answer Berenice’s question, a man appeared whom she recognized, Shimeon, standing at a door to the house across the yard and looking at the people clustered around the tree. At his left there was a middle-aged woman, her gray hair piled upon her head, giving the impression of even more height than was actually hers. At his right, a thin man coming into his older years, gray beard streaked with white, the man himself clad in an ankle-length gown of blue linen, cut fully and belted in the Babylonian manner; and this man was talking to Shimeon as they walked out of the house and across the yard to the tree. Almost at the tree and already in the shade, Shimeon looked up from the commanding position of his height and saw her. Then he whispered something to the man and woman, left them, walked around the cluster of tables, where people were already eating, and directly over to Berenice—the surprise and disbelief on his face replaced now by very real delight; yet he did not take her hand or reach out to her. He stood before her with diffidence, no longer the doctor at his patient’s bed; and it was more than this difference in him that Berenice felt, rather a difference that pervaded him, his manner, his being. He examined her with his eyes as a man examines a woman, her dusty feet, her stained clothes, and the kerchief wrapped tightly to conceal her torrent of auburn hair.

“How long have you been here, my lady?” he asked her.

“Perhaps an hour.”

“Then forgive me for my failings as a host.”

“It was a good hour. I sat at the edge of the school and I listened.”

“There’s a fate, for there’s nothing in the world charms my brother Hillel like the sound of his own voice. Come—please.” He led her to one side, where there was an old mounting bench, and then he motioned to a slave and told him to bring a basin and water. He knelt in front of Berenice as he unbuckled her sandals.

“Shouldn’t you be there?” Berenice asked, nodding at the tables.

“There—you mean to eat? No, no—I hold with my blessed mentor, Hippocrates, that three quarters of the physical evils that beset mankind flow from eating too much, not too little. But they will be at it for a while, and there is food enough. When the House of Hillel dines, the world stands still.” The slaves returned with the water now, and Shimeon poured it into the basin and began to wash Berenice’s feet.

More times than she could count she had had her feet washed, but never exactly like this, so easily and spontaneously and with hands that rippled the whole fiber of her body whenever they touched her. She could have closed her eyes and said—as she thought—go on like this and wash them for ever and ever, and wash away everything that hurts and exacerbates and torments and shames, and leave them clean and leave me clean—but these were thoughts out of the strangeness of the occasion, and to feel something one has never felt before can be more disquieting than anything else. As he washed her feet, Shimeon told her of his amazement when he first saw her, yet he had recognized her immediately—

“Which,” he added, “is rather strange, because you look different.”

“Because my hair is covered?”

“No. No—I think—will you be angry if I say it?” He had to talk loudly to be heard over the babble of voices from the tables.

“Nothing could make me angry here.”

“Well, that’s it,” Shimeon nodded.

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s no hate, no anger. You were always angry. Such anger! If it were not blasphemous to think of the Almighty as a woman, I would say it reminded me of the stories in the Torah—when God explodes in anger at Moses.”

He added, grinning, “That was very regal anger—if you know what I mean?”

“I don’t know whether you’re mocking me or praising me or scolding me.”

“Not scolding you—” He dried her feet with linen napkins. “Mockery and praise—yes, that’s the due of a queen—”

“And yet you’re not surprised to find me here?” Berenice said.

“Surprised? No. Perhaps in our ego, we have come to believe that the whole world will come to the House of Hillel—sooner or later. And there is some truth in that. Here have come kings and procurators and proconsuls and tetrarchs and alabarchs and princes and priests—and heaven knows what other titles. And most go away disappointed that what they have heard so much of is merely a Galilean farmhouse, a country villa, and far from the largest in Galilee. Are you disappointed, Queen Berenice—no, I did not mean to call you that.”

“I don’t understand this place,” she replied. “Will you call me Berenice? I will call you Shimeon, and we will be friends. I never had a friend. Will you be my friend, Shimeon?”

“If you wish—and what is not to be understood here, Berenice?”

“Just”—her sandals buckled on, her feet cool and clean, she dipped a linen napkin into the water and washed her face and hands—”all of this,” she said. “What is it? What are you? You are not a sect—not a party. In one breath you will link yourselves with the Pharisees, and in the next breath you denounce them. You appear to be without weapon and without rancor, and I see no soldiers anywhere, no arms; yet those two Zealots who came in here to your table as if it were at their heart and home and under their own rooftree—they’re as hard-bitten and bloody-minded a pair of bandits as I have ever seen, and I saw them on the road this morning, where they and their comrades were cursing the fate that led them to miss an Arab caravan—which they would have looted, and murdered too—”

“The Zealots come here,” Shimeon nodded. “Why not? They have no homes, many of them, no land, no rooftree, and here they can sit an hour in peace and fill their bellies. Does that hurt anyone?”

“Hurt? I don’t understand you. Your brother preaches a God of love and compassion—”

“As we all do.”

“—and decries the Torah—”

“No,” Shimeon smiled, “we honor the Torah, but we honor people more—is that mysterious?”

“But all of this”—she waved at the tables, suddenly very hungry with the hot smell of broken bread everywhere now—”what does it mean?”

“People are hungry, and they are fed. Thus it must be at the House of Hillel,” said Shimeon. “And when it cannot be this way, the House of Hillel will crumble.”

“But this? Oh, I have heard about the Essenes and their monasteries in the desert by the Dead Sea—but they are holy men, and their common table is an altar to God, and they take no wives but eat their crust of bread and their cup of water—”

“And they live in poverty and filth, and they exalt filth and worship poverty, and they hate women and fear women, and their holiness can be measured by the smell and their piousness by the shout of doom that arises from their grim and ugly nests—and the more they suffer, the larger their pride; and if a wise man or a learned man, an engineer or an architect or a doctor should come among them, they would scourge him out like a pestilence. They fear knowledge and they love ignorance; they whip each other the better to glorify the Almighty, and they go on long fasts, until they look like famine victims, and for this they ask God’s approval—oh, tell me, Berenice, do you admire them?”

“They are fanatics,” Berenice said, “but they are holy men.”

“Ha—that I should hear Berenice Basagrippa parroting phrases. Holy men indeed!”

“And how do you honor the Almighty?” Berenice asked.

“As men should, I think. There is no hatred in the House of Hillel. In the Torah, it says that the Almighty made man in His own image, so to us the body of man is holy—the superb and supreme work of God. To allow a fellow man among us to go unfed is sinful. To hate Jew or Gentile is sinful—and these things we eschew—as we do the bearing of arms, and if need be, we will die before we raise a hand against a fellow man. We hold that the love of a man for a woman and of a woman for a man is holy and perfect—and we work to understand the meaning of love and compassion, so we can practice both. We are Jews—but no Gentile has ever been turned away from the House of Hillel, and many come here. But enough of this schooling and preaching—come with me, Berenice and meet my father and mother and the others of my family.”

The torrent of words and the passion implicit amazed Berenice, and she said nothing as he took her hand and led her toward the tables. Indeed, there was nothing she could think of that must be said. The whole world was new, and this was either a madhouse or a dream—and it was more likely a madhouse, since Berenice had never been one to stumble over the difference between dreams and reality; and if it were that, its inhabitants were well chosen, for this physician had been mad in the beginning when he tore down the drapes and blinds in her chambers and roared out his intolerant theories of medicine and health. Then he had spoken around her and now he spoke to her, but his words were no more sensible in terms of the plain world of wealth and manners and ambition in which she had spent her life.

“And thieves come here,” she managed to say finally.

“Thieves, murderers, sinners, and even some saints, and devils too—and this, Berenice, is my kinblood, my father, Gamaliel the son of Hillel the Babylonian, who was the founder of our house.” He bowed, an older man than she had suspected from the distance, courtly, gentle, his twinkling blue eyes hidden under shaggy white brows. He had been watching her and now he regarded her shrewdly, as he broke a piece of bread, dipped it in salt, and offered it to her.

“Take our bread from my hand and honor me, my child,” he said. She took the bread. “Eat, please. I have hoped that my son would bring a woman to our table, but one so beautiful—”

She munched the bread. “This is my mother, Sarah,” Shimeon said, watching with pleasure the way Berenice’s strong white teeth chewed so hungrily at the salted bread.

“Welcome and peace—but I look deeper than my husband for beauty.”

“And to you, peace,” Berenice replied. “If I have beauty, it brought me no happiness. Your bread is good, and blessed is the house where the bread of the earth is savored.”

The old man chuckled with pleasure, and Shimeon introduced her to his brother, “Hillel, my brother—he teaches of wisdom and confusion, and he will make you believe that the two are identical—as perhaps they are.”