Agrippa's Daughter (47 page)

So in Alexandria, at a meeting of the most influential Jews in the city, Berenice looked from face to face—wondering what they would say if they knew how closely her thoughts followed a Roman almost young enough to be her son. What did they think of her in any case? And yet she hardly cared—it was of so little importance what anyone thought of her. The alabarch was dead. Philo was dead. And the Berenice who came down to Egypt then, so long ago—was she also dead?

“So we say now,” Berenice told them, “that this is our salvation, that we will raise up out of the ashes of Jerusalem not the dead but the living—”

They were tense, tired, defensive, these Alexandrian Jews. No longer were they the driving, moving power in the city. No longer was Alexandria their city. Day and night they faced a hostile population, and the alabarch among them, one Casper Shamo Hacohen, said to Berenice and Jacobar:

“What is our debt to Jerusalem? What happened in Jerusalem set off a riot here, and many Jews died—and we lost millions of sesterces in property—burnings, looting, destruction. Jerusalem turned the pagan mad, and he is not yet sane. And what was Jerusalem? Shall we weep for a monster like Bargiora? Already they are hailing him for a hero. Shall we weep for him and his Sicarii?”

“No,” replied Berenice simply, “we do not ask that. Yet if you weep for him, I will weep with you. He murdered my husband, the nashi, yet I will weep for him—because we made him. We Jews made him, yet God placed upon us an obligation to make something better. I will ask you to weep for something else—for eight thousand slaves, most of them little girls, whom we must buy out of death quickly, quickly—”

Then she told them the story.

“This is madness—eight million sesterces,” said one of them.

“The legends of Jewish wealth in Alexandria are of the past,” the alabarch insisted.

“It was God’s will that Jerusalem fell,” a third said.

“We know what took place in the walls,” said a fourth.

“God help me, I am ashamed to be an Alexandrian!” Cadmus Bargora cried. “I know you. Lie to the queen if you must—not to me. I know you and you and you and you and you”—directing a finger at each. “We talk of life! Do you put a price on human existence? Her husband was the grandson of Hillel. Hillel! It is told that when Hillel died a river of tears flowed out of Alexandria. All the tears? Are none left?”

In Alexandria the money was found to complete the purchase of the children, but the game had spread and now there was a crisis in Antioch. From Antioch, Berenice went to Rhodes, where eighteen thousand Jewish slaves had been brought. The ninety days were almost past, and she wrote to Titus in Rome; but as it turned out her letter never reached him. Anat Beradin joined her at Rhodes with word that Jewish captives were being slain at Salamis and starved in Tyre. The Jews of Rhodes had put together a purse of four and a half million sesterces; yet it was not enough, and Beradin pledged four tons of wool and twelve thousand sheep on various ranges in Anatolia to the pagan bankers in return for another three million sesterces. As a double pledge, he assigned to these bankers his gold reserves in various cities—and Berenice was convinced that it meant his ruin. When she spoke to him, Beradin shrugged his shoulders.

“I am seventy-three years old, Berenice. The game is done. You heard the old legend about how the angel of death whispers in one’s ear seven months before he claims him—”

His premonition was correct, and Berenice heard the news of his death before the year was out. But meanwhile, she had the sensation of one who builds a wall of sand against the sea and then attempts to stem its collapse with bare hands, rushing from here to there. She felt that the whole world was well aware of this particular Jewish madness; that having first provoked an insane and suicidal war with Rome, they were now trying to buy a whole nation out of bondage. With Jacobar Hacohen she traveled to Athens, where a wealthy Greek slave dealer said to them, “You Jews have this business of bondage and freedom on the brain—the way that you preface everything with the recollection that your Yaweh brought you out of bondage in Egypt. You are not the first people to go down to defeat. When Rome broke the back of Greece, she took a quarter of a million slaves in a single week and killed half of them. There it is—life and death, war and peace, freedom and bondage; it is the substance of existence, and you might as well accept it. Now let me tell you this. I am a rich man, and I don’t need the money—but let me tell you that everyone in Athens and everyone in every other city, if my guess is right, is laughing at you Jews. It has become the short road to riches. Get hold of a dozen Jewish slaves, and these rich Jews will pay what you ask—anything. Madness! What are these Jewish slaves? Cutthroats! The scum of Judea! What are they good for? Who will buy Sicarii? This world is pretty rotten—but a cult dedicated to murder is still more than one likes to take, even as a bargain. If you would only stand clear of this for a few months, we will wash out the adult males. Then you can buy the children and the women at a fair price.”

In a way, Berenice decided, by his own lights and his own manner of thinking, he was not too wrong. With tough, iron-covered guards, she walked through one of the slave pens in Athens where the men were kept, half-starved, filthy-bearded Jewish soldiers who looked at her with silent hatred and then spat a malediction onto the ground she trod. Yet it made no difference, and when Jacobar had managed to bring together in Athens rich Jews from Nicopolis and Corinth as well as Athens, and a handful of noble Spartans too—who thought of themselves in good measure as Jews through an eternal blood brotherhood—Berenice wept as she spoke to them.

Nicodemus Kractus, a Spartan who operated olive groves of considerable size in Arcadia, said that while he would not quarrel with the purpose of the queen of Chalcis, they could not continue in this mode of desperation, nor could they expect men of substance to bankrupt themselves in the cause of the Jewish captives. Even in Sparta, he reminded Berenice, the Sicarii evoked disgust and horror—and so nightmarish were the tales of the internecine warfare in Jerusalem before the Roman attack and of the murders done by the Sicarii that most people were poorly disposed toward the cause of the captives. All too many felt that their present condition was a just judgment.

“I am not here to argue the directions of divine justice,” Berenice said, “nor distinctions of guilt. We are determined to save as many captives as we can.”

“Exactly,” Kractus nodded. “But Athens is hardly the place to undertake this decisively. The great Jewish wealth is centered at Rome, as we all know—but that is not enough. Either we get the support of the emperor or his son, Titus, or most of the slaves will be dead before half the money is raised. I think, Queen Berenice, that we must turn to Rome.”

Melek-ak was a folk hero of the Semitic people who lived on the coast of Palestine. In the dawn of time, it was held, at the very beginning of beginnings, Melek-ak was filled with lust for a woman, and, seeing Tyros, the daughter of the mother god, walking on the beach, he set off after her. Never before had he caught Tyros, who was remarkably fleet of foot for a girl, but on this occasion the nymph’s attention was diverted by a dog with a purple muzzle—and that moment of diversion cost Tyros her virginity. Being a wise maiden—and wise even when no longer a maiden—Tyros ensnared the large muscled demigod who had raped her and demanded in return for her maidenhead a cloak of the same purple that stained the dog’s muzzle. It was only fair, the nymph argued, for through the beauty and unusual color of that stain, she had lost what women profess to value but are so eager to part with. With this request, Melek-ak, who had not formerly been noted for intelligence, displayed rare deductive intelligence and traced the purple dye to shellfish the dog had been crunching, namely the banded murex and the spiny murex—and so began what was to remain for uncounted centuries one of the prime business monopolies of Jew and Phoenician. At first, a thousand years before Berenice’s time, it had appeared that the supply of murex on the Palestinian coast was unlimited, and though only a few drops of the precious fluid—colorless when it emerged from the shellfish but turning purple on exposure to sunlight—were available from each mollusk, the mollusks were so abundant that no one could imagine that some day they would be exhausted. Not only did King Solomon wear the purple, but he clothed his women in purple and hung purple drapes from the walls of his palace. The Jewish caravans carried bolts of cotton and linen dyed purple even to the far-off cities of India and the Punjab, while the Phoenician galleys bore the purple cloth to every corner of the known world. A Phoenician-Jewish network of dealers and dyers, based on the precious murex, covered the whole Mediterranean basin; and when suddenly it was realized that the mollusks on the Palestinian coast were rapidly disappearing, Jew and Phoenician joined forces to begin a systematic search of the beaches of the world, across Africa, around every mile of the coast of Spain, and down the Atlantic coast of Africa for more than a thousand miles—in search of the shellfish that was more precious than gold; for as the murex became increasingly rare, the price rose and rose.

Meanwhile, Rome had come into the political and military ascendancy—and Rome chose the purple as the symbolic representation of its power and majesty. At first the purple toga was a commonplace in Rome, Jews settling in Rome and setting up dyeing vats there—until Rome became the cloth-dyeing center of the world. But then, as the purple became increasingly difficult to produce, the purple toga was replaced by the purple stripe—and then, suddenly, Augustus forbade any but the members of his own house to wear the purple; and he placed an injunction upon the Jews who controlled the purple that hereafter no purple was to be sold anywhere in the world but at Rome—and there only to agents of the imperial house.

Thus the history and wealth of the House of Barona, where Berenice went as a guest of the head of the house, whose name was David Barona Judaicus Purpureus—a small, gentle, white-haired Jew, mild in manner, devout, a follower of Hillel, and perhaps one of the richest men in the world. For over five hundred years, his family had been a leading force in the exploitation of the murex, and not only did he own dye factories in Rome, but he had eleven plantations on the African coast, where the murex was cultivated and farmed. That Berenice would come to him in Rome was inevitable; equally inevitable the fact that he would insist that she remain at his house, a very large city house at the edge of the Jewish quarter, where an apartment of rooms was set aside for her pleasure. While Barona was one of the very few Jews granted Roman citizenship, he was essentially a very simple and modest man—overwhelmed at the honor done to him by the fact of Berenice as his guest. It was many years since Berenice had been to Rome—and during that time, she had become a sort of legend to Jew and non-Jew alike. Her astonishing beauty, apparently invulnerable to the ravages of time, her strange and striking green eyes, and her red hair, still unstreaked by any touch of gray or white—made her an object of attention and discussion from the moment she stepped off the Greek galley that brought her to Ostia; and this, connected with the fact of servants and baggage, marked a woman of importance and wealth. By the time she had arrived at the House of Barona, the city was buzzing with news that Berenice, queen of Chalcis and princess of the ancient houses of Herod and Mattathias was in Rome and at the home of the Jewish millionaire, David Barona.

Barona had thoughtfully asked only the slightest of social amenities from Berenice, the merest words of peace and greeting with his wife, his very old mother, his five children, three of them married. Of the grandchildren, eleven stood quietly in the background, staring with wide eyes and open, speechless mouths at this very tall, very beautiful woman whose blood, they knew, went back to Judah the Maccabee and his father, and beyond them to the great King David, and then beyond David into the dawn of time and the mighty priest and wonder-worker, Aaron, who was the brother of Moses. They asked no genealogical proof, these children, but stared at Berenice as if she were the living proof and embodiment of God’s choice of Israel.

“We will talk tomorrow, Berenice Basagrippa,” the old man, the head of the house, said to her. “Tonight, rest in your rooms, and I will have food and refreshment sent to you. I take a liberty, my dear—a liberty of intimacy, because I am much older than you. Never did I imagine that my house would be blessed with your presence. I am fortunate and rewarded.”

For all of her weariness, Berenice was touched, and tears came to her eyes as the old man kissed her hand. He led her himself to the apartment that had been provided for her. “I know why you are here,” he told her, “and I have invited people to meet with us tomorrow. I will not fail you.”

The apartment provided for her was magnificent—as indeed the entire house was. Even very wealthy Romans would build four or five stories of income-producing rental apartments over their town houses; Barona was one of the very few who kept a great, multi-storied mansion exclusively for his own use—a kind of extravagance that was sourly put by the Romans to the uncountable wealth of Jews—and within this mansion, the quarters assigned to Berenice made her own houses in Galilee seem almost austere by comparison. There was her own limpid pool of water to bathe in if she desired, or simply to contemplate, a pillared gallery around it, a reception room of her own with a ceiling twelve feet high, a suite of three bedrooms, and a room for writing, study, or contemplation: all of this furnished with taste and without thought of cost.

As Berenice walked slowly through the place, she listened to Gabo’s bitter complaints about the cold weather, the damp air and the distance from Galilee: “And do I ever see my children again?” Gabo wanted to know. “Or are we here forever? Of course, it’s all right for you—but I have children and I have grandchildren—and there isn’t a word of sensible language spoken here, only that Latin gibberish, and I might as well be dead.”

It made no impression upon her when Berenice pointed out that this was not only the largest city in the world, but the center of the world’s government, culture, and excitement; she went on complaining and whining. Berenice bathed. The pool was filled with warm, sweet water, slightly perfumed, and equipped with a total plumbing system of silver. You turned the taps on and off, as water was needed, fed water through the mixer, had a clean flow always, and let the used water out through the silver mask over the drain. The pool was tiled with green marble, its fixtures in the shape of dolphins, herrings, and sea horses. As Berenice bathed, turning lazily in the water, she thought of how in all of Galilee there was no bath like this; and then, thinking of Galilee, she thought of the lake, its milk-warm water, swimming there as a child with her brother, Agrippa—and other things, too, as she left the bath, wrapped herself in a robe, and calmed Gabo, who came running in breathless to announce that he was here.