Azazeel (15 page)

We staggered up to her room from the cellar, and that night we fell asleep sitting on the cushions scattered around the floor, without a taste from the bottle of wine. The next
day I woke up early and Octavia was asleep beside me like an indecent dream. Quietly I went down to the library, with my bag in my hand for fear she might look inside it when she woke up. I quietly
opened the window and the place filled with light. I sprawled on the floor, resuming my session among the books. I finished off my copying from the margins of the holy books, I mean the Sicilian
master’s commentaries on the verses which caught his attention. While I was putting the copy of the Old Testament back in its place on the shelf my eye fell on a large volume, and on the
inner cover I found a title describing its contents:
Epistles and Fragments of the Ancient Philosophers of Alexandria
.

I already knew many of these texts because the authors were well known, but some of the epistles and fragments were completely new to me and I had not heard of the authors in our schools in
Akhmim. I took the big volume back to my place on the floor and began to read writings which surprised me, especially fragments attributed to an old philosopher I had not heard of, by the name of
Hegesias the Death-Persuader or advocate of suicide, according to the introduction to his fragments. I was about to embark on choosing some of these fragments for copying onto my scroll when
Octavia arrived in alarm, her face quite yellow. The tresses of her ample brown hair covered her shoulders and her creamy breasts were heaving as she panted.

‘You’re here! I thought you... Why did you take your bag with you?’ she said.

‘What’s the panic? I saw here older and more accurate copies of some books I have in my bag, and I wanted to correct my copies,’ I said.

‘My love, I beg you, don’t frighten me again by leaving me suddenly. I almost died of worry for you. Come, let’s go back to our room, come on, my love.’

She threw herself in my arms, like a child whose father has returned after a long journey. At the time I did not feel her nakedness so much as I felt her anguish. I took her in my arms with
paternal affection, with none of that lust which swept us off our feet the night before, and she was comforted. As I inhaled the scent of her hair, I was close to certain that she loved me more
than my mother loved me. Did my mother hate me, as she hated my father? And did she later love her wicked husband?

I could feel Octavia’s tears running down my bare chest, washing away the pains of my boyhood. I held her closer and ran my hands along her shoulders and down her bare arm, and she calmed
down. Should I have trusted Octavia in those days more than I did? Who knows, and what use is it now? Anyway, we take a serious risk if we feel safe, just as we take a major risk if we believe in
something.

‘Never leave me, my one love,’ she said. She wiped away her tears with her hands and forced a smile to her lips. She was looking at me with frenzied passion, her tearful honey eyes
full of love and awe. When her smile softened, and her eyes recovered from the flood of tears, she took me to the roof of the house without us saying anything, as though for the moment we were
content with the messages that passed from eye to eye.

She made me stop outside her room until she came back wearing the white dress I had seen her in the first time we met, carrying in her hand the Sicilian master’s gown with the embroidered
hems, the gown I had previously refused to wear. Her eyes were begging me and she took off my gown. I put on the other one in silence, or rather she put it on me. I would have liked to stand a
while at the wall which surrounded the roof but she warned me gently again and took me affectionately into her room. She opened the window and the room filled with the light that flooded the
roof.

She sat on the edge of her bed, stretching her arms towards me like a bountiful mistress, tender, generous and cheerful. But at the time my thoughts recurred. ‘Who can say that these
traits will last forever? Nothing lasts forever. What if she betrays me? For women are by nature false. She may lose her temper with me one day for some reason and denounce me to the men of the
church and expose my secret to them. She would say that I seduced her or that I was a monk and debauched her. The church of Alexandria by all reports is strong and decisive. Most of its men are
cruel, and what might they do to me? Will I meet here the same fate as my father?

‘What’s the matter, my love? You seem distracted. Take this apple.’

‘An apple! I don’t like them, because that’s the fruit that led to Adam leaving Paradise.’

‘What’s this nonsense?’ said Octavia. ‘Who told you this superstition, my little child?’

Confused and without thinking, I said sharply, ‘It’s written in the commentaries on the Old Testament.’

‘Ha, the Old Testament. That’s a wonderful book, always mocking the ancient Egyptians and making allegations about their women. My master used to read it to me, and he would smile
and shake his head in amazement.’

I was furious at what she said, and it angered me that she was showing contempt for the Old Testament of the Lord, which we have believed in for hundreds of years and which the Jews believed in
before us. I was furious despite the many doubts I had about the material in the Pentateuch. But whatever the case, no one should show contempt for the beliefs of others, or else all beliefs would
seem hollow or be treated with scorn, and no religion would hold good for anyone.

I said to myself that maybe the time had come for some frank talking between us, so I said firmly, ‘Octavia, you shouldn’t make fun of people’s beliefs.’

‘Don’t get angry like that, my love. From now on I’ll never make fun of anyone’s belief, as long as it upsets you. So don’t make me angry, and take this apple from
my hand,’ she said.

I took the apple reluctantly. Octavia lifted my hand with the apple to my mouth, while I thought about the Book of Genesis. I bit off a small piece of the apple, and had an overpowering sense
that I was Adam, who was tempted by his wife and deceived by the accursed Azazeel. Adam then passed on the original sin of disobedience, the first sin. The well-known verses of the Old Testament,
which no one other than us can believe, stuck in my head. Some questions nagged me: why did the Lord tell Adam to stay away from the trees of knowledge and of eternal life? Why was the Lord angry
when Adam ate from the tree of knowledge? According to the Book of Genesis, he said to himself, ‘The man has now become like one of us; knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach
out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.’ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he
drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life... Why in the first place did God want
man to remain ignorant? Was the knowledge that Adam obtained a prelude to him obtaining eternal life? Who are those about whom the Lord said that Adam had become one of them? If Adam and Eve had
remained ignorant, would they have lived forever in the Garden of Eden? Is it right that immortality should go along with ignorance and disregard for nature? What exactly did they find out when
they ate from the tree? Was it what I have discovered with Octavia over the past few days, what she has dragged me into without any planning or intention on my part? Am I perhaps repeating
Adam’s deed, and will I anger the Lord so that he orders another expulsion? Whence and whither will he expel me, when I have been an outcast for years, without a place or a purpose?

I was tormented by the thoughts induced by this pagan mistress who had me sitting on her bed. But was Octavia the mistress or the slave of her desires? With this apple of hers did she perhaps
mean to take us back to sin, and thus to the start of a new creation? She had taken me out into a sea of sins, and how was I going to save myself from drowning? And now she wanted me to spend my
life with her. How so, when she did not know true faith, and did not know that I was from the people of faith?

‘What are you thinking about, my love?’

‘About marriage. I mean your late husband. Was he ill?’

‘No, he was twenty years older than me. He was very fat and weak, but he wasn’t ill. He died in the western temple.’

A sadness came over her as she told the story of what had happened to her husband, on the day she described as inauspicious. Her pagan husband had always asked her Sicilian master to bring him
incense from his travels, for him to deliver to the temples and come back happy in the evening. She used to worry about him, but he would make light of her anxiety. He did not think that temples
had become dangerous places and he used to repeat within her hearing empty meaningless phrases such as ‘Our god Serapis is the god of the world, and we have to show our respect for him in
spite of all the Christians, including Emperor Theodosius himself.’

I understood from what she said that her late husband was a little foolish and misguided. She melted my heart as she sat there, sadly telling her story. Her hair framed her face as though she
was a flower about to wilt. I should have embraced her at that moment and told her that I would be the best of husbands to her. But I said to myself, ‘Anyway she didn’t love her first
husband, and she says she loves me, so perhaps the Lord took away her husband to give her a better one.’ My mind was vacant, I was in a stupor. She was continuing her story, telling me that
her husband went out one morning to put some incense in the small temple which stood to the east of the harbour, and he was surrounded there, meaning that Christians surrounded him. She sobbed as
she spoke. ‘He was killed by the criminals and the monks who led them, as they destroyed the temple.’

‘What are you saying? Monks don’t kill people,’ I said.

‘The monks in Alexandria do. In the name of their wonderful Lord, and with the blessings of Bishop Theophilus the fanatic, and his successor Cyril, who is even more fanatical.’

‘Please, Octavia.’

‘Good, enough of such talk now. But why do you seem so hurt, my love, and so biased in their favour? They pursue us everywhere, expel their brothers the Jews, bring down temples on top of
those inside and call us filthy pagans. They are spreading around us like locusts, and filling the country like a curse cast on the world.’

‘Please.’

‘What are they to you? Why are your eyes so red and why are you about to cry?’

‘Because I... ’

‘Because you what?’

‘I...’

‘You what?’

‘I’m a Christian monk.’

A long moment of shocked silence passed. Octavia bowed her head, then looked towards me. Her face was flushed with anger, and her eyes inflamed with a furious sadness. Suddenly
she sprang to her feet and stood like one of those massive ancient statues, full of pagan vigour and ancestral bitterness. She stretched her right arm towards the door and shouted at me in a
fearsome voice, like the rumbling of Alexandria thunder or the howling of a raging pagan wind, ‘Out of my house, you wretch. Out, you villain.’

SCROLL SEVEN

I
threw down the silk gown in the middle of the room and grabbed my own gown from near the door. I put it on as I hurried down the stairs. I felt
as though I were falling into a void and my soul had been wrenched from my body. I stepped on the picture of the sad dog on my way to the door of the mansion. Before I opened it, from above and
behind me, there came the sound of Octavia’s wailing and steady groaning. As I rushed out of the door and crossed the garden to the half-open gate, I could just about hear her. The glare of
the sun on the stretch of sand hurt my eyes and the hot sand hurt my bare feet.

I turned my face towards the sea, indifferent to the look of surprise from the guard when he saw me suddenly coming out of the garden gate. I did not glance at him and I did not look back when
his sheep walked a few paces behind me. I had never felt so humiliated in my life. I was insulted and outraged to the utmost extent.