Azazeel (2 page)

In the name of God on high,
¹
I hereby start to write my life as it has been and as it is, describing what happens around me and the
terrors that burn within me. I begin my chronicle (and I do not know how or when it will end) on the night of the 27th day of the month of Thout (September) in the year 147 of the Martyrs, that is
the year 431 of the birth of Jesus the Messiah, the inauspicious year in which the Venerable Bishop Nestorius was excommunicated and deposed, and in which the foundations of the Faith were shaken.
I may recount the transgressions and torments that came to pass between me and the beautiful Martha, and the doings of Azazeel, the insidious and accursed. I will also narrate some of my dealings
with the abbot of this monastery in which I live, and where I have not found peace of mind. In the course of my story I will tell of events I have lived through since leaving my original country
near the town of Aswan in southern Egypt on the banks of the Nile. The people of my village believed the Nile flows from between the fingers of their god as the water falls from the sky. In my
childhood I believed the same myth, until I learnt what I learnt in Naga Hammadi, Akhmim and later in Alexandria, and realized that the Nile is a river like other rivers and that all other things,
like everything elsewhere, differ only to the extent that we make them different by shrouding them in delusion, conjecture and dogma.

Where should I begin my narrative? The beginnings are intertwined, teeming in my head. Perhaps, as my old teacher Syrianus used to say, beginnings are merely delusions we believe in, for the
beginning and the ending exist only along a straight line, and there are no straight lines except in our imagination or on the scraps of paper where we trace our delusions. In life and in all
creation, however, everything is circular, returning to where it began, interwoven with whatever is connected. There is in reality no beginning and no ending, only an unbroken succession. In the
universe the connections never break, the weft never unravels, and the branching never ceases, nor the filling and the emptying. Any one thing is successively connected, its circle expanding to
mesh with something else, and from the two of them a new circle branches off, meshing in turn with other circles. Life is full when the circle is complete, and drains away when we end in death, to
return to whence we began. How confused I am, what is this I am writing? All the circles turn in my head and only moments of sleep bring them to a stop. Then my dreams start to turn, and in those
dreams, as when I am awake, the memories teem and wrench within me. The memories are like overlapping eddies, circle after circle. If I yield to them and put them in writing, then where should I
begin?

I will begin with the present, from this very moment, from my sitting here in my room, which is no more than two yards long and two yards wide. There are Egyptian tombs that are larger. Its
walls are of the stone with which people build in these parts. They bring it from nearby quarries. The stone was white but today it has lost its colour.

My room has a feeble wooden door which does not shut tight. It opens to the outside where there is the long corridor passing by the rooms of the other monks. There is nothing here around me but
a wooden board on which I sleep, covered with three layers of wool and linen, the soft bedding and the blanket, although I am accustomed to sleep seated, in the manner of Egyptian monks.

In the left corner, facing the door, stands a small low table with an inkstand on top and the old lamp with its pathetic wick and its dancing flame. Under the table are blank pieces of white
parchment and pieces of pale parchment from which the writing has been washed off. Next to the table is a bag containing scraps of dry bread, a jar of water, a bottle of oil for the lamp and some
folded books. Above them I have hung on the wall a picture of the Virgin Mary, in relief on wood, because it gives me comfort to look at the face of the Virgin, the Mother.

In the corner of the room alongside the door there sits a wooden trunk decorated with copper engraving, which a rich man from Tyre gave me full of dates after I treated his chronic diarrhoea and
took no fee for my services, reviving the tradition of the eminent physician Hippocrates, who taught mankind medicine inasmuch as he dared to write it down in books. I wonder if it was Azazeel who
prompted him to write.

If I finish tonight what I am starting, I will put what I have written in this trunk, along with the proscribed gospels and other forbidden books, and bury it under the loose marble slab at the
monastery gate. I will fill up around it and cover the slab in soil. I will have left something of myself here, before I finally depart, when I end the forty days of seclusion which I begin today
as I start this writing, about which I have said nothing to anyone.

My room lies on the upper floor of the building and is one of twenty-four similar rooms where the monks of this monastery live. Some of the rooms are locked up, some are storerooms for grain and
one is for prayer. The ground floor of this building contains the monastery kitchen, the refectory and the large reception room. Twenty-two monks live in the monastery, as well as twenty novices
who serve the place until they take their vows as monks. The large monastery church has a temporary priest who is not a monk but was originally the priest of the small church which stands among the
houses scattered at the foot of the monastery hill. He has been serving the monastery church since the old monastic priest passed away some years ago, pending the ordination of another priest from
among the monks. The ordination would take place in the Antioch church, to which this monastery is subordinate. The ordinary priests have wives in whose arms they sleep, while we monks sleep alone
and on most nights we sleep seated, or do not sleep at all because we are busy with prayers and singing long hymns of praise.

The abbot lives in a separate room, which has at the corners four old Roman columns which used to stand in the large courtyard in front of the large monastery church. When they joined up the
columns with thin walls, the columns became the corners of the large room. Next to his room is the small church where we usually pray. The big church has two doors, one on the monastery side and
the other overlooking the hill outside the wall, as though it were two churches, one for the monks on most days and the other for the faithful and the parishioners who come on Sundays and holy days
to attend mass. Those who come later do not find space inside and have to squeeze in outside the dilapidated wall, around the outer door.

My room is the little circle of my tangible world, surrounded by a bigger circle which is this monastery, which I have loved from the first day I came inside years ago, where I have stayed ever
since and where I was blessed with the peace of mind which I had long sought before coming here, until the events that I will relate took place.

I came to the monastery from Jerusalem, Salem, Yerushalayim, Urusalim, Ilya, al-Quds, the House of the Lord. Many names has this holy city borne, this city surrounded by wilderness on all sides.
I lived there several years before I came here, fulfilling the will of the Lord and following the guidance and advice of Nestorius, although he, God help him today, had first invited me to go with
him to Antioch and live there till the end of my life. Then something came up and instead he urged me to come here. In his own hand he wrote me a letter of recommendation to the abbot, and destiny
led me into events which I have witnessed or suffered, events which I would never have expected. Under my rough pillow I still keep the letter Nestorius sent with me to the abbot. The abbot gave it
back to me when I asked him for it, a year after I came here from Jerusalem. Jerusalem, how far away you seem now, how my days there seem like a dream that shone in the firmament of my dull life
and then went out.

Why has everything gone dark? The light of faith which used to shine inside me, the peace of mind which kept me company in my loneliness, like a candle in the night, my serenity within the walls
of this gentle room, even the daylight sun, I see them today extinguished and abandoned.

Will these cares depart my soul? Will joyful news come to me after that which came to us from Ephesus, where the priests and bishops beleaguered the blessed Bishop Nestorius and toiled until
they brought him down? Time has brought me down, care and anxiety have overcome me. What will become of deposed Bishop Nestorius, whom I knew in the days when he was a priest? We met in Jerusalem
when he came on pilgrimage with the delegation from Antioch, four years before he was consecrated Bishop of Constantinople. We met at a time which now seems distant, after long years have passed,
and in the meantime the places, the cities have come to seem remote, impossibly remote.

Were we really in Jerusalem?

SCROLL TWO

I
well remember how in the middle of the day I entered Jerusalem from the dilapidated part of its high walls, the part which in former times
included the great gate known as the Zion Gate, and set down my travelling stick there, after long wanderings among the villages of Judaea and Samaria.

I entered Jerusalem at about the age of thirty, my body and soul exhausted by travel on earth and in the heavens and by roaming through the pages of books. I entered it with unsteady steps,
close to collapse, in the dog days of Abib (July), and at the door to the great church I fell in a swoon. Some of the pilgrims carried me inside for the priest of the Church of the Resurrection to
attend to me. He laughed when I told him I was a physician and a monk, and when I recovered from my fainting fit he joked with me, saying, ‘I knew you were a monk from the cap on your head,
but from your fainting I could not tell you were a physician!’ Then he asked me my name and I told him it was Hypa.

‘Have you come on pilgrimage, or do you intend to reside amongst us, holy monk?’

‘On pilgrimage first, then let the will of the Lord be done.’

I spent days in Jerusalem as a pilgrim after three years touring the Holy Places, in line with the advice of St Chariton the Monk, who worshipped incessantly in a desolate cave near the Dead
Sea. When he bade me farewell, Chariton said, ‘My son, do not enter Jerusalem as soon as you reach the land of Palestine. Enter only when your heart is ready for pilgrimage and your spirit is
prepared, because pilgrimage is just a journey of preparation, and travel is just a revelation of the sacred element hidden in the essence of the spirit.’

On my wanderings I had passed by the places where the disciples of Jesus the Messiah once lived and where the Apostles began their mission. I spent months following in the footsteps of Jesus, as
described in the Gospels and other books, starting with the town of Cana near Nazareth, where the Messiah performed the first of his miracles, when he changed water into wine for the wedding guests
to drink, as it says in the Gospels. In Nazareth I found no vestige of his presence and no building left to speak of his time. I was puzzled, and I went out of my way to the other villages
mentioned in the Torah, the Gospels, the canonical holy books and the non-canonical books which we have recently come to call the Apocrypha. On my journeys many doubts plagued me and I suffered
terrors in my sleep, until three years of wandering had passed and that clear night came when I saw Jesus the Messiah in a vivid dream. His light filled the heavens, and in Aramaic he said to me,
‘If you are seeking me, you who are perplexed and astray, set aside your self, and leave the dead, and come up to see me in Jerusalem, that you might live.’ Jesus was addressing me in
my visions, from up on his Cross, and there was no one around me in the wilderness.

At dawn, the day after this annunciation, I set off straight towards Jerusalem. My heart rejoiced along the way, as I asked the Lord to purge me of the effects of drowning in seas of doubt, to
bring tranquillity to my soul through his bounteous grace and to bestow upon my heart sound faith and the light of certitude.

From the environs of Sidon, where the annunciation came to me, except for two hours in the dead of night when I tried to sleep under a tree, I did not stop until I reached Jerusalem, where I
intended to settle for the rest of my life. But under the tree successive visions kept me awake: the Saviour suffering on the Cross of Redemption, the lamentation of the Holy Virgin Mother, the
cries of John the Baptist in the wilderness, and what happened to me when I was in Alexandria. I could not sleep that night.

I entered Jerusalem from the Samaria road in the heat of the day, and I was gripped by those feelings of alienation that overwhelm me in large cities. The heat was fierce and the tumult great.
On my way to the Church of the Resurrection I passed by markets and many houses, monks and merchants and people of every kind – Arabs, Syriacs, Greeks, Persians and those of other nations
whose languages I could not make out when they spoke amongst themselves. I had forgotten the tumult of big cities during my long wandering through the villages of Palestine, and I fled from the
crowd to the walls of the church and its big open door. I had hardly arrived when I was overcome by my hunger and exhaustion and from assiduously glorifying the Lord. My bag, laden with books and
papyrus scrolls, weighed heavy on me, and then I fainted that faint for which the priest of the church treated me.