Azazeel (45 page)

‘What fever, Deacon? I don’t understand anything.’

‘Don’t exert yourself, father. Relax, and the food will come.’

I was very hungry and I longed to go outside into the daylight, but I was too weak even to sit up. My strength had completely dwindled. I could hardly say what I wanted and I asked Deacon to
help me sit up straight. He lifted me under the arms and leant my back against the wall. I almost fainted but I heard footsteps approaching.

Pharisee was the first into the room and his eyes were sparkling with delight. After him came a monk with a cup of soup. I took some sips but it hurt my stomach at first. Then the hunger got the
better of the pain and I drank the whole cup. The monk went out and Deacon followed. Pharisee stayed at the door. I smiled at him with all the strength I could muster, and he came closer. I could
see the tears in his eyes.

‘Take me to the library,’ I said.

‘Not now, Hypa. The sun is hot. We can go late in the afternoon.’

Was the midday sun now stronger than I could bear, I whose bare head withstood its fierce rays for years? I wanted to speak to Pharisee but fits of drowsiness made me dizzy, then swept me away
into unconsciousness. I hardly felt it when he put a blanket on me, went out and closed the door. When I came round again I had no idea of the time, and I was hungry and thirsty once more. There
was no one in the room for me to ask for water. Leaning against the wall, I struggled to my feet, then staggered towards the water jar, which was covered with a round piece of wood. I lifted the
lid, filled the copper cup and started to gulp down the water with unusual voracity. Water is the origin of life and my body was dried out, like a piece of land cracked through long drought.

I leant my head against the wall and tried to gather up my strength. But I was too weak and I sat where I was for a while, until I was finally able to stand up again. When I opened the door, the
light of the sun hurt my eyes. I shielded my eyes with my sleeve so that I could stand the light. I walked along, supporting myself against the wall of the corridor which links the monks’
rooms. I breathed deeply, then suddenly remembered Martha and shivered.

I saw the monks coming out of church after the three o’clock prayers, wearing their holy day cassocks. They saw me and cheered, and most of them came up to me. I met them at the bottom of
the stairway, after walking down with great care and with trembling legs. On our way to the library I found out from them that the fever had lasted a full twenty days. I wondered what kind of fever
it could be that went on so long, and with such a short gap between successive bouts. Was it the diurnal fever, which brings bouts at night? Or was it the tertian fever, in which the bouts come
every other day? It was certainly a severe fever rather than a chronic one, or else it would not have hit me in this violent manner. Twenty days. Acute fevers tend to kill the patient in less time
than that. How did I survive? What course of treatment did they follow with me? Where’s Deacon for me to ask him? What happened in Ephesus? What were those visions that came to me during the
bouts of fever? Was I really speaking to Azazeel, or was it just my fevered imagination?

We reached the library with difficulty. One of the monks went ahead and opened the door for us. I found everything covered in dust. Places degenerate if people abandon them. One of the monks
quickly found a piece of cloth and wiped the dust from where we were going to sit. About ten monks were hovering around me. I asked them for news about the ecumenical council and they all answered
at once. Bishop Cyril had taken the initiative and, cheered on by the Egyptian monks and the general public, convened the council before the emperor arrived. Cyril chaired the meeting and collected
signatures from a group of bishops and priests to an ecclesiastical decree deposing and excommunicating Bishop Nestorius. Bishop John of Antioch and Nestorius held another council a few days later
in the same town, and also gathered signatures from a group of bishops and priests, to a resolution deposing and excommunicating Bishop Cyril. When the emperor arrived from Constantinople with the
bishop of Rome, they were angry at what had happened and, along with a group of bishops and priests, passed a resolution deposing and excommunicating the two main bishops. So Nestorius and Cyril
were both excommunicated and expelled from the ranks of bishops and dismissed from the church.

What utter madness was this? I looked at Pharisee, who had remained silent throughout the conversation. After a while he shook his head and pursed his lips, without saying anything. The abbot
came in and the monks stood up out of respect for him. He indicated that he wanted to be alone with me so they left one by one, delighted that I had recovered from the fever but worried about the
news from Ephesus.

The abbot was about to speak when a servant came in with a square wooden board and on it an old copper cup full of soup and small pieces of chicken meat. He also brought a plate with some fresh
fruit. The abbot waited till the servant had gone, then he offered me the soup and I took it with both hands. He urged me to drink it and I did so. He passed me the plate of fruit and insisted that
I eat some. I took a piece and put the plate aside. We did not speak for a while, and the abbot was busy reciting prayers under his breath. I could not make out the words. When he had finished his
muttering, I asked him, ‘So father, what is it that’s been happening in Ephesus?’

‘It was the turmoil and ambitions of the world which won the day.’

‘How will it end?’

‘Today they are holding the council officially, chaired by the emperor and the pope of Rome, although it’s Easter.’

‘Happy Easter, father. But do you think the crisis will pass?’

‘I don’t think so, Hypa. Satan is on the rampage in Ephesus.’

I was perturbed that the abbot mentioned Satan – Azazeel – and I was so distressed at the sorrow which lined his face that I shuddered. The abbot noticed, stood up and advised me to
rest until my days of convalescence had ended peacefully. He urged me to go back to my room to rest but I asked his permission to lie in the library, because I felt claustrophobic in my room and
thought I could relax more among the bookshelves. He nodded in agreement and prepared to leave, while I prepared to sleep on the bench near the door.

Before leaving, he took me by surprise, saying, ‘After the eyelash prayer, my child, you should say the sotoro
¹⁵
prayer, because it fends off the
accursed Azazeel and destroys the powers of his assistant devils.’

SCROLL TWENTY-NINE

A
fter preparing to sleep I heard Deacon’s voice coming softly from behind the door. ‘Are you asleep, sir?’ he asked. I invited
him in and he came in with a piece of black cloth in his hand. He offered it to me and I opened it out with my hands. It was a black waistcoat, decorated at the edges with crosses in the same
thread but grey. I understood immediately and Deacon made it yet clearer and more certain: Martha and her aunt had moved out a week earlier and the old woman had left me this present with Deacon.
Martha had left with him the briefest of messages for me: ‘Against my will’.

Martha had gone to Aleppo against her will. What compulsion had driven her to leave while I was in the throes of my fever? Could she not have waited a few more days? She must have given up hope
that I would recover and concluded I was bound to perish. She left me to my death and went to look for a life for herself. That’s the way of women. All of them, as Pharisee said, are
faithless and immoral, and he knows more about them than I. Now I am convinced I had deceived myself with delusions of my own making and had committed unforgivable sins with Martha. She took me out
of my world, then abandoned me when she thought I would die. I wish I had died and gone to rest.

‘They took all their belongings with them, father, so I don’t think they are going to come back and live here again,’ Deacon said.

‘Yes, Deacon, that’s obvious.’

‘Do you think, father, I could ask the abbot permission to live in the cottage?’

‘Deacon, you’re still too young to live alone. You’d do best to stay in the priest’s house. Now let me go to sleep.’

‘Call me if you need anything, father. I’ll be nearby.’

Deacon invoked a blessing upon me and left. I prayed to God to take me out of myself and let me rest. My head was ringing and I managed to sleep only for a few short snatches. My moments of
sleep gave me pain, and pain in sleep is a bad sign, as is well known among doctors, from the words of Hippocrates: ‘If in chronic diseases sleeping causes pain, then that is a sign of
death.’ Let it be. My death and my life are now the same to me, and maybe death would be preferable. But I have recovered from my fever, whether it was chronic or acute, and my sleeping pains
are pains of the spirit, not the effects of the fever.

I got up off the bench and busied myself with prayer. I performed the sotoro prayer before the set time and repeated it again and again until night had fallen. As though to prove that the prayer
was ineffective, I felt Azazeel close by me, more than at any time before. So he was not a dream or a phantasm that came to me when my mind was confused in the bouts of fever. Now he was close. I
felt him looking at me and not speaking. Or perhaps I had thrown myself into the bottom of the pit of madness.

Before dawn I woke up to the sound of footsteps crunching across the gravel at speed and coming towards the library. It was Pharisee’s gait and I thought he must be coming to see how I
was. I finished my prayers and opened the door for him. He came in carrying a cloth full of fruit, and we sat down opposite each other at the big table.

‘How are you now, Hypa?’ he asked.

‘Better, and I think I’ll improve. Why do you look so worried?’

‘The news just came. The holy council, chaired by the emperor, has restored Cyril to his status as bishop and has confirmed that Nestorius is deposed and exiled.’

‘What are you saying? How did that happen?’ I asked.

‘The bishops abandoned Nestorius, except for Bishop John of Antioch, and for well-known reasons the emperor and the pope of Rome did not want to anger Alexandria. When Bishop Rabbula and
his people saw that the balance was in favour of Cyril they turned on Nestorius and denounced him. Then the council drafted a new creed, with additions to the creed endorsed a hundred years ago in
Nicaea.’

My eyes clouded over. I closed them and wrapped my head in my arms resting on the table. In the midst of my despair a subtle point occurred to me. The council of Nicaea was not a hundred years
ago, but 106 years ago. What happened exactly a hundred years ago was that Emperor Constantine set up the terrible committee of fanatical priests in an attempt to placate the bishops. That was in
the year 331 of the Christian era. The committee set about inspecting libraries and breaking into people’s houses to collect books by philosophers and heretics, copies of the apocryphal
gospels, and religious books at variance with the doctrines established by the bishops, as well as gnostic epistles. They gathered all those books in public squares in cities and villages and burnt
them openly, with threats of woe for anyone who hid these forbidden books. Woe! I raised my head and asked Pharisee, ‘What are they going to do with the reverend Nestorius?’

‘He’s no longer reverend. They will banish him to some remote place under Alexandria’s control, the Libyan Pentapolis or Akhmim. I don’t know exactly. The council also
condemned Bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia and denounced his views.’

I was shocked and depressed at the news Pharisee had brought. I stood up to open the window overlooking the monastery courtyard. My head was spinning and I was so unsteady on my feet that I
almost fell to the floor. Pharisee caught me and helped me sit down again. He opened the window and we sat in silence for a moment. Then he started murmuring and I could tell from his eyes that he
wanted to tell me something else. But I couldn’t listen to more. In spite of myself I started crying and could not hold back my tears. I quickly wiped the tears from my face.

Pharisee opened up his cloth and offered me some of the fruit, saying it was fresh from Aleppo and he had brought it for me to regain my strength. I was perturbed at the mention of Aleppo. I
looked into his eyes and saw in them a trace of sympathy. He urged me to eat but I declined. I pushed the cloth aside with the back of my hand. I asked him if anyone had come from Aleppo. He said
no, and told me that this summer fruit had been sent by a Christian merchant as a gift to the monastery. Again he pressed me to eat some. When he offered me a large apricot, I took it from his hand
and put it aside. He looked around the library, then said that the air was stifling. He asked me if I would like to go out and sit at the gate, and I agreed. I leant on his arm and we went out,
dragging our feet like women in mourning.

As we were leaving, we found Deacon asleep on the ground near the door and I urged him to go home, assuring him that I would no longer need him for anything. Dawn was on its way as we proceeded
to the gate. The moon was not shining in the sky because it was on the wane. We sat in the darkness, on the stone where I was sitting the day Martha’s aunt came at dawn to tell me about their
plan to go to Aleppo, the stone where the Roman guard who asked to marry her later sat. Did she say goodbye to him when she left? What encouraged him in the first place to propose marriage? I
wonder if he won any favours from her in the twenty days when I had the fever.

I was looking towards the cottage, which was sunk in darkness, and Pharisee was sitting cross-legged on the ground, silently tracing criss-cross shapes in the dust with a dry stick. A cool
breeze blew up. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with it, then gave a sigh of pain. Pharisee pointed his stick towards the cottage and said that the women had gone. I did not answer. He said he
had not been enthusiastic about our project to sing in church. I did not answer. He said he had not felt comfortable about the woman called Martha, and my heart pounded. Dawn gave the sky a reddish
tinge and the air felt cold. I asked Pharisee if we could go back to the library for me to sleep a little, and he stood up with me. I did not lean on his arm on our way back, and before he left me
at the door I asked him if he was hiding anything from me.