Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  He did not like having to choose. When two alternatives were offered to his mind, it was always the one that was to have unfortunate consequences for which he opted.

  As far as he went back in his memories, he saw bad luck installed by his side and following him like his shadow. As a child, he had broken his leg playing and had remained lame. When he had gone in pilgrimage to Jerusalem he had been gripped by a malign fever at Joppa, where he had just disembarked. He had spent three months lying in a fisherman’s hut, which had caught fire just as he was entering into convalescence, and he had been obliged to return to Egypt without having kissed the spot where the temple had stood.

  His wife had died bringing a child into the world, who had not survived. He had been imprisoned for theft because he had been mistaken for another Amoraim who resembled him, and had had great difficulty justifying himself. He was ugly and expressed himself with difficulty. He had possessed a small field in the environs of Alexandria but a singular hail, which had not ravaged the neighboring fields, had destroyed his crop the previous year, limited to his own domain as if God had wanted to mark a creature devoid of merit with special disfavor. Meanwhile, a slave who had occupied himself with the field in question had died, and Amoraim had sold that petty property for a petty price.

  He was accustomed to blows of that sort. Every time, he curbed his head with more resignation. He felt that an evil force accompanied him. So he did as little as possible, because of the consequences his actions might have. He rarely went out. With a sort of anxious dread he sold his candles to his clients, who were not very numerous, and only did so while pronouncing an internal prayer that their light might only illuminate his neighbor’s wellbeing.

  He had remained good and gentle. He was ignorant of jealousy and derived his joy from being useful. He did not measure the injustice of his destiny. But sometimes, he attempted innocently to dupe fate. That was what he did that evening.

  “I’ve decided to take the street of the Gardens,” he proclaimed, almost loudly.

  And he took it. But scarcely had he taken two or three steps than he went back, thinking that he had deflected the hostile forces, and went directly up the high street, at the extremity of which the Jewish quarter commenced.

  He stumbled and almost fell. He put his hand out and had a sensation of moist warmth. He touched a beard, a neck, a human form. By the uncertain light of the stars he saw blood on his hand. Someone was lying there, motionless.

  He leaned over and recognized the face of a certain Hieros, a notorious Christian of Alexandria, who had a school and taught theology.

  Amoraim’s first thought was to flee. Surprised by a patrol of soldiers next to that man, who had probably been murdered, how would be defend himself against the suspicion of being the murderer? The Jews were only judged by their ethnarch for what happened within the strict limits of their quarter, and in any case, the murder of a Christian reverted to the imperial tribunals, and a Jew who was implicated was always condemned.

  He was therefore about to go back down the high street when his name resounded in his ears, pronounced by a severe voice: “Amoraim!”

  He had voiced it himself.

  Almost everything that he did turned against him; he had made it a law only to accomplish what his conscience deemed just, in order to be without regret.

  It was not just to leave a dead man with his head in the gutter.

  Around him, all the windows were closed. In any case, it would be a Christian house on which it was necessary to knock in order to obtain help. With great difficulty, he loaded the corpse on to his back and started going back down the street. He had remembered that the Church of Saint Mark was not very far away and that there was a small red brick dwelling beside it which served as the caretaker’s residence.

  Hieros was a tall, stout man and Amoraim, who was not very strong, staggered under his weight. He walked slowly and quietly.

  “It’s for your sins, Amoraim, that God has just placed this burden on your shoulders. You have not been pious enough, or humble enough.”

  Something trickled into his ear that seemed to be warmer than his own sweat, He thought several times about renouncing his task and setting the body down along a wall. He remembered as he walked that Hieros had hated Jews and had spoken against them in public several times.

  “Amoraim, go on Amoraim!”

  How far away the Church of Saint Mark was! It retreated into a tenebrous horizon. It seemed to him now that it was spinning around him in the midst of a farandole of colonnades and obelisks.

  “Courage, Amoraim!” Accomplish the good deed that is preparing the misery of your people. It is necessary this evening that a just old man carry the heavy burden of a cadaver, in order to enable injustice to triumph.

  Before a narrow window Amoraim almost let himself fall. He breathed in deeply. He straightened Hieros’ upper body. Then he knocked on the shutter. He knocked for a long time, because Peter the church caretaker must have been profoundly sleep.

  In the end, Amoraim heard a human grunt coming from inside the house. The shutter opened and Peter’s enormous, redoubtable and hairy head was framed in the window.

  But that was more than Amoraim could bear. Not that man! He knew his reputation. He would always retrace his steps rather than cross his path in a street. He was afraid of him, afraid of the pollution of his breath, afraid of the evil that radiated in the gaze of his little eyes.

  In any case, had the Christian not been helped? Was he not on the threshold of a church, in the hands of another Christian?

  “Hieros! It’s Hieros, whom someone has killed!” said Amoraim to the stupefied Peter. And with all the speed of his legs, multiplied tenfold by terror, fleeing the evil destiny that had just been rendered forever inevitable, he started running and disappeared into the night.

  Peter, as he opened his door, had the time to distinguish that it was a limping man who was running away, and, seeing his sleeves as broad as wings and his square bonnet, he said: “It’s a Jew!”

  Bishop Cyril mingled in his soul ardent faith, profound mediocrity and an unlimited liking for wealth. He was eloquent, for it is not necessary to have ideas to be a orator, and he was easily enthused because, with his tall stature, his long beard and his bulging blue eyes, he resembled the image that people had of Christ’s first apostles. He had no sensuality, although he had a sanguine temperament, and because of that he was ravaged by sudden tempests of anger in which the violence of his nature was given free rein. He hated forcefully and he was devoid of pity for those who did not think as he did. Gold exercised a physical magnetism upon him that he had never been able to master.

  Bare-headed, in the light of the torches that his six armed servants were carrying, he took great strides, holding on to the arm of his companion, who was having difficulty keeping up with him.

  Peter was repeating his explanations.

  “There must have been a whole band. Doubtless they killed him. After which, by derision, they carried him to the church. I heard them blaspheming and laughing when they ran away.”

  “Yes,” said Cyril, “that’s it. Hieros had singular habits. He went out late at night, and alone. And see where it led him!”

  And he darted a severe glance at Peter, who also sometimes wandered in Rhacotis and the back-streets of the port for the same reasons as Hieros.

  “I picked him up in the street and laid him down in my bedroom. He appeared to me to have a wound in his head and another in his breast. Our bodies must contain a lot of blood, for the three steps of my door were entirely red.”

  Cyril followed his train of thought and was excited.

  “The Church will perish if she doesn’t defend herself with the same weapons hat used to strike her. Neither Constantine nor Theodosius has dared to go on to the end, and that’s why we’re where we are. Tolerance is a crime, since it engenders crime. Pagans and Jews are ready to put Jesus on the cross again, if they could. There’s no Emperor, there’s no Pope; there’s o
nly the strength of those who believe. Everyone must act in the measure of his means. God has confided to me courageous and passionate men whom I’ve contributed myself to inflaming, I’ll make use of them to defend him!”

  He clapped Peter on the shoulder; the latter bowed his head respectfully.

  “The moment has come,” Cyril said, as if struck by a sudden idea. “Three hundred and seventy years ago the Christians were expelled from Alexandria. Where did they go? Into the deserts of Libya and the Thebaid! Just retribution! Those who have struck with the sword will perish by the sword. Since the Jews are murdering ours, we’ll send them to the places where the Christians of old went. They’ll discover the blackened stones where our martyrs once lit their fires and they’ll drink from the same wells, if the wrath of Heaven doesn’t desiccate them.”

  Suddenly, it was as if Cyril’s mind was illuminated. He imagined the Jewish quarter when its inhabitants had been expelled by force. That quarter was not immense, although it sheltered a population of forty thousand people, because of the singular faculty the Jewish people had for crowding together. But it contained enormous wealth. Cyril knew the ancient traditions that said that when the Emperor Hadrian had burned Jerusalem two and a half centuries before, the powerful families of the Gamaliels and the Hillels had divided up the treasures of the Temple, those of Herod’s palace and those of the Antonia fortress. The Gamaliels had gone to the banks of the Euphrates, but the Hillels, who were more numerous and who had taken charge of the greater part of the treasures, had come to Alexandria, had established themselves near the Eastern necropolis, and had founded the Jewish city there.

  Cyril knew a legend that circulated among the mariners of the port and the poor people of the outlying districts. A century before, a Carthaginian pilot had got drunk and had set out after sunset to traverse Alexandria. Without really knowing how, he had reached the Delta quarter and had wandered at hazard through the little streets that intersected there. Those streets were so narrow, it was said that sometimes, by extending both hands, he could touch the opposite walls, which permitted him to support himself when he staggered.

  A door had opened in front of him in a place that he could not find again subsequently, and he had crossed the threshold. He had the sensation that a feast, or perhaps a funeral ceremony, had attracted the masters and servants to a certain part of the house, and he seemed to hear a murmur of voices similar to that of a large number of people praying together. He went down a stairway that he encountered and stopped, contemplating an unexpected spectacle.

  Three candelabra disposed in a triangle illuminated a quadrangular room which seemed to him to be entirely covered in golden plaques. He perceived in large bronze jars heaps of coins of all lands, making dull piles. Camel-skin gourds were swollen by gold powder, and in places that powder had overflowed, strewn on the floor like sand. There were ingots of a darker gold that obstructed the entrance of a gallery at the back, where gold spangles palpitated as far as the eye could see. To the right and the left, suspended from the walls, attached to the ceiling and covering the floor, objects of singular form, the hilts of swords, mirrors, disks, massive balls, thick necklaces were heaped in disorder in a palpitation of yellow light, mingled with life-size statues with gold visages, golden robes and pedestals of the same metal.

  All those objects framed a sort of altar, before which a resplendent candelabrum with seven gold branches was set. And on the altar, as if on a sacred tabernacle, reposed a worn ark, rounded by time, enriched with blue sapphires, with four stout gold rings on its sides and having at the extremities of the lid two solid gold cherubim, facing one another, with their wings deployed. And that ark was dense, ancient and miraculous, in green-tinted gold, gold a thousand years old, so polished by centuries of adoration, conflagrations and travels, that it did not give any reflection, and yet exhaled a mysterious glow of sanctity,

  The drunken mariner, suddenly sobered up, had thought about the risk he was running if he were discovered in that room, before that fabulous treasure. He had gone back upstairs silently and had been able to reach the street.

  Afterwards, he had disappeared mysteriously. That end had given credit to his improbable story. It was thought that the Jews had killed the man who might know the location where the Hebrew fortune reposed.

  Cyril remembered that story. It confirmed other things he knew. The sanctuary of the race of Moses, the Holy of Holies for which King Solomon had had the sacred Temple built in blocks of porphyry linked with lead on the hill of Moriah, the ark that contained the law, which the sun of the south had burnished in exile, which the waves of the Red Sea had moistened, might now repose within his arm’s reach, in a cellar in Alexandria.

  He shivered at the reality of the dream. Herod the Great had combined the formidable riches of Arabia, bequeathed by his father Hyrcanus,22 with the riches of the Asmonean dynasty. Cyril could follow the destiny of the Jewish treasure during the siege and destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, until the moment when Hadrian had burned the Temple for the last time. It was not impossible that the Carthaginian mariner had penetrated one evening into the house of the Hillels, where the Holy of Holies of King Solomon reposed obscurely among the riches of Herod.

  The gold could belong to him. He had no remorse about desiring it so ardently. He would employ the greater part of it for the defense of the Church, the maintenance of convents and the edification of cathedrals. In any case, he was only one with the Church. As Patriarch of Alexandria, he had the right to take in order to protect his own and build their shelters. The gold was necessary to the religion. It was necessary to maintain the flow of monstrances and pyxes. The mystical wine needed a chalice of unalloyed metal, divine metal. Like the Aphrodites of Corinth and Byblos, the Virgin Mary ought to be carved in single blocks of gold.

  His vision was so clear that, like the Carthaginian mariner, he was almost blinded by it. He tottered like him in a yellow light. He had the sensation of plunging ankle-deep in strewn gold powder.

  “Be careful,” said Peter, “one walks on blood here.”

  They had arrived. Bending down, Cyril saw that his sandals were soiled.

  He’s lying behind the door,” said Peter, with a certain embarrassment, standing aside to let Cyril pass. But he uttered a cry of surprise. The cadaver was no longer on the flagstones where he had left it.

  Peter’s room was very large and illuminated by a single candle, which the wind, blowing through the open door, caused to vacillate. It was dirty and untidy. Cobwebs garnished the corners of the ceiling and hung down from an iron lantern suspended from a hook. A dirty rag was placed in evidence on the table. An open wooden chest containing old linen and detritus had been dragged into the middle of the room. A thousand feet wandered over the black tiles, among the remains of a meal that had not been swept away. And at the back, enormous, splendid and full of gilt, with four sculpted columns and an awning in crimson Damask velvet, was a Babylonian bed of monumental form, from which animal skins, lacerated precious furs and smoke-blackened silk cushions were overflowing.

  Cyril did not have time to be astonished by the contrast between the dirtiness of the room and the sumptuousness of the bed. Before being struck by that image of ecclesiastical debauchery he had perceived, facing him, against the wall, a livid human form, a pale imitation of what the professor of theology Hieros had been, a bloodless specter with a face like a host with eyes, and transparent hands, and in which, in a blue mist, the design of bones was floating.

  He recoiled in terror to the door. But the form deprived of blood, exhausted by a supreme effort, collapsed upon itself, agitating the milky fragments of wax that were its lips.

  Then Cyril understood that it was Hieros himself, and that if he had attained that degree of phantasmal fluidity, it was because all the blood he had shed was about to turn into gold, for the greater glory of Christ.

  He advanced, avid to collect the certainty of the accusation, and he knelt down beside the dying man.

 
Peter had followed him, and lifted the shaky head.

  “It was the Jews? You’ve been murdered by the Jews? Speak.”

  The head, still animate, moved from left to right, in a gesture of denial.

  “I’m Bishop Cyril. I’ll give you absolution for your sins. Tell me who struck you.”

  The waxy mouth palpitated and formed a few slight sounds. That vibration of scarcely-sketched syllables reached the ears of the two men. It was only a breath, but in that breath they perceived names, a semblance of a sentence.

  “No! Not Jews! Christians! Nicanor the Ephesian, his mistress Olympe…at the bottom of the high street. They were the ones who killed me...”

  The head agitated again before immobilizing completely. Cyril was muttering the formula of absolution mechanically when the door opened and a man appeared on the threshold.

  He was tall and strong, with a bird-like head whose smallness was disproportionate with his body. He advanced hesitantly and irritatedly, looking alternately at the standing Peter and the kneeling bishop, the sordid room and the sumptuous bed. It was the Prefect Orestes, whom Cyril had sent someone in haste to inform. He was rubbing his well-manicured and ring-laden hands together nervously.

  There was a clink of weapons in the street.

  “Well,” he said, “Hieros has been murdered. I’ve always thought that it would happen. The procurator of Rhacotis told me, a few days ago, about the danger there was to a man of his reputation...”

  He did not finish. Cyril had stood up abruptly. His resolution was made. In any case, did not the grandeur of the Church, the victory of Christ, justify any lie?

  He raised his hand in a theatrical gesture. “It’s the Jews who killed him. He just told me so, as he died. In any case, Peter saw them. If imperial justice is impotent to defend us, we’ll arm ourselves and defend ourselves.”

  The Prefect made a weary gesture. For a long time, the Christians, organized by Cyril, had formed militias of fanatics, more numerous and better disciplined than his own soldiers. He lowered his head, fatigued in advance by all the annoyances that he glimpsed, the weight of decisions to be made, the injustices in which it would be necessary to participate. He draped himself in his toga in a melancholy fashion and delicately, almost with respect, with the tip of his silver-laced cothurne, he crushed a spider that was about to reach the dead man’s face.