Priscilla of Alexandria

by Maurice Magre

  Groans responded to that cry, and human forms agitated round Aurelius.

  “But if my son is dead, who has just responded to me?”

  Aurelius understood that a Jewish family afflicted by the plague, who had doubtless been able to escape the surveillance of the legionaries had, like him, taken refuge in the ruins. He was more upset by disappointment than by horror.

  He had stood up. He was surrounded by a group of specters. Confusedly, he made out heads covered with black scabs and breasts bared because of the buboes that had burst forth under the armpits.

  So, it was with that frightful vision that his great hope of communicating mentally with the wise directors of humankind had concluded! He had a desire to hug one of the plague victims in order to be struck by death immediately.

  “A curse on you who have come to turn our misfortune to derision,” proclaimed the one who appeared to be the oldest among the specters, “and may that curse fall upon your children!”

  Aurelius ran toward the porch of the ruin, went through it and started running along the road.

  For days he went on as if in a dream. He was scarcely conscious of the places he passed through. He was so detached from things that the proximity of Alexandria did not cause him any joy.

  Night had fallen a long time ago when he passed alongside the marshes of Shedia.

  If he had turned right and walked for a few moments, he would have perceived the roof of reeds under which his friend Olympios was leading the life of an anchorite. Perhaps he was in the process, by virtue of the force of his meditation, of rising into the air, as he said he often did when he was alone. Perhaps he had died a long time ago. Aurelius would have liked to know, but it was much further that he had to go.

  The sycamores made a slight sound of foliage over his head. Now he was going alongside Lake Mareotis. The stars were sparkling over the waters.

  Oh, faster still!

  When a whiteness rendered the azure of the sky paler and announced the dawn, Aurelius went past his house at a rapid pace.

  Scarcely a glance at the locked door, scarcely a glance to observe that there were no longer any white roses above the wall!

  It was the hour when the gates of Alexandria were opened. A few market gardeners leading donkeys were already advancing along the road. Aurelius stumbled several times and nearly fell. Beside him, someone advised him to sit down and rest a while. A woman in a great striped burnoose like those Arabs wore shouted from the back of the camel on which she was crouched: “Can’t you see that he’s drunk?”

  Faster still! He was going very slowly. The Gate of the Sun, which he had thought closed, was much further away than it appeared. He finally arrived there.

  But he no longer recognized the city. The houses had a foreign, hostile aspect. They were tightly grouped together as if to block his way. The Canopic Way unfurled infinitely and on the two sides the colonnades of monuments had the effect on him of two corteges of white monks who were about to extend their arms and immobilize him by the power of prayer.

  He sensed his strength diminishing. He was weaker than a child. If he had fallen, he would not have got up again. Priscilla’s house was at the other end of the city. He wondered whether he ought to take the quays of the port of Magnus and go as far as the port of Kibotos or follow the Canopic Way, in which he was already engaged.

  And now, with marvelous precision, and in extraordinary detail, he saw once again memories of childhood that he had forgotten completely. There was a series of unexpected, absurd, exact images that unfurled rapidly, and which he could not avoid.

  Do not those who are about to die have similar reminiscences? he thought.

  He went passed churches, obelisks and the perspectives of rows of sphinxes. He leaned on the truncated pylons of the temple of Isis. He caused doves to fly away amid the laurels of the temple of Poseidon.

  He hesitated after the street of the Sema and as a porter came to open a door he said to him, in a voice as light as a breath: “I’m going to see Priscilla, the daughter of Diodorus. Indicate her house to me.”

  The porter made a gesture, pointing at a street.

  Aurelius had never imagined that she might be married, or have left Alexandria. The porter’s gesture confirmed his certainty. He was about to see her, to bring her the message.

  He was about to see her, if he did not die beforehand.

  A deserted street illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun and an immense cedar-wood door, as high, as closed and as impenetrable as the one that separates imperfect humans from the abode of pure spirits...

  One last effort to go along the street, one last effort, and he reaches the door.

  He touches the thick wood, and considers it, but from below, for he is now lying on the pavement of the street.

  How to open it? There is a means, but he no longer has a clear idea of what it is. He searches, He cannot remember. He makes desperate efforts.

  Priscilla is very close. He only has one movement to make and the door that separates him from her will open. What is the necessary gesture?

  And time passes and death comes, for it is a very long time since he has eaten, or slept, and a heavy shadow is beginning to invade his brain.

  Suddenly there is a light. He remembers! It is necessary to lift the bronze knocker, let it fall back, and slaves will come running, and the immense door will open as if by enchantment. He will be in Priscilla’s presence.

  Where is that bronze knocker?

  Aurelius raises his head and perceives it, very far away and very high, at an infinite distance. He cannot make an effort sufficient to reach it. In vain he raises himself up and extends his arm.

  With the extremity of his trembling fingers he touches the bronze, but that is all. He falls back.

  He will not try again. He starts to laugh bitterly. A determined injustice has followed him in his voyage, and is going to make him perish at the exact moment that he has reached his goal, after so much difficulty!

  It is too much! No good intelligence rules the world.

  He closes his eyes, denies his faith, and aspires to enter into an annihilation of darkness.

  Then he heard a voice, which said: “Are you there, my son?”

  And in spite of himself, he responded: “I’m here!”

  And he opened his eyelids slightly.

  But he closed them again immediately. It was the trap of hope. No, no, he did not want to see the plague-ridden old Jew with his pustules and his open buboes. He sensed around him the specters he had already glimpsed near Heliopolis. They had followed him. Let them go away! May they let him die in peace!

  “Are you suffering?” said the voice.

  And in spite of himself, he replied: “I have suffered, but I’m no longer suffering at present.”

  And the voice said again, as it had out there: “Perhaps God will permit you to escape.”

  But it had a graver, more profound tone than the voice that had resonated in the ruined house.

  Escape to what? To the obscurity of the mind, to the desiccation of the heart, to the absence of love, to what had been evil for him?

  What did it matter to him now to attain the blissful peace of the sage, to achieve his salvation, as the Christians put it, if he left his daughter prey to hatred, if he could not bequeath to her his heritage of truth?

  He opened his eyes wide. The sun was radiant with a resplendent light, such as he had never seen before.

  “Distance does not exist for them.”

  They had come. They were around him. He saw on their noble features and expression of serene goodness. Aurelius believed that he recognized them. One resembled Pythagoras. The one who was short and completely bald must be Apollonius. The one who was dressed like the Jews of Jerusalem and wore his beard in three points must be Jesus, and in the tallest, the one who had the yellow robe of Hindu monks and a complexion he color of clay he rediscovered the features of the Iarchas whom Nanda had often described to him.41

  To h
im, humble messenger that he was, the law of Retribution had not given the hour of strength he still needed to complete his task. Perhaps he had not merited it. But the law was mysterious and the message would arrive anyway.

  He was quite tranquil now. It was not worth the trouble of lifting the bronze knocker. The cedar-wood door could remain closed, and inside the dwelling, the slaves could stay asleep. Priscilla would awake up to listen to the voice of the divine masters.

  Aurelius saw, distinctly, the master who resembled Apollonius of Tyana make him a sign that signified: Come! and with an inconceivable lightness he launched himself forth to join him.

  He was dead.

  XXIV. Bishop Cyril’s Last Night

  In his large armchair, before the table on which the pages of his Anathematism lay,42 Bishop Cyril straightened up.

  In order not to think, he had started to write and had doubtless let himself fall asleep while writing. He opened his eyes wide in order to examine an extraordinary spectacle. His perception was amplified. A story that had been told to him and to which he had not added credence took on the proportions of an exact reality before him.

  In a landscape of rocks and sandy hills a few hundred men were gathered. He recognized them by their robes, their bonnets and their curled hair. They were Jews. The setting sun inflamed their energetic and tenacious faces. They were praying. In spite of the extent of the desert around them, however, they were strangely huddled together.

  At the center of their group was a large coffer at the extremities of which Cyril distinguished two solid gold cherubim. In front of the coffer was an immense candelabrum with seven branches, and behind it, a motionless young man was lifting a golden lamp so luminous that Cyril thought that it must be the sacred lamp that, according to Solomon, cast more light than the morning star.

  An old man of short stature, his body slightly inclined to the right, had a book in his hands and was reading prayers that everyone around him was repeating.

  So the accursed race had not been vanquished! They had departed with their treasures, which he, Cyril, had not been able to steal; they had carried them away like the symbols of their insatiable, rebellious, indestructible soul.

  If those few hundred Jews were huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, it was because they supposed themselves to be enclosed within the walls of an invisible Temple, which their minds had built. Tracked by simooms and ferocious beasts, uncertain of the morrow, they were nevertheless accomplishing, around the holy Ark that they had saved, the age-old rites prescribed by their law.

  Before that fanaticism, equal to his own, Cyril, understanding for the first time the vivacious force of his enemy, and felt weary and discouraged.

  Immediately, however, another image appeared to his eyes just as clearly.

  In the shadow of the great red ramparts of Heliopolis, he saw the Jewish city constructed on the terrain once ceded to Onias, the tragedy of which had recently been recounted to him.

  A poor city, whose inhabitants had been obliged to struggle from the first day against despair and hunger! The land that had been put into cultivation was not sufficiently vast to nourish so many people and it would take time for commerce to become prosperous.

  Cyril contemplated that mute city in which the plague, it was said, had emerged from the temple that the prefect Orestes had imprudently allowed to be reopened.

  In a white and empty street he saw a man walking. He recognized him. He was the former ethnarch of Alexandria, thinned by anguish and privations. He was carrying a long staff on his shoulder at the extremity of which, attached to it by a hook, was a jar, at the bottom of which there was a broth of barley and rice. Having arrived at a house whose door and all of the windows but one were nailed shut by large beams in the form of a cross, he shouted a name. At the only window that was not condemned, a livid face appeared, marbled by black patches. The ethnarch held out to the plague victim the wretched nourishment at the end of his pole, intimating an instruction to close the window quickly, for the wind transported the germs of the disease with the exhalations of the sick.

  Cyril saw men planting stakes at the extremity of certain streets. The plague was in all the houses of those streets and the inhabitants there were condemned to the contagion after having known the terror of the contagion, more terrible than the disease itself.

  At the entrance to those streets, the ethnarch, increasingly thin and defeated, brought the broth of barley and rice. But he no longer made use of a pole. He set down the jar with his own hands, for the danger, in becoming more menacing, had only developed his courage, his pity and his scorn for death. And men twisted their hands, others begged, and others were praying, on the thresholds of those closed and accursed streets.

  And Cyril saw other terrible images unfurling before his eyes.

  A cart, preceded by a man holding a torch, traveled through the city by night and collected the cadavers, which were then thrown into a profound ditch that had been hollowed out to receive them. But the ditch had been filled rapidly, and only an insufficient layer of earth had been thrown on top of the corpses that were overflowing it. That overfull ditch, from which hands and heads emerged, was a nucleus of pestilence, but no one dared any longer to approach it in order to complete the burial, with the exception of one wretched demented woman who ran around it repeatedly, and whose frightful screams could be heard for several days.

  His gaze was transported then to the marketplace, in front of the temple. Men who had not felt any visible affliction of the disease but who were being eaten away by it internally without being aware of it were abruptly stricken.

  He saw one of them who suddenly tore his robe in two, considered his naked breast, and then fell to his knees crying: “Get away from me! I have the disease! May the Lord protect me!”

  And a great circle opened up around him.

  He saw another who was running hither and yon, weeping and saying: “Kill me! I’m suffering too much!”

  Then a crowd gathered in the temple and outside it, on the steps of the threshold. It was the day of penitence and expiatory prayers. The ceremony of Rosh Hashanah was being celebrated. Every Jew advanced toward the Temple holding a candle fabricated with seven wicks, in which his sins were supposedly enlaced, in order that they would burn with the flame. On that day, God, seated on his throne, in the presence of Satan the denunciator, judged each man and determined is fate.

  But his decision was known in advance, for at the extremities of the city the weapons of the legionaries could be seen glinting, and the plague was everywhere, in all the streets, and in all the houses.

  “Be blessed, Adonai, who has chosen us among all peoples!” chanted the Jews, with a single voice, raising their candles.

  But when the moment came for the assembly to repeat seven times the forty-seventh psalm: “People, clap your hands! Rejoice!” the Jewish people measured the derision of those words, their hearts broke and there was no longer anything but an immense sob rising toward the God that had abandoned his own in order to condemn them to an unspeakable misery.

  And Cyril then saw the eyes of the pale and courageous ethnarch fixed on him with a heart-rending expression of reproach. All the dolorous and sobbing faces turned in his direction, and all the Jews of the plague-ridden city looked at him. There were not only those assembled before the temple, there were those wandering in the sealed streets, those who were agonizing in the houses with their buboes and pustules, and also the dead, who were lifting themselves out of the full ditch to stare at him.

  Cyril took his head in his hands. He heard a slight sound behind him. He turned round. The door of his room opened. Pale and sad, the ethnarch was standing before him.

  Cyril did not reflect on the impossibility of that advent. His knees buckled. He fell, his arms outstretched in front of him to protect himself.

  It was the physician Adamantius who picked him up.

  He apologized profusely for arriving so late. He had not been at home and had come as soon as he
had acquired cognizance of Cyril’s message. He was at the Bishop’s orders.

  But his obsequious politeness died away and dried up as Cyril explained his trouble, recounted the strangeness of his visions, their reality before his eyes, and how he thought he had seen the ethnarch when he, Adamantius, had appeared at his door.

  His gaze lit up, his face took on a grave expression, and he stared at the Bishop for a long time, as if he had been in front of the temple himself, holding a candle with seven woven wicks and intoning the forty-seventh psalm: “People, clap your hands! Rejoice!”

  He savored all the irony there was in the fact that it was him, the renegade, the only one of the forty thousand who had accepted baptism, who was a witness to the punishment of the execrable persecutor of the Jewish people.

  He was a man of great science, who had put himself above religions by the absence of faith, but who remained forcefully attached to the race he had betrayed. He had difficulty not allowing a terrible joy to burst forth.

  Cyril’s words indicated that his mind was completely unhinged. He could speak to him as to a child.

  “No, these visions are not pure imagination. They are a reality transmitted by hostile thoughts. A physician is powerless for that.”

  “But after all,” moaned Cyril, “I’m not the cause of that frightful epidemic. Was it not on the very day of the reopening of the Temple that the epidemic became manifest, by virtue of an ancient malediction? It’s the Epistratege of Memphis, not me, who is responsible for the measures taken to prevent the disease from spreading.”

  “What was the first cause of the evil?” Adamantius asked, gravely, as if he were searching his memories. Then, after a pause, he went on: “Who ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Alexandria? That was you.”

  “That was me,” Cyril replied.

  “Who sent secret orders to the Bishop of Heliopolis for him to oppose any commerce between Christians and Jews when the latter were building their city? That was you.”