by Fast, Howard
“You have a sense of humor, my lord, and that delights me.”
So, you see, sister, we became friends, and tomorrow Polemon subjects himself to Shimeon’s knife. I pray you to send me your consent by return messenger.
From Berenice to her brother, Agrippa:
I do not know what to say. The days and weeks and months pass, and I feel more and more like some animal creature enclosed in a box. However I turn, there is no way out.
Always I have taken a husband or betrothed because it was necessary or expedient. My father married me to his brother because as he had it, I was a whore. Now I cannot go near the place I was born or the brother of my flesh because all the wagging, evil tongues in the land will have it that we lie together. My brother Agrippa—what am I to do? I am lost, and there is no way for me to find myself.
Agrippa to his sister Berenice:
I am sending for you. I am sending a troop of horse and a gift from Polemon. This is a scarf, measuring two feet in width and seven feet in length, and the whole surface is covered with pearls that have been sewn to it—over two thousand pearls. It is said to be very valuable. Beradin, who has excellent connections with the pearl dealers in the Far East, has been after me to sell it, since according to him the pearl market is at its height today. He feels that if the money is invested in the glassworks at Tyre, it can be doubled within a year. He says that the gesture of presenting the scarf to you is typical of Polemon. I gather from Beradin that financially, Polemon leaves something to be desired, but the advantages of a union with him far outweigh such disadvantages. In any case, the disposal of the scarf is a worthy gesture.
I am amazed at the grasp of matters financial by people like Beradin or the men of the House of Shlomo. Their knowledge fairly makes my head spin, but as Beradin puts it, it is more important for a king to know the assets and resources of his neighbors than the size of their armies. He has persuaded me to put funds into the wool trade, and already I can see profits that amaze me.
But that is off the point, is it not? I am writing to tell you that Shimeon Bengamaliel has successfully completed his operation on the king of Cilicia, and that for the past two weeks Polemon has been recuperating very nicely.
We postponed the operation until Polemon’s uncle and two of his seneschals could come to Tiberias—a considerable journey, as you know, from Cilicia. Along with myself, Beradin, and others, they witnessed the operation. The operation itself is no great problem for a skilled surgeon, and in this case it took only a few minutes. Not only is Shimeon very clever at his work, but he makes a fetish of cleanliness, being of the school of Hippocrates, which holds that cleanliness is a bar against infection. He uses wine as wash water—which most of our Jewish surgeons do—but he also heats his instruments and then cools them. In this case, he used a copper plate almost identical to that which the Mohel uses for infants, except that it was somewhat larger to accommodate the manhood of Polemon—such manhood being of normal size, a reassuring fact in itself. The plate has a slit, and after the foreskin is properly inserted in this slit, the surgeon removes it with three quick cuts. Then wine is poured upon it and the cut member is packed with wadding to halt the bleeding.
I must say that Polemon took it very well, not crying out except for a single squeal when the first cut was made; and all the people watching applauded him and said that he had shown a very kingly spirit indeed. Yet I must say that I am quite grateful that my own circumcision took place in my infancy.
The following day, some slight infection set in, and for three days thereafter Polemon had a fever. I was very uneasy lest he should become really ill and die in Tiberias—something that could only lead to endless political complications. But he overcame the infection and now he is completely healed and healthy.
He looks forward to your arrival as eagerly as I do, my sister. I await you. Our separation has been too long.
Part Three
An old man with a limp, a withered arm, and a tattered gray beard was called Rabbi Gershon—a title which no one questioned too stringently. He had the freedom of the palace for alms, as certain other beggars did, providing that they were old and unobtrusive and appeared infrequently enough to avoid being nuisances. Berenice met him in the hallway, as she was entering her chamber, and when he asked for alms, Gabo appeared to chase him away.
“Let him be,” Berenice said, going into her bag and finding a gold piece that she dropped into his outstretched hand.
“Gold!” Gabo exclaimed. Her eyes were wide as saucers.
“You made a mistake, my lady, Berenice,” said the old man.
“Why?”
“Gold. Just as that Benjaminite says—her eyes are ready to fall out of her head. I thank you with all my heart, and I bow to you and kneel to you—if I may, figuratively—my arthritis being what it is, if I did get down on my knees there is no telling when I would get up again.”
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Berenice said. “I have plenty of gold. It is nothing.”
“But one does not give gold to a beggar,” Rabbi Gershon insisted.
“You are a most obstinate old man, aren’t you? And how did you know that my maidservant here is a Benjaminite?”
“Oh? It’s simple—dark skin, crafty as a jackal at night, shies away like a wild animal—but very clever if they are educated.” He bit at the gold piece with his yellow fangs.
“Don’t you believe my gold is gold?” Berenice asked.
“You I believe, my lady. This is simply the reaction to the world I live in—a world full of thieves and connivers. You—I ask for God’s blessing on you. God keep you, back here in the land of your fathers in this good place, Tiberias. May the Lord God Almighty bless you and make your womb ripe and fruitful and your years prosperous.”
“And you would call down such a blessing upon the infamous Berenice?”
“May my tongue wither before I repeat such a term,” the old man said. “God bless you.”
In her chamber, Berenice said to Gabo, “That was very nice of him.”
“So would I for a gold piece.”
“You’re not a rabbi—not even a self-styled one. You are a bothersome girl who never bathes enough—and you’d better bathe today because you are beginning to smell ripe. Anyway, whether a gold piece purchased it or not—”
“A gold piece,” said Gabo. “Enough to keep a family for a year!”
Looking at her brother, Agrippa, king of Tiberias and king of Chalcis, king of some Jews and some Gentiles, Berenice decided that he had changed very little in five years. He was almost twenty-two years old now, but he was as slender and boyish as at seventeen, his head covered with dark ringlets of hair, his beard short and softly curled, his face the long-suffering face of a put-upon young man—a face without too much strength or ambition. He was like his face too—as if all the fierce, unspeakably cruel ambition and lust for power that had marked the Hasmonean and Herodian lines with a brand of infamy that all of time would never erase had washed out in him, the last male of his line; leaving him serenely unassuming and unperturbed by either ambition or overwhelming desire. People were always struck by his diffidence. He had a sort of stammer that was not a stammer; and if he were not a king—and not simply a king but the last of the most famous royal house in all the world of his age—he would have been occupied with an endless series of apologies. He disliked anger and scenes charged with emotion, so that even now, when his patience was near the breaking point, he resisted the temptation to shout at his sister.
And it was a matter of patience rather than anger, for Agrippa could never face his sister and be angry. Berenice was the most wonderful and improbable creature in his environment. If the charges of incest constantly flung at his sister and himself were blatantly false, there was nevertheless truth in the fact that he adored her; and now he tried to be reasonable rather than rigid.
“My dear,” he said to Berenice, “you must admit that all this puts me in the most ridiculous position imaginable.”
“Oh, come now,” Agrippa said. “Just look at the thing from my point of view, Berenice. Or from anyone’s point of view. From Chalcis, you wrote to me, agreeing to marry poor Polemon—”
“I will not have you call him ‘poor Polemon,’” Berenice interrupted. “Poor nothing of the sort! He is a large, grown man who has had three wives before me and more women than King Solomon. He is a lecher and a pig—and I think something of a homosexual, too, with this great need of his to prove that he is one huge penis from head to foot—”
“That’s putting it much too strongly, and you know it,” Agrippa said. “The fact remains that you did agree to marry him. You accepted his gifts. You allowed me to bring the high priest here from Jerusalem, and you went through with the ceremony. You married the man. You must face that—you married the man. And then you promptly turned your back on him, retired here to your chambers—and here you have been for the past five days.”
“I changed my mind,” Berenice shrugged.
“You haven’t even kissed him.”
“I changed my mind. I have no desire to kiss him, now or ever.”
“Berenice—you don’t seem to understand. He underwent a circumcision for you.”
“I am thoroughly bored with that circumcision of his. The truth is that I couldn’t care less if they had castrated him. Brother—I am bored with Polemon, his circumcision, his so-called love, and most of all with his whining. Why doesn’t he go back to Cilicia and leave us alone?”
“You know why he doesn’t. Because you are his wife.”
“Well, I have no intention of continuing in that function. I told that high priest of yours that I wanted the marriage dissolved.”
“He can’t just dissolve the marriage,” Agrippa protested.
“He certainly can. He’s the high priest. He can do anything he desires to do, and if he doesn’t do it, we can make certain that he does not remain as high priest.”
“We had reasons for this,” Agrippa began miserably, but Berenice interrupted him again and asked, “Why don’t you get married, brother?”
“Me?”
“Yes—you, brother.”
At that point, he threw up his arms and stalked out of her chamber.
She lay down in her chambers. She said to Gabo, “Do you understand, I will see no one. No reason, no person. No one.” She couldn’t bear the light that poured in through the windows. “Draw the blinds,” she said to Gabo. The darkness was better. She lay in the darkness and allowed sorrow and self-pity to engulf her. Gabo tiptoed put of the room, and when Berenice knew that she was alone, she allowed herself to weep. She wept for a while, and then her hand went to the table by her couch and fumbled here and there until her fingers closed over a small, razor-sharp dagger. But the dagger was no good. Her thoughts of suicide were always ridiculous. She could not even begin the process of bringing them to consummation.
“Because I am a Jew!” she cried angrily. “The most cursed, wretched, miserable Jew that ever lived. The pagans can die as easily and effortlessly as they live—”
She hurled the dagger across the room. She put her face into the pillow—already moist from tears—and remembered her wedding to Polemon. All through it, she had been securely wrapped in a spell, a charm, a witch’s robe; she had walked as confidently and omnipotently as a little girl; and she had been as witless as a person asleep or unconscious. Why? she asked herself now. What had happened to her? Do cattle go to slaughter that way, lost in an idiot dream? And then, already her husband, he had bent to kiss her and she had smelled the appalling foul odor of his breath. He had a bad tooth that had abscessed, and the smell from his mouth was the smell of death stinking and decaying in the hot sun; it exploded her into wakefulness, and she fled. Had anything like this ever happened—in all the history of kings and princesses and weddings—a woman wed to a king, who then was bending to kiss her when she fled? She fled through them all—through the grandees of Cilicia, the noble and the rich who were not so noble of Tiberias, the barons of Galilee, the great landowners of Judea, there by royal invitation, the Jewish merchant-princes of Chalcis, the Syrian-Greek dukes, the Phoenician shipowners, the Roman tax farmers and bureaucrats and administrators, the Alexandrian aesthetes, heirs of the greatest of Jewish houses, the Idumean chieftains in their black and white striped robes, all of them, like all noble Idumeans, tracing some weary, tenuous blood connection to Antipater, the founder of the House of Herod, the Samaritan priests and petty kings and poverty-stricken, illiterate gentry, making their own tiresome claim to the blood of David and the House of David—all of these and so many others, and through them Berenice fled to be away from that hateful smell of death and decay, emanating from this strange, fleshy, loose-lipped man who, through some dim process of memory, she could remember as having married. Long ago? No, the wedding words were still lingering in the air as she fled, and the wedding guests stood aside. No one dared put out a hand to halt her or interfere with her progress. This was Berenice, who was already more of a legend than a reality, clad now in shining white, glittering white, white silk sewn with pearls and diamonds and even tiny rubies where the red sheen flickered about her shoulders—so beautiful that poor Polemon choked with emotion at his first sight of her in her wedding finery; and swore a vow to his pagan gods, still remembered, that he would not only have his wife put to death, but three concubines to whom he still clung—so that he could come clean and unhindered and pure to this radiant vision of loveliness. But the radiant vision of loveliness fled from the palace as if all the hounds of hell pursued her and through the guards outside, tearing away the long skeins of priceless cloth that impeded her progress.
Through the streets she fled, into dark alleys, and then through a postern gate which she wrenched open. All behind her she left a trail of silks and pearls and diamonds and rubies and gold clasps and gold pins and broken bracelets and beads from snapped strings—even the pearl-and-diamond-encrusted slippers which she wore; and finally, barefoot and naked, she found the shore of the lake and almost without hesitating in her wild pace plunged into the warm, sweet water.
Ah—what peace this was, what delight, what sweet and gentle relaxation, what safety, what security there in the black and good waters of Gennesaret! This was her mother and her mother’s womb, and with the perfect freedom of nakedness she swam as easily and noiselessly as some great fish—long, smooth strokes, and behind her the web of her rich red hair undulating and floating on the water. Once she turned on her back to look at Tiberias, at the flickering lights of the city, and she listened to the frantic shouting and watched the waving torches. Let them find her here! Let them look on the lake! God was on the lake. Was there not a rabbi once, as she heard it told, who had walked on the waters of the lake? The lake was filled with magic.
She would swim and swim until all her strength was gone, and then she would give herself to the lake. Gennesaret would take her into its warm bosom. Down, down, down into the deep darkness of eternity. But an hour later, far out on the lake, weary to exhaustion, she found the will to live too much for her, too much for Gennesaret—and swimming slowly, floating, resting, her long copper-skinned body a water thing, a part of the lake and the water, she made her way back. She swam back to the landing where she and Agrippa had played as children and dragged herself out onto the cool stone slab of the dock and lay there panting, whimpering—until she was strong enough to creep through their secret passages to her chambers. The corridors to the chambers were dark. She felt her way. She found her bed and crawled into it, and a moment later she was asleep.
&
nbsp; She was awakened once for a moment by Gabo’s sobbing joy; then she slept again.
The high priest at that time was Ishmael Barfabi, a pompous, strutting little man. Young Agrippa’s advisers had persuaded him to appoint Ishmael because of the priest’s connections with the wealthy and powerful Jerusalem House of Homash—and Agrippa himself could readily understand the need for strong connections in Judea. Not only were the Jews of Judea uneasy and resentful under the heel of the Roman procurator who governed the land, but they had never fully given their hearts to the House of Herod, even when Agrippa’s father became a saint of sorts. When the marriage of Berenice to Polemon was announced, opinion was mixed in Jerusalem. Some were flattered that Agrippa would have the ceremony performed by no other than the high priest; others—especially among the highly orthodox—felt that it was rather abject and tasteless, if not blasphemous, for the high priest to go off to Galilee to marry the widow of an incestuous uncle-niece relationship to a heathen. The high priest, however, did as he was told, and he had appeared at the wedding in the full costume of office, purple robe with its hem of golden bells, the pomegranate tassels, the glittering Ephod, the breastplate set with rubies and diamonds, and his great miznefit of hammered gold, towering up a foot above his head.
When he wore these ancient and holy vestments in the Temple at Jerusalem, there was no one to observe him but other priests and pious Jews. Here, however, he was the focus for the eyes of all the noble blood and less noble wealth of the Middle East, and he strutted like a little popinjay. A year later he died of snake bite, and this unfortunate accident convinced people that Nehushtan, the ancient serpent-god, had destroyed him for his sins. But this night, when Berenice fled from the man to whom he had duly wedded her, Barfabi felt that the disgrace had descended squarely upon his own shoulders, turning his moment of glory into a beginning of ridicule. He would be remembered as the priest who had driven the bride away from the altar. Or would they say, beware of Barfabi—whom he marries is instantaneously divorced? In any case, when Berenice summoned him the following day, he went to her chambers stiff as a ramrod with irritation and bruised pride. There was a crowd around the door to her chambers, at least twenty men and women who desired to see her but who remained at a safe distance because the door was guarded by the oversized Adam Benur, who had switched his allegiance from Agrippa to Berenice. This had been a simple matter for Berenice, who had smiled upon the overmuscled Galilean soldier and won his undying loyalty; but others put it down to witchcraft and spells—which was the simplest way to explain Berenice.