by Fast, Howard
“I am trying to,” Titus nodded.
“I wonder sometimes how much I comprehend, who I am, or what—and then I talk like this, because it is not very often I find someone to talk to—the desire of course, I mean to talk—and a long time ago, the Emperor Claudius had my father murdered. He believed, and with some reason, that my father plotted against him. My brother, Agrippa, and I knew who had killed my father, but we picked some poor hapless priest whom we disliked and he was put to death for a crime he never committed. And again, a few weeks after this, a soldier tried to make love to me. Poor boy, he was only enamored of me and blundering with the excitement of touching a royal princess, and he did no more than that, only to touch me, and then I had him beaten to death. This defined my life; this was the being and morality of the House of Herod, where Agrippa and I had been raised, and I remember it, the bleakness of infamy, the awful boredom and depression of wickedness, the hopelessness of cruelty and the utter emptiness of a life devoid of love. That is the whole history of the Herods and perhaps of the Julians, too, and it’s nothing to live for; so such houses make a process of dying their existence—do you know what I am trying to say, Titus Flavius?”
“I think so—in part. Tell me, Berenice, what did the House of Hillel give you then?”
“Life.”
“We all live.”
“But to taste its sweetness, there is a privilege.”
“My father is emperor,” Titus said thoughtfully, “but the only sweetness I have tasted in this life is the sight of you.”
“Ah—no. Surely more than that.”
“Are you happy now?” Titus asked her.
“Happy? What a strange question to ask me. My husband lies buried a few paces from here, you know how he died. Our holy city in ruins—my people weeping—”
“You don’t weep. I saw no weeping at the House of Hillel.”
“We teach a way of love—not sorrow.”
“And you love? Now?”
“Yes,” Berenice replied.
“Whom?”
“Many people and the memory of many people. A great many people. It is something you learn, and then you live a little better, a little easier.”
“Do you love me?” Titus asked her.
“I don’t know. It must be said that Titus destroyed Jerusalem. What else can be said?” They stood facing each other now, and Berenice reached out and touched his face—and then her hand fell. Titus moved not at all. “You are very gentle,” Berenice whispered. “I prayed to the Almighty that He would let me know about you.”
“Perhaps He will,” Titus answered her.
They stood on the hillside above the farmhouse in the little cemetery where Shimeon lay buried, and Berenice watched the Roman. In all things, he was tentative. He looked at the grave and asked her what kind of a man Shimeon was.
“Tall and slow. He spoke slowly and moved slowly. You had to know him, otherwise he would appear slow-witted, because he was tender and gentle, the way you are. But he was not like you—he could not command, God help him. He would not have taken Jerusalem. He would have left it, had he been in your place.”
“But he would have been a Roman,” Titus reminded her. “Had he been in my place—he would have thought as I do. And why did they kill him, Berenice?”
“You saved that question, Titus Flavius,” Berenice said. “What will you do to me with that question?”
“I could never do you harm. But neither is it easy to do you good. I would have to understand you first, and you would have to understand me. Do you know why they killed him?”
Berenice nodded, tears welling into her eyes in spite of her efforts to remain cold and objective. “I know why they killed him. He became tired of death—too quickly. How I pleaded with him not to remain there in Jerusalem! But he had become proud. In all his life, he had never been proud in this way—because he was a simple man, a plain man, what we call an Israelite, which means one out of the common mass, without noble ancestors or bloodline. Do you see?”
“The Flavians are that way—no noble ancestors or bloodline, out of the common nothing.”
“So he became proud, and pride is a disease. He stepped into the man’s game—the game of death. My people, my city, my land, my honor, my courage—all the war words, all the filthy, prideful words that have made my people’s history a history of blood and slaughter unending for a thousand years. He forgot Hillel for a little while, and when he remembered, it was too late. Because for the Sicarii—death is life, and they can make no distinction between the two—and so they murdered Shimeon and Shimeon’s friend and every other man I knew and loved in Jerusalem—every one of these they murdered. Yet we weep for them. Why? You are a stranger among us—tell me why?”
“We are a part Sicarii, I suppose,” Titus shrugged.
“You know—they became proud of their Latin name,” Berenice said. “All other things Roman they hated but the name. The men of the knife. They gloried in that. The men of death. You know, before the war, we would hold great assemblies of all the people in Jerusalem on important issues, but the Sicarii would circulate in the assemblies and those who voted against what the Sicarii desired would feel that knife, and then when the assembly was over, there would be forty or fifty bodies on the ground. So presently, we held no more assemblies. We elected high priests, but if the Sicarii disagreed they would murder the priest. Murder became their sole statement—because they felt so surely that they were the voice of God. They were the holiest of the holy, the most orthodox of the orthodox. No one prayed more than they did. No one more carefully observed every minutia of the Law. No one was more pious—or more righteous. So righteous that they preempted the right to practice death.” She was weeping now, without restraint, nor could she restrain the words as they poured out of her:
“So you see, my lord, Titus Flavius, I speak the truth when I speak at all—and I say that this city had to perish. Part of me died with it, and I will mourn for Jerusalem all my days—but I will not wish it to be otherwise. God willing, we will not take up the sword again. Let other nations kill and be killed—I think we Jews will fight no more.”
“I am afraid not, my dear Berenice,” Titus said. “No one in all the world has the courage to live without the sword.”
They climbed higher, to where the cedars grew, and then they sat in the shade on the sweet-smelling sod under the trees, and the cool wind from the west caressed them.
“This is a good place,” Titus said, “beautiful and old, and nowhere in the world are there such trees as these.”
“They are very old—as old as time, our legends say, planted by the hand of God when time began. The Greeks say that this is nonsense, but I like to believe it. To us they are holy trees, and out of these trees, my great-grandfather built the Temple.”
“Yes—and it went up like a torch,” Titus nodded.
“The wood burns easily—and the smell is good. And if you like our land so well, Titus Flavius, stay here.”
“You ask me to?”
“Yes, I ask you to.”
He turned, sprawling on his stomach, his legs flung out behind him, and he rested his chin on his hands and stared at her.
“My asking you won’t keep you here—”
“You, Berenice,” he said, “are like this place—with those strange green eyes of yours and your hair the color of cedarwood—long-limbed, like the wood creatures that the Greeks worship; and I would give my life to stay here with you—but I am Vespasian’s son, so even if I laid down my life to make a bond, they would return my body to Rome.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
“My father?”
“My father was a king. I never loved him.”
“But I learned to love Vespasian before he was ever king,” Titus said. “He was everything to me, mother and father and nurse and teacher, a simple man—so very simple—and out of poor, plain people. The kind of Roman they never send overseas to govern. No, we send out our scum, and they lie a
nd conspire and kill for the privilege of being sent out as procurator or proconsul—because that way is the short road to riches. And this lust for wealth, for money and more money and still more money is the disease of Rome—and it will be the death of Rome too. But my father never had this disease and he never taught me it. He taught me other things.”
“What kind of things, Titus Flavius?” she asked him.
“To measure a man—or a woman. To look at a woman like you—and to know her worth. And believe me, Berenice, I have never looked at a woman this way before. In one thing we are the same. I don’t lie either, not because I am a follower of Hillel, but because I have been taught this way—and I say that you are the only woman in my life. Yes, I have had women and I have sickened myself with lechery and drink—it was expected of me, but I have not loved as a man loves a woman. I waited, but I waited with great certainty, and that is why when I saw you, I knew. I love you, Berenice—I love you as much as a man can love a woman. You are twelve years older than I am—granted. I don’t close my eyes to that. But it makes no difference. Twenty, thirty years, and still it would make no difference. You are all of woman that I desire—the loveliest, the wisest—and there is no other. And there will be no other for me ever again. Nor am I such a fool as to fail to see that you don’t hate me—that you look at me with some fondness, some good feeling. Admit it!”
“I admit it, Titus Flavius.”
“I don’t press you. By all the gods, I do not press you. Let the wounds heal first. The past is too close. I am patient.”
“Patient—patient—do you think time ever stops? What will you wait for?”
“For your love.”
“While I grow old and dry? I am already barren. As the old wives here say, my womb is cursed—just as the whole House of Herod is cursed. There is no more seed, only my brother and myself to grow old and dry and finally to perish. So what will you wait for, Titus Flavius?”
“My own destiny. I can no more avoid it than I can avoid the death that awaits me somewhere along my road.”
“Ah, that is Roman talk—and we Jews believe in no such destiny. When the Almighty put man on earth, He left it to man to make his own destiny. We plot our own road and mostly our own death too. So don’t talk to me about death. You are too young, too vital—and some day you will be Emperor of Rome, and you must have children who are the flesh of your flesh—”
“Berenice,” he interrupted. She paused and looked at him. “Berenice,” he said, “let me decide what my own destiny must be. I am no boy. I command an army of eighty thousand men here in Palestine alone, and as my father’s legate, I command half the world. I can call into being great fleets and great armies—simply by my word or my seal. I have the power of life and death over millions. I have led my men into many battles, and I have seen great nations and cities fall beneath my blows. Of course, I am boasting in a most disgusting manner, but I don’t know how else to impress upon you the fact that I am aware of my own thoughts and my own needs—and that I know my own mind. It is three years since I first met you, and in that time nothing has happened to change my original observation, namely that you are a beautiful and wise woman. I love you. I am patient—but I love you deeply, very deeply.”
He spoke formally, a man much tutored in the art of speech, articulate, but also the victim of his voice and its power; in his eyes there was something else, something pleading that touched Berenice in spite of all her resolution. Titus drew himself up beside her and lightly caressed her face. She shook her head. Then he kissed her gently, but she saw that he was trembling and fighting to control himself, and she drew away from him and got to her feet. He rose and faced her, staring at her for a long moment, and then he took her in his arms. She didn’t resist, but neither did she feel desire or passion; yet the pressure of his hard-muscled body, the smell of him, the close male smell that she had almost forgotten, and the strength of his arms around her—all this had its effect. Still he let go of her and stood away.
“When the wounds heal,” he said.
She was summoned to Caesarea by an urgent plea from Gideon Benharmish and Jacobar Hacohen—and they said for her to bring jewels and whatever gold she could lay hands on. The urgency resolved into a cheap and wretched piece of blackmail. Two Syrian and three Egyptian slave dealers—who had an option on eight thousand Jewish captives, mostly virgin girls between the ages of six and thirteen—had chanced upon some rumor to the effect of a Jewish syndicate being formed, a rumor re-enforced by Titus’ injunction about the slaughter of slaves. Now they announced that they intended to march their slaves across the northern shore of Sinai to Alexandria—a long and arduous march, and one which would exact a large toll from such a group, even if they were well fed and in the best of health. But these five dealers had spent their money on options, and the only way they could continue to feed their slaves was to sell them off; however, there were no customers. Everyone knew of the tremendous number of Jewish slaves to be offered and everyone knew by now that Titus had rejected all pleas to lessen their numbers and keep the price up. Dealers and buyers had come from all over the world to the main slave markets of Anatolia, Greece, Palestine, and Egypt, but no one was buying. Everyone was waiting for the prices to break—for slaves to be cast on the market for a pittance—and desperate, these five dealers had evolved their plan. They spoke to someone who spoke to another—and finally it found Benharmish, who still maintained warehouses in Caesarea. Flatly these dealers said:
“Either buy these eight thousand slaves, or we will walk them and starve them to death. We will not wait.”
There were no Jews left in Caesarea to spell out the situation or analyze the motives of these men or the worth of their threats. In the great massacre of half a decade past every Jew in Caesarea had been slaughtered; it was a city Jews hated, avoided, and coupled with a malediction. The brothers Philip and Cadmus Bargora Hacohen, two very wealthy Alexandrian Jews who dealt in Chinese jade and practically had a monopoly in it, had come up to negotiate some business loans with Jacobar, the banker. They knew the slave dealers—that is, the Egyptian ones—by reputation as an unsavory and desperate lot who would do anything for money, and they persuaded Jacobar and the others to deal with them. Then the slave dealers fixed the price at one thousand sesterces per slave, on the grounds that these were virgins, young and desirable. The figure thus arrived at was at once incredible and impossible, eight million sesterces, but the agreement was made, and the five slave dealers became both rich and Judophile at once. The brothers Philip and Cadmus turned in all the jade they had with them, and Jacobar turned in the substance of the loan he would have made to them. Benharmish raised a million sesterces personally—still they had to turn to Berenice. In the warehouse of Benharmish in Caesarea, where they met, she opened a jewel casket to reveal pearls, diamonds, and rubies to the value of three and a half million sesterces. She bore also a note of demand from her brother, Agrippa. Still they were short, and Berenice left by ship for Alexandria, with Jacobar and the Bargora brothers to raise the rest of the money. Meanwhile, the slave children were moved quietly, in groups of ten or fifteen, to Galilee. All of Berenice’s villas and palaces on the lake there had been set aside as staging areas for the slaves—and there began the vast operation of feeding and caring for the slaves, of moving them then to other cities, to Greece and Italy and North Africa—wherever there were Jewish communities large enough to accept them, integrate them, and return them to an existence of hope and work. It was a complex and vast operation, frequently inoperative, seemingly hopeless, yet somehow stumbling along in the face of food shortages, in the face of the growing dislike of the Galilean Jews for the Judean Jews, in the face of the continuing discord, quarrels, and hatred among the Jewish captives—slaves and manumitted—still Zealot against Hillel and Sicarii against both.
On the coasting galley from Caesarea to Alexandria, Berenice relaxed, lay for hours on a couch under an awning, and enjoyed the attention and conversation of those three wo
rldly men—the jewel merchants from Alexandria and Jacobar Hacohen, the banker. Gabo, older, even more petulant, frequently seasick, let Berenice know that she trusted no Jew who made his home outside of Israel—and what right had such to style themselves Jews? Yet she crouched within hearing distance when Philip Bargora told his incredible tales of a trip he himself had made across the top of the world to the land of a slant-eyed people with yellow-brown skins, where, there were a thousand walled cities and where armies mounted on elephants fought each other. His mixture of truth and fantasy enthralled Berenice, and the witty and knowledgeable talk of all three of them shortened and enlivened the trip. It was almost as if time had not passed at all when the swift coasting galley shipped oars and slid slowly alongside the docks at Alexandria.
So it began, and then for a long time to follow there was little rest for Berenice. In Alexandria, a message from Titus that had fled after her in a galley speedier than hers reached her: “And now, my beloved Berenice, I find that I can put off my return to Rome no longer. My mind is as filled with you as my heart—and in that I, who can have everything else the world may provide a man, cannot have you, is a lesson in humility, a habit I have never considered a virtue. Yet I said I would be patient. We are both of us persons, my beloved one, very much persons, and strong and willful and with much to do. I know what you do—be assured that I will feast little and make merry less. Already the polite set in Rome look upon the Flavians as a dour and brooding lot, little given to dancing a jig when the piper pipes; and I am afraid I shall do little to alter that reputation. I shall think of you and send my messages to you when I know what corner of the world you currently inhabit, and if you should think of sending me a word of greeting on some occasion, I shall burn sacrifices to all the gods that be, including your angry Yaweh, who has such little reason to bless me. But no freedom from my love, my regard, my desire to serve you shall ever be yours.”