Agrippa's Daughter

by Fast, Howard

  He was sleeping now, and she lay next to him and looked at him, and then she too slept. The first light of dawn was coming into the room when he awakened her, and again he touched her and awakened the wellspring of her life and being.

  Lying back, her eyes closed, she heard his soft plea.

  “Yes.”

  “Speak it.”

  “I love you, Titus Flavius.”

  “And you will be my wife?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Have I ever wished otherwise?”

  “Ever? Ever is too long.”

  “Not for us, blessed Berenice. For us, it is ever and always—our own eternity.”

  “You are so young, Titus Flavius—so young, and this city of yours is so young, and your people so young—”

  “I will be as old as time for you.”

  “Ah? And what will that solve?”

  “There is nothing more for me to solve. I have you, my beloved. So I have everything. I have life and I have eternity.”

  “You are really an amazing man,” Berenice said. “I have never known you to do a cruel thing or a thoughtless thing, or to speak a cruel word, and you are as gentle as any man I have ever known, and—”

  “And yet I am a Roman,” Titus agreed.

  “Yes.”

  “And you are a Jew—and doesn’t your Hillel teach that God has a purpose and a plan? So we are Jew and Roman joined finally, and if it is true that your bloodlines go back three thousand years to time’s beginning, is it not highly proper that they should find their haven here in my arms?”

  “Oh, what ego! What arrogance!”

  “Yes—because we shall rule the whole world, you and me, Jew and Roman joined together finally for man’s golden age. Doesn’t this poor, beaten old world deserve it?”

  “Your dreams are too beautiful for me to upset them.”

  “My dreams will be the hard facts of history. Only, don’t leave me, Berenice. Without you, I am nothing. I swear by all the gods that be that I am telling the truth—without you, I am nothing. But with you to support me, to love me, to caress me, to give me some worth in myself—with this, all things are possible. So promise me that you will never leave me.”

  She didn’t answer for a while, and then she said, “For as long as you want me to remain with you, I will. I promise that.”

  The following day, David Barona made no mention of Titus’ visit. The best part of the day was given over to discussions with the leading men of the Jewish community—and out of seventeen men who attended, twenty-two million sesterces were pledged, either as a gift or as a sum to be raised within sixty days. Not all of it would be raised in Rome, or even in Italy; certain men would embark immediately for Africa and for Spain; but the pledges were secure, and the money would be raised—and now, at last, the final step in the enormous financial effort was in sight. Here, too, Berenice found herself changed. She was not pleading for money. She was demanding it, quietly, gently, but demanding it nevertheless—with a kind of firmness she had never considered herself to be capable of, and the men responded to her.

  That night, she dined with Barona and his family—and they were utterly charmed and captured by her directness, her simplicity, and her great beauty. To people raised in luxury in Rome, where every woman who could afford it painted her face, rouged her lips, powdered her cheeks, and framed her eyes in heavy gobs of red-black outline and shadow, the sight of this Galilean princess, unrouged and unpainted, was exciting and unbelievable—and in Italy, where most men were quite short and the women shorter, her height and breadth of shoulder marked her as one apart, foreign and mysterious. The children of the house worshiped her with their eyes; the little girls attempted to walk as she walked, to hold themselves as she held herself.

  After dinner Barona took her aside and said, “I think, my dear, that there are one or two matters we must discuss. Not our visitor last night. That is not my concern and in any case, it is something that I have known about. But concerning the slaves, you must understand this: Vespasian, the emperor, took over a throne where not the least among a number of pressing problems was finance—in other words, the near bankruptcy of the Empire. No, don’t look so surprised—the Romans have only the most primitive concept of finance, and their scheme of balancing a budget is to balance enormous expenditures with equally enormous international looting. Eventually they will pay for this and pay an awful price, but for the moment they are able to step out of each crisis into the next. Now, when Titus began his siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian, at his wit’s end for money, pledged two hundred thousand Jewish slaves to the big dealers and took option money to the extent of five million sesterces. We want to preserve the lives of the captives until sufficient funds are raised, and the only way to do this, I think, is to satisfy the dealers that you will not bring undue pressure on Titus to ruin them. In other words, we must guarantee their options, and you yourself must, I think, meet with them. I hate to do this, my dear. These are not Jews or like the Jews you met here today. These are not even like Romans. These dealers are very wealthy, but they are the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. So if you feel that you cannot—”

  “I will meet them,” Berenice said.

  The following day she met with these slave dealers in their common room at the slave market at one end of the Circus Maximus, gross men, wealthy men, but mixed breeds barred from citizenship and from the baths and unwashed as in protest, foul of smell and foul of tongue, addressing her as “Jew-woman,” though they knew well enough who she was. Barona watched her as she dealt with them, never for one moment losing her composure, controlling herself and talking to them firmly but without hostility, as if she were dealing with a group of truculent children. Gently and firmly she induced them to part with the options, and when the meeting was over each of them bowed to her. There were seven of them. They kissed her hand one by one.

  In his litter on the way back to his house, Barona said to Berenice, “Do you know, my dear—I think you are the most remarkable woman I have ever known. Through the years, I have heard much about you, and none of it measured up to the fact of yourself. I am seventy-six years old, so I can say things that would be impermissible in another man; also I have a prior claim. For when your father lived in Rome and was in desperate need of funds, I gave him credit to the extent of eighty thousand sesterces—”

  “I never knew that. I must repay you,” Berenice said.

  “Child, child—the money was repaid these thirty years ago, and money is nothing, nothing at all. In the end there is only one thing that matters, and that is Israel and its destiny along the road that Hillel marked. May I talk frankly?”

  “I think we should both talk frankly,” Berenice said.

  “Exactly, for it seems to me that we need each other. Now it is common talk that Titus adores you—but tell me this, will you be content as his mistress?”

  “No, I will not,” Berenice answered flatly.

  “Good, good,” he nodded, rubbing his hands together with pleasure. “I am glad you said that. As sure as the Almighty is, my child—this is ordained. Have no regrets, for this is no ordinary man—this Titus. I think I know as much about him as anyone, and you see that he comes and goes freely in my house. I tell you, he is sober and wise and just, and when he puts on the purple, there will be a new era for the world. Now answer me straightly—did he ask you to marry him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “Yes—and no. I need more time.”

  “Well, nothing is simple. I don’t think he can marry you before he becomes emperor.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it plain? Because we are Jews, my dear—and because the hatred of Jews is becoming both a fashion and a passion in Rome.”

  “But why?” Berenice asked. “I lived here as a child—and there was no hatred of Jews then. I don’t think the people here had any real notion of what a Jew was.”

  “Well, they do now. A great deal has changed
since then, and they know very well what a Jew is now—a Jew being someone who is apart from the dole, who lives quietly and decently, who remains sober and manages to eat with such restraint that he is not obligated to vomit up his excess food each evening, who does not destroy his children at birth—and who most dangerously converts Romans. Over the last five years, here in Rome, we have had eight hundred converts from Roman families—from the best families, if I may say so—and the men endure all the pain and indignity of circumcision to become Jews. And each year the number increases. Rest assured, my dear, we are envied and feared and hated, and that too increases constantly. I don’t think that Titus could marry you without risking the throne—I don’t think that he should until the throne is his.”

  “Isn’t that for Titus to decide?”

  “Now you are angry at me. But I am trying to make you understand what Vespasian will decide—and Titus will obey him. You see, my dear Berenice, a man loves a woman, a woman loves a man—this is within a framework, and the framework is the world. We are playing for the largest stakes in all time—for I tell you this: if ever Rome and Israel were joined together, then a new age would begin for mankind. Yes, I have dreamed of that—but until now, there has been no possibility. Now it is at least possible. Only don’t press him. Let it be in his own good time.”

  To this, Berenice was silent, absorbed in her own thoughts and suddenly desperately lonely for Galilee.

  But it was to be a long time before she saw Galilee again. The vast effort in which the Jews of all the world had joined was now coming to fruition. The gigantic sum of money was being raised, and in every important city of the Mediterranean basin, agents were quietly bidding for and purchasing Jewish slaves. But in Rome the slaves were most numerous, the effort largest; and here, too, was located the central bank, to where the major part of the money was directed and from whence it was dispensed. Jacobar Hacohen and Gideon Benharmish—his House of Shlomo had a warehouse at Ostia and ships based there—joined Berenice in Rome, bringing with them Phineas Hacohen. He had been recorded as among the dead in Jerusalem, but had turned up subsequently in the slave market at Antioch and had been purchased for a token fee of twenty sesterces, being then almost dead with hunger and disease. Now, four months later, he was still thin, slow in his step, and humble at the fact that twenty sesterces had been his price in the markets of men. While his own fortune was gone, he was the last survivor of the ancient House of Hakedron and the grandson of the legendary Ba’as Hacohen and therefore a potent force in the effort. It was at his urging that Spain was chosen as the destination for most of the manumitted captives.

  Not only were the Palestinian members of the syndicate uneasy at the prospect of thousands of Zealots and Sicarii bought out of slavery and returned to Judea to nurse their hate and their dreams of revenge, but the Romans let it be known that at the first sign of substantial numbers of able-bodied men being returned to Judea, they would intervene and halt the traffic entirely. At the moment, because of Titus’ support, the Roman authorities were standing aside, allowing the manumission to continue as a private process between the Jews and the slave dealers. For this reason, it was decided to ship as many of the Jews as possible, that is, adult men and women and their families, to Spain and to southern France—spreading the orphans and widowed women among the Italian, Greek, and Galilean Jewish communities. In Spain there was no trace of anti-Semitism; Jewish synagogues and communities had flourished in the coastal communities for hundreds of years; and thousands of Spaniards had been converted to Judaism.

  Still there were a hundred matters to be arranged, and the support of the Jewish community leaders in Spain had to be won. For this reason Berenice made two trips to Spain. On the first trip she was absent from Rome for three months; and when she decided to make the second trip, Titus refused to accept so long a separation and went with her—leaving quietly so that only a handful of his intimate friends and of the Jews in the syndicate knew that he had left for Spain with Berenice.

  Now a year and a half had passed since the death of Shimeon—and almost five years since she had parted with him in Jerusalem. The pall which had been upon her through all that time seemed suddenly to lift. She felt young, footloose, and amazingly happy. Never had she been the recipient of the kind of devotion Titus offered her; never had she been so long and so intimately connected with a man as lighthearted as Titus, as open-faced, and as unfalteringly optimistic. And never had she felt so certainly that her presence on earth was useful and important.

  Most astonishingly, Titus was apparently happy to stand in the background and observe her. Except for Benharmish’s son, Enoch, no one on the galley knew Titus’ identity—only that he was a wealthy and highly placed Roman—and so it was in Spain, too, where Berenice was greeted with an adulation that verged on worship. Apparently he was delighted with this. Berenice had wondered whether he could sit back and watch and observe without jealousy and without uncertainty, and she was pleased to find still another aspect of him that she had not known of.

  They returned to Rome overland through the gardens and valleys of northern Italy, taking ship from Spain to Cisalpine Gaul and traveling south from there by chariot. And it was out of the flush of joy and certainty of this trip that Titus decided to present Berenice to his father. But that went poorly.

  In the great palace of the principate Berenice felt dwarfed. The public buildings of Tiberias could be set in the hallways here and yet leave enough room to pass. And the hawk-nosed, hard-faced man called Vespasian, who sat behind his desk and examined her, did nothing to ease her feelings.

  “So you’re the Jewish princess my son has lost his head over,” the emperor said flatly, his voice harsh and nasal. “Well, you’re not the old witch they say you are, and I doubt whether you’re old enough to be his mother, which is something else that they say. Still, you’re a Jew, and I can’t say that I like Jews. I’m plain-spoken about things; that’s something you’ll have to get used to.”

  “It’s a habit, and maybe not the worst one in the world,” Berenice replied. “But it’s nothing I have to get used to. You see, I am equally plain-spoken, Imperator, and I never confuse rudeness with the truth—so I can take your ways with women or I can leave them alone. As I wish.”

  Out of the corner of her eyes, Berenice watched Titus, whose mouth was twitching and who had to control himself visibly to restrain his mirth. Vespasian swallowed and roared and asked Berenice who the devil she imagined she was to talk to him like that? She replied that he knew very well who she was; and then he turned to Titus and demanded:

  “Did you bring her here to irritate me? Don’t I have enough troubles as things are? I never found a Jew I could trust—not even that wretched Joseph Benmattathias who cozened his way into our bosom and now calls himself Flavius Josephus—and why should I trust this one?”

  “Why indeed?” Berenice asked him. “Only that you’re the father of a man I care for.”

  “How old are you, woman?” he snapped.

  “That, Imperator, is of concern only to myself and to Titus. And further, do not address me as woman. My ancestors were priests at Jerusalem and kings at Megiddo when Rome was a circle of mud huts inhabited by brutes who had not yet learned to weave cloth or even to smelt copper. And as for this meeting, I think that I at least have had sufficient of it—and if you will permit me, I should like to go.”

  Hours later, when Titus met her at the House of Barona, he was still unable to control his mirth. “My whole body aches from laughing,” he told her. “By all the gods, I have not laughed like that in years.”

  “Did your father laugh?” Berenice asked him.

  “He is furious. In all truth, if he was not out of the hardest, meanest peasant stock in all Italy, he would certainly have a stroke. Let him stew. He deserves to. Was ever a man put down so brilliantly and neatly!”

  “That’s enough!”

  “What?”

  “I do not wish to discuss it any further,” Berenice said, a
nd then Titus realized that she had been weeping.

  “But why?”

  “I did not think it particularly humorous,” Berenice said. “How old am I? Is that the current gossip all over Rome—how old is this Jew witch? Is that what I am here for? I tell you this, Titus, I am sick and tired of your Rome, and I have had enough of it—”

  But he closed off her protests with his embraces, and when they lay in bed, making love to each other, her hatred of Rome melted away. As did her plans for returning to Galilee.

  “You are as young as the new morning,” Titus whispered to her, “and as old as the truth—”

  Titus went to Greece. He had expected to return in weeks, but he was away almost five months; and back in Rome a few days, he was ordered by his father to Africa. Now Berenice sat in front of her mirror, conscious for the first time in her life that her face was changing. A few slight wrinkles. A single white hair that she angrily plucked out. She lay for hours in her rooms, while beauticians applied mudpacks to her face and body and then gently massaged cream into the wrinkles around her eyes. Never before had she given a thought to her appearance; blessed with beauty, she had never questioned it, never doubted it. Now she was filled with doubts and even more filled with mistrust of herself. What had happened to her? She was becoming short of temper, querulous, angry too easily. She tongue-lashed Gabo until Gabo fell into a fit of hysterical tears; and then, conscience-stricken, Berenice attempted to comfort her. Gabo turned up to her mistress a tear-streaked face that was suddenly old—old, and that pierced Berenice to her heart. Wasn’t Gabo only a year older than she was? And now Gabo was a small, dark, wrinkled woman with sagging dugs and nests of creases to bed her eyes, complaining forlornly,

  “Is it right to talk to me like that? I love you so—and for a whole lifetime I served you and followed you everywhere, even to the ends of the earth and even to this pagan place which is the true Edom, the vanity of vanities and cursed by the Lord God—and always a slave—”