The Deadliest Lie

by June Trop

  The fans love to see a driver demonstrate his skill by fouling another, even though it’s against the rules. Once I saw a driver reach out and grab the bridle of his rival’s horse, pull on the bit, and force the rival’s chariot back while his own sprang forward. Another time I saw a driver scrape his opponent’s chariot with his own, and then, as he surged ahead, he broke the leg of his opponent’s horse with one of his wheels. All the while, the fans are playing charioteer themselves, streaming with sweat as they lash their imaginary horses to drive them to victory.

  The races are exciting, but the excitement soars when a charioteer, splendid from helmet to boots in his faction’s color, captures the inside track, or alas, when there’s a spill or a crash. The last time I was at the races, drivers from both the White and Blue factions forced a Red charioteer into the median just as he was about to execute his last deadly turn around the meta, the gilded column that’s the turning point for each lap. Following the crash, his four-horse team dragged him around the circus while the hooves of the other horses trampled him. Because Roman charioteers wrap the reins around their waist, he couldn’t have freed himself by letting go but would have had to cut the reins with his falx, the curved knife every charioteer carries for that purpose. But before he could do that, I heard his chariot splinter, his bones snap, his team of horses stampede, and the spectators yell until their voices croaked. And all I saw were the backs of the fans who, enthralled by the spectacle, stood on their seats flourishing their fists.

  Eventually the fans calmed down. A troupe of musicians materialized to entertain us while various crews of slaves drew awnings over the seats for the wealthy, reined in the fallen driver’s horses, cleared away his crushed remains and the debris from his wrecked chariot, and raked the track to level its surface and cover the blood-soaked sand and oysters of flesh. Nothing can stop the flies and rats, but to mask the acrid stench of the flesh, blood, and ordure baking under the relentless sun, another crew began to heat on braziers the aromatic cones of the stone pine trees planted for that purpose around the hippodrome.

  I had to grab my ankles and drop my head between my knees to keep from getting sick, but many of the spectators took advantage of the break to step around me and swarm to the snack bars beneath the stands. Others waited for a roving food vendor to carve his way through the crowd to peddle pouches of roasted lima beans, the bookmaker in his wake collecting the purses for the next race or consulting his tablet to pay off the winning wagers from the previous race.

  The rivalries are keen among the financial backers and betting fans whose loyalty to their favorite faction, Red, White, Blue, or Green, is rooted in their family or craft. Any of them might throw a nail-studded lead missile at a rival faction’s team to distract the charioteer or, worse yet, to cause him to spill. But among the charioteers, the rivalries are even more violent. Initially slaves, they can become celebrities and buy their freedom with a sufficient number of victories, each dependent, of course, on surviving their opponents’ attempts to force them out of a preferred position. Binyamin says the spills and crashes are so spectacular that no charioteer or team of horses ever dies of old age.

  Amram took a last sip from his goblet and handed it to me before continuing his praise of Philo.

  “And he can still captivate an audience. He spoke to us about the moral development of man, that once the soul is confined in a body, its purity is threatened by corporeal desires—”

  “—Abba, Abba, we’d started to worry about you.”

  Noah must have heard his father’s voice from the library. He stumbled into the atrium, his bearing even less certain than usual.

  Together, Noah and Amram reminded me of a before-and-after picture. Both are lanky, their arms enclosing their bodies like a pair of parentheses, each face split by a narrow, hatchet-blade nose, the halves reunited by a span of long, overlapping front teeth and a receding chin that makes you believe everything they say. But Noah is clean shaven, his sparse tawny hair as straight and stubborn as the bristles on a paint brush, whereas Amram’s hair is the color of mother-of-pearl, its untidy wisps extending from his pink scalp to his lacy Hebraic beard, which he twines when he’s deep in thought.

  Leaning toward his father, grabbing the bench with one hand, Noah pressed the palm of his other hand to his heart and, in a spray of crumbs, said, “It’s late, Abba. Come, let’s have dinner.”

  And I wondered why he’d had so much to drink.

  Chapter 4

  Friday (Shabbat) Night

  AS NOAH AND I escorted Amram into the dining room, I saw that Phoebe had already served the first course, chilled cucumber slices in a tangy dill dressing, and was bringing in a freshly mixed crater of wine.

  Phoebe was the Greek foundling my mother rescued. The long-established practice of the Greeks abandoning their infant daughters had resurfaced in Egypt as a symptom of their hardship under the Roman occupation. Finding her wrapped in a soiled blanket in the Bruchium Quarter when she was hardly more than a day old, my mother brought her home and hired a wet nurse for her first three years. Then she herself undertook to rear Phoebe as a domestic slave to assist Iphigenia, who was already getting old.

  After my mother’s death and until her own nine years ago, Iphigenia minded Phoebe in her own gentle but stern way, along with helping Aunt Hannah manage Binyamin and me. I can still remember Iphigenia as a second mother, a plain woman with the full breasts of a fertility goddess, unobtrusive but never still, her hair streaked with gray, her skin smelling of soap, her cheeks covered with down, her chin sprouting a few errant whiskers, and her spotted hands gnarled with arthritis. Later, when I was five and my father had engaged a tutor for me, he invited Phoebe, at that time ten, to join me in my lessons. Phoebe has given me the confidential ear of a best friend ever since, and when her dimpled smile flashes across her face and crinkles the spray of freckles across her nose, I realize I can view life through a simpler lens.

  Papa and Binyamin, by now composed, had taken their places lying side by side on the middle couch. Aunt Hannah held a place for me on the first, and Amram and Noah were to recline on the third, Amram adjacent to Papa. Before taking my place next to Aunt Hannah, I had to review the menu and help Phoebe serve the next course: roast duck stuffed with figs and chestnuts, glazed with a cherry sauce, and accompanied by asparagus in a mustard vinaigrette. After that, we would serve grilled lamb with rice balls rolled in mint extract while the cinnamon tea and sesame cakes topped with currants and dates were being kept warm for dessert.

  While Phoebe and I placed the platters on the ivory table and she carved the roast duck, I overheard snippets of the day’s news punctuated by bites, sips, and swallows.

  “Our business is doing well, Isaac. Noah has been investing our capital at ten percent in mortgages near the agora. The three he closed on this week were for an inn, a glass factory, and just today, the expansion of a Roman-style luncheonette into a larger cookshop.”

  Good old Noah. True, he invests our capital in the agora for a handsome return, but to first-time borrowers in the outlying neighborhoods, he issues short-term, interest-free loans. That’s not all. He offers to pay the tax each year to manumit up to ten of his family’s slaves. But few want to leave a household where their needs are met, where they have the ease to rest and study on Shabbat, the freedom to earn their own money, the certainty of keeping their family together, the promise of support in their old age, and the gratitude of the people they serve.

  I remember when I was a little girl about six years old, and, ignoring Aunt Hannah’s warnings to stop playing near the rose bushes, I was attacked by a swarm of bees. Noah visited me every day of my convalescence, bearing a fresh bouquet of carnations and reading to me from Aesop’s Fables. That’s when I began to like the idea of marrying him, when I thought marriage meant always having a playmate, someone to stay with you, tell your secrets to, and share your toys with.

>   I began to have fantasies then about how we’d play together after we were married: how we’d go to the agora and sample the pastries in every kapeleion and the fragrances in every perfumery, how he’d hold my hand and whisper secrets to me when we’d walk in front of our fathers to the Great Synagogue on Shabbat and our holy days, and how he’d take me to the harbor in a golden litter and read to me from The Odyssey while I watched the gulls frolic beyond the breakers. Still I had trouble imagining him as a hero like Odysseus stringing his bow and shooting it through a dozen axe heads to regain his Penelope.

  But when I was twelve, I stopped amusing myself with those fantasies. Noah and I had been walking to the Great Synagogue on the first day of Sukkot, Binyamin way ahead of us, Papa and Amram somewhere behind. Amram had tripped and was resting with Papa just inside the Jewish Quarter. When Noah realized we were beyond our parents’ supervision, he leaned toward me and whispered that he was going to kiss me. Eager for my first romantic experience, I followed him around a monument and into the inky shadow of a portico. He told me to open my mouth and close my eyes, but instead of kissing me, he stuck his tongue deep inside my mouth and made me gag. When I asked him why he did that, he said he was practicing for when we got married. That’s when he started calling me Mimi, as if we’d been bound together by that intimacy, but after that, I didn’t even want to hold his hand anymore. So whenever he calls me Mimi, I bristle.

  “My Mimi’s hair is radiating sparkles of gold tonight—”

  Silly Noah. I was wearing a gold net around my bun.

  “—I wish she’d set the date.”

  I hoped Papa hadn’t heard that.

  “I’m afraid, Isaac. Alexandria is as volatile as ever, intellectually tolerant but politically on the verge of violence. Only a strong arm from Rome can protect us from one faction or another making a scapegoat of us. Otherwise, another eruption against Jews could happen anytime.”

  This time when Amram spoke, his sigh rose to a low moan.

  Amram knew the history of the infamous Alexandrian mob, how even before the Pogrom it had had a centuries-long reputation for brutality with far-reaching political consequences. The provocations may have differed, but the mob’s zeal has always been the same.

  “The many races in Alexandria are united by only a hatred of Rome and a love of money.”

  That was Papa parroting one of his clichés. Like most Alexandrians, he relishes the impish wit of our comedians and the rebellious verses of our songsters, who are forever mocking the emperor and the imperial government, but then he regurgitates their quips and epigrams as if they were his own.

  “Did you hear about Levi’s neighbor?” Binyamin was speaking across Papa and Amram to address Noah. “He was struck down in broad daylight. The one day he went to the Rhakotis Quarter without his bodyguard, he was robbed, beaten, and left for dead in a blood-soaked alley.”

  Binyamin was referring to the third residential quarter to our southwest, all that remains of the old fishing village, pirates’ nest, and Egyptian outpost that was known as Rhakotis (meaning Building Site). Alexander the Great recognized this two-mile-wide tongue of limestone between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake Mareotis as having the potential to become his great city. But he never had the chance to realize his dream. Before his thirty-third birthday, he succumbed to a fever during a stay in Babylon.

  Ultimately, one of his bodyguards, a trusted general named Ptolemy, proclaimed himself King Ptolemy I Soter (meaning The Savior) and constructed the city that would be unrivaled for its splendor. But the heaviest burden would fall on the laborers and peasants in the Rhakotis Quarter who, in addition to having to pay a draconian share of the taxes, were conscripted to repair the canals, pave the roads, and construct the dikes.

  Before Noah had a chance to commiserate, Papa intercepted Binyamin’s remark. “Whoever he is, he should have known better than to go to the Rhakotis Quarter alone, right Amram?” Papa flashed Amram a knowing nod, but Amram was busy chasing cucumber slices around on his plate.

  Papa believes that if he had to learn something the hard way, then everybody else should have learned it then too.

  “When Amram and I started our mortgage investment business, I went to the Rhakotis Quarter to solicit clients. That, by the way, was the first and only time Amram and I ever disagreed.”

  How anyone could believe that claptrap, given the duration of their friendship, Amram’s measured rationality, and Papa’s impetuosity and volatility, was beyond my comprehension. They’d been friends since childhood, when, along with their fathers, they would encounter each other regularly at the Great Synagogue and the Great Gymnasium, the complex that’s an educational institution for young men and a center of civic life where Alexandrian men go for relaxation, exercise, and sport.

  Aunt Hannah once told me that Amram, who’s five years older than Papa, was like an older brother to him, that Amram was the academic one, that Papa had hated school, that Amram had tutored Papa, especially in geometry, and that Amram regarded helping Isaac as his holy obligation. Not that Papa would ever admit to any of that.

  Anyway, Aunt Hannah says the substance of a story depends upon who’s doing the telling, and the meaning of a story depends upon who’s doing the listening. As she tells it, Papa and Amram each ended up in the business of investing in mortgages. Papa struggled as Amram’s competitor, but as Amram’s business grew, he needed a partner and invited Papa to join him. Still, it was my betrothal to Noah that cemented their partnership.

  But as for Papa’s claim that he and Amram always agreed, I know firsthand how preposterous that is. I can remember as a child awakening to my father’s ear-scraping shouts as he’d argue in the middle of the night with Amram over whether to invest in one property or another, Amram always urging caution. So as I listened to Papa, I suspected that he, not Amram, had suggested venturing into the Rhakotis Quarter, and that Amram had even advised against it.

  Papa threw back a goblet of wine and smacked his lips before continuing.

  “I was dead set against going, but Amram knew that many hardworking Egyptians could profit from expanding their businesses, that all they needed was the capital. So I went.

  “As expected, I encountered the most destitute conditions: the dreariest buildings, the dustiest yards, the grimmest alleys, the foulest gutters, the vilest graffiti, the hungriest mosquitoes, the scrawniest cats, the filthiest children, the saddest drunks, and the oldest whores. Trapped inside the quarter’s narrow brooding lanes that twist around a hodge-podge of makeshift dwellings, I thought the houses would topple over and bury me in their stinking rubble. Their windows are small, uncovered, and well above eye level, affording only air, a somber light, and the squalor of the street, not just its screeches and clatters but its festering stenches and smoke from the fish roasting in their courtyards.

  “I walked past dozens of toothless, potato-faced men, some shambling about, others squatting amid the rubbish on sun-bleached rocks. Drinking posca from earthen cups, they were throwing knucklebones under a canopy of crisscrossing clotheslines draped with tattered garments. But a spasm of fear ripped through me when I saw just ahead a gang of dagger-wielding thugs storm into a basket shop, the very one topping my list of prospects.”

  Papa picked up his goblet again. A flicker of confusion puckered his features until he remembered he’d already drained it. Staring ahead while lowering the goblet, he resumed his story.

  “They tramped into the shop, their boots grating on the stone doorsill as if they numbered a hundred instead of ten. After that I heard a cacophony of gasps and whimpers, followed by the whoosh and grunts of a scuffle, the smack of fists, the thud of boots, the toppling of merchandise, the slashing of flesh, and the severing of bone, all accompanied by screams so shrill they had to have come from the great pit of Tartarus. Even now I can recall the trill of their blades, a sound I mercifully have never heard since.
Then a silence gathered as if a toxic gas had settled over the shop, and deltas of blood began to trickle into the gutter, a tributary of my own excrement adding to the stream.

  “Fleeing around the corner, ducking into the nearest alley, I fell to my knees on the backs of my now piss-spattered boots and puked all but my entrails against a filth-stained mud-brick wall. Then, slumping into the pool of my own vomit, a bitter cream still oozing from my nose and tears still cutting tracks through my slime-coated chin, I leaned my head against the wall, gulping for air, daring to stand as I choked down my sobs. Finally, drenched in rancid sweat, I dragged in a breath, swallowed what was left of my spittle, and trudged home. Weaving on wobbly legs through the hot breath of the streets, attacked by a squadron of blood-sucking sand flies, half-blinded by fresh surges of tears, stumbling on every cobble, I bumped into every man, beast, and knot of ragtag boys while lizards shrank from the sight of me.

  “That was the last time I ever went to the Rhakotis Quarter without a bodyguard, even in broad daylight.”

  Today, the Rhakotis Quarter, where most of the Egyptians who work in the shipyards and warehouses and on the quays still live, continues to be blighted by poverty, pestilence, violence, injustice, and despair.

  “I feel so bad for Levi’s neighbor, Binyamin, and anyone else who has to venture into that abyss. Corpses surface in the canal there every morning. No one seems to care who’s beaten or murdered in the streets. Just last week, a woman was raped and a man robbed. They gouged out her eyes and severed her tongue so she couldn’t accuse them, and they castrated him to make sure he wouldn’t have the nerve to.” Noah’s face mirrored the wretchedness of the victims.

  Noah feels everyone’s pain, but he’s so judgmental. I can still see him admonishing me with his chin tucked in and the milky crescents beneath his irises rolling skyward. “Binyamin plays too rough,” he’d say. “Besides, raucous play doesn’t befit my future wife.” Imagine if he’d seen Binyamin and me playing shadow. I’d mimic everything Binyamin did, whether he stood on his head, shinnied up a tree, mounted a sphinx, or threw pebbles at a snake.