The Deadliest Lie

by June Trop

  Phoebe loves Isis because of her own history as an abandoned infant. Still, Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood and the patroness of family life, is a favorite among all women here. They identify with her mourning the loss of a husband, protecting the lives of children, and championing the rights of women. Because of Isis, the queens of Egypt had more power and honor than the kings, and the marriage contracts of ordinary women require their husbands to obey them.

  Everyone in Alexandria participates in the festivals to honor Isis. The Fall Festival, the Festival of Seeking and Finding, is a reenactment of her search for the strewn body parts of her murdered and dismembered brother and husband, Osiris. Egyptians believe her tears over his death account for the annual flooding of the Nile. During the festival, she is said to use her magic powers to resurrect him.

  Isis is also a seafaring divinity. Her Spring Festival, the Launching of Isis’s Ship, is a celebration of renewed life and marks the advent of our sailing season. In a ceremony for all Alexandrians, her chief priest names and consecrates a splendid ship that has been decorated with lights and embroidered sails and piled high with baskets of spices and other sweet offerings. After the purification rite, the ship is launched amid libations on the waves and cheers for a safe sailing season.

  Phoebe and I would go to the Isis festivals together. Afterward, we’d crowd into The Flamingo’s Tongue, the smoke-filled restaurant just east of the Heptastadion that seasons the neighborhood with the aroma of fried onions. There we’d dine with a view of the lighthouse and the thousands of ships moored in the Great Harbor, their bumboats swaying in synchrony with the lapping tide, their rubbery shadows quivering on the crinkled skin of the water. We’d enjoy the luxury of a latrine on the premises and a private dining room crammed with plump couches. A host of jostling waiters would bear platters of grilled fish, smoked meats, and fried fowl, lithely shouldering their silvery trays above the clatter of dishes, the chink of goblets, and the shouts of swilling celebrants.

  We’d order dishes like pickled cauliflower and lentil soup with buttered caraway muffins. The spicy flavors would burst on our tongues before melding into a savory mixture, rolling down our throats, and flowering in our chests. Still, we’d save room for their signature dish, marinated flamingo tongues in a spicy pepper sauce, a delicacy impossible to find elsewhere in the city. And we’d enjoy the jugglers, the performing dogs, and the acrobats in spangled costumes until the afternoon mellowed into dusk.

  By then the vulgarity of the entertainment would spike for an audience now held aloft by food and wine. The citharists would chant their potpourri of lewd songs, accompanied by the zestful guffaws of revelers, and the mimes would perform their sketches about prostitutes and pimps or adulterous wives and truant schoolboys for the lustful patrons leaping to their feet like hired dancers.

  I was already anticipating our next visit to The Flamingo’s Tongue, but Phoebe was still focused on my mother.

  “Your mother was a goddess, Miriam.”

  “Maybe so, Phoebe, but I want to do more with my life. I want to make a lasting contribution so my mother’s life will have meant more than just producing another generation of mayflies. Still I’m loath to hurt Papa. The future of our family—to say nothing of Noah’s—sits squarely on my shoulders, and Papa asks so little of me, only that I marry the most honorable companion a woman could have and carry on the traditions of our two esteemed families.”

  Phoebe reached up with a jasmine-scented linen square to catch the tears that had begun to sprout in my eyes.

  “Papa has had so little comfort in his life. Yet he has given me everything, Phoebe, everything, even my Roman citizenship. That’s why I can’t free myself from his expectations. What makes matters worse is that my delay continues to baffle and embarrass Noah and his father.”

  “Oh no, Miriam. They love you.”

  “They love me, but I see the distress in their eyes. We should have been married by my sixteenth birthday, and already I’m almost seventeen. That’s why Papa’s been pressing me. I have only this one week, just seven more days, to check with our astrologer and commit to a wedding date.”

  “You want the kind of personal freedom you’ve suggested for me, don’t you, Miriam?”

  “Aunt Hannah always wanted it. Binyamin wants it too. He at least isn’t conflicted about demanding it.”

  “And if you had that freedom?”

  “I’d devote my life to studying the properties of metals with Judah. He’s the jeweler who at the age of ten began his training with Saul ben Joseph, the master craftsman in the agora. He worked with Saul for ten years and then bought his shop five years ago. Papa and Amram financed Judah’s purchase, and this year, when I began collecting the payments from their mortgagors in the agora, I got to know him. But he does more than craft jewelry, Phoebe. He belongs to a secret league of Jewish artisans who study how to perfect the spirit of base metals.”

  I could see that Phoebe had no interest in the alchemists that Judah had introduced me to and how they sought to apply Aristotle’s theory that everything in nature advances toward perfection deep in the ground over long periods of time. Judah and Saul were developing a recipe to accelerate the natural process for perfecting copper into gold. They sought first to deaden the spirit of the copper by blackening it. Only by killing its essential nature could they transform it by stages into its perfect form. Then, through prolonged, gentle heating with arsenic alloys or mercury, a process called tingeing, they would renew the life of the now blackened mass, the prote hyle, by impressing it with the spirit of gold.

  I could hear my inner voice warning me that I had already said too much, that the League’s very existence had to be kept secret so the Gentiles couldn’t steal and sell its recipes or accuse the Jews of cheating their customers or conspiring to devalue the currency. So I was glad when, after a polite pause, Phoebe changed the subject.

  “So, what did you think of the meal tonight, Miriam?”

  “It was lifeless. I’d looked forward to the crispness of the cucumbers, their flavor layered with the dill, and their coolness against the roof of my mouth. Instead they felt spongy. Or was it just me?”

  “No, the ingredients were stale; the herbs, dried; and the wine, local. Your father had told me to go to Apollon’s pantopoleion of all places, instead of to our usual vendors, except for the meat, of course, which I always get from Moshe. Even so, I could see that he was wrapping a cheaper cut of lamb for us, something your father had ordered ahead of time. Your father told me that we needed to economize and to start by cutting back on our food orders.”

  My throat constricted. “He did what? When did he do that?” I hardly recognized my voice, the pitch was so high.

  “Last week. Your father also sold his younger secretary, Kastor, the one who reads and writes both Latin and Greek. He sold him to the Roman civil authorities to work as a clerk in the Public Records Office.”

  “Which one is Kastor?”

  “He’s the underfed jackal with the clubfoot.”

  “I can’t believe it.” My hands turned to ice.

  “You would if you’d heard the fuss he made in the servants’ quarters when he had to empty out his things and move into a dingy room, ‘the size of a cubiculum,’ he said, ‘in a backstreet of the Bruchium Quarter.’ He was furious.”

  At dinner Amram had said business was good, that Noah was closing on mortgages all the time. Why would Papa need money? And why wouldn’t he discuss the matter with me first? The same dread I felt before Shabbat took hold of me again, this time by the throat.

  Chapter 6

  Late Saturday (Shabbat) Afternoon

  AUNT HANNAH AND I would often meet in the courtyard on a late Shabbat afternoon to share a light lunch and stroll about the city. This afternoon I found her resting on her favorite chaise lounge, fanned by the date palms’ glossy fronds and serenaded
by the fountain’s babble. The sun brushed her features with gold and spread a veil of warmth across her face.

  “Good Shabbat, Miriam,” she said, sensing my presence before I’d even crossed the threshold. “Come join me. Phoebe brought us each a dish of rice cakes and a bowl of yogurt topped with berries and honeyed walnuts.”

  I stifled a retch with a hard swallow that sent aftershocks through my bowels.

  “I’m too upset to eat,” I said, facing her as I took a seat on the edge of her chaise lounge. “I keep obsessing about how I’m going to resolve my betrothal to Noah. I’m too much of a coward to face Noah and Amram, let alone to confront Papa.

  “They all think I’d be the perfect wife for Noah, but lately waves of revulsion, even contempt, have rushed through me, only to be followed by ripples of guilt and sorrow as memories of our shared childhood bob to the surface. And I know he senses my estrangement.”

  My aunt just pursed her lips while I soaked up the silence and let the relief of my confession spread through me. She turned her head as if gazing into the future but then turned back to face me.

  “Miriam, when did your feelings for Noah change?”

  “I don’t think they have. He’s still dear to me, but I’ve discovered another way to love, a way that’s different from my feelings for Noah. A way that’s a mixture of wonder and excitement, of physical desire and respect. A way that’s framed by the desire to belong to someone. A way that’s more complex than the familiar companionship I feel for Noah.

  “But it’s more than my feelings for Noah. I don’t think I ever wanted to marry, at least not since I understood what marriage meant. I thought I’d managed to evade the hairy beast, but I see now that it’s hunted me down and is poised at my throat. Please, Auntie, tell me what to do.”

  “You know, Miriam, I never married. I’m not saying I never wanted to, but your grandfather thought your father would be the best one to take care of me, and I suppose he was right. Isaac has been my protector since I was a toddler.”

  The trace of a smile spoke of their lifetime of mutual affection.

  “When I was a little girl and had made a friend, your father would interrupt his studies to take me to her house and then call for me no matter what else he had to do. And after some bullies killed his pet, he became more protective than ever.

  “Your grandparents had given him a basenji puppy for his tenth birthday. He would spend hours taking care of his new playmate, feeding it, cuddling it, bathing it, and training it first to stand on its hind legs and then to jump high in the air. But one day, a gang of Greek boys who’d been tormenting your father snatched the dog while he was walking it along our street. A week later they returned the dog in pieces so your father could recognize his beloved basenji and see that they’d tortured it.

  “That loss bleached the color out of your father’s childhood. Nothing, until he met your mother, could restore his spirit, not running on the beach, catching fish on the lake, or riding oxcarts in the countryside, all jaunts he’d shared with his basenji. Your father emerged from the horror with a heightened sense of vulnerability and the dread that harm could come without warning to anyone or anything he loved.

  “I saw his obsession intensify when he courted your mother. He became wary, overprotective, even officious. She came from a family that had once owned and operated a fleet of freighters in the eastern Mediterranean. They’d been wealthy but had lost too many ships to storms in the Aegean and piracy along the Anatolian coast to meet their expenses. At first our parents objected to the match. They thought her family’s losses presaged a future of bad luck. Besides, your mother, even as the only surviving child, had a meager dowry: some Alexandrian pearls, clothing, and cash, but no landed properties. Nevertheless, they acquiesced. She was after all a Jewess, a member of our tribe, and a Roman citizen, and your father was smitten with her. But years later, with her two stillbirths, your father would wonder whether our parents had been right, that her family had been doomed.

  “In the meantime, your father doted on me all the more. When I got a little older, he surprised me with a cithara and shared his music tutor with me. So I can’t say I’ve missed much. Although I didn’t have the opportunity to follow my dreams as you do, I was free to study music, a pleasure I could curl myself around, one that’s helped suppress my other yearnings. And while exempt from domestic duties, I still had the satisfaction of helping to rear you and Binyamin.”

  She grasped my hand as if she’d seen it resting in my lap.

  “But, Auntie, did you ever want to marry?”

  She pushed aside her bowl of yogurt. Inhaling deeply, she closed her eyes and tipped her head back, as if gathering the details of a dream long since anesthetized. When she lowered her chin and opened her eyes, her lips had relaxed into a faint smile, her complexion had turned to a rosy blush, and her eyes sparkled like sequins.

  “I once had a suitor, Miriam. You’ve heard of your great-grandfather, the Olympic champion Binyamin ben Jacob? He had a brother, Pinchas. My suitor was his grandson, Samson. Samson had started a trading company to transport goods by sea between the Mediterranean and China. Instead of using intermediaries to and from the Indus River to move the goods by caravan across Asia, his ships would sail around the tip of the Indian peninsula.

  “Isaac and your grandfather Asher were concerned that Samson would be away from Alexandria for long periods of time, that he’d be busy managing the offices he’d have to establish in the commercial centers along his route. Worse yet, they imagined him leaving me in one of those cities, beyond any point where they could watch over me.

  “Samson came to visit several times. Some afternoons, when we’d sit across from each other in the courtyard holding hands and sipping tea, he’d speak to me about his future in the fine-textured, resolute voice of a politician. Some evenings, when we’d walk along the harbor, he’d explain his plans in an intimate whisper, his lips close to my ear, his dulcet words carried on the current of verbena that scented the air around him.

  “But your father and grandfather didn’t trust him. They said his laugh was too loud, his nose too long, his palms too damp, his cologne too strong, his hair too greasy, his manner too familiar, and his tongue too glib. That he seemed more interested in my dowry than my welfare. That he could beget children with foreign women along his trade route and force me to adopt them so they’d be Roman citizens. That our family would be better off investing all of its capital in a business for Isaac rather than dividing it up to give me a dowry. So one day Samson and I were planning a future together, and the next day he was gone.”

  My poor Auntie, living all these years with an unfulfilled dream. Still, my sadness for her paled alongside the resentment I felt toward my father and grandfather. I was about to ask her whether she’d considered marrying Amram after Leah was killed, but I didn’t have the chance because a moment later, she’d shrugged off the memory of Samson and had refocused on my quandary.

  “Still, I’m wondering, Miriam. What part about being married distresses you?”

  I reached into the corners of my mind for something I could put into words.

  “It’s the part about being a mother. Perhaps I resent having to be a mother when I didn’t have one myself, or perhaps I just don’t believe I’d know how to be one. What I feel though is fear. I’m afraid that what happened to my mother will happen to me, that I’ve inherited her fate. Everyone, even Papa, says I’m just like her. I told Phoebe that I didn’t want to be a mayfly, but the truth is I’m afraid I would be a mayfly.”

  “Just because you look like your mother, Miriam, doesn’t mean your life has to turn out like hers. Besides, you don’t have to live as she did to honor her memory. She made a life that had meaning to her, and you can make a life that has meaning to you.”

  Aunt Hannah’s pause, deep breath, and shift of position told me she was about to tell anot
her story about my parents.

  “When your mother felt life quicken inside her, she went to her astrologer, who told her that she’d have a daughter with great gifts, one whose contributions would be famous for centuries but who would also experience great losses. So she knew your life would be exceptional. To bless the birth, she and your father commissioned the writing of a Sefer Torah (meaning Book of the Torah) for the Great Synagogue.”

  I’d heard the story about the Sefer Torah many times. That my parents had hired the most pious scribe in Judea to make a copy of the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), our holiest text and the foundation of our legal, ethical, and religious codes. Because every mark, including all 304,805 stylized Hebrew letters, is divinely inspired and infused with arcane meanings, the copy must be perfect. And everything, the quills, the parchment, and the strands to sew the panels together, must come from kosher animals.

  My parents also arranged for a community celebration upon completion of the Sefer Torah. The thousand-year-old tradition of singing, praying, and dancing before the Holy Ark would take place on the first anniversary of the birth. But instead of our parents dedicating the Sefer Torah to the birth of Binyamin and me, my father, alas, ended up dedicating it to the memory of our mother and sending Amram in his place to claim the honor of copying the last few letters.

  But I’m getting ahead of Aunt Hannah’s story.

  “Your father bought a well-trained doula to assist Iphigenia. He also hired a midwife reputed to have miraculous powers. He gave your mother charms to protect her from Abyzou, the infertile demon responsible for miscarriages and infant mortality. He arranged for your mother to have the purest foods, and when her time drew near, he bought the freshest herbs to start her labor and ease her pain. But beginning a day or two after your birth, the heat from her heart began to escape, her pulse rate increased, and she began to vomit.

  “As your mother’s strength ebbed, your father would stumble through the house, carrying her from room to room, sometimes begging, other times commanding her fever to go away. Until then, death had been a misfortune that happened only to others.