Azazeel

by Ziedan, Youssef

  ‘My love, you are the most beautiful superstition I’ve known, and I’ll continue to believe in it for the rest of my life.’

  The curtains of the evening had fallen and I felt that I was quite adrift in Octavia’s orbit, drowning completely in the torrential river that she was. She encircled me on all sides, as the Great Sea surrounds the whole world. I said to myself, ‘I’ll make up my mind tonight. I’ll think carefully, then decide tomorrow at dawn what will become of us.’ That was what I intended, but I did not know what would happen, unaware of what fate would bring.

  Octavia invited me to her bed. The world had fallen still around us and inside us. She told me she wanted to take a light snooze. I had no desire to sleep so I asked her if I could go back to the library. She answered in a friendly manner, full of ambiguity and redolent of vice, ‘If you stay with me, I’ll teach you things you won’t find in books.’

  I tried to be serious in the hope that she would comply with my request, but her high spirits overwhelmed me and I found I had no choice but to submit as she pulled me towards the bed. That day I really did experience with her what no one could find in any book, because Octavia had talents unheard of by those who write books. We lay there naked until night encroached on us and the cold began to bite. She pulled the blanket over us, wrapped her arms around me and prepared for sleep.

  Then suddenly she stood up, her lively mind taken with a whimsy. ‘My love, come with me and I’ll show you the wine cellar,’ she said.

  ‘I want to sleep.’

  ‘Sleep! If you’re tired at the beginning of the night, how will you be at the end of it? Come with me, I’ll fetch you from the cellar the best wine in the world.’

  Octavia never stopped.

  SCROLL SIX

  The Decisive Point

  I remember well that to reach the cellar we went down the stairway leading to the roof, and then the big staircase linking the two floors, and then another stairway behind the wooden door at the end of the large hall with the image of the sad dog on the floor. The last stairway was made of stone and the steps grew wider the more we descended towards the cellar.

  The air in the cellar was damp and cold, and the smell was strong. The floor was stone and on top of the flagstones, thick oak planks had been laid. I had not realized that cellars could be so wide, because the houses and temples in my first country did not have cellars, and I had thought that a cellar was a low passageway under big houses and palaces, like a corridor, and that it was necessarily narrow and confined. But with Octavia, by the light of her metal lantern, I saw a whole storey with high walls, supported underground on rows of strong marble pillars, with each row connected by a brick wall. There were three shelves on either side of each wall, and on each shelf so many jars it would be hard to count them.

  ‘We have enough wine to last a thousand years,’ she said proudly. ‘Come this way, where there’s the vintage wine from grapes pressed in the best years.’

  ‘Why do you lay down all this wine? Does the owner of the house think he’s going to live forever?’ I asked.

  ‘Take it easy, my love. His father had much wine made for him, and he has brought some kinds of wine from Greece and Cyprus, because they used to have many guests here and hold large banquets. I’ve seen that ever since I was a little girl.’

  She took me to a corridor that ran between the lines of jars and at the end of it she reached behind the jar next to the wall and took out a bottle of clear green glass. She took two steps back until her bottom was against me and, rubbing her bottom against my groin, she said, ‘This is excellent wine, just right for our little party!’ She turned her face towards me with a smile and continued to gyrate against me. ‘I saved it here for us months ago, because I liked the taste,’ she added.

  I forgot myself at the time, and I was annoyed that it was always she who took the initiative. This time I felt the urge to do so myself, to make her feel that I was strong. I was young and rash. I turned her by the shoulders until her face was towards the wall and then I pushed her forward, my hands on the sides of her back. She moved forward obediently. I blew at the flame of the lantern and it went out, and darkness enveloped us. Her front was against the damp wall and my chest was against her warm back. In the darkness I fondled her body and found it completely submissive. She put her hands against the wall and bent her head forward a little. I lifted my gown off and took down my undergarments. Then I lifted her dress off. She had nothing underneath for me to take down, and we were completely naked. She made much noise as she moaned, and asked me to split her in two. O my God, it is most improper, all this that I remember and that I relate after the passage of these long years.

  We staggered up to her room from the cellar, and that night we fell asleep sitting on the cushions scattered around the floor, without a taste from the bottle of wine. The next day I woke up early and Octavia was asleep beside me like an indecent dream. Quietly I went down to the library, with my bag in my hand for fear she might look inside it when she woke up. I quietly opened the window and the place filled with light. I sprawled on the floor, resuming my session among the books. I finished off my copying from the margins of the holy books, I mean the Sicilian master’s commentaries on the verses which caught his attention. While I was putting the copy of the Old Testament back in its place on the shelf my eye fell on a large volume, and on the inner cover I found a title describing its contents: Epistles and Fragments of the Ancient Philosophers of Alexandria.

  I already knew many of these texts because the authors were well known, but some of the epistles and fragments were completely new to me and I had not heard of the authors in our schools in Akhmim. I took the big volume back to my place on the floor and began to read writings which surprised me, especially fragments attributed to an old philosopher I had not heard of, by the name of Hegesias the Death-Persuader or advocate of suicide, according to the introduction to his fragments. I was about to embark on choosing some of these fragments for copying onto my scroll when Octavia arrived in alarm, her face quite yellow. The tresses of her ample brown hair covered her shoulders and her creamy breasts were heaving as she panted.

  ‘You’re here! I thought you... Why did you take your bag with you?’ she said.

  ‘What’s the panic? I saw here older and more accurate copies of some books I have in my bag, and I wanted to correct my copies,’ I said.

  ‘My love, I beg you, don’t frighten me again by leaving me suddenly. I almost died of worry for you. Come, let’s go back to our room, come on, my love.’

  She threw herself in my arms, like a child whose father has returned after a long journey. At the time I did not feel her nakedness so much as I felt her anguish. I took her in my arms with paternal affection, with none of that lust which swept us off our feet the night before, and she was comforted. As I inhaled the scent of her hair, I was close to certain that she loved me more than my mother loved me. Did my mother hate me, as she hated my father? And did she later love her wicked husband?

  I could feel Octavia’s tears running down my bare chest, washing away the pains of my boyhood. I held her closer and ran my hands along her shoulders and down her bare arm, and she calmed down. Should I have trusted Octavia in those days more than I did? Who knows, and what use is it now? Anyway, we take a serious risk if we feel safe, just as we take a major risk if we believe in something.

  ‘Never leave me, my one love,’ she said. She wiped away her tears with her hands and forced a smile to her lips. She was looking at me with frenzied passion, her tearful honey eyes full of love and awe. When her smile softened, and her eyes recovered from the flood of tears, she took me to the roof of the house without us saying anything, as though for the moment we were content with the messages that passed from eye to eye.

  She made me stop outside her room until she came back wearing the white dress I had seen her in the first time we met, carrying in her hand the Sicilian master’s gown with the embroidered hems, the gown I had previously refused to wear. He
r eyes were begging me and she took off my gown. I put on the other one in silence, or rather she put it on me. I would have liked to stand a while at the wall which surrounded the roof but she warned me gently again and took me affectionately into her room. She opened the window and the room filled with the light that flooded the roof.

  She sat on the edge of her bed, stretching her arms towards me like a bountiful mistress, tender, generous and cheerful. But at the time my thoughts recurred. ‘Who can say that these traits will last forever? Nothing lasts forever. What if she betrays me? For women are by nature false. She may lose her temper with me one day for some reason and denounce me to the men of the church and expose my secret to them. She would say that I seduced her or that I was a monk and debauched her. The church of Alexandria by all reports is strong and decisive. Most of its men are cruel, and what might they do to me? Will I meet here the same fate as my father?

  ‘What’s the matter, my love? You seem distracted. Take this apple.’

  ‘An apple! I don’t like them, because that’s the fruit that led to Adam leaving Paradise.’

  ‘What’s this nonsense?’ said Octavia. ‘Who told you this superstition, my little child?’

  Confused and without thinking, I said sharply, ‘It’s written in the commentaries on the Old Testament.’

  ‘Ha, the Old Testament. That’s a wonderful book, always mocking the ancient Egyptians and making allegations about their women. My master used to read it to me, and he would smile and shake his head in amazement.’

  I was furious at what she said, and it angered me that she was showing contempt for the Old Testament of the Lord, which we have believed in for hundreds of years and which the Jews believed in before us. I was furious despite the many doubts I had about the material in the Pentateuch. But whatever the case, no one should show contempt for the beliefs of others, or else all beliefs would seem hollow or be treated with scorn, and no religion would hold good for anyone.

  I said to myself that maybe the time had come for some frank talking between us, so I said firmly, ‘Octavia, you shouldn’t make fun of people’s beliefs.’

  ‘Don’t get angry like that, my love. From now on I’ll never make fun of anyone’s belief, as long as it upsets you. So don’t make me angry, and take this apple from my hand,’ she said.

  I took the apple reluctantly. Octavia lifted my hand with the apple to my mouth, while I thought about the Book of Genesis. I bit off a small piece of the apple, and had an overpowering sense that I was Adam, who was tempted by his wife and deceived by the accursed Azazeel. Adam then passed on the original sin of disobedience, the first sin. The well-known verses of the Old Testament, which no one other than us can believe, stuck in my head. Some questions nagged me: why did the Lord tell Adam to stay away from the trees of knowledge and of eternal life? Why was the Lord angry when Adam ate from the tree of knowledge? According to the Book of Genesis, he said to himself, ‘The man has now become like one of us; knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.’ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life... Why in the first place did God want man to remain ignorant? Was the knowledge that Adam obtained a prelude to him obtaining eternal life? Who are those about whom the Lord said that Adam had become one of them? If Adam and Eve had remained ignorant, would they have lived forever in the Garden of Eden? Is it right that immortality should go along with ignorance and disregard for nature? What exactly did they find out when they ate from the tree? Was it what I have discovered with Octavia over the past few days, what she has dragged me into without any planning or intention on my part? Am I perhaps repeating Adam’s deed, and will I anger the Lord so that he orders another expulsion? Whence and whither will he expel me, when I have been an outcast for years, without a place or a purpose?

  I was tormented by the thoughts induced by this pagan mistress who had me sitting on her bed. But was Octavia the mistress or the slave of her desires? With this apple of hers did she perhaps mean to take us back to sin, and thus to the start of a new creation? She had taken me out into a sea of sins, and how was I going to save myself from drowning? And now she wanted me to spend my life with her. How so, when she did not know true faith, and did not know that I was from the people of faith?

  ‘What are you thinking about, my love?’

  ‘About marriage. I mean your late husband. Was he ill?’

  ‘No, he was twenty years older than me. He was very fat and weak, but he wasn’t ill. He died in the western temple.’

  A sadness came over her as she told the story of what had happened to her husband, on the day she described as inauspicious. Her pagan husband had always asked her Sicilian master to bring him incense from his travels, for him to deliver to the temples and come back happy in the evening. She used to worry about him, but he would make light of her anxiety. He did not think that temples had become dangerous places and he used to repeat within her hearing empty meaningless phrases such as ‘Our god Serapis is the god of the world, and we have to show our respect for him in spite of all the Christians, including Emperor Theodosius himself.’

  I understood from what she said that her late husband was a little foolish and misguided. She melted my heart as she sat there, sadly telling her story. Her hair framed her face as though she was a flower about to wilt. I should have embraced her at that moment and told her that I would be the best of husbands to her. But I said to myself, ‘Anyway she didn’t love her first husband, and she says she loves me, so perhaps the Lord took away her husband to give her a better one.’ My mind was vacant, I was in a stupor. She was continuing her story, telling me that her husband went out one morning to put some incense in the small temple which stood to the east of the harbour, and he was surrounded there, meaning that Christians surrounded him. She sobbed as she spoke. ‘He was killed by the criminals and the monks who led them, as they destroyed the temple.’

  ‘What are you saying? Monks don’t kill people,’ I said.

  ‘The monks in Alexandria do. In the name of their wonderful Lord, and with the blessings of Bishop Theophilus the fanatic, and his successor Cyril, who is even more fanatical.’

  ‘Please, Octavia.’

  ‘Good, enough of such talk now. But why do you seem so hurt, my love, and so biased in their favour? They pursue us everywhere, expel their brothers the Jews, bring down temples on top of those inside and call us filthy pagans. They are spreading around us like locusts, and filling the country like a curse cast on the world.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘What are they to you? Why are your eyes so red and why are you about to cry?’

  ‘Because I... ’

  ‘Because you what?’

  ‘I...’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m a Christian monk.’

  A long moment of shocked silence passed. Octavia bowed her head, then looked towards me. Her face was flushed with anger, and her eyes inflamed with a furious sadness. Suddenly she sprang to her feet and stood like one of those massive ancient statues, full of pagan vigour and ancestral bitterness. She stretched her right arm towards the door and shouted at me in a fearsome voice, like the rumbling of Alexandria thunder or the howling of a raging pagan wind, ‘Out of my house, you wretch. Out, you villain.’

  SCROLL SEVEN

  The Missing Parchment

  I threw down the silk gown in the middle of the room and grabbed my own gown from near the door. I put it on as I hurried down the stairs. I felt as though I were falling into a void and my soul had been wrenched from my body. I stepped on the picture of the sad dog on my way to the door of the mansion. Before I opened it, from above and behind me, there came the sound of Octavia’s wailing and steady groaning. As I rushed out of the door and crossed the gard
en to the half-open gate, I could just about hear her. The glare of the sun on the stretch of sand hurt my eyes and the hot sand hurt my bare feet.

  I turned my face towards the sea, indifferent to the look of surprise from the guard when he saw me suddenly coming out of the garden gate. I did not glance at him and I did not look back when his sheep walked a few paces behind me. I had never felt so humiliated in my life. I was insulted and outraged to the utmost extent.

  Did all this really take place, twenty years ago? How is it that I feel it is still happening now? Poor Octavia. If only you had been a little more patient with me. If only I had known what fate had in store for me? Or... now... my hands are trembling. Dear Octavia, I can write no longer.5

  SCROLL EIGHT

  Alone Among the Rocks

  Any memory is necessarily painful, even if it is a memory of happy moments, because it hurts for having passed. I would like to go out right now to the edge of the monastery wall and shout towards the north where Nestorius is in trouble, and to the south where Martha has disappeared. If I shout out with all the pain inside me, will someone hear my voice arrive, or will death come? Or will the permanent loss and the sorrows torment us?

  What should I do about these worries, when I am the prisoner of my fear, cooped up with my memories? Should I tear up the parchments and knock over my inkwell? Or rend my garments, as John the Baptist did, and cry in the wilderness? Or roam the faraway regions of the past and resume writing, to finish what I started, then depart this place, never to return?

  Oh Octavia, you paragon. I vividly remember how, when she cruelly threw me out of her paradise, my steps led me from the seas of sand around her house to the cave among the rocks.

  My steps led me there without any forethought on my part, or perhaps I wanted to ask God’s forgiveness and await His mercy, in the place where I disobeyed Him for the first time. As soon as I entered the cave, I cowered in a remote corner and pressed my right shoulder and my knees against the damp wall, hoping to protect myself from the echo of my breakdown. I was a total wreck. After a moment of complete shock, I suddenly sobbed with tears of remorse. This is where Octavia knelt and took the white food out of her basket. And this is where I stood captivated by the beauty of her breasts, and here my face touched her body and her light shone over me for the first time. Here was the moment which has passed, the moment which engulfed me and threw me into a bottomless pit.