Azazeel

by Ziedan, Youssef

  SCROLL FOURTEEN

  The Inner Suns

  Before the recent violent upheavals began and disasters struck, I used to divide my time between sleeping in my room or in the library, praying with the monks in the morning, meeting patients in the early afternoon and reading and writing poetry until I fell asleep. I slept little and my dreams were tranquil. I would often hear poems in my dreams and I would wake up to write them down. Because of that I started to put my scrolls and inkwell next to my pillow. At the time I delved into the secrets of the Syriac language and fell in love with its written literature, especially the story of Ahiqar the wise man, which I first studied under a teacher in Akhmim called Wissa. He taught us ancient languages, including Aramaic, or Syriac as Nestorius likes to call it. Here I had seen other copies of the story of Ahiqar with variants, and I had intended to compare these many copies to extract a precise edited text of this instructive story.9 I had such a wonderful time in those days, which now seem remote. At sunrise I would sit on the rocks which lay at the edge of the monastery wall. The wall was in ruins at the northwestern corner and looked over the vast plains which stretched as far as the sea coast far away and the city of Antioch. At the time I wished I had supernatural eyesight and from my position on the monastery wall I could see distant cities: Antioch, Constantinople and Mopsuestia. It would be a miracle of which I would tell no one, if it happened, I mean if the Lord granted me that gift. Only rarely does the Lord like to reveal the miracles which he performs through his saints. But I am not a saint: I am a physician and a poet who dresses as a monk, whose heart is filled with love for the universe and who expects to pass the remaining years of his life without sin, so that his unblemished soul can ascend to the heavens where the light of divine glory shines. Those were the limits of my life at that time – just one year ago.

  The abbot had become close to me, in fact at that time I was the person in the monastery closest to him and the one who spent most time sitting with him, especially after the monks Laugher and Pharisee left. The abbot would often call me to his large three-windowed room, or he would come to me in the library shortly before noon and stay until lunchtime. Lunch was his only meal, but he tried to be present in the dining room at breakfast and dinner to read psalms to the monks and speak a few words to them. He would always ask me about my patients and whether I had written any poetry. He would be happy when I read him something new, in fact he started to memorize some of my poems. When I read them to him he would look at me with the same benevolence that I remembered from my father when he looked at me in the old days. Fatherhood is a divine spirit that flows through the universe, bringing heavenly grace to the young through their fathers.

  I will never be a father and I will never have a wife and children. I will never give this world children to torment in the same way I was tormented, because I cannot bear to see a child suffer. When I heard the crying of a sick baby that his mother was bringing to me for treatment, I would run to meet them at the library door, take the baby from her and rush it inside, where among the medicines I keep many remedies for childhood ailments. The infants often suffer, either from wind in their bellies or because their mothers do not look after them properly or do not produce good milk. For the mothers I prescribe foods that improve the breast milk and I loosen the nappy and anoint the baby with an aromatic oil I have invented, tested many times and found to be beneficial. The babies would often urinate towards me when I undid their nappies. I would laugh and take pleasure in the joy of the mothers who brought their children crying in pain and suffering and left me with their children calm and sleeping on their shoulders. There is nothing in the world more sublime than easing the pain of a human being who cannot express his pain. Did not Jesus the Messiah come only to save lost souls who are heedless of their many sins? Jesus endured pain to spare us from sin. That idea was the starting point of one of my Syriac poems which the abbot liked and learnt by heart. Shall I record it here? Why not? The poem runs:

  By enduring pain He saved us from sin,

  By His sacrifice He redeemed us.

  With love He descended, with love He ascended and with love He traced the way,

  And guided people to peace, and gave joy to the faithful.

  He suffered the fire of Earth to bring down on us the cool breezes of Heaven.

  He offered His soul as a sacrifice on the Cross,

  To atone for our lack of faith, that we might obtain salvation.

  The poem is long and it is one of the poems of mine that Martha was later to sing, breathing her spirit into the words and dispelling the sorrows of the audience. Her singing brought tears to my eyes several times, when she sang and looked towards me in one of the recitals that brought us together. My encounters with Martha are another story, which I will not tell now because I am recalling the days of serenity when I felt at ease within the walls of this monastery and when my inner suns rose over the horizon of mercy until I forgot my torments, my doubts and my constant uncertainty. I came to feel that I was living in the clouds and could almost sense around me the rustling of the wings of the angels that fill the sky. It was then that I discovered for the first time the secret of the monastic life, the virtues of seclusion and the serenity of escaping the tumult of this world. I was certain that the world had no value and that when I left it behind me I would exchange the cheap pleasures of the body for the precious prospect of the spirit.

  In those days I had nothing to disturb my peace of mind, other than those dreams which sometimes took me by surprise without warning, to remind me of my burdensome legacy and the secrets I harboured. Some nights I would wake up weeping and trembling when I saw my mother in a dream looking with contempt at my father. My father was humble even in my dreams, never speaking a word to me. He would just look at me with great anguish as he rowed his boat or drew in his nets with no fish. It was my mother who often spoke to me in those dreams and often she would roar with laughter and wake me up in alarm. Although these dreams would come to me infrequently, they might come twice or more in the same night.

  One night I saw Hypatia in her white silk dress with the hems decorated with golden thread. She was radiant and friendly. In my dream I was a young man of no more than twenty and she was the same age as she was when I knew her. I dreamt she was reading a chemistry book to me, although she never in her life studied that science. I was memorizing what she was reading from the book as she read the lines and ran her finger along them. Her finger was elegant, her fingernail bright white, as it passed lightly across the words. She would turn towards me with a smile as she read, and when I wanted her to embrace me, she embraced me. When I took her in my arms I found she had changed into Octavia covered in her own blood and I woke up terrified.

  Several times I had strange dreams: the salty sea roiled by many eddies and my mother trying to escape them while I watched her in fear, standing naked on the beach. She was calling me by the name which Octavia had chosen for me and which no one knew but us: Theodhoros Poseidonios. Then her call turned into a cry for help and that quickly became a scream which echoed across the firmament and woke me exhausted from my sleep and left me sleepless for the rest of the night.

  Last year I spoke to the abbot twice about the mysterious building. The first time he took refuge in silence and did not answer me. The second time we were sitting one morning and the sun was about to rise from behind the building. I told him I would not ask him again if he did not want to tell me. The morning was clear and it was summer. The abbot bowed his head for a moment, then told me that in ancient times this monastery was a temple to the god of fertility and pastures and the goddess of the fields. In the old days people believed that they met on top of this hill and made love. For hundreds of years worshippers would come here from far and wide, so they built a temple and over time set up tall columns until it became one of the largest temples of the ancient world.

  In the time of King Solomon, the son of David, the Jews wanted to convert the temple into a house of the Lord and
they secretly sent a squadron of soldiers to demolish it, but that proved impossible for them to achieve because of the solidity of the structure and the large number of priests living there and of people visiting. They say that the Jewish squadron was completely wiped out in mysterious circumstances and Solomon in anger sent more of his soldiers to demolish it, but they could not do it either because of the powerful amulets buried beneath it and the spells of the ancient priests. No one could decipher the spells or thwart their magical power.

  So the temple remained standing until the time of Jesus the Messiah but it fell into ruin as the years took their toll. When people abandoned it Azazeel and his cohorts – devils and fiends – moved in and lived inside the temple with their human followers, who at that time worshipped the devil. But when Azazeel failed to tempt Christ, as is written in the Gospels, and the word of the Lord triumphed, a mighty earthquake took place and the temple was destroyed. All that remained was these stones here and there and the broken columns. Then it happened that some of the early fathers were preaching in the region, and the Romans killed them. Their disciples buried them in this eastern part of the temple and when Christianity spread in this parts the spot became a place of pilgrimage. This building was built over the tombs of the martyred fathers for fear they might be disinterred by the pagans, who resented the followers of Christ and hoped to restore their old temple to its former state. The Christians erected this structure to surround the resting place of the early fathers and at the wall on the side of the square there were three contiguous walls, which could not be breached because of the hardness of the rock and the thickness of the three walls. As for the other three sides, they were fortified by nature because they were on high ground overlooking the precipice. Eventually the building became a refuge and stronghold for monks.

  The abbot paused a while, then continued: ‘When I was fifteen I was here when bandits surrounded us and we spent five full days in the building, not a month as is said. We almost perished of hunger and thirst. When the bandits failed to breach the walls they gave up and left. They didn’t know there was nothing in the building to steal anyway.’ The abbot paused again a moment, then added, ‘There’s no truth to the story about the nails which were hammered into the body of Jesus and which glow by night. That, Hypa, is all I can tell you about this building, so after today do not ask me about it again.’

  The abbot had finished speaking, but I was still puzzled and my thoughts were confused. I did not understand much of what he said. He had been speaking to me as though he were reading from a text he had memorized. Even his face showed no expression as he spoke.

  I hesitated a moment, then without thinking I pursued the subject. ‘But father, I’ve heard subdued sounds coming from inside the building when I put my ear to the wall. That’s happened to me several times.’

  ‘Hypa, those are sounds that come from inside you, not from inside the building. There may be big rats or snakes or insects in the building, because it hasn’t been opened for many years.’

  ‘But father, you’ll open it if one of the monks dies.’

  ‘No, we no longer bury anyone in it, and it will never be opened,’ he said.

  SCROLL FIFTEEN

  The Hypostasis Pharisee

  The monks in this monastery and in the surrounding areas differ from their brothers in Egypt and Alexandria. Both groups are pious, love the Lord and have a deep interest in divinity, but the approach of us Egyptian monks is tougher and more inclined towards arduous forms of worship. That is no surprise because we Egyptians invented monasticism and gave it to those parts of the world where Christians live.

  The monks here are amazed at my asceticism and my spiritual exertions. They admire my patience as a reader and my constant application as a writer. They were, and still are, surprised at how I sleep in a chair most nights and how I stay secluded in the library most days, so much so that several months after I arrived they started to call me Hypa the Strange. Little by little their surprise diminished as they grew accustomed to me and came to know me better. But they continued to call me ‘the Strange’, and sometimes ‘the Physician’. Here they are less interested in news about Alexandria than the monks in Jerusalem, and so they pestered me less. In fact, the truth be told, they did not pester me at all, though in the beginning they were keen to find out what was behind the connection between me and Bishop Nestorius. When I told them the truth about how we met in Jerusalem they relaxed, and when they found out about my skill in medicine and the arts of healing they became more friendly. When they had observed me for months and had not noticed anything troubling in my behaviour they were reassured. They used to visit me in the library and sit with me in the upper courtyard after the long masses.

  At the start I was not very talkative or sociable, and they respected my silence and my solitude. Then day by day I became more like them. I started to enjoy sitting with them and delighted in their constant cheerfulness. My closest friends were two of the most honest monks. One I called Laugher or, in full, the Dignified Laugher because he combined the two qualities, which rarely occur together. After two years with me here, he recently moved to Antioch, where he settled in the suburbs in a monastery they call Eupropius.10 While he was here he filled everyone around him with joy, love and serenity. The features of his face, especially his upper lip which arched to reveal his teeth, gave the impression that he was always smiling. He did in fact smile often, as if the Lord had favoured him with good news to dispel any cares he might have. He had a glint in his eye and would laugh on the slightest pretext, and when he laughed he would cover his mouth with his hand like a girl. But he was also quick to tears. He was present once when I was treating a poor child who had an inflammation in his neck of the type we call Persian fire, and he burst into tears and left because he could not bear to hear the child crying. After that he would leave the library as soon as any patient came in. I could not hold back my tears when I said goodbye to him at the monastery gate on the day he suddenly left, and I never saw him again after that, although I often longed to see him and I missed his company.

  The other monk is now the one closest to my heart. He has spent twenty years of his life here and he is the monk most like the abbot, though twenty years younger, fatter and with a thicker beard. He is strikingly short with a large belly, so when he walks quickly, as he always does, he looks like a rolling ball. His hands and feet are as tiny as those of a small boy and he also has the smile of a boy or an adolescent. But what makes him look like a man is his baldness, his thick black beard, his puffy cheeks and the black rings around his eyes from staying up late or indigestion. His eyes are wide, full of intelligence and curiosity, and he is goodhearted in a way which strangers would miss but which is obvious to those who grow close to him.

  At first I saw him several times in church, then with time we became as brothers, especially after he helped me with great enthusiasm to prepare the library, which had been an abandoned building. As he helped me arrange the books on the shelves he would look at them like someone fascinated with texts, but I rarely saw him reading. The monks here call him by a strange name: the Hypostasis Pharisee. I started calling him by the same name, which neither irritates nor pleases him.

  At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, when we were sitting at the monastery gate one day, he told me he was of Arab origin and spoke the languages of both the Arabs of the north and those in Yemen. At the time I did not know there were two Arabic languages, northern and southern. He told me his father was a wealthy man who worked in trade and lived in a large house in the middle of Aleppo. But he died young and when his uncle married his mother to preserve his father’s wealth, Pharisee left their world and joined the parish there as a servant and then as a deacon. He became a monk at the age of twenty-five and lived in seclusion for three years, then came here and settled in the monastery.

  When I came to know him better, he told me some of his secrets, such as the fact that in his early youth he disobeyed the Lord with women sever
al times and wrongly saw them as fair game for erotic adventures. Then he suffered for his sins, repented and confessed to the abbot everything he had committed. He found out the secret of how to tap into the mercy of the Lord through confession and he gave up the debauchery which had both troubled and delighted him. But after he joined the church he hated women, in fact he could not abide any female, even if she were a dumb animal. One day I said to him, after he had talked at length in denigration of females: ‘Take it easy, Pharisee, the Earth is female and the Lord came from the Virgin.’

  ‘No, Hypa,’ he replied. ‘Femininity and women are the cause of every misfortune. Earth, sky, water, air and plants are neither female nor male, but the Lord’s gifts to Adam who was led astray by his wife Eve, and what happened happened. The Virgin Mary is a solitary exception and the Lord made her faultless so that our Lord Jesus Christ could stem from her and to show us that the most sublime things can come from the least of things, just as pearls take shape in sea shells. Or else what would the Virgin be, had she not given birth to Christ?’

  I was surprised at him saying ‘stem from her’ but I did not want to argue with him, because he had not studied theology in Egypt to know that ‘stem from’ is a philosophical term that should not be used to express incarnation and that Christ took from the body of the Virgin his humanity, and hence he was half human, judging by what they used to say there.

  At the time, he stopped for a moment and gazed into the distance, then suddenly, as though he had discovered something important, he said, ‘Look at this monastery, and all the monasteries and churches, why does peace prevail in them? Because they do not have women in them, and are spared all the calamities and betrayals that women cause.’