Azazeel

by Ziedan, Youssef

  As the donkey clip-clopped steadily along the gravel road, these thoughts made my head spin. Neither the verdure of the gardens around Antioch nor their beauty could help me escape the eddies and currents of Alexandria. Much violence surrounded the history of the city, which for years I had dreamed of visiting and which, once I arrived, I longed to escape – the city where I was trapped until that calamitous day. I would have liked to fulfil Nestorius’s request and help him in what he was about to do, but how could I return to Alexandria? And would Cyril expect a monk like me to argue with him and explain to him Nestorius’s theological concepts? He would not meet me in the first place, but would annihilate me. If I escaped him, would I escape the public and the Lovers of the Passion if they knew I had come as a representative of Bishop Nestorius, whom they see as a heretic? The people of Alexandria have no mercy and do not fear punishment for their deeds. They killed Hypatia in front of all the inhabitants and they were not punished. Before that they killed the bishop of their own city, George of Cappadocia, and pulled his body apart on the main street. Emperor Julian, who renounced Christianity, was too cowardly to punish them and confined himself to saying, in an outrageous imperial decree, that he would pardon them in honour of Serapis, the god of Alexandria.

  How could I return to Alexandria after what I saw there and found out about the city? Who knows what they said about me when they found out that I had run away on that fateful day. Perhaps one of the pilgrims returning from Jerusalem had spoken to them about me. Would the fact that I adopted the ecclesiastical name Hypa conceal me from the gaze of the church of St Mark and the claws of the lion? Did I let down the reverend Nestorius by declining to carry out his request? Or did the Lord reveal something to him, something to make him abandon the idea of throwing me into the furnace that is Alexandria? Or did he notice my fear when I told him the story of my meeting with Bishop Cyril and then he relieved me of this frightful mission, which would have been pointless anyway?

  The questions spun around in my head, but then something strange the donkey was doing caught my attention. We had gone about halfway and it was midday. I found the donkey heading for the bushes under which we had stopped at noon two days earlier when we were going to Antioch. Under the bushes the donkey’s legs stopped stock still and he began to twitch his ears as though to tell me it was his lunchtime. Donkeys surely cannot be stupid. They are stoical by nature and stoicism may sometimes look like stupidity, and sometimes like cowardice. It seems I have been a donkey all my life.

  I dismounted and took the wooden saddle off the donkey’s back. He sighed with relief. I tied his front legs together with the rope attached to one of them and hung the nosebag around his neck. He started to chew the fodder with pleasure, slowly. I had no desire to eat, nor to sleep, not even to think. I leant back against the trunk of a bush and shut my eyes, overwhelmed by a mysterious sense of relief that I was almost back at the monastery.

  After a period of noontime calm, a young man of close to twenty years of age passed by. He came from afar, walking along the paved road, holding the lead of a nanny goat, followed by three of her kids. He came towards me on the other side of the road and asked me kindly if I needed anything. I thanked him, sat up and asked him if he could possibly find us some water to drink, for the donkey and me. With great enthusiasm he said there was a well nearby, tied his goat under the bushes and rushed off towards the houses in the town. He came back in a while carrying a large earthenware vessel gurgling with clean fresh water. I drank from it until my thirst was quenched, then the man took the vessel from my hands, put it in front of the donkey and took the nosebag off his neck. The donkey bent down to drink. The young man came back to me and sat politely in front of me at the edge of the shade from the bushes. He seemed shy and I wanted to engage him in conversation as a way of expressing my gratitude towards him. I asked him which town he was from.

  ‘From this town, father,’ he said, ‘Sarmada.’

  I looked towards the town as it slept peacefully under God’s sun, which shines on good and evil alike. The town was small with humble houses, no more than a hundred of them. On the edges there were a few orchards and groves of olive trees. I could not see anyone at the houses. Could it be that they were sleeping at this middle time of the day, although the days are short at this winter season? The young man was sitting in silence and I asked him if he was a shepherd, as he appeared to be.

  ‘No, father,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I work at the olive press on the western end of town and this is my aunt’s nanny goat. I took her yesterday to stay the night at our neighbour’s, who has a strong billy, and now I’m taking her back to my aunt after she spent the night with the billy.’

  ‘I understand, my child, I understand.’

  The look in the young man’s eyes was no surprise when he mentioned the goat and described it as strong. My donkey was still gulping down the water, enjoying the coolness of it, and the little kids were nuzzling their mother’s stomach. The young man remained seated at the edge of the shade, facing me. The sunlight lit up his left side, while the shade of the bushes fell on his right. The man had tucked up his cloak and was sitting cross-legged. I could see his knees and the whiteness of his legs, which were hairless, unlike a man’s. I examined his features and they seemed more like those of a woman, especially as he had no beard. His hair had a golden streak and his eyes were greenish. His face and his neck had traces of the sun and his hands were unusually soft for those of a poor man.

  The young man was unsettling. I took from my bag a copy of the Psalms written in a fine Greek hand and began to look at it. The man was fidgety as though he wanted to tell me something, but I pretended to be busy, reciting the psalms in a low voice, and he calmed down. When I stopped murmuring, the man crept towards me, still seated, and said that he would like to confess to me. I explained to him that confession should take place in church and that a priest should hear it, not a monk like me.

  ‘But father, the priest in our church knows me and I’m too embarrassed to confess in front of him,’ he answered.

  ‘Overcome your embarrassment, my child, to show that your faith is strong and to prove that you repent and acknowledge the sin you have committed.’

  The young man bowed his head and his face showed a mixture of embarrassment, uncertainty and distress. I looked at him again, scrutinizing his features, and I had a strange feeling about him. He had a humility and an innocence, with his long white face slightly gaunt. The sparse hairs on his chin made him seem more like an adolescent than a man, and his gentle demeanour made him look more like a woman. The submissive way he was sitting struck a chord of sympathy in me and led me to wonder what sins this poor, strange young man might have committed. I thought he was just a boy who was making too much of his mistakes, and I doubted his sins would go beyond the minor and trivial things that people do and which then trouble their consciences until they find someone into whose hands they can offload the burden of guilt. Confession comforts them by making forgiveness possible and by affirming the compassion of the Lord.

  I said to myself, ‘He’s only a young child and it would do no harm if I took pity on him. He needs someone to listen to him and guide him to the true faith.’

  ‘Listen, my child,’ I said. ‘You can go to Antioch and confess in one of the big churches there,’ I told him.

  ‘It’s a long way, father, and the priest there might recognize me. I don’t think I’ll meet you again, so hear my confession.’

  ‘But, my child...’

  ‘Please, good father, I beg you.’

  ‘Tell me what you have to confess,’ I said.

  I closed the Psalm book, pulled my cap down towards my forehead and bowed my head, preparing to take confession for the first time in my life, and the last. That day I heard from the man things which I cannot now write down in full, although I did intend to write here everything that happened. But what the man told me was extremely obscene and strange, and it had never before occurred to me that such thi
ngs happened. Among the abominations which he confessed was that since the age of puberty he was in the habit of copulating with goats. He would wait until he was alone with a nanny goat that wanted a male, then in the depths of night he would hold her between his thighs and have his way with her. When he told me this, I did not want to show my discomfort in front of him, so I stayed calm and stared at the ground where I was sitting, as I tried to put together the words with which to respond, embellishing my answer with verses from the Gospels. But he did not give me time. After that he confessed that his widowed mother, who was forty, saw him one night as he was in the act with a goat and was greatly distressed for him. She rebuked him soundly as she washed between his thighs. Then she sat and wept at length, lamenting the poverty that prevented them from finding him a wife.

  ‘My child, all the poor get married,’ I said.

  ‘Their poverty, father, is not as extreme as ours.’

  I choked in distress and I did not want to hear any more from the young man. But he insisted, broke into tears and started sobbing. When he had calmed down a little he told me that his mother had committed with him the worst of all sins. One moonlit night in summer, as she was sleeping beside him in their hovel under the broken roof, their bodies met and it happened.

  I was so embarrassed by what the young man was telling me that I could not listen to more. The man was going into the details of what he and his mother did together, and I was most distressed. He told me they did it together most nights and for the first few nights they sinned two or three times. I noticed that he had gone beyond the stage of embarrassment and was now enjoying telling the story.

  I interrupted him. ‘Enough of this, my child, enough. You must keep away from her immediately, look for a good wife and think about your sin through constant prayer and attending mass.’

  ‘But she cannot do without me, father!’ he said.

  I was amazed at the young man’s brazenness and at the smile of relief that spread across his face. He looked even stranger than before and his eyes seemed suspiciously cold. Were the signs of remorse which he showed a while ago just an illusion I had imagined? Or was it that he was relieved to have confessed and no longer felt how serious it was to commit this heinous sin? I looked at the sky far away. A thick cloud was passing over us and I felt it was a long way to the monastery. The shadows had inclined towards the east and it threatened rain. I wanted to set off to finish the journey back. When I gathered my cloak about me in readiness to stand, the young man asked me to stop.

  ‘Will you not hear the rest of my confession, my father?’ he asked.

  His expression ‘my father’ rang strangely in my ears. His voice no longer had the diffidence of someone distressed, as was the case before he confessed, and I could no longer stay with him. In fact I regretted listening to him in the first place. I told him the hour was late and I must resume my long journey. He said he had not yet finished his confession and he had even more serious things he wanted to confess to me.

  ‘No, my child, there’s nothing more serious than what I’ve heard from you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes there is, good monk.’

  ‘I cannot listen to any more.’

  I stood up hurriedly, stuffed the Psalms into the pocket of my jellaba and put the nosebag under the donkey’s saddle. The man left me to untie the fetter from around the donkey’s legs without offering to help. Although previously he had followed me like my shadow, I did not expect him to say anything in farewell. But he walked close behind me, almost touching me, and in a voice that smacked of shameless bragging he told me he now enjoyed what he was doing. I ignored him. He said he did the same thing with his sister when her husband was travelling with a caravan and she stayed the night with them. I ignored him. He said he enjoyed what he did with her and she enjoyed it too but now she was pregnant by him.

  Without looking towards him I mounted my donkey and pulled the reins towards the road.

  As I moved away, the young man shouted after me in great anger and suppressed spite.

  ‘Why are you running away, monk? Stop and hear about the pleasures and delights which you have denied yourself. I have lots and lots of them,’ he said.

  I dug my heels into the donkey’s belly and it headed east with all the resolve it could muster. The donkey shot off as though in flight, or perhaps the donkey realized, as I did, that this was no young man but rather the devil, appearing to us in human form to make a fool of me.

  SCROLL NINETEEN

  The Lady

  I reached the monastery before sunset, my clothes sticking to my body with sweat, although the air was cold. My head was ringing with apprehensions and churning with thoughts. Halfway up the hill leading to the gateway I noticed the abbot sitting on the large square stone with a bible in his hand. He was reading it, which was unusual given that he knew the four Gospels and the books of the Old Testament by heart. When he saw me, he closed the bible and stood up. His expression betrayed the anxiety hidden within him. I came up to him and dismounted. I kissed his hand as usual and I could tell from the trembling of his fingers that his mind was troubled, or rather that his heart was perturbed. On our way to his room he asked me about my journey and what happened in the meeting with Bishop Nestorius. Then in his room he asked me what I had seen in Antioch and he offered me a bowl with a handful of dried fruit.

  I started by telling him that I had delivered his letter to Bishop Nestorius and that he promised to carry out the request it contained. I gave him the letter Nestorius had sent him and he opened it. He looked at it quickly, then folded it up and stuffed it under his pillow. I was surprised that he took so little interest in the letter. I told him that in Antioch I had met the three bishops and the priest of the church in the capital, all of them in one place. He was not surprised at that, as if he already knew of it. Then I thought I had to tell him about the mission that Nestorius had intended to send me on and how something had happened and Nestorius had changed his mind.

  When I had told the story, the abbot waited a moment, then spoke. ‘My child, there’s no point in you going to Alexandria.’

  His words came as a relief, easing the burden of guilt I felt at abandoning Nestorius in his ordeal. Because I was still bewildered by what had happened to me on the way back from Antioch, I told the abbot about the devil who appeared in the form of the young man on the outskirts of Sarmada. He smiled weakly, shook his head and said, ‘Go and rest, Hypa. As for that young man, he was just one of those jokers who like to amuse themselves by making fun of monks.’

  I prepared to take my leave, without discovering the secret of the abbot’s evident anxiety and without asking him. Before I left his room, as though speaking to himself the abbot said, ‘Azazeel has tricks and disguises that are more subtle and cunning than that. May the Lord bestow His universal grace on all of us.’

  The next few days and months passed tediously, then summer came upon us and the heavy hours of daytime stretched out, while the fleeting nights grew shorter – the nights that mark our lives as passing patches of cloud mark out daylight hours. I often used to, and still do, gaze into the horizon in the afternoon and at sunset and feel that the clouds in the sky are in the form of divine scriptures, or messages from God in a language which is not spoken and can be read only by those who realize that it is based on shapes rather than letters. This realization was one of my secrets, though I did one day divulge this secret to the abbot, who bowed his head for a long time and then said, ‘Perhaps they are a manifestation of that which is deep inside us, of the word of God which is latent within us.’

  Among the strange events which took place at the end of last summer, that is the summer of the year 430 of the Nativity, was that doves landed around the monastery. One morning a large flock of mountain doves came down, doves which we usually see alone or occasionally in pairs. This time, many dozens of them suddenly covered the monastery hill and circled the air above. The monks were delighted, except for Pharisee, and they saw it as a miracle forete
lling that the site of the monastery would receive many blessings from heaven. The mountain doves are different from the domestic kind that people breed at home in Egypt and which they eat when young. They are smaller in size and harder to digest when eaten, and their feathers have a subtle sheen. They have only one colour, namely grey, unlike the domestic pigeon, which comes in white, brown and mixes of colours, so it is easy to tell the individual pigeons apart. But mountain doves are uniform, like many clones from one dove. Their wing feathers are light grey and the tips of their wings have two dark bands. The grey has a slight sheen, especially on the head and the neck.

  One strange thing about these doves is that they do not take fright when people move, so when people came very close they would just fly a short distance and land nearby. Only Pharisee was keen to frighten the doves and drive them as far away as possible, while the other monks were surprised at his behaviour and could not understand what was behind it.

  The second day after the doves landed, the monks came up with all kinds of explanations for why they had landed and why they were staying around the monastery. Some said they had moved here to enjoy the verdure of the hill, while others said they sensed the spirituality of the place and liked the company. Yet others said the doves were obeying a divine command to live here, a command given so that the monastery would be graced with the presence of God and the spirit of peace. Doves really do have an aura of peace. I enjoyed watching them in the early morning and before sunset. I would spend ages contemplating their behaviour, marvelling at how they would spend the night in cracks in the walls and in places where the stones had broken loose, without nests to nestle in and hatch their young, as we know from the habits of domestic doves and in fact of birds in general.