Before leaving, he took me by surprise, saying, ‘After the eyelash prayer, my child, you should say the sotoro15 prayer, because it fends off the accursed Azazeel and destroys the powers of his assistant devils.’
SCROLL TWENTY-NINE
Loss
After preparing to sleep I heard Deacon’s voice coming softly from behind the door. ‘Are you asleep, sir?’ he asked. I invited him in and he came in with a piece of black cloth in his hand. He offered it to me and I opened it out with my hands. It was a black waistcoat, decorated at the edges with crosses in the same thread but grey. I understood immediately and Deacon made it yet clearer and more certain: Martha and her aunt had moved out a week earlier and the old woman had left me this present with Deacon. Martha had left with him the briefest of messages for me: ‘Against my will’.
Martha had gone to Aleppo against her will. What compulsion had driven her to leave while I was in the throes of my fever? Could she not have waited a few more days? She must have given up hope that I would recover and concluded I was bound to perish. She left me to my death and went to look for a life for herself. That’s the way of women. All of them, as Pharisee said, are faithless and immoral, and he knows more about them than I. Now I am convinced I had deceived myself with delusions of my own making and had committed unforgivable sins with Martha. She took me out of my world, then abandoned me when she thought I would die. I wish I had died and gone to rest.
‘They took all their belongings with them, father, so I don’t think they are going to come back and live here again,’ Deacon said.
‘Yes, Deacon, that’s obvious.’
‘Do you think, father, I could ask the abbot permission to live in the cottage?’
‘Deacon, you’re still too young to live alone. You’d do best to stay in the priest’s house. Now let me go to sleep.’
‘Call me if you need anything, father. I’ll be nearby.’
Deacon invoked a blessing upon me and left. I prayed to God to take me out of myself and let me rest. My head was ringing and I managed to sleep only for a few short snatches. My moments of sleep gave me pain, and pain in sleep is a bad sign, as is well known among doctors, from the words of Hippocrates: ‘If in chronic diseases sleeping causes pain, then that is a sign of death.’ Let it be. My death and my life are now the same to me, and maybe death would be preferable. But I have recovered from my fever, whether it was chronic or acute, and my sleeping pains are pains of the spirit, not the effects of the fever.
I got up off the bench and busied myself with prayer. I performed the sotoro prayer before the set time and repeated it again and again until night had fallen. As though to prove that the prayer was ineffective, I felt Azazeel close by me, more than at any time before. So he was not a dream or a phantasm that came to me when my mind was confused in the bouts of fever. Now he was close. I felt him looking at me and not speaking. Or perhaps I had thrown myself into the bottom of the pit of madness.
Before dawn I woke up to the sound of footsteps crunching across the gravel at speed and coming towards the library. It was Pharisee’s gait and I thought he must be coming to see how I was. I finished my prayers and opened the door for him. He came in carrying a cloth full of fruit, and we sat down opposite each other at the big table.
‘How are you now, Hypa?’ he asked.
‘Better, and I think I’ll improve. Why do you look so worried?’
‘The news just came. The holy council, chaired by the emperor, has restored Cyril to his status as bishop and has confirmed that Nestorius is deposed and exiled.’
‘What are you saying? How did that happen?’ I asked.
‘The bishops abandoned Nestorius, except for Bishop John of Antioch, and for well-known reasons the emperor and the pope of Rome did not want to anger Alexandria. When Bishop Rabbula and his people saw that the balance was in favour of Cyril they turned on Nestorius and denounced him. Then the council drafted a new creed, with additions to the creed endorsed a hundred years ago in Nicaea.’
My eyes clouded over. I closed them and wrapped my head in my arms resting on the table. In the midst of my despair a subtle point occurred to me. The council of Nicaea was not a hundred years ago, but 106 years ago. What happened exactly a hundred years ago was that Emperor Constantine set up the terrible committee of fanatical priests in an attempt to placate the bishops. That was in the year 331 of the Christian era. The committee set about inspecting libraries and breaking into people’s houses to collect books by philosophers and heretics, copies of the apocryphal gospels, and religious books at variance with the doctrines established by the bishops, as well as gnostic epistles. They gathered all those books in public squares in cities and villages and burnt them openly, with threats of woe for anyone who hid these forbidden books. Woe! I raised my head and asked Pharisee, ‘What are they going to do with the reverend Nestorius?’
‘He’s no longer reverend. They will banish him to some remote place under Alexandria’s control, the Libyan Pentapolis or Akhmim. I don’t know exactly. The council also condemned Bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia and denounced his views.’
I was shocked and depressed at the news Pharisee had brought. I stood up to open the window overlooking the monastery courtyard. My head was spinning and I was so unsteady on my feet that I almost fell to the floor. Pharisee caught me and helped me sit down again. He opened the window and we sat in silence for a moment. Then he started murmuring and I could tell from his eyes that he wanted to tell me something else. But I couldn’t listen to more. In spite of myself I started crying and could not hold back my tears. I quickly wiped the tears from my face.
Pharisee opened up his cloth and offered me some of the fruit, saying it was fresh from Aleppo and he had brought it for me to regain my strength. I was perturbed at the mention of Aleppo. I looked into his eyes and saw in them a trace of sympathy. He urged me to eat but I declined. I pushed the cloth aside with the back of my hand. I asked him if anyone had come from Aleppo. He said no, and told me that this summer fruit had been sent by a Christian merchant as a gift to the monastery. Again he pressed me to eat some. When he offered me a large apricot, I took it from his hand and put it aside. He looked around the library, then said that the air was stifling. He asked me if I would like to go out and sit at the gate, and I agreed. I leant on his arm and we went out, dragging our feet like women in mourning.
As we were leaving, we found Deacon asleep on the ground near the door and I urged him to go home, assuring him that I would no longer need him for anything. Dawn was on its way as we proceeded to the gate. The moon was not shining in the sky because it was on the wane. We sat in the darkness, on the stone where I was sitting the day Martha’s aunt came at dawn to tell me about their plan to go to Aleppo, the stone where the Roman guard who asked to marry her later sat. Did she say goodbye to him when she left? What encouraged him in the first place to propose marriage? I wonder if he won any favours from her in the twenty days when I had the fever.
I was looking towards the cottage, which was sunk in darkness, and Pharisee was sitting cross-legged on the ground, silently tracing criss-cross shapes in the dust with a dry stick. A cool breeze blew up. I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with it, then gave a sigh of pain. Pharisee pointed his stick towards the cottage and said that the women had gone. I did not answer. He said he had not been enthusiastic about our project to sing in church. I did not answer. He said he had not felt comfortable about the woman called Martha, and my heart pounded. Dawn gave the sky a reddish tinge and the air felt cold. I asked Pharisee if we could go back to the library for me to sleep a little, and he stood up with me. I did not lean on his arm on our way back, and before he left me at the door I asked him if he was hiding anything from me.
He said, ‘It’s you who’s been trying to hide your thoughts, but we all knew!’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Nothing, Hypa. But when you had your fever attacks, you often called out a woman’s name – Martha. The fact that she
is gone is a blessing from the Lord, for you and for us, because we, as you know, want only the best for you and that woman was something quite inappropriate.’
I shut the door of the library behind me and threw myself down on the bench nearby. I don’t know how I fell asleep but I woke up in alarm at dawn, went straight to the table and devoured all the fruit in the cloth. I was eating like someone sick with canine hunger and I was crying. I put my head in my hands, with my elbows on the table, and burst into tears and sobs. I recovered after a while, and one idea had swept all other ideas from my head: everything was over, Nestorius was defeated, Martha had disappeared, Azazeel was gone and the people in the monastery knew the truth about me. My whole life was over and ahead of me only death remained.
‘You have a long life ahead of you, Hypa, so don’t think about death now.’
‘Azazeel, where have you been?’
He explained to me that he had been, and would always be, around me, and that the real world was what was inside me, not in events which flare up and die down, which end only to start again, or for something else to begin. I was surprised that he was not hiding and that when he appeared he was not morose. I was still bent down, my head on the table, with my eyes closed, gazing into the void.
I asked him, ‘Should I take some poison to escape my predicament, so that my soul can return to its origin?’
‘Have you gone mad? Death has no meaning. All the meaning is in life. I am always alive, and I will die only when you die and when those who believe in me die, and those who discover that I exist inside them. You have no right to kill me off by dying before your time is due.’
‘How can I go on living after everything that has happened?’
‘Live to write, Hypa. That way you will remain alive even when your time to die has come, and I will remain alive through your writings. Write, Hypa, because he who writes will never die.’
Azazeel loves life because it is fertile ground for him. That’s why he hates those who advocate banning merriment and festivities. He cannot bear ascetics and those who cut themselves off from life. He calls them idiots! I stood up and shut the window which opens on to the monastery courtyard. The morning light had begun to shine and I wanted to keep talking with Azazeel.
I leant my forehead against the wall and asked him, ‘Was it you I met on the outskirts of the town of Sarmada, and when I came down from Mount Qusqam in Egypt?’
‘What are you saying? I don’t exist independently of you. I am you, Hypa, and I can only be in you.’
‘Don’t you appear in the form of particular people, Azazeel?’
‘Incarnation is a myth.’
I heard the sound of footsteps and I opened the window again. It was a group of monks coming to visit me, as well as two servants carrying a big table with breakfast on it. They told me that the abbot would join them and we would all have breakfast together here. It was very kind of them.
The abbot recited some psalms and then spoke to us, but as though he were addressing me in particular: ‘Children of the Lord, let us pray to God this blessed morning, thanking Him for his blessings and soliciting His mercy. Know that God is always present in our hearts, even if His Throne is in heaven. I have seen that many of you were distressed by what happened in Ephesus, that your faith was shaken and your hearts perturbed. What happened is saddening to us, so may the Lord bestow his pardon on all of us. But our way, we monks, has nothing to do with problems of theology and the arguments between the heads of the churches. Those flare up from time to time and then die down, so let them be. In the meantime we have our way, which we have chosen with the help of the Lord. One thing brings us together – the love of the Lord, the Gospel of Jesus and reverence for the Holy Virgin, whether she be the mother of God or the mother of Christ. We have renounced the clamour of the world, and we know the Virgin in our hearts, not through the words of the theologians or their sects. Here we will adhere to the creed they drafted in Ephesus and we will rally people around it in the fold of the Lord, or else Satan will play tricks with the common people if they are disunited. We have a way to God which is not defined in any written creed or by any special words. The monastic life has a mystery which transcends words, rises above language and is too subtle to articulate. Monasticism, the communal and monastic life, will remain a beacon to guide the faithful, a path for those who have dedicated themselves sincerely to their love for the Lord, and who have deep faith in Jesus Christ and reverence for the Virgin.’
I liked what the abbot said and I had a little to eat with the monks, but I was aware of Azazeel sitting in the far corner of the library, smiling mischievously and scornfully. The monks said goodbye and the abbot reminded me that I needed to rest. He asked me if I wanted anything from the monastery kitchen and I thanked him.
In the afternoon I felt dissatisfied and uneasy. I was alone in the library and I summoned Azazeel in the hope that his strange opinions might distract me from my pain. I asked him what he thought about what the abbot had said in the morning. He answered with a smile, deliberately trying to irritate me, ‘What could the abbot say, other than what he said? Otherwise he would have to find somewhere else to manage, rather than this monastery.’ I thought he was unfair to the venerable father and when I shouted at him to be polite, he disappeared.
In the early evening I sat down at the table and made up my mind to write a new hymn. My head was ringing with poetry. I performed the night prayer alone and prepared pieces of parchment, then wrote this poem:
My God, cast a ray of Your eternal light,
Light up my dark heart and dispel my loneliness.
Our Father which art in heaven, bestow on earth glad tidings of solace,
For all of us are saddened and our sorrows are painful.
Christ the Saviour, You are our beginning and our end,
You are our survival after our world perishes.
I wrote the verses after many laborious attempts, as though I were digging the words out from deep inside myself and drawing blood. My body was still fragile and I was on the point of falling into a deep sleep which would have taken me far away, but suddenly Azazeel’s voice rose up from the deepest and darkest spot in the emptiness inside me. His voice melted my heart and made me feel that the sky had collapsed to the ground and I was trapped between the two. He was saying, ‘When will you write the real story, Hypa, and stop being evasive and singing about the pain you feel? Don’t be like a dead man who speaks for the dead to please the dead! Tell the truth in your heart. For example: “Martha, revive within me for a moment the harmony we shared, to bring light to my darkened heart and dispel my loneliness.”’
‘Shut up, you wretch. I will sing only of the living Christ, because poetry is like a string of pearls and the Christ Jesus said: “Do not cast pearls before swine.”’
‘Now you’re comparing Martha to swine! Wake up, Hypa, and come to your senses. Your desire for her is crushing you and breaking your heart. Go to her, take her and leave this country. Delight in her and make her happy, then heap curses on me because I tempted you. Then all three of us will thrive, having fulfilled ourselves.’
I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to listen to Azazeel’s attempts to shake my faith. He’s a cynic and a troublemaker by nature. I’ll wash my heart with the water of certitude and hold fast to my faith against his temptations, his heresy and his predilection for transient pleasures. However attached I was to Martha, it was temporary, like everything in this world, and I will not sell the eternal for the sake of the transient, or what is precious for the sake of what is cheap. I will live my life in the living Christ.’
‘Is he alive? How so when the Romans killed him?’
‘He died for some days, then He was resurrected in glory from the dead.’
‘And how did he die in the first place? How could you believe that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, a mere man, could kill Christ, who is God?’
‘That was the only way to save mankind.’
‘No, that
was the only way to save Christianity from Judaism!’
I did not want to hear more from Azazeel but he kept whispering strange ideas in my ear as I slept. He said many things, such as that the Jews belittled the idea of the divine, which mankind had long struggled to articulate. The ancient human civilizations elevated God, but in their Torah the Jews had Him preoccupied with mankind, and then He had to be restored to heaven again. So Christianity came to assert that God existed on earth alongside mankind in the person of Christ and then, borrowing from ancient Egyptian myths, to raise Him to His original place in heaven, after God sacrificed Himself, as they claim, to save mankind from the sin of their ancestor Adam. Were all sins erased after Christ? Would it have been difficult for God to forgive mankind with a simple order, without imaginary suffering, a humiliating crucifixion, an inglorious death and a glorious resurrection?
Azazeel disappeared inside me and kept quiet. A sudden peace filled me, and then I felt a void enclosing me. After a while I rested my head on the void and slipped into sleep.
SCROLL THIRTY
The Creed
We magnify you, O Mother of the True Light and we glorify you, O saint and Mother of God, for you have borne unto us the Saviour of the world. Glory to you, O our Master and King: Christ, the pride of the Apostles, the crown of the martyrs, the rejoicing of the righteous, firmness of the churches and the forgiveness of sins. We proclaim the Holy Trinity in One Godhead: we worship Him, we glorify Him, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord bless us, Amen.’
Azazeel Page 33