Achillas took a deep breath in spite of the pain. “Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Already a great load has been lifted from me. You have performed a miracle, Joseph.”
“Not a miracle,” Joseph corrected him. “An ordinary surgical operation.”
“But not one many physicians would attempt, even in Alexandria,” Albina said warmly. “We owe you our lives for saving my father.”
“I ask no fee,” Joseph told them. “You are friends of Matthat, who is also my friend. That is enough.”
“No,” Achillas said firmly. “I know it is written in the ancient writings of the Jews that in all labor there is profit. Bring me the small pouch from the chest there in the corner, Albina.”
Joseph was washing his hands when the girl returned. While he dried them, Achillas fumbled with the strings of the pouch and tumbled something out into his palm. “Take this,” he said, handing it to Joseph. “It was to be Albina’s wedding portion.
“You need not hesitate,” he added. “It was bought, not stolen.”
Joseph had no choice but to accept the gift if he was to avoid offending the old man. It was a large pearl, almost as big as a small egg. “Won’t you take this back as a gift from me?” he asked the girl. “I wish no pay for helping your father.”
But the beautiful dark-skinned dancer shook her head. “My father’s life is worth more to me than jewels. Take it, please, from both of us. You have earned it ten times over.”
Joseph put the pearl into his purse. “I will sell it, then,” he told them, “and give the money to the poor.”
As he gathered up his instruments and supplies, he saw that the young thief Manetho’s face was dark with anger. And when they were leaving the Necropolis, Matthat warned, “I may have underestimated Manetho, Joseph. He would gladly stick a knife between your ribs to get that pearl. Give it to me to sell, and I will see that he knows you no longer have it. The money will be safe with a moneylender and will earn interest for you until you return to Jerusalem.”
Joseph gladly gave Matthat the jewel since he had no wish for his body to be found floating in the Agathadaemon Canal the next morning.
At the canal, Matthat hailed one of the boats for hire that plied back and forth between Lake Mareotis, the Harbor of the Happy Return, and the main part of the city itself. Joseph left him there and went on through the Rhakotis alone. It was said of the Alexandrians that they slept by day and roistered the whole night long and, looking about him tonight, Joseph could well believe it. The weather was still warm, although winter was approaching, and the babbling of voices in every tongue of the world filled the air. Brawny sailors and fishermen from the waterfront ranged the narrow streets arm in arm. Those they met were forced to scurry into doorways for protection or be knocked sprawling into the stone-paved street. On almost every corner was a drinking house from which came shouts and coarse laughter mingled with the happy squeals of the women who thronged there with the men.
It was on just such a warm night as this, Joseph remembered, that he had walked across the city of Magdala to Demetrius’s house with Mary and she had kissed him before going inside. He wondered if he would ever find her here in this teeming city. The quest seemed hopeless now, for she had apparently failed in her ambition to become an important figure in the theater of Alexandria, and he did not know where else to look for her. She might even have left the city in her disappointment, going perhaps to Ephesus, Antioch, or even Rome, all of which had large theaters.
Obeying an impulse to see if he could learn anything about Mary at the waterfront, Joseph turned along a street leading to the Great Harbor. The spars of hundreds of vessels were always visible where the streets opened upon the harbor, and if Mary had sailed for Rome or another city, it would have been from the great quay.
When he came out upon the jetty near the Heptastadium, Joseph stopped in astonishment. It was the first time he had come here at night, and he was not prepared for what he saw. A mirror reflected seaward the light of the great fires built nightly on the platform atop the Pharos, but the flames themselves were bright enough to light up the harbor and the great broad causeway leading across it to the island upon which the lighthouse stood. Along the waterfront streets and the causeway itself a great crowd of people—the largest Joseph had ever seen—was moving in the nightly promenade of the Alexandrians, a sight to be seen nowhere else in the world.
In Judea women did not go out at night, except when accompanied by their menfolk. This crowd, however, teemed with unattached women of every nationality, every color, every social level, for the Heptastadium was in truth the meeting place of all Alexandrians. A haughty Roman wife walked idly along in her finery, perhaps to meet a lover, attended by a coal-black slave girl naked above the snow-white cloth wrapped about her body as a skirt. Almost touching the respectable matron, a courtesan ambled with the peculiar undulating gait of her tribe, cheeks painted with antimony, eyelids dripping with kohl, lips vivid with carmine, gazing boldly at the men she met and smiling an invitation to any who looked prosperous. Dark-skinned Egyptian girls walked with blond descendants of the soldiers brought here by Alexander and much more recently by the legions of Caesar. Actually, it seemed to Joseph that there were more courtesans in Alexandria than respectable women, which was not far from the truth.
In a Jewish community, these painted women would have been stoned by an outraged populace. Lest he find temptation stronger than his will, Joseph turned toward the quays themselves where the work of loading and unloading ships went on both night and day. If Mary had left Alexandria, someone among the mariners who sailed regularly to all the seaport cities of the empire might remember her and Demetrius, or at least the height and the hawklike profile of the Nabatean, Hadja.
He stopped to speak to Phoenician traders, tall men with long hair and jutting beaks of noses guarding piled-up bales of the rich purple fabric used for Roman uniforms, but learned nothing. Then he went on to question sailors who had traveled beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the land called Britannia, returning with vast stores of amber and crude tin, but to no avail.
All the produce in which men traded the world over lay on the massive wharves of this great free port where no customs fees were charged on goods transshipped to other destinations. Silken cloth and cheaper cotton fabric from the far-distant domain of the Han emperors; apes, peacocks, and precious jewels from the ports of Malabar; spices and precious incense from the cities of Arabia; ivory and gold from the land of the blacks called Nubia—these and hundreds of other goods filled the quays and the great warehouses. Long lines of slaves marched up and down the gangplanks under the whips of the overseers, handling cargo even at night. For the sea lanes of the world radiated from this teeming port, and from the bottomless granary of the Nile Valley flowed an endless stream of grain for Rome and its soldiers. But none of the ships’ captains remembered taking as passengers a girl whose hair was as red as the sunset over Lake Mareotis, a fat Greek musician, and a man of the deserts.
VI
Although Joseph was disappointed in his search for Mary, he was not unhappy concerning his other purpose in coming to Alexandria, that of learning more about his profession. Under the tutelage of Bana Jivaka he was able to go directly to the source of this rich fountain of learning: the great Museum that stood between the Street of Canopus and the waterfront. Actually the Museum was part of a larger building or palace that formed in its entirety a university for the study of science and other subjects. The teachers took their meals in a large hall from which opened a series of arcades where students walked and conversed with the professors between lectures. Nearby were rooms where the lecturers gave their discourses.
On higher ground between the Museum and the Lochias Promontory stood the famous Alexandrian Theater. From its upper seats patrons were afforded a view of the broad panorama of the harbor, a forest of masts from ships, scores of small boats, and the great white lighthou
se on the island at the seaward boundary. Beside the theater towered the Temple of Pan, and west of this, the great gymnasium whose porticoes were more than a stadium in length. Just beyond the gymnasium were the Courts of Justice.
Joseph spent his days in the Museum, watching the physician-teachers treat the sick poor who thronged here from every part of the city. While the professors diagnosed and treated each case, they lectured to a semicircle of students standing around the patient. Less often, surgical operations were performed, but in this field none of the teachers could equal the skill and daring of Bana Jivaka or the teachings of the great physician Susruta whose precepts he scrupulously followed.
Afternoons were given over to lectures on science and astronomy, in which the school at Alexandria led the world. It was here that Euclid had proved his famous theorems in geometry. Here, too, Eratosthenes had accomplished the astounding feat of measuring the earth. And beneath the same cool arcades, Aristarchus of Samos had studied the stars at night and evolved his startling theory that the earth and the planets revolved around the sun.
As the days passed, Joseph found that he was learning more from Bana Jivaka than he was from the teachers at the university. Under his friend’s tutelage, he became adept at inducing the strange trancelike condition by which the Indian surgeon was able to perform serious operations without pain. The subject merely gazed at a bright object, such as the jewel used by Jivaka, while the physician’s will gradually overcame his through the repeated suggestion that he was falling asleep. From an Egyptian student he learned that this accomplishment was not limited to India, but had been known by the priests of the Nile for thousands of years.
Working together, Joseph and Bana Jivaka performed many feats of surgery, so much so that their reputation soon spread throughout the city and people came seeking them from all quarters. In this way, Joseph came to make friends and earn the gratitude of high persons among the officials who ruled the great metropolis, merchants who operated the bazaars, traders in foreign exchange whose offices were in the great warehouses, people of his own race from the Jewish Quarter, and, following his success with Achillas, even the thieves and petty criminals who were everywhere.
Achillas’s recovery was steady and uncomplicated. Joseph visited him every few days for the first week, and by the second he was so much recovered that he no longer needed anything but an occasional examination of the operative wound.
True to his promise, Matthat came a few weeks later to take Joseph to the theater, where the performances began in mid-afternoon and ran until darkness had fallen. The drama and dance were favorite diversions of the pleasure-loving Alexandrians, and a great crowd thronged the streets, moving toward the massive stone walls of the great theater near the waterfront.
“It is always like this when Flamen dances,” Matthat explained as they were pushed about by the crowd. “The theatergoers worship her. There has never been another like her in Alexandria.”
“Is she a courtesan?” Joseph had come to know that actresses in Alexandria, as in the rest of the world, belonged generally to this group.
Matthat shrugged. “Some claim she is not. Men who have sought her favors and been repulsed will wager she is a virgin. Whatever she is, her power over men is greater than that of any other woman in Alexandria. She is rich already from gifts by wealthy men who seek her favors.”
“Why do they seek her if she refuses them?”
Matthat smiled. “You are a physician. You should know human nature well enough to realize that a man will beggar himself for a beautiful woman who denies him when he would soon become tired of her if she yielded. Courtesan or not, this Flamen is smart and cold-blooded. Just last year the tax collector, Flavius, lost his position because he stole tax moneys to buy gifts for her. The day he was found out, she turned to another, and richer, man.”
Matthat had purchased tickets entitling them to a seat in the great cavea, or auditorium. They entered by the aisles called paradoi, separating the performers from the audience, and found their way along other passages radiating out from these to a row of seats only a short distance from the stage. The first several rows were reserved for the nobility and the very rich. Just over the openings where the crowd entered, two elaborate boxes called tribunalia were set apart for even more important dignitaries.
“One of the tribunalia is always taken by Flamen’s current suitor,” Matthat explained. “You can see that she caters only to very rich men. Nobody else could afford such a seat night after night.”
Joseph looked about him curiously, for it was the first time he had ever been in a theater. Before the scaena, or stage, was a broad semicircular platform, the orchestra, on which the chorus sang and danced and before which the musicians sat. They were already tuning their instruments when Joseph and Matthat came in.
A great partition separated the audience from the stage proper, but soon after they found seats, it was lowered into a grooved slot in the floor at the edge of the scaena, revealing the stage with its painted backdrop, or skene. Of stage machinery there was little except the eccyclema, a wheeled platform that was run out on the stage when necessary, bearing special scenes.
The auditorium was filling rapidly, and a steady roar of conversation filled the air. It was a brilliant scene indeed, for the vast semicircular theater was a riot of color from the tunics of the men and the vivid draperies of the women who sat with them. Hawkers moved up and down the aisles selling sweetmeats and small skins of wine with which a thirsty viewer might refresh himself. People shouted gaily to each other across the rows, relaying the latest bawdy story or the newest juicy bit of scandal.
The musicians soon began to play the opening chorus, but there was little letup in the hum of conversation. Fortunately Joseph and Matthat were close to the orchestra, so they could hear the music and also had a fine view of the stage itself. Shortly a group of jugglers appeared, tossing swords deftly to each other and catching them by the handles with amazing dexterity. After them a beautiful girl in jeweled breastplates and a golden girdle set a number of swords upright upon the floor and danced among them nimbly, missing the points, it seemed, by only a finger’s breadth.
Now came the first play. It was a mime, one of those short scandalous dramas full of double meanings and frank asides spoken to the audience. The stock characters in these earthy dramas were the unfaithful wife, the handsome effeminate lover, the cuckolded husband, and the gay coquette. This last was played by a young lady who made a great hit with the audience by flirting up her skirts at every opportunity. The audience loved it all, shouting their approval and keeping up a steady conversation all the while.
Next a troupe of girls in filmy tunics ran out upon the orchestra with garlands of flowers in their hair and carrying golden lyres in their hands. They sang a tender love song, then, putting the lyres on the edge of the raised stage above them, began to dance. All were very graceful and made a lovely picture.
After the dancing came another mime, this time the Atelan Farce, with its broad comic characters, the clown called Bucco, the pantaloon Pappus, a booby called Maccus, and the wise man, Dossenus. Next, the musicians began a strange haunting melody which Joseph had never heard but which Matthat said was a song of ancient Egypt, and a dark-skinned girl ran to the center of the stage and bowed, her extended fingertips touching the floor. When she raised her writhing arms slowly and stood erect, Joseph saw with a start that it was Achillas’s daughter, Albina.
“Next to Flamen, Albina is the best dancer they have,” Matthat observed. “And a lovely girl as well.”
The dark-skinned girl’s dance was strange to him, a thing of stylized postures with fingers together and hands extended in many odd positions, but the audience, especially the Egyptians, loved it, and Joseph judged that it was a favorite of her people. When she finished, applause filled the theater and she came back once to bow to the audience.
On the performan
ce went, for a regular program in the Alexandrian Theater lasted four hours. Finally, a band of black women from Africa danced the strange, sensuous tribal dances of their people, their skin glistening with sweat in the light of an actual fire built in a great copper pot on the stage.
“Flamen will be coming on soon,” Matthat said. “Her current suitor is in his box.”
Joseph looked across at the seat in the tribunalia which had until now been empty and saw that a tall man with a cold hard face had taken his place. The Roman was graying at the temple but very handsome, a patrician in every haughty line of his face.
“That is the gymnasiarch Plotinus,” Matthat explained. “I hear that he has already spent thousands of denarii on Flamen.” Joseph had been in Alexandria long enough to know that the gymnasiarch, as head of the great gymnasium that was the center of the city’s social activities as well as much of its political life, was one of the most important men in Alexandria.
“What does this Flamen do that makes her so popular in the theater?” Joseph asked curiously. “She can hardly wear less clothing than the dancers who have gone before her.”
“She wears more. They say when she first came to Alexandria the director wanted her to dance naked like the others, but she refused. Wait until you see her, and you will understand the magic she uses upon a crowd, even when more fully clothed than many women in the audience tonight.”
The last of the black dancers scurried from the stage and the massive curtain rose, creaking, from the depths beneath it. It was already dusk, and attendants began to light torches on either side of the stage itself while a hush fell over the crowd in anticipation of the main attraction. Then, as slowly and as ponderously as it had risen, the curtain descended again and a scene of fairy-like beauty was revealed.
A flower garden erected upon the eccyclema had been wheeled upon the stage while the curtain was down. A bench stood in the garden beside the little fountain playing there as naturally as if it were real, and flowers were cunningly arranged so that they seemed to be growing around it. The sheer beauty of the scene brought a burst of spontaneous applause from the audience.
The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene Page 14