The Secret Magdalene Page 8

  Tata pauses here. I glance over at Addai for his reaction, but there is none. He sits quietly, his beard splayed out over his barrel of a chest; his clever hands idle in his lap. I glance back at Tata. There is nothing about Tata that I usually see, no quick pride or fierce humor. There is only a simple seriousness.

  “I was sold to a woman named Euodia who was a sacred harlot, a Temple prostitute, a divine whore, which to the Jews is called a zonah. From the moment I could walk and talk, Euodia set about teaching me all she knew. And though women like my mistress were no longer allowed publicly in the Temple, I grew up secretly servicing men in the name of a god, the very men who barred us from that god’s house. In all else save this and the art of healing, Euodia was ignorant. Those who shared this life with us were as ignorant as she, all but Theodora, a woman of Cyprus, who taught me everything I have taught you, and one other, a woman from far to the east, who taught me all I have never taught you, and will never teach you, for you have no need of such skills.”

  Tata tosses her head. Salome and I live for what she might now say.

  “I should have lived an honored life for mine is an ancient and honorable profession. But not now, not here in Judaea where the female has fallen so far, where the goddess is driven from her place. Here, what I did until the day I came to your house was done in secret, but it was done and is done by many. There is much in and about the Temple that is not freely spoken of, and some things that are not spoken of at all.”

  Tata pauses again. This time I see she struggles. She is coming to something it will be hard for her to say. I suddenly wonder how hard it is going to be for me to hear.

  “And now I shall tell you how I came to be in your father’s house.”

  Suddenly, Salome inhales so sharply and so loudly we all start. Her eyes have grown round with understanding. Tata smiles at her, but there is no humor in the smile.

  “Salome with her quick fox mind sees what I am about to say. I came because Josephus bought me from Euodia.”

  I blurt out, “Father bought you for us?” I say it in order not to hear the truth, because of course Father did not buy Tata for us.

  “For himself.”

  Oh yes, it is very hard to hear this. How much more will Father hurt me?

  “The visits of Josephus became so frequent, Euodia offered me to him for a great price, an impossible price, and he paid it. I came to your house as your father’s bedmate and I remained so until the day I left. If you had chosen to obey Josephus, Mariamne, and live with his brother-in-law, I confess that I should have stayed until I thought you settled, for I love you as my own child—you and Salome are my own children—but I should then have found my way here no matter the cost. I am, after all, the daughter of an unusual woman.”

  I understand now why Father did not punish Tata the day he drove Salome from his house.

  Tata has more to say. Can I hear more?

  “I think it time I also tell you that I am now the companion of Addai of Shechem and, if he wishes, I shall stay his companion for all that remains of my life.”

  “Wish it?” Addai breathes in Tata as he would breathe in a priceless scent. “You are my other half, the half I lost at birth.”

  Salome sends me a quick sign—the Love of Plato! That we should see it!

  It is settled. Neither Tata nor Addai will go to Egypt. Instead Salome and I go with Seth and with the actor Dositheus. It is now we learn who the last of us shall be: black Helena, not from the south, but from the northern city of Tyre.

  We are going to the land where life began, where the gods and goddesses were born, where history was first written and the stars first studied, or so claims Salome. We go to Alexandria! The first thing I shall do will be to see the museum where they say the great Alexander is embalmed in honey, and where I know there is a library more wonderful than any in the world. And oh, we have never seen Seth as he is now. He smiles, he talks, he must take all his books, his astrolabe and his maps, his inks and his desk and his reeds. He must take so much, Addai lends him Eio to carry it all.

  The sun burns red. In moments it will sink into the Great Sea. In an hour it will be full dark and by then we are to meet up with Ananias who waits for us in a hidden place arranged by John of the River. John himself, as well as Queen Helen and her son, Izates, are already away, gone with the caravan the night before.

  Addai and Tata have packed our things on the donkey that travels along with Eio, have whispered with Dositheus and with the woman Helena and with Seth. There is nothing left to do but to go. At the last moment, I throw my arms around Tata’s waist and cling there. Tata gives me a small leather purse, gives one also to Salome. “Tie them to your belts,” she says, “and whenever you have need of them, think of me.” Addai looks on us as a father whose child has died, and I rush to him, take his beloved face in my hands and kiss him full on the lips. “I shall see you again,” I whisper into his mouth. “You will know me again, and I you.”

  And that is the last I see of them for seven years.

  Straightaway, Seth sets off at a brisk pace. And straightaway we find the merchant Ananias and his caravan hidden in a deep defile. Ananias has been waiting to leave at first sight of us, and leave he does, with an astonishing speed and silence for beast and man.

  That first night, and for three nights afterward, we travel only by the light of the stars and a growing splinter of a moon. On these first three nights, we are more silent than not. It is when we pass the Fortress of Herodian seated atop its man-made mountain that Salome reveals to me her feelings for John of the River. Salome whispers that just as Addai is Tata’s Platonic other half, John is hers. “I shall never know a man,” she quietly declares, “never marry, never birth children, for I have decided to dedicate my life to John. It is done and it shall not be undone.”

  When she tells me this I am consumed by a terrible envy of Salome. Where is the man created from the other half of me, as we waited in the treasury of souls to be born?

  After these three silent nights, Salome and I fairly burst into chatter. Allowed finally to talk, we live with our heads in the stars. There are times when my neck aches from staring up at the worlds of light. Cicero said, “If anyone cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, he cannot feel at all…if anyone thinks it mindless, then he himself must be out of his mind.” Metrodorus of Chios said, “To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow.”

  As for the two who travel with us, we think Dositheus could play nothing but tragedy, for his every movement speaks of studied woe. The hills ring with his doleful voice reciting poetry and declaiming the great speeches of the great characters written not only by Greek playwrights, but by brutal and bloody Roman playwrights, and even a few by Jewish playwrights. And as for Helena, she has about her such a curious air, I have carefully stepped into her mind, and as carefully stepped out for the sorrow and the pain. Salome imagines that Helena allows the doleful Dositheus to “lie in her lap.” Dositheus calls her Ennoia, which he says means First Thought, saying also, “Surely God’s first thought was female.” But Helena gently rebukes Salome. Before coming away with Dositheus, she had been a common prostitute; now she suffers from something she does not name, a thing that sites itself in her female parts.

  Ah, think I, this is the darkness within her; this is her pain. Both Salome and I are now fascinated by God’s First Thought—and slightly repelled.

  Somewhere after we leave the limestone hills to the west of Idumaea and are traveling south along the shore of the Great Sea on the old Nabataean spice and perfume caravan route, Seth begins speaking of the inner Nazorean. Salome and I exchange looks. Shall we learn the secret teaching now? Will I understand it?

  Seth strides along as he speaks and I run behind him, almost tripping him up, Salome close on my heels. “Outwardly, the inner Nazorean, which are the Few, appear as other sects, seem to cleave as close to
the Law as other sects, but inwardly this is far from true. If others should know what is really believed and truly taught, we would be seen as deceitful apostates, as spiritually wicked. For what would the priests of the Temple who take in coin and spill blood daily, or the righteous men of the Law who shun other men as unclean, or the fervid Sicarii who shout for death to those God ‘hates’ make of a teaching that placed no blame, nursed no guilt, sought no redress, harbored no hatred, followed no Law, suffered no priests, and looked not to an angry arrogant god, or to a savior king, a messiah, but looked within for knowledge of Source?”

  This is almost Greek! It seems finer than Greek. But no messiah? I thought the Nazorean believed John to be the Messiah?

  Salome is shaking her head. “I have heard what men say John teaches, and it is not this.”

  “For all that the Baptizer seems a wild man of rage and repentance,” replies Seth, “he hides from all but the inner Nazorean that which he knows.”

  “What does he know?” I ask. I have tripped over four rocks in succession.

  “That in all men there lives the divine spark, but that gnosis, or ‘knowledge of the divine,’ comes only to the few, for only the Few are bold enough to look within. For all others, those many who look without, who would be told, who would follow rules set by others, especially if that other is called a god or a king or a priest, these are as sheep who seek a shepherd. These must be led. Or driven. This is John’s calling, to be that shepherd. And to offer himself freely. If they would call him a messiah, a messiah he would be.”

  I glance at Salome who has chosen John. Her face shines.

  A day or so later, Ananias leaves his camels and beckons me aside. He does not beckon Salome, who is well caught up in a discussion with Seth and Dositheus on what Dositheus calls the “threefold nature of God.” Ananias tells me this: In the Jericho market buying up the Galilean oil for Egypt, he has heard word of me. Father has let it be known far and wide that I am no longer his daughter, Salome is no longer his ward, and that we have been entered by demons. It is said that these demons number three for me and four for Salome, but this number rises each new time Ananias hears the tale. Father has also let it be known that he would not transgress the First Noachite Law; therefore, our fortunes, hers from her father, Coron of Memphis, mine from my mother, Hokhmah, are deposited in our names with the Temple priests, and there they shall remain until we are proven dead or until we come for them, demon ridden or not demon ridden. Ananias says Josephus has called me whore, a cruel word men use to brand females not in the care of a brother or a husband or a father or an uncle or a son.

  By the stars, even our very sons have precedence over us.

  Ananias’s news is like a blow to my heart. My father calling me whore is more terrible than John the Baptizer calling me unworthy of life. But I will not tell Salome. I will not tell Salome because I would not see her hurt more for my very soul. And I will not have Ananias tell Salome.

  By and by, with much talk and little adventure, save the miles under our feet and the dust in our throats, we come out of a world of heat and sand into a world of heat and wet. Here, in the confusion of the seven waters, Ananias dismisses his camel drivers and his camels, off-loads his jars of oils and aromatics onto a large slow barge. From the fortress city of Pelusium on, where the lakes are bitter with salt and the sea is a sea of reeds, it is much too marshy to walk farther. It seems we shall come to Alexandria by way of the fabled Nile!

  Therefore, in this manner we reach the westernmost branch of the green-watered Canopic Nile and from there sail into a reeded canal cut through the flat and endless delta. And all along, there have been waterwheels, and boats of many styles and many purposes, and houses made of mud-brick, and sloe-eyed people born out of Egypt’s bounty. There have been great, flat, fearsome-toothed water lizards hiding in the rushes, and there have been great, fat hippopotami lurking under our keel. I have hung my head over the side as keenly as has Salome, for what amazing things they are! They are like enormous gray pigs with huge fatty yellow mouths that could swallow Goliath whole. Their teeth are like the stubby legs of Father’s best table. Their ears turn full round in their great fat heads like pegs in holes. They could turn us over, barge and all, with one watery grunt.

  From the canal we enter an enormous lake edged with reeds and scattered with islands. We float in and out of a jungle of bean plants that hold up their huge leaves like cups to be filled with the light of the sun. The islands are out where the water is clear, and on the islands are temples, but on the banks of this lake, and spreading out as far as we can see, are vast vineyards lying green under the Egyptian sun.

  Tacking against a wind from the north, we slowly move across the lake of islands and wine. Upright in the prow, Salome and I strain for our first sight of Alexandria. We see nothing but more islands, nothing but water birds rising above us, nothing but the blue flash of a kingfisher in the reeds beside us, nothing but strange fish gliding below us, and around us nothing but other boats laden with wine from the rich estates on the lakeshore. Where is Alexandria? Where is Alexandria? We shall fall in a faint if it does not show itself in all these reeds and all this water. But there is nothing, nothing, nothing, and then—a dark line between the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake. And then—tiny boats, tiny docks, tiny buildings.

  Salome seizes my hand. We are almost there, almost at Alexander’s great city set at the edge of the sea. A moment later, there is movement in the distant streets. A moment after that, and the whole city lies clear before us. It is almost more than our hearts can bear.

  As we said we would, Salome and I have come to Egypt.

  THE FIFTH SCROLL

  Alexandria

  I walk under a golden gate in a golden wall of golden towers and stand awestruck. How to speak of what is entirely flat and entirely wonderful? Everywhere is the yellow of sand in the sun. Or the blue of the great green sea. Between sky above and salted sea ahead and the vast southern lake of sweet water behind me, there stretches an arm of land from east to west, no more than twenty stadia wide, but on it sprawls such a stupendous display of temples and theaters and baths and palaces and shops, that it stops the breath. It is all of it so large, so tall, so wide, so spacious, so imposing, so grand, so ordered, so many, so much.

  Already our barge is off-loaded at a customs checkpoint. (What Ananias had to say at the hefty fee I will not repeat.) Already he’s sent off the bearers along with the cargo of oils. These were followed by the three criers Ananias hired at the docks who shouted to one and all of the olive oil newly arrived from Palestine. They extolled its Galilean quality, pulling along a growing crowd eager to buy, at the sight of which, I saw Ananias put aside thoughts of his hefty fee only to gather in thoughts of his hefty profit.

  And now we push through utter chaos along the wide and bustling street running from the fresh water harbor of Lake Mareia to the saltwater harbors of the Egyptian Sea, until we come on a synagogue so large Ananias says someone must signal with a flag so that those in the back can know where the ceremony has come to for those in the front. Further, says he, here there is no sacrifice and no ritual; here there is only prayer.

  But out in the streets, how all the people shout! Our eyes and our ears and our noses are assaulted by the entire world in one city. There are not only Jews and Egyptians, but there are Greeks and Romans and Syrians, Libyans, Cilicians and yet others from farther countries: Ethiopians, Arabs, as well as Bactrians, Scythians, Persians, even Indians! Here, Helena of Tyre’s color is no more than all other colors, one color among every color. Ananias announces there are a million souls around us and as many more below us in the City of the Dead. I stare at Salome and she stares at me—the dead have their own city? Ananias, catching our wonder, explains that if we were to walk into the shadow of the Gate of the West, then summon nerve to pass through that gate, we would find ourselves outside the city walls and in the Necropolis, the vast city of Hathor, she who guards the newly dead. The embalmers are
there, shop after shop of them, for although the Greeks would cremate and the Jews entomb and then bury, the Egyptians still think to take their bodies with them wherever they go. Our merchant of sponges and oil tells us that more than one sorry soul has lost himself in the labyrinth of tombs or fallen into holes meant to light the maze of underground catacombs, and was never seen again. Salome and I shiver with delicious fright.

  Striding along, pushing people out of the way, Ananias has inflated with the pride of the informative and with the need to make himself heard over the din. I do not hear all that he says, but this I already know: Alexander the Macedonian’s greatest city is everywhere Greek or it is Egyptian or it is Roman or it is all of these. Both the Greek religion and the Egyptian religion thrive here and often in the hearts of the same people. This too I know: out into the Egyptian sea there is an island called Pharos, and between it and the city are two harbors divided by the Heptastadion dike seven stadia long—to think that men have built a bridge across the salt waters! To think that on Pharos, there is a lighthouse as high as forty giants and its beam of mirror and of fire can be seen far out into the Great Green Sea! I am made silly by giddy delight. Jerusalem is a city huddled round a jealous and vengeful god. Its people live in houses built like ovens or beehives or dove cots, each house squeezed tight against its neighbor. In Jerusalem, only the rich and the Romans have room to breathe. But here, though some might say the only god worshipped is money, there are open spaces of comforting green for the pleasure even of the poor. There are wide streets, each lined from end to end with colonnades, wide enough for a dozen chariots abreast. There are sphinxes on pedestals and obelisks standing against the Egyptian sky, and there are statues and pink granite pharaohs and pink granite gods and pink granite goddesses. There is one who makes me pull on Salome’s traveling cloak. “Look at that! Does it not seem as someone we know?”