Threshold of Fire Read online

  Because of the painstaking performance of his duty, the fastidious observance of even the slightest detail of procedure, he has become more and more convinced that he has earned the right to his second birth as a Roman citizen. Egyptians are considered to be capricious, to be oriented toward Greece, filled with an old resentment of a triumphant Rome. Hadrian, honorary Roman, more Roman than the Romans, presumes distrust when there is no reason for it at all; is ashamed — worse, sometimes offended — even when Egypt is mentioned innocently. He does not wish to analyze his reactions; he has chosen to turn his back on the petrifying past; he has tried by drastic methods to free himself from those bonds. For ten years he believed he had banned thoughts of that rupture, painful as a wound ….

  But a dream, a sudden encounter with a certain Niliacus (whose last remark seems to have separated them from the others and joined them together) have shrivelled away two decades of Roman grand style. The hand of the other, this Niliacus, raised in an oath …

  “I swear that I have never sacrificed a cock unless it was in your presence.”

  That piece of stone in the dream, that relief, a raised hand: “I swear…” But what, when, how? Dreams, it is said, are a mixture of memory and premonition … Is it a residue of paganism to think like this, to attach so much importance to a dream? Hadrian has never seen a cock sacrificed.

  Never?

  Before him on the table are rows of boxes holding rolls of books. The clerks stand waiting for the inspection to end. Once again, the Prefect unrolls one of the volumes. Again, as so often, he is overcome by the need to demonstrate his authority and expert knowledge — all the more after the slight drop in attitude and appearance which no one in the justice hall could have missed. Beautiful letters, regular and even on the page — Marcus Anicius Rufus had capable calligraphers among his slaves. Verses teeming with mythological names… this choice of reading matter only confirms what the Prefect already knows. A shameful devotion to the pagan legacy!

  Hadrian presses his lips together in disapproval, restraining the testy impulse to roll the paper up again. He recognizes the metaphor, the style: the epigram that he holds before him is inscribed word-for-word in his memory. The blood drains from his face.

  While Mallius dreams in daylight and darkness

  The Egyptian steals everything; nothing is sacred to him.

  People of Rome, cry with one voice: Mallius, wake!

  Perhaps then the light of Egypt will fade away.

  Ten years ago, in these same rooms, there had been another interrogation. The accused at that time was the poet whose work, adeptly copied by Marcus Anicius Rufus’s slave-scribe, now lies exposed on the desk of the prefecture; the writer of that epigram which passed from mouth to mouth, received with scornful laughter and malicious enjoyment. Don’t these walls hold an echo? Aren’t the coldest phrases charged with passion, and doesn’t that passion remain even after the words themselves have died away forever? Then — ten years ago — Hadrian had scarcely been able to control the trembling of his hands during that interrogation, that game of question-and-answer… A game indeed — that was more than ever a comedy of justice performed in an orderly way to give an appearance of objectivity to what was really an act of personal vengeance.

  In the place reserved for the accused, the young man, the court poet fallen into disfavor, looked him straight in the eye, his lip curled in contempt; he did not yet believe in the seriousness of this procedure: he was undoubtedly thinking of his powerful friends — or of those among the powerful whom he took to be his friends — and most of all of his constant benefactor Flavius Stilicho, the guardian, father-in-law and advisor of Emperor Honorius and virtual ruler of the Occidental Empire. The Prefect, however, his palms wet with emotion, knew that this accused’s hopes for help were futile, that the nature of the indictment, the risk of scandal at that exact moment, would render Flavius Stilicho powerless.

  Oh, how intolerable that black haughty look in a face darker in complexion than is usual among the Roman elite — but how comforting his own certainty of seeing that calm expression wiped away, of seeing this illustrious protégé of the great kicked off his pedestal, how soothing to watch doubt and helplessness creep over that self-confident mask.

  “Name?”

  “Claudius Claudianus.”

  “Position?”

  “Notary tribune, court poet.”

  “Accused of the practice of magic, of sacrificing to idols. Suspected of abusive practices….”

  No one in the justice hall betrayed by look or gesture that he knew what all Rome knew: that the Prefect of the City, Hadrian, was standing eye-to-eye with a former client and longtime intimate friend who had turned into a hated enemy; that the Prefect had seized the opportunity now to destroy the man whom, a few years earlier, he had not dared accuse of defamation for fear of making himself ridiculous. Four lines of verse which had been on everyone’s lips about the “Egyptian” and his avarice — these were undoubtedly in the thoughts of more than one of those attending the proceedings. This realization certainly helped the Prefect to overcome his feelings of uncertainty. Vigilance — yes, like the Pharos lighthouse, the light of Egypt, he would show himself to be pitilessly vigilant, an example to anyone who might think that the authority of the Empire, as it is vested in those who represent it, could be mocked with impunity.

  Claudius Claudianus — eliminated, excluded forever from the world of the living. Every trace of him removed. Or is that an illusion? The epigram has lost none of its corrosive force. Four lines, written many years ago, brought to light again by accident in the private library of one accused in a later trial, possesses the power to summon back a vanished man, to reopen an old wound.

  “We don’t need this here,” the Prefect says. He pushes the book roll (“The Works of Claudianus”) away from him across the table top. “It has no connection with the matters under discussion today.”

  But as he leaves the anteroom, he feels that he has been the victim of an illusion. His eyes and ears perceive signs of a presence which he refuses to acknowledge; his instinct tells him more than his intellect. In an instant he will have crossed a threshold — not just the tangible threshold of the justice hall. A voice behind him (one of the police officials) asks whether the instruments should be prepared for the more stringent interrogation. With a hasty wave of his hand, Hadrian delegates the decision.

  A ghost has been called up in the silent justice hall — the poet who was condemned ten years earlier. He clings to the Prefect as though he were his shadow. The sun comes through the window niches now so that the Prefect cannot move or turn without seeing, at his feet or next to him or opposite him on the wall, the dull blot of his own opacity.

  He always thinks of Claudius Claudianus as a dead man, because the verdict he had pronounced upon him (exclusion from water and fire and thus hunger, thirst and homelessness; complete isolation from people inside a circumference of one hundred miles with the City in the center) was in fact a death sentence. An unwritten law, applied since the time of the Twelve Tables, holds that one thrust out in this way can be stabbed with impunity as soon as he sets foot in the forbidden territory. At the time, the Prefect had taken certain steps, given certain commands. There is a blind spot in his memory. Had no one told him the outcome or had he intentionally ignored the report? He has to acknowledge that after ten years he doesn’t really know whether Claudius Claudianus is still alive.

  What ghosts have appeared in the wake of Marcus Anicius Rufus and his clique of patrician pagans? Even if there has been no actual sacrifice in the villa, it is nevertheless true that they all believe in the power of magic. Their idolatry is a form of exorcism. They commit their crimes brazenly wherever there is darkness, evil … all the horrors and troubling secrets of a dead sinful world arise once more through the breaches they create, to threaten the peace of the soul, achieved at so high a price. Pious hermits in the mountains of Umbria have told Hadrian how, with their own eyes, they had seen pitch-bla
ck demons crawling out of a hole in the ground toward a secret offering which still smoldered on a pagan altar. Through persistent pagan practices, Marcus Anicius Rufus and his friends appear to have eclipsed the light of the sun and to have caused one word to buzz in the Prefect’s brain like a poisonous insect: the Nile, the Nile.

  2.

  An image rises from the depths of time. Clearly standing out from hordes of memories, an estate in the Nile Delta. It belongs to one Eliezar ben Ezekiel, one of the richest men in Alexandria. A walled villa and outbuildings, a small settlement set among fields, olive groves, fishponds. Eliezar, who has just come from the city, is receiving a high official in the service of Rome, the young Hadrian, who has only recently been appointed. The entertainment includes a circular cruise among the reeds.

  Memory focuses on a flimsy lean-to of woven reeds standing on one of the countless marshy islands; a raft, tied to poles thrust in the mud. A boat, a dahabyeh manned by oarsmen, has just come along the narrow canals between the reeds. Under the striped awning, host and guest are seated. Both Eliezar’s hands are raised in anger and dismay … why? Statues move, come to life: half-naked youths, surprised in their hiding place, leap away from a fire-blackened stone used since time immemorial by the farm workers for secret sacrifices to the ancient fertility gods. One of the youths — still only a child — turns toward the landowner in the boat and, in a gesture that is at once defiant and defensive, shows the palms of his hands, smeared with the blood of the cock lying at his feet.

  Now, more than twenty-five years later, in the prefecture of Rome, all the impressions and feelings of that moment revive in the memories of two men for whom the words “born on the banks of the Nile” are key. Close, sultry heat, the stink of mud, the cries of the ibis flying above the endless masses of rustling reeds … For Hadrian, the Prefect, the unforgettable sensation of the boat rocking in flashing water; for the other, the man held under suspicion in the holding room, purely sensual impressions — the prickling of sharp corn-stubble under his feet — are as strong as ever, but the thoughts and feelings of that moment have faded long ago, replaced by new interpretations.

  The incident itself — some youths caught by Eliezar and his guest in the act of sacrificing, or playing at sacrificing, to gods, against the landowner’s express prohibition — that is the surface action, the simple direct beginning of an affair which has grown most complicated over the years, branching out in many directions until the day of the trial of Marcus Anicius Rufus.

  Those things which are most hidden — the desire or the aversion of one individual, even those impulses which are never completely conscious — can turn the scale, determine the lives and destinies of others, call up actions and reactions which, years later, that man cannot control.

  Let us take the case of Eliezar ben Ezekiel who, in the zenith of his manhood, has reached that stage of life when one becomes aware that old age is approaching. An experienced man who understands people, who has earned his insights through sorrow and bitterness; a pious man whose passion for justice makes him incapable of charity …

  On the evening of the discovery in the canefields — first of all, he had sent the boys home, then courteously bade his guest Hadrian farewell — he is now alone in the room draped with mosquito netting and lit by the glimmer of an oil lamp, where he sleeps when he is staying at the villa. Seven steps forward, seven steps back — his caftan trails behind him over the floor … frowning, talking softly but vehememtly to himself, his right hand squeezed into a fist before his heart, or turned palm upward, fingers spread, in a gesture of prayer, or even supplication … Now and then, he pauses at a table set with an ongoing game of chess; he takes up a piece, moves it, shoves it back. The night wind rises, stirs the gauze curtains. Someone is playing a flute in one of the outbuildings. There is a marshy odor in the air; it smells of the Nile. There is no one to witness Eliezar’s restlessness and confusion. The boy who cut the cock’s throat is his own son’s son.

  When the mother — an Egyptian slave — died of fever, Eliezar placed the small child with the family of an overseer on the estate. His nicknames — “Little One”, “Sonny”, “Hey You” — were quickly outgrown. The names passed on from father to son are Ezekiel, Nathan, Mordecai — one of these is what the family heir should be called, but his son’s son has no place in his family. So he allows the boy to be called by a name similar to his Egyptian mother’s name — Klafthi. The people of the estate know nothing, the child is considered an orphan, a foundling, taken under the wing of the generous landlord. Eliezar’s son — he has married during this time and is the father of daughters only — never comes here from Alexandria; he is involved in other business and has no interest in the land.

  A child’s game — imitating a half-understood primitive ritual like those practiced by the fellahs outside the enclosures of the estate, cock’s blood washed away in the twinkling of an eye and forgotten — one can look at these things objectively, without attaching too much importance to them. If anyone else were involved, Eliezar would silently repress his disgust and then take steps to prevent that sort of thing from happening again. But the look of that boy — his whole body tense with the shock of being caught, the tendon trembling in his outstretched foot — this struck Eliezar with the force of a blow. Nathan, Mordecai, Ezekiel … but there is something unformed, wild, hidden there … the still unborn grandson close by and yet unreachable in the shape of a slave child, no different at first glance from the countless others who wander about the grounds.

  In one single second, the look in those eyes, glimpsed across the narrow strip of water between the boat and the island, betrayed an infallible instinct mixed with an even more definite will to resist. It was that expression, above two bloody hands, which caused Eliezar to raise his own hands to heaven in pain, anger, shame — as when a beloved child behaves in a stupid, scandalous way. But he quickly stifled this reaction: he wished to appear, in the eyes of Hadrian, the representative of Rome, to be merely the landlord who ordered the boys, with restrained severity, to return home immediately on the raft in the wake of his boat and who instructed his servants to purify the spot in the canefields by burning it down before sunset. The young magistrate felt compelled, with the fervor of the recent convert to Christianity, to voice both his abhorrence at pagan custom and his familiarity with it, in the same breath. Eliezar found his pedantry almost unbearably irritating.

  He brings the oil lamp to the recess where his bed stands, but he cannot sleep. The guilt of his son, who created this child out of unthinking lust, and created with him a whole world of acts and thoughts — that guilt is his guilt too. Where and how did he fail to instill respect for the Law and the Commandments in his own heir? What neglect on his part — lack of a loving example, lack of wisdom — brought his son to the commission of such a sin? Because it is a sin in the eyes of pious men.

  He, Eliezar, is a stranger in Egypt. Is there any place where he will not feel like an exile? The houses where he lives with his people — supplied with every necessity, but furnished in utter simplicity — are like the dwellings of nomads, tents in a desert which are set up and taken down from day to day. The treasures which he has gathered, thanks to his foresight and his talents as a merchant, he doesn’t consider to be really his — he only administers them, gives them away to the needy, uses them to help support people and opinions which he — his eye sharpened by chess-playing — sees as progressive, as representing a victory over sluggishness of mind and weakness of will. Now as he lies in the darkness, he is overcome by doubt, a lifelong enemy: is this perhaps pride, the chessplayer’s love for plotting the future, the pleasure of working out possible solutions, reached through a series of bold calculations?

  Because of his mother, the young Klafthi belongs forever to the others, not to the People. Eliezar has never doubted the precision of the Law. And yet … the word “slave” will never cross his lips in connection with that child. He can’t even think it. The overseer, a freedman, assum
es that the boy who has been entrusted to him belongs to his own caste. The boy himself knows nothing; he accepts his place and his surroundings as a matter of course …. But is that really true? Whenever Eliezar is on the estate, his eyes search the grounds until somewhere — near the stables, or outside the wall with the watch towers, in the orchard — he discovers that tanned figure, swift as water. The superintendent’s clerk has said more than once that the boy can think as fast as he can run; he learned to read and write with as much ease as if he were playing a game.

  Behind Eliezar’s closed eyelids appears the fleeting gleam of white porticos, the long galleries of the schools of Alexandria. The desire to develop an unformed mind — is that pride? to be able to put in charge of the estate, which holds no interest for his legitimate heir, a young administrator, a child of the country who values the land … To glide through the reeds in the dahabyah in the cool of the evening under a yellow-rose sky and listen to a trusted voice next to him reporting on harvests and flocks … Is it pride to want to think about the future? Is it better to do nothing, to let matters drift, to wait passively to see what will happen to the boy: a servant in the striped shirt of a fellaheen, working the land, rowing the dahabyah, who might one day, consumed by an uneasiness he doesn’t understand, run off to become a thief or an assassin?

  Standing in the darkness, his eyes fixed on the luminous blue rectangle of the gauze-curtained open door, Eliezar pushes these questions aside, cleanses himself spiritually before the Divine Presence, utters the Shema for peace through the night.

  Perhaps it is the light falling over the meandering black and white pattern of the mosaics — suddenly the image rises before the Prefect of a chessboard divided into black and white squares, and a hand cautiously shifting the carved ivory figures, one by one. An echo of words spoken long ago in a house in Alexandria, in a space dominated by a silver candlestick with seven branches …