Azazeel (36 page)

As he went into the church, surrounded by monks, for the morning prayers, he said, ‘May the Lord bless you, Hypa, and through you serve your brothers and your patients.’

When Deacon saw me as we left the big church, he gave me a sly and childish smile which I did not understand. I paid little attention because that day I was busy thinking about something more
important that the significance of his smile. At midday three of the monks helped me arrange the library. We put the books which were scattered about the room back in their place on the shelves and
brought in a long bench for the singing boys to sit on. We put it on the right as you come in through the door, with two wooden chairs facing it, one for the singing girl and the other for me. We
moved the long table to the corner facing the door and in the other corner we put a small table for me to write on when I wanted or at which I could sleep in a chair. This made the place roomier,
cleaner and more spacious.

In the early afternoon one of the monastery servants knocked on my door and told me that two women had come seeking treatment. I closed the music book and rose to meet them at the door. It was a
pleasant shock: Martha in her distinctive dress, with an old woman of about sixty. I concealed my surprise and my delight and invited them in. The servant stayed standing at the door a while and
then left.

Martha began the conversation: ‘Father, this is my aunt, who’s been coughing at night for months and none of the usual remedies have done her any good.’

‘Don’t worry, aunt. When do you get the coughing fits?’

‘All night long and at the start of the day,’ she said. ‘I feel my chest rasping with the attacks.’

I took the old woman’s pulse and it was irregular. I noticed that her body was very thin. I asked her if I could put my ear against her back to hear her breathing. She stepped forward,
resting on Martha’s arm, until she was standing in front of me, and then she turned around. I bent my face down towards her back and put my ear against it. Martha was looking at me with a
smile. I heard a grating which suggested that the old woman’s chest was full of phlegm and other fluids. The treatment was easy: an infusion of anti-phlegmatic seeds to be drunk warm, good
covering in bed and drinking camomile in the usual manner.

‘Don’t sit in front of the oven for the next two weeks,’ I advised the old woman, ‘so that the smoke doesn’t agitate the fluids in your chest.’

‘We haven’t renovated the oven yet, father, because we’ve only been your neighbours for a couple of days, and we found the oven in the cottage in ruins,’ she said.

‘So you’re the new neighbours,’ I said. ‘I can see your cottage from this window. Are you living there alone?’

‘Yes, father.’

The two women answered simultaneously. Martha’s voice was louder and more pleasant, and when she raised the silk veil hanging over her face I looked towards her warily to find a radiant
smile, standing out modestly like a clear sun on a cold winter’s day, or like a fresh breeze on a stifling summer’s night. Her smile was...

Confused, I stood up and scooped some of the seeds from under the table. I brought them back to put them in the old woman’s hands. Martha put her hand out first and I had no choice. I
avoided touching her hand, but when she closed her fists around the seeds she touched the back of my right hand, whether intentionally or not. I felt a shiver running up my arm and I could still
feel it days later. I asked them if they had any camomile and Martha said ‘Yes’.

Then she turned to her aunt. ‘Stand up and I’ll take you home, then I’ll come back to study the chant.’

The old woman leant on Martha’s arm and they began to leave. My eyes followed them. I was sitting on the chair opposite the bench for the singers and I did not move from my spot. At the
door Martha turned towards me as she lowered the veil, hiding her sweet smile and her light brown eyes.

Martha was not gone long. When she came back she found me sitting on the square stone which the earthquake had moved in ancient times, in front of the library door. Her gait as she approached
suggested a mysterious elation. She sat opposite me on a nearby stone, and asked me, ‘Haven’t the boys come yet?’

‘I sent Deacon to fetch them, to spare their mothers the trouble of climbing the hill. They’ll come in a while,’ I said.

I tried to distract myself by looking at the parchments I was holding but it did not work. I took a small bible from my pocket and was about to start reading, but she unexpectedly spoke out.

‘Father, there’s something different about you, compared with the day before yesterday.’

‘Yes, this gown is new,’ I said.

‘Just the gown?’

I ignored her remark, but it pleased me – though I did not show my pleasure. I started to think about how it might go with this new neighbour, who did not seem content to be just a
neighbour. She had broken through the barriers of my privacy and seclusion in this monastery since the day I first saw her and heard her sing. I was anxious. I asked her to wait while I fetched
some papers, and I deliberately shut the library door behind me so that she would not think of joining me. I felt that she was smiling behind me but I did not look in her direction. I stood still,
inside the library behind the closed door, while she sat in the open courtyard. When I heard the clamour of the boys coming from afar I opened my door and invited them all in, and Deacon too. So
began the first of many singing lessons. I don’t remember how many there were but I do remember well what happened in them and much of it I will narrate.

SCROLL TWENTY-ONE

T
he lyre reached the monastery a full week after we had started training without it. The group was now used to singing without accompaniment, and I
made do with little use of the lyre. The training lasted several weeks, as the boys’ singing improved day by day, while Martha’s singing was excellent from the first day. Sometimes she
would sing verses which were not from my poems and which she was not going to sing with the boys in church. She would arrive shortly before them, and then they would join her for the usual
practice. The other days of practice would take place in the big church, between the noon and the afternoon prayers. The abbot attended the first days of practice in the church and when Martha sang
he rested his brow on his stick. When she was in full song, there were tears in his eyes. His head remained bowed until we were all gone and when he saw me in the refectory in the evening he gave
me two grateful pats on the shoulder and said nothing.

On the second day of the final days of practice in the church, Martha came early to me in the library as usual, before the boys arrived. She knocked on the door and came in, striding across the
carpet with a pretence of bashfulness. She lifted the veil from her face, gave a broad smile and told me that her aunt’s nocturnal coughing had started to diminish and the croaking in her
throat was almost gone. She also told me that her aunt planned to weave for me a waistcoat of black wool for me to wear at night in the approaching winter. The two of them were skilled at weaving
on the loom and made their living from this work, or so she said.

I asked her, ‘The day I saw you why did you tell me so firmly that you were not a maid?’

‘Because I am not a maid!’ she said.

‘Does the abbot know that?’ I asked.

‘How would I know whether he knows or not?’

I felt that she was hedging so I kept quiet. She realized I was annoyed so she moderated her tone and told me that the church priest, a distant relative of her mother’s, knew she had once
been married, but when they came to live here, he had introduced her to the abbot with the words: ‘This girl and her aunt are Christian folk and poor. The old woman is sick and if you would
let them live in the ruined cottage it would be a great favour on your part, because they don’t have any relatives or any patron.’ She added, ‘That’s what the priest said
that day, so I was a girl as far as the abbot was concerned. I told him that I sang church chants and the songs which the potters sing from my early childhood, so in his eyes I became a singer.
That’s how he introduced me to you, good kindly father.’

Martha pronounced the word ‘kindly’ with such great affection and such extreme graciousness that I could not help but raise my face and look straight into her eyes. I saw how limpid
the irises were, the colour of honey mixed with green, and how the beauty of her thick eyelashes framed the beauty of the roundness of her eyes. I saw how full were her eyebrows, created by God
with perfection. Glossy black, they highlighted the pure whiteness of her face. Her hair, judging by the strands that hung down from under her headdress, was the same jet black as her eyebrows,
glossy and lustrous. Martha was a miracle of divine beauty, her face childlike and impetuous, beautiful as an image of the Virgin, but she also had a bold expression most disconcerting to someone
like me.

I looked up at her headdress, with its pleats of silk folded with such precision, and studied it at length. How long, I asked her, did it take her to arrange it so carefully?

‘No, father, it takes no time at all,’ she replied. ‘It’s sewn like that in the first place, and after that you just put it on your head to hold the silk veil which hangs
from it.’ With a sudden movement I had not expected, she lifted her headdress off and a cascade of thick and soft black hair tumbled down. Her hair was imprisoned under her headdress, longing
to be free, and when it framed her face she was evidence of the divine genius in creating mankind. What beauty was hidden under her head covering! What a look I saw in her eyes! Her look stung me
and her beauty so awed me that I was about to faint.

Quickly I said, ‘Cover your hair, my girl, Lord preserve you.’

Slowly and deliberately Martha wrapped around her head the hair which she had unleashed on the whole of creation. She lifted it with one hand and with the other closed over it the silken crown
with the pleats and the delicate coloured stitching. She did not turn away from me, but I pretended to be busy looking at the bookshelves. I picked up a book lying at hand and started to turn the
pages without reading a word, nor even seeing a single line.

She broke the silence, saying, ‘This dress is all Damascene. It was my mother’s and I took it after she died.’

‘So you’re from an Arab family?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been told that in the olden days my family were rich people in Palmyra, but they fled the city when Aurelian destroyed it, may the Lord curse him.’

‘My child, do not let your tongue acquire the habit of making curses. Palmyra was destroyed a long time ago.’

‘Yes, father, a long time ago. And after that my people dispersed across the world. My family first settled in the city of Aleppo, then they moved to Damascus and they became poor. There
they produced my mother, who married a Damascus man, and brought me into this world,’ she said.

‘So you know Arabic and Syriac?’

‘And I sing in the two languages.’

We heard the clamour of the boys arriving, so Martha lowered her Damascene veil and sat up straight. We moved to the church and when the chanting began my mind was wandering far away.

The next day Martha came early with her aunt, who bent down to kiss my hand, showing gratitude that I had treated her. But it is the Lord who heals. The old woman sat with us until the boys came
and we did not speak of anything that day. They all went off, and the day passed without me seeing any more of Martha’s face than was visible through her thin silk veil.

The next day was memorable because as we were coming out of church after the three o’clock prayers we heard a great uproar and a jumble of voices coming from the direction of the monastery
gate. We rushed to the gate and the abbot, the priest and all the monks hurried after us. At the foot of the hill we saw a large caravan, with pack animals resting at the slope to the monastery.
There were more than fifty camels and the same number of mules, along with some donkeys, and many merchants of various ages. Three of them, with colossal frames, came up towards us, supporting a
man who was even vaster than them and hardly able to walk. Two soldiers from the contingent accompanied them, smiling like idiots. The man they were supporting was about fifty years old, wearing
Kurdish clothes spattered with blood. Because he was so heavy and had lost his strength, his helpers brought him up the hill with great effort. Two of them were holding him up under his armpits,
and one man, shorter than them, was supporting him from behind his back. The other merchants stood around watching with great interest from their place at the foot of the hill. When the group came
close to us, I saw a trickle of blood running from the mouth of the man they were carrying, and I noticed Martha and her aunt standing outside their cottage, watching in amazement at the commotion
that suddenly surrounded us.

The abbot took two steps towards them and the men approaching told him that the caravan leader, the man they were holding, needed urgent attention from the monastery doctors – as though
the monastery had any doctor other than me! They said the man was about to expire and would die unless we urgently did something to save him. The abbot cleared the way for them and they brought the
man into the courtyard and sat him on the platform near the goat pen opposite the gate. The abbot took me by the hand, advanced towards them and asked them what had happened to the man.

‘The poor man drank from the devil’s well,’ they said.

The abbot told the monks to go back to their work and the two soldiers sat at the monastery gate. I took one of the merchants aside to try to find out what had really happened, and the two
others joined us. I learnt from them that the caravan was heading to Antioch from the land of the Kurds, which lies beyond the eastern desert, in the marches between Persia and the Roman Empire,
and that three nights ago the boss had drunk from a disused well in the desert – a well the caravan men call the devil’s well – because he wanted to prove there were no devils in
it. He drank the well water at night, and the next day he began to vomit blood, and he continued to do so for two days, without eating, until he was on the verge of death. Then the villagers
advised them to come to the monastery because he would surely perish before they reached Antioch. So they had brought him in the hope he could be saved, whether by medicine or by some charm or
anything that might cure him. The short man added, ‘He’ll be a good Christian if you cure him. He and his family will be important initiates who will soon join your religion.’