Azazeel (41 page)

We sat next to each other without speaking, and after a while her aunt came, calling for her from outside the cottage, as though she wanted to warn us that she was coming.
Martha did not jump as much as I did. I quickly dressed and moved closer to the door, panting constantly. Martha joined me after throwing on her dress and she hugged me from behind affectionately.
We went through the door together and found her aunt putting a small seat in front of the loom.

Martha asked her, ‘Were they all there?’

‘Yes, and they asked after you.’

When her aunt sat down at the loom, we went out in front of the cottage to sit at the edge of the cultivated land and look out over the western horizon which stretched out in front of us, a
place where no one could see us. Evening had started to fall and Martha was singing in a whisper, the song of someone wooing a loved one. The dusk breeze was gentle. When we sat down on the stones
at the edge of the slope, Martha sat close and asked me about my native country. I told her some of what had happened there. After a moment of silence she sighed and asked about the house I lived
in there. I said that it must be in the same old place on the hill overlooking the Nile, and it must now be closed up and in ruins, because houses fall apart when the inhabitants move on. Martha
looked at me with sympathy and love. She put her hand on my shoulder and asked me, ‘Is it a long way to Egypt? How long does it take to get there?’

‘If we went by sea and then sailed up the Nile, we would get there in a month,’ I said.

‘Hypa, let’s go and do up the house and live there together for the rest of our lives. We can take my aunt with us and she can look after our children, and I’ll be free to look
after you.’

‘How would that be possible?’ I asked.

‘We would get married and if you like you could be the priest at the church there. In any case, you’re a skilled physician and you can earn well from your work. We would live our
best days together, and we would have children and a beautiful house.’

Martha could be excused, because she knew nothing. She did not know that I could not live among the people of my home country. The children who insulted me in the old days for what my mother had
done had now become men. They would look on me with contempt. Neither did she know that I could not go back to Naga Hammadi because my sick uncle would have died by now and perhaps his Nubian wife
would also have died, and I would have no place there, and they would have no need of my medical knowledge.

‘This is something that requires deep thought, Martha,’ I said.

‘Don’t think alone. Let’s think together about our future life. I will be faithful to you as long as I live, and a mother to your children, and...’

We heard the voice of Deacon talking to her aunt as he hurried towards us, and we broke off the conversation. Martha stood up from next to me and sat on the ground instead. When Deacon reached
us, we both stood up. We walked through the herb seedlings as we climbed the hill towards the monastery gate. Martha left us there and went back down to her cottage. No chance arose for me to look
back at her.

Deacon was hungry and I went to the dining hall with him. We helped the kitchen servants lay the table, and they mumbled their thanks. I was hungry too. Deacon ate quickly, then stood up and
headed to his room to sleep. At least that’s what he told us. Obviously I had to wait for everyone to arrive. The monks trickled in like tortoises that hardly knew their way, and after a
while the abbot came in with three monks. Unusually for him, he seemed to be visibly distressed when he entered and shouted, ‘Good evening, children of Jesus. Come close so we can start our
prayers.’

The abbot recited the evening prayers, and I paid little attention because I was busy thinking about what had happened with Martha. Then everyone said ‘Amen’ in unison behind the
abbot, and I asked myself, ‘In all our prayers could we possibly be repeating the name of the ancient Egyptian god Amon, confusing an “e” for the “o” in his
name.’ I wondered, ‘Why do all things, not just religion, always have their origins in Egypt?’ and I asked myself why I should not go back to my home country to live there, given
that I was no longer fit for the monastic life.

I felt a sudden longing for the Nile, which runs across the land like the arm of God, with the Delta its hand and fingers. I remembered the sailing boat which carried me down the river, the
hamlets and villages slumbering along its banks, the way the tree branches hung over the water’s edge, how green were the fields that stretched as far as the eye could see, how the birds
would burst into song at dawn and at sunset. Ah, distant Egypt. I almost shed a tear of nostalgia. After a dinner noisy with the mutterings of the monks everyone prepared to leave the refectory. As
we were leaving, the abbot beckoned me over and the others understood that he wanted to be alone with me. They hurried off towards the church, leaving enough space for the abbot and me to be
alone.

‘You looked distracted tonight, Hypa,’ he said.

‘I am anxious, father, I feel homesick.’

‘This is anxiety of the spirit, my child. It flares up and then dies down.’

‘But father, I can no longer bear this constant anxiety. I can never find a place to live in peace and a way to settle down,’ I said.

‘Are you worried about what’s happening in Constantinople?’

‘What is happening in Constantinople, father? Has something dreadful happened to Bishop Nestorius?’

‘No, my child, not yet. With the will of the Lord, things will quieten down and no harm will come to him, with the will of the Lord,’ the abbot said.

‘You have made me more anxious, father. What is going on?’

‘The emperor has accepted Cyril’s request to hold a meeting of the heads of all the churches in the world, to examine Bishop Nestorius’s doctrine, and the meeting will take
place soon in the city of Ephesus.’ The abbot bowed his head and started to mutter a prayer, the side of his face resting on the top of his stick. I saw how worried he was, and he did not
want to say more.

Lost in thought, I walked away from him, then I remembered something and went back. Hesitantly and absentmindedly, I said, ‘Father, should we start the singing in the mass on Sunday, the
day after tomorrow, or should we...’

‘No, Hypa. We’ll have to postpone it. The time is not yet right.’

The abbot spoke without looking up towards me, and I walked away, deeply desolate.

SCROLL TWENTY-SIX

I
did not see Martha all of Saturday because I was busy with the kitchen servant, on whose underarm I performed a surgical operation, lancing a
large abscess which I had been treating with the well-known black ointment over the previous few days. The time for opening it had come. At first I thought it would be a simple operation which
would not take long but I found that the man’s constitution was weak and the pus had reached his chest. He bled so profusely that he almost perished in front of me, had it not been for the
mercy of the Lord. I spent the rest of the day treating the wound, removing all the pus from it and dressing it with anti-ulcerants. When I came down from my room after washing, the sun had set and
it would have been inappropriate to drop in on Martha in her cottage after nightfall.

At prayers I alternated between feelings of rapture, anticipation and other forms of emotional turmoil. When we came out of the church, Pharisee the monk was walking next to me with heavy steps.
In the middle of the small courtyard I asked him if he would like to come with me to the library, and he agreed without enthusiasm. While I was opening the door for him, I asked him if he had any
more news of the ecumenical council which was expected to take place. He told me in brief that Bishop Cyril had arrived in the city of Ephesus with Shenouda, the famous monk from Akhmim and the
leader of the solitaries, at the head of a large Egyptian delegation including priests, Alexandrian monks and many laymen. They were now awaiting the arrival of the bishop of Rome and the emperor,
for the council to begin. Hesitantly he added that many bishops had arrived from all over Christendom, but Bishop John of Antioch had gone off to Aleppo two days earlier to wait for the Roman
contingent to accompany him there, because the roads to Ephesus were not safe these days.

‘The roads? Or is it Ephesus that isn’t safe?’ I asked. As I spoke I offered him a drink of carob, sweetened with taffy.

He took it from my hand without looking up at me. After a pause he continued, ‘I don’t know, Hypa, I don’t know. Don’t make me say things I don’t like to
say.’

Unusually for this time of year, the night air was cold. I asked Pharisee if he would like me to make a fire with some wood and dry twigs in the brazier, meaning the large brass bowl around
which we would gather in winter to keep ourselves warm. He nodded in agreement. By the time the wood was alight and sputtering in the bowl I was deep in thought about what the abbot had told me
after supper the previous day and what Martha had told me on the edge of the slope at sundown.

Pharisee interrupted my thoughts, sighing and saying, ‘The council will be stormy and it will oust Bishop Nestorius.’

His words troubled me and drove away the image of Martha which I had imagined among the dancing tongues of flame. I decided to stay silent to give him a chance to elaborate, as he liked to do
whenever he found a willing listener, and I wanted him to distract me from my thoughts. I was right to stay silent, and he did speak at length, just as I expected. He began to trace his words in
the air, as he usually did when he was caught up in telling a story. It was as if he were addressing other people, rather than me. He did not even look at me. With bitterness, he said: ‘You
didn’t believe me when I told you that our dispute over the nature of Christ is the essence of our religion, and that this essence is subtle and problematic, and portends schism and discord.
The monks here made light of the subject, the abbot forbade any discussion of it, the priests in Antioch reprimanded me and warned me of excommunication and expulsion if I wrote the treatise which
I was planning to write. They let me back here only when I gave them a sacred oath that I would never again bring up the question of the hypostasis. But everyone disagrees about this. The Egyptians
insist that God was incarnated fully in Christ from the time He was in His mother’s womb, that in Christ the divine and the human are inseparable, that He is wholly and completely God and the
Lord and that He has no human nature distinct from His divinity. What Bishop Cyril said in his last letter is definitive: the body of Christ was not transformed to become divine, and God never
assumed corporeal form, even when Christ was an infant in swaddling clothes.’

Pharisee looked towards me as though he had just discovered I was there. He looked at me as though he could see someone else hidden within me. Pharisee had a strange way of looking which
confused those who did not know him. He raised his eyebrows, opened his eyes wide and took off his cap to show his shiny bald pate. He wiped his brow with the palm of his hand, and said,
‘Look at Bishop Cyril’s power of expression when he says “God is made one with the flesh hypostatically, for He is the God of all and He is neither His own slave nor His own
master. Like us, He came to be under the law, while at the same time Himself speaking the law and being a lawgiver like God. He is one hypostasis, one person, one nature, son and Lord, and since
the holy Virgin brought forth corporeally God made one with flesh according to nature, for this reason we call her Mother of God.” Bishop Cyril is very eloquent, Hypa, and he knows what he is
saying, and he will never go back on what he has said, and Bishop Nestorius will never retract his belief that God adopted Jesus as a manifestation of Himself, and for the sake of God the unseen we
worship the visible Jesus, aware that they are two persons, that is, according to Nestorius, Christ the Assumer, or the Logos of God, and Christ the Assumed Man who is called by the name which he
adopted.’

Involuntarily Pharisee stretched out his hands towards the flames to warm himself, rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Bishop Nestorius believes what he heard from Bishop Theodore the
Interpreter and others, and asserts that God manifested Himself in Christ the Man. So how can the two sides agree, when each of them has taken a position contrary to that of the other? The further
they go in their doctrines, the deeper they go in their differences and the wider the gap between them grows. Even if they agree on the nature of Christ they will still disagree on the hypostasis
of the Holy Spirit, which is mysterious and confusing. Neither of them will ever accept what they did not previously believe, so all that remains is confrontation, then conflict and then war. War,
Hypa, is a force that finds its way into people and overwhelms them. It flares up and rages inside them, and does not abate until it destroys them. It stirs up strife between them and they lose
heart. Their vigour fails and their spirit is broken. War. Did Jesus Christ mean it when He said He came to earth to bring a sword?’