The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene (15 page)

“But none could prove they were sent from God,” Matthat finished triumphantly. “Come, walk with me back to my place of business in the city. We will refresh ourselves with a glass of wine and talk of Jerusalem.”

Matthat’s shop was located on the Street of the Sun Gate, just off the Meson Pedion in the very center of the city. In the luxuriously furnished apartment adjacent to the shop, a deft slave waited upon them and served them wine. “You are probably wondering what a man who operates an establishment such as this was doing in the Eleusis,” Matthat said with a smile. “I can assure you I was not looking for a girl.”

Joseph smiled. “If you asked me the same question, I would have to admit that I
was
looking for a girl.”

The merchant’s eyebrows rose. “Women are the cheapest of all commodities in Alexandria, and also the most expensive. If you want a woman, you need only to shout from a window in the Rhakotis to find yourself overrun with them.”

“You misunderstand me,” Joseph said. “I am looking for a friend who lives here, or did at one time. She is a singer and a dancer, a very beautiful young woman named Mary.”

“A Jewess?”

“Part Jewish and part Greek. She comes from Magdala.”

“There is no Jewess named Mary of Magdala in the theater here, nor in the Jewish Quarter. I know the area well. But if you want to see dancing—” his eyes lit up— “you must let me take you to see Flamen when she begins her performances next week. Even a devout Jew should not visit Alexandria without seeing the most famous dancer in the Roman Empire.”

“My purpose in coming to Alexandria was to study things I could not study in Jerusalem,” Joseph admitted.

Matthat grinned. “Then we will call a visit to the theater the study of beautiful women. Believe me, there will be little to interfere with your vision.” He put down his glass. “I went to the Eleusis this afternoon to meet a man who must be careful how he shows his face in the city.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those of us who deal in gold and precious stones,” Matthat explained, “buy from all who have such things to sell. Sometimes it is better not to be too sure of the identity of our clients.”

“Thieves!”

Matthat shrugged. “If you would be so uncharitable as to call them such. I prefer to remember that the rich prey upon the poor by working them at low wages, and so it is natural for the poor to rob the rich. If I stand between them and make a profit by selling things stolen from one rich man to another, who is to say that I am either thief or profiteer?”

Joseph laughed. “Your reasoning would put a Greek philosopher to shame. I suppose many thieves are to be found in a city of this size.”

“There are more living than dead in the Necropolis,” Matthat said cryptically. “The police prudently stay away from the catacombs, for they know a man can get a knife in his back without seeing who struck him. But it is a good thing to know that one can always find a refuge from the Romans in the Necropolis, even with thieves. We Jews have had to look for cover more than once.”

“‘Do not men despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his appetite when he is hungry?’”
Joseph reminded him.

Matthat nodded. “The same prophet says,
‘He who keeps his mouth and his tongue
keeps himself out of trouble.’
Remember that, Joseph, and you may find that thieves can make valuable friends indeed.”

A few days after their visit, Matthat came to the house where Joseph lived with Bana Jivaka in the Rhakotis, asking him to come to his shop at once and bring his instruments and medicines. Matthat would tell Joseph only that a friend was ill and he wanted him to give medical attention.

As they waited for an empty sedan chair at the corner of the Meson Pedion and the Street of the Sun Gate by the square called the Omphalos, Joseph had an opportunity to see more of the activity of this great city from its busiest corner. On one side was the Jewish Quarter and on the other the Regia, giving access to the Royal Barracks, the Sema, as the temple-tomb where the body of Alexander lay in a coffin of gold was called, and to the palace itself on the promontory of Lochias with the Temple of Isis close by. It was nearing sundown and people thronged the streets, dodging through a constant stream of chariots, carriages, and sedan chairs to cross the busiest intersection in the entire city.

The hour was too early yet for the courtesans, who rarely showed their faces and as much of their bodies as they dared before darkness, but men were everywhere. Ruddy-faced Romans on the way to their homes from the baths, where they spent most of the day, jostled arrogantly against Greeks and dark-skinned Egyptians. A white-robed prince of the desert tribes that lived beyond the Egyptian Sea, also called the Red Sea, strode through the crowd with haughty mien, until pushed aside arrogantly by a Roman officer in magnificently polished harness, followed by two soldiers with drawn swords in case their leader became embroiled in one of the sudden snarling fights that often broke out here among the many nationalities making up this polyglot city. It was truly said that one could see here in an hour faces from every nation of the world. And of course the Jews were everywhere, for this was the richest of all Jewish cities.

Matthat had to shout at several chairs before one carrying double stopped before him. Four slaves were chained to the carrying handles, lest they drop the chair and run away after receiving the price. A few men controlled almost the entire public chair concession in the city and thus were able to set the prices at which they rented their conveyances. Richer Alexandrians, of course, had private chairs borne by their own slaves, but any man could be carried about the city in a style equaling his fortune merely by hailing a conveyance that was for hire.

Along the Street of Canopus they were borne swiftly through the Brucheion. Swarms of people were moving toward the waterfront and its buildings, where much of the social life of the masses took place in the evenings. Already in the Forum, a hundred separate groups of gesticulating citizens were discussing as many subjects. And travelers from far-off lands were entertaining admiring circles of listeners with their thrilling tales. When darkness fell, the courtesans would saunter from their quarters in the high-tiered buildings along the streets housing the teeming thousands of the Greek Quarter, idling along the Heptastadium while the sea breeze molded filmy draperies to voluptuous bodies with calculated intent. There the gallants could write on the stone parapets with bits of charcoal their choice for an assignation, with the added forethought of the price to be paid. And seeing it, the lady chosen could hurry to the meeting or erase the offer contemptuously because the price was too low.

Through the Rhakotis the chair moved slowly toward the Necropolis Gate, near where the smaller library of the Museum was located close to the Serapeum, the temple to the artificial god created by the Ptolemies to join the worship of Isis and Osiris. The streets of the Rhakotis were narrow, and they were stopped often by trains of mules bearing great bulbous wineskins and baskets of fruit to be sold that evening to the idlers thronging the waterfront.

In the center of the Greek Quarter was the open square of the marketplace, now almost depleted of provisions for it was late afternoon. Here the stalls were loaded during the night, ready for the crowds that came shopping in the morning. But in the late afternoon, it was a wild place of tumbled bales and wrecks of baskets, where squashed fruits and vegetables made the stones of the pavement slippery. In the booths, sellers cried the remaining wares, a few green beans wilted from lying in the open all day, too-ripe berries passed over by discerning shoppers earlier when the produce was fresh, roots of lotus, wilted lettuce, baskets of olives, and all the thousand and one foods necessary to satisfy the varied tastes of so many nationalities.

Near the market were many open-fronted eating places where attendants had already begun setting out viands to tempt the crowds beginning to throng the streets. Mugs of beer; preserved figs and dates; flat cakes, some spiced, some plain; preserved eels; smoked fish; something to tempt every appetite—all were temptingly displayed before the chattering crowd.

Women’s voices shrieked from tier to tier of the high-fronted tenements and across the narrow streets, laughing, singing, shouting obscene jokes, or calling out a frank invitation to men passing on the streets below. They were like the varied instruments of a mighty orchestra playing a symphony in whose notes were the more earthy experiences and urges of human life. But no matter how intently he listened to the voice of the city, nowhere did Joseph hear the sound of a girl’s voice as clear as the bell whose tones it resembled, or the twang of a giant cithara in the wild barbaric dances of the desert country.

Turning southward, the slaves bore the chair toward the Necropolis Gate that gave access to the City of the Dead. They crossed the Agathadaemon Canal leading from Lake Mareotis to the Harbor of the Happy Return, a narrow waterway looking far too small to perform its function of connecting the East and the West. Yet through it passed ships from Upper Egypt and the canal, completed by Darius I, between the Nile and the Red Sea, connected the farthest eastern reaches of the world with the farthest western beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the Western Sea washed the shores of Britannia, Hibernia, and Caledonia.

At the Gate of the Necropolis, Matthat dismissed the bearers and they emerged from the walls of the city itself on foot. To the south lay the stadium, scene of some of Alexandria’s most magnificent religious festivals. The yearly Great Dionysia was held here in the spring, celebrating the resurrection of life through seeds after their death in the warm earth and the breaking forth of new life from the ground that insured a good crop. And here, too, were held the games that the Greeks loved so well.

Matthat turned in the other direction, toward the resting places of the dead near the shore of the lake. Southward on Lake Mareotis was a suburb of palatial villas belonging to the very rich, but in the Necropolis itself the quiet peace of evening prevailed among the tombs. It was hard to believe that thieves lived here among the dead, but Matthat seemed to know what he was doing, for he led the way along a stone-paved roadway that passed directly through the vast cemetery.

Like all cities of the age, Alexandria had long buried its dead just outside the walls. Here, according to the earthly riches of the corpse and his relatives, the tombs varied greatly in magnificence. Almost a solid wall of marble mausoleums had been erected along the stone-paved central road, each with its tablet giving the list of those who occupied the tombs. Behind the rich marble façades was another and less expensive row of tombs between which towered the tall spires of cypress trees and the broader expanse of green pines. As one moved back from the central road, the crypts were less and less imposing, and near the shores of the lake itself was a broad field dotted with graves, the resting place of those too poor to build a tomb or belong to one of the many burial societies. These last had tunneled long catacombs beneath the rising ground farther back from the lake so that they could bury many at different levels and thus more effectively use the rapidly diminishing space left in the Necropolis. Any Alexandrian with a small coin to pay each month could thus insure a resting place for his body.

“I trust, being a physician, Joseph, you do not have the aversion of most Jews to the dead,” Matthat said with a smile.

“‘Death should be looked forward to if it takes the spirit some whither where it will be eternal,’”
Joseph quoted.

Matthat frowned. “I knew the Books of the Law and the Prophets well as a youth, but I do not remember those words.”

“A Roman philosopher spoke them. His name was Cicero.” Bana Jivaka had introduced Joseph to the writings of the great orator, as well as to the opinions of Socrates and others among the Greeks. He had been startled to find that the views of these pagan philosophers on life and religion were remarkably like the things he himself had been taught.

Matthat stopped before a marble-fronted entrance bearing the name of a burial society. When he was sure no one was observing them, he opened the heavy door and motioned Joseph to follow him inside. They entered a narrow passage angling downward into the earth. Beside the door a taper burned, and above it was a rack of unlit torches. Matthat selected one of these and lit it from the taper; then, holding the flame above his head, he started down the passage with Joseph close behind him. It was chilly here beneath the ground, and the floor was damp and slippery.

“We are not very high above the sea level,” Matthat explained, “so some water seeps through the walls.”

“This place is truly fit only for the dead.” Joseph shivered. “The living would soon die of phthisis.”

“Better to risk consumption than be crucified by the Roman soldiers,” Matthat observed. “Have you ever seen a man nailed to the cross, Joseph?”

“Once, in Caesarea. Pontius Pilate executed a fanatic who tried to kill him.”

“From what I hear, Pilate is over-quick to crucify,” Matthat said. “No wonder our people hate him. In this climate men sometimes hang for days on the cross before they die, with the flies torturing them and rats gnawing their bodies at night. The thieves are more merciful than the Romans. They usually manage to put the poor fellow out of his misery while the guards are not looking.”

Deep underground they came upon a barred door. Matthat knocked twice upon it, paused, and knocked twice again. A few seconds later a small window in the door itself was opened and a scowling face peered out at them. “Who is it?” a harsh voice demanded.

“Matthat,” the merchant announced. “Open up, Manetho, we are not playing games today.”

The door was opened, but when they started to enter, a sword barred the passage. To Joseph, Matthat said in Aramaic, “This one is always suspicious. I will handle him.”

“Have you come to cheat us again?” the man called Manetho demanded. “What scoundrel do you bring with you this time?”