Azazeel Read online

  I was so full I thought I could never be hungry again. When I closed my lips tight to decline the last morsel, she brought it back to my mouth until I opened it. Her right hand reached out gently for the bottle, and with charming tenderness she stretched out her left hand towards my left shoulder and pulled me down gently towards her breasts.

  I was shocked and I shouted at her in alarm, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’ll give you a drink of the sweetest Alexandrian wine, my way,’ she said.

  Her way was that I rest my right cheek on her left breast, until half my face was flat against the softness of her ample breasts. I resisted her a little and then gave in. Close to her I did not sense any danger of sin, but rather I felt that I was diving into her and forgetting everything else. When she put her left arm around my shoulders I felt she had enfolded me for ever and that my separate existence had ebbed away until it vanished in her warm embrace. With her right palm she started to bring the bottle to my lips and tease my mouth with the mouth of the bottle. Then she poured into me sips of her heavenly wine. I had never tasted the equal of this wine and since those days of mine with Octavia I have not tasted any wine at all. When I had drunk my fill, I shut my eyes. I felt a drowsiness permeate my senses, taking me up to seventh heaven. I did not open my eyes until I heard her say, ‘Drink some more. Wine is good for you, my love.’

  ‘“Your love”, how can you say that?’

  ‘Don’t ask, and don’t argue with mermaids. Shut your eyes so you feel me more,’ she said.

  The sun was preparing to set, and the silence around us was total, except for the sound of the waves. I shut my eyes in spite of myself and could not resist her overwhelming Alexandrian presence. It seemed to me that she was right, and when I shut my eyes on her breasts, I did feel her more, and when she ran her right hand gently across my neck, I went into a trance. She began to caress my shoulder blades and run her fingertips over my hard bony chest. I felt her left hand kneading my flesh and the aromatic breath of her sighs brushed my face. Her right hand found its way into my pants, which were still soaked with salty water and semen that had leaked out. Her hand was plunging down, invading my terrain, and I surrendered completely, from the tips of my toes to the parts of me that were huddled in her embrace. When the palm of her hand touched my right knee and she pulled me forcefully towards her, I lost control completely. I was Adam when he was about to leave the Garden of Eden because he was about to enter Paradise and eat again from the tree. Driven by this forbidden lust, replete with magical allure, I was about to take her right then and there.

  ‘Easy, my love. Your body is wet with seawater. Your body, my love, is firm as a tree in autumn. How I love how that tree is firm!’

  At that time I was not myself. I felt as though the firmament above had stopped turning and the Nile far away had ceased to flow, and there were no humans left on the face of the earth and the angels had vanished from heaven. I ejaculated inadvertently, and she laughed. I wanted to wrap my arms around her but she resisted. Coquettishly she pushed my hand off her shoulder, then pulled it towards her mouth and kissed the tips of my fingers. She prolonged the kiss, and when I felt her tongue touch the fingertips, I came close to fainting.

  ‘The sun has set, my love. It will turn cold. Come to the house. It’s nearby and no one is there but the goodly doorman.’

  I sat up straight, and she nimbly gathered off the ground everything she had unloaded from her basket – the white cloth, the empty wine bottle, and the silver bracelets she had taken off while she was putting food in my mouth. When she stood up like a spreading holm oak, and I like a stiff palm, she explained to me in a whisper (though there was no need to whisper, since we were alone) that I should follow close behind her and she would lure the house guard away from the gate.

  I walked not too far behind her and saw her say something to the elderly guard. Then the man disappeared from sight behind the silent houses, followed by his emaciated sheep, which had looked towards me in the same way as dogs look. I stepped forward towards the big house and she was waiting for me with a smile at the gate. The guard’s room was attached to the outer wall and behind the wall there was a large garden and then in the centre an elegant two-storey building raised on sturdy pillars. She quietly shut behind us the gate of the neat garden, full of colourful bushes and flowers which in the light of the sunset took on a pink hue that enhanced their splendour. I looked around, wondering to myself: ‘Could Paradise be more beautiful than this place?’

  It was like a wonderful dream from which I did not want to awake. Octavia opened the house door with a brass key which she took out of the light palmwood box and gestured to me to enter. Kingdom of heaven!

  In a whisper I said to her, ‘What’s all this luxury?’

  She smiled and took my arm to her bosom. She clutched my hand with one of hers and with the other she picked up a lamp which gave light without smoke. On our way from the vast hall to the upper floor I saw beauty all around me. As Octavia walked along with her lamp my eyes would fall upon a niche of decorative marble or an extraordinary statue of one of the pagans’ false gods, or fine silk coverings skilfully embroidered. The stairway linking the two floors was all of white marble and each step was carved with a different design, with decorative touches using coloured marble inlaid into the white. Each step had its own motifs, different from those of the other steps. How much money and time, effort, artistry and craftsmanship went into making this stairway! Even the remains of the amazing temples spread along the Nile valley, which the long-living ancients built over many years,4 do not show such precision or craftsmanship. I asked myself at the time, ‘Will our religion give to future generations beauty such as that which the pagan times have offered us?’ This question continues to nag me after all these years and remains without an answer. Oh Octavia, oh the memory of your enticements, and your time which is passed.

  She lit another wick. Its light, and her light, shone out at the head of the stairway. I looked behind me and on the floor of the hall below I noticed an image drawn in mosaic tiles. That night I could not make out the details but in the morning I discovered it was the picture of a dog. I was surprised and Octavia explained to me what was behind it: ‘This sad dog, depicted in a large circle out of small pieces of marble, with a spilt bowl of milk next to it, was a dog that belonged to the Sicilian master, who wanted to immortalize his faithful dog when the animal was dying of some disease. So he commissioned skilful artists to depict it on the hall on the ground floor in front of the staircase, so he would see it every day when he came down the stairs from the upper floor.’

  On the upper floor of the house there was the bedroom and when I saw it, I asked Octavia: ‘If this is the merchant’s bedroom, then what would a king’s bedroom be like?’ She answered to the effect that her master was obscenely rich and I could spend the night in his bed if I wished. Naturally I declined.

  At the time my mind was preoccupied with this Sicilian merchant, about whom I learnt from her that he was not fully Sicilian and that it was his father who moved from Sicily to Alexandria in his youth with his family. At first I thought he must be deranged, even if he was rich and loved the arts and was loyal to his dead dog. He was a strange case, this man, commemorating his wife, who had died years before his dead dog, with only a single statue in his vast bedroom, while he immortalized his sad-looking dog with this extraordinary mosaic. The next day Octavia told me that the owner of the house wept for months when he walked over the dog depicted on the floor. He wept for months for a dog! I puzzled at the strangeness of this new world and then I remembered my native country, where the dogs are pitiful, along with the people.

  I spent three nights in succession with Octavia on the roof of the house, and no one else was aware of us. I decided nothing. From the first night on, it was she who took me from the upper floor of the house to the place where she lived in the rooms above. She took me up to the heights with confident steps. After the big staircase, we climbed another sm
all stairway, which took us to her spacious and charming room, carefully constructed on the roof of the house. Around it the roof was paved with marble tiles, surrounded by an elegant wall. Around the edge of the roof stood short columns in the shape of graceful naked women, carrying between them a long marble table carved to depict various fruits. In the equally spaced gaps between the naked statues the sea was visible, and the sky floating above the sea. I wanted to move closer to the wall to see the magnificent view from there, but Octavia warned me that if I did so I might be spotted by the guard, who was unaware of my presence.

  When we went into her room, Octavia lit a metal lantern which beamed its light around the room, and with an unexpected kiss she lit a flame inside me too. Until then I had known the word ‘kiss’ without understanding what it meant. She hugged me and told me softly that she could smell on me the scent of the sea she loved. Then she asked me to wait a moment and tottered over to the wall. She called the guard and told him something I could not make out, then came back smiling and reassured, to take me into the bathroom next to her room. It was a small room with a marble tub in the middle, similar to the grey granite sarcophaguses common in the caves in my native country, except that this tub was of white marble, had short legs and was carved on the sides with pictures of wrestlers.

  With a laugh she pushed me towards the marble tub. I stepped towards it timorously. With her hands she lifted my gown and I did not stop her, then she sat me naked in the middle of the tub and started to pour the sweet water around my trembling body. I yielded to her, enchanted by everything around me. She poured an aromatic oil into the tub from a bottle on a nearby shelf, then took some water in her cupped hands and began to scrub my hair. She left me to finish off washing and when I had finished I stepped out of the marble tub, taking care not to slip, but heedless of falling submissively into the chasm which I was approaching. I put on the short loose gown which Octavia had given me when I went in.

  When I came out I found her in another dress, not the white one she had been wearing. In the moonlight the new dress seemed even whiter and more revealing. At the bathroom door she clung to me, embraced me at length with a love untainted by lust. She sighed and my chest touched the warmth of her bosom. Then she let go of me to spread a carpet on the marble surface of the roof, a carpet neither eastern nor western, unlike any carpet I have seen before or after. It was more highly decorated than other carpets, and larger, softer to the touch and with finer colours. Its embroidered edges were the limits of our world throughout the night, until the rays of the morning sun dislodged us from it.

  Octavia brought from her room everything we might need – a jug of water, a silver bowl of fruit, two pillows and a blanket of soft coloured wool. Her fragrance enveloped me when she sat close by me, whispering how important it was that we should lower our voices so that the guard would not hear us, the guard on duty with his sheep outside the wall. Then she stretched out comfortably on her back, smiling at the faraway moon. I almost overcame my usual hesitation and stretched out my hand to touch her breasts, but she asked me to be patient and brought the bowl of fruits closer to me. The fruits were of a kind unfamiliar to me and I had never tasted anything so delicious. She asked me in a whisper about the fruit in my country. ‘Limes, doum fruit and dates,’ I answered with a subdued laugh.

  I moved closer to her without touching. She lay on her back again and had me stretch out next to her. The stars were like the stars in my home country, and the heavens like the heavens that were there, but the Earth was different, and I was different.

  With her soft fingers she started to play with the tips of my fingers, and when I looked towards her I saw a tear run down from the corner of her eye. Before it reached her ear I wiped the tear away with the fingers of my left hand, and asked her, ‘Why are you crying now?’

  ‘That’s a long story,’ she answered tersely. Then she wiped the rest of her tears from her eyes and leant over towards me. She was resting her head on her left arm and pinning me down with her right arm draped across my chest. She wanted, as she said, to look at me at length because she had waited a long time for me. I did not understand what she meant and when I asked, she said, ‘I’ll tell you everything tomorrow morning. But for now let me see you shine like a dream by the light of the moon.’

  ‘I don’t understand a thing. What do you want of me?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not important that you understand now. What matters is that you feel! Tell me, my love, how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-three or twenty-four,’ I said.

  ‘I thought we were the same age. So I’m five years older than you, but anyway you are taller than me and more beautiful. Come to me.’

  With the palm of her right hand, which was lying on my chest, she turned my face towards her, leant towards me and gave me a silken kiss. She was fulfilling her wish, without allowing me to fulfil mine. I was thoroughly aroused and her seductive charms had lit a fire within me. I suppressed my desire for her until it subsided, and I decided to stay calm because I felt a certain anxiety creep up on me. She asked me if I thought her beautiful, and impetuously I said she was the most beautiful of women.

  ‘And have you known many women?’

  ‘No, you are the first woman to touch me. I mean, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. Believe me.’

  ‘I’ll never ever believe you. Come on, tell me about the women in your faraway southern country.’

  ‘They are tough like me, and sad. You are very different, prettier and gentler. You are an exception among women.’

  ‘Ah, you are so eloquent,’ she said.

  Her phrase encouraged me and I sat up straight a little to face her and tell her with pride that I knew by heart the poetry of Homer and Pindar, and that I had read all the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

  ‘You are well educated. Have you come to Alexandria looking for work?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I’ve come to finish my medical studies,’ I answered.

  The word ‘medical’ had a magical effect on her. She raised her eyebrows and her face beamed with a smile that showed her sparkling teeth. The light of the moon enhanced their whiteness and their sparkle. She bent her face – in fact her whole body – towards me and pushed me flat on my back again, throwing herself at me passionately. Until then I had thought that when a man is alone with a woman he mounts her, but what happened then is that she mounted me. I cannot write down the rest of what happened between us on that first night, our night. It was full of the forbidden pleasures which brought Adam out of Paradise. I wonder, did God expel Adam from Paradise because he disobeyed His order, or because, when he discovered secretly Eve’s femininity, he understand his own masculinity and how he was different from God, although God had created him in His image.

  In the morning the sun disturbed us and forced us into her room. In the room I learnt from her that she was the widow of a poor man who used to work with her in this fine house. She objected strongly to my calling her house a palace. Sadly and gently she said: ‘You haven’t seen the palaces there were in the Brucheum.’ She meant the royal quarter of Alexandria. My imagination ran riot thinking how they might be, these palaces which I had not seen, and would never see. At the time I was sitting on her bed and she was on top of me again. She again asked me how old I was, and when I said twenty-three she quickly replied that even if she was five years older than me what mattered was not the age difference between us. She said with passion that women who love men younger than them make them the happiest of men and that she would make me the happiest of the happiest.

  Stupidly, with intent to tease her, I said that Cleopatra, when she fell in love with Mark Antony, did not make him a happy man. She turned him into a man who killed himself, defeated, disowned by his family and friends, and divorced from his wife who was the mother of his children. Looking deep into her startled eyes, I said, ‘His wife was called Octavia, like you, and she was the sister of the ruler of Rome, Octavian, his old friend whom he
turned against, and they became enemies after they had been like brothers.’

  She interrupted me, her cheeks flushed in anger. ‘Enough of those old stories and believe what I say. I will make you the happiest man in the world,’ she said.

  ‘How? I mean why?’

  ‘You are full of questions. I’m going to leave you for a moment now. Stay here and I’ll tell you everything when I come back.’

  She left me drowning in confusion, thinking that things had taken a strange turn. One day earlier the current had almost swept me out to the treacherous sea and now this delightful woman was taking me I knew not where. Somehow I fell asleep; then I woke up when she came back carrying food, which I could tell by the smell.

  ‘Octavia, I don’t eat fish,’ I said.

  ‘Fine, we’ll eat anything else. I’ll give the fish to the guard, and I’ll bring some cheese and grapes for us.’

  I did not answer, and she did not await an answer. She stood up hurriedly and came back after a while, wearing a serious expression which she had not had the day before. As on the first occasion she started to put the food in my mouth with her hand. I was not hungry and she ate only a couple of mouthfuls. She took away the plates from between us and sat down affectionately next to me, smiling at my surprise and anticipation. Then she began to tell me the story.

  I still remember how she sat and her gestures as she spoke. In fact I still remember her words to the letter.

  ‘After my husband died I wanted to devote myself to the gods and serve one of the temples still remaining in the city. The Sicilian master did not agree. He loves me as his daughter. It’s he who taught me to read, when I was ten years old.’

  ‘And why did he stop you serving in the temple?’

  ‘He said that the gods no longer need anyone to serve them, but people to weep for them. He gave me advice, saying, “Mourn a while, my daughter, for mourning is human, and with time your sadness will diminish, as with all things human, and one day you will find another husband.”’