Agrippa's Daughter (28 page)

Walking next to Berenice, he greeted her with great formality. There was nothing as elegant or as conscious of itself as an upper-class Jew—no one more eager to contrast a fluidity of manners with a rigidity of premise and notion. He greeted her, apologized for his intrusion, and asked whether he might walk with her.

“If you wish,” she shrugged. “We walk a good distance in the morning, my husband and myself, to the Fountain Gate and then perhaps to the Horse Gate and up the steep steps. There are many people who dislike the climb.”

“I assure you that I enjoy the climb,” Joseph said. “Perhaps you will find me amusing.”

“Perhaps.”

“Or even informative. I beg the opportunity. I have never seen you without your husband before—”

“Then you watch me?” Berenice asked. It was hard to be angry with Joseph Benmattathias. He was nakedly opportunistic, but he made no secret of it; he was as nakedly ambitious. Had he seen her walk by alone and not seized this opportunity, he would have never forgiven himself; but Berenice knew this and he was aware that she knew.

“When I see you, I watch you, Queen Berenice,” he replied. “Like all young, male Jews, I am in love with you.”

“What nonsense—and rather insulting too! Only my age makes you bold enough to say such a thing. If I were ten years younger, you would bite your tongue.”

“I am ready to bite it to shreds now.” He spread his hands. “When I saw that wretched little Roman preening himself in front of you, I bit my lips until I felt the taste of blood in my mouth. It’s there now. Yet it was too evident that you despised him.”

“Indeed?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed, my lady.”

“You miss very little.”

“I try to miss nothing.”

“I don’t care for men like that,” Berenice said slowly. “I don’t like centurions. They are a dirty breed. But I admire Rome.”

“Oh? And might I ask why?”

“Do you admire Rome, Joseph?”

“They have many qualities I admire.”

“As I do. Order and stability—” She spoke in generalities, realizing as she spoke that she was uncertain about Joseph Benmattathias. He nodded soberly at her answer, however, and took her arm to help her down five steps hewn from the naked rock.

“Our city leaves much to be desired. And does the nashi share your opinion of Rome?”

“The nashi?”

“Your husband.”

“Why do you call him the nashi?”

Joseph shrugged expressively. “Everyone knows—am I to think that the cleverest woman in Jerusalem remains ignorant?”

“You risk a good deal with that kind of flattery.”

“And I gain a good deal. Let us accept the fact that we have certain things in common.”

“Such as?”

“Such as a hatred for senseless destruction and a taste for civilization.”

“Because we are Jews?” Berenice asked. “Or because we admire Rome?”

“Perhaps we admire certain qualities in Rome only because we are Jews—just as our being Jews makes us the implacable enemies of other qualities that Rome embraces.”

“Such as?”

“A witless, aimless, and pointless universe,” Joseph replied surprisingly. “Because I am brash, my lady, don’t mistake me for a fool. I am very young by the lights of some and profoundly old by the lights of others. Right now, the Great Sanhedrin is placing the crown of nashi upon your husband. The fact that the crown is only symbolic does not make him less the head of all Israel. He is that, and they had no other choice than to confirm it. There is only himself and his brother left out of the bloodline of Hillel the Good, and his brother is a scholar and a teacher. We want a man of iron.”

“And you think that my husband is a man of iron?”

They had dropped down from the Upper City to the Lower City, steps and steep streets and twisting pavement, and now they stopped for a moment in the wide Square of the Jebusites, where there was an open water gutter where women knelt and washed clothes. There were a stone bench and an olive tree fighting for life in this wilderness of man-hewn stone.

“We can sit here a moment,” Berenice said, sinking down onto the bench.

“Yes—yes.” He was self-conscious with his fine robe. The bench was dirty. “Yes, I will tell you what I think,” he said, his pretensions forgotten for the moment, all of him absorbed in what he was formulating. “I think this, Queen Berenice. I think that the struggle is not between Jew and Roman but between Hillel and Shammai.” He nodded at a little cluster of lean, hard-faced, and ragged Jews making their way across the square. For all of their stained and torn clothes, they walked easily and warily, their hands hidden in their linen vests, long blue threads trailing from the corners of their garments. “Sicarii,” he said softly. “There is Shammai—”

“And where is Hillel?” Berenice wondered.

“There.” Nodding at the women washing their clothes. “Hillel is life and Shammai is death. I despise the ignorant old men who cover their foolishness by talking in riddles. I am not talking in riddles. I talk of life and death. Everything we Jews do, we do to the extreme. We have become enamored of life, and thereby we are enamored of death. We love the sword and we hate the sword. We will use it or eschew it. Think of your own father. Claudius gave him everything—all that a Jewish king could desire and a realm as large as any Jewish king ever ruled before—yet your father had to plot war against Rome. Was there ever such a people as ourselves? We are a nation split in two—and where do the two connect? The House of Hillel says, Thou shalt not kill—and nothing—nothing justifies the taking of human life. Life is God and God is life. Will you do away with the Almighty?” His voice rose. Never had Berenice dreamed that this controlled and aloof young man could thus be carried away. “And what does the House of Shammai say?” he went on. “Death—the meaning of life. By death, life is made pure!”

She touched the dagger that hung from his sash. “Then why do you wear this?”

“Because we are all like that,” he answered moodily. “Shammai and Hillel, inside of us—”

Eight days after this, Berenice gave a reception for the members of the Great Sanhedrin. They had voted Shimeon the nashi, sitting in continuous session for almost seven hours, in the Hall of Hewn Stone in the Temple. Then, when the final ballot had been cast and this man, a common Israelite with no drop of priestly blood or royal blood in his veins, had been named the prince in judgment over all of Israel, even over King Agrippa in the North, the members of the Sanhedrin walked with slow pace into the innermost sanctum of the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary of the Almighty Himself. They walked between two lines of Levites, who held flaming torches to light their way, the Levites resplendent in their blue and orange trappings, the members of the Sanhedrin wrapped plainly in black and white striped robes, a symbol of the desert costume and the tents where the legendary patriarchs meted out the first justice. Phinehas Benhavta, the high priest just appointed by the Sanhedrin, had dressed himself entirely in white, as a priest would on the Day of Atonement, and as the Sanhedrin entered the Holy of Holies, he chanted the ancient unity. Then Shimeon prostrated himself before Phinehas, who anointed him.

No woman had ever seen such a ceremony, and Berenice listened, fascinated, as Shimeon repeated the steps of the process. Berenice felt herself swelling with pride and had to hold back from a desire to touch Shimeon’s face as he spoke, to caress his hands. “This is the man who chose me,” she kept repeating to herself. Her eyes were wet, yet she laughed with delight, and Shimeon said, “There’s no credit or virtue on my part. It had to be either the blood of Hillel or Shammai—and they chose Hillel. God be praised.”

“And what will the Zealots do?” Berenice asked.

“I don’t know—no one knows. We will wait and see, and meanwhile, they have asked me to hold a reception—for the Romans as well as our own.”

It was the event of the season in Jerusalem, and over four hundred guests appeared to pay their respects to Shimeon Bengamaliel—among them one Menahem Hacohen, a tall, exceedingly thin yet handsome man, who was the leader of the Sicarii. He was dressed all in pale blue, but soberly, with no ornament of gold or silver visible, and after he had bowed to Shimeon, he said softly, “We are both Jews. I will remember that. Will you, Bengamaliel?”

Who had invited him, or whether he had been invited at all, Shimeon did not know; and as for Berenice, she had her hands full; by the time the reception was over, Shimeon had forgotten about Menahem. Berenice, on her part, had a hundred other matters to be concerned about, the summoning of the guests in the very short time allowed—only enough time to send postriders to Galilee and have at least a token representation from there—the balance of the guests, who would include not only a handful of the leading Romans in Jerusalem and in Caesarea as well, but Pharisees and Sadducees, Hillelites and Shammaites, Zealots and Herodians—a mixture that could only resolve itself under the masterly control of a particular hostess, and perhaps no other hostess than Berenice. Food had to be planned for and purchased, musicians provided, prejudices shelved for the moment at least—and in the end guests greeted and handled and directed. And all of it on top of the fact that Judea was on edge.

It was more than two decades since Berenice’s father had been murdered at Caesarea—and that meant two decades of Roman occupation and rule in Judea and thereby in Jerusalem. Berenice thought of this as she placed at the head of her list of guests the name of Gessius Florus, the current procurator of Judea. She had known a great many procurators since that day of her father’s death, seven in all to be exact, and all alike in their compulsive, corroding greed for money. No, there was one exception to that—Tiberius Julius, who was an apostate Jew and nephew to the Alabarch Alexander and to Philo, both of them dead these many years. Yet suppose the sickly boy in Alexandria had survived and she had married him? What would the shape of the world be to her now? She shook loose from these fruitless thoughts. The fact of the matter was that a procurator was a procurator, as if shaken from a mold—self-made petty slave traders and businessmen of Rome, who bought their appointment from the emperor and then proceeded to regard Judea as one great tax farm. Why, she wondered, did no one ever equate Rome with money? Why all the splendid words to disguise one plain fact—that she had never known a Roman who did not want money more than anything else in the world? Well, here was her list, and on the top of it, Gessius Florus, a short, plump man of fifty-two, with a protruding belly the size of a large melon. Was he worse than the others? Or was it her imagination? Fadus, the first of them, hated fanatics. How can you govern Jews and hate fanatics? There was a single day when he crucified one hundred and twelve of the immersers, who were doing no more than baptizing themselves in the River Jordan. The second procurator, Tiberius Julius the apostate, would take a father who had broken the law and execute the sons. The third one, Ventidius Cumanus, had provoked a minor civil war between Samaritans and Jews in Samaria—so that two branches of the same folk killed and killed until the streets of every Samaritan city ran with blood. That was when Berenice and Shimeon had gone to Rome to plead for his removal; and Berenice remembered well how the Emperor Claudius had listened to her and wept as the daughter of his old friend told of what took place in Samaria. Cumanus was removed and replaced with Felix, who wanted only money, and after him, Festus, who wanted even more money, and then Albinus, who was half insane in his lust for money, and now at last Gessius Florus, who, it was said, had taken a sacred oath before every god he encountered, including Yaweh, that he would not leave Judea until he had amassed one hundred talents
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in gold, which would make him the most successful administrator in the history of Roman administrators.

Berenice studied his name thoughtfully as she wrote it. After a manner, he would be the guest of honor. He was in residence in Caesarea, but he would cheerfully come to Jerusalem. Two motives would bring him: suspicion and greed.

Gessius Florus said to Berenice, speaking Latin, for his Greek was embarrassingly bad and he could not speak a word of Hebrew or Aramaic, “This would do you credit in Rome, you know. Fine affair—fine party. And the wine—excellent wine.”

“We Jews pride ourselves on our wine, and of course we are honored to have the procurator as our guest.”

“And may I remark upon your beauty? This we do not have in Rome—beauty, yes, but not Berenice.”

“I admire Rome, both its strong men and its beautiful women.”

She passed him on then. Personally, she had to greet hundreds of guests, remember them or recognize them, and say the right thing in the most suitable language to each of them—for while the occasion was in honor of the nashi, no guest came without the anticipation of seeing Berenice. The past fifteen years had turned her into a legend—the mother symbol that the Jews yearned for so passionately, the dim yet fervent memory of Ashtarte whom they had worshiped once in the legendary past, before the fierce and commanding figure of Yaweh had forbidden them to whore after the fertility images. Yet again and again, they would create a mother for Israel, were she Sarah or Rachel or Esther—or now Berenice. They had made a saint of Berenice. Had not the Almighty Himself chosen her? Did she change? Did she grow older? Did her beauty wither or become less? Was there ever a streak of gray or white in the red flame of her hair—the blooded hair where the finger of the Almighty touches the seed of Aaron?

“No,” said old Anat Beradin, who had journeyed down from Galilee to be here, “no, my child—time has exempted you. We grow old, we wither, we die, but Berenice does not change.”

“Berenice gets old and still and tired,” she told him. “And God bless you for coming. It’s good to see old friends. We have been too long here, and my heart yearns for my homeland.”

“As we yearn for you. Is your brother here?”

“He’s in Alexandria, and he did not dare leave now. Kings or nashis or Sanhedrins—we all exist by virtue of the bankers in Alexandria—and between the banks and the Romans, well—”

She greeted Shimeon’s brother Hillel, Britannicus Galul, the new proconsul from Damascus, Atak Phen, the Egyptian shipping lord, whose fleet of wheat barges poured an unending stream of grain into Rome; she greeted the old, old man, Isaac Benabram, the archon of her own Tiberias, and young Rabbi Tava, only nineteen years old. She greeted the members of the Sanhedrin, fighting desperately to control the sequence of names.