Agrippa's Daughter (16 page)

And it was a matter of patience rather than anger, for Agrippa could never face his sister and be angry. Berenice was the most wonderful and improbable creature in his environment. If the charges of incest constantly flung at his sister and himself were blatantly false, there was nevertheless truth in the fact that he adored her; and now he tried to be reasonable rather than rigid.

“My dear,” he said to Berenice, “you must admit that all this puts me in the most ridiculous position imaginable.”

“I admit nothing of the sort,” Berenice replied. She was very fond of Agrippa, but in the relationship between them she was the mother and he was the child. More than that filled her with anxiety and horror, for in the dark, tangled web that spelled out her relationship to sex and womanhood, the very thought of incest was like a knife into her heart. She had lost two children. Agrippa was her surviving child; she humored him as one would a child.

“Oh, come now,” Agrippa said. “Just look at the thing from my point of view, Berenice. Or from anyone’s point of view. From Chalcis, you wrote to me, agreeing to marry poor Polemon—”

“I will not have you call him ‘poor Polemon,’” Berenice interrupted. “Poor nothing of the sort! He is a large, grown man who has had three wives before me and more women than King Solomon. He is a lecher and a pig—and I think something of a homosexual, too, with this great need of his to prove that he is one huge penis from head to foot—”

“That’s putting it much too strongly, and you know it,” Agrippa said. “The fact remains that you did agree to marry him. You accepted his gifts. You allowed me to bring the high priest here from Jerusalem, and you went through with the ceremony. You married the man. You must face that—you married the man. And then you promptly turned your back on him, retired here to your chambers—and here you have been for the past five days.”

“I changed my mind,” Berenice shrugged.

“You haven’t even kissed him.”

“I changed my mind. I have no desire to kiss him, now or ever.”

“Berenice—you don’t seem to understand. He underwent a circumcision for you.”

“I am thoroughly bored with that circumcision of his. The truth is that I couldn’t care less if they had castrated him. Brother—I am bored with Polemon, his circumcision, his so-called love, and most of all with his whining. Why doesn’t he go back to Cilicia and leave us alone?”

“You know why he doesn’t. Because you are his wife.”

“Well, I have no intention of continuing in that function. I told that high priest of yours that I wanted the marriage dissolved.”

“He can’t just dissolve the marriage,” Agrippa protested.

“He certainly can. He’s the high priest. He can do anything he desires to do, and if he doesn’t do it, we can make certain that he does not remain as high priest.”

“We had reasons for this,” Agrippa began miserably, but Berenice interrupted him again and asked, “Why don’t you get married, brother?”

“Me?”

“Yes—you, brother.”

At that point, he threw up his arms and stalked out of her chamber.

She lay down in her chambers. She said to Gabo, “Do you understand, I will see no one. No reason, no person. No one.” She couldn’t bear the light that poured in through the windows. “Draw the blinds,” she said to Gabo. The darkness was better. She lay in the darkness and allowed sorrow and self-pity to engulf her. Gabo tiptoed put of the room, and when Berenice knew that she was alone, she allowed herself to weep. She wept for a while, and then her hand went to the table by her couch and fumbled here and there until her fingers closed over a small, razor-sharp dagger. But the dagger was no good. Her thoughts of suicide were always ridiculous. She could not even begin the process of bringing them to consummation.

“Because I am a Jew!” she cried angrily. “The most cursed, wretched, miserable Jew that ever lived. The pagans can die as easily and effortlessly as they live—”

She hurled the dagger across the room. She put her face into the pillow—already moist from tears—and remembered her wedding to Polemon. All through it, she had been securely wrapped in a spell, a charm, a witch’s robe; she had walked as confidently and omnipotently as a little girl; and she had been as witless as a person asleep or unconscious. Why? she asked herself now. What had happened to her? Do cattle go to slaughter that way, lost in an idiot dream? And then, already her husband, he had bent to kiss her and she had smelled the appalling foul odor of his breath. He had a bad tooth that had abscessed, and the smell from his mouth was the smell of death stinking and decaying in the hot sun; it exploded her into wakefulness, and she fled. Had anything like this ever happened—in all the history of kings and princesses and weddings—a woman wed to a king, who then was bending to kiss her when she fled? She fled through them all—through the grandees of Cilicia, the noble and the rich who were not so noble of Tiberias, the barons of Galilee, the great landowners of Judea, there by royal invitation, the Jewish merchant-princes of Chalcis, the Syrian-Greek dukes, the Phoenician shipowners, the Roman tax farmers and bureaucrats and administrators, the Alexandrian aesthetes, heirs of the greatest of Jewish houses, the Idumean chieftains in their black and white striped robes, all of them, like all noble Idumeans, tracing some weary, tenuous blood connection to Antipater, the founder of the House of Herod, the Samaritan priests and petty kings and poverty-stricken, illiterate gentry, making their own tiresome claim to the blood of David and the House of David—all of these and so many others, and through them Berenice fled to be away from that hateful smell of death and decay, emanating from this strange, fleshy, loose-lipped man who, through some dim process of memory, she could remember as having married. Long ago? No, the wedding words were still lingering in the air as she fled, and the wedding guests stood aside. No one dared put out a hand to halt her or interfere with her progress. This was Berenice, who was already more of a legend than a reality, clad now in shining white, glittering white, white silk sewn with pearls and diamonds and even tiny rubies where the red sheen flickered about her shoulders—so beautiful that poor Polemon choked with emotion at his first sight of her in her wedding finery; and swore a vow to his pagan gods, still remembered, that he would not only have his wife put to death, but three concubines to whom he still clung—so that he could come clean and unhindered and pure to this radiant vision of loveliness. But the radiant vision of loveliness fled from the palace as if all the hounds of hell pursued her and through the guards outside, tearing away the long skeins of priceless cloth that impeded her progress.

Through the streets she fled, into dark alleys, and then through a postern gate which she wrenched open. All behind her she left a trail of silks and pearls and diamonds and rubies and gold clasps and gold pins and broken bracelets and beads from snapped strings—even the pearl-and-diamond-encrusted slippers which she wore; and finally, barefoot and naked, she found the shore of the lake and almost without hesitating in her wild pace plunged into the warm, sweet water.

Ah—what peace this was, what delight, what sweet and gentle relaxation, what safety, what security there in the black and good waters of Gennesaret! This was her mother and her mother’s womb, and with the perfect freedom of nakedness she swam as easily and noiselessly as some great fish—long, smooth strokes, and behind her the web of her rich red hair undulating and floating on the water. Once she turned on her back to look at Tiberias, at the flickering lights of the city, and she listened to the frantic shouting and watched the waving torches. Let them find her here! Let them look on the lake! God was on the lake. Was there not a rabbi once, as she heard it told, who had walked on the waters of the lake? The lake was filled with magic.

She would swim and swim until all her strength was gone, and then she would give herself to the lake. Gennesaret would take her into its warm bosom. Down, down, down into the deep darkness of eternity. But an hour later, far out on the lake, weary to exhaustion, she found the will to live too much for her, too much for Gennesaret—and swimming slowly, floating, resting, her long copper-skinned body a water thing, a part of the lake and the water, she made her way back. She swam back to the landing where she and Agrippa had played as children and dragged herself out onto the cool stone slab of the dock and lay there panting, whimpering—until she was strong enough to creep through their secret passages to her chambers. The corridors to the chambers were dark. She felt her way. She found her bed and crawled into it, and a moment later she was asleep.

She was awakened once for a moment by Gabo’s sobbing joy; then she slept again.

The high priest at that time was Ishmael Barfabi, a pompous, strutting little man. Young Agrippa’s advisers had persuaded him to appoint Ishmael because of the priest’s connections with the wealthy and powerful Jerusalem House of Homash—and Agrippa himself could readily understand the need for strong connections in Judea. Not only were the Jews of Judea uneasy and resentful under the heel of the Roman procurator who governed the land, but they had never fully given their hearts to the House of Herod, even when Agrippa’s father became a saint of sorts. When the marriage of Berenice to Polemon was announced, opinion was mixed in Jerusalem. Some were flattered that Agrippa would have the ceremony performed by no other than the high priest; others—especially among the highly orthodox—felt that it was rather abject and tasteless, if not blasphemous, for the high priest to go off to Galilee to marry the widow of an incestuous uncle-niece relationship to a heathen. The high priest, however, did as he was told, and he had appeared at the wedding in the full costume of office, purple robe with its hem of golden bells, the pomegranate tassels, the glittering Ephod, the breastplate set with rubies and diamonds, and his great
miznefit
of hammered gold, towering up a foot above his head.

When he wore these ancient and holy vestments in the Temple at Jerusalem, there was no one to observe him but other priests and pious Jews. Here, however, he was the focus for the eyes of all the noble blood and less noble wealth of the Middle East, and he strutted like a little popinjay. A year later he died of snake bite, and this unfortunate accident convinced people that Nehushtan, the ancient serpent-god, had destroyed him for his sins. But this night, when Berenice fled from the man to whom he had duly wedded her, Barfabi felt that the disgrace had descended squarely upon his own shoulders, turning his moment of glory into a beginning of ridicule. He would be remembered as the priest who had driven the bride away from the altar. Or would they say, beware of Barfabi—whom he marries is instantaneously divorced? In any case, when Berenice summoned him the following day, he went to her chambers stiff as a ramrod with irritation and bruised pride. There was a crowd around the door to her chambers, at least twenty men and women who desired to see her but who remained at a safe distance because the door was guarded by the oversized Adam Benur, who had switched his allegiance from Agrippa to Berenice. This had been a simple matter for Berenice, who had smiled upon the overmuscled Galilean soldier and won his undying loyalty; but others put it down to witchcraft and spells—which was the simplest way to explain Berenice.

Benur allowed Barfabi through the door, and then Gabo took him to Berenice’s bedroom, where she lay upon her couch with a saffron-colored robe wrapped around her, her red hair loose and cast over her pillow like a great splash of honey. Seeing her half-bare legs and her naked feet, Barfabi began to mutter prayers and invocations against the whores of the mother-god, only to be interrupted by Berenice who exclaimed angrily,

“How dare you spout that nonsense—what is your name?—Ishmael, isn’t it?”

“I am the high priest, madam!” he cried.

“I know exactly what you are, little man—and if you repeat one more word of that stupid invocation about prostitutes and temples, I will call in that oversized soldier who stands in front of my door, and I will have him put you across his knee and spank you until you are unable to sit down for a week.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Barfabi squealed.

“But wouldn’t I! Don’t you put on airs for me. I know exactly what your family paid my brother’s seneschals for your office, and there are plenty of other priests who are cheaper and more amiable. Now will you behave?”

Breathing deeply, chewing his lower lip in rage, clenching his trembling fists, Barfabi calculated the chances of opposing the queen and then abandoned them. He let out his breath slowly and nodded.

“Good. Now I want you to annul my marriage to King Polemon.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” Berenice said, sitting up now and facing him. “And you will.”

“But an annulment can proceed only out of specific cause. That is the Law. Can I change the Law?”

“Is deception specific cause?”

“What deception?”

“Polemon claimed to be a Jew.”

“He became a Jew.”

“Nonsense,” Berenice declared. “He was circumcised by some Pharisee physician, which meant nothing. In his heart, he remained an idol worshiper.”

“I shall have to question him,” the high priest said warily.

“You will do nothing of the kind. You will annul the marriage. Otherwise, we will find a high priest who is amiable and intelligent as well as pious. Do you understand me?”

He stared at this tall, lean, and beautiful woman who sat on the couch facing him, and he asked himself, Who can go against a witch or a devil?

“I understand you,” he said.

“And do not think that you can turn my brother against me, Barfabi. You are not strong enough for intrigue—nor wise enough.”

But nothing changed the fact that this was certainly the strangest marriage and the juiciest bit of gossip in the entire world—as the world was at that time. In his report to the Emperor Claudius, Cuspius Fadus, the procurator of Judea, said among other things: “While there is precious little of what we would call entertainment in a Jewish world, all of what passes for polite society here is titillated with the astonishing marriage of Queen Berenice, the daughter of your friend Agrippa and sister to the present tetrarch of Galilee. You will recall that she was formerly married to Herod of Chalcis, who was old enough to be her grandfather, and there is some rumor of a previous marriage to the son of the alabarch of Alexandria—who possesses some rank or role or situation in the unfathomable web of Jewish nobility, if you can call it that. Anyway, both the Alexandrian and the king of Chalcis died mysteriously, as did Berenice’s two sons; and I would hardly think that anyone would look forward to an alliance with her. But apparently this Polemon, who is titular king of old Cilicia, and to whom we permit a palace and certain ceremonies in Tarsus, has a suicidal bent. He fell madly in love with Berenice, submitted himself to having his foreskin hacked away in this nasty Jewish rite of circumcision, became Jewish, and then was married to Berenice. But no sooner the ceremony completed than Berenice up and fled. All that wedding night they hunted vainly for her, and finally old Polemon had to go to bed with no other company than his truncated penis. Now I hear that Berenice has ordered the wedding dissolved. Whatever her virtuses or vices, we should be grateful for the diversions she provides—”