Azazeel (21 page)

The monk and the boy tried to support me but I pushed their arms away. After stumbling twice I managed to stand upright. In my left hand I grabbed the cross hanging on my chest and yanked it,
and the thread around my neck broke. The monk and boy were shocked and the woman broke into tears. I felt a sudden relief when I pulled the cross from around my neck and dropped it to the ground to
the amazement of the three. The monk bent down and picked it up and the boy took two steps back towards the wall, and the woman wailed. I moved away, fleeing them, escaping everything.

My steps led me to the Canopian Way, and I followed it eastwards without knowing why I was walking in that direction. I was roaming without forethought, without reflecting on my purpose. I
noticed nothing along the way, until I emerged through the Sun Gate after dark. As soon as I went through the gate I ripped my cassock at the front and it hung down at my sides. I walked through
the Jewish quarter with its houses stretching along the eastern wall. Their dogs barked behind me and almost grabbed the dangling shreds of cloth, and the night was pitch black.

I met no one along the way, neither Jews nor non-Jews, as though not a living soul remained in the whole world, neither human or jinn, angel or devil. The Lord was not with me, or was resting
after a new creation which he had made in another six days. Alone I wandered over mud and sand, along the edges of sea, lakes and salt flats... away from Alexandria.

In the middle of the night I reached the village of Canopus but I did not go in lest someone see me or I see someone. In the early morning I crossed the Canopian branch of the Nile on a decrepit
wooden ferry with two oars. Around me were peasants, a goat and sacks full of grain. The owner of the ferry did not ask me for the fare, and I kept walking eastwards. I don’t remember the
villages and fields I skirted, other than some scenes which now seem like a dream, and images of the lakes I passed, lakes where reeds grew so high they looked like giant thorns stabbing at the
sky. The first verses of the Book of Habakkuk kept coming back to me: ‘How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not
save? Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.’

I wandered like the Jews in the years of their great wandering in the Sinai desert to which I was heading. Why did my steps take me towards Sinai? Was that part of a divine plan which I did not
understand? Or was fate playing with me, giving me a taste of every vicissitude, that I should see Christians in this country carry out deeds which I would never have imagined? When I meditate
today on the works of fate, I wonder why I left Alexandria through the eastern gate. Was not the western gate closer? Or did I perhaps want to put my years in Alexandria behind me? I went in by one
gate and left by the one opposite, as though my stay was just a transient passage which I wished I had not made. Would it have been more appropriate to head west that day and spend the rest of my
life in one of the five peaceful cities of the Western Pentapolis dotted along the shore of the sea in the Libyan desert? Are they not distant cities fit for my heavy soul? Or perhaps I turned away
from them because those cities are subject to Alexandria. If I had gone there at that time, I would not have met Nestorius in Jerusalem nor seen Martha here, and fate would not have played games
with me nor sprinkled salt on my wounds. Even today I find no answer to my questions and have no choice but to say that it was the will of the Lord, the Lord secluded behind the panoplies of His
mysterious wisdom or behind our chronic inability to understand who we are and what is happening around us.

‘There’s no need to talk about that now, Hypa, go back to your story and finish it off, because you are running out of time, for in twenty days you will leave this
monastery.’

‘Azazeel, don’t you ever sleep?’

‘How could I sleep when you are awake?’

I kept walking eastwards, inanimate. I was hurrying towards an unknown goal and at some point I realized that I did not even know my own self. My past life no longer existed.
Thoughts and images crossed my mind without taking root, just as my feet stepped along the ground without stopping. I felt that everything that had happened to me and everything I had seen in the
past days and years were nothing to do with me. I was someone else, not the person that once was and now was no more.

I reached an open area at the end of the Nile Delta, where the land meets the sea in vast marshes, where the water is a mixture of salty and fresh and deep enough only to reach my knees. Dunes
of black sand stretched as far as my eyes could see. Here on the surface of the water I threw away my shredded cassock and my head cap. All I had left on was my inner linen gown.

When I threw the clothes away, I felt somewhat relieved of a burden. The late morning breezes rippled the water as I waded in, and with the ripples I felt that I was not walking but flying off
to a new world. There was nothing around me as far as I could see in all four directions. Just the shallow water on all sides. I spoke to myself out loud, in Coptic. ‘Here the land merges
with the water and the sky, and here I shall start anew.’ The idea came over me and suddenly captured my imagination. I took off what I was wearing and piled it on top of one of those sandy
domes which protruded from the water here and there. Then I waded in until I lost my footing. I headed north and met the wind with my bare chest. I opened my arms wide and started to recite a
prayer I had never read in any book, nor heard at any mass.

I began to repeat this prayer with my eyes shut. And with every repetition my voice grew louder, until after dozens of repetitions it became a roar that filled the void around me. The primal
void from which things began. When the sun reached its zenith and I no longer cast a shadow in any direction, I bent down and scooped the pure water into my hands. I stood up and threw the water on
to my head to wash away everything that had happened. I baptized myself and in that sudden moment of insight I gave myself a new name, the name I am still known by – Hypa – which is
just the first half of her name.

After the baptism I picked up my clothes, and when I was dressed I felt like the other person who had been latent inside me. Now I am Hypa the monk, not that boy whose father
was betrayed by his mother and killed in front of his eyes. I am not the adolescent who was brought up by his uncle in Naga Hammadi, nor the young man who once studied in Akhmim. I am the other
person, aided by the mysterious kingdom. I am the twice-born.

My shadow lengthened in front of me as the sun declined towards sunset, and I walked behind my shadow, which led me to the east. Without expecting an answer, I asked myself, ‘Should I walk
on to Jerusalem, to seek there the origins of Christianity, or should I keep walking until I reach the place to the east where the world begins, or should I look deep into myself to discover my own
east and comprehend the godhead?’ I did not wait for an answer because all answers are one. It is the questions that are many.

Shortly before sunset I reached a place where the borders were clear between the land, the sea and the sky and again I saw in front of me trees and people, and realized for the first time that
people are like trees and trees are like people, although people have shorter lives. On the edge of a village where fishermen lived, I spent the night leaning my back against an old dilapidated
wall that looked about ready to collapse. I slept in a sitting position and in the morning I went into the fishing village. There were not many people in the few houses. I asked a man as thin as
me, who was making nets, if he needed my help. He helped me over my hunger with a bowl of fish soup with pieces of white fish meat in it. The fish in those regions are different from the fish I
knew in my home country. Fish from the sea is bigger, tastes better and is better suited for human consumption. Before then I used not to eat fish, but that day I took to it as though the person
who once did not eat it was someone other than me.

I spent days with the man making his nets, eating with him the food that his old wife brought us twice a day. Then I took leave of him to continue my journey eastwards. A few days later I
arrived in a town by the name of Damietta, inhabited by fishermen, boat builders and some merchants. I passed three months in this town, or maybe even a few days more. By day I worked as a
carpenter in the shipyards and at night making nets, and I slept only a few hours a night. The boss was the chief fisherman there and had about twenty apprentice workers such as me and about the
same number of fishermen and skilled craftsmen. The man was a Christian, if one assumes that a good man must have a religion. He really was good, although he was rich. Why did Jesus the Messiah say
it was harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? I once told that man in Damietta that his job, combining fishing with boat-building,
was the best job a Christian man could do, because St Peter the Apostle, the rock on which the church was built, used to work as a fisherman, and Joseph the carpenter had brought up Jesus the
Messiah. The man smiled and said, ‘I know that, but I did not choose fishing or carpentry. My father and my grandfather before him chose them for me. If I had had the choice, I would have
preferred to be a farmer, so that I would not always be frightened that the sea will swallow up one of my men.’ He shook his head in anguish and proceeded to inspect the work of the
carpenters and fishermen.

After a few weeks staying in Damietta, I started to prescribe medicines for the sick, and they would recover. That made me famous there as a physician. But I was in a hurry to leave them,
especially after I turned down an offer from the chief to stay among them forever and take a wife from among them. I bade them farewell and left Damietta. The chief pressed some money into my hand
and gave me a bag with a gown of goat’s wool, a traveller’s blanket and some dry food. It was winter and I left at dawn, and Jerusalem was my goal.

I walked east for days and the green fields became fewer and fewer. The views of the sea and the blue lakes disappeared behind some hills, and the colour yellow prevailed. I was at the gates of
Sinai with its unbroken deserts and all the desolation, poverty and sterility they entail. At the edge of the desert there stood a humble monastery, alone in the midst of the sands, and solitary in
appearance. I noticed it from afar but I did not approach it, and I did not ask myself what I would eat in the Sinai desert, for there are no green herbs there for me to pick and stuff in my belly,
as I used to do earlier on my journey. In fear of the wilderness I had chosen, I spent the night under a friendly tree within sight of the monastery at a distance. At dawn a monk from the monastery
saw me when he went out early to graze their sheep and goats. He came up towards me with a loaf of bread in one hand and his shepherd’s staff in the other. I had not spoken to another human
for two days, but I could not avoid speaking to him once he kindly offered me the loaf.

‘Good day, brother. My heart tells me you are hungry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Are you planning to cross the desert in that gown and without a mount?’

So began our conversation, which ended in a way I had not expected. In this frail monk I found something I had not found in the monks I had met before – anxiety. He told me he was
originally from Damietta and he had fallen in love with a girl there but they forced her to marry another man, and so he chose the monastic life. That happened to him when he was twenty years old
and now he had reached thirty, and throughout his ten years as a monk he had asked himself every day if his decision had been wrong or right. His honesty left a good impression on me and I listened
to him. I spoke at length to him, and he to me. I told him what drove me out of Alexandria to wander on my way. He made light of it. He did not know of Hypatia and had not heard of her death. He
made light of what I told him because he was contemptuous of everything that had happened or would happen in the course of events. His disdain for everything amazed me, and I was yet more amazed at
the levity with which he said that if his beloved came back to him he would abandon the monastic life, or become a priest in a church, or go back to carpentry with his father. But, by his own
account, he knew she would not come back and so he would spend his life as a monk.