Azazeel (33 page)

The questions spun around in my head, but then something strange the donkey was doing caught my attention. We had gone about halfway and it was midday. I found the donkey heading for the bushes
under which we had stopped at noon two days earlier when we were going to Antioch. Under the bushes the donkey’s legs stopped stock still and he began to twitch his ears as though to tell me
it was his lunchtime. Donkeys surely cannot be stupid. They are stoical by nature and stoicism may sometimes look like stupidity, and sometimes like cowardice. It seems I have been a donkey all my
life.

I dismounted and took the wooden saddle off the donkey’s back. He sighed with relief. I tied his front legs together with the rope attached to one of them and hung the nosebag around his
neck. He started to chew the fodder with pleasure, slowly. I had no desire to eat, nor to sleep, not even to think. I leant back against the trunk of a bush and shut my eyes, overwhelmed by a
mysterious sense of relief that I was almost back at the monastery.

After a period of noontime calm, a young man of close to twenty years of age passed by. He came from afar, walking along the paved road, holding the lead of a nanny goat, followed by three of
her kids. He came towards me on the other side of the road and asked me kindly if I needed anything. I thanked him, sat up and asked him if he could possibly find us some water to drink, for the
donkey and me. With great enthusiasm he said there was a well nearby, tied his goat under the bushes and rushed off towards the houses in the town. He came back in a while carrying a large
earthenware vessel gurgling with clean fresh water. I drank from it until my thirst was quenched, then the man took the vessel from my hands, put it in front of the donkey and took the nosebag off
his neck. The donkey bent down to drink. The young man came back to me and sat politely in front of me at the edge of the shade from the bushes. He seemed shy and I wanted to engage him in
conversation as a way of expressing my gratitude towards him. I asked him which town he was from.

‘From this town, father,’ he said, ‘Sarmada.’

I looked towards the town as it slept peacefully under God’s sun, which shines on good and evil alike. The town was small with humble houses, no more than a hundred of them. On the edges
there were a few orchards and groves of olive trees. I could not see anyone at the houses. Could it be that they were sleeping at this middle time of the day, although the days are short at this
winter season? The young man was sitting in silence and I asked him if he was a shepherd, as he appeared to be.

‘No, father,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I work at the olive press on the western end of town and this is my aunt’s nanny goat. I took her yesterday to stay the night at our
neighbour’s, who has a strong billy, and now I’m taking her back to my aunt after she spent the night with the billy.’

‘I understand, my child, I understand.’

The look in the young man’s eyes was no surprise when he mentioned the goat and described it as strong. My donkey was still gulping down the water, enjoying the coolness of it, and the
little kids were nuzzling their mother’s stomach. The young man remained seated at the edge of the shade, facing me. The sunlight lit up his left side, while the shade of the bushes fell on
his right. The man had tucked up his cloak and was sitting cross-legged. I could see his knees and the whiteness of his legs, which were hairless, unlike a man’s. I examined his features and
they seemed more like those of a woman, especially as he had no beard. His hair had a golden streak and his eyes were greenish. His face and his neck had traces of the sun and his hands were
unusually soft for those of a poor man.

The young man was unsettling. I took from my bag a copy of the Psalms written in a fine Greek hand and began to look at it. The man was fidgety as though he wanted to tell me something, but I
pretended to be busy, reciting the psalms in a low voice, and he calmed down. When I stopped murmuring, the man crept towards me, still seated, and said that he would like to confess to me. I
explained to him that confession should take place in church and that a priest should hear it, not a monk like me.

‘But father, the priest in our church knows me and I’m too embarrassed to confess in front of him,’ he answered.

‘Overcome your embarrassment, my child, to show that your faith is strong and to prove that you repent and acknowledge the sin you have committed.’

The young man bowed his head and his face showed a mixture of embarrassment, uncertainty and distress. I looked at him again, scrutinizing his features, and I had a strange feeling about him. He
had a humility and an innocence, with his long white face slightly gaunt. The sparse hairs on his chin made him seem more like an adolescent than a man, and his gentle demeanour made him look more
like a woman. The submissive way he was sitting struck a chord of sympathy in me and led me to wonder what sins this poor, strange young man might have committed. I thought he was just a boy who
was making too much of his mistakes, and I doubted his sins would go beyond the minor and trivial things that people do and which then trouble their consciences until they find someone into whose
hands they can offload the burden of guilt. Confession comforts them by making forgiveness possible and by affirming the compassion of the Lord.

I said to myself, ‘He’s only a young child and it would do no harm if I took pity on him. He needs someone to listen to him and guide him to the true faith.’

‘Listen, my child,’ I said. ‘You can go to Antioch and confess in one of the big churches there,’ I told him.

‘It’s a long way, father, and the priest there might recognize me. I don’t think I’ll meet you again, so hear my confession.’

‘But, my child...’

‘Please, good father, I beg you.’

‘Tell me what you have to confess,’ I said.

I closed the Psalm book, pulled my cap down towards my forehead and bowed my head, preparing to take confession for the first time in my life, and the last. That day I heard from the man things
which I cannot now write down in full, although I did intend to write here everything that happened. But what the man told me was extremely obscene and strange, and it had never before occurred to
me that such things happened. Among the abominations which he confessed was that since the age of puberty he was in the habit of copulating with goats. He would wait until he was alone with a nanny
goat that wanted a male, then in the depths of night he would hold her between his thighs and have his way with her. When he told me this, I did not want to show my discomfort in front of him, so I
stayed calm and stared at the ground where I was sitting, as I tried to put together the words with which to respond, embellishing my answer with verses from the Gospels. But he did not give me
time. After that he confessed that his widowed mother, who was forty, saw him one night as he was in the act with a goat and was greatly distressed for him. She rebuked him soundly as she washed
between his thighs. Then she sat and wept at length, lamenting the poverty that prevented them from finding him a wife.

‘My child, all the poor get married,’ I said.

‘Their poverty, father, is not as extreme as ours.’

I choked in distress and I did not want to hear any more from the young man. But he insisted, broke into tears and started sobbing. When he had calmed down a little he told me that his mother
had committed with him the worst of all sins. One moonlit night in summer, as she was sleeping beside him in their hovel under the broken roof, their bodies met and it happened.

I was so embarrassed by what the young man was telling me that I could not listen to more. The man was going into the details of what he and his mother did together, and I was most distressed.
He told me they did it together most nights and for the first few nights they sinned two or three times. I noticed that he had gone beyond the stage of embarrassment and was now enjoying telling
the story.

I interrupted him. ‘Enough of this, my child, enough. You must keep away from her immediately, look for a good wife and think about your sin through constant prayer and attending
mass.’

‘But she cannot do without me, father!’ he said.

I was amazed at the young man’s brazenness and at the smile of relief that spread across his face. He looked even stranger than before and his eyes seemed suspiciously cold. Were the signs
of remorse which he showed a while ago just an illusion I had imagined? Or was it that he was relieved to have confessed and no longer felt how serious it was to commit this heinous sin? I looked
at the sky far away. A thick cloud was passing over us and I felt it was a long way to the monastery. The shadows had inclined towards the east and it threatened rain. I wanted to set off to finish
the journey back. When I gathered my cloak about me in readiness to stand, the young man asked me to stop.

‘Will you not hear the rest of my confession, my father?’ he asked.

His expression ‘my father’ rang strangely in my ears. His voice no longer had the diffidence of someone distressed, as was the case before he confessed, and I could no longer stay
with him. In fact I regretted listening to him in the first place. I told him the hour was late and I must resume my long journey. He said he had not yet finished his confession and he had even
more serious things he wanted to confess to me.

‘No, my child, there’s nothing more serious than what I’ve heard from you,’ I said.

‘Oh yes there is, good monk.’

‘I cannot listen to any more.’

I stood up hurriedly, stuffed the Psalms into the pocket of my jellaba and put the nosebag under the donkey’s saddle. The man left me to untie the fetter from around the donkey’s
legs without offering to help. Although previously he had followed me like my shadow, I did not expect him to say anything in farewell. But he walked close behind me, almost touching me, and in a
voice that smacked of shameless bragging he told me he now enjoyed what he was doing. I ignored him. He said he did the same thing with his sister when her husband was travelling with a caravan and
she stayed the night with them. I ignored him. He said he enjoyed what he did with her and she enjoyed it too but now she was pregnant by him.

Without looking towards him I mounted my donkey and pulled the reins towards the road.

As I moved away, the young man shouted after me in great anger and suppressed spite.

‘Why are you running away, monk? Stop and hear about the pleasures and delights which you have denied yourself. I have lots and lots of them,’ he said.

I dug my heels into the donkey’s belly and it headed east with all the resolve it could muster. The donkey shot off as though in flight, or perhaps the donkey realized, as I did, that this
was no young man but rather the devil, appearing to us in human form to make a fool of me.

SCROLL NINETEEN

I
reached the monastery before sunset, my clothes sticking to my body with sweat, although the air was cold. My head was ringing with apprehensions
and churning with thoughts. Halfway up the hill leading to the gateway I noticed the abbot sitting on the large square stone with a bible in his hand. He was reading it, which was unusual given
that he knew the four Gospels and the books of the Old Testament by heart. When he saw me, he closed the bible and stood up. His expression betrayed the anxiety hidden within him. I came up to him
and dismounted. I kissed his hand as usual and I could tell from the trembling of his fingers that his mind was troubled, or rather that his heart was perturbed. On our way to his room he asked me
about my journey and what happened in the meeting with Bishop Nestorius. Then in his room he asked me what I had seen in Antioch and he offered me a bowl with a handful of dried fruit.

I started by telling him that I had delivered his letter to Bishop Nestorius and that he promised to carry out the request it contained. I gave him the letter Nestorius had sent him and he
opened it. He looked at it quickly, then folded it up and stuffed it under his pillow. I was surprised that he took so little interest in the letter. I told him that in Antioch I had met the three
bishops and the priest of the church in the capital, all of them in one place. He was not surprised at that, as if he already knew of it. Then I thought I had to tell him about the mission that
Nestorius had intended to send me on and how something had happened and Nestorius had changed his mind.

When I had told the story, the abbot waited a moment, then spoke. ‘My child, there’s no point in you going to Alexandria.’

His words came as a relief, easing the burden of guilt I felt at abandoning Nestorius in his ordeal. Because I was still bewildered by what had happened to me on the way back from Antioch, I
told the abbot about the devil who appeared in the form of the young man on the outskirts of Sarmada. He smiled weakly, shook his head and said, ‘Go and rest, Hypa. As for that young man, he
was just one of those jokers who like to amuse themselves by making fun of monks.’

I prepared to take my leave, without discovering the secret of the abbot’s evident anxiety and without asking him. Before I left his room, as though speaking to himself the abbot said,
‘Azazeel has tricks and disguises that are more subtle and cunning than that. May the Lord bestow His universal grace on all of us.’