Threshold of Fire (3 page)

“All right, punish me then if you have to, but I beg you to leave my family and my friends alone.”

“I can’t leave anyone alone who was discovered on your premises last night. My heart is bleeding, but I must enforce the law.”

“Enforce it then, but don’t insult my intelligence with these elaborate speeches —”

“I wonder if you would be able to maintain this stoical attitude under all circumstances … ?”

“I’ve said what I had to say. Nothing in the world could make me say anything else. And I know my friends — it’s the same for them.”

“This man, this Niliacus… clearly
he
doesn’t belong to your distinguished circle of friends. Perhaps
he
will prove … willing — or should I say, more sensitive to certain methods of persuasion … if that should become necessary … ”

“He’s a complete outsider.”

“I can’t accept that, as long as I don’t know the reason for your involvement with him.”

“It’s a private matter of no importance.”

“I have the impression that you have a strong reason to protect him.”

“I came upon the man by accident in the street — he looked like someone I knew once. After I had invited him to visit my home, I discovered my mistake.”

“And when was that?”

“My slave told you — on the day of the entry of the Emperor Honorius, three weeks ago.”

“And who was it you thought he resembled?”

“That’s certainly beside the point — it has nothing to do with the situation.”

“Nevertheless, I find it extremely interesting.”

“I’m not standing before a nosy old woman, am I — but before the first magistrate in the City —”

“Your insults can only make matters worse. Stop and think about your charming wife Sempronia whom I must still interrogate … You still refuse to answer? Niliacus will certainly tell me everything soon.”

“All I know is that you won’t get to hear what you insist on hearing. Since I am not allowed to defend myself fairly and you’ve obviously made up your mind to destroy me, all discussion between us is meaningless. From this moment, I will not say another word to you.”

The statements of the four others, the guests of
Marcus Anicius Rufus, are identical. They come one after the other, to stand before the Prefect; all — depending on their temperaments and the extent of their self-command — grimly stiff or convincingly indifferent, unshaven, the traces of a sleepless night on their faces, but with their togas correctly draped over arm and shoulder. Just as their host had done, all four ask for lawyers. Four times the Prefect refuses, pointing out that as the representative of the highest authority in the City, he is fully qualified — yes, required — to pronounce judgment in cases like these, behind closed doors, without jury, without counsel, without defense, and within twenty-four hours.

It had not been his secretary’s voice that he had heard. His name had been called, a faint, distant, drawn-out sound: Hadrian! A cry from the sea, against the wind. He was standing then on the bottom step of the broad staircase, with every wave a thin, shiny film washing over the granite. In his dream, he saw the myriad pebbles of the sloping shore moving under the water. Slivers in the mosaic on the floor before his platform gleam like wet stones. The sun is higher in the sky; there are fewer
shadows in the corners of the justice hall. Some sounds are still coming from the doorway through which Quintus Fulcinius Trio has just been led away: footsteps ring in the hollow corridor beyond it. The low voices of the praetorian guard summon the next prisoner for interrogation; their weapons and greaves clink softly against the metal-covered leather scallops of their breastplates.

The Prefect’s officials, arrayed in a semi-circle behind him, whisper together. He can hear the rusde of their garments and the shuffling of their feet as they move about. Someone stifles a cough. He knows that he need only tap his signet ring against the arm of his chair to obtain complete silence, which he values above all else during a session — the wall of living statues behind him underlining the atmosphere of impassive, dignified expectancy which befits his role as deputy to His Majesty. But that he makes no attempt to call his retinue to order, by tapping with the onyx on the index finger of his left hand, is more evidence of the uncertainty which came over him when he saw the prisoners standing before him. He feels thwarted, in some inexplicable fashion checkmated, unjustly deprived of satisfaction, injured in the most essential part of himself: the
belief in his duty. Is this the after-effect of a dream?

Behind the impressive façade with the columns, an impenetrable precipice, and before him as far as the eye can reach, the equally impenetrable sea.

“Hadrian!”

It did not seem to be a summons, nor a greeting. The sound grew fainter, more protracted and melancholy, and there on the most extreme edge of that place without depth, without landscape, he had, on the threshold between sleep and waking, realized in dismay the profundity of his loneliness.

“Niliacus? Nothing more? No last name, no first name? A foreigner?”

“Born on the Nile as the name tells you, but I’ve been in Rome for a long time.”

“So you’re not a Roman citizen?”

“No more nor no less than you yourself.”

The Prefect’s studied impassivity stiffens under the pressure of a sudden instinctive defensiveness; this creates a still deeper silence around him, as if everyone is holding his breath. Who can be more Roman than the City’s highest magistrate sitting in judgment on the dais, his sallow skin stretched, shining as if it were polished, over forehead, cheek
bones and chin, eyes just as dark and opaque as the seal on his finger, accentuated by the immaculate folds which flow from shoulders to toes, horizontal and vertical, pleats and creases, blue white against cream white — the only broken line is the purple band bordering his garments, which seems to be drawn in blood.

For the first time in many years, feelings stir in the Prefect which he thought had been dispelled; they smart like old wounds. He suspects that all the officials behind him have been reminded now of what they have always known: that Hadrian, born and raised in Alexandria, in Egypt, is an imported Roman — yes, he too is a Niliacus — and that this knowledge, despite the respect shown him (his due) could once again (as in earlier days) rouse in his inferiors an intolerable tendency to behave toward him with condescending familiarity. This thought alienates him from the self-image which he has cultivated for so long: his outward appearance, his bearing and the ceremonial toga, seem a brittle shell within which he cringes, vulnerable.

Reason is powerless here. The word “Egypt” — which has been in everyone’s thoughts, but which no one has yet uttered — possesses, perhaps even
before it is grasped by the mind, the force of an exorcism. Pharos, the lighthouse at Alexandria, a white needle in the morning light, a forefinger raised against the sky before us as, from the afterdeck of a ship on its way to Rome, we saw the familiar coastline fade away forever ….

In his dream, the little ship sailed without him. He was called by name, his Roman name: Hadrian! But he must remain behind, an exile in a land only one arcade deep, unreal as the backdrop of a theatre. Marble steps rise to the quays of Alexandria, they rise out of the sea to the colonnades of the buildings. The desolate region of his dreams — was it an hermetically sealed country of origin, an Egypt become inaccessible? How can one tell what is hiding behind there, or lying fossilized in the rocks?

The interrogation continues. More cautiously now, with mounting suspicion — and another feeling, too: a disturbing tension. The Prefect gropes for information about this man in the shabby cloak. A freedman, yes, practicing no craft, no, lives from hand to mouth. No, he had nothing to do with the events in the villa of Marcus Anicius Rufus.

“But you had been in that house once before.
Marcus Anicius Rufus has admitted it.
^”

A shrug, a longer pause than after the first questions.

“What do you want to know?”

“The reason for your first visit.”

“I didn’t visit Marcus Anicius Rufus.”

“Ah, yes, then it was he who approached you. What did he want with you?”

“A while ago I was attacked during a fight in the street —”

“On the day of the entry of the exalted Emperor Honorius?”

“That’s right. Marcus Anicius Rufus saw this in passing and saved me by taking me home with him in his retinue.”

“No one acts like that toward a total stranger.”

“Possibly he mistook me for someone else. I thanked him and left again. That’s all.”

“Whom did he take you for then?”

“I didn’t ask him that.”

“What were you doing near his house last night?”

“I was looking for a place to sleep. Since the Emperor’s entry, there are many people in the City. When I was leaving Marcus Anicius Rufus’s house that time, I saw how peaceful the garden was and
filled with jasmine —”

The Prefect is irritated by this air of indifference bordering on impertinence, from one who belongs without question to the most destitute social caste.

“That’s enough! The City and the provinces are swarming with charlatans disguised as vagabonds who privately perpetuate their pagan hocus pocus for money. Their equipment includes portable altars and cases with sacrificial knives. The praetorian guard have frequently confiscated items like these. Unfortunately, too many of our highly placed citizens, who should know better, are secretly greedy for prophecies and black arts — if not for something still worse. It is curious that you were so close to the villa where, as has been proven, preparations had been made for the sacrifice of cocks. Everything that has come to light during these hearings has confirmed my belief that the mealtime at Marcus Anicius Rufus’s was far from being as innocent as some would like us to think. Both Marcus Anicius Rufus and you must provide me with more credible explanations before I feel I have reason to revise my opinion. Prove to me first of all that Marcus Anicius did not send for you on the recommendation of like-minded friends, that you have never sacrificed a
cock …”

The man facing the Prefect moves a step nearer on the meandering mosaics and raises his right hand.

“I can’t prove anything. Besides, it’s the accuser who must supply the proof. But I swear that I have never sacrificed a cock unless it was in your presence.”

Later — the hearing is suspended until further notice — in an adjoining room where the confiscated books and personal property of Marcus Anicius Rufus are displayed, the Prefect absorbs the full significance of that last remark. As he takes up the rolls of parchment, glances at the wax tablets (the clerks, busy since midnight reading line by line, declare that so far they have found no incriminating material), the words of Niliacus, born on the Nile, hang in the air, a disturbing echo. Why that gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction, even of secret fear? That question is closely connected to another which the Prefect must admit to his consciousness: why, when surprise and displeasure were clearly written on the faces of his officials, did he not go on to interrogate the enigmatic foreigner? To elicit personal details — from which village, which city on the Nile have you
come, what brought you to Rome, when and how, who gave you your freedom?

Indistinct images of the past flash before him, startling because they make the Prefect realize that his past — Egypt, his youth — form a backdrop made of basalt which cannot be destroyed. The mud huts of the Fayyum, lotus blossoms floating on the brown reflecting water of the Nile inlets in the swampy Delta, the long rows of lighted pleasure boats moored outside Canopis, the suburb of Alexandria …. his father’s house … the fragrance of forgotten meals … the sounds of the vernacular which he has not spoken since he was a little child. For more than thirty years, he has been a Roman. Magistrate of the Empire, a vocation for a bachelor who has left all his relatives behind in Egypt, who has no circle of friends and no inclination to indulge in forms of amusement which require intimacy with others… He has dedicated himself completely to the task set him by two emperors in succession.

Because of the painstaking performance of his duty, the fastidious observance of even the slightest detail of procedure, he has become more and more convinced that he has earned the right to his second birth as a Roman citizen. Egyptians are considered
to be capricious, to be oriented toward Greece, filled with an old resentment of a triumphant Rome. Hadrian, honorary Roman, more Roman than the Romans, presumes distrust when there is no reason for it at all; is ashamed — worse, sometimes offended — even when Egypt is mentioned innocently. He does not wish to analyze his reactions; he has chosen to turn his back on the petrifying past; he has tried by drastic methods to free himself from those bonds. For ten years he believed he had banned thoughts of that rupture, painful as a wound ….

But a dream, a sudden encounter with a certain Niliacus (whose last remark seems to have separated them from the others and joined them together) have shrivelled away two decades of Roman grand style. The hand of the other, this Niliacus, raised in an oath …

“I swear that I have never sacrificed a cock unless it was in your presence.”

That piece of stone in the dream, that relief, a raised hand: “I swear…” But what, when, how? Dreams, it is said, are a mixture of memory and premonition … Is it a residue of paganism to think like this, to attach so much importance to a dream? Hadrian has never seen a cock sacrificed.

Never?

Before him on the table are rows of boxes holding rolls of books. The clerks stand waiting for the inspection to end. Once again, the Prefect unrolls one of the volumes. Again, as so often, he is overcome by the need to demonstrate his authority and expert knowledge — all the more after the slight drop in attitude and appearance which no one in the justice hall could have missed. Beautiful letters, regular and even on the page — Marcus Anicius Rufus had capable calligraphers among his slaves. Verses teeming with mythological names… this choice of reading matter only confirms what the Prefect already knows. A shameful devotion to the pagan legacy!