by Jan Potocki
My grandfather wept at the sight of someone who was setting off for Jerusalem. He gave Dellius a letter for Hillel, and the sum of thirty thousand darics, with instructions to buy on his behalf the finest house in Jerusalem. Dellius came back three weeks later. He informed my grandfather at once of his return, but let him know at the same time that he would not be able to see him for four days because he had business at court. When he eventually came to the house, he said:
‘My dear Hiskias, here is the contract of sale relating to the finest house in Jerusalem, that of your father-in-law. All the judges have set their seal to it and the act is in due form. Here is a letter from Hillel, who will continue to live in the house until you get there and will pay you rent. As for my trip, it was highly enjoyable. Herod was not in Jerusalem when I got there. His mother-in-law, Alexandra, invited me to supper with her two children: Mariamne, who had just married Herod, and the young Aristobulus,3 who was intended for the high priesthood but who found himself passed over in favour of a fellow from the gutter. Aristobulus looks like a god come down to earth. Picture the face of the most beautiful woman imaginable on the shoulders of the most handsome youth. As I have been speaking of nothing else since my return, Antony has said that they both simply must come here.’
‘What a very good idea,’ said Cleopatra in reply. ‘Invite the wife of the King of Judaea here and in no time you’ll have the Parthians swarming all over the Roman provinces.’
‘Well,’ said Antony, ‘at least let’s have this handsome youth come. We’ll make him first cupbearer. Although I am not concerned about how beautiful slaves are, I would like those who serve me to be from the very best Roman families, or if barbarians, at least sons of kings.’
‘Splendid,’ said Cleopatra. ‘Let’s summon Aristobulus.’
‘Oh God of Israel and Jacob!’ exclaimed my grandfather. ‘Did I hear what you said? An Asmonean4 of the purest blood of the Maccabees, a successor of Aaron, will be a page to the uncircumcised Antony? Antony, who has given himself over to every manner of impurity! I have lived too long, Dellius! I am going to retire, rend my garments, put on sackcloth and cover my head with ashes.’
My grandfather did as he said he would. He shut himself up in his house and wept over the tribulations of Zion; tears were his meat day and night. He would certainly have died of grief if Dellius had not arrived and shouted at his door, ‘Aristobulus will not be Antony’s page. Herod has made him high priest! Herod has made him high priest!’
My grandfather opened the door, took heart somewhat from this news and began to live with his family again as he had done before.
Some time later Antony left for Armenia and Cleopatra followed him, intending to procure Arabia Petraea and Judaea as gifts. Dellius undertook the journey with them and gave a detailed account of it.
Alexandra had been confined to her palace on Herod’s orders and had decided to escape with her son to see Cleopatra who, if the truth were known, was curious to set eyes on the handsome high priest. A person called Gabion5 discovered the plot and Herod had Aristobulus drowned in his bath. Cleopatra asked that his death be avenged but Antony replied that the king must be master in his own kingdom. To appease Cleopatra, however, he gave her a few towns that belonged to Herod.
‘After that,’ continued Dellius, ‘we were witness to a great deal more. Herod, a real Jew at heart, leasêd back from Cleopatra the provinces she had taken from him. We went to Jerusalem to negotiate this affair. Our queen wanted to give a seductive tone to the proceedings, but the good princess is fully thirty-five years old and Herod is in love with Mariamne, who is only twenty. Rather than respond to her blandishments he called the council together and proposed to have Cleopatra strangled, going so far as to assure them that Antony was tired of her and would be obliged to him if this were done. Fortunately, the council pointed out to him that although Antony would have been pleased to be rid of Cleopatra, he would still avenge her death; and they were quite right.
‘On our return we learned other news: Cleopatra stands accused in Rome of having bewitched Antony. The trial has not yet begun but it will very soon. What have you to say about all this? Do you still want to retire to Jerusalem, my dear Hiskias?’
‘Not at the moment,’ replied my grandfather. ‘I would not be able to hide my attachment to the blood of the Maccabees and I am sure that Herod would have all the Asmoneans killed one after the other.’
‘Since you have decided to stay here,’ Dellius went on, ‘let me retire here with you. I left the court yesterday. We will live here together within these walls, and will only leave when this country shall again have become a Roman province, which cannot be long away. As for my fortune, I entrusted it to your father-in-law. It amounts to thirty thousand darics. He has also asked me to pass on to you the rent for your house.’
My grandfather accepted his friend Dellius’s proposal with joy and lived an even more retiring life than before. Dellius would go out occasionally and bring back news from the city. The rest of the time he devoted to teaching Mardochee, my future father, about Greek literature. He also often read the Holy Scriptures, for my father was trying to convert Dellius.
You know how Antony and Cleopatra finished their days. Egypt became a Roman province exactly as Dellius had predicted. But our household was so used to living apart from the world that political events brought no changes to our way of life. Meanwhile there was no shortage of news from Palestine. Herod, who was expected to follow Antony in his fall, gained Augustus’s favour. His lost territories were restored to him, he conquered others, created an army, amassed treasure and built inexhaustible grain-stores, with the result that already people were beginning to call him ‘the Great’. And indeed he might well have been called if not great then at least happy, if there had not been family quarrels which tarnished the brilliance of so remarkable a career.
When peace had returned to Palestine my grandfather went back to his old plan of settling there with his dear Mardochee, then thirteen years old. Dellius was equally attached to his pupil and felt no desire whatsoever to leave him. One day a Jew arrived from Jerusalem, carrying the following letter:
Rabbi Sedekias, son of Hillel, miserable sinner and the least of the holy Sanhedrin of the Pharisees, sends greetings to Hiskias, husband of his sister Melea.
The epidemic which the sins of Israel have brought down on Jerusalem has carried off my father and my elder brothers. They are now in Abraham’s bosom and share in his eternal glory. May heaven destroy the Sadducees and all those who do not believe in the resurrection!
I would be unworthy of the name of Pharisee if I dared to pollute my hands by taking possession of what belongs to another. That is why I have carefully examined whether my father had debts outstanding to anyone, and as I had heard it said that the house in which we live here in Jerusalem once belonged to you for a time, I went to see the judges but found nothing there to confirm my suppositions. The house is therefore mine without doubt. May heaven destroy the evil-doers! I am no Sadducee!
I also discovered that a certain uncircumcised person named Dellius at one time deposited thirty thousand darics with my father. By chance I came upon a somewhat faded document which I take to be the said Dellius’s discharge of this sum. This man was in any case a follower of Mariamne and her brother Aristobule, and therefore an enemy of our great king. May heaven curse him together with all evil-doers and Sadducees!
Farewell, my dear brother. Greet my sister, Melea, tenderly from me. Although I was very young when you took her as your bride, I have always kept her memory alive in my heart.
It seems that the dowry she took with her into your house is somewhat greater than the share which was due to her. But we will speak of this another time. May heaven make you a true Pharisee!
My father and Dellius looked at each other for a long time in astonishment. Then Dellius broke the silence. ‘This is the result of living away from the world,’ he said. ‘We hoped for peace but fate has decided otherwise. Men take yo
u for a dead tree whose branches they can tear off at their leisure, and whose trunk they can uproot. They take you for an earthworm which they can crush. In short, they take you for a useless burden on the earth. In this world one must be either the hammer or the anvil. One must strike or be struck down. I was once the friend of several Roman prefects who chose Octavian’s side. If I had not neglected their friendship, it would not be possible today to inflict this injustice on me. But I was tired of the world, and I left it to live with a virtuous friend. And now a Pharisee in Jerusalem turns up, strips me of my fortune and claims to have in his possession a yellowing document which he takes to be my discharge of debt. Your loss is not so great. The house amounts to barely a quarter of your fortune. But I have lost everything, and come what may I shall leave for Palestine.’
Melea came in as these words were uttered. She was told of the death of her father and two elder brothers and the despicable behaviour of her brother Sedekias was described to her. Emotions one suffers in solitude are usually very powerful. The grief which overtook the unhappy woman was compounded by an unknown illness which in six months carried her to her grave.
Dellius had already begun preparing for his journey when one evening, as he was returning from the suburb of Rakote, he was stabbed in the chest by a knife. He looked up and recognized the very Jew who had brought Sedekias’s letter. It took a long time for him to recover from his wound. When he was better, he no longer felt any desire to journey to Palestine. But in case he went there after all, he decided to secure the support of those in power on this earth and reflected for a long time on how he could bring himself to the notice of his old protectors. Yet even Augustus followed the principle of letting kings reign as sovereigns in their own lands. So it was first necessary to discover what Herod’s attitude to Sedekias was. It was thus decided to send a loyal and shrewd man to Jerusalem.
The messenger came back two months later. He reported that Herod’s star was rising from one day to the next, that the astute monarch knew how to win Jews as well as Romans to his cause and that at the same time as erecting monuments to Augustus, he announced his intention to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem on an even more magnificent scale than before, which so delighted the people that Herod was being prematurely praised by some flatterers as the Messiah foretold by the prophets.
‘These praises,’ said the messenger, ‘have been very well received at court. A sect has already been formed. Its members are called Herodians. Its head is Sedekias.’
You can well imagine that this news made my grandfather and Dellius abandon all further inquiries. But before I continue with their story I must tell you what our prophets said about the Messiah.
Suddenly the Wandering Jew fell silent. Then, casting a scornful glance at the cabbalist, he said, ‘Impure son of Mamoun! A more powerful adept than you has summoned me to the Atlas mountains. Farewell!’
‘You lie!’ said the cabbalist. ‘I am a hundred times more powerful than the Sheikh of Taroudant.’
‘You lost your powers at the Venta Quemada,’ retorted the Jew, who ran off so quickly that we soon lost sight of him.
The cabbalist was somewhat embarrassed by this, but said after a moment’s reflection, ‘I assure you that that insolent wretch doesn’t know half of the formulae in my power. He will soon feel their effect. But let’s speak of other matters. Señor de Velásquez, did you follow the thread of his story?’
‘Certainly; I paid close attention to the Wandering Jew’s words and believe them to conform to history. Tertullian mentions the Herodians as a sect.’
‘Are you as versed in history as you are in geometry?’ exclaimed the cabbalist.
‘Not altogether,’ admitted Velásquez. ‘But my father, who applied mathematical formulae to all reasoning, as I have told you, thought that geometry could be applied to history in order to determine the relationship between events which really occurred and those which might have occurred. He even took his theory further and thought in fact that it was possible to describe human action and emotion by geometrical figures.
‘Here’s an example to give you a clearer idea. My father would say:
“Take the case of Antony in Egypt. He is prey to two emotions: ambition, which incites him to rule, and love, which dissuades him from it. I represent these two movements by two lines, AB and AC, with an arbitrary angle between them. The line AB, representing the love of Antony for Cleopatra, is less than AC because at heart Antony has less love than ambition. Let us suppose he has three times less. So I take the line AB and produce it to three times the length of AC. Now I complete the parallelogram and draw in the resulting diagonal, which represents exactly the new direction produced by Antony’s attraction to B and C. This diagonal will come closer to the line AB the greater we suppose love is. And contrarily it will come closer to the line AC the more ambition is supposed. Augustus, for example, who did not experience love, was not deflected from point c. And although less energetic he reached it more quickly.”
‘But as passions grow larger or diminish in turn, changing as a consequence the form of the parallelogram, the extremity of the resulting diagonal describes in every case a curve to which my father applied differential calculus, then called the calculus of fluxions. Apart from this the wise author of my life only looked upon all historical problems as pleasant absurdities which he employed to brighten up the dryness of his usual studies. But as the accuracy of solutions depends on the accuracy of data my father collected historical sources with great care. This storehouse was long denied to me, as were the books on geometry, for my father hoped that I would learn only the saraband, the minuet and other such absurdities. Happily, I managed to get into his library. It was only then that I was able to devote myself to history.’
‘Please allow me, Señor de Velásquez,’ said the cabbalist, ‘to express again my admiration for your learning in history as well as in mathematics. For one of these fields of knowledge requires more thought, the other more memory. And these two mental faculties are the complete opposite of each other.’
‘I venture not to share your opinion,’ said the geometer. ‘Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all the conclusions it entails. However, I do not deny that memory and thought can only be effectively applied to a certain number of notions. For example, I myself have retained very well all that I learned about geometry and about human and natural history. Whereas I often forget what relationship I have at any time with the things around me. Or rather I don’t see what is staring me in the eyes or hear what is ringing in my ears, which leads certain people to take me to be absent-minded.’
‘I now understand how you came to fall in the water, Señor,’ said the cabbalist.
‘It is certain that I don’t myself know why I found myself in the water at the very moment I least expected to,’ said Velásquez. ‘But this accident was a happy one for me since it afforded me the opportunity of saving the life of this noble young gentleman who is a captain in the Walloon Guards. However, I should be glad not to have to be of service in this way too often because I know no more disagreeable sensation than that felt by a man whose empty stomach fills up with water.’
Conversing in this way we reached our resting-place, where a meal awaited us. We ate voraciously and conversation languished because the cabbalist seemed worried. After the meal brother and sister spoke to each other for a long time. I did not want to disturb them so I went to a little cave in which a bed had been prepared for me.
The Twenty-third Day
The weather was beautiful. We rose with the sun and after a light meal set out once more. Around midday we stopped and sat down to table, or rather round a hide spread out on the ground. The cabbalist uttered some remarks which indicated that he wasn’t altogether pleased with the superterrestrial world. After the meal he continued in the same vein until his sister, thinking that such monologues would bore the comp
any, asked Velásquez to continue his story, which he did as follows:
VELÁSQUEZ’S STORY CONTINUED
I had the honour of relating to you how I came to be born and how my father took me in his arms, uttered a geometric prayer over me and then swore solemnly that he would never teach me geometry.
About six months after my birth my father saw a small vessel, a chebec, enter harbour, drop anchor and send out a longboat to the shore. From this longboat stepped out a man stooped with age, dressed in the manner of an officer of the late Duke of Velásquez’s household, that is to say, in a green jacket, gold and scarlet braid, loose-hanging sleeves and Galician belt, and a sword suspended from his shoulder-harness. My father took up his telescope and thought he recognized old Alvarez. Indeed it was he. He was finding it difficult to walk. My father rushed all the way to the harbour to meet him and they both nearly died of the emotions they then felt. Then Alvar told my father that he had been sent by the Duchess Blanca, who had retired to an Ursuline convent. He gave him a letter couched in the following terms:
Señor Don Enrique,
A hapless person who caused the death of her father and the misery of your life ventures to remind you of her.
Prey to remorse, I have devoted myself to acts of penance whose severity would have shortened my days, but Alvar made me realize that my death, by restoring to the duke his freedom, might also allow him to have heirs, and that by prolonging my days I would be able to keep his inheritance for you. This thought made me decide to live. I gave up austere fasting, took off my hair shirt and restricted my acts of penance to solitude and prayer.
The duke, whose life is constantly filled with worldly dissipations, has suffered every year from some grave illness or other. On several occasions I thought that he was going to restore to you the title and fortune of our house. But heaven evidently has decreed that you remain in an obscurity which so ill befits your talents.
