The Deadliest Lie

by June Trop

  “Did he call you by name?”

  “Yes.” After a thoughtful pause, she added, “I wonder why he didn’t just come to the front door.”

  And I wondered why the sheet of papyrus had been sealed without the sender’s mark. But I’d know soon enough. I managed to break the seal despite my trembling fingers and read the scrawled message aloud in a voice stressed to a high pitch:

  “miss bat isaac, stop tryin to recover

  the scrolls r sumtin bad will happn.”

  Then I heard a thud.

  Phoebe had toppled over.

  Her face now bloodless.

  Her eyes rolled back.

  Her jaws locked.

  Her limbs rigid.

  Her chest drenched in sweat.

  Her body vibrating in short, rapid, rhythmic waves.

  “Phoebe!”

  No response.

  “G-d Almighty, what’s happened to my Phoebe!”

  I moved the desk out of the way, turned her on her side, and wedged a pillow under her head.

  Her spasms beat an eerie tattoo against the tiles for a minute or two. Then I heard a gurgle and a gasp for breath. Her twitching had subsided, her jaw had slackened, and her eyelids were fluttering. She looked around in wonder as if adjusting to the details as they trickled back to her.

  “You’re okay, Phoebe. Everything’s going to be all right.” I cooed these assurances with only the pretense of confidence. Then I kneeled and, straddling her body as I faced her, threaded my arms under hers, locked my hands behind her back, and slowly raised her to a sitting position to ease her breathing.

  I waited, listening to the silence until she was ready to speak. At last she released a few words in the stream of a sigh.

  “What happened to me? I started to feel numb, and after that I don’t remember anything.”

  No one had to tell me what had precipitated Phoebe’s seizure. But as alarmed as I was by her convulsions, I was comforted by the letter itself. I realized the thief was feeling threatened and the scrolls were still recoverable, which meant they hadn’t been sold and hadn’t left Alexandria. Second, I realized the thief knew us well enough to anticipate Phoebe’s routine and call her by name.

  “How are you feeling now, Phoebe?”

  “I’m all right, just sleepy. But I’m afraid. I don’t want you trying to recover the scrolls anymore, but I know you will. That’s the way you are.”

  “A terrible wrong has been done not only to me but to the League, something that could hurt all the Jews in Alexandria, even the whole Empire, and I’m the only one who can right that wrong.”

  Aside from the thief, of course.

  Poor Phoebe. I sounded as egotistical as Papa. So I softened my tone. “I’m also afraid, Phoebe, but whoever the thief is, he’s more frightened than we are, and knowing he’s afraid bolsters my resolve.”

  All the while I must have been trying to imagine the thief’s modus operandi because as soon as I said the word “resolve,” it hit me. Phoebe hadn’t scratched her arm, but the hunchback had.

  I struck my forehead with the palm of my hand. Here I’d been flailing about for days trying to discover who the thief was, and if it wasn’t Papa or Binyamin, how he’d managed to steal the scrolls out from under our very noses. And Phoebe had just given me the answer. My thoughts crystallized now on what had been unthinkable before. With rekindled hope, I bolted out of the room to search for the key witness, Aunt Hannah.

  Chapter 26

  Late Thursday Evening

  “IS THAT YOU, Miriam?”

  I hardly recognized the timbre of Papa’s voice. Its raspy edge had been worn smooth.

  Crossing the atrium, I peeked into his study and saw a shadow of his former self hunched over his desk, one elbow perched on the desktop, his slackened jaw leaning into the palm of that hand. Sadness lived in every crease of his face.

  “I was looking for Aunt Hannah, but one of the maids told me she’d already gone to bed.”

  “So come in and sit down. Please.” He waved me toward my usual chair and then studied my face.

  “You’re bruised, Miriam.”

  “Oh, never mind that, Papa. I’ll tell you about that later.”

  I had no intentions of doing so.

  “Let’s sit in the peristyle, Papa. I like the smell of the greenery in the evening.” In truth, I couldn’t bear to sit dwarfed before his massive desk anymore.

  As our sandals clicked against the marble tiles, he called for a maid to light a tallow lamp and bring us some cinnamon cakes and mint tea, and then we took seats across from each other on the teak benches that curve around the stone table. Aside from the hanging baskets of ferns and the ribbons of ivy coiling around and festooning across the pillars, planters of peonies projected their stout shadows across the tiles. Their foliage bowed and swayed while the perfume from their deep pink blossoms mingled with a sea breeze that had dismissed the heat of the day but had yet to usher in the chill of the night.

  After the maid served us and Papa excused her, he took a deep breath, paused, and then reported with a stoic face and a lifeless voice, “Binyamin’s gone. Late this afternoon one of the maids preparing to clean his room found his door ajar, his clothes strewn about, and his travel bag missing.”

  Papa looked at his tea. He curled his huge hands around the glass but didn’t lift it. “I drove him away,” he said, shaking his head to ward off the incomprehensible.

  The rising moon cast a blue light on his black hair while the flickering lamp alternated between illuminating and obscuring the furrows across his forehead. He twirled his glass around with the tips of his fingers before he spoke again.

  “I remember when we went to the Serapeum for Binyamin’s induction ceremony, how gratified I was that he’d have the advantages of an ephebe. He’d begin his day in the lecture halls studying all the subjects I loved: grammar, literature, rhetoric, music, logic, astronomy, and geometry. I knew he wasn’t scholarly like you, but I thought the competition would motivate him to study.

  “After his studies, he could thread his way along the Gymnasium’s shady colonnades through a campus so immense and grand that Augustus himself used it as a public place to address the city. Depending on the sports of the day, Binyamin might go to either the covered track to run or the palaistra to wrestle or box; on another day, to either the field to throw the discus and javelin or the korykos to punch the bag.

  “After that he might enjoy the sauna, the hot and cold pools, or a massage at the Roman-style baths. Or he could amble over to the water gardens, where he’d relax and socialize while cooling himself in its fountains. Still later, he could saunter under the covered gallery past the wrestling arena to the theater. There, before ending the day at an evening banquet, he might watch the latest play, fascinated like the rest of the audience by Hero’s special effects: the thunder and lightning, the ‘gods’ flying through the air, and the rotating scenic backdrops. Or he might listen to a politician charm the crowd. How gratified I was that I’d be fulfilling my promise to your mother to give him the best possible education.”

  I also let the memory of that day wash over me. I’d been to the Serapeum only twice, the first time as a young girl to tour with Aunt Hannah, Iphigenia, and Phoebe its cool labyrinth of subterranean crypts and corridors. We passed cavernous chambers of bare stone breathing out their ancient must, some for stocking the scented wood for the temple’s fires and flambeaux, others for storing its sacrificial instruments, ceremonial utensils, and sacerdotal robes. Mostly though I remember my nose tingling from the scents of frankincense, myrrh, and nard in the laboratories where they manufacture the cones of incense.

  We were barred from some of the rooms: the chapels for ascetic worship and contemplation, the dungeon for those guilty of a sacrilege against the god, the living quarters f
or the monks, the refectories for the functionaries and servants, the vaults for the temple’s most precious treasures, the stalls and stables for its sacrificial animals, and the well-stocked arsenal to defend the precinct and its enormous wealth. Still, we were able to pick our way through the meeting halls and the kitchens with their soot-streaked walls, enormous hearths, bakeries, pantries, and wine cellars, each chamber a hive of activity dappled by the sputtering light of smoky, oil-fed torches and ripe with the smell of sweat on unwashed bodies.

  When we were escorted out of the cellars and I’d cleared some of the dust from my throat, I noticed short messages, scores of them, scrawled on the stone walls where the daylight had penetrated. Most of the graffiti were in Greek, many in verse, all dated, some even mentioning the author, his profession, and homeland. I wanted to scribble my own verse until Iphigenia warned me that I could be thrown into the dungeon for a desecration like that. As soon as she said that, I thought of the scores of manacled souls rumored to be incarcerated inside its moldy walls.

  But Papa was ruminating on the second time I’d been to the Serapeum, when I’d gone to meet him there two years ago. He’d hired a chariot to carry him up the carriage road, but I’d set out earlier and arrived long before he did. My legs first running, then aching, I climbed the steep, one-hundred-step spiraling marble staircase, which was flanked by rows of sphinxes from the base of the acropolis to the vast quadrangle of white stone at its summit. Having reached the highest point in Alexandria, I was rewarded with a merry breeze and a panorama of the miniaturized city while I rested on a stone bench until the pricking in my lungs eased.

  Lake Mareotis and the countryside beyond unrolled before me toward the south. As I raised my hands to shade my brow, my eyes were drawn to the bustle about the lake. Brown-skinned women shouldering baskets of laundry to and fro along the sandy paths, others either bowed over their garments, kneading them while the water lapped at their feet and the wind snatched their chatter, or crouching to spread them out on the rocks to bleach and dry. Barefoot children frolicking along its marshy fringes. Ibises perched on their stilt-like legs, probing the mud with their long, down-curving bills. Gangly boys up to their knees in the stagnant water, cutting down reeds on fleshy stems and collecting them in baskets strapped to their backs. Houseboats squatting in the papyrus beds, their occupants fishing off the deck. Punters propelling cargo in their flat-bottomed boats with a push of their pole against the lake bottom. And ferries zigzagging across the tea-colored water from town to town, slicing through beds of Egyptian-blue water lilies.

  When I’d finished counting all the ferries, I raised my eyes to the fertile countryside beyond the lake. Meandering lanes dotted with outbuildings too numerous to count cut the landscape into orchards of silver-barked olive trees, arbors of twisted grapevines, and golden fields of barley, castor beans, and emmer wheat.

  Tendrils of damp hair fanned out from the back of my neck when I turned to view the sea stretching to the northern horizon, its surface whisked by a breeze that billowed a thousand sails. My gaze dropped to locate the intersection of the Street of the Soma and the Canopic Way, and from there my finger traced the route to our house and up the side street to Noah’s.

  Now, sitting across from Papa, I stifled a yawn. Silently studying the tabletop’s swirling patterns instead of listening to his bleating account of that day, a story I’d already heard so many times, I remembered leaving the lookout point with its vistas still imprinted on my memory. I crossed the chariot road, and feeling each marble tread bake through the soles of my leather sandals, I mounted the expansive stairway to the six-columned Doric façade of the Serapeum’s gatehouse. Once inside, dwarfed by its coffered ceiling of carved marble blocks, I cut my way around the throng of visitors, filed through the ornamental bronze gate that was guarded by a cloudy-eyed, muttering old priest, and ventured into the sacred precinct’s dazzling light.

  Hector had taught me about the cult of Serapis. So I imagined Hector with me, together our strolling about the gardens and lecture halls. Our meandering through the Daughter Library’s collection of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Our circling the cult’s stadium, where thousands celebrate the power of their god with annual games. Our catching glimpses through the colonnaded porticoes of the priests’ long, narrow residence halls. Our studying the shafts of the temple’s four Aswan granite columns, wrought to tell the story of their god’s mythical incarnation. And our marveling at the immense doors to the temple itself, their panels depicting the birth, death, and resurrection of Osiris.

  That day now seemed part of an ancient dream, a floating collection of moments rich in texture and sweetened with the fragrance of the flowering acacias that lined the winding walkways. I waggled my head. If only I could resurrect those innocent days and anesthetize all that’s occurred since the scrolls disappeared. But no, I couldn’t. Instead I rode the wave of that memory back again to the Serapeum.

  All the chambers house extravagant works of art, but none is more breathtaking than Serapis himself enthroned within a semi-circular alcove at the far end of the Temple Hall. He is an enormous, exquisitely sculpted statue of marble adorned with gold plate, precious stones, and gem-chiseled ivory. Seated in profound majesty, he is lavishly bearded and robed, serene and self-centered, handsome in the Greek tradition. In his left hand, he’s holding the scepter of power; in his right, he’s restraining Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hades. Each year, in a most stunning and sacred ceremony witnessed by throngs of his disciples, he’s kissed by the sun when a shaft of morning light enters the sanctuary through a window at the precise angle to illuminate his lips and thereby assure Alexandrians of his continuing protection.

  Papa took a long sip of his already tepid tea, preparing to continue his recall of that day. When his hand trembled, some of the tea splashed onto the table, flooding one of my swirls, and refocusing my attention onto his story.

  “…proudly watching while the priest sheared each ephebe’s hair, Binyamin’s first, instantly transforming him into a man among boys, lean, broad-shouldered, and magnetic, someone Emperor Claudius would enroll in the order of the Equestrians.”

  Papa paused again, this time to gaze into the moonlight. While I pretended to nibble on a cinnamon cake, his hard swallows told me he was feeling the memory viscerally. When he continued, his voice dipped into a moan as thick and distant as the muffled rumble of the sea.

  “But then came that day at the Gymnasium’s palaistra, his first pankration bout, when he slew young Titus. I knew at that moment that no matter how hard I would try to keep the promise I made to your mother, Binyamin would be the athlete more than the scholar, a Greek more than a Jew, or worse yet, a Roman, barbarous, haughty, and determined to win at all costs.”

  Papa pressed his lips together and tightened his grip on the glass.

  “The horror of that day turned my fatherly pride into disgust, and he became for me a grotesque caricature of his boyhood self.”

  I didn’t have the heart to remind Papa that he’d been rejecting Binyamin long before young Titus’s death. Instead I said, “Papa, your tea is getting cold” and shifted the conversation to the present.

  “Maybe the lesson, Papa, is that, notwithstanding a parent’s well-intentioned guidance, children have to define their own future. As a parent you gave Binyamin the opportunity for a wide range of choices. Then it was up to him to choose the life that made the most sense to him.”

  I paused so he could grasp my meaning. When he leaned back, put his glass down, and folded his arms across his chest, I continued.

  “Just as Binyamin has chosen a life, I have to choose one as well. You’ve showered me with all I could want: a loving and gracious home, a tutor like Hector, and a devoted friend like Phoebe—and even Noah—but now I must make my own choices.”

  Still, I could hear my all-too-familiar placatory singsong, and I despised it. T
he time had come to banish the actress who, masquerading as my double, had been playing the role of his submissive daughter. Hadn’t I spent the better part of the week surmounting my fears? Could my father pose a greater threat to me than the pitiless streets of the Rhakotis Quarter?

  Still, the finger of fear pressed against my throat. I stared into the tallow lamp and for courage, imagined myself married to Noah, enduring his fawning apologies, his blatant ogles, his feverish lips pouring his sour vapor into me, his putrid odor fouling my skin. And me, claustrophobic in his embrace, doomed to miss the ecstasy of erotic love.

  Pulling my eyes from the lamp’s writhing flame, I faced Papa squarely, drew in a ragged breath, and opened my mouth, half expecting my jaw to screech like a rickety gate.

  Instead the words slid out as if they’d been waiting on my tongue for years.

  “I’m not going to marry Noah. I know how much he means to you, and he can still be the son to you that you’d like him to be, but I’m not going to marry him.”

  There. I said what was on my mind before the opportunity had passed and I’d have in its wake only my imaginary reenactments and regrets.

  I expected to see Papa’s eyes blaze, his nostrils flare, his face discolor, and a plume of fire shoot from his mouth.

  Instead he sat very still.

  We both did.

  At last he said, “Oh.”

  Just that one word.

  He didn’t speak again for several minutes. He dropped his eyelids, lowered his chin, slumped forward, and kneaded his temples. When he finally raised his lids, I could see that remorse had settled over him.

  “Miriam, I’ve been an overbearing father to you as well as Binyamin. I’ve reacted out of loneliness and the fear that each of you would choose a life I didn’t understand and couldn’t protect you from, and most of all, a life that would exclude me. Even though I knew at the time I shouldn’t burden you with my obsessions, my demons goaded me. Later, I would spend sleepless nights in self-castigation and fantasy conversations to convince myself that you would someday be better off. I knew I shouldn’t be forcing you or Binyamin to choose between your filial obligations and your destiny, that I couldn’t mitigate your destinies anyway—your mother’s astrologer explained that before you were even born—but the fear of losing you and Binyamin, after having lost your mother, fanned my anguish like an irrepressible wind.”