Agrippa's Daughter (49 page)

Still there were a hundred matters to be arranged, and the support of the Jewish community leaders in Spain had to be won. For this reason Berenice made two trips to Spain. On the first trip she was absent from Rome for three months; and when she decided to make the second trip, Titus refused to accept so long a separation and went with her—leaving quietly so that only a handful of his intimate friends and of the Jews in the syndicate knew that he had left for Spain with Berenice.

Now a year and a half had passed since the death of Shimeon—and almost five years since she had parted with him in Jerusalem. The pall which had been upon her through all that time seemed suddenly to lift. She felt young, footloose, and amazingly happy. Never had she been the recipient of the kind of devotion Titus offered her; never had she been so long and so intimately connected with a man as lighthearted as Titus, as open-faced, and as unfalteringly optimistic. And never had she felt so certainly that her presence on earth was useful and important.

Most astonishingly, Titus was apparently happy to stand in the background and observe her. Except for Benharmish’s son, Enoch, no one on the galley knew Titus’ identity—only that he was a wealthy and highly placed Roman—and so it was in Spain, too, where Berenice was greeted with an adulation that verged on worship. Apparently he was delighted with this. Berenice had wondered whether he could sit back and watch and observe without jealousy and without uncertainty, and she was pleased to find still another aspect of him that she had not known of.

They returned to Rome overland through the gardens and valleys of northern Italy, taking ship from Spain to Cisalpine Gaul and traveling south from there by chariot. And it was out of the flush of joy and certainty of this trip that Titus decided to present Berenice to his father. But that went poorly.

In the great palace of the principate Berenice felt dwarfed. The public buildings of Tiberias could be set in the hallways here and yet leave enough room to pass. And the hawk-nosed, hard-faced man called Vespasian, who sat behind his desk and examined her, did nothing to ease her feelings.

“So you’re the Jewish princess my son has lost his head over,” the emperor said flatly, his voice harsh and nasal. “Well, you’re not the old witch they say you are, and I doubt whether you’re old enough to be his mother, which is something else that they say. Still, you’re a Jew, and I can’t say that I like Jews. I’m plain-spoken about things; that’s something you’ll have to get used to.”

“It’s a habit, and maybe not the worst one in the world,” Berenice replied. “But it’s nothing I have to get used to. You see, I am equally plain-spoken, Imperator, and I never confuse rudeness with the truth—so I can take your ways with women or I can leave them alone. As I wish.”

Out of the corner of her eyes, Berenice watched Titus, whose mouth was twitching and who had to control himself visibly to restrain his mirth. Vespasian swallowed and roared and asked Berenice who the devil she imagined she was to talk to him like that? She replied that he knew very well who she was; and then he turned to Titus and demanded:

“Did you bring her here to irritate me? Don’t I have enough troubles as things are? I never found a Jew I could trust—not even that wretched Joseph Benmattathias who cozened his way into our bosom and now calls himself Flavius Josephus—and why should I trust this one?”

“Why indeed?” Berenice asked him. “Only that you’re the father of a man I care for.”

“How old are you, woman?” he snapped.

“That, Imperator, is of concern only to myself and to Titus. And further, do not address me as
woman.
My ancestors were priests at Jerusalem and kings at Megiddo when Rome was a circle of mud huts inhabited by brutes who had not yet learned to weave cloth or even to smelt copper. And as for this meeting, I think that I at least have had sufficient of it—and if you will permit me, I should like to go.”

Hours later, when Titus met her at the House of Barona, he was still unable to control his mirth. “My whole body aches from laughing,” he told her. “By all the gods, I have not laughed like that in years.”

“Did your father laugh?” Berenice asked him.

“He is furious. In all truth, if he was not out of the hardest, meanest peasant stock in all Italy, he would certainly have a stroke. Let him stew. He deserves to. Was ever a man put down so brilliantly and neatly!”

“That’s enough!”

“What?”

“I do not wish to discuss it any further,” Berenice said, and then Titus realized that she had been weeping.

“But why?”

“I did not think it particularly humorous,” Berenice said. “How old am I? Is that the current gossip all over Rome—how old is this Jew witch? Is that what I am here for? I tell you this, Titus, I am sick and tired of your Rome, and I have had enough of it—”

But he closed off her protests with his embraces, and when they lay in bed, making love to each other, her hatred of Rome melted away. As did her plans for returning to Galilee.

“You are as young as the new morning,” Titus whispered to her, “and as old as the truth—”

Titus went to Greece. He had expected to return in weeks, but he was away almost five months; and back in Rome a few days, he was ordered by his father to Africa. Now Berenice sat in front of her mirror, conscious for the first time in her life that her face was changing. A few slight wrinkles. A single white hair that she angrily plucked out. She lay for hours in her rooms, while beauticians applied mudpacks to her face and body and then gently massaged cream into the wrinkles around her eyes. Never before had she given a thought to her appearance; blessed with beauty, she had never questioned it, never doubted it. Now she was filled with doubts and even more filled with mistrust of herself. What had happened to her? She was becoming short of temper, querulous, angry too easily. She tongue-lashed Gabo until Gabo fell into a fit of hysterical tears; and then, conscience-stricken, Berenice attempted to comfort her. Gabo turned up to her mistress a tear-streaked face that was suddenly old—old, and that pierced Berenice to her heart. Wasn’t Gabo only a year older than she was? And now Gabo was a small, dark, wrinkled woman with sagging dugs and nests of creases to bed her eyes, complaining forlornly,

“Is it right to talk to me like that? I love you so—and for a whole lifetime I served you and followed you everywhere, even to the ends of the earth and even to this pagan place which is the true Edom, the vanity of vanities and cursed by the Lord God—and always a slave—”

“No, no, no,” Berenice begged her. “I manumitted you years ago.”

“Then I made myself a slave. Did you ever thank me? I have children—”

“But they are well taken care of, Gabo,” Berenice pleaded. “I shelter them in the palace in Tiberias and they are fed and clothed and schooled.”

“Don’t I have feelings? Don’t I wish to see them?”

Berenice threw her arms around Gabo. “Anything—of course, you must go to see them. And I will find a swift ship for you and money, and you will bring them wonderful gifts from here, dresses for the girls and fine tunics and shoes for the boys—”

Now Gabo burst into tears and swore that she would die before she ever permitted herself to be separated from Berenice. And Berenice thanked her. “Oh, I am so lonely, Gabo. I am so lonely. I am so afraid here—”

“Come home with me, mistress. We will go back to a Jewish land—to a place where the God Yaweh can look down on us and keep us. Does He even know that we exist here, with these dark and ugly Roman gods?”

“Gabo, Gabo—there is only one God and He is everywhere.”

“In Israel, yes, because Yaweh would destroy any other gods. Just as He destroyed the gods of Canaan in the olden times. But what can Yaweh do here?”

Go home—it was a dream. She said to Barona, “I am so lonely for Israel—”

“Because Titus is away? But that is only natural, my dear. Now listen to me—I know how long it has been—”

“Can anyone know how long it has been?” Berenice asked him. “Once, when we had the mission to the Jewish captives and there was meaning in my life because so many thousands of poor people had to be saved—once it was different. But when that was over, time became like a river, and I floated on the river wishing half of the time that I could sink into it and drown.”

“And yet you love Titus.”

“Do I? I don’t know. Sometimes—it seems to me that I love him so much that I cannot face life without him. Other times I am simply indifferent and unable to comprehend my relationship to this young man.”

“Isn’t that only natural?” Barona asked her. “Please, believe me, Berenice Basagrippa—and remain here with me only a little longer. Let me tell you what I have heard. I heard that Vespasian is mortally ill. They have had doctors from Greece and from Egypt, some of the most renowned physicians on earth, and they all agree that there is little or no chance for a recovery. In other words, the emperor is dying, and tomorrow or a month from now, as God wills, Titus will be Emperor of Rome. Has he not sworn that he will make you his empress?”

“So he said,” Berenice agreed.

The days and the weeks passed, and Vespasian still lived. Titus returned to Rome, but there was so much intrigue, so many problems surrounding the dying emperor that Berenice saw little of Titus. And when he did come, he was perturbed and distracted. As if a wall had come into being between them.

“Do you want me to go away?” Berenice asked him. “Back to Galilee—because you must say so if you do. You must tell me. I cannot remain here without your love.”

“If I could only tell you how much I love you.”

“What then, Titus? What then?”

“How can I tell you, Berenice? People hate me, fear me, envy me; it’s part of being what I am, and you don’t escape it. I have a brother, Domitian. I have cousins, stepbrothers, friends, enemies—and more who might be either one. Already, I am the Praetorian prefect. Two years ago, my father made me his colleague in the Imperium. A year ago, he gave me tribunician authority. I have power—too much power, and enemies, too many enemies. I have enemies who hate you even more than they hate me.”

“Why should they hate me?”

“Because I love you, and because you are a Jew. They hate me for loving a Jew—and they hate you for being a Jew. They hate me because I turned a deaf ear to all their pleading that I drive the Jews out of Rome and dispossess them of all their property in Italy. Our curse is wealth, my darling, and our sickness is a lust for it; and now we have the new sickness of lusting for the wealth of the Jews. Why not kill them? Why not destroy them?”

“Yet you are Titus. They will never forget that.”

Yet within three months after Vespasian died, they forgot that Titus was emperor—or hoped that as emperor he would ignore such things; and twenty armed men attacked the House of Barona. Berenice had just left her rooms to go down and join the family at their evening meal, when the assassins burst into the house. The entrance to her apartment was on a marble landing, about nine feet above the magnificent reception hall; so from where she stood, Berenice could look down the whole length of the reception hall to the front door, into the dining room on her right, and into passageways on her left that led to the kitchen. Gabo was coming from the kitchens with a bundle of Berenice’s clothes, which she had steamed over the great stove, and the assassin in the lead cut her down with a single stroke of his sword, almost severing her head from her body. At that moment, Barona’s daughter entered the room, leading her two children, one by each hand, and she paused and screamed. The second assassin ran her through, and two others ran after the children, cutting wildly at them. Brought by the screams, Barona and two of his sons ran into the reception hall, and they were murdered there on the spot. At the same time, half a dozen of the assassins raced down the length of the reception hall to the stairs to reach Berenice—who was apparently the focal point of their attack and the underlying reason for it. When she leaped back to the shelter of the door to her apartment, they flung swords and daggers at her, and though one of the swords skipped into the doorway, she was untouched. She slammed the door behind her and managed to throw the bar into place just as the body of the first of the assassins to mount the stairs hurtled against it. The door quivered but held. In a moment, all of them were fighting the door, hurling their weight against it and cutting at the panels with their swords. For the moment it held—but for how long? And if it did hold, how long before one of them exhibited intelligence and realized that there were other ways into the apartment—windows, balconies.

When the door continued to hold up under their blows, they stopped—and now, too, the terrible screams from beyond the door had stopped, which could only mean that the members of the House of Barona were dead, unless some of them had escaped. Leaning against the wall next to the door, Berenice was sick with what she had seen. Her first reaction over, she felt that it made no difference whether she lived or died. If they broke down the door now, she knew that she would make no effort to escape—that she would accept whatever fate awaited her. She was past caring, and suddenly she felt so weary, so inexpressibly tired and exhausted that the effort of standing erect was too much for her. She sank down to the floor and crouched there, waiting for the assassins to make their way in through the windows or to devise some sort of battering ram that would smash in the door.

She waited, and time passed, and suddenly there was a wild shout, a clash of iron against iron, more shouting, more sound of weapons, screams of pain, roars of rage, and then a metal-shod hand hammering at the door.

“Berenice! Berenice—do you hear me?”

It was the voice of Titus, and yet it could not be. He called to her again. Someone was attacking the door with an ax. Blow after blow, and it began to splinter. Berenice saw the axhead come through. Then a hole was made and enlarged, and a hand came through and flung the bar out of its socket. Titus leaped into the room, two Praetorians following with bared sword. He looked around him wildly for a moment, and then he saw Berenice—to whom it was all like a senseless dream. She watched him come to her and raise her up; only when his arms were securely about her did she begin to sob, deep, hard sobs that racked her whole body.