Chapter 25 #3
“Euphemia was a young virgin in the earliest days of Christianity, the daughter of a senator at Chalcedon,” Jean began, and again I envisioned him telling stories to one of his children.
This time, I could really visualize the big wood stove in the solarium of the house of Rohard in Acre, and Jean sitting with little Balian.
“What is Chalcedon?” I whispered. “By Byzantium,” Jean replied and moved up in the line.
“Euphemia devoted herself to Christianity and was unwilling to make a sacrifice to Ares, the god of war.” I nodded knowingly.
Jean smiled a small smile. “The Roman authorities put her through unthinkable torture, but she did not give up her faith. Finally, they threw her into the arena of beasts of prey. A wild bear attacked her and mortally wounded her. When the lions approached her body lying on the ground, the crowd roared, expecting the lions to tear her to pieces, but they did not. They approached her and began to gently lick her wounds, until she almost appeared a girl who had fallen asleep on a spring day, in a meadow.” The line continued to progress.
From behind the backs of several of those waiting, I saw a woman kneeling and sobbing in front of what appeared to be a rather disturbing statue of a wide-eyed woman with a mane of brown hair.
“The saint’s remains were painstakingly preserved for hundreds of years in her church in Chalcedon,” Jean resumed telling.
“But a few decades ago, in a most strange and unusual coincidence, her head disappeared from among her remains. A priest who opened her coffin in order to replace the fragrant herbs discovered this and was horrified.” The sobbing lady crossed herself and vacated her spot.
“When His Holiness the Bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, helped establish the Pilgrim Castle some twenty years ago, he prayed one day beside the spring in Le Destroit,” Jean went on.
I perked up. “Suddenly, before his eyes, out of the water appeared the head of a woman with wild, vivid hair, and eyes deeper than the sea. His Holiness held the cross over his heart, thinking that it was some kind of demon, but the head began to speak to him. The head told him that it had wandered the length of the sea from Byzantium to the Pilgrim Castle in the Holy Kingdom in order to unite East and West, between the Greek and the Latin Church, and to put an end to the age-old rivalry within the Christian world. When the church of the Pilgrim Castle was built, a magnificent sculpture was constructed in honor of the saint, in which they buried the head from the spring and thus preserved her remains to this day.”
“Pshhh,” I responded with admiration. This was a good story.
That devil of a fellow de Vitry, I thought to myself.
Interesting if Simone knows this story. Our turn came.
Jean knelt down, and I hurried to do as he did.
He murmured a prayer, and I murmured Latin-sounding gibberish, both of us with our eyes closed.
When he finished praying, he pushed me gently with his elbow.
I opened my eyes and looked up at the sculpture as he did.
In the stands, a choir of monks sang Gregorian chants.
I did not understand what I was seeing and blinked each eye alternately, no longer sure.
Before me stood a painted wooden statue of a woman.
She looked disturbingly real: a brown-skinned woman, her thick brown hair tucked under a gold-embroidered cap, her gown of royal crimson, sleeves of blinding white.
The bright colors were in inverse proportion to the general gloom inside the church.
Her hands were folded modestly yet her stance radiated a resolute strength.
Her piercing eyes seemed to follow you, slicing through your soul to its core.
I preferred not to imagine what relics were kept inside that unsettling statue, and assumed the opening must be in the back.
Jean stood before the statue and crossed himself again; I mimicked him, my eyes locked on the statue’s.
The eyes seemed to meet mine with a vivid gaze, and I grasped Jean’s hand impulsively.
They stared at me, wise and wild and strong and knowing everything about me.
What I recalled in that moment was Halimi’s mushroom dream of the ancient stone circle and the priestess dancing at its center.
I felt like I was on the verge of a stroke.
“Do not remain any longer,” I heard a voice say. The lips of the statue did not move, but its eyes spoke to me. As the Gregorian chanting grew muffled in my ears, a disturbing sound hummed inside my head, and I collapsed into Jean’s arms.
I had not actually fainted but simply lost all ability to use so much as a muscle of my body, and even though I could see what was happening around me, everything was blurry.
A murky vapor shrouded my eyes and head.
Jean carried me to the horses, which were waiting outside, and someone helped him untie one of them and lifted me into his arms. Jean held the reins in one hand, holding me to him with the other, and we galloped away, accompanied by Brunette beside us, running and barking.
The way passed hazily before my eyes, and the mysterious voice in my head continued, accompanied by a growing hum. My body leaned limply against Jean, and I struggled not to lose consciousness completely.
We arrived at the canopy of the big carob tree. A greeting was heard from the guardhouse, and Jean cried back in response. He jumped down from the horse without even bothering to tie him, and took me down too. Being close to the spring strengthened me. With unsteady steps, I staggered toward it.
“Are you feeling better, my lady?” he asked after I noisily gulped water from the trickling spring, as did Brunette.
“I am much better,” I said with difficulty.
“But I must pass through. I cannot stay any longer,” I said with urgency, the terrible eyes still burning before me and the voice commanding me not to linger any longer repeating in my ears.
I rummaged around in my bag until I found the cloth pouch where I kept my coins. I took out Lily’s ten-agorot coin and knelt beside the water. Jean knelt beside me. Brunette sat and looked at us with her tongue lolling and a look of concern.
“I’ll come with you,” he said, and at the sight of my weak protest, he added, “I have to make sure that you arrive there safely.” I had no strength to say anything.
I held his one hand, and with the other he produced his knife.
He made a small cut in his hand and in mine.
Brunette barked one lonely bark. I dipped my hand with the coin in it into the water, and Jean and I tumbled in at once, Brunette’s sad howl echoing in my ears.
The pulling sensation almost crushed me completely, as if I were passing through a birth canal—it felt as if a dark sponge were pressing against all the organs of my body as I struggled to squeeze through the narrow passage toward the promise of light and air on the other side.
A warm hand grasped mine and reminded me that there was a world and life and time. We were spat out.
The sun had already set, and it was dim beneath the carob canopy.
We lay on the dry earth for a few minutes.
Then, I stood and went out onto the ridge.
In the west were ruins of the fort and the military base, and to the east, cars and trucks were speeding along the highways, and the houses of Atlit were visible.
It seemed that I had returned home. I took a deep breath and returned to the carob canopy.
Jean was sitting up, but it looked like he was not yet entirely lucid.
With his cupped hand, he took a little water from the book-sized puddle and licked it.
I went back out from under the canopy to see if my car was still parked where I’d left it. I returned to my cloth bag beside the spring, took the single contact lens out of my eye, and put on my glasses.
“What is that thing?” Jean recoiled.
“These are glasses,” I told him with a smile. “They help me see better.” The color had returned to Jean’s cheeks, and he asked to examine the glasses. He looked through them and recoiled again, then examined them from every angle.
“There was a Saracen sailor I knew who used magnifying glasses on the end of a long stick, and they helped him see where the land was and other things,” he said seriously.
“It’s the same principle,” I said. I looked around me and could not believe that for the past two days, I had been fainting left and right like some gentle lady in a tight corset. I felt an urgent need to call my parents.
I took out my cell phone, turning it on with a sense of expectation and concern that something terrible may have happened in my absence, or that my lie had been found out and everyone knew that I was not at any Vipassana workshop and were wondering where I had disappeared to.
“It’s getting dark already, my lady,” said Jean, glancing through the branches out at the darkening sky. I looked up from the tiny screen that had begun to flash at my knight, who had crossed through worlds to make sure that I was okay, and I put the phone aside.
“Indeed it is,” I said gently, and an idea popped into my head.
“Might I offer you to spend the night at my residence? Nobody will disturb us there, and you can return tomorrow morning.” Jean looked as though I had suggested to him that we fly to the moon.
“Think about it,” I said, letting him digest the idea while I returned to the phone.