Silence.
We stared at one another.
"Gabriel," he said to me. He raised his chin slightly and arched his eyebrows. "The angel Gabriel himself. He came to speak to your mother and to none other, except, as we all know - the prophet Daniel."
The warmth beat in my face; it beat in my chest. I could feel it in the palms of my hands.
"You press me like a grape, my lord," I said, "between your thumb and forefinger." And I know that when pressed in this manner, I may say strange things, things I don't even think in the course of my day-to-day work, things I don't even think when I'm alone . . . or dreaming.
"So I do," he said. "Because I despise you."
"So it seems, my lord."
"Why don't you jump to your feet again?"
"I stay because I'm on an errand."
He laughed with immense satisfaction. He curled his fingers under his chin and looked around him, but not at the heaps of books, or the lattices with their flashes of light and green, or at the pools of light on the marble floor, or the thin sweet smoke rising from the bronze brazier.
What does it take to ransom Avigail?
"Well, you certainly do love this child, don't you?" he asked. "Either that or you are a fool, as people say, but only some people, I should add."
"What must we do to help her?"
"Don't you want to know why I despise you?" he asked.
"Is it your wish that I should know?"
"I know all the stories about you."
"So it seems."
"About the strange doings when you were born, how your family fled to Egypt, about the miserable massacre of those babies in Bethlehem by that madman who called himself our King, about the things you can do."
"Things I can do? I laid this marble floor," I said. "I'm a carpenter. That's the sort of thing I can do."
"Precisely," he said. "And that's why I despise you. And anyone else would too if they had the memory that I have!" He lifted his finger as though instructing a child. "Samson's birth was foretold, not by the angel Gabriel, but by an angel for certain. And Samson was a man. And we know his mighty deeds and repeat them generation after generation. Where are your mighty deeds? Where are your defeated enemies lying dead in heaps, or where are the ruins of the heathen temples that you've brought down with the strength of your arm?"
The heat in me burnt blindingly fierce. I had risen to my feet, and knocked the stool aside without meaning to do it. I stood there before him but I didn't see him and I didn't see the room.
It was as if I was remembering something, something forgotten all my life. But this wasn't a memory. No, it was something altogether different.
Heathen temples, where are your heathen temples. In no set place or time, I saw temples, and I saw them falling, I heard them falling, collapsing, as air and form and light shifted, as clouds of dust rose like the boiling sky of a tempest, a sky that went on forever - and this shifting, this breaking, this fierce and deafening ruin, moved on like the ever-changing and ceaseless sea.
I closed my eyes. Memories threatened the purity of this inner vision. Memories of my boyhood in Alexandria, of the Roman processions weaving their way towards their shrines with clouds of rose petals swirling in the air and the steady beat of drums, the shiver of sistrums. I heard the singing of the women, and I saw a golden god drifting forward beneath a wavering canopy - and then the vision returned, sweeping up the memory in its mighty current, the vision so huge and vague that it was shaking the whole world as if the mountains around all the great sea were rumbling and spewing fire, and the altars were falling. The altars were crashing down into pieces.
All of this dissolved. The room came back.
I turned and looked at the old man. He looked like leather and bone. No meanness in him. He seemed frail and like a lily held too close to the brazier, like something withering, burning up.
A deep piercing sense of his misery came to me, his years alone in grief for those he'd lost, his fear of failing eyes and failing fingers and failing reason and failing hope.
Unbearable.
A humming came to my ears, a humming from every room of the house, a humming from beyond the house, from all the rooms of all the houses - the frail, the sick, the weary, the suffering, the bitter.
Unbearable. But I can bear it. I will bear it.
I'd been looking at him for a long while, but only now realized he was stricken with sadness. He was silently imploring me.
"Come here to me," he begged.
I stood a step nearer, then another step. I watched him reach for my hand and lift my hand. How silken his hand felt, the skin of his palm so thin. He looked up at me.
"When you were twelve years old," he said, "when you came to the Temple to be presented to Israel, I was there. I was one of the Scribes who examined you and all the boys with you. Do you remember me from that time?"
I didn't answer.
"We were questioning you, all you boys, about the Book of Samuel, do you remember this, in particular?" he asked. He was eager and careful with his words. His hand clung to mine. "We were speaking of the story of King Saul, after he's been anointed for the kingship by the prophet Samuel . . . but before anyone knew that Saul was to be King." He stopped, and ran his tongue over his dry lips. But his eyes were fastened to mine.
"Saul fell in with a group of prophets on the road, you remember, and the Spirit came over Saul and Saul went into ecstasy and Saul fell down into a trance among the prophets. And those looking on, those who saw this sight, one of them asked, 'And who is their father?' "
I didn't say anything.
"We asked you boys, we asked you all, to think of that story and tell us, What did this man mean who asked of Saul, 'And who is their father?' The other boys were quick to say that prophets had to come from families of prophets, and that Saul did not, and so it was natural for someone to ask this question."
I kept silent.
"Your answer," he said, "was different from that of the other boys. Do you remember? You said it was an insult, this question. It was an insult from those who had never known ecstasy or the power of the Spirit, those who envied the ones who did. The man who mocked was saying, 'Who are you, Saul, and what is your right to be among the prophets?' "
He studied me, holding my hand as tight as before.
"You remember?"
"I do," I said.
"You said, 'Men scorn what they can't grasp. They suffer in their longing for it.'"
Silence from me.
He drew his left hand out of his robes and now he held my hand with both his hands.