It would have been good to hear more about Alexandria, but all of a sudden some servants with laden baskets on their heads appeared on the steeply sloping street. At first all that could be seen were the wobbling baskets and only after that the heads. They were followed by a few armed men, and behind them came eight slaves bearing an ornate palanquin up the hill. A litter borne by eight slaves was a rare enough sight even in Rome, where even the wealthy made do with four. It was set down at the gate as gently as if they were transporting eggs, and out of it descended a tousled, black-bearded, rotund figure, balding and with graying hair and bushy eyebrows and wearing an exquisitely draped toga.
This was Simon the Magus.
Their host had made his arrival. They got to their feet to greet him.
Simon offered no excuses; after all, they might just as easily have arrived a day or two earlier or later. He just nodded by way of welcome, greeted Matthew in Aramaic as an old acquaintance and embraced him too, though without a smile on his face. The gate was opened and they were finally able to go in.
They made their way through a splendid, well-kept garden to the stone house, which was larger than that of the proprietor of the sawmill in Syracusa.
Room was made for them in an enormous chamber somewhat like an atrium. They were given wood benches to rest their backs on, and on those were mattresses spread with fine linen. They took a dip in a sumptuous tiled pool, prayed, and then gathered for supper, by which time Simon had also changed, putting on a clean tunic. His hair and beard were uncombed and he was pop-eyed with weariness.
They were served a meal of countless dishes, among them a great variety of meats (Simon knew that having been on a ship, they had eaten no meat for weeks) and fine wines. They fell on the food and ate with gusto, whereas Simon the Magus took only small bites of everything.
Uri looked around; there was nothing to suggest that the person dwelling in the house was a physician.
Simon started speaking Greek with them, but he struggled with the declension of words and the mysteries of the aorist tense, so after a few glasses he switched to Aramaic. He spoke with an easily recognizable Galilean accent. Matthew spoke Aramaic, and now it was suddenly revealed that Plotius spoke it perfectly; not surprising, thought Uri, given that he had spent quite a few years in Judaea, though he found it peculiar that he had not made this clear before. So Plotius too was also testing my Aramaic that Sabbath when I interpreted the reading, he thought.
Hilarus spoke Hebrew, so he was able to follow what the host was saying, more or less, and for the benefit of Iustus, Valerius, and Alexandros, a Jewish servant interpreted from Aramaic to Greek — perfectly, as far as Uri could tell.
Simon tried to banter, but he wasn’t suited to play the role of man of the world, as he was quite obviously unable to set his worries aside, and although no one asked him, he began to talk about them.
He had gotten back to the house so late because he had been trying to call in the outstanding debts of his creditors, and that was no easy matter. He had been concentrating almost exclusively on that for several weeks, and he had been forced to realize that lenders took a much bigger risk than he would ever have imagined. He had been poor for all of his days; he had limped the length and breadth of Galilee as an itinerant sorcerer, curing where he was asked and seeing very little in the way of money as he generally worked for room and board until, by a stroke of luck, Pilate, having heard about the cures he had achieved, sent for him and asked him to restore his sickly wife to health. He did indeed manage to help the lady recover, and he had been given a large amount of money by a grateful Pilate, after which he had gone away and for a few weeks had resumed his healing work in the villages of Galilee, until Pilate’s men caught up with him and called him to the palace, where the condition of Pilate’s spouse had taken a turn for the worse. A few days of speaking to the lady once more brought an improvement; Pilate had retained his services, and since then had very generously supported him financially. It now seemed that the curative effect was no longer working; he would not be able to keep his job much longer, and he wanted to be sure that the money he had saved was in a secure place. He did not regret having to leave this beautiful house: he had been content in stables and sties, and in fact greatly missed the smells of the land and livestock; he missed the country people, who were more appreciative than the rich, even when they could barely pay him, not even in kind, if they had nothing. But if he had come by money, better it should not go astray.
Matthew advised Simon the Magus to invest his money in land; it was cheap now but prices were certain to rise. Plotius recommended something else: buy a share in a well-run bank, and he would then have a share of the bank’s profits, in proportion to the capital that had been put in, with the money accumulating much faster than if it were simply earning interest.
Simon the Magus shook his head: he was a bit old-fashioned and had no head for working out compound interest; indeed, he was not interested, he just wanted to put his money in the safest place, and that was the treasury of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was so well guarded that he could be sure the money would not go astray. Plotius conceded that he was right; as far as he was informed, private fortunes were also stored there, but then the treasury did not pay out any interest. That didn’t matter, said Simon the Magus, as long as the money was in a safe place.
Anyway, he had recently been trying to call in his outstanding debts, and to be sure he was sorry now that earlier on he had given loans at usurious rates, because if the interest had been lower he would have gotten the money back long ago. He had all the promissory notes; they were drawn up in three copies in the presence of two witnesses, as they should be, with a copy going to him, a second to the debtor, and a third to the records office in Caesarea, by the Druseion, but then again a records office could be torched at any time, or a promissory note filched and the debtor’s own copy destroyed, and then the money was as good as gone.
“The Temple’s treasury is safe, because the Jews will never let that be torched,” said Simon the Magus. “If I choose, I can reclassify a part of the money as a donation, and then I shall be putting into effect a deed that is genuinely pleasing to God, and who knows, maybe even the priests will leave me be and not try to curse me two or three times a year for helping the sick and driving out their demons.”
Uri was happy he could understand every word: how lucky he was that his mother tongue was Aramaic, and Greek only his father’s language.
He would never have thought that a sorcerer would have problems like that — exactly the same as any businessman. But there had been gossip about sorcerers back in Rome; they were good for nothing beyond the laying on of hands, it was said, and they cast dubious spells instead of studying Celsus.
“Has Pilate’s wife’s illness gotten worse?” asked Matthew. “Are you afraid that you’ll be kicked out?”
“She’s no worse than earlier,” said Simon the Magus. “She’s dogged by being chronically unloved, which breaks out in various forms on and in her body. I am able to converse with her, listen to her; I am a friend, a well-wisher, her spiritual adviser, but I am not her husband. She has no children, her relatives are a long way away, she can’t confide in the servants, her husband is preoccupied and restless, and the initial charm of my sympathy for her, which made her improvement so spectacular early on, has since disappeared. She has grown accustomed to me and has relapsed. I, in my turn, have grown accustomed to her; her ailments bore me. I know her too well, and for that very reason I can’t think of anything to say. She needs a new doctor — anyone, just not me. Someone in whom she can place unbounded trust. Healing is anyway mostly a question of faith. Pilate is a wise man; he knows that, but I am not waiting for him to terminate the arrangement.”