The Obelus

by Origen, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I

From the street door to the copying room there were thirty-one steps. Marthana had counted them on her first morning in the house, when she was eleven and had been told that the room at the top held the Scriptures six times over. She had wanted to know how high a thing like that had to be kept.

It was kept low, as it turned out, on shelves no higher than a man's chest, in quires bound between boards of cedar. The room smelled not of holiness but of gall ink, wet pumice, and the fish market, which the sea wind carried up from the harbour every afternoon after the sixth hour. Four years later she still counted the steps. Thirty-one going up. Going down, on the days her eyes were tired, she sometimes made it thirty.

The sheet in front of her this morning was ruled in six columns. She did not copy all six. The first, the Hebrew in its square letters, was Yose's; the second, the same Hebrew spelled out in Greek letters, so that a man who could not read the square script might still hear how the words had sounded in the mouth of the prophet, was Yose's too, done slowly, with his lips moving and his thumb on the line. Aquila and Symmachus belonged to the two copyists at the long table under the window. Marthana had the fifth column: the Seventy, the Greek that was read aloud in the assembly every Lord's day. And with the fifth column, the marks.

There were three marks, and she had learned them on wax before she was allowed to touch a pen to skin. The asterisk, a small star of crossed strokes, stood in front of words that the Hebrew had and the Seventy had left out; those words were fetched from Theodotion and written into the fifth column, so that nothing the prophet had said should go missing from it. The obelus, a short bar with a dot above it and a dot below, stood in front of words that the Seventy had and the Hebrew did not. The metobelus, a hooked stroke like a bent nail, showed where either of the others ended.

What she had found strange at eleven, and still found strange at fifteen, was that the obelized words were not cut. They were copied in full, in the same hand, at the same size, on the same calfskin that cost more than her father earned in a month. The mark stood in front of them like a man standing in a doorway, and they went on being read.

II

"You have dropped a metobelus," Hermeias said.

He had come up behind her without a sound, which was his habit; he was a tachygrapher, and twenty-five years of taking down the master's dictation at speed had left him with a way of being in a room as if he were already halfway through the next sentence. He laid the end of his ruler against her column, two lines below the place where she had set an obelus that morning.

"Here. The plus runs to here. You have not closed it."

She looked. He was right. The obelus stood in its place, bar and two dots, and then the words ran on and on down the column with nothing to say where the Seventy stopped adding and began again to agree with the Hebrew. A reader trusting her sheet would take everything below it, to the foot of the column, as additions to Jeremiah. He would mark them in his own copy. Another would copy his.

"The lamp," she said. "It went down."

It was true. Since the edict the house had bought its oil from a Samaritan in the lower market, and the Samaritan's oil was cheap and thick and smoked, so that by the fourth hour of the morning the wick wanted trimming and the flame lay over sideways and the room was full of a greasy haze that sat in the throat. Before the edict the oil had come from her father. It had been clear, and it had cost a quarter more, and nobody had complained of the price.

Hermeias did not answer about the lamp. He watched while she took the small knife and the pumice and lifted the last two lines, which she had written past the place, and set the hooked stroke where it belonged, and wrote the lines again. On parchment you could do this. The skin forgave you once, perhaps twice, and after that it went thin and furred and the ink spread in it like a stain in cloth.

"Your father was at the gate of the assembly on the Lord's day," Hermeias said, when she had finished.

"He stood outside."

"He can stand outside until his beard is white." Hermeias took the ruler away. "A man with a paper in his house that has the commissioners' names on it has told everyone which assembly he belongs to. He doesn't need us to tell him again."

He went back to his own table, where the master's homilies on Jeremiah lay in tachygraphic notes, all hooks and loops, waiting to be written out fair for when the master came home, if the master came home. Theodotion, the sixth column, was his too, when he had time for it.

Marthana trimmed the wick. She looked at the column for some time.

The paper was not in her father's house. It was in her pen case, folded twice, under the spare reeds. She had taken it out of the brazier in the yard in the month of Xanthicus of the year before, when her father had put it there, and had slapped the scorched corner out against her thigh, and he had seen her do it and had said nothing then and nothing since. She knew it by heart, as she knew the Psalms by heart, by having read it too many times. To the commissioners chosen for the sacrifices. I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence, in accordance with the edict, I have sacrificed and poured a libation and tasted the offerings, and I ask you to certify this. Then the clerk's hand, quicker and uglier, giving her father's name and age and the scar on his left eyebrow, and the two signatures of men who had never seen his face.

Her father had not sacrificed. He had not poured. He had not tasted. He had stood at the end of the commissioners' table under the colonnade, where the clerks sat with their stacks of blank forms, and he had put seven denarii on the board under his palm, and the clerk had moved his hand over the coins and written. Every verb in the document was false. By it her father had kept his shop, and his stock, and his daughter's place at the top of thirty-one steps.

III

The master had been in the prison since the winter.

Everyone in the house knew what was being done to him, and everyone knew it the same way: from the wife of the under-jailer, who bought her lamp oil from Marthana's father because the prison did not care who had a paper and who had not. She came to the shop in the street of the potters every eight or nine days with her jar, and talked while it was filled, and Zenas listened, and then he walked to the corner below the house and stood where Marthana could see him from the copying-room window, and when she came down he told her, and she came up again and told the room.

So the house had heard about the iron collar from a man who was not allowed through its assembly's gate. It had heard about the stocks, and that the master's feet had been stretched to the fourth hole and kept there for days together, and that the governor's men had shown him the brazier and the irons and had told him what they were for, and that he had answered them in a way the under-jailer's wife could not repeat because she had not understood it. It had heard that he was not to be killed. The governor wanted him to recant, alive and in public, an old man everyone had heard of, saying the words in the forum. A dead man said nothing.

"They want the sentence," Yose had said, when Marthana brought that piece of news. He had been grinding ink, and did not stop. "Not the man. The sentence out of the man's mouth. It's the same with the paper your father bought. They don't care what anyone believes. They want it written down."

Hermeias had said that Yose was a Jew and did not understand. Yose had gone on grinding.

In the month of Panemus the news came that Decius was dead. He had been killed with his son in a marsh on the Danube, fighting the Goths, so far away that the news had to cross two seas, and for some days nobody in Caesarea believed it. Then the governor's edicts came down from the boards in the forum, and new ones went up with new names on them, and the commissioners' tables under the colonnade were gone one morning, the clerks with them.

On the eleventh day of Loüs, a little after the third hour, a cart stopped in the street below the copying-room window, and Marthana, who had been watching the corner for her father, saw who was in it.

IV

He was smaller. That was the first thing. She had remembered him as a tall man, and he was not, and perhaps had never been; perhaps he had only seemed so from the bottom step. He sat propped against a sack of chaff in the bed of the cart with a blanket over his legs, in the heat, and his neck under the beard was ringed with a raw brown band, as if someone had tried to draw a collar on him in ink and pressed too hard.

The whole room went down. Hermeias went first, and the two copyists from the window, and Yose more slowly, wiping his hands. Marthana went last. Thirty-one.

In the street they stood round the cart and did not know what to do with their hands.

"Master," Hermeias said. "Master. We have kept the work. The homilies are written up as far as the twentieth. Jeremiah is ruled through to the fortieth chapter. We have—"

"Good," the old man said. His voice was hoarse and quite ordinary. "Good. Now I need to get up there, and I can't."

They looked at the door, and at the stairs beyond it, which went straight up between whitewashed walls and turned once, sharply, at the landing.

Hermeias and the younger copyist tried. They made a chair of their arms the way children do, and the old man was lifted off the chaff and out over the tail of the cart, and he cried out once, not loudly, and the younger copyist's grip failed on the left side, and they set him down on the mounting stone by the door with his face grey and his eyes shut. The copyists were scholars. They had arms like reed pens. Yose was past sixty. The driver of the cart had been paid to the door and no further, and was already backing his mule.

"Fetch the deacon," said Hermeias. "Fetch Theoktistos's men. Fetch someone."

Marthana was already running.

Her father's shop was four streets away, in the street of the potters, and he was in the doorway of it with a jar on his shoulder when she came round the corner. He had heard. The whole quarter had heard; a cart with that man in it does not go through Caesarea unseen. He looked at her face and set down the jar.

"He can't climb," she said.

Zenas wiped his hands on his apron. They were shining to the wrist, as they always were; oil got into the cracks of the skin and never came out, so that when she was small she had thought her father's hands gave off light. He did not ask what she wanted. He untied the apron and hung it on its nail, and came.

At the house Hermeias saw them turn the corner, and saw who it was, and stepped between them and the mounting stone.

"No," he said. "Not him."

Zenas stopped. He was a broad man, not tall, with the scar through his left eyebrow that the clerk had written down, and he stopped exactly where Hermeias had put himself, at the edge of the shade of the doorway, and did not try to go round.

The old man opened his eyes.

"Who is this?"

"The oil-seller," Hermeias said. "Zenas, of the potters' street. Marthana's father. Master, he has a certificate. He was at the commissioners' table, last year, in Xanthicus. The bishop has not ruled on any of them yet; nobody has been received back; we can't—"

"The bishop is not carrying me." The old man turned his head, carefully, because of the band on his neck, and looked at Zenas for some time. "A certificate. What does it say?"

Zenas looked at the ground.

Marthana said it. She did not have to take it out of her pen case. She said it the way she would have read a column aloud for checking, at the even pace Hermeias had taught her, every word given its weight and no word more than its weight: I have always sacrificed to the gods, and now in your presence, in accordance with the edict, I have sacrificed and poured a libation and tasted the offerings, and I ask you to certify this.

"Always," the old man said. "Always sacrificed. That's a great deal of sacrificing for an oil-seller." He looked at Zenas again. "Did you taste?"

"No."

"Pour?"

"No."

"Did you go to the altar at all?"

"I paid the clerk," said Zenas. "Seven denarii."

The old man shut his eyes. When he opened them he was looking not at Zenas but at the stairs.

"So every word of it is false," he said. "Then it's a strange kind of document. It is all written down, and none of it happened, and still a man stands outside a gate because of it." He was quiet for a moment, breathing. "I've spent thirty years with texts that say things that cannot have happened. Hermeias, I'll think about the certificate. I'll think about it upstairs. Zenas, take me from the right side, if you can. They did something to the left hip, and I would rather not find out what."

Hermeias did not move at once. Then he did.

V

Her father lifted the old man as he lifted a full jar: knees bent, back straight, the weight brought in against his chest before he stood. The old man's arm went round his neck, above the collar of his tunic, and the old man's face went over his shoulder, so that Marthana, coming behind on the stairs, found herself looking into it.

"My father carried me like this once," he said. "Up to bed, when I had fallen asleep over the lamp. I was smaller." His eyes were open and quite clear. "He was a better man than either of us. Mind the turn."

Zenas minded the turn. At the landing the stair narrowed and the whitewash had been rubbed grey at shoulder height by twenty years of men coming and going with books, and Zenas turned sideways to fit, and the old man's bad hip touched the wall and he made a small sound and said, "Go on, go on." Marthana counted. She could not help it. Nineteen, twenty. Below her came Hermeias, and the two copyists, and Yose with his hand on the wall, and nobody spoke.

Thirty-one.

The copying room was as they had left it when they ran: the pens down, the ink drying in the horns, the Samaritan's lamp smoking on the long table, and the haze of it lying across the room at the height of a man's face. Zenas put the old man into the chair by the shelves where he used to sit to dictate, and went back to the door, and wiped his hands on his tunic, though there was nothing on them now but the old shine that never came off.

The old man looked round the room. He looked at the shelves, and at the quires between their boards, and at the sheets on the tables, ruled in their six columns. He looked at the lamp.

"What," he said, "are you burning?"

"Samaritan oil," said Hermeias. "From the lower market."

"It smokes."

"It's cheap, Master. The endowment—"

"It smokes," the old man said again. "I can't see the fifth column from here. I have been since the winter in a place with one window, and I would like to see the fifth column." He looked at Zenas, who was still standing just inside the door, where the step ended. "Have you any oil with you?"

Zenas had nothing with him. He had untied his apron and hung it on its nail and come as he was. But Marthana remembered the jar he had set down in his shop doorway when she came round the corner, and she was already at the top of the stairs.

Thirty-one, going down. She made it thirty-one, and ran the four streets, and the jar was where he had left it, untouched, because in the potters' street nobody would steal oil from Zenas, whatever paper he had in his house. She carried it back on her shoulder the way he did, and climbed. Thirty-one.

Her father took it from her at the door. He went to the long table and pinched out the Samaritan's flame between finger and thumb, and lifted the lamp and carried it to the window and tipped out the dregs of the thick oil into the street, where it fell on the stones and lay there. He wiped the bowl with the corner of his tunic. He trimmed the wick with his thumbnail, close, the way he had shown her when she was small. Then he unstopped the jar and poured, slowly, so as not to flood the wick, and Hermeias brought a light from his own lamp without being asked, and held it there.

The flame caught, and stood up straight, and did not smoke. It lay clear across the sheet on Marthana's table, across all six columns at once: the square letters and the spelled-out Hebrew and Aquila and Symmachus and the Seventy and Theodotion, and across the obelus that stood in the fifth column in front of the words that the Hebrew did not have, and across the bent nail of the metobelus below them, where she had put it back that morning.

Her father stopped the jar and stood holding it, inside the door, and nobody told him to go.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Ōrigene per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Origen, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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