The Reed Knife

by Gregory of Nazianzus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Paregorios came home from the wedding with his cheeks aching and three coppers more than he had been promised, which is to say that the bride's father had been drunk and the bride's mother had not yet counted.

He climbed the stair in the dark. He knew it by its faults: the fourth step that gave, the ninth that was not there, the place near the top where the plaster had come away and you put your hand into the wall up to the wrist. The tenement leaned against its neighbour like a tired man against a friend. Below him the street still smelled of the day's fish. Above him, somewhere, a baby was objecting to the hour, and its mother was singing it a song with no tune at all, which is the oldest kind.

His room was the last on the third floor. Theodoule was asleep on the pallet under the window with her knees drawn up and her mouth open, nine years old and snoring like a porter. He did not wake her. He set the lamp on the shelf and took off the leather strap that held the pipes to his mouth, and his face, released, felt for a moment as if it belonged to someone else. Then he did what he did every night, wedding or funeral or theatre, whatever had been paid for: he took the reeds out of the pipes, two by two, and put them to soak in the cup of water by the door, so that they would not split as they dried.

A reed is a small thing. It is a length of cane, cut in the marshes in winter and left a year to season, then split, and shaved, and pinched at the end so that two thin lips almost meet. If they meet, there is no sound. If they gape, there is only breath. The whole art is in the almost. He had told Theodoule this once, and she had asked why he did not simply buy better reeds, and he had not been able to answer her.

He sat down on the stool to unlace his boots, and heard the shouting.

---

It came up from the direction of the Anastasia, which was the little church at the top of the street, though it was not truly a church: it was a house that friends of the bishop had lent him, because the bishop had come to the City with no church at all. All the great churches belonged to the other party, the ones who said the Son was like the Father but not the same; the bishop's people said He was the same, and met in a house, and were few. Paregorios knew this the way he knew which taverns watered their wine. He was not one of them and not one of the others. He played for whoever paid, and the dead, in his experience, did not ask the piper's creed.

The bishop himself he had seen twice: a small bent man, bald as an egg, in a cloak that a beggar would have bargained over, walking with his eyes on the ground as if he had dropped something there years ago and was still looking. The neighbours said that when he preached the Christians stood in the street outside, because the house would not hold them, and that the other party sent boys to throw stones. The neighbours said a great many things.

The shouting grew. There were feet on the cobbles, more than a few, and a voice crying "Out! Out!", and another voice, high and furious, crying something in Greek that had been born in Egypt and had not travelled well. Then the feet were in the doorway below, and on the stair, and the fourth step gave under someone, and someone else found the ninth step was not there.

Paregorios stood up with one boot on. The door had a bar, but he had not put it down. Before he could, the door opened, and the room was full of Egyptians.

There were seven of them, or eight; a lamp swinging in one man's hand made them seem to multiply. Four were sailors, broad brown men who smelled of tar and wet grain and who stood as sailors stand, with their knees loose, as though the floor might move. Three were old men in long white linen, out of breath, one with a book clutched to his chest like a man carrying a child out of a fire. And in the middle of them, held by an arm on either side, was a man Paregorios had seen before, though for a moment he did not know where.

He was tall, and he wore the coarse doubled cloak of the philosophers who sleep in porticoes and despise everything except being looked at, and he carried a staff. Half of his head was covered in long black curls, oiled, falling to the shoulder in ringlets that had plainly cost him trouble every morning of his life. The other half had been shorn to the scalp. The line between them ran down the middle of his crown like a road between a forest and a field.

Paregorios knew him then. He had seen him at the Anastasia, on the day the bishop had praised him in front of everyone: the philosopher from Alexandria, who had suffered for the faith, and slept on the ground, and shown how a man could be a Cynic and a Christian both. The whole street had talked of it. The bishop had called him the best of philosophers. The philosopher had wept.

"A door," said one of the old men in linen. He was the one with the book. "We need a door that shuts."

"This is my house," said Paregorios.

"It is a door," said the old man. "It shuts. Bar it."

One of the sailors barred it. Paregorios found that he had not objected. There is a kind of authority in a man who knows exactly what he wants at a moment when you yourself want only to take off your other boot.

"Is there a blade?" said the second old man. "Brother Ammon dropped the shears in the church."

"I did not drop them," said a third. "They were taken from me by a soldier."

"A blade," said the man with the book.

They were all looking at him. Behind him, on the shelf, beside the lamp, lay the knife he used for the reeds: a short thin blade with a bone handle, ground so often that it had grown narrow as a leaf, the edge fine enough to shave cane to the thickness of a fingernail. It had been his father's. It had shaped every reed he had played since he was twelve years old.

He did not give it to them. He did not refuse. He simply stood there, and one of the sailors, following his eyes, reached past him and took it from the shelf, and turned it in the lamplight with a professional interest, and nodded.

"It'll do," said the sailor.

"There must be a seat," said the man with the book. "He must be seated. It is the throne."

There was one stool in the room. Paregorios was standing in front of it. He stepped aside.

So the philosopher sat down on the stool of a flute-player, in a room nine feet by twelve, with a child asleep under the window and a cup of reeds soaking by the door; and the three Egyptian bishops stood round him, and the one with the book opened it and held it over his half-shorn head, and the second began a prayer in a voice that kept breaking, and the sailor with the reed knife set to work on the remaining curls.

---

It must be said that the sailor was good at it. He held each ringlet out taut between his finger and thumb and drew the little blade through it close to the scalp, the way a man cuts a rope he means to use again, and dropped it on the floor. The curls fell softly. They lay on the boards in the lamplight like something that had died in the night and was still warm. The smell of the oil rose from them: nard, Paregorios thought, or something that wished to be taken for nard.

The prayer did not go well. The second bishop forgot a phrase and the first supplied it and the third said that was not the phrase, that in Alexandria they said it otherwise, and for a while all three said it in the different ways at once, so that the room was full of a muttering like bees in a wall. Through it all the philosopher sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes closed and his face set in the expression of a man enduring a great suffering with great patience, which may have been sincere; the knife was not always gentle.

Paregorios, who had played at a hundred weddings, observed that it was not so very different. Here was a man being given to something, with words said over him, and witnesses standing about, and a good deal of hair; and here were the relatives, quarrelling over the form of words; and here was the servant with the blade; and here, at the door, the hired musician, who had not been asked to play and did not expect to be paid.

Then Theodoule woke.

She sat up on the pallet with her hair flat on one side and looked at the room. She looked at the sailors, who looked at the ceiling. She looked at the old men in white. She looked for a long time at the philosopher, who now had, perhaps, a quarter of his head still in curls, on the left side over the ear, and the rest of it as pale as new cheese. Then she looked at her father.

"Is it a wedding?" she said.

The bishop with the book stopped praying. The second bishop, who had not stopped, stopped. The sailor with the knife held a curl out in his fingers and did not cut it.

"Go back to sleep," said Paregorios.

"Who is he marrying?"

"The City," said the bishop with the book, after a moment; and he said it, Paregorios thought, not unkindly, and not quite as if he believed it.

Theodoule considered this. She looked at the philosopher's head again. "Does the City want him?" she said.

Nobody answered her. The sailor cut the curl. Outside, at the foot of the stair, someone began to beat on the door below with something heavier than a fist, and a man's voice, the kind of voice that has been trained to carry across a courtyard full of the guilty, called for the door to be opened in the name of the Prefect.

---

What was left was done very quickly.

The bishops laid their hands on the philosopher's bare head, all three at once, their fingers overlapping like the roots of trees, and said the last words together and for once the same. The sailor shaved the last stubborn tuft over the left ear and stood back. The philosopher opened his eyes. He put up a hand and felt his scalp, slowly, all over, as a man feels a room in the dark to learn its shape. Then he looked about him with an expression Paregorios never forgot, though he could never afterwards describe it: as if he had expected, on opening his eyes, to see a church.

"Is there a mirror?" he said.

There was. It was a disc of bronze the size of a hand, polished thin, that had belonged to Theodoule's mother; it hung on a nail by the window. Paregorios did not move. Theodoule got up off the pallet in her shift, took it down, and held it out.

The philosopher looked into it for some time. The bronze was old and gave back only a dim gold man with a round head. He handed it back to the child and said, "Thank you," gravely, as to a lady; and she took it and said nothing, and hung it back on its nail, and got into bed again with her face to the wall.

The beating on the door below had stopped. That was worse. They could hear men on the stair now, slowly, finding out about the fourth step.

"The roof," said a sailor.

There was a ladder in the corner of the landing outside that went up through a trap to the flat roof where the women of the house dried their washing, and from there you could cross to the next roof, and the next, and come down by the bakery into the lane that ran to the harbour. Every child in the tenement knew it. Paregorios had not known the sailors would know it; but sailors know roofs as other men know floors. They went up one after another, quick and silent, and handed the old bishops up after them, the one with the book last, protesting, the book passed up before him. The philosopher went with his staff in his hand and the cloak bunched up round his knees. At the top of the ladder he turned and looked down at the room, and seemed about to speak, and did not.

The trap closed. A little dust fell.

On the stool, where he had been sitting, lay two coppers; nobody had seen who put them there. The reed knife was gone.

---

The Prefect's men were civil, as such men go. They looked at the hair on the floor and at the cup of reeds and at Theodoule, who pretended to be asleep, and at Paregorios, who pretended to be stupid; and their officer, who was neither, wrote something on a tablet and asked him whether he was of the bishop's party or the other, and he said he played the pipes, and the officer seemed to find that this was an answer. They went away down the stair, and one of them put his foot where the ninth step should have been and swore in Latin.

He swept the curls into a heap with the side of his foot. There was a great deal of hair; there always is. He thought of throwing it out of the window, and then thought of what the neighbours would say, and put it in the basket by the brazier, and sat down on the stool, and found that he could not get up again for a long while.

That was the first day.

On the third day a deacon came from the Anastasia and asked him to come and tell the bishop what he had seen.

---

The bishop was sitting up in a narrow bed in a room no bigger than the flute-player's own, wrapped in two blankets, though the day was warm. There were books on the floor round the bed in heaps, like a wall built by a child. A boy was writing at a table under the window, and stopped when Paregorios came in, and was sent away.

Up close the bishop was older than Paregorios had thought, or else illness had made him so. The skin of his scalp was yellow, his beard thin and white, the hands lying on the blanket very long and very thin and never quite still, as though they were writing something on it. But his eyes were black and quick, and they went over Paregorios once, from his boots to his hair, and missed nothing, and seemed to like most of it.

"You are the musician," said the bishop. His voice was hoarse but it was a voice; it had been made, as an instrument is made, and the illness had only roughened the reed. "Sit. No, there is nowhere to sit. Sit on the Psalms; they will bear it. Tell me."

So Paregorios sat on a heap of books and told him. He told it plainly, because he had no other way of telling things: the wedding, the stair, the door, the old men and the sailors, the knife, the stool, the prayers in three versions, the child, the mirror, the roof. He did not tell what Theodoule had said about the City. He did not know why not.

The bishop listened with his eyes shut. Twice he laughed, once at the shears taken by a soldier, once at the mirror, and the laughing turned into coughing, and the coughing went on long enough that Paregorios half rose to call the boy back; but the long hand lifted from the blanket and waved him down.

"I praised him," said the bishop, when he had breath. "You heard me, I think. Everyone heard me. In my own house, before my own people, I called him the best of philosophers. I made him an oration. It was a good oration. I worked on it a week." He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. "It is still a good oration. That is the difficulty with them."

Paregorios said nothing. It seemed to him that nothing was being asked.

"They will call it a consecration," said the bishop. "In Alexandria they will write it down as a consecration. And then there will be a council, and the council will say it was not, and that will be written down too, and in a hundred years some poor scholar will have to read both." He turned his head on the pillow. "And between them, a flute-player's floor, covered in hair. That will not be written down. Will you write it down?"

"I cannot write."

"No. Nor could the shepherds." The bishop was silent a moment. "What did they cut it with?"

"My knife."

"Your knife."

"For the reeds," said Paregorios. And then, because the black eyes were waiting and because he had not said it to anyone, not even to Theodoule: "They took it with them. It was my father's."

The bishop looked at him for a long time. Then he put out one of the long thin hands, not to Paregorios but to the table beside the bed, among the inkpots and the pens, and felt about among them, and found what he was looking for, and held it out.

It was a penknife: the small sharp blade that a writer uses to trim the end of a reed pen when it splits and blots. The handle was black horn, worn pale at the place where a thumb goes.

"It is the same work," said the bishop. "You cut a reed so that it will speak; so do I. Mine speaks less well than yours, and is listened to more, which is unjust. Take it." And when Paregorios did not take it: "I have others. I have far too many. I have been sent a great many pens by people who want me to write to the Emperor, and I do not want to write to the Emperor. I want to write verses. Take it, and play at the next wedding, and do not tell me whose."

Paregorios took it.

At the door he turned back. The boy had come in again, and was settling himself at the table, and the bishop had closed his eyes. But he said, without opening them, "Musician."

"Yes?"

"Your daughter. When she asked if it was a wedding. What did you tell her?"

So he had heard of that too; the deacon, perhaps, or the street. In this City, everything is heard of.

"I told her to go back to sleep."

"Good," said the bishop. "That was wise. That was much the wisest thing anyone said that night." And then, to the boy, in another voice altogether: "Where were we. Read me the last line again. No, the one before."

---

Paregorios went home by the lane that runs past the bakery. Theodoule was sitting on the stair outside the door with a doll made of rag on her knee, telling it something severe.

Inside, the cup of reeds still stood by the door. He had not played for three days, and they had soaked too long; most of them were soft as boiled leeks and good for nothing. He went through them one by one, pinching the lips between finger and thumb, and threw away five, and kept one.

He sat on the stool. He took the bishop's penknife out of his belt and opened it and tried the edge on his thumbnail. It was a good edge; a writer keeps it so. Then he took the one reed, and, holding it up to the window, began very carefully to shave the back of it, a little at a time, a curl of cane no thicker than a hair lifting from the blade and falling to the floor; and when it was thin enough he wet it in his mouth, and fitted it to the pipe, and blew.

Out on the stair, Theodoule stopped talking to the doll.

---

THE END

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

Gregory of Nazianzus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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