Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria Page 4

  I sound convincing. Had I not already from time to time taken Father’s place at lectures when he was ill or otherwise occupied, and published three mathematical commentaries which have been taken seriously as well as a book about the geology of Theophrastus? Alexandria calls me “sage.” Surely all this puffery counts for something?

  Lais lowers her hand and smiles. Lais, smiling, can cause the heart to swoon. Jone lowers her head to finish her bun and her book. They are content. Hypatia will pay the bills if Father refuses to rise again.

  If only I could smile with such ease. The fact remains that I am female. I have taught males to great effect. But would these same males be taught by me if they must pay?

  ~

  From behind the walls of our house, I watch Alexandria driven to her knees.

  Emperor Theodosius, tiring of Alexandria’s “unrest,” has ordered Alexandria’s Prefect to have Alexandria’s Military Commander step between Christian and heretic. Imperial troops immediately surrounded the Serapeum, demanding all defenders leave or be crucified. The “pagans” left and the Christians flooded in. These have torn the temple to pieces.

  The battle is over. Old women scrub blood from the streets. Bodies are fished from the canals. We have lost.

  And just as the gods have kept their silence, Father has kept to his bed. He will have nothing further to do with human passions, concluding that the human state is unjust, immoral, and unworthy. It is also insane. If, says he, he must live in one room to escape it, then he shall live in one room. One room can be, he hopes, controlled by the shutting of a door and the barring of a window.

  What this means is that no money comes into our house, but a great deal flows out.

  He no longer covers his head, but as for the rest of him, all that stays firmly under his bedding. For a week or so, he even taught from this bed, surrounded by a small class of uncomfortable students as he lectured on the geometry of Euclid or the astronomy of Ptolemy or the harmonics of Nicomachus of Gerasa. But he has stopped even this.

  Minkah, his scalp tended to daily by Ife, is become his body servant and in return Father teaches him to speak and to read in Latin. He teaches him of stars and of numbers and of divination. In this, and in many other ways, they delight in each other. Father has seldom delighted in anyone but Didymus, and often Lais and sometimes even me, so that, I suppose, explains a stray Egyptian in our house.

  This, as I feared, leaves only Hypatia. I must do as I said I would do. Teach and be paid to teach.

  Who would allow me this? How should I start? And then I remember—who would allow me this? Who else? Our family’s good friend, Didymus the Blind. His school, the Christian Didascalia, takes pagan students hoping they might convert them, but they do not take pagan teachers who might convert back not only pagan but Christian.

  But there is this. Didymus knows everyone and everyone knows him. Didymus will help me find work, for Didymus who we love, loves us.

  ~

  Here, in the Christian district, all appears well with the world. The wide street that runs before the Christian school of Didymus, the narrow streets that pass either side, the public park behind, the Christians of Alexandria pushing their way here and there, the noise they make, the smell, the summer’s heat, all remains. Nothing seems changed but me. I am as ever barefoot, yet I am not the wild child who roamed the streets, coming from a lesson or going to, dodging through legs, knocking cabbage from stalls and pots from walls. I am head of my family now.

  Sitting in a white cup of a chair at the top of pink marble steps, Didymus awaits me in the great doorway to his school, founded, or so the Christians say, by Mark the Evangelist who they also say wrote the first gospel of Jesus. Old when I was a child, Didymus is so much older now. Bent then, he bends more. But the old man can make people laugh. He can make them cry. With his tales, he can cause them to sigh with longing or to shiver with fear.

  All love Didymus who has never sought to force his beliefs on any, especially not on Theon of Alexandria and his motherless brood of daughters. In this he shows great wisdom. Had he done so, the rest of his days would have been spent in the buzz of argument. We should have driven him mad.

  To me, that he lost his sight at the age of four has given him greater sight.

  “Hypatia!” His voice carries no farther than the pillars either side of the door as I take the stairs two at a time. “Go in,” I call, “go in and wait. I shall find you.”

  “Not without thread. Inside is as the Labyrinth of Minos.”

  Somewhere deep inside the school Origen wrestled from Mystery sects when Diocletian was emperor and doing his best to remove Christians from physical existence—how reversed the world now!—I sit with Didymus, confessing my problem. He laughs, and I see if teeth he has, they could number no more than three. I find myself thinking of triads and triangles and trinities.

  “It is perfection! My dear friend has finally solved his own dilemma.”

  “What dilemma is that?”

  “What to do with three daughters. Ordinarily a man with three daughters, but no wife, would remarry. But Theon loves only numbers and divination and Damara. So what to do with three girls? Is it not a father’s responsibility to see his daughters wed and off his hands?”

  “But we none of us wish to marry.”

  “Then you see his dilemma.”

  “And you see mine?”

  “I do. Normally you should all be out in the streets in no time.”

  “But that cannot happen.”

  “And it will not. You are Hypatia. Much is expected of you.”

  This clenches my jaw. “Perhaps too much.”

  “I imagine it feels that way, but when have you ever failed your father? Have you not even surpassed him in all things?” I would not answer that, and Didymus knows I would not. “You will teach. You will be greater than any. You will not falter nor will you fail. As said Heraclitus of Ephesus: ‘Character is Destiny.’ To fail is not in you.”

  I am surprised when I weep. I weep so suddenly and so deeply and for so long we are both of us shocked. Didymus listens to me cry. He makes no soft sounds to soothe me. He does not touch me. He waits. But crying, I see that I am afraid. I am so afraid. How does he know I shall not fail? With the best will, any can fail. Any can fall. To see my sisters in the street, my father, our faithful Ife, even that Egyptian person…to lose our home, our books, our horses, I could not bear it. But who am I to stop it?

  Now I no longer weep, I sob. And still Didymus waits.

  And when I am done and sit sniffling and wiping my snotty nose, he says this, “You cannot teach here, of course, but you can teach. And I know the very place.”

  In an instant, my back is once more straight, my face wiped with the hem of my tunic. “Where!”

  “It can be done with the penning of a single letter. He thinks to hire another, but he shall hire you. Oh, I had forgot! If this does not cause Theon to leap from that wretched bed, nothing will. Tell him we have counted the books. Some are lost, this is true, but most are not. Those who did not flee the siege secretly removed almost all.” My cheeks, already pink with tears, redden. We both know Father was one of those who fled. “All we need do now is—”

  I am out of my chair to kiss his knot of a nose, to pull his scant beard.

  He finishes. “—decide what else we need do.”

  Driving my grays home, I am reminded how small the world that is mine, how rare. I am reminded too how rare is Didymus the Blind. Of all who call themselves Christian, is it only Didymus who hears the true voice of their Christ?

  I stand between a new and violent faith that would remove all but its own beliefs from the world, and an old and violent faith with many faces, but all blooded with sacrifice. Passing through the Street of the Glassblowers, I am witness to a sight that is seen not by the week or by the day, but by the hour. Naked save for a leather pouch to cradle his scrotum and penis, a man holds a knife to the throat of a calf. His chest like a bowl, yet with a belly
in which a full term baby could fit, he is calling out to a god, demanding that god accept the blood of this poor trembling creature in payment for something he desires.

  Between these forces of ignorance, where is there room for the graceful Bast and the loving Hathor?

  Who hears the voice of Lais?

  Minkah the Egyptian

  I am called Minkah, but who has named me this, I do not know. I say I was born in the city of Alexandria, that it was here I first entered this realm of pain and of sorrow, but I would not swear this is true. And no more than where, do I know when. This only I know: I am a true Egyptian. Was I not born poor? Have I not been, for most of my wretched life, homeless? If any I could call by name, were they not toothless or lacking an arm or a leg or in some other way afflicted? If work I could find, was it not menial and when I held out my hand for pay, was I not beaten?

  Yet what is so on one day may not be so on another. Egyptian I am and Egyptian I remain. Yet for eight years and more I am as well Parabalanoi, one of the Christian brotherhood. I am fed and I am clothed and I am sheltered, but I took no holy orders and swore no solemn vows. No need even to be a cklus of a Christian—a good thing, for if god I have, it is Horus the Elder, god of suffering and poverty—but I am protected in all that I do by a Christian bishop who has use for me and my kind. The people are told we are merciful, that we bury the dead and care for the sick—and we do. But in truth we do much more for the bishop himself, and none of it merciful. The people are not fooled. As Parabalanoi, I inspire fear in all. As for those who once drove me from their door, or shielded their daughters from the sight and the smell of me, they do so no longer. They cringe and they tremble. Now, if I demanded it, they would thrust their women at me, even those yet babes. Take her, they would plead, take her—and leave us alone. Buttholes, the lot of them.

  In Egypt, an Egyptian is less than a camel for a camel spits at those who would ride him and hit him and load him down with great burdens. As Parabalanoi, I am become at least a camel.

  By my own effort I have taught myself to read. By my reading I have learned to speak as my betters speak—a handy skill. I am strong in body and quick in thought. What is shown me once, I learn. I suffer no illness, though I do now bear wounds, one from fire and one from the sword. As close as my shadow, scorn followed me into this world.

  And then there is this, as satisfying as status: Egyptians, brought low, are no longer alone in their shame and their anger. Hellenists, Jews, Gnostics, Greeks, philosophers, scientists, poets, mathematicians, historians, astronomers, each suffers a new force in Egypt, a force that seems darker by far than any come before. Ironic, is it not, that that same force affords me my new place in the world? If I were free enough for choice, I might care who offers me coin. I am not free enough.

  Our Bishop is a cunning man. He has destroyed the statue of Serapis, the one made to float by lodestones. With no image to worship, there will soon be no god. Men are forgetful. A god dies when he is forgotten, even Serapis who sets souls free. And then he destroyed the Serapeum. It was ground into dust which blew away on the wind and was no more.

  In Memphis, once a city of Pharaoh, the Iseum is also sacked and those that are spared, merely await their turn. Emperor Theodosius, by notice nailed to doors, affects to soothe the defenders of the old traditions. He swears none need fear him or his Christians, assures us with messenger after messenger that all might return to what had been—but even the simple are not simple enough to believe such dung.

  And yet, like the Nile in the season of Ahket, these difficult times have brought me riches on the crest of the flood. I have work and respect, and though I have paid with fiery pain, I sleep under the roof of the famous Theon of Alexandria in the Royal District, a roof that covers also the heads of his three sleeping daughters. One touches my heart with her goodness and beauty. The other touches my heart and my body. I must be careful here. She is not for me, or I for her. The third, a sad thing by comparison to her sisters, but not without spine. I am given such looks as would turn me to stone if the last were named Medusa.

  To remain, I become indispensable to Theon of Alexandria. Called first among mathematicians and astronomers, I call him last among men. Look at him now, curled up and buried in bed! If choice were mine, I’d drag him out by the hair of his beard only to kick his ass all the way to a lecture hall.

  Lucky for Theon, I seem alone in my disgust.

  Men make their way to his house. Some come alone, more often they come by twos and by threes. But however they arrive, they come by cover of night, and when they come, they gather in his draped and darkened room. Tonight, there are nine in the house of Theon, mathematician, astronomer, and coward. Not one could run more than ten steps without bending over to cough. All are, to me, old. Half sweat like slaves in the sun.

  As usual, only his head shows above the bedclothes. As usual, he does not speak but listens. No matter that he does this, all who arrive, friends and scholars alike, believe he will regain himself. I, who have never seen him other than he is now, do not believe this. A man with balls would not shrivel in bed. A man without balls seldom grows them.

  Tonight his guests talk of constructing defenses. Standing behind the man all assume is my “master,” I learn as I listen for it is these men, old, breathless, and sweating, who defended the Serapeum.

  The room is a hubbub of voices. Though the violence has passed, asks one, who knows when it will erupt again? Should they do nothing but wait, asks another, for emperor or bishop or some other tyrant to attack what is left them and see that destroyed as well? Should they disappear as this or that one has done? Or do as the poet Claudian did, flee to Rome so he might sing himself into favor? “Curse Claudian!” they cry.

  Curse Claudian? Gifted with wealth, able to read and to write, yet still he would sing to a tyrant? I say: cut his fucking throat.

  The poet Palladas, whose skin hangs on his bones as clothes on a line, whines that without public funds he goes hungry. But if he should leave, where can he go? He knows no other city. No other city knows him. “Why leave?” snorts Ammonius, the priest of Thoth who killed three who would spoil the Serapeum—with breasts that droop as the god Hapi’s, his deeds are hard to imagine. “Are there still not freedoms in Alexander’s city found nowhere else? And has this not been so for more than seven hundred years?” Behind Theon’s locked door, these freedoms will, he boldly proclaims, remain true for another seven hundred years.

  I do not laugh. I am skilled at not laughing.

  Finally, ask all, what is to become of the books? Each has what he took away during the siege of the Serapeum. Even I have books which remain in the satchel in a corner of the room given me, a room smelling of the great beasts living in larger rooms than I across a courtyard of yellow brick.

  I endure the same drivel each time they gather: one or another complains that the Great Library is scattered all over the city from the Gate of the Moon to the Necrotic Gate, hidden away in chests, in storage rooms, under beds, in stables, in the homes of people who do not know they are there, even in certain tombs in the City of the Dead. Once catalogued and stored by system, they are no longer, and none are protected by other than the secrecy of those who hide them. Emperor Theodosius may think them destroyed, bishops from Rome to Constantinople may cherish the idea they are gone forever, but they are not. They exist. By their bravery, old men like these, and women—I shall never forget my first sight of Hypatia, or the splendor of her naked body—had a week to remove every book that did not burn. After his first and only haul, brave Theon was not among them.

  Here they go again, talking each over each. Impossible to hear what any single man says, but easy to understand what all mean. What to do? What to do? The books must not remain in this place and that place. So much could happen to them, a loss here and a loss there. In no time some will be taken from the city, says a Jew named Meletus, others will be claimed as the property of this one or that one, for, given the chance, all men are thieves.
<
br />   Well, that’s true enough. All may be thieves, but not all here are fools. There will be books that are sold, books that are bartered, books that “disappear.” If nothing is done, and done soon, the books might as well have burned.

  From one moment to the next, I am enraged. If anger I feel tending to Theon, it is nothing to this. It floods my head. It causes my scalp to throb with pain. It fills my lungs. Theon hides in his bed, but these hide in an endless desert of words. Without thought, I shout, “Buttfuck them all! What is Alexandria without her library!”

  In the sudden and lengthy silence, only one voice finally sounds. “Indeed,” sighs the wry Pappas, an astronomer who seems Theon’s mentor, “…and what are scholars without books?”

  I need not hide for my outburst, nor explain my crudity, for now follows complete chaos. All are thrown into frustrated indecision. There must be a new library. How can there be a new library? Empty a building! Use that! And which building would allow this? Build a new one! Where? Somewhere out of the city. A secret place hidden in the eastern marshes. How will those who seek it, find it? Somewhere in the city, but not marked as such. But how to hide this from an emperor who exults in the burning of our books? Theodosius will find them…and try again.

  It is Helladius, priest of Ammon, barrel in chest, barrel in body, barrel in voice, who is finally loudest of all. “It falls to each man here to ensure that never happens. How, Theon, shall we do this?” As usual, Theon does not answer, though he does look attentive. This seems to answer for him. Helladius bellows on. “If we experience further threat, we must prepare for further threat. If they would burn more temples, what can we do? We are scholars, magistrates, priests. They are mindless fanatics protected by the Parabalanoi.” Here he spits. “Ignorant thugs! May Ammon cast them into the lowest hells of Amenta! May He stuff their mouths with the Stone of Sut!” I would flinch, but as with laughter, I know the art of a straight face. “We have learned by all this and learned grievously. Using violence against violence saved the books, but did not save the temple. As well, violence reduced us to the brutish level of a slavering Goth.” All heads nod. They remember his blooded sword. “The new library must be as secret as the books we hide in it. And that is not all we must hide. Our thoughts must be muted, our ideas spoken in whispers. The threat has not passed. That bishop awaits us like a lion in the tall grass.”