Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (33 page)

~

Holding Miw, I lean over the gunwale.

A mile or more from Pharos, and here is Synesius of Cyrene, his small boat alongside mine of size, following us into the reef and shoal littered Eunostos, the Port of Good Return.
 
How does he know when I come?

I am irritated.
 
He will assail me with tales of woe.
 
I am thrilled.
 
To smell the Egyptian sun on Egyptian limestone, to hear the music of bells in windows, to see again one who loves me, who has ever loved me.
 
All the news I know of Alexandria, I learn most fully from faithful Synesius—all but news of Minkah.
 
I have not asked and he has not sent a single word.

 
“Blessed lady!”
 
Synesius must shout, and if he must, he will.
 
“I cannot express my joy!
 
I choke with it!”

Men are running to and fro as the Blue Raven readies to anchor.
 
I must shout back.
 
“But are you not yet a bishop!”

His shudder is obvious.
 
“All too soon!”

“For my sanity’s sake, tell your brother no!
 
Tell Theophilus you are not worthy of such an honor.”

Down goes the mouth of Synesius.
 
“My life is over, teacher!
 
All that is left me is intrigue and the bickering of bishops!”

“Your life can begin again at a word.
 
Speak out before it’s too late.”

“I can’t!
 
All shall deride me.”

“In that case, think!
 
Bishops become invariably rich.”

“I am already rich.
 
It is worse than this.”

“How so?”

“I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of my brother Euoptius.
 
But even more, of hell!”

“What hell?”

“That which awaits the sinner.”

I stare down at him.
 
“As a Companion, how
have
you come to believe this?”

“You were not here to protect me.
 
Four years, teacher!
 
I was alone!”

~

Synesius provides litters, one for me and Miw, one for him.
 
On these we would quickly leave the harbor for home, a home I am beside myself to see—but we cannot.
 
A great noisy crowd gathers at the entry to the docks, one that pushes forward on either side.
 
I am astonished.
 
Is the whole of Alexandria here?
 
Faces I do not know, faces I do know, are held back by the soldiers of Rome.
 
There is shouting.
 
Some weep.
 
Some laugh.
 
It is as if Cleopatra had returned to them, this time triumphant in the Battle of Actium.
 
But it is only Hypatia.

“Synesius!
 
What is this?”

“You are beloved, Hypatia.
 
These are those who love you.”

I stare about at those who “love me.”
 
By the smiles and the proffering of fresh papyrus stalks, by the flowers thrown: chrysanthemum and chamomile and poppies, by the crying out of my name, Synesius is right.
 
I am loved—or am at least a thing to do on a day normally devoted to toil.
 
But he is also wrong.
 
There are those here who love me not.
 
Here and there, as soot on clean linen, gather the black monks.

Nothing has changed.
 
Yet I remain consumed with surprise.
 
That Father could see this, that Lais could see it…somewhere among all these, does Jone see it?
 
Does Minkah?

~

I enter my house trimmed in garlands of welcome in a city on the brink of the hell Synesius fears.
 
One step, two, and we fall.
 
Alexandria will be no more than brutalized Rome, no more than Sparta, each man’s life bound with the rope of rigid belief.

How fast Christians have turned persecution of themselves into persecution of others.
 
The orthodox, led by their bishop, kill thousands of their own, calling them heretic…many more than Diocletian could claim.
 
And then to hear, that on penalty of death, no one is to read a book not written by a Christian!
 
I pace my house.
 
How far will this go?
 
And how long before they turn, again, on the Jews and the pagans—how long before the fires are relit?

I hide in my books and my Companions.
 
Most are scattered, become important in some important city, but for those who remain, I am as ever the Divine Guide, and each has someone he would have join.
 
None are poor and none are women.

Synesius’
Dion
was right.
 
I am well painted, and made troubled by it.

As well as private, I return to public teaching for my house grows no less expensive with the passing of time.
 
And as I leave for each lecture, Nildjat Miw does as she has ever done, leaps into my chariot to attend, sleeping throughout at my feet.
 
Thankfully, paying students arrive in great numbers and of them, full half are foreign and full half are new, as new as my lecture hall in the Agora.
 
The Agora has many such, each as large as the other with stepped benches in semicircles.
 
Through the Jew Meletus, I find my trusted Rinat again.
 
To help her, I hire stenographers and scribes.
 
Though I were to become old as Didymus, I mean to place copies of my new work when complete in as many libraries as now hold Plato.

~

Synesius is this day consecrated Bishop of Ptolemais in the once Caesarium.

Before he finally fell into “grace,” to his credit, he forced the church to allow him his wife, to allow him dissent, and on certain questions: the soul’s creation: a literal resurrection, the final destruction of the world…he is allowed his say.

The ceremony is hours long, the heat intense, the air choked with incense, the benches hard.
 
Three have fainted and been taken away.
 
Closest to Synesius, sits his union of four friends, those Companions who pattern themselves after the
tetractys
of Pythagoras: Herculianus, Hesychius, and a Syrian of great wealth named Olympius.
 
I myself sit in a place of high honor; the place next to mine is occupied by the sister of Theophilus, Theophania.
 
She has not looked at me once.
 
I have looked at her.
 
She is angular and shocking in a bright red wig and thin linen dyed the thick red of her dyed red lips.
 
Cyril, her son, is now fat as a bladder and sweats as a wine skin.
 
This one sits on my left so that
his
place threatens to spill into
my
place.
 
Beside him slumps a man as narrow as a needle.
 
This is Hierax, spoken of by Synesius.
 
Synesius claims that by words alone Hierax could make hot seem cold, wet seem dry, wrong seem right.
 
It is hard to imagine.

As Synesius is declared by Theophilus a thing he would not be in an endless exhausting display, Cyril leans towards me to breathe, “Does this not move you, Hypatia?
 
Do you not admire its splendor?”

I am about to answer, about to say, yes, it
is
truly a thing of great expense and great ceremony and even great seriousness, when I see that behind him, hidden by his bulk, sits Jone.
 
I would jump up and open my arms, I would pull her close, but though Panya sees me, she makes no sign.
 
I do not jump up.
 
I do not open my arms.
 
“Yes, Cyril.
 
This moves me.”

As reward, he offers a crooked smile full of brown and yellow teeth.

Synesius is now Bishop of Ptolemais.
 
Later, privately, I will hold his hand as he weeps.
 
But for now I am confronted by Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria.
 
“Hypatia!
 
All were diminished by your absence.”

“I am more than pleased to be home.”

“I see you continue as before.”

I answer as he hopes I will.
 
“If it pleases you.”

In truth, I would teach with or without the consent of Theophilus, and therefore his protection, but it is good to have the latter.
 
Pulcheria, sister of the Emperor of the East, poor God-ridden child, now writes him misspelled letters—they arrive as quickly as runners can carry them—each one condemning that “heretic woman.”

~

Where Lais once slept, I now sleep.
 
Nildjat Miw sleeps where Paniwi once slept.
 
But long into the night, night after night, I am found at my mother’s green table.
 
Parmenides claims “nothing
is
.”
 
Heraclitus states “all is change.”
 
Through Seth, the Magdalene speaks of the ultimate singularity of “All That Is.”
 
There is a thread running through I weave as carefully as a weaver weaves cloth.
 
There is a secret here, hidden in words.
 
I will see it.
 
I swear, if not by the intellect, then in some other way, I will learn it.

I am home.
 
It is better than not being home.

~

Autumn, 410

Minkah the Egyptian

When my darling came back, I posed in a window four stories above the mouth of the Draco.
 
Every moment stays with me: the delirious crowd come to meet her, Synesius and his litters, the monks in black gnashing their rotted teeth, the constant cup in my hand and the wine in the cup.
 
On that day I lost both my latest bed and my latest “friend.”
 
How to blame her?
 
Shâshafi was only one of many, and none were Hypatia.

Not invited, yet I saw her again at the consecration of my once Companion Synesius.
 
Shoved to the back with the rest of the public drunks, as drunk as they, I held up my cup.
 
“A toast to the craven!”
 
I piss on his feet for showing the back of his neck.
 
I saw too Cyril.
 
And Jone…broken by Theon, gone mad with faith, as foolish as a chicken.
 
As for Cyril, he acts the fanatic, but is not.
 
He is as cunning as a rat.
 
Assuming himself unheard by any but Hierax, he once hissed: “Religious men are a homo-erotic cult.”
 
He is right, but to
say
so?

And me?
 
I drink in taverns, alone, not alone, what does it matter?

If I pound on her door, will she open it?
 
I regret nothing for what does regret change?
 
The path offered by Peter the Reader seemed a wise one.
 
That it would close doors as well as open them did not occur to me.

Over a house of wine on a decaying street in Rhakotis, sunk in a hole that is mine alone, I remember John of Chrysostom.
 
Dragged to exile in Pityus on the shores of the Black Sea, yet he hoped to return to Constantinople as bishop.
 
John died in the rain and the mud.
 
Shall I die in mud?

What else should I be but still
Parabalanoi
?
 
I am a drunken thug digging out the enemies of Theophilus.
 
Only men, yet they seem to breed, hidden in caves as spiders in holes.
 
The more we catch, the more there are, clinging to the idea of Origen, if not his teaching.
 
Origen is become a symbol, his teaching untaught.

I go about this work as a jackal goes about feeding.
 
All seems pointless.
 
Numb, I am more feared than ever.

Though I cannot go to her, I can make her a gift.
 
A counting board, an
abakos
.
 
Hers, when last seen, was a clumsy thing compared to the one I will make.
 
Mine will be grooved so that the balls, though they move easily back and forth, cannot fall out, or get stuck.
 
The wood will be finest cedar, the counting balls purest silver.

I will not ask to see her, but will leave my gift in the hands of Ife, in spite of herself, fond of fallen Minkah.
 
Hypatia will know who has made it.

Early Spring, 411

Hypatia of Alexandria

At my mother’s table, Miw and I read letters.

Gone to the city of Ptolemais, Synesius composes his missives as he has ever done: daily.
 
He laments his new home; it has no harbor, no theater, no library.
 
He is bishop of nothing.
 
Orestes and Flavius Anthemius both write from Constantinople, months of hard travel away.
 
Anthemius begs that I return, but if I would not, he begs I instruct him through letters.
 
Through his, I am instructed.
 
The Empire of the West reels from calamity to calamity.
 
Britain is left to fend for itself.
 
The Visigoth Alaric besieges Rome yet again.
 
Honorius, Emperor and chicken lover, panicking, kills his best advisors on the advice of his worst.
 
The letters of Orestes make me laugh.
 
Augustine, now bishop of Hippo, travels rarely, but writes as often as Synesius.
 
Knowing that Hippo will not be converted, still he labors mightily.
 
Something dark has begun to color his letters.
 
More and more he pleads for my soul.
 
In return, I reason with his pleading.
 
I leave the best for last.
 
Galla Placidia sends colorful tales full of love and life.
 
She lives openly with Athaulf the Visigoth.
 
Nildjat Miw is envious.

Yet no matter how many write me, I feel myself alone…and filled with thoughts of Minkah.
 
He is alive in Alexandria.
 
He thinks of me.
 
All other counting boards are set aside, even that one once belonging to Ctesibius, inventor of the “water thief” by which all the world keeps time.
 
I see him in the Serapeum as first I saw him.
 
I smell the stench of his burning hair.
 
I hear his voice as he tells me he owes me his life.
 
I remember the devices we made together, his wit and his laughter.
 
And the books!
 
It was Minkah who hid the books.
 
Which remain hidden.
 
If they were not, all Alexandria, pagan and Christian, would have been forced to witness their burning.

Memory upon memory crowds my mind.
 
He haunts me.

The day before I took flight, I took up the map he left on my mother’s green table.
 
This I placed in the tomb of Lais so that she might keep it safe, and with it Father’s “new” will.
 
I saw also the letter, thick with writing, and knew it for what it was: Minkah’s “Confession.”
 
But I, fleeing fast and fleeing far, did not read it.
 
And now, I have been in a panic to find it again.
 
It is not in my nature to destroy paper, and never paper on which a word of import or beauty might be written.
 
Ife, who maintains my house, cannot recall where she put it.
 
Where is it?
 
Where
is
it?

We spend weeks of frantic searching: in boxes and baskets, between the pages of books, under beds and in storage rooms.
 
And then, as casually as misplacing a sum, a Greek scribe, only lately hired, finds it among scraps of computations.

I rip it open and read it, over and over.
 
I read it aloud to Nildjat Miw who listens most carefully.
 
If
I
had listened most carefully, Minkah would not be gone from this place, and I should not have traveled, stirring up passions for and against me.

I know every word of Augustine’s confessions.
 
The confessions of Minkah are nothing like as long, but they are many times sadder.
 
Augustine took pleasure where he found it, found himself mistaken in the teachings of Mani who thought the flesh as evil as he thought the world.
 
Augustine loved and was loved.
 
But Minkah lived no life at all.
 
Motherless, homeless, betrayed and brutalized, to be tempted into the brotherhood by a creature called Peter the Reader was a choice any would make.
 
And I would not listen.
 
After years of love and of trust, I would
not
listen.

Minkah brought a gift to my door but did not bring himself.
 
More than any desire left me, I would give Minkah the gift of my repentance.
 
Nildjat Miw tells me I must not commit yet another sin of pride by requesting he come to me.
 
I must go to him.

But where is he?

~

Recommended as he who could find one grain of salt in a bucket of sand, I’ve used the services of a certain Wati, a man of Kush.
 
As black as Bia, the furious new filly I name after the goddess of force and compulsion, Wati is not as beautiful or as willful or as wild, but he is at least as clever.
 
Even so, the whole of two weeks pass before he has news of my “brother.”

On this, the evening of the fourteenth day, Wati leads me on foot to a door on the cobbled Street of the Herbalists, takes the purse I offer him, and disappears from this dusty canyon of a hundred sneezes.
 
I would faint from the crush of my fellows.
 
The whole of the city seems gathered here.

Covered from head to foot in a rough blue cloak borrowed from a stable lad, I press back against a mass of monk’s hood, dried root and dried leaf, ignored by those who shove past me.
 
Between sneezes, I stare at a faded red door to what is surely a house of beer.
 
Or of wine.
 
I honestly don’t know.
 
Those who enter begin more or less erect and steady on their feet.
 
Those who exit often crawl.
 
Three stories above is the home of my “brother.”
 
The walls either side of the tavern’s red door are splashed with urine, daubed with crude graffiti.
 
I have seen worse.
 
I have seen better.
 
But I have never seen inside such a place.

Heart racing, I push my way across the street to enter a world clamorous with heat and stench and noise, and so much darker than the night.
 
How do they see what they drink and with whom?
 
There is only a lamp on a hook near the door, a second by a staircase seeming unattached to its wall, a guttering candle on the one stone counter behind which moves what I think a woman.
 
Humpbacked under the great jug balanced on a muscled arm, slopping drink into cups, “she” is as dark as the room, as twisted as its staircase.
 
Staring, I am pushed aside by a naked boy whose lips are bright red.
 
Where did I read that lips painted red advertize fellatio?
 
Is it true?
 
An image rises of Theophania, sister to Theophilus.
 
Turning, I would ask the
lupa
, but my feet, for once shod, slip on the wet uneven floor and I seek balance against a fellow whose nose is as a falcon’s beak and whose eye is single.
 
I stare into his one eye.
 
The other is a socket, brown and puckered.
 
His one eye stares into mine.
 
Our gaze unlocks at a bray come from the deepest reach of this cave of drink.
 
Shadowed against a shadowed wall leans a man of enormous girth.
 
If bear became man, it would look as this man.
 
In his paw of a hand, he holds a drinking cup, dwarfed by his grip.
 
In a place where all shout, he is clearly heard.
 
“Alexander was a drunk!
 
I am a drunk!
 
Does this make me great?”

Another voice is raised, its owner obscured by the man like a bear.
 
“None greater, Felix Zoilus!”

I know the voice I hear.
 
Even slurred, I know the voice.
 
And from some recess in my mind, I know the name Felix Zoilus.

Minkah is as drunk as Alexander the Great.
 
I have never seen him drunk.
 
But drunk or sober, calm or angry, it is my Egyptian and, trembling with both fear and eagerness, I will speak to him.
 
Though first I must get to, and then around, Felix Zoilus the Great Drunk.
 
To do so, I must push and shove.
 
Not known to any, I am elbowed.
 
I am called
cunnus.
 
Stumbled against,
muni
is hissed in my face.
 
My breasts gripped, and my ass, I am called
kenes
.
 
A blue-eyed man who reeks of fresh shit grabs at my crotch while he offers a cup for a
nek
.
 
No need to rent a crib, he says, no need for even an alley.
 
He would have me on the slime of the floor.
 
What?
 
No?
 
Then two cups!
 
I decline, sweetly I think.
 
My answer earns me a cup of wine dumped down my back.

My Alexandria is a place of privilege.
 
There, I live as a creature of the air lives, sipping thought for sustenance.
 
But in Rome and in Athens and Antioch and Constantinople, I have walked the streets, picking my way through offal and slop, swatting away flies.
 
In Constantinople I reclined on silk in the inner chambers of a palace as the fetor of corruption overpowered my senses.
 
I sailed for months in huge ships with crews of all nations and stations.
 
After such places, this place is no more than is found anywhere.
 
If these are those who would inherit the earth, then should the books that are “lost” be found, who would read them?
 
Who would Lais be to any of these?
 
And who am I?
 
The answer comes so quickly I cannot silence it.
 
Here, I am no one and I am alone and I stand after so many years before Minkah, clutching my borrowed cloak, my hair dripping with the poorest wine.
 
And yet, when I speak I speak as if I sat above all in a
tribon
white as a wall in the sun.
 
“Companion!
 
Would you hear me?”

The bear on its back legs looks down from a great height.
 
I
do
know this one.
 
Once, long ago, stopped by the drawbridge between the two harbors, he would kill Augustine and then he would kill me.
 
I understand much now.
 
He did not kill us because my Egyptian asked him not to.
 
Beside him sags Minkah, one arm propping up his head, the other around the slim waist of a girl whose lips are red.
 
She too is naked and she too is drunk.
 
Her body is soiled with sweat and with grease and with the bites of fleas, yet remains enticing.
 
“Who is this?” she says, “I am not paid yet.
 
Tell the slut to fuck off.”

Returning stare for stare, I will not fuck off.
 
“I ask only a moment.”

Minkah has raised his face from his cup, and his eyes to mine.
 
Certainly I am not one, but two, even three…but his voice is steady enough.
 
“A moment?
 
How long is a moment?
 
Felix!
 
Fetch a cup.
 
For a moment, I would drink with my sister.”

As would a bear, Felix Zoilus shakes his huge shaggy head.
 
“Sister?
 
You have no sister.”

“A cup, Felix.
 
We shall both drink with my sister.
 
Excuse me, but who are you?”
 
This is said to the girl whose waist he still holds.

“Money.”

“Fair enough.
 
Felix.
 
I need a cup and a coin.
 
As for you…”
 
This is said to me.
 
“Tell him, Sage!
 
Tell my friend who you are.”

I look up at his friend, a giant, a man whose brain would not threaten a cow, yet whose hairy arms and hairy legs and hairier back could lift a bullock and its wagon.
 
I do not say, but shout, “I am the sister of Minkah the Egyptian.”