Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (11 page)

Home again in my own room by my own window, I begin anew the letter that came this day from Augustine, but now, quieter than the mouse Lais names her, Jone appears.
 
And then, oddest of all odd things, she who seldom speaks, speaks to me. “Father does not love me.”

I am cast into a cave of sorrow.
 
Jone is right.
 
Father does not love her.
 
But this is not to be said, not by me, not by anyone.
 
I had even hoped it would not be known, but Ife knows and it’s why she makes it her business to soothe Damara’s lost babe.
 
I, who can speak of anything at any time, am silenced and my silence is complete.

My clever little sister hears me.
 
“So you know it is true.
 
He loves you.
 
He loves Lais.
 
He loved Mother.
 
But he does not love me.
 
He thinks it was I who killed her.”

I manage a startled, “No!”

Sudden as a snake, Jone’s head swivels on her neck.
 
“You will not lie to me!
 
Not you!”

This from Jone, so quiet, so still, so passive?
 
In humbled return, I say, “I will not lie.”

“Then you know he thinks this.”

“I do.”

Jone does not cry.
 
I have never seen her cry.
 
But she has closed her eyes and sits now, and if she does not weep, it is only from strength of will.
 
“I am not loved, not even by you.”

I would gather her up in my arms; I would croon to her as I have seen Ife croon.
 
But Jone does not allow me this.
 
All I have left are words.
 
“You are right.
 
It is not my place to speak for others.
 
But as for me, I have always loved you.
 
Though I do not know you, though you keep yourself hidden, I love you with all my heart.”

Jone does not melt at my true words.
 
Instead, she stares deep into my eyes.
 
If I do not lie, if I love her as I say I do, can she trust me?
 
Jone has need to speak.

“Tell me what you have come to say, Jone.
 
I promise I will not repeat it or judge it.”

A moment more, a looking round to make sure we are unobserved, a flick of her tongue across her lips: “I have been reading.”
 
If I say, “Of course,” she will sense the irony.
 
If she senses irony, my serious little sister will walk away, and that will be that.
 
I am silent.
 
“And I have spoken to some who convince me.
 
I have decided to convert.”

As she says nothing further, I must ask, though I fear I already know, “Convert to what?”

“I would be Christian.”
 
It is hard, but I do not react.
 
“Do you know
why
I would be Christian?”
 
I cannot imagine.
 
Our family is high-born, literate, and Greek.
 
Father and I are in love with reason.
 
Lais is love itself.
 
I shake my head: no, I have no idea.
 
Jone waits to give me her answer.
 
If she times it for effect, her timing is perfect as is her almost whisper.
 
“Because the Christian Father forgives.”

I count the moments so that my timing equals hers.
 
I absorb what has been said to me.
 
I decide.
 
“In that case, little one, we must find you a school.”

At this, Jone’s face changes as lightning changes the dark.
 
She, who seldom touches any, throws her arms around my neck, and cries, “I could not ask, but you guess!
 
Clever Hypatia.”
 
And with that our “Panya” leaves as swiftly as she came.

I cannot return to my letter.
 
Any awe that was mine has fled.
 
It is not fear or concern that Jone turns Christian that grips me.
 
It is
why
she turns Christian.
 
If I were to tell Father, would it matter?
 
He cannot love what he cannot love.
 
And Jone, by this night’s conversation, is no fool.
 
He cannot now pretend to love what he cannot love.

Tomorrow I shall enroll her in the Didascalia, the Catechetical School of Alexandria.

How useful Didymus is to my family.
 
May he live forever.

And how difficult life these last two years.
 
But surely, as Heraclitus wrote, it will turn and turn again.

~

The first month of 393

Students curve round me as a cat’s tail curves round a seated cat.
 
Half the Caesarium is filled.

I have managed no more than a moment concerning the incommensurate dimension of lines forming the sides and diagonals of the square, saying these represent an imponderable mystery leading us to the precipice of the infinite, beyond which all certainty is lost for here the thinking mind loses all comprehension and stands before the mystery of the All, when of a sudden, there comes a strange heat and then a great silence—and then, a tipping of the dais toward the sea.
 
I am thrown first to one side of my chair, then to the other.
 
The floor before me sinks.
 
And then, with a tremendous jolt, all is thrown down by Eris, Goddess of chaos.
 
What has stood upright, falls, what has lain flat, rises, what has kept silent, roars.
 
A crack opens in the tiled and painted ceiling high above, dropping gorgeous chunks of deadly debris down upon us.
 
In seconds, the air chokes us with dust.

All know what happens here.
 
All shout or flee or cower under stepped benches, one pushes at that which he cannot remove, another crawls dazed and bleeding towards nothing.
 
Four surround the one who is trapped, failing to lift away the stone.

I have never endured an earthquake of size, never felt other than feeble tremors.
 
That which caused the wave that took the palace took also the lives of thousands.
 
It took the city of Cyrene.
 
What will this one take?

Leaping from my chair, I would not be elsewhere, not if it would square the circle or renew the reading of Sappho.

Running out through the swaying pillars of the lecture hall and into the swaying Street of the Great Harbor, Synesius of Cyrene is right behind me, his brother Euoptius right behind him.
 
But Minkah runs before us.

We four come to an abrupt and shocking halt.
 
Everywhere, the tops or the sides or the carved concrete moldings of the buildings are gone.
 
Octavian’s two stolen obelisks shift on their bases so that, in looking, my own head shifts.
 
Will they fall?
 
Will the salted green waters pour in yet again, flooding the harbors and the canals, swallowing in one huge gulp the city itself?

No matter if they are Christian or if they are not Christian, my students scatter.

I do not run.
 
I turn where I stand, surveying what has come of this shaking.
 
Minkah turns with me, as does Synesius and his brother.
 
For a time even Euoptius is open-mouthed before the gods, for not only is he shocked, he is stunned by a piece of fallen gilt.
 
Near the palace of Hadrian, there are
insulae
of many stories where are housed the masses, each
insulae
five and six, even seven, stories tall, and in some floor after floor can be seen, sagging now without support, and what was inside falls outside: beds, tables, dishes, baskets, lamps, terra cotta pots, cradles, even the poor cradled babes themselves.
 
The staircases, steep narrow things onto which people cling, lean out and away, as do sewage pipes.
 
Of these, many are broken.
 
And beneath these, the side streets are close to impassable from all that has fallen upon them.
 
Everywhere there are the dead and the wounded.
 
Everywhere there is panic and lamentation.
 
Downed horses scream, oxen bellow, all the birds have flown.
 
Everywhere there are those who clamber over unutterable destruction in an attempt to gather their goods or rescue their kin.
 
All smells of human waste.
 
All is the color of dust and blood.
 
The sun at noon is pale and gives no heat.
 
Everyone calls out for their god.
 
The din is incredible.

Minkah would go where I would go.
 
But I beseech him to take the horses; he must see to Father and to my sisters.
 
As for me, I seek the worst damage.
 
I would find the deepest widest fissures.

Augustine and his thoughts of evil rise up in me.
 
If we are good, say many, the gods are good.
 
If we do evil, the gods exact their toll.
 
How then do the good die in earthquakes and the bad earn kingdoms by grievous murder?
 
Why does the earth shake in some places and never in others?
 
Good men and bad reside everywhere.
 
Proud Eratosthenes, he who first named the search for such answers “geology,” asked these same questions when he was not measuring the earth.
 
The sober Aristotle also asked.
 
Augustine asks now.
 
But none know the answer.
 
I ask: could the shaking become so tremendous it would split the world in two?

There is a second, larger, stronger, jolt and the street I run on moves under my feet like a woven mat pulled along the floor.
 
I would fall to my knees, even land flat on my face, were it not for the strong arm that stops me.
 
It is not Minkah.
 
Minkah is away as I bid him.
 
It is not Synesius nor is it Euoptius.
 
Last I saw either, Synesius, unharmed, led his brother away, Euoptius bleeding from his great nose.

Spitting dust and grit from my mouth, I look up at my savior.
 
Isidore of Pergamon pulls me aright, the priest who remains the favorite of Bishop Theophilus but has not remained my student.
 
Beside him stands Cyril, nephew of Theophilus, grown taller as well as wider.
 
If he has also grown in arrogance, it does not show now.
 
Cyril trembles.
 
His eyes, round as his round face, dart from side to side.
 
His mouth, once a disturbing red, is now a dry white.
 
His skin is whiter than his mouth.
 
I imagine a privy would be most welcome to young Cyril.

We three stand near an
insulae
that shifts on its base like the obelisks of rose red granite.
 
Cladding falls from its walls in small chunks and large.
 
If it goes past its center of balance, all beneath will be crushed flat—and
we
are beneath.
 
I gather my
tribon
around me, a
tribon
yet white as the sail of our boat, the
Irisi
, and run.
 
Isidore and Cyril run with me.
 
But I do not run to safety.
 
I have never intended safety.

Isidore calls out, “Where are you going?”

“Wherever the earth has opened widest.”

“Why!”

“To say I have seen it.”

I am as fleet as the fierce Atalanta who would not marry, but Isidore is equally fleet.
 
I look back only once.
 
Cyril cannot run.
 
Before half a block, the wheezing fearful boy is left far behind and where he goes after he is lost to sight I could not guess.

Behind us, the building topples and the screaming trebles—and now the fires start.
 
Small fires begun by cooking stoves grow larger.
 
Large fires flare into flames that swallow all that attracts them.

We come on a crack in the granite of a side street running south from the Canopic Way big enough to dwarf a racing chariot and all four of its horses.
 
Behind us, from the offices and markets and great lecture halls of the sprawling Agora, the city’s constant heart, come shrieks and shouts and the thud of fallen statues, but I kneel on the edge of a precipice of an infinite void, looking down at the bowels of the world.
 
Isidore kneels with me.

“Is this your hell, Isidore?”

“Nothing is as hellish as your polyhedrons.”

Isidore, who I have neither seen nor heard since the night we spoke in my atrium, has wit?
 
In the midst of terror and sorrow, I forget myself.
 
I would laugh.
 
But before I can do so, Isidore speaks, “So many are hurt.
 
So many are frightened.
 
I am
Parabalanoi
.
 
I am needed.”