by June Trop
“Her suffering ended when she died, but your father’s had only begun. Raw grief took hold of him. For weeks thereafter, he would tear at his clothes, and smothering himself in her soiled linen, filling his nostrils with her scent, he’d pound his body with his fists as if to pulverize the grief and expel it through his pores. All the while, he’d be either gasping and heaving in a convulsive wave of sobs or whimpering for the Yocheved who’d abandoned him. He emerged from this acute phase of anguish with a romanticized image of your mother, like the bronze statue in his study, that no one, not you or Yocheved herself, could possibly live up to. That’s when his fear of losing a loved one hardened into an obsession.
“I suspect, Miriam, that since your earliest days, you’ve been carrying the double burden of dealing with his obsession and living up to his myth, to say nothing of your having to suffer the ambivalence he must feel toward you and Binyamin. Although these circumstances have fostered in you a remarkable sensitivity—”
(She meant the way I’m so vulnerable to criticism. As if I were porous, she says.)
“—and a perfectionist’s sense of order—”
(She meant the way I arrange my things symmetrically and count everything, like my steps when I walk around the house.)
“—they have undermined your self-confidence and sense of independence.”
(She meant the way I fret so much about my relationship with Papa.)
“So why isn’t Binyamin like that too? He wears a crust of confidence and flouts all boundaries.”
“Because your mother’s death affected him differently. You know Binyamin was a breech baby. That’s why his Roman name is Agrippa, meaning ‘born feet first.’ Consequently, he blames himself for your mother’s death. So Binyamin’s recklessness could be his way of inviting retribution.”
“Oh, Auntie, I wish you could tell Papa that Binyamin needs his forgiveness, not his reprimands, and that the woman of his bronze statue is an invention. But he’s armored in pride and fortified by wrath. I pity him, that his solace should derive from a figment of his imagination. But I’m also angry with him, angry that he baits Binyamin and counts on me to fulfill his fantasy. All I know is that I’m sick at heart for being expected to assume the life he’s cast for me, and disgusted with myself for being too spineless to defy him.”
The way Aunt Hannah pressed her lips together told me that she too had no ready solution.
“Come, Miriam. Let’s take a walk along the waterfront so the Shabbat breeze can tousle our hair.”
Chapter 7
Later Saturday (Shabbat) Afternoon
MY MOOD LIFTED as soon as we stepped into the brilliant light of a Shabbat afternoon and I heard the heels of our sandals clacking on the rough cobblestones. Aunt Hannah at my side, cupping my left elbow with her right hand, we threaded our way north and west through the Jewish Quarter toward the shoreline of the Bruchium Quarter. Of the three residential quarters in Alexandria, ours, also known as the Delta Quarter, is the district Ptolemy I pledged to our people to encourage us to settle here. Most of us, about twenty percent of the city’s population (our largest community outside of Palestine), prefer to live in our own quarter, where we are free to observe our customs and obey the laws of our Council of Elders.
We pride ourselves on living in the finest quarter of the city. We’re on the coast and farthest from the main necropolis. Alexandrians have been burying their dead there for more than a century, whether in multi-chambered underground tombs of stone decorated with the scenes and symbols of Egyptian funerary art, or in simple, earth-covered pits. In the Jewish Quarter, we can inhale the scent of the sea instead of the stench of the embalming workshops.
“Auntie, we’re passing Levi’s house now. The ground is a little uneven, so hold onto me with both hands.”
“Have their roses grown taller this year?”
I could swear my aunt could see.
“And Miriam, do I hear a raven croaking over there?”
She was pointing to a crooked pine tree a few feet from our path. It was laden with cones, a brown-necked raven concealed in its crotch.
“A plump one, Auntie with a proud stance; long, pointed wings; a thick, sharp beak that sets its face in a frown; and a blunt tail.”
After a few more blocks, we passed on our right the barracks and armories of the Roman fleet, which dominate the eastern waterfront of the Bruchium Quarter. When we reached the beach, we lingered under the fronds of a date palm, inhaling the briny smell of the damp sand, almost tasting the ropes of kelp stranded on the beach. Listening to the surf lap the shore, we basked in the gentle sea breeze as it ruffled the hems of our himations.
For a moment, I watched a family of bathers, the children’s wet hair sticking to their faces like black ribbons as they frolicked on the massive marble steps that descend into the salty water. They reminded me of when Iphigenia would take Binyamin and me to swim there. Until she’d call us, I’d ride the waves like an alighting gull while pretending to be Thessalonike, the legendary mermaid who calms the seas for sailors. But Binyamin would continue swimming even as Iphigenia stood near the edge of the steps flailing her arms to get his attention, even as the wind whipped her tunic, slapped her broad cheeks, and snapped plumes of her gray-streaked hair across her forehead. He’d tunnel under the waves and cut through the foam like a razor until she’d have to send for Papa’s bodyguard to fish him out. By then his ginger curls would be stiff with salt and his face bronzed by the sun.
Of course, that’s not how Binyamin would tell the story. He’d say that by the time we walked to the beach—Iphigenia wouldn’t dare let us rush a mule cart—he’d have barely enough time to get wet before she’d say it was time to go. “We could’ve found our own way home,” he’d say. “So why couldn’t she let us stay?”
Anyway, once we got home, Papa would ground him for a week.
“Auntie, the sea is a shimmering lake this Shabbat afternoon.”
The sun was also stroking the tiny lines of her brow, while the breeze was loosening tendrils of her caramel hair, some veined with silver, others with gold.
“The metallic luster of your hair, Auntie, reminds me of the work I’m doing with Judah.”
Interest lifted the corners of her mouth.
“Judah and Saul are studying how to perfect copper into gold. Judah lent me the League’s notes from Aristotle’s Meteorologica that detail how metals are perfected deep in the ground when the right mixture of earths and waters congeals. If that process is interrupted, a rudimentary form of the perfect metal, a base metal like copper, results. He also lent me his own notes on the recipe he and Saul have devised to perfect copper in a bath of mercury. But first, they have to extract the mercury from cinnabar, its brick-red ore. I’m so excited because just before stowing the scrolls and preparing for Shabbat, I recorded my own design for an apparatus to roast the cinnabar and collect the mercury vapors safely. So, as soon as Shabbat is over, I can begin constructing it.”
Aunt Hannah swept a ribbon of hair away from her eyes, but the wind blew it back again.
“Tell me, Miriam, why is alchemy so interesting to you?”
My aunt has always been interested in anything that interests me.
“Alchemy is the search for both material and spiritual perfection. Saul and Judah are interested in perfecting metals. By transferring the appropriate spirit (vapor) to a base metal like copper, they hope to transmute it into gold. I’m interested in perfecting not only the body and spirit of metals but the body and spirit of humans as well. My fascination with the human body began when I studied anatomy with Hector.”
“How can learning about the body and spirit of metals help you understand the body and spirit of humans?”
“One principle of alchemy, Auntie, is Aristotle’s Unity of Nature, that all things, whether animal, vegetable, mineral, or human, are varia
nt forms of the same vital substance. That’s why learning about one can teach you about everything else.
“I want to make it safe to study metals. If I can make an apparatus for experimenting with metals safely, it might prevent the sicknesses that are afflicting our alchemists. And not just the alchemists but the dyers in our textile factories. They too are showing the same deadly symptoms. I think they’re being poisoned by the metals in either the dyes or the mordants that set the dyes on the fabrics.
“Only the laborers who work with the dyes are getting sick. Some, like Judah’s cousin David, began to drool and retch, then to vomit up a greenish-yellow cream streaked with blood. David’s urine also turned dark red until he couldn’t urinate at all. He died in a delirium shortly after that, during a convulsion when his heart failed. David’s brother-in-law, Uri, also died that way, but before that, he’d lost all feeling in his body except for a burning sensation in his hands and feet. The burning was so severe that, in his delirium, he tried to cut off his feet. Scores of workers are suffering like this.”
My aunt wrinkled her prissy nose. Evidently the clinical details were too much for her, especially on Shabbat.
After a hard swallow, she said, “So, have I met your Judah?”
“No, Auntie. That’s another problem. Papa would never permit him in our home. First, Judah is a bastard. No one, including Judah himself, knows anything about his father.”
My aunt’s eyebrows rose slightly.
“His mother was Jewish, a silversmith named Ruth who was orphaned when her parents were crushed by an overloaded oxcart. It flipped over right in front of their butcher shop one summer evening as they were accepting a delivery of ice. So, without a dowry, Ruth couldn’t marry. Then, more than a decade ago, she herself died of pneumonia. She’d caught a chill that depleted the heat in her body and generated more phlegm than her physicians could purge in time to save her.
“Second, Judah is neither a Roman citizen nor a member of any other privileged class, so he’s subject to the laographia.”
By now, my aunt had started to work the inside of her cheek.
The laographia, or poll tax, is one of a complex array of taxes, charges, and surcharges imposed on Roman Egypt, a humiliating tax on all accountable males between the ages of fourteen and sixty, including slaves. The tax collector, selected for his raw brutality and accompanied by soldiers and armed guards (ostensibly for his own protection but serving to terrorize the taxpayer), resorts to any cruelty to exact payment. He knows he has to make up the money he fails to collect but he can keep any surplus for himself.
“Just last week, Auntie, there was yet another spectacle in the agora. The tax collector filled a huge basket with sand and lassoed it around the necks of an entire family, the wife, children, and parents of a fugitive of the laographia. Sinking under its weight in the relentless sun of the open marketplace, they suffered a prolonged and humiliating death. People jostled for a space, bobbing and squatting for a glimpse, stretching their own necks like turtles to see what was happening, but no one dared to offer any help beyond a pitying glance, not even a cup of water, for fear of being held liable for the debt or of being tortured for information on the fugitive’s whereabouts.”
Tax collectors have continued whipping their victims even after death to extort payment from relatives for the release of the body. Aside from having to face one of these spectacles, we all run the risk of encountering an acquaintance in the agora, someone the tax collector has reduced to slavery. Now a beast of burden, he plods through the crowd lugging an unwieldy load on his twisted back.
“So apart from collecting the mortgage payments on Judah’s stall, Papa wants me to have nothing to do with him. To Papa, he’s just another bastard with no future.”
After listening judicially, Aunt Hannah tilted her head back slightly and asked, “So, how do you feel about Judah?”
How could I explain my feelings to her? That until I met Judah, love was an abstraction to me, the substance of myth, legend, and my own embryonic fantasies. But when I met him, a flutter deep inside my belly stirred the rest of me to life and launched a longing both mystical and earthy, passionate and tender, shy and eager.
So I didn’t say anything. Instead, for that split second, I was grateful that my aunt was blind, that she couldn’t see the blush burning through me, or the image of Judah in my eyes: his thick black curls glossy with sweat, his luminous green eyes framed by a dreamer’s lashes, and the precise contours of his body beneath his coarse gray woolen tunic.
Aunt Hannah waited as if listening for another raven.
“Miriam, I hope you’re not confusing an interest in alchemy with a lust for Judah.”
“Come, Auntie. Let’s finish our walk.”
Continuing westward along the shore, we reached our favorite stone bench in the gardens along the base of Point Lochias, the promontory of royal land that belonged to the Ptolemies and where the Roman governor now lives. Thrusting its peninsula into the sea, the Point’s arc shapes the eastern boundary of the Great Harbor. Here, lining the harbor, the palaces are a dazzle of light, each limestone, granite, and marble exterior radiating the scent of warm stone, each linked to another through a maze of porticoes and colonnades, each casting its slanted silhouette upon its gleaming neighbor.
Also casting their silhouettes are groves of cypress, olive, and pine trees populated by marble statues who look as if they too, like me, can hear the whisper of each fountain’s iridescent spray, breathe in the heady fragrance of the roses, and watch the swans glide on the silvered surface of each quiet pool. Like the pools in our quarter and the fountain in our very own courtyard, the source of water for these fountains and pools is the Canopic branch of the Nile. Via a twelve-mile canal and an elaborate labyrinth of tunnels, the Nile finds its way to hundreds of underground stone cisterns in every neighborhood of the city except our most destitute outskirts. There the tenement dwellers must fetch their water from a stagnant canal lacy with scum.
Following the gulls wheeling overhead, calling to one another, spiraling toward the docks, each spreading a ripple of foam as it settled on the water, I took the moment to watch the activity in the harbor. Among the thousands of vessels, a heavy dory with extra-long oars was towing a naval ship to moor her nose-first to a huge stone ring on the marble quay. At the same time, a procession of brown, bare-chested stevedores unloaded a cargo ship. Already moored, her gangplank lowered, she’d been carrying camphor, jade, and silk from China and cotton, cinnamon, spikenard, and pepper from India, treasures destined for the governor’s household. And on the poop of a third ship entering the harbor, the grateful captain, his feet planted in the bold stance of a sailor, was performing a post-sail sacrifice.
By the time Aunt Hannah and I got up from our bench, I’d hardly a thought about my own Strait of Messina, about my own Scylla and my own Charybdis.
Chapter 8
Early Sunday Morning
I HAD NO INKLING that Sunday morning that our house had been burglarized and that the theft would lead to an even greater calamity. As I crossed the courtyard in the Sunday morning stillness and entered the library’s main level, I was aware of only the hem of my tunic sweeping across the cool mosaic floor and my footsteps resounding against the marble staircase that leads to the upper level, a gallery supported by fluted Doric columns. Looking up toward the white plaster ceiling, I saw three walls of polished acacia cubbies, each crammed with papyrus scrolls, their wooden dowels jutting out, their leather tags entangled. And resting against the gallery’s back wall I saw the moveable, shoulder-high platform ladder hooked onto the brass rail that runs along each of the three walls.
A lone moth flickered in the glow of an oil lamp lit before Shabbat and left to burn after the evening’s three stars had ushered in the new week. The feeble light barely washed the round cherry wood table and surrounding chairs, let alone Aunt Hannah’s spi
ndly-legged chair that backs against the north window and the open mahogany hutch atop its matching cabinet along the western wall. The hutch’s upper shelves displayed what remained of Papa’s collection of Etruscan vases. The lowest shelf was mine. Papa had it divided into several compartments, some for stowing my primers, notes, and souvenirs, including the ceramic figurines that had belonged to my mother. But one cubby was for the bronze pen that had been my mother’s, a bottle of carbon black ink, and most important, the scrolls for my work with the League. Despite the oil lamp and the blush of dawn edging the walls, the library smelled of darkness.
I reached into my compartment for the scrolls, the three of them, the two from Judah and the one of my own. So accustomed was I to the coolness of my pen and the familiar contour of the ink bottle impressed against my palm that I didn’t immediately notice that the rest of the compartment was empty.
But then I did.
My eyes raked the compartment from side to side, front to back.
The scrolls were gone.
All three of them.
I hardly recognized the sound of my own shriek as waves of disbelief and then alarm spread through my chest like a seismic shock. I pressed the back of my hand against my open mouth, biting the knuckle of my index finger, all but breaking the skin to stifle the howl welling up inside me. Otherwise I’d have stirred not only the entire Jewish Quarter but the early Ptolemies buried in the Old Necropolis just east of our quarter. At the same time, sparks snapped inside my head as the scene before me spun farther and farther away before zooming back on fresh waves of disbelief and alarm.
How could the scrolls have disappeared?
Once more, I felt the inside of the compartment, this time leaning against the cabinet so my flattened palm could reach all the way back to verify the void. My eyes could have deceived me, but never my hands, certainly not twice.
