Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  From one of the windows in our house you could throw a line directly down into the lake. I spent all that day there, though paying little attention to my fishing-line. Father hurried in and out of the bedroom. All afternoon I sat, hour after hour, watching the light change the surface of the lake and the shadows grow out from the western hills. Evening came and I’d not caught a single fish. I’d even forgotten to eat. The sun was behind the hills across the lake and the first stars playing in the sky when my father told me to go to my room and sleep. I slept a few uneasy hours, waking on and off, worried for my mother’s sake.

  In the morning when I woke the house had been transformed. The doorways were hung with vervain, to cleanse the house of bad spirits. This was not auspicious. As I padded barefoot through the familiar rooms I had hopes of being introduced to my new brother. But all was quiet around the house, muted, with an unmistakable sadness to be read in the hushed, thoughtful way everyone went about their business.

  “How is mother?” I asked Cornelia.

  “Your mother’s fine,” she said, setting a bowl of porridge for me.

  “Do I have a brother?”

  Cornelia’s eyes met mine. There was kindness, and sadness in them. “Yes. But you are not to speak of him. Do you understand?”

  I nodded that I did understand, but it was a lie.

  What I did not know, and so could not understand, was that during the night my mother had given birth and the child, as I’d so fervently hoped, was a boy. But little Aulus’ face was broad and flat, his eyes slanted upward into little folds of skin, and his ears misshapen. The midwife had gasped when she saw him.

  Yes, Aulus had come to us, but Aulus was not right. It was supposed to be a time of familial triumph. The midwife would lay the infant on the floor. Father would pick him up, and hand him to the nurse who would proceed with him once around the family hearth, tying him to the family and its gens. Instead while I’d slept in the middle of the night came that terrible moment of confusion and shame.

  Aulus’ deformities were seen by my father as punishment for some unknown sin against the gods, for some conscious or even accidental transgression against ceremony or divine order. If the gods were pleased with a family, the family was blessed with healthy children and a stable and thriving household. If the gods were somehow displeased they showed their displeasure, and no message was so clear as the birth of a deformed infant.

  The Spartans had required the abandonment of deformed infants, a mandate even Aristotle favored. The Twelve Tables, dating back five centuries before my time, were the fundament of our law, and according to Table IV my father had absolute control over the family. And the Tables required that father expose a deformed child, which usually meant a slow, lingering death. Foundlings were sometimes rescued and raised by another family, becoming a class of children called alumni. I remembered seeing in Rome several of the columns called lactaria where unwanted newborns were left. Many ended up in a life of slavery or prostitution. Religious orders low on novitiates so often harvested foundlings left by the lactaria that the public referred to the religious orders as milvae, so called for the birds of prey who would also be found hovering around the lactaria.

  It was not easy for him, but father did what he felt he had to do. My brother, I later was to learn from Cornelia, had been within hours of his birth quietly placed into a small wooden box and, while I slept, in the darkest hours of the night carried by servants in a row-boat out into the middle of the lake and cast free, leaving Aulus’ fate in the hands of the gods. Tiny Aulus’ eyes were barely open yet, that night of his coming into the world, and many nights while lying awake I would wonder what they'd seen. Nothing, perhaps? Deep, unfathomable darkness? The three-quarter moon bobbing up and down in the sky above, like the far-away, untouchable face of a mother, eyes filled with tears of light which poured down upon him? Or the uncountable stars, flickering playmates gathered round and beckoning him upward?

  But I didn’t know any of this, that morning twenty years ago. I was set busy learning my Greek, as though nothing had happened. Of course I knew something important had happened, and even Aristotle could not keep me from wanting the details. While I absentmindedly translated, scratching Aristotle’s careful sentences onto a wax tablet, Aulus was floating on the lake, bobbing in the wind and watching the light of his life's first day. Eventually he blew to the shore where he rocked up and down on the little waves which caressed the shore like a mother’s hand on a child’s skin. Glancing out now and then over the lake, I might have seen the box, had I known it was there, far towards the opposite shore and settled into a little rush-bed not far from a village busily going about its morning chores. Aulus lay quietly in the reassuring rocking of the boat, now and then crying spontaneously like a wounded kitten.

  In time, while I busily filled two wax tablets with Aristotle, little Aulus was discovered. Two boys searching the lake-shore for clams found him, and after looking him over and making fun of his deformities, pushed him back out onto the lake. They picked up small rocks and threw them at the box. Rebekah, an old woman returning to her hovel from a trip to town, put an end to their play. Old and bent over as she was, she'd seen little boxes like Aulus’ before. She despised the practice of exposing infants, forbidden by Hebraic law. She chased the boys away with her walking-cane and sat beside the lake to wait for the wind to bring the box to her. Finally she hooked it with her cane, then peered down and touched the infant’s face, so soft and vulnerable. Aulus responded by opening his tiny amber eyes to stare up at her. She cooed to the child, as she had to her own children and her many grandchildren. The box holding the child was too heavy for her to carry. She dragged Aulus to a cool spot under a nearby bush. When she got home she sent her grandchild Joseph to fetch the infant.

  An uneasy peace existed between our people and the Jews. First Tiberius then Caligula had expelled them from Rome; and Claudius, too, while I was up in Germany. Cast-offs from Claudius’ pogrom wandered in little groups all over the countryside looking for food and work. Some wandered far up to the shores of Lake Larius. Rather than chance crossing the mountains they settled along the lake. Some of the men found work during planting and harvest seasons. To keep body and soul together many took up small crafts, making farm-tools, pottery and furniture. The women wove and sewed or became midwives and healers. Though their strange customs and dress set them apart, they were by and large tolerated.

  When Aulus came in through Rebekah’s doorway he brought discord with him. The old woman and her husband argued long over what to do with the child. She wanted to keep him.

  “But he’s wrong, all wrong,” her husband retorted. “Don’t you see, his eyes, the flesh there, the turn of his face, he’s not right.”

  “He’s a child, right or wrong,” his wife replied, holding the infant to her.

  “If they find out, who knows what they’ll do,” her husband said.

  “They can do nothing.”

  “Whose do you think he is?”

  “I will find out.”

  “And what good will that do?”

  “We can take him back.”

  “Back? But they’ve cast him out,” her husband argued.

  “Do you expect me to nurse him with these?” she pulled one of her old, shrunken breasts from out of her tunic.

  Her husband did not answer.

  The old woman knew all the midwives on this end of the lake. The winds would have brought him from the direction of Novum Comum. She hobbled into town and placed the question into the hands of her network of friends. Meanwhile she fed the infant with drops of sheep-milk off her finger-tip. He sucked rabidly at her finger, awakening strong urges inside her. By evening she’d learned that one of the Jewish midwives had been called out to minister to Marcella of the Plini gens, who had indeed given birth to a malformed boy.

  Under the cover of darkness that night the boy Joseph carried the infant, not in his little death-boat, but covered under a cloth in Rebekah’s finest basket,
up the highway to behind our estate. His grandmother had made sure the child had plenty of milk before she handed him over. Now Joseph’s heart beat wildly, partly from the climb and partly from fear of being discovered. Though he disguised his mission by holding the basket as though he was carrying fruit or grain, he expected the child to cry out at any moment and give him away. But little Aulus was quiet, warm now in the swaddling wraps and soothed to sleep by the gentle rocking as he was carried up the path.

  Directly above the Plinius estate Joseph turned off the path and carried the basket down toward the villa. When he’d passed the rock cairn which marked the terminus of the estate he went a further ten yards, and there set the boy down on a tiny ledge between two bushes. He blessed the infant with oil his grandmother had provided, turned and hurried away into the night.

  The next day, the second after Aulus’ birth, I felt morose and lonely, my parents themselves distant and troubled. Everyone went about their business with little enthusiasm or feeling. My father had begun the long spell of ritual purification, burning incense and sacrifices before the household gods, hour upon hour. I needed to escape the gloom of the house.

  As I often did when needing to be alone I slipped out back and explored the corners of the estate. As a child the rough and tumble games of other boys weren’t for me; after a few minutes of play, my asthma would fire up. Envying my playmates I would drift off to lie in the grass and watch the swallows or hawks flying so gracefully above, or a tiny ant carrying on its back twice its own weight through the grassy jungle. I came to know these hills intimately, their flora and fauna becoming my childhood friends. Now I stopped to watch a bee working a marjoram flower, busily going about its business mindless of the human tragedy all around it. The bee’s world was separate from mine, yet we shared the world, in a way, and the overlap of the two worlds had always intrigued me -- what did the bee think of me, if anything, and how much would it be possible to know of the bee’s world? I spent a long hour watching the bee and its companions coming and going on the various flowers blooming on the hillside, and their simple industry lifted my spirits.

  I was ready to wander back to the house when I heard a strange noise from up the hill. It sounded like an animal in distress. I waited. Yes, there it was again. My curiosity turned me toward the sound, which came between long intervals of silence.

  As I came up the hill I saw the low basket with the cloth and a small moving hand, and I knew what I’d found, and the mystery of the past days came undone. Now I wished I’d never left the house. My heart nearly stopped. I wanted to run back home into the arms of my mother, or to Cornelia. I’d already turned to hurry homeward, but another part of me turned me around. I wanted to meet my brother, and learn why he’d been banished from the sacredness of the family.

  My legs, almost against my will, took me to Aulus’ side. My breath came loud and hard as I stopped above the basket. I turned back the cloth, expecting to encounter a horror of some kind, but found instead a lovely face, gentle and kind, which stopped its crying as I touched it with my hand.

  “Aulus!” I found myself saying again and again as I touched the child’s face. “Little brother. Aulus.”

  With deep eyes, like precious gems of priceless amber set in the folds of his face, Aulus stared up at the brother who had been forbidden to recognize him.

  What should I do? I thought of carrying the child back to the house; but Aulus would not be here if he were not meant to be here. To reveal his discovery would be to endanger poor Aulus again.

  This was the first and greatest moral dilemma of my life, and it would haunt me across the years, across the wide adventure of my life yet to be lived. I stood between the sun and the child, the shadow I cast cooling the boy as the day grew hotter. I had encountered another world, as I had with the bee’s, but a human world, and what I shared and what I did not share with this my own blood kin was a great mystery.

  I spent a long time standing beside my Aulus, frozen in a kind of moral dilemma no child should have to face.

  At last I knew what to do.

  I hurried back to the house, filled a jar half full with goat’s milk and brought it to Aulus. I dipped a finger in the milk and let the infant’s lips suck gratefully. I gave him half the milk in this way, then set the jar, wrapped in a thick cloth, in a shade beside the basket.

  I knew I could not care for the boy. There was only one person who could. Gathering all the courage I could muster, I told my mother. She stared at me, from out of the emotional pain she’d been feeling the past day, and nearly fainted. She called in Cornelia. I was sent out of the room, but could hear the two women conferring in low voices full of emotion. Cornelia hurried past, and in a few moments returned with father in tow. Father would not look at me as he swept past.

  Now inside the room rose up an argument between mother and father, such as I’d never heard before. I felt I was the cause of it all. I couldn’t bear to hear them. I went outside and sat on a bench in the cool shade provided by the house, glancing now and again guiltily up towards the ridge on which poor little Aulus rested.

  Why had I wandered up that way? Why did the gods let me discover the boy? What meaning was there in all this, this terrible fate granted to the child, to me, to the family? I felt myself somehow responsible for it all, though I could not for the life of me understand what I’d done to deserve this.

  At last father came out of the house, gently put his hand on my head, and simply said, in a strong but breaking voice: “We will not speak of this again. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. I wanted so badly to speak of it. I wanted my parents, who were so much wiser than me and seemed to understand the world in ways I could not, to explain it all to me. But instead, I was not to speak of it.

  After my father left I rose and crawled as much as walked, the burden of life heavy on me, to the shade of a favorite laurel tree, where I lay on the ground and sobbed myself into a quiet sleep.

  It was dark when I awoke, and my home, the house and grounds and the fruit trees and gardens seemed somehow deeper with meaning than they ever had been before, and yet somehow more distant, too. For the first time ever, I felt that I did not like this world, a world different from the one I would have chosen. But it was the world I had been given, and I did not know what to do with that.

  Again almost against my will my legs carried me up the hillside towards the child. The moon shone brightly onto the cooling rocks, and its sparkling reflection off the lake far below danced with the wind-ruffled waves. I could hear Aulus’ low cries now, like the sound of a mortally-injured cat, rising and falling, coming and going, sending its sad message out into the uncaring world.

  I stood again above the child, watched as his eyes came open and seemed to stare deeply into me and through me into the deep, un-answering wells of the sky. Little Aulus was alone in all the world, alone except for this brother standing above him, and I seemed to feel that loneliness and swore I would not desert him. I sat down and dipped my finger in the milk, and gave it to the soft lips, which quieted him.

  I fell asleep with my arm across his body, and woke while the moon still lit the night air. A nightingale sang from beyond the hills, its song a sweet and lonely psalm which spoke directly to me, like a great poem pouring its wisdom into my heart. It seemed to me that it was Aulus crying out to me with the bird’s voice, telling me that in spite of everything, all would be all right. I aged that night far beyond my years, was given an unwanted but irrepressible wisdom.

  By the time I rose from the ground dawn was already crawling over the hills to the east. I turned to make my weary way back to the household. My brother’s voice, as though it had given its all in the crying of the nightingale, was silent. His eyes were closed, and his face seemed immobile, gone to a more distant world.

  It had all happened twenty years before, yet it all came back to me as I sat beside the rocks where I’d found my brother, the unspeakable Aulus. Here little had changed over the years. The ridge on
which Aulus had rested was the same. The very rocks which held him from tumbling down the hill were still here, the herbs and shrubs seemed identical. I recognized the plant under which I’d hidden the jar of milk. I turned to see the lake below, serene and beautiful.

  As the sun slipped behind the hills west of the lake it cast a golden sword upon the waters. When I first saw it, it shimmered long and thin, like a javelin. The rippling waters made the gold shine brightly; I couldn’t look directly at it. As I watched, slowly the sword grew shorter, became a spatha, then a gladius, shorter and broader. Sword of light, I thought. Sword of darkness. I was glad to be putting my sword away, and hoped I would never have to take it up again. I hadn’t killed anyone, but been too close to the dying to think highly of it. I’d seen good friends die. Aulus, for one. Aulus and Aulus. Now Little Sparrow, not dead but gone. Gone and gone, ever and ever.

  The big Aulus, the strapping kind-hearted giant. The other, the little one, who never really was, the unspeakable one. And now chirruping Little Sparrow, gone.

  Where did they go? I looked around. I could not see them. They had traveled far away, into the land of the past, a land all the legions in the world could not conquer. I felt giddy for an instant, as though I stood at the bowsprit of a ship, cleaving the rolling waters at breakneck speed, the wind-whipped waters of time. I was young, my future bright and unknown, but I had caught a whiff of that which would hound me throughout my life, a sense of my life being left behind faster than I could account for.