Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  Drusilla lay her hands on my head, her fingers moving gently and slowly like leaves in a gentle breeze. I relaxed, closed my eyes. I knew so much yet I had so much to learn. The more I knew, it seemed, the more I had to learn. In a moment I'd drifted asleep.

  Drusilla blew out the lamps and candles and left me there, my head slumped onto the drawing of the oleander flower. She walked through the house out into the moonlit night from which the familiar stars shone down in bright profusion, walked to the west beach and waded out into the ocean, feeling the earth at her feet, the sea on her legs, and above her the stars and moon gathered round to guide her on her journey.

  The next morning after I'd finished my rounds of the harbor, the sailor's barracks, and the reservoir, I worked again in my study. And again she slipped in behind me, almost unheard. I looked up from my work and we smiled at each other. She was studying the prints I'd hung on my wall, with their striking conjunction of leaves or flowers over random texts.

  She'd told me once how astonished she was at my library, its hundreds of rolls of papyrus stuffed in as many pigeonholes and labeled with author and title. She'd said she was more used to men who wanted to control the world, not understand it.

  She gazed out through the window across the Bay, sparkling in the morning light, in one corner of her view the mount of Vesuvius dominating the landscape.

  “It's lovely, the water, the mountain. I already feel myself falling in love with it.” She moved beside me and picked up my notes on the oleander blossom.

  “I wish I could draw better,” I said, embarrassed by the primitive sketch of the flower. “Do you draw?”

  “Well, I have, sometimes.” She set the notes down and lifted the sprig of oleander with its pretty white and pink spray of blossoms. The flowers, though they’d begun to dry and wilt, gave off a light but intoxicating odor. “You do quite well, actually.”

  “The Greeks called it rhododendron. Here, look...” I pulled one of the thick, leathery leaves off the twig, and at the wound, the twig bled a milky white blood. “It's poisonous. I've heard that people have gotten sick, or even died from using the twigs as roasting skewers. Yet Dioscorides, in his Materia Medica, claims it's an antidote against snake bites. Isn't it interesting that one poison can be an antidote against another?”

  I could tell she sometimes resented the way I flooded her with information. To her, I knew, the flower was lovely in itself and represented something quite different than a doorway into a hoard of information, and that my insatiable curiosity somehow tainted the mystery which is a flower. To her it was as though if everything could be dissected, nothing would be left that was holy. To her that dissecting, that taking apart, was not exciting but a kind of injury.

  “The seeds have sails,” I went on, “which catch the breeze and carry them off to new places to live. Other plants have seeds like that too. Have you seen them, sometimes, wafting by in the air?”

  “Yes, I suppose,” she said.

  “If you like, you could help me,” I said, touching her arm. “I'm surveying the plants from the Cape to Monte Prochida. Even beyond, if I have time. It's a big job. I need someone who can draw. I have an extra room.”

  “Yes, but,” she asked, setting the oleander down, “why are you doing this?”

  “Why? Because it would be good to know how many different kinds of plants we have.”

  “Kinds? What do you mean, kind?”

  “Well,” I said, picking up the oleander. “You’ll agree this is not rhubarb.”

  “No, not rhubarb.”

  “Or apple, or walnut. It's oleander. Each is its own kind.”

  “But every plant is different,” she insisted. “If you look closely enough every single plant is its own kind, just like people. And if you lump them together, you take something away from them, their individuality. I am Judean. I am Herodean. But knowing that, do you know me?”

  “Well, I know something about you.”

  “But it’s not anything about me, who I really am. I think it’s just a way for you to pigeonhole me, to make it easier for to type me as this, or that. But you know I'm no longer a Jew, and I've disinherited my Herodean ancestry, so it’s not me at all. I'm closer to Isis than I am to Yahweh.”

  “Well, yes, I see what you're saying. But there are patterns, in nature. Not every plant is completely different. All oleanders have some things in common. In admitting that I'm not taking away their individuality. I’m just describing them. There are oleanders and there are laurels, and rhubarbs, and apples, and you can tell them one from the other. It's like oxen and horses, only sometimes you have to look closer at plants to see the differences. Do you see?” I wasn’t sure she did. “Let’s go for a walk and I’ll show you.”

  She hadn’t slept well, and was tired. But, yes, she would go with me.

  Left unanswered, I realized, was the question of whether she was interested in drawing for me. I really wanted drawings in my Flora of Campania. I could do them himself, but I was so slow at it each of them took hours away from the field or cataloging. At this rate I would never be done. If she was interested I could tutor her, teach her how to look. Though Plinia and she didn’t especially get along the thought of having her around and of exploring the hillsides with her seemed to pick me up. I’d lived alone so long, had developed my own ways, that bringing someone new into my life, I knew, wouldn’t be easy. Yet there was something about her, a strength of character and openness to the world, which intrigued me. She’d come along at the right time, just as my enthusiasm for my new project had begun to lift me out of the loss of Vespasian’s friendship. Except for taking Plinia and Caecilius in to live with me I'd designed a life as a kind of hermit, which allowed me to plot out my own course, set sail and make whatever mid-course corrections I needed. My many books and my pile of journals, which I’d already been offered a sizable fortune for, were proof of the value of this kind of life, at least for me. It had been a rich and adventurous life. I'd played a part in many of the most important events of the past thirty years, been friend and adviser to a great emperor. Why I felt it necessary to change my ways now was a mystery to me.

  From a distance we were two tiny dots wandering along the beach, pausing now and then for a moment or two then continuing on our way. Up closer we could be seen bending as though picking fruit from off the ground; but no fruit grew on this beach. Villagers and sailors watched, wondering what we were up to. To them we seemed to move randomly, exploring the rocks and sand and plants we encountered, exclaiming to one another or gesturing over a new find: shell, stone, insect, seed. At times we stopped to bend and kneel down low, our faces but a few inches from a tiny insect which scuttered across the sand.

  Over several hours we moved in this way from one end of the beach to the other and back again. We'd returned to where the beach gave way to rocks at the base of the hilly promontory of the Cape. Here bee-eaters had gathered, their nests in shallow tunnels dug into the hill. We stopped to watch the half dozen birds perched at the tips of the low oleanders and laurels, scanning for insects. Now and then one sallied out, dipped to catch its prey, then flitted back to the shrubbery. They were lovely to watch, bluish birds washed with pastel yellow on their back and belly, their long beaks highlighted by a dark eye-stripe. They seemed so at home in the air, zooming out over the beach or water to catch passing bees and flies neither I nor Drusilla could even see.

  We stood quietly watching the birds. Drusilla seemed now drawn into this natural world which til now she’d hardly noticed.

  We started off again up the beach leaving the bee-eaters to the earnest business of staying alive.

  Among the dry rocks and sand was a small pool of water, surrounded by its circle of greenery. “This,” I said, touching a buttercup, “is a member of a group I’ve named ranunculus.” I’ll show you why.” I bent the plant over and moved my hand through the greenery. “Well, not this time. But it means little frogs, because so often when I find the plant I find a frog under it. Its
name tells you something about it.”

  We walked on. I was in high spirits. We left the beach behind and started up the slope of the hill which was Misenum’s Cape.

  "This plant," I said, reaching to touch a high shrub with bright red berries. “Virgil named arbutus. Here, try a berry.” She held it in her hand. “Go ahead, it won’t hurt you."

  She placed it in her mouth and sucked on it. After a moment she squinted and spat it out.

  “I call it arbutus unedo,” I explained, “It tastes so strong you can only eat one – that’s the unedo. And that tree there,” I said, pointing to a tree twice as tall as us with smooth gray bark and delicate light-green leaves growing part-way up the hillside. “Do you know it?”

  “Tell me then,” Drusilla said, tiring of her education.

  “Look at the leaves.”

  Drusilla stared at the tree. “Is it laurel?”“

  Yes, very good,” I complimented her. “Sacred to Apollo, the tree Daphne became. It’s said that lightning never strikes a laurel. So Tiberius had a laurel wreath handy, which he always put on during thunder-storms. Maybe I should get you one! It’s the crown emperors wear at their triumphs, too, our most famous plant!”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “When I see one, my mind reels with the history it draws forth. You know, Theophrastus claims you can't propagate them from cuttings but an old man named Castor I once knew in Rome told me you could. So I tried it, and you can. I use it sometimes,” I said of the plant fondly, “the leaves in honey or by chewing on the berries when I have trouble breathing. It’s not as good as laser but it helps.”

  We scanned the countryside from our new vantage partway up the hill. To the north was the old farmstead which Gaius Marcius had built two centuries before, the last farmhouse built at Misenum, which had since become a busy little town. Most of the rustic farmhouses which once stood on the surrounding hillsides had been replaced by opulent villas. I admired Marcius’ farmstead, well-designed and efficient, and pointed it out to Drusilla, who didn't share my romantic notions about the bucolic life of Virgil’s Georgics.

  Up along the Bay we could just see the villa where Agrippina died. “You knew her?” Drusilla asked. “I mean, Agrippina.”

  “Yes. And you.”

  “We'd met several times.”

  “You were with her at Ara Agrippinensis,” I said. “It’s when I first saw you.”

  “Oh, yes. What did you think of her?" she wondered.

  “At first she frightened me, then I despised her, and now mostly I feel sorry for her.”

  “I don’t understand feeling sorry for someone,” Drusilla confessed. We stood looking out over the Bay. To the east we could just see the harbors of Naples, Herculaneum and Pompeii nestled under the great, restless mountain itself partially hidden by haze.

  “Not even the Jews we slaughtered at Jerusalem, and at Macherus and Masada?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I was raised Jewish,” she said at last. “My great grandfather built the temple in Jerusalem you and your Titus destroyed.”

  “Yes. I was there, you know, saw all the killing, and wondered even while I watched it, and am not yet done wondering, if what we accomplished was worth all those deaths."

  We sat on a little bench on the hillside.

  Like a plant sprouting out of its native soil Drusilla had grown up in the very earth of the Jewish conflict. In many ways her life had been a constant attempt at adapting to one or the other -- her ancient Jewish ancestry, or the power of us Romans. In the end she'd decided in our favor.

  “My father was a Romanized Jew, raised in Augustus’ court,” she said. “Drusus’ wife Antonia took him under wing, and for a time Claudius was father’s best friend. Unfortunately my father was not a good businessman. After he went deeply into debt he was no longer welcome in Tiberius’ court. So he returned to Judea where he dug himself even deeper into debt, and after some unwise comments about Tiberius was thrown into jail. But his friendship with Gaius saved him and when Gaius became Caligula he presented my father a small kingdom. At last great-grandfather Herod’s kingdom was in our family's hands again. Well, anyway part of it. When my father died Claudius took the kingdom from us and made my birthright a province. The procurators sent our way were every one of them stupid, stupid morons. They overstepped their authority, built personal fortunes on the people’s backs, insisted on choosing the High Priests, and so were despised, rightly despised. It was their stupidity which brought on the revolution that brought down the Temple and caused all that killing.”

  “So now your people, the people of your birth, have a past but not a future.”

  “Perhaps,” Drusilla said, rising off the bench. “Who can say?”

  She was right. Who could say. We stood and walked a while in silence.

  We were halfway back to the admiralty, walking through mixed pine, juniper, and low aromatic shrubs and herbs. Below we could see the piscina in which Lucius Lucullus had kept fish brought alive from the sea. I knew of Lucullus’ fish-tanks, and the gradual improvements he'd made in keeping the fish alive. Lucullus’ greatest innovation, now copied up and down the coast, was to build bronze grates rather than a stone wall between the sea and the tanks. The gates allowed the tides to flush the tanks and keep the water clean. Lucullus went so far as to build piscinae filled with diluted seawater, for estuarine fish. Like plants fish thrive in their own favorite habitats. Some of Lucullus' fish-ponds had held gray mullets. I knew this because gray mullets would sometimes leap out of the water and over the fences, and fish-ponds made for them had higher fences. To me these expensive tanks are emblematic of the depths of luxury into which the empire has fallen: when Lucullus died the fish in his tanks sold for 40,000 sesterces, nearly enough to buy a small farm.

  A few oleander were still in bloom and suddenly, without expecting it, we found ourselves in a great flurry of butterflies, whose yellow bodies seemed like broken pieces of the sun fluttering about trying to put themselves back together. We stopped in their midst. The insects seemed aware of our presence yet chose to ignore us.

  “They’re breeding,” I said in a whisper. Some of them hung on plants like flags, now and then slowly opening and closing their wings. Others flew around trying to land, competing for a nearby stem of grass.

  “They’re lovely,” she said. “Flowers in flight.”

  We stood stock-still in this tiny opening in the chaparral, where the air was alive with fluttering color. I found I was losing myself in the insects, becoming dizzy with their constant movement. They seemed so fragile yet so focused on finding one another to mate. Their world was outside and parallel to our world, in which over time entire peoples and temples were destroyed, built and rebuilt. It was reassuring that in spite of all the vicissitudes of human fortune, the rise and fall of empires and millennia, they would persevere. Jews, Romans, Gauls, even the ancient Egyptian culture were nothing to them. And they recalled to me my dream of Drusus in Germany, and the riot of butterflies which was its prelude.

  As they unwove the afternoon light and air into their own fluttering pattern of color and movement they dismantled my mind too, for a moment, and by that allowed me to enter their world. I felt giddy and had to catch my breath. Drusilla reached out and held my arm.

  She seemed in her element. One of the butterflies landed lightly on her shoulder, its wings slowly breathing in and out. She beamed at me. Carefully she moved her hand toward the insect but just as she was about to touch it, it lifted off her tunic and slid down the wind toward the east.

  We stood watching the butterflies for a long time before once again starting out, leaving the little field of fluttering yellow behind. After a while we turned to look but they were gone. Only one or two were still on the oleanders.

  We walked quietly up the path toward the admiralty. At last I spoke. “I looked into a lion’s eyes once, at Puteoli, and was granted a glimpse of another world. Now, too. Somehow, it seems,” I said, breathing harde
r from the walk, “somehow I believe that to really understand other creatures we must participate in their lives.”

  Drusilla smiled to herself. “Of course,” she said.

  Drusilla brought with her a sea-falcon in a cage who she'd named Horus. At first she'd kept him a secret. But once I’d seen the lovely hawk I was fascinated. I’d never seen one up close. Its sleek feathers worked the light into a soft and subtle wash of colors, dark across its back and head, striped on its chest. Its talons were shiny and sharp. The bird gave off a faint, brittle odor, the smell of the air and the wild. She kept it tethered to a perch, its head covered with a leather hood. Sometimes she reached into the cage and slipped the hood off. Then its eyes flashed at us alive with wildness. From the moment I first saw it I loved it, the simple beauty of its form, the subtlety of its movements. Everything about it spoke of the finely-wrought way it fit its way of life. I’d seen one once hovering high in the sky. As I watched it spotted something far below, folded its wings and dove at breakneck speed, pulling up at the last instant to snare a its prey in its talons.

  Like the lion below Puteoli’s arena the bird would gaze around the room, full of fire and anger at being held captive. Then it would open and flap its wings, lightly, arching its back and fluffing out its feathers, only to settle back into a kind of sphinx-like comprehension of the world and its place in it. She would lift small chunks of lamb from a bowl and talking to it as though it were a child place the meat carefully into one of its talons. It gulped down the smaller chunks, but held the larger in its talons and torn them to bits with its dagger-sharp beak.