“A little farther,” I heard Rusticus say.
And then the cord slipped suddenly over the baby’s head so that, with my hands cupped on either side of it, I could gently draw the head and then the body forth. A tiny girl-child, her face empurpled, her body a skinned rabbit’s, the life-giving cord that had encircled her neck like the iron ring of a shackle spiraled darkly from her navel. She lay quite motionless on the bed.
Rusticus quickly reached over and, taking the baby by the heels with one hand, hung her upside down. Fluid poured from her nose and mouth. Then he struck her lightly on the buttocks, once, twice, and she gave a tiny gasp. Then she drew in a great rasping breath and when she let it out it was as a cry, a thin wavering sound like the bleating of a newborn lamb.
I saw a smile appear on Tanit’s waxlike face; Anzar laid his forehead on the bed and wept.
The child was named Ifru after Tanit’s mother. For weeks after her birth Tanit lay gravely ill, sometimes raving, sometimes sane, no strength to hold her child still less to give her suck. Anzar was no use to us at all so frantic was he his wife would die; day and night he sat at her bedside cradling his daughter in his arms while Tanit slept. When her bed needed changing he would lift her tenderly as he lifted his child and it was all we could do to take her from him again and lay her down when the bed was made. His tools lay forgotten in the yard, his face remained unshaved until, one day, seeing him hollow-eyed, his face quite sunken, I ordered him to quit his vigil and sleep.
“What use will you be to Tanit if you die?” I said to him but he refused to leave, remaining hunched upon his stool, his face set, his hands gripping his knees so tightly his knuckles shone white. So I had him carry Tanit to the main house while I walked behind holding the baby. I installed them in my bedchamber, for it was the largest, with a pallet on the floor for Anzar and a basket for Ifru bedded snugly down with sheepskins.
“Now rest,” I ordered.
I tended Tanit and the child while Maia took over the running of the house. It was the first time I had held a babe since I cared for Neith’s children, but I found my arm curving just so, her tiny head resting sweetly in the crook of my elbow, my hips swaying from side to side to lull the child to sleep, as if all those intervening years had never been and I was young again, a new mother, as if my body were wiser than my mind. I spent long hours walking her, for she was colicky and would not thrive, seeming always to be hungry yet unable to keep much down. I was determined she and her mother would live, for I had had a bellyful of death and grieving and fought for their lives with a kind of dogged rage.
I found a wet nurse from a neighboring farm, a woman whose own child had died at birth, and then later, when it looked as if Ifru would live, I fed her cream to put some flesh on her tiny, stick-like limbs. In deep winter when the earth lay sunken into its dreamless sleep of waiting, the ebbing of the tide of Tanit’s and Ifru’s lives turned and began to run swift and full again and, with it, my own.
Once Ifru was born, time—frozen since my son died—began to flow again. Each milestone of her little life, the day she lifted up her head unsupported, the day her wavering hand closed round her foot when I was changing her, her eyes opening wide in amazement to feel it was her own, the way she would creep along the floor like a little worm, reaching what she sought and grasping it with triumph, these little markers of her growth were drops of time accumulating in a bowl that grew to fullness.
When she began to walk, we drained the pool in the atrium and used it as her play place knowing she could not climb out. In the evening Anzar carved bits of wood into animals for a miniature farm while Tanit, Maia, and I sewed her clothes, for she was growing fast. We made dolls from linen scraps, inked in the faces, and fashioned hair from wool. Now that the danger to her life was passed, she grew robust and strong with sturdy limbs still chubby from her babyhood, black eyes filled with mischief, dark silky curls I tied up in a ribbon, just enough to curl once around my finger even as her tiny fist had curled when she was born and we despaired of her. Sometimes she would lapse into a dreamy state and sit, unmoving, her eyes wide open and unblinking as if she saw things hidden from other’s eyes. Tanit believed she possessed the Sight, but I thought it was a weakness left over from the manner of her birth, the cutting off of air, though I never said so out loud.
I have heard Christians speak of grace as if it were something without substance, something which falls on them from the heavens like light or air. Grace, for me, is flesh and blood, bones and sinew, someone whom my mouth can name: Father, Augustine, Adeodatus, Nebridius. And now, when I thought I had lost all grace: Ifru. And it was not as if she replaced my own son, her birth coming so soon after Adeodatus’s death; rather her small life fell like a drop of water on the stone of my heart, in itself so tiny, so ineffectual, but oft repeated over time, with the power to wear it smooth.
Years later, when I looked for the last time on the farm I loved, the faces of those I loved more, I understood what Nebridius’s gentle heart had known: that this small plot of land, of all the places on the earth, could raise a crop of love from the stony soil of my heart.
Even the news of Nebridius’s death of the same fever that took my son’s life soon after Ifru was born did not break me, so accustomed I had become to loss. The legacy of his kindness has sustained me these forty years and I will bless his name forever. I lived longer in this place than in any other and, most wondrous thing of all, came to call it home, a place where I found, if not peace, a kind of deep contentment when I could say: This is the harvest of my life and it is good.
CHAPTER 35
When I was a child each day passed as if it were a year; as I have grown older I have found that a year can pass as quickly as a single month. And so ten years passed. I did not see Augustine again. I heard he had been ordained a priest and then a bishop. Recently he had written a book called Confessions, a memory of his life before he was a priest, a chronicle of the journey he had taken to God. He sent me a copy and wrote on the front these words:
“For love who showed me Love itself.”
That is all he wrote; there was no letter, not even his name.
About this time an imperial edict banning pagan worship and ordering the closing of pagan shrines sparked rioting in Carthage. The religious unrest spilled out into the countryside where bands of men and youths, emboldened by the emperor’s edicts against heresy and pagan rites, set upon innocent laborers working in the fields or people gathered at gravesites to hold feasting for their dead as was the African custom, one that even Monica had observed until Ambrose told her it was unseemly. A neighbor who was known to be a worshipper of Baal was murdered, his house and barn burned. One evening Rusticus came home from the fields, his face bloody from a fight.
“It was this that saved me,” he said, showing me a wooden cross he wore on a leather cord around his neck.
After that he made me nail a simple wooden cross above the lintel of the door to show that we were Christian. I did it to protect my people though I felt apostate, as if I had recanted a faith I did not have. Although I did not worship the Punic gods as Tanit and Anzar did, as Neith and my father had done, yet I also did not worship the Christian God. He had taken too much from me. The next day when I was weeding in the kitchen garden, a hawk swooped down and snatched a snake up in its talons. Tanit, who was with me, straightened, one fist pushed into the small of her back, the other hand shading her eyes as she watched the bird’s flight.
“It is a sign from the gods, Domina,” she said, though of what she never explained.
Old age approaches slowly step by step, at first so distant as to be unseen, unheard then, one day, it is there. Thus did my old age come upon me, the sudden pains in my limbs when I awoke each morning, the silver strands appearing in my hair until the dark turned wholly gray, then white
. My hands so used to hard work, the wringing out of clothes in the icy stream behind the house, the beating of the olives from the trees at harvest, the punching down of dough upon the kitchen board, grew stiff and gnarled like the branches of an ancient apple tree long since barren. At first I was angry my body would not obey my mind, thinking it a recalcitrant child who refused to do his share of labors, but I grew more tolerant and mild, preferring more and more to sit in the shade of the orchard and watch the chickens pecking at my feet, watch the swelling of a pear upon the branch until—nature’s amphora, brimful with juice and sweetness—it was ready to be plucked. The rhythmic chanting of the laborers at harvest would pulse across the fields, reminding me of my childhood with my father, our solitary travels, their singing a signal it was time to return to Carthage for the winter.
In these quieter years I spent many hours reading, my only luxury a library I had collected scroll by scroll and now filling a closet in my room. Ovid’s stories of the gods, the tales of Cupid—Amor—and the women he ruined, held me spellbound. Daphne, in her desperation to escape, changed into a tree; Europa, Leda, Arachne, Philomela, all pursued by love and forever changed from one nature into another.
Like these women from the ancient stories, I, too, had changed. I was no longer the young girl who thought a man’s desire was love, his caresses proof of his devotion, nor even the young matron proudly carrying his child on my hip who now believed our son would ratify his fidelity. I was now an old but still living tree, tough, resilient, able to bend to winter winds, bare branches awaiting the coming of spring with patience and a longing to hear birdsong once again.
The pain of my son’s death had dulled with the passing of time, lodged now like the broken tip of a knife in a wound encased by scar tissue, a foreign object I would carry to my grave.
As I grew older, sleep became elusive and so I would arise and light the lamps and sit in my chair and look deep into my memories and see again Adeodatus and Augustine and it was as if I was young again and we were together.
One event stands out in my memory during those long, quiet years when season followed season in an unvarying round and religious unrest died down. Half a day’s journey from Carthage, we would often receive news of the world outside our tiny sphere of life. One morning, I heard the sound of wheels and saw a neighbor, a farmer called Linus, draw his mule-drawn rig up before the house.
“Have you heard?” he said. “Rome has been sacked by Alaric and his army.”
It seemed a thing incredible that Rome, the ancient center of the world, should fall. It was as if the earth had shaken, the seas had risen to overwhelm the land, all nature turned upside down. I remembered the streets of Rome, dirty, teeming with people from all the corners of the earth, its temples rising huge and white against an azure sky, the amphitheater that Vespasian built, the largest in the world, beside the ancient forum of the Caesars.
Though born on a different continent, a child of a conquered race, I had lived my whole life in the shadow of the Romans, their culture my culture, their ways my ways, like the water that flowed from their aqueducts to the city fountains from which we drank and thought little of it except that our thirst was sated. Linus, a devout Christian, weeping told me of the sacrilege committed by the Goths, how they raped holy nuns, slaughtered priests, pulled down statues, and stabled their beasts in churches fouling the beautiful mosaic floors with ordure. We felt, Linus and I, citizens of Africa Province and all the Roman world, as if the whole world perished in that one city.
One day, during my seventy-fourth year, news came that the Vandals had landed on the African shore east of the city of Hippo Regius and had begun to lay waste the countryside, burning farms and villages, killing and enslaving the inhabitants.
I had also heard some months previously that Augustine was ill, had left Hippo in the winter for his health but had returned still ailing. It was rumored the barbarians had their eyes on Hippo Regius, a rich and ancient coastal city, that if it would not surrender they intended to sack it and put it to the torch.
The next morning I awoke before dawn, knotted a few belongings inside a cloak, including Neith’s statue, placed the scroll containing my will leaving everything to Ifru on my bed, and left the house. I saddled the old mule, Hannibal, in the barn, a hard task to lift the heavy saddle and buckle it around his fat girth, then led him out into the orchard and tied him to a tree to graze. A faint light was showing in the sky, a pearlescent sheen above a stilled landscape, the only sound the sleepy sounds of birds as they awoke. The dogs came and nosed my hand, whining and looking up at me with their great innocent eyes as if they knew what I intended. I murmured their names—Torch, Orion, Tecla, Nimrod, and Sisyphus—the great-great-great-grandchildren of the dogs that bared their teeth at me when I first came to the farm, a stranger to their sires. Torch butted his great head under my hand, his feathery tail sweeping back and forth in placid greeting. I stroked his wiry muzzle, grizzled now, remembering how, when he was born the runt of the litter, I had had to guide him to his mother’s teat and protect him from his stronger brothers and sisters. He had outlived them all.
I knew I must leave before the rooster crowed and woke the farm but I lingered, walking the paths about the house, seeing it as I did a lifetime ago when I was a woman bruised almost to death.
A figure appeared in the doorway, no longer lithe and girlish but thickened now with the bearing of her five children. In her hand she held the scroll I had left her. Long ago I had taught Ifru to read, so she knew very well what it meant.
“Mina,” Ifru said, the infant name she first used when she had been unable to pronounce Domina now as familiar to me as Mama. “Where are you going?”
I came toward her and took her by the shoulders so I could see her face and look into her eyes, the eyes of her mother, Tanit.
“It is time,” I said, “for me to make one final journey. I go to Hippo Regius.”
“No,” she wailed, tears starting in her eyes. “It is too dangerous; you are too old.”
I smiled at this and patted her cheek as I used to when she was a child and needed comfort.
“That is why I will be safe,” I said. “Who is going to notice an old woman like me?”
“They will rob and murder you,” she said.
“I have nothing that they want. All I have is yours, Little Bird. Take what you can and flee, for the Vandals will not be content with Hippo Regius but will sweep west consuming all before them until they reach Carthage. If you love me you will go.”
I embraced her then, astonished to feel her woman’s bulk when it seemed to me she was still a girl.
She helped me on my mule, weeping, and that is how I saw her for the last time, standing in the lane, her hand uplifted in farewell like my son all those years ago, except it was I who was leaving and she, like me, was left behind to grieve. I clicked my tongue at Hannibal and he set off.
At the rise of the hill I drew up and looked back over the coastal plain where my farm sat, miniature as a picture in my father’s mosaics, a thin tendril of smoke now rising from the oven as Ifru baked the day’s bread as if this day were like any other.
To see it down below, knowing how the morning light was slanting into the atrium, a band of gold illuminating the mosaics I had put down in memory of my father, the clash of pots from the kitchen, the distant call of voices as the household awoke to the smell of baking bread. All this was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing, yet it was removed from me, too, as if I gazed upon a living picture of my life long distant from my present. It came to me then that all my life had been a journey from one place to another, each time thinking, this, surely, is the last.
I did not have a premonition of my death except to know this body that had carried me
faithfully through life, even as Hannibal plodded placidly on with me upon his back, would soon be no more.
“I am coming,” I said aloud. Hannibal’s ears twitched at the sound of my voice.
“Not you,” I said, patting him. “Another. Though equally mule-like.”
I took the inland route reasoning that the coastal road would be swarming with the Vandal army, for they never liked to be far from the sea. It was high summer and the fields were filled with laborers, the lanes with farmers taking their produce to market, their oxen slow and ponderous, snatching mouthfuls from the hedgerows as they went, the farmers’ children running behind the cart, their bare feet caked in dust, their tunics dirty from their play, staring to see one so ancient as me until their parents bade them sharply to mind their manners.
Many a stranger stopped to ask me how I did, if I was lost, and could they point the way, addressing me as Mother and Grandmother.
“No, thank you,” I told them. “But if you have news of Hippo Regius I would be glad.”
None had news but some said they had seen black smoke rising in the east, too early in the year for it to be the burning of the harvest stubble. As I drew closer to my journey’s end, the farmers and the travelers were replaced by refugees fleeing the environs of Hippo, an endless train of carts piled with belongings deemed too precious to be left behind: a feather bolster, a crate of squabbling chickens, a baby’s cradle filled with pots, an oven, chairs, tables. Small children sitting on the laps of grandparents or ancient slaves, those too young, too old, to walk, stunned by their misfortune. It seemed the whole world was on the move.
At night I camped in the fields beside a stream if I could find one now the heat of summer had shrunk the watercourses to a trickle, its cheerful music an accompaniment as I lay and watched the stars wheel in living arcs above my head.
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