by June Trop
Nothing.
Where could the scrolls be?
In my panic, I had to search somewhere.
I dashed to the staircase and charged up the steps, tripping on the hem of my tunic, gouging my forehead against the edge of a riser, grabbing for the banister, hoisting myself up, and scrambling onto the gallery.
My hands seized scrolls, bunches of them, tugging them free. First, a few tumbled out, then a rush of them, scores, hundreds, even thousands cascading everywhere, over the ladder, some rolling across the floor and bounding down the steps, others flying over the balustrade, thundering against the table, gashing its surface, chipping its rim, bouncing off, splintering the glass lamp, knocking down a chair, first one, then another.
Followed by a burst of them. Like missiles, aiming for the rest of Papa’s Etruscan vases, and Holy of Holies, my mother’s figurines.
Shattered.
Then the walls spun, the floor canted, the light faded, and darkness swallowed me.
When my eyes opened, I was startled to find Phoebe crowned with debris hovering over me, her consoling presence framed by the floral motifs on the plaster ceiling.
“Miriam, what happened?”
The details hit me like a one-two punch that made me wish I were unconscious again. The first punch was a replay of the morning’s events but in reverse: my parents’ treasures shattering, the thousands of scrolls spilling over the balustrade, my forehead stinging against the edge of the riser, my dash to the staircase, and my reach into the empty compartment. The second punch flashed images of my routine for storing the scrolls before Shabbat: rolling them up, tying each with its silk sash; turning from the table, always from the same chair; walking the three steps to my compartment; bending to check that the inside was clean; and stowing each one, the pen and ink going in last.
I found my tongue, but could utter only a staccato. My breath was still trapped inside my rib cage.
“Scrolls gone.”
Could Phoebe hear me over the buzz in my head?
“We can buy new ones.”
“No. League’s scrolls. Secrets valuable. Black market. Jews in danger.”
I dreaded facing Judah. He’d entrusted me with them. I’d promised to return them this afternoon. How could he rely on me again? How could the League? How could anyone?
“Who could have taken them, Phoebe? Who in this house would betray me like this?”
The thought throbbed like a toothache.
Chapter 9
Late Sunday Morning
OTHERS IN THE household were taken aback by the disappearance of the scrolls—there was a lot of tsking and head shaking—but I was stunned as if I’d been beaten into unconsciousness in the darkest alley of the Rhakotis Quarter and left there to die. Nevertheless, I’d promised to return the scrolls to Judah that afternoon, an occasion I would otherwise have looked forward to with a starved longing. I had to see him, if only to explain why I wasn’t returning them.
I remember asking the maids to take extra care with my grooming that morning, as if my appearance could distract Judah from the missing scrolls. They bathed me, rubbed my face with a pumice stone to remove the stray hairs around my eyebrows and upper lip, and anointed me with Arabian fragrances. While I watched in a polished bronze mirror, one plaited my hair with ribbons to make a braided crown that she fixed in place with beaded pins. The other heated a metal rod and, holding it by its wooden handle, wrapped locks of hair around it to set a row of screw curls across my forehead to cover the gash. Then they dressed me in a sleeveless blue linen tunica interior over which I wore a white silk chiton girded under my breast and pooling in soft folds to my ankles. Finally, they arranged a strand of lapis lazuli around my neck, dressed my ears with matching stones, clad my feet in ankle-length pigskin boots, and enveloped me in a light woolen himation fastened at the shoulder with my mother’s fibula.
Propelled by a gritty sea breeze that chilled the nape of my neck and flattened my skirt against my calves, I walked south to the Canopic Way, where I turned west toward the Bruchium Quarter. Led by my shrinking shadow, I passed the Great Synagogue and neared the campus of the Great Gymnasium, which is south of the palace gardens that Aunt Hannah and I visited the day before and across the Canopic Way from the Park of Pan.
Sometimes, on my way home from the agora after seeing Judah, I would stop at the Park of Pan, the site the early Ptolomies created to honor their goat-like god of shepherds, pastures, and flocks. As I’d climb to its summit along a walkway shadowed by dwarf pines, I’d spiral around its fir-cone shaped hill, passing the grotto dedicated to the playful Pan, and marvel at the series of artificial terraces and waterfalls wreathed in rainbows. All the while the turtledoves in its gardens and the blackbirds along its secluded sylvan pathways would accompany me with their songs. When I’d reached the summit, I’d look out at the magnificent view encircling me, especially at the walls that once enclosed the city’s sprawl, and imagine my own future like the city’s, pressing to expand beyond today’s constraints.
The walls date back more than three hundred and fifty years to the time of Ptolemy I. Standing in triplicate and shouldering towers at frequent intervals, they form a twelve-mile semicircle around the city. (No walls enclose the seaward side.) Three gates pierce the walls: the Gate of the Sun at the eastern end of the Canopic Way, the Gate of the Moon at its western end, and the Mareotic Gate at the southern end of the Street of the Soma. On the eastern and western sides, the walls soar to two stories, but on the southern side, where armed ships guard Lake Mareotis, they level to only one.
But whether or not I’d stop by the park, my palms would dampen whenever I passed the grove of marble columns that fronts the Great Gymnasium. I’d recall the pankration competition in its palaistra, the Gymnasium’s school for combative sports. Binyamin had his very first bout there shortly after entering ephebic training, the Gymnasium’s physical and academic preparation for young men of privilege. During the bout, he distinguished himself as an accomplished athlete against another ephebe, Titus, who along with Binyamin had just had his long, childhood hair shorn at their induction ceremony.
At first they seemed well matched, the fair, husky Titus hammering Binyamin’s face with a few left jabs, a thread of blood squiggling from Binyamin’s eyebrow, Titus driving his fists into Binyamin’s midriff, and Binyamin pounding him with some solid body punches. But then Binyamin caught him with a sudden left hook to the jaw, a straight right to the nose that snapped his head back, and a strangle hold that sent him to the mat. Permanently. Binyamin’s face froze in numbed disbelief and my father’s foam-flecked lips twisted in horror. A mass of oozing wounds was all that remained of Binyamin’s schoolmate.
By the time I neared the intersection with our other main thoroughfare, the Street of the Soma, the sun had inched its way up the sky enough to bake the pavement and coat my throat with dust. In front of the Museum (meaning Shrine of the Muses but serving as our academy for scholars) and the adjoining Great Library, I carved my way through a thickening crowd of tourists. Some in robes, others in turbans, they were shouting in a host of languages, perhaps hoping for a glimpse of Hero or one of the free-roaming exotic animals that the scholars keep in their private zoo.
I had to wait at the intersection for a curtained litter to pass. While the pedisequi, the slaves who trot ahead of and alongside their master’s litter, were parting the crowd with their long bamboo canes, I could gaze across the Way at the Soma, the sacred precinct Ptolemy II built to honor Alexander the Great.
The Soma is the magnificent walled precinct around the mausoleum itself, a funereal temple built of the finest Greek and Egyptian marbles and furnished with the most exquisite mortuary relics. The body of Alexander was interred under the temple in a cool recess at the end of a long, sepulchral anteroom called the Place of Lamentation, a flight of steps down from the temple’s colonnaded co
urtyard. Although it became the resting place as well for the later Ptolemies, the Soma was dedicated to the worship of the divine Alexander.
But today Alexander lies in a looted vault with a broken nose. With the insolvency of his government, Ptolemy IX Soter II or Lathyros (meaning Green Pea) seized Alexander’s gold coffin, melted it down for coinage, and replaced it with one of crystal. The second insult occurred when Augustus, in his clumsy eagerness to examine Alexander’s mummified remains, crushed part of the noble nose. Still, tourists this morning, like every morning, are lining up along the walls around the Soma to pass through its heavy bronze doors. If they’re looking for inspiration in the restrained beauty of the temple, its clouds of lavender incense, its floors inlaid with mother-of-pearl, its priests’ undulating robes, or the soul of its immortal hero, they’ll have to find it as well in the odor of ancient dust, the must of under-ventilation, the crush of sweaty bodies, and the greasy fingerprints on Alexander’s coffin.
Just as the litter was rounding the corner, another procession appeared, this one a motley parade of the crippled and the sick, each carrying a gift while casting a deformed shadow across the pavement. As they hobbled northward on the median strip of the Street of the Soma, I noticed among them a dull-eyed, ashen man, hardly more than a crooked skeleton. Wincing as he leaned forward to support his tottering companion, he nevertheless offered him a tentative smile. As if in rehearsal, each for his own death, the troop was heading for the Temple of Isis on Pharos Island and the noon opening of its sanctuary for private prayer and meditation.
While waiting, I found myself absorbed in my favorite fantasy, that of spending my life with Judah, all the while sensing an odd tingle of both pleasure and pain. I imagined him in the dim lamplight loosening my hair, it spilling into his hands and stirring his passion. Drugged by the scent of him, I’d surrender in a flush of longing. Moving above me, his hands everywhere delighting me, guiding me, he’d penetrate my most private chamber, losing himself inside me, spreading his heat through me. Our bodies would rock as one, riding waves of heightening pleasure until that crest of ecstasy when the world would quake and the shudder of fulfillment would pulse through us. Then, against the tousled sheets, in a daze of exhaustion, I’d dissolve into his tenderness, and floating in his warmth and the sweetness of his breath, I’d fall asleep wrapped in his arms.
Most of the time the fantasy would end there, but sometimes I’d extend it to our mornings together, my awakening at his side, our working in his shop, his crafting metals, together our fashioning experimental apparatus. I’d repeated this fantasy so many times, occasionally elaborating it, more often keeping it simple, varying it only as to whether we’d someday transmute the copper into gold.
Continuing with my liquid thoughts, dreaming my way back to earlier that year, I re-lived my first encounter with Judah, that unexpected ache when I walked into his shop. He raised his lids to look at me and then squared his shoulders with a slow, deep, almost guttural intake of breath and an even slower exhale. Later, as I was leaving, he leaned toward me. That sensation of his nearness, close enough for our air to mingle and for his hand to brush against mine when he handed me his payment, would ignite my private adventures in solitary love.
Sometimes, when his shop wasn’t busy, we’d talk. The vibrations of his voice would diffuse through my body when he, with an easy optimism, would tell me of his plans to manufacture his own gems and precious metals rather than import them, the gems from India and the ingots of silver and gold from Spain. Other times he’d speak about his gratitude to Saul for taking him in, teaching him the art and craft of metalworking, and introducing him to the League of Alchemists. They’re his family, the men who believe in him and share their secrets with him, secrets he hopes will advance his business and save his clients money.
Just as I was imagining him in every detail—his high-bridged nose and rugged cleft chin, his broad shoulders and chiseled muscles—and just as I was envying his sense of purpose, his freedom to set his own goals, and his self-confidence when making decisions, I was jarred out of my reverie by a crush of scarlet-cloaked soldiers. That jolt and the sour stink fanning out from their pores of last night’s henket, an Egyptian beer made from barley or emmer wheat, roused me from my trance and sent me north onto the Street of the Soma toward the agora, which is just east of the Great Harbor’s dockyards and warehouses.
The agora, our central marketplace, is both the heart of the city and its cloaca of gossip, the venue for seeing and being seen, for hearing and being heard. Like the legendary agoras in the Greek city-states, ours consists of a series of long, low buildings that face a central plaza, each building or stoa fronted by a portico to shade and shelter its shoppers. Within the stoas and their adjoining small buildings are shops, kapeleia for light snacks, small inns, and industrial workshops.
Its vigor filtered into my lifeless arteries as haranguing hawkers and hucksters, orators and priests, soothsayers and astrologers, tricksters and swindlers, magicians and conjurers, snake charmers and peddlers, wizards and sorcerers all promised me a miracle for a price. Men and women of every class, many in the stunning colors of their native garb, bustled about the stalls, tents, and awning-sheltered barrows. Among them were hordes of slaves, pickpockets, cutthroats, musicians, Oriental dancers, prostitutes, loiterers, and speculators, all accompanied by the din of carts, the haggling of buyers, the calls of tinkers, the blandishments of vendors, the pleas of beggars, the quarrels of men, the gossip of women, and the buzz of flies. I raised my hem to tiptoe around the ripe twists of excrement and the opals of phlegm that dotted the pavement while I confronted the squawks of caged fowl awaiting the butcher’s knife, the smoky odors of street food, and the reek of salted meat hanging in strips, threaded with fat, and streaked with blood.
Judah’s stall is well situated in the agora, in a stoa facing both the center of the marketplace and the Street of the Soma, so his location is always congested with moneychangers’ tables and merchants’ wagons, the dealers of these portable businesses vying each day for a favorable spot, their disputes sometimes requiring the governor’s official to settle. Maneuvering around them to cross the plaza, drenched in liquid sunlight, awash in both the fever of desire and the chill of dread, I forewent a snack of figs and a cheese pastry at my favorite kapeleion. Instead, welcoming the shade of his stoa’s portico, I dawdled in the neighboring stalls, some for wines, others for Alexandrine glassware, Corinthian bronze statuary, Greek pottery, and Oriental carpets, grateful for the opportunity to tarry while I garnered the courage to enter his stall empty handed.
Chapter 10
Sunday Afternoon
GARNERING THE courage with a few deep breaths, I pinched my cheeks for some color and entered Judah’s stall on a spike of sunlight that stretched past his displays of bejeweled gold and silver chains and settled on the scrim that curtains off his living quarters. He was facing the entrance, seated on a stool, arched over his workbench in front of the scrim. Intent on his craft, his sandaled feet resting on the white tile floor, his lips parted, his calloused hands were skillfully weaving strands of metal into a wire gauze for spreading the heat of a flame. Eager to fix this image of him in my memory but ready to look away if he should catch me staring, I must have sighed during a surge of sweet imaginings, because his concentration broke and he raised his lids to look at me with steady eyes.
I felt as though he’d touched me.
“Hello, Miriam.”
His voice resonated through my body, triggering such a wave of tremors that I had to grip the edge of one of the stools around his display counter to stop the fluttering of my himation.
But, like my father, he got right to the point.
“Miriam, I was counting on seeing you today. I’ve been concerned about returning the scrolls before anyone realizes I borrowed them.”
One of Homer’s Gorgons materialized before me, baring her fangs, seizing me with
her terrible gaze, and turning my pale courage to stone.
“The scrolls? Actually I’d quite forgotten about them. I just dropped in to tell you I’ve designed the apparatus for you and Saul and I’ll have everything for you, my design, your scrolls, and the apparatus, by next week.”
I forced a tight smile to cover the lie that was burning like acid in my throat.
Raking his hands through his hair, he took several seconds to respond.
“You know, Miriam, I borrowed the scrolls without telling anyone. They still consider you an outsider. Besides, I’d be mortified if Saul notices their absence. As it is, he’s afraid our years of hard work could get into the wrong hands. I thought you understood that.”
“Saul. How is Saul? Last time I was here you told me he had a cough and was developing a tremor in his hands.”
I’d only met Saul twice, once last year when I first started coming to the shop to collect Judah’s mortgage payment, and another time more recently when I saw them together at a craft meeting at the Great Synagogue. I’d gone there on the pretext of using its library and happened to buy a scroll about the lives of the women in the Torah, but my real purpose was to catch a glimpse of Judah. The prospect of seeing him or hearing his voice, even just his name, brought me pleasure.
When I met Saul, I was struck by his hands, a young man’s hands, strong, large but graceful, with long square fingers and oval tapered nails. He’s not quite handsome, despite his crest of reddish curls only slightly threaded with gray, but he’s tall and broad-shouldered with a kind square face, a wide mouth, and a strong brow.
Judah had told me that Saul’s a widower. His wife, Dinah, died a few years ago, but she’d been sick with mania for more than twenty years, since the birth of their only child, a son named Eran. Saul had done everything to ease her suffering, even taking her to the asclepieion at Pergamon, the famous healing temple dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of health and medicine. There she was treated with a special diet, dream therapy, mineral baths, exercise, and massage along with various healing rituals—one in particular involved sleeping in a dormitory with non-venomous snakes crawling all over the floor—but nothing could restore the balance of her yellow bile. So, when Saul wasn’t in the shop, he’d be home taking care of Dinah and Eran, and when he was in the shop, he’d be teaching Judah his craft.