by Vincent Czyz
The door opened again—Lisa. A girl so quiet Drew sometimes wondered if she wasn’t some kind of nun keeping a vow of silence.
Professor de la Croix came in right behind her, an overstuffed briefcase and a stack of books under her arm. A short woman, she nonetheless did a pretty good job of blocking a doorway. Her gray hair, pulled back in a bun, had a metallic sheen, but a few wiry strays sprang out at random as if to spite her sense of order. And though she had put on a smear of orange lipstick, aside from not quite hitting the mark—something like a child’s crayon job—it just didn’t look right.
She let the books thump to her desk and appraised the class from behind a pair of glasses that were almost modern. Everything else she wore looked as if it had been rescued from an attic. She pulled their papers out of her briefcase and began handing them out as students trickled in.
“Miss Dent …”
“Miss Fenton …”
“Mr. Demko …”
She called out names and returned papers until she had only one left. “Mr. Korchula …”
Professor de la Croix fixed her gaze on Drew, but the white glare of the fluorescent lights on her glasses erased her eyes.
Drew’s fingertips tingled.
Professor de la Croix slapped the paper on his desk, face down. “A particularly poor piece of scholarship,” she muttered.
Drew’s stomach lurched, as if he were on an elevator that had suddenly dipped.
Bending down, she whispered hoarsely, “A C- is a gift,” and then headed up the aisle between desks.
“C-?” Drew was surprised by the force of his own voice.
Professor de la Croix turned to glare at him. “If you’re going to call Saint Augustine a liar, you’d better back it up.”
Faces swiveled toward him.
Drew cleared his throat. “Well, he … made a false accusation.”
Even Jesse looked skeptical. “How do you know?”
“Good question, Miss Fenton.” With a twist of a smile, Professor de la Croix answered it: “He doesn’t.”
Ignoring the professor, Drew looked at Jesse. “Scholars who lived during the Renaissance assumed that the author of the Corpus Hermeticum was an Egyptian priest.”
Professor de la Croix rolled her eyes. “Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed author, never existed. He was a fiction created by the Gnostics.”
Drew conceded with a nod. “Yes, but Hermes was thought to have lived at about the same time as Moses—”
“In point of fact,” Professor de la Croix interjected, “the Corpus Hermeticum was compiled in 100 AD at the earliest and probably closer to 300 AD, well after Christianity had been firmly established.”
Drew pushed a wing of dark hair from his eyes. “But Augustine didn’t know that. Augustine, like everyone else writing around the fifth century, believed that the Corpus Hermeticum was as old as the pyramids. And because Hermes refers to God the Father and uses the expression Son of God, and because he says God created the world through a luminous word, there were a lot of theologians who thought Hermes must have been a prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity. Augustine denied this of course.”
Professor de la Croix waved a hand dismissively. “Augustine saw through the absurdity of this Gnostic heresy.”
“Yes, maybe, but according to Augustine, everything Hermes knew about Christianity came from the Devil.” Drew flipped through the pages of his paper. “Hermes presages these things as the Devil’s confederate, suppressing evidence of the Christian name …” Drew looked up for a response.
“And who is to say he wasn’t, Mr. Korchula? Who is to say that is not a valid explanation?”
Drew was too surprised to answer. It had never occurred to him that a college professor might consider the Devil as valid an explanation as an algebra equation or a logical proof. “Umm … well, there was no one named Hermes Trismegistus, and the Corpus Hermeticum came after Christianity so … so there was nothing to explain. But when Augustine thought Hermes knew about the future, and Augustine couldn’t explain how a pagan could be a prophet, he just made something up about conferring with the Devil. He—”
“Oh enough of this rubbish! The Gnostics were plagiarists who, between them, never had an original idea. Nor do you, Mr. Korchula.”
Drew was furious. His gaze slid over to Jesse, but she was looking down at her notebook. His best paper, probably in all four years of college, and the professor had just announced to the class it was crap.
“Just who are you to call Saint Augustine a liar? Have you ever written anything worth publishing? Let alone texts that have been studied for a millennium and a half.”
“No, but I haven’t written any lies lately, either.” His voice cracked on lies.
“This from a student who can’t seem to make it to class on time— when he bothers to come.”
Drew had missed only three classes. “Christianity,” he shot back, “was a little late too, don’t you think?”
Professor de la Croix put the back of her hand on her hip and took off her glasses. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Drew’s paper was no longer the issue. Neither was his grade. PhD or not, de la Croix was wrong. “Religion is what? About 30,000 years old? If we call those paintings in Lascaux and Alta Mira religious? Assuming a Christian God has been up there all this time, why did He wait 28,000 years to put in an appearance? Isn’t it kind of a cruel joke to leave human beings in the dark with all those pagan gods the saints insist were really demons? I mean, those guys painting in caves? Why not give them a little light to work by? Why not give them a … a goddamn clue?”
Her eyes narrowed. “How dare you use profanity in my classroom.”
Drew had to hold onto the arm of his desk to keep his hand from shaking. “Yeah, okay, sorry, but you haven’t answered my question.”
“You are lucky, Mr. Korchula, extremely lucky that I tolerate your presence at all. As to your question, which involves thousands of years that are utterly dark to those of us in modern times, who can possibly know? Who are we, after all, to question the ways of God?”
Drew looked to the other students, but he could tell from their faces he wasn’t going to get any support. “I thought this was a university, not Sunday school.”
Professor de la Croix slammed a desk with the heel of her hand. “Get out! Out of my class!”
Gathering up his books, Drew glanced at Jesse, hoping she would say something in his defense. All he got was a sympathetic look.
“I will not tolerate that kind of disrespectful back-talk from a student.”
As he left the classroom, the professor’s words pelting his back, he wasn’t sure if the backs of his ears were burning from anger or humiliation.
Let’s see what the head of the religion department has to say about your C-.
1: 2
BYZANTIUM
WHENEVER HE CAME ACROSS the word, he instinctively imagined the letters embossed on gold foil. It reminded him of Yeats’s gold-enameled bird singing to keep drowsy emperors awake. Of Constantine the Great’s bronze lions that—powered by steam—actually roared. Sitting in Professor Wittier’s office, it was hard not to think of Byzantium; along with the antique desk, a fountain pen in a gleaming holder weighted by a marble base, and bookshelves fitted with glass doors and brass hinges, there were several Byzantine icons—Jesus among them. The Savior’s robes, a rich red, looked as though they had been stained by smoke. They contrasted with a gilded background that had lost much of its shimmer. Although gold doesn’t tarnish, this was paint webbed by fine cracks. All of the icons looked as though they had been rescued from a fire—the colors sooty, and the parched wood beginning to split along the grain—but the fire was just time, time consuming everything at an imperceptible smolder.
A short man with a receding hairline, Professor Wittier had dressed up the informality of his jeans with a herringbone jacket. He had puffy eyelids that made him seem permanently sleepy and, like his mahogany desk, fit in perfec
tly with the Old World look of his office.
“Look, Drew, you’re a bright kid, but some of your comments, you have to admit, were a little inflammatory.” He sighed heavily. “Couldn’t you have just said darn?”
“I know I shouldn’t have said that, but it’s one … little … word.”
“The universe began with a word.”
“Yeah, I guess. But my paper has about five thousand of them.” Drew’s hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he’d tucked a button-up shirt into a pair of black jeans. “Couldn’t we give that a little more attention? I mean, do you think it’s C- work? Can’t she be brought up in front of a board for being unprofessional…?”
Professor Wittier leaned forward. “Look, Professor de la Croix was angry, she stepped a little over the line. And, no, your paper isn’t C- work. You’ll get a B+. I’ll see to that.”
“But—”
“You would have gotten your A if you had just been a little more … diplomatic in the classroom. I hope, at least, that you’ve learned something from this incident.”
Drew smiled bitterly. “I learned that if Professor de la Croix can’t attack my work, she’ll attack me.”
Professor Wittier laced his fingers together and lowered his eyebrows. “Drew, let me ask you something. You’re an English major … are you planning to teach?”
“I really don’t know. I just … I enjoy reading.” He shrugged.
“Well, chances are with an English major that’s exactly what you’re going to do at some point or another—teach. Now I’m not saying Professor de la Croix is right, but in a few years, if you’re running a classroom, you might have a little more sympathy for her position. Don’t forget that, like the rest of our staff, she has put decades of research into her subject. Sometimes, I’ll admit …” He waffled a hand. “Sometimes we’re a little too sure of ourselves, that’s all.”
Drew nodded. This office with its rustle of paper, its air faintly musty with the dust-covered wisdom that lined the shelves, its corners and niches where shadow was a reminder that so much more had been lost beneath the crush of history than could ever be imagined—let alone retrieved—yes, he could spend any number of hours in an office like this. But a classroom…?
“Can I ask you something a little off-topic here, Drew? Your last name is Korchula. Where does that come from?”
“My father’s Croatian,” Drew answered. “We’re named after a town. And my mother’s Gypsy.” He purposely left out the indefinite article to indicate his mother’s ethnicity rather than comment on her personality.
“Quite a mix. I suppose I can see it now.”
Drew was dark-skinned enough to make people wonder about his ethnic background. Prominent cheekbones and eyebrows that slashed down at a sharp angle gave his eyes something of the Asian, although his nose and the rest of his face had the straight lines and right angles most people associated with Westerners. He lifted his chin. “Are those icons authentic?”
Professor Wittier glanced back at them. “Ah … they’re beautiful, aren’t they? Yes, they’re genuine. I picked them up at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. Even after bargaining to get the price down, I paid quite a bit for them.”
Rain tapped against the glass of the office windows.
“You’re a senior, aren’t you, Drew?” Professor Wittier lifted his graying eyebrows. “One more semester and it’s out into the world, right?”
Drew nodded. Yeah. Out. Then what? Grad school? Peace Corps? He had no idea.
Professor Wittier stood and skirted the edge of his desk. “So let’s just put this whole thing behind us, shall we?”
Drew pushed out of his chair. “Sure.”
Wittier gave him a friendly pat on the back as he opened the door and shook his hand. “Keep up the good work, but keep it clean, okay?”
So that’s it, Drew thought as he walked down the hall. One of the best papers he’d ever written gets a B+. Pulling on an old pea coat, he slid his hands into the worn pockets and walked out into a cold drizzle. The mall was lined with venerable brownstones half-covered with ivy.
It was only December, but he had begun to worry about May: what was he going to do after graduation? His father kept asking him the same question.
“You don’t wanna teach so what the hell kinda work you gonna find? You wanna drive a truck like me with your fancy diploma?” His father was up at four every morning to deliver cold cuts. “You know what BS stands for, right? Bullshit. MS? More shit. And PhD is just piled higher and deeper.” His father would drag on a cigarette. “What you really need, is a jay oh bee, so you can pay back those loans.”
Drew’s father was a practical Slav. He didn’t understand the point of an expensive education that couldn’t be converted into a job paying a lot more than his.
“And what did you study? Stories that never happened. They call it lidderacher like it’s important. What the hell is the point if it never happened?”
Drew had never been able to answer his father. He couldn’t even appeal to the storytelling tradition of the Gypsies—Drew’s mother was the only Gypsy his father liked.
The one rule Drew set for himself when he’d started college was that he enjoy the next four years. And he had. While some students were doing indifference-curve analysis in microeconomics or working out integrals in calculus, he was reading a Greek play or buzzing through a chapter in a Dickens novel. But now that the trees had lost their leaves and the weather had turned cold, the feeling he found himself facing wasn’t anxiety; it was dread.
“Hey.”
Her voice startled him.
“Deep in thought?” Freckles, disarming smile, and short, dark hair safe under a paisley umbrella, Jesse was looking up at him.
His own hair was beginning to soak through. “Yeah, I guess I was.”
“You have your powwow with Wittier?”
“Just now.”
“And?”
I got a B+.”
“Not bad.”
He pulled his head back, a contrived grimace expressing a mixture of disbelief and disgust.
“All right.” Raising her eyebrows and pressing her lips together, Jesse nodded. “For us a B+ is an unmitigated disaster. But you’ll still ace the course.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I think you made your point. And I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have just sat there.”
Drew shook his head. “Nah …” The apology made something in his chest that had been uncomfortably tight go slack.
“I’m not saying I totally agree with you, but Professor de la Croix was wrong to turn it into a personal attack.”
“Well, it’s done with.”
“Yeah, I guess. Just remember, there are more things under heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” She smiled again, and shallow dimples deepened among the freckles. “Horatio.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Hamlet is Shakespeare’s best if you ask me.”
This was the first time they’d ever spoken outside of class. It was also the first time their conversation had gone beyond theology, and he was suddenly desperate to spend the drizzly December afternoon with her.
“I don’t know about the play, but the line definitely suits you … you’re just a little too enamored of logic.”
He nodded. “Maybe.” For a long second he listened to rain drum lightly on her paisley umbrella. “How about hitting Café Insomnia for a coffee or something?”
The rain came down harder, and the drumming intensified.
“I’d love to, but I’m meeting my boyfriend in about fifteen minutes.”
Maybe because it was unexpected, the word boyfriend stung almost as much as what Professor de la Croix had said about his paper. A little too quickly he asked, “Another time, maybe?” He knew there wouldn’t be.
“I’ll see you at the final.” She snickered. “Horatio.”
He watched her cross the mall wondering what her boyfriend was like.
Long hair hang
ing down his back like drenched seaweed, Drew started toward the dorm. Nothing, he decided, is as gray as rain on a sidewalk. Under his breath he said, “Byzantium.” And the gray was backgrounded by gold.
BOOK 2: 1 - 7
MARKET OF SECONDHAND BOOKSELLERS
Yale University has announced the discovery of the oldest extant manuscript of the Book of Isaiah. The manuscript was brought to light in the Syrian monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem. Written on a scroll of parchment dating to the first century BC, it was identified by American scholars conducting research in Jerusalem.
— The Times, April 11, 1948
2: 1
ISTANBUL
EX ORIENTE LUX. OUT OF THE EAST, LIGHT. Late afternoon cast a glow on Beyazit Square. That was one of the things Drew loved about Istanbul—the light. Sometimes it seemed almost solid as it slanted down. Other times, like today, it gave the weathered stone of Beyazit Mosque and the other Ottoman buildings a kind of halo. Paved with cobblestones and shaded by ancient trees, the square was dominated by the mosque on its eastern side, and, to the west, the massive stone gateway of Istanbul University. An arch rising to a height of fifty or sixty feet, the gate was flanked by a pair of dwarf towers, crenellated but unimposing.
Pigeons rose in a confusion of flapping wings at his approach.
He had ended up, as Professor Wittier had predicted more than a decade ago, teaching. Nothing that required a PhD, though, just English as a foreign language. He’d scored high enough on the GRE to get in just about anywhere, but he’d never applied to graduate school. He still turned the idea around in his head, like a curio, examining it from different angles, but then he’d gaze out his apartment window at the spectacular view of the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn—a finger of the Bosporus Strait that pointed west—and put off the decision. Grad school would be books of critical theory and novels that had to be read in a week, all-nighters and thirty-page term papers. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to do it, not when he’d gotten used to a teaching load of only twenty hours a week, to long summers traipsing around the Mediterranean and Europe, to lazy weekends raiding secondhand bookstores and antique shops. One other thing held him in Istanbul: it was easier to be a failure abroad. He didn’t run into old friends, and even when he flew back home for a visit, he had the air of an adventurer.