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or the harmonics of Nicomachus of Gerasa.   But he has stopped even this.
    Minkah, his scalp tended to daily by Ife, is become his body servant and in return Father teaches him to speak and to read in Latin.   He teaches him of stars and of numbers and of divination.   In this, and in many other ways, they delight in each other.   Father has seldom delighted in anyone but Didymus, and often Lais and sometimes even me, so that, I suppose, explains a stray Egyptian in our house.
    This, as I feared, leaves only Hypatia.   I must do as I said I would do.   Teach and be paid to teach.
    Who would allow me this?   How should I start?   And then I remember— who would allow me this?   Who else?   Our family’s good friend, Didymus the Blind.   His school, the Christian Didascalia, takes pagan students hoping they might convert them, but they do not take pagan teachers who might convert back not only pagan but Christian.
    But there is this.   Didymus knows everyone and everyone knows him.   Didymus will help me find work, for Didymus who we love, loves us.
    ~
    Here, in the Christian district, all appears well with the world.   The wide street that runs before the Christian school of Didymus, the narrow streets that pass either side, the public park behind, the Christians of Alexandria pushing their way here and there, the noise they make, the smell, the summer’s heat, all remains.   Nothing seems changed but me.   I am as ever barefoot, yet I am not the wild child who roamed the streets, coming from a lesson or going to, dodging through legs, knocking cabbage from stalls and pots from walls.   I am head of my family now.
      Sitting in a white cup of a chair at the top of pink marble steps, Didymus awaits me in the great doorway to his school, founded, or so the Christians say, by Mark the Evangelist who they also say wrote the first gospel of Jesus.   Old when I was a child, Didymus is so much older now.   Bent then, he bends more.   But the old man can make people laugh.   He can make them cry.   With his tales, he can cause them to sigh with longing or to shiver with fear.
    All love Didymus who has never sought to force his beliefs on any, especially not on Theon of Alexandria and his motherless brood of daughters.   In this he shows great wisdom.   Had he done so, the rest of his days would have been spent in the buzz of argument.   We should have driven him mad.
    To me, that he lost his sight at the age of four has given him greater sight.
    “Hypatia!”   His voice carries no farther than the pillars either side of the door as I take the stairs two at a time.   “Go in,” I call, “go in and wait.   I shall find you.”
    “Not without thread.   Inside is as the Labyrinth of Minos.”

    Somewhere deep inside the school Origen wrestled from Mystery sects when Diocletian was emperor and doing his best to remove Christians from physical existence—how reversed the world now!—I sit with Didymus, confessing my problem.   He laughs, and I see if teeth he has, they could number no more than three.   I find myself thinking of triads and triangles and trinities.
    “It is perfection!   My dear friend has finally solved his own dilemma.”
    “What dilemma is that?”
    “What to do with three daughters.   Ordinarily a man with three daughters, but no wife, would remarry.   But Theon loves only numbers and divination and Damara.   So what to do with three girls?   Is it not a father’s responsibility to see his daughters wed and off his hands?”
    “But we none of us wish to marry.”
    “Then you see his dilemma.”
    “And you see mine?”
    “I do.   Normally you should all be out in the streets in no time.”
    “But that cannot happen.”
    “And it will not.   You are Hypatia.   Much is expected of you.”
    This clenches my jaw.   “Perhaps too much.”
    “I imagine it feels that way, but when have you ever failed your father?   Have you not even surpassed him in all things?”