House of Names

by Colm Toibin

  ‘You made us sit and eat while his body lay there, and then pretend that we had not witnessed your pleasure. You made us live as though nothing had happened. You frightened us into silence.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Theodotus shouted at Mitros.

  ‘We came to say that we wish to send a small army to search for the boys,’ Theodotus went on. ‘We have been trying to meet you for some time to discuss this.’

  ‘You kidnapped the boys,’ Mitros said, pointing at my mother. ‘It was done on your orders to frighten us. And it was your hand and no one else’s that wielded the knife that murdered Agamemnon. It was not done on your orders. It was done by you! By you only.’

  ‘My friend is stricken with grief for his son,’ Theodotus said. ‘His wife is very delicate and may not have long to live.’

  ‘I am stricken with the truth,’ Mitros said. ‘I have spoken the truth. Will anyone deny that what I have said is true? Will you, yes, you?’

  He looked to Aegisthus, who shrugged.

  When he directed his attention to me, I almost smiled. What the maids in the kitchens and the guards in the corridors knew, but what had been only whispered, had been stated clearly for the first time. Now that the truth had been spoken, I felt free to go towards my mother and hold her hard by the wrists and shake her.

  When I turned towards the men who were still here, I noticed that some of them appeared uneasy now, but others wore a determined, fearless look, seeming to have been emboldened by Mitros’ words and by what I had done.

  And then I glanced towards Aegisthus. He had begun staring at me again. I moved to the side, suddenly terrified. When I looked over again, I saw that his gaze had hardened and intensified. He was staring at no one else except me, as if I were the one who had openly accused my mother in public of kidnapping my brother and murdering my father, as if I were the one who would need to be dealt with when these men had left.

  ‘You are hysterical. I have no interest in anything you have to say,’ my mother said to Mitros, before turning to Theodotus. ‘And no army, large or small, will be sent from here without my orders.’

  ‘We need to search for them,’ Theodotus said.

  ‘We have sent men who know the terrain and we await their return,’ my mother said. ‘Let us meet again in some days, perhaps when tempers are less frayed. And perhaps you might ask your friend to withdraw the words he has spoken? I see that he has disturbed my daughter’s fragile peace of mind with his lies. My daughter is not strong.’

  All of the men stood their ground.

  My mother stood up and raised her voice.

  ‘I insist that you leave at once and if you’ – she pointed her finger at Mitros – ‘approach the palace again, then I will have you detained immediately for spreading vile and malicious lies.’

  ‘You murdered your own husband with a knife,’ Mitros said. ‘You tricked him. And you had your own son kidnapped. And my son, and all the others. That man in the corner is just your puppet.’

  He pointed again at Aegisthus.

  ‘I will call the guards and they will have you removed,’ my mother said.

  ‘And your daughter!’ Mitros said.

  ‘My daughter?’

  ‘You led her to be murdered.’

  My mother lunged towards him and tried to hit him across the face but he moved back.

  ‘You led her to be murdered!’ Mitros said again. ‘And you had that one’ – he pointed at me – ‘locked up in a dungeon like a dog while you did your evil work murdering your husband.’

  He spat on the ground as two men dragged him out of the room. The last one to go was Theodotus, who turned to my mother and whispered: ‘In a few days, perhaps I could come alone? This has been a disgrace. None of us imagined that he would speak like this.’

  My mother offered him a crooked, exaggerated smile.

  ‘I think you should take your friend home.’

  When they had all gone, I noticed that Aegisthus’ gaze was still on me. As my mother turned as if to say something, I fled from the room.

  *

  Later, I was almost asleep when I felt a presence in the doorway. I knew who it was. I was expecting him.

  ‘Do not come into my room,’ I said.

  Aegisthus smiled as he stood there.

  ‘You know why I am here,’ he said.

  ‘Do not come into my room,’ I repeated.

  ‘Your mother –’ he began.

  ‘I don’t want to hear about my mother,’ I interrupted.

  ‘It’s difficult for her, this waiting, and these men do not help. You must not repeat to her what you heard today. She has asked me to convey that to you.’

  ‘I should not repeat what everyone heard? What was said in broad daylight?’

  ‘And also, if your brother should come back, then it is essential that you do not discuss any of this with him.’

  ‘When is he coming back?’

  ‘No one knows where he is. But he could return at any time. And it will be your mother’s task to inform him what has happened.’

  ‘To misinform him, you mean?’

  ‘Have I made myself clear? You must not discuss any of what was said today with him.’

  ‘He will find out. Someone will tell him.’

  ‘By which time he will have become accustomed to his mother’s role and to mine. He will know that we look after everyone’s interests. Everything else is in the past.’

  ‘You want him to trust you? After all that has happened?’

  ‘Why would he not trust us?’ He almost laughed.

  ‘He will trust you, I’m sure, as much as we all do.’

  ‘If I find that you have defied your mother, then you’ll see a side of me that perhaps you have not seen yet. There is another floor below the dungeon.’

  He pointed his finger downwards, as though I did not know where the dungeon was.

  ‘And your mother, as I said, has asked me to emphasize that she does not want any of this discussed at all at any time, even if you and she are alone. She has heard enough about it.’

  He did not bother denying what Mitros had said. Instead, his demanding that I not repeat it even to my mother moved it merely into the realm of uncomfortable, awkward fact, something that might disrupt the ease my mother pretended to feel.

  She had murdered my father and left his body to rot under the sun. She had sent me and my brother into darkness. She had arranged the kidnapping of the children. But she wanted all that set aside, as you might a plate of uneaten, unappetizing food.

  I wanted to go to her room and insist that she hear me as I told her clearly once more what she had done to my brother and to me so that we would not be witnesses to the fact that she, with no permission from the gods, having consulted no one among the elders, decided that my father would die. I wanted to make sure that she heard me when I repeated what Mitros had said so that it would be heard by the gods themselves: that she alone had wielded the knife that killed my father.

  I pictured her when she came back from my sister’s sacrifice. I remembered her silences and her rages, her darting, shifting moods, her wilfulness, her haughtiness.

  Now it had been said in the open who she was. She was a woman filled with a scheming hunger for murder.

  When she stood waiting to welcome my father, with Aegisthus inside the palace, it was the beginning of a long performance, a performance that started with smiles and ended with shrieks.

  Did she not understand that the servants knew what she had done, that the servants had seen her leave my father’s bloodied body, her eyes filled with satisfaction, and that the news of what she did had spread like fire in a dry and windy season?

  Yet all day she and Aegisthus enacted their fiction. If they could keep us from reminding them of what they did, then they could live in a world of their own invention. They wanted silence so they could continue with their roles as the innocent ones since there were no other parts they could perform without feeling an urge to turn on each other
and turn on us all. The role of murderess and kidnapper was, I saw, somehow beyond my mother’s reach. For her, it was something that merely happened once. It was in the past and was not to be mentioned. And the role of puppet and assistant to a murderess was not a role that Aegisthus could easily play either without becoming hungry for more drama, more blood, more savagery.

  As Aegisthus still stood and watched me, with all his malevolence on display, I saw that I was in danger unless I agreed to be the frail daughter, the sweet simpleton who visits her father’s grave and speaks to his ghost, the witness who barely remembered all of the evidence that she had heard.

  I would join them in the game of innocence for as long as I needed to. I would assist my mother in her role as someone who had known grief and was now almost foolish, distracted, harmless. We would play the parts together even if my brother came back.

  ‘We will be watching you,’ Aegisthus said. ‘And if your brother should appear, then we will be watching you more closely still. At any time if you want to visit the floor below the dungeon, you merely have to let me know. It is there for you. And it would be best, if you value your safety, still not to venture beyond the palace grounds. We would like to know where you are.’

  Once he had left, I told myself that I would, when the time was right, have my mother murdered. And I would, as soon as the first chance came, have Aegisthus murdered too. I would ask the gods to be on my side as I planned how this would be achieved.

  *

  Some days after the encounter between my mother and Mitros and Theodotus, I was stopped by one of the guards in the corridor when I had accompanied my father back to his grave and stayed there until his spirit returned to rest.

  ‘I have a message for you,’ he said. ‘It is from Cobon, Theodotus’ son. He wants you to go to their house. He says you must go there urgently. He cannot come here. He is afraid. They are all afraid. You must not mention that I have spoken to you.’

  ‘I am forbidden from leaving the palace and its grounds,’ I said.

  ‘He would not ask if it were not important.’

  I felt at first that I could not go, and I wondered if this were a trap that had been set by Aegisthus for me. I wavered between deciding to go out by the side door I used to go to my father’s grave and imagining bravely walking to the front and down the steps, aware that I would be watched by the guards, and that Aegisthus would be quickly alerted to my departure. I wavered between moments of reckless courage when I was ready to defy him, and then the shivering knowledge that I could not face the dungeon again. I decided I would use the side door.

  At my father’s grave, I checked that there was no one watching. Furtively, I slipped between the gravestones, and found the old path that was overgrown, the path by the dried-up stream along which people used to carry the bodies to be buried. Few come this way any more. No one wanted to be in these ghostly spaces.

  What I noticed, even as I passed houses where I knew entire families lived, was shuttered silence. I realized quickly, as I flitted from shadow to shadow, that I should not have come out at all. I was sure that I had already been seen. As I made my way to the house of Theodotus, I was sure that some man would already have gone to the palace and, as a way of ingratiating himself, informed Aegisthus of my movements.

  Even Theodotus’ house was shuttered. I went around by the side and tapped on the window. Eventually, I heard someone whispering. As I waited, I could hear further movements from within the house, a lock being pulled back and footsteps. And then a woman’s voice. After a while, Raisa, Cobon’s wife, and her mother appeared at a door and beckoned me to enter. They whispered to me to follow them to an inner room that was almost fully dark.

  As my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw that the whole family was there in the room – Theodotus’ wife, Dacia, Raisa’s parents and her sister and her sister’s husband and their children, five or six of them gathered around their father and mother, and then also Raisa and Cobon’s daughter, Ianthe. She gazed at me from a corner of the room, her two hands clenched into fists and held against her mouth. I had not seen her since she was a child; she was almost a young woman now.

  ‘What has happened?’ I asked.

  None of them spoke as one of the children started to cry.

  ‘Where is Theodotus?’ I asked.

  ‘That is why we asked to see you,’ Cobon said. ‘We thought that you might know.’

  ‘I know nothing.’

  ‘The men who took Leander, the same men, they came and took my father-in-law in the night,’ Raisa said.

  ‘They didn’t speak this time,’ Ianthe said, as she began to cry, ‘but the last time, when they came for my brother, they said that they were here on the orders of your mother.’

  ‘I am not my mother,’ I said, and then immediately saw how accusing their looks were. I tried to think of something more to say that would make clear to them that I could not help them. In thinking, however, I had left silence for too long. I had allowed the accusing stares to mark me in some way.

  ‘Can you ask her?’ Cobon said gently. ‘Can you ask your mother?’

  I understood that it would sound untrue if I explained to them how I lived and how distant I was from my mother and Aegisthus. These people sought help for themselves; they had no interest in hearing how afraid I was.

  ‘I have no power,’ I said. ‘I am only –’

  ‘And there is more,’ Raisa said, interrupting.

  I wondered if they had taken someone else from the family. I looked from face to face in the semi-darkness, unsure if someone else was missing.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Mitros,’ Cobon said.

  ‘They took him too?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘He’s not in his house?’

  ‘There is no house,’ Raisa said quietly. ‘I’ll take you out and show you where his house was.’

  ‘It’s not safe to go out,’ her father said.

  ‘They have taken my son and they have taken my husband’s father,’ Raisa replied. ‘If they want me too, they can have me.’

  It did not occur to them that going out might not be safe for me either, as Raisa motioned me to come with her. I noticed how proud and defiant she was once she was outside the house. She was like a woman asking to be taken into custody, a woman ready to sacrifice herself. I walked slowly and carefully beside her.

  When we came to the place where Mitros’ house had been, there was nothing. Some trees and scrub, that was all. There was no sign that there had been a large house and a garden and olive trees all around it.

  ‘Two days ago, there was a house here,’ Raisa said in a loud voice. ‘There was a family living in the house. Everyone who passed knew it was the house of Mitros. Now, there is nothing. Those trees there were planted in the night. They were not there yesterday. They were taken from elsewhere. The house was reduced to rubble and then the rubble was carted away. The foundations were covered over. Where are the people? Where are Mitros’ family? Where are Mitros’ servants? Someone has tried to pretend that they never lived here. But they did. I remember them. I will remember them as long as I have breath.’

  By this time, people had gathered and were listening. Raisa then turned towards me. She wished me to witness this. I knew then that I would have to get away from her, but I did not want her to believe that I was in league with my mother and Aegisthus. I stood as though alone. I let my eyes linger on the space where the house had been. I did not lower my head. As I faced Raisa, I felt strengthened by her, enough to want to suggest that I was with her. But I was determined that no one among this crowd would be able to convey to Aegisthus or to my mother any words that I spoke.

  What I wanted was Raisa to return home, and I wanted to return home too.

  ‘Where is my son?’ Raisa shouted to the crowd. ‘Where is my husband’s father? Where are Mitros and his family?’

  Then she looked at me.

  ‘Will you ask your mother where t
hey are?’

  She was challenging me, waiting for a response. If I turned away without speaking, I knew, I would appear as an accomplice to my mother and her lover. If I stood my ground, on the other hand, I would be forced to reply.

  I called to my father’s ghost and to my sister’s dead body. I called to the gods on high. I asked them to silence this woman, to make her move away from me.

  As I stared at Raisa, it was my uncertainty that seemed to unsettle her. I tried to suggest that if the men could come in the night and make a house disappear, if they could take the two most powerful elders, then asking me to help was almost foolish.

  But I also wished to emphasize that I was in possession of a power that came from the grave and from the gods, a power that could not easily be named or eliminated. I wanted her to know that, despite my weakness, I would, at some time in the future, prevail.

  ‘I have no power now,’ I said. ‘But there will come a time. There will come a time.’

  Raisa turned and walked proudly back towards her own house and her own family. It was only when she was some distance away that I saw her body buckle and I heard her broken cries.

  I filled my lungs with breath and did not move, forcing those who had been watching me to drift away. I would go back, I decided, through the open spaces. As I walked, I looked at nobody I met, but when I approached the palace, I saw the figure of Aegisthus waiting for me. He was smiling. He was the same figure of pure charm who had beguiled my mother those years before. He made as though to help me as I came near the steps. I allowed him to guide me as my mother’s errant daughter, into the palace and through the corridors to my room.

  *

  In the years that followed, as I began to abandon hope that I would ever see my brother again, I realized that, as a woman with no husband, I was powerless and would remain so. All I had were my ghosts and my memories. Even my resolute will would mean nothing, would come to nothing.

  I watched the men who came to my mother’s table, the ones she had singled out from my father’s soldiers to protect the places that my father had conquered. Sometimes, they came to consult with her and remained for weeks.