Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Anacreon died of septic misfortune seven years ago following a wound from snapped spears in the campaign against Aigina. He died in our house, a week after having been carried home on a litter. For weeks Kynegeiros seemed enraged at the sight of me. And my own expressions of sadness incited him further.

  We groped in the murk of the gods' motives. All we knew was that their directives needed no explanation and had to be obeyed. Artemis is angry: Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter. Mene-laus is favored: Troy must fall. And when a mortal is taken into a god's confidence, that mortal brings everyone bad fortune.

  We consulted a local oracle, though our mother hated oracles, with their language tricks and teasing word-mazes. We were told that human life was a nursery in which larger designs were revealed. We were told that we had brought this on ourselves. We were told to look to the youngest. I am the youngest.

  Our father for years said with pride that parents live on in their children and that the dead man rises in his offspring. He said, whenever he watched Anacreon on the parade ground, that he was like the gods' medicine, applied with kind intention. He called him the pillar for our roof. Our mother always chided us to remember that we were rich; that heaven's grace had been poured over us.

  We drained and washed his wound and packed it with the prescribed herbs. A surgeon bled him. We waited, sitting about as a family through long evenings like the crew of a galley in an onshore wind, sullen and becalmed.

  But with him the gods' verdict was suffering followed by death. As if our natural condition were a world without mercy. Our hope dwindled for seven days and then was gone. We were left with our father on his knees and the greasy reek of our brother's infected clothing on a courtyard pyre. Our mother became like Queen Procne, who lost her son and then, transformed into a nightingale, forever sang his name. She went about laureled with misery.

  Kynegeiros too went about like a blind man. But my feelings were like chalk drawings, and if my father had known he would have flogged me raw. I cut my hair to crown my brother's tomb. I helped pour the offering. But how could I make my prayers? What words could I pour into his absence? And from which brother did I want forgiveness?

  My surviving brother seemed to know. He looked at me as if he understood that in my case, conceit and vanity would never abate. As if he could see now that I was Catastrophe, hand-reared at home.

  Why did our family act like this? I asked my brother in frustration almost a year ago. Our parents had still not recovered. By then I understood the old saying that grief is a cold hearth.

  Others had lives much more filled with grief. Families that had blow after blow rained upon their reeling heads. What was different about ours?

  The question has always been an unwise one to ask.

  Each night on this plain in front of the invader, sharing with me a sleeping palette damp and cold with dew, my brother lies awake despite his exhaustion, still grieving for our brother and still refusing me forgiveness for having been spared.

  Poison sweet waters once and they're poisoned for good. I don't ask him for his thoughts. Calamity is my school, and in it I've learned when to speak and when to keep silent.

  By the third watch, it feels as though I'm the only one awake. My cloak, when it covers my feet, doesn't cover my shoulders. Under the wood smoke I can smell marjoram and pine resin. In the distance there's some quiet sentry-stirring in the dark.

  When I lie awake on my mat, I compose. I sing about discipline and a good heart, which is not the same as having had either. Though I made my debut at the city Dionysia festival at the age of twenty-two, I did not win the prize until fifteen years later.

  Our family belongs to the eupatridae, heir of an aristocratic lineage extending back to the origins of Attica. My brother and I are old enough to remember the tyranny of Hippias and to have voted on Kleisthenes's democratic reforms. We're considered men of some moment, having had a foot in both worlds. My neighbors admire me for what they've seen during the festivals, and they admire my brother for what they know of his spirit. My children hold him up as their model for fiercely applied self-discipline. He doesn't disappoint them. This evening for his supper while I cooked he contented himself with the kind of hard flax seed loaf that's fit mostly for winter boot insulation.

  “They'll fight tomorrow,” he says from out of the darkness beside me. When I ask him why, he reminds me that the Spartans will arrive the following day.

  My brother is always right. Over the morning breakfast fires, we watch the invader's muster. Kynegeiros goes about the business of preparing without acknowledging what's before him. It's a mesmerizing sight and it fills the plain from the mountain to the sea. There doesn't seem to be enough earth to hold all of the activity. Dust kicked up floats slantwise across their ranks in the rear. Their line as it forms looks to have a frontage of about fifteen hundred men. The formations are at least ten to fifteen men deep. The Persians themselves, flanked by the Sakai, form the center. And this is without yet any sign of their cavalry.

  Kynegeiros is still refusing to look, like a boy trying to impress me. Finally, we're sixteen together.

  We're in the hands of god's justice, one way or the other: the battle pennant, now hoisted, informs us that the command which rotates on a daily basis among the strategoi falls today to Milti-ades, who argued the most insistently for our march out to face the invader in the first place. All around us in our tribe we're surrounded by the kind of sons of aristocratic families who give themselves epithets, the way that young people do: nicknames like Sacred Erection or the Self-Abuser. They take courage from one another and from us the way each ship takes courage from its moorings. They present the invader with a version of Hellas bare and lean as a wolf.

  Some of us write on small wax tablets or tree bark or potshards scraps of messages for family members or wives. My brother and I each write a line on the disposition of our property. Armorers pass among us with sacks to collect the notes for safekeeping back at the armament wagons with the sacrificial goats.

  The squires begin arming citizens from the feet up: bronze greaves prised apart for fitting, then secured by the natural springiness of the metal.

  It goes without saying that my brother will handle our private commerce with the gods. He mixes a little of our honey and wine in our grandfather's clay bowl to prepare the drink for Earth, and to give the thirsty dead their sip: libations poured down into Earth's hidden rooms to sweeten dead men's attitudes. Libations for our brother, listening in his buried dark. Soon he'll hear his dirt ceiling groan as it's hammered and scratched open.

  Kynegeiros pours the mixture, and a straw-brown mantis with feathery grasping claws walks through the wet when he's finished. On the army's temporary altar nearby, two other goats are kept in reserve in case the bleeding from the first reads inauspiciously.

  Even the cynics recognize the usefulness of these rituals: someone's always seeing an eagle when they need to before battle.

  When a city falls, the universe is upended, and things are toppled that once climbed to heaven, and bound that should be free. The Persians have upset the natural order of things. As have I.

  The final libations have been poured, the omens scrutinized and teased forth. There's that pause, as at a banquet when the tables are cleared and the floors swept of shells and bones. We take our places in the lines, neighbors holding out their hands as they pass, touching fingers like boys sliding palms along fence posts.

  Now it's just men waiting in the heat. Squires circulate with water. My brother stands to my right. To my left is a neighbor we call Crayfish because he loves them and because his eyes unmoor from their pairings. The felt of his undercap is already soaked. Clouds like islands of migratory air sail by.

  I've prayed. Now I must bring my prayers to flower. My brother beside me marks his place for my father, mother, and brother who died. If I weep my love for the chambered dead, will those tears restore me? The dead's grievances live on and on. I stand shoulder to shoulder with those I lo
ve while a flood tide of self-hate beats the prow of my ship. For Kynegeiros, one brother's loss and the other's shame is a grief past bearing, a tether ring that tears against all pulling. We must heal ourselves. Our cure is blood for blood. The ability to live with ourselves must be earned with the spear. We're the corks that lift the nets and the lines that rise from the depths.

  He's the man who instructed me in bivouac and foraging, dress and parade rest. He taught me how to balance a pack animal's load. Where in the kit bag to stuff the oil lamp. The usefulness of a hand-mill for grain.

  Any contact he's had with me has been a mercy. Orestes after the murder of his mother was given his own table and drank separately from a cup touched by his mouth alone.

  After we had carried my brother's body outside the walls of the town, after the pyre, after the ashes and bones had been gathered in his cerecloth and consigned to the urn, after the last libations had been poured, our clothes and house purified with sea water and hyssop, his cult was inaugurated with sacrifice on the third, ninth, and thirtieth days after the funeral, and then on all subsequent anniversaries.

  The night after the purification our father, drunk, quoted to us Hesiod's advice about families: “Try, if you can, to have only one son, to care for the family inheritance: that's the way wealth multiplies in one's halls.”

  He then added that it was a great deal to have been granted even a few years' happiness by the deity.

  I found Kynegeiros in the hills above our house some hours later. He was on a slope near a cluster of dead-nettle and mint. He stayed bent-backed, and I stood about. We were like an old man and a soft-boned child. I wanted to say to him: You will not wear me down. All can still be well. I wanted to say to him: How can an infant explain his hunger or thirst or need for his pot? Aren't his insides a law unto themselves? But I knew better than to voice my self-pity.

  The past enters and floods our present while we wait. I've labored to the top of this hill, and it's taken half my life to get here and the other side slopes down. Today once again we'll trust in the way heaven's law compels but not always protects its human allies. Today he'll teach me even more about the war between the self and the world, the self divided into soul and body, the body usually acting as the traitor within the gates. He'll lead me to that magic which we recognize in dreams that make the face of the sleeper relax. He'll show me how my shame could rise like a glad bird and vanish over the shoulder of the hill. I can wish us united in good feeling and in hate, with a cure for every injury, though I know there's no regaining what's gone. We'll act so that something better can be rendered in the days to come.

  Medes, Egyptians, Dacians, Illyrians: they're all drawn up now, in full panoply, their marshaling positions invisible against the sheer mass. The marsh behind them is a stretch of searing sun where the air goes hazy with mosquitoes. Nothing moves on the hillside up above them to our left. Braced planks arrest the spill of a wall down the slope in the distance.

  They wear trousers. Boots dyed purple or red. Quilted linen tunics. Cuirasses with metalwork like the meshings of a net. Open-faced helmets and animal skin headdresses. Bowcases of leopard skin. Here they come, eager for combat, packed man on man: spear-tamers, horse-breakers, endurance and malice and fear on their faces, in horizon-crowding lines, with their curved Scythian swords and double-ended pig stickers, the flower of the wide world's earth stepping forward while their parents and wives and younger brothers in their cold beds back in Asia count the days they've been gone.

  At the signal from our strategos, we hammer our spear shafts on the outer curve of our shields. When we cease, he gives the order to swing down and fit snug the bronze facing of our helmets, and then to advance.

  In the sun we will seem an endlessly wide threshing machine of blades and unyielding surfaces. Our paean will be Zeus Savior, spare us who march into your fire. They'll hear a roar, a windhowl, our singing together. We will find that bright vibration, that pitch at which the spirit oscillates. We will march through their archers' bolts like covered wagons in a hailstorm. They will see, as we close, the spears of our first four ranks swing down to the horizontal. They will discover how far beyond our shields the blades of those shafts can extend. We will break into a run. We will hit them like a bull. We will savage them of all they have. Our collision with the wood and wicker of their shields will be like the sound of kindling underfoot. After the shock of impact, our ranks behind will seat their shields into our backs, hoist their shoulder bones under the upper rims, and, splaying dust as they scrabble for footing, push and shove with all their force. The invader's wicker will have no purchase against the implacable smoothness of our bowl-shaped bronze. Their front ranks will be left trampled in the gleaning-ground that will spool out behind us as the butchery rolls forward, where they'll meet the spiked clubs and gutting knives and bone-breakers of our light infantry. Our churning feet will continue the push even slipping on their blood, like boys' soles on river rocks. We will hit them like a wave, the wild water seething into seaside homes; we will leave them like a tidal pool after a storm, with its clamor of blasted lives.

  All of this is sent to me, or generated in me: visceral shadows instead of words, turning and turning in my imagination. In the cattle-stunning light before we step off, I can see it, my head that open gate. They will be cut down, body on body. They will endure being god-overturned in war. Their slaughter will extend all the way back to their ships at anchor, where we, the right wing, the tribe of Aiantis, will be like the gods jumping both feet into their ranks, about to learn the whole reach of pain, our sandals piercing the shallows and the breakers' roil, our thighs surging back and forth in the water's wilderness of spumy sand, our bodies wading in full armor into the surf, our weapons slashing at the back-watering oars and cable ropes sliding in the waves' retreat, and gaffing the wounded like fish, and there my brother will lay hands on the backsliding deck of a trireme, and there, while I watch, a Persian's boarding axe will chop through one of his wrists, and there on the beach his life will stream out of him and cover us in the river mouth of his blood, with his last words to me that their ships are getting away; their ships are getting away.

  They will find out: all that begins well can come to the worst end. Having done evil, no less will they suffer. And more in the future. In their pride and self-deception they will have led themselves to the disasters of this day and more coming on. As I am for my family, with my friends and neighbors I'll be their sorrow, a sad hollow son born to bring home misfortune, to initiate the roll of grief.

  We can feel our hearts in their bony cages. We're about to enroll them in the academy of chaos and self-command. We're about to lead them to that world in which their sons and brothers are dead and gone. Lost and always there. And they're about to form for us that jury in which each man reads his own future: home and hearth, or no home and hearth. Pain, or release from pain.

  Eros 7

  14 June 1963 Morning

  Though we've been in this cottage for only a day, I got up at first light and set about a housecleaning. Solovyova is still depressed and lay on her bed like a corpse while I worked. When I finished I left. In the chilly air the sun warmed my arms and long blue shadows crossed the roadside weeds and gravel. I walked through the pines to our little river and sat with my toes in the mud. Bream and sturgeon explored the stones on the bottom, flicking their fins.

  We are in Kazakhstan, 370 kilometers northeast of a town called Baikonur. Solovyova and I are in one cottage and Korolyov himself is in the other. The cottages were requisitioned for Yuri Gagarin's flight and have been used ever since. Their original owners came by with flowers when we arrived, in honor of our undertaking. The cottage fronts are covered with creepers and face the pine forest. Behind and above them looms the launchpad in all its concrete immensity. It's a kilometer away but looks as if it could be touched with an outstretched hand. The sides of the blast pit resemble the face of a dam. The command bunker alongside is a squat hedgehog with jagged steel spars sp
iking from its super-hardened roof at all angles, so a malfunctioning first stage falling atop it would break up, thereby diffusing the focus of the blast.

  Diary! You are a historic document: my name is Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, and I was born in the Yaroslavl Raion, and I am twenty-four years old, and by 12:30 Moscow time the day after tomorrow I will have put on my orange spacesuit and climbed into my own spacecraft, the Vostok 6, to rendezvous with a fellow cosmonaut, Senior Lieutenant Valery Fyodorovich Bykov-sky, 150 miles above the Earth. I will become, then, the tenth person, the sixth Russian, and the first woman in space.

  But I have more reason to be unable to sit still, as if electrified by joy: the mind that has laid me open to awe and gratitude—the man for whom I'd give whatever I have to give—is already fulfilling his dream, orbiting above us in Vostok 5. And I am going to join him.

  Technically, of course, that's incorrect. Our mission will be the first step in developing our country's capabilities for orbital rendezvous. Twice daily, during the parabolas of our orbits, we'll approach to within less than two kilometers of each other. But two kilometers is very close. At that range his capsule will be the size of a dried pea at arm's length. Two kilometers, given the slight imprecision of the trajectories, is as near as they dare bring us. As Korolyov put it, the achievement of two cosmonauts orbiting simultaneously would be compromised if they were to kill each other.

  Even so, we'll be in space together. In other words, as Solov-yova pointed out before she fell asleep last night, the combined efforts of the most diligent minds in the Soviet Union—some one hundred thirty bureaus and thirty factories, employing over seven thousand scientists, designers, and engineers—have come together for however many years of labor in order to indulge my sordid and criminally irresponsible obsession with a Hero of the Soviet Union who bears a spotless reputation. “So that's the best they could do for you: two kilometers?” she asked, reaching to turn off the light.