I couldn’t believe what I was doing. We were in someone’s backyard, in plain daylight, a few feet from the sidewalk and all the cars passing on the road—but I didn’t care.
When he began to unbutton my shirt, it sobered me up instantly. I pushed him away.
“What’s the matter?”
“We can’t do this here.”
“Who cares where we are?”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. We weren’t here yesterday and you still acted this way. Why?”
“Because . . . you don’t even know me.”
“I don’t need to know you.” His stunning eyes were ruthless. “I need to have you.”
He pressed me back against the tree with an insistence that he was unable—or unwilling—to control.
I doubted that my arguments would last much longer. “Then because I don’t know you.”
“You don’t need to know me either. All you need to do is let me.”
The words spilled over the madly pulsating artery on my neck. He pinned my arms up against the tree and slipped his hand into my jeans, without even bothering with the zipper.
“Rhys, stop.” I said it with the last bit of voice left in my throat.
He froze while he still held me. I heard him take a breath. Then his body detached itself from mine and, without touching me or even looking in my direction, he walked away and disappeared through the trees.
WITH TWO WHOLE HOURS BEFORE my meeting with Giles, I went to the art library and tried to read. But the longer I stared at the book, the more upset I felt over what had just happened: the miserable walk back from Mercer Street, the anger at being left under that tree.
I don’t need to know you.
And why would he? Getting to know every girl whose clothes he wanted to take off? A full-time job, for sure. Shortcuts, on the other hand, were exactly what sex was supposed to be: Casual. Anonymous. Easy. He was probably used to getting girls naked just by smiling at them, let alone inviting them on fancy car rides or picnics in the forest. So if I wasn’t willing to reciprocate the extra effort, why waste any more time on me?
I left the library and went into the art museum for one last look at the vase in case Giles decided to bring it up again. Or at least so I told myself, while in fact part of me still missed Rhys. Not him exactly—the fantasy of him. Of our few moments by the Greek vases, when he had spoken to me in riddles about love.
The place turned out to be the opposite of what I remembered: no magic, no ghosts, just an unremarkable room with a few cluttered cabinets. Inside, each piece had a brief description. The entry next to the Orpheus vase read: Psykter, Athens, cir. 500 B.C. [Acq. 1995].
It took me a beat to process what I had just read—the brackets, the abbreviated word inside them—and to realize that the only trace of Elza I had discovered so far wasn’t a trace at all. Giles was wrong. She couldn’t possibly have written about the same vase. Either his age or the long stream of students had caught up with him, mixing up his recollections to produce the incoherent story he had thrown my way.
Princeton had acquired the vase in 1995. And by then, my sister was already dead.
“MISS SLAVIN, IF MEMORY SERVES me right, there is a creature similar to the maenad in the legends of your country?”
The question flew out at me as soon as I walked into Giles’s office, before I had a chance to sit down.
“Yes, samodiva. In Bulgarian, sam means ‘alone’ and diva means ‘wild.’”
“How interesting . . . a wildalone.” The word rolled off his tongue so naturally. “Untamed and all by herself. Like the maenad on a certain vase.”
We were back to my unforgivable error: writing the paper in the plural. It had offended him deeply, and I still didn’t know why.
“In our folk tales, the samodivi never come out alone. They dance together in the forest.”
“As do the maenads. Their name means ‘raving ones.’ And in your typical myth that’s exactly what they are: a retinue of savage women, intoxicated by Dionysus in the frenzy of his rituals.”
He opened one of the books on his desk and, oddly, didn’t need to flip through it to find what he wanted:
“I have seen those frantic women, who dart in frenzy from this land with bare feet . . . seeking to gratify their lusts amid the woods, by wine and music maddened . . . with snakes that lick their cheeks. Crowns they wore of ivy or of oak or blossoming convolvulus. One plunged her wand into the earth and there the god sent up a spring of wine.”
He closed the book.
“Familiar?” His eyes lit up with a strange excitement. “Bacchae by Euripides, won him first prize at the drama festival in Athens. An entire tragedy about the maenads. Or, in this case, bacchantes, as they were known in Rome.”
“I am sorry, but I haven’t read it.”
“Well, I assumed as much. Yet I still thought it might ring close to home.”
He studied me for another moment, until it became clear that a vague nod was the only response he was going to get.
“Professor Giles, you wanted to show me something.”
“Yes, I did.” He hesitated, as if no longer sure it was worth the effort. “How well acquainted are you with the myth of Orpheus?”
“Other than what I wrote in my paper?”
“Everyone knows that part—his descent into the Underworld and the tragic mayhem that follows. I am more interested in the rest. In his life before he met Eurydice.”
My brain struggled for details, but to my own embarrassment retrieved very little: “He was born in Thrace, to the Muse of poetry, Calliope. When Apollo gave him a lyre, the boy began to turn his poems into songs.”
“Yes, yes, the music and all. But more to the point, Orpheus spent many years in the mystery schools of Egypt. Upon his return to Greece, he became involved in the cults of Dionysus.”
“Cults?”
“Cults, rituals, mysteries, orgies—I have heard the entire thesaurus. Most of the negative labels were invented by the Roman Church, the orgiastic one being a particular favorite.”
“Why would the Church invent orgies?”
“Funny, isn’t it? There was sex, of course—after all, Dionysus is the god of nature’s forces and of anything that produces life. Yet sex for its own sake, especially in its . . . well, its less common variations, was never a defining part of the rituals. Often they involved no sex at all.”
“I don’t follow. The Church just filled the gap with made-up stories?”
“Filling gaps was not the intent, I’m afraid. Quite the opposite. You have to understand, there was a time when the Dionysian religion was as widespread as the Christian one, a pagan rival that had to be quashed quickly. And proclaiming the Greek rituals a drunken orgy was the surest death knell. Even more ironic is that it became a case of the lamb devouring the sheep, since Christianity had borrowed so much from the Greeks.”
“From their myths?”
“Especially from the myths. Dionysus, for one, is thought to be an archetype of Christ: both died in an act of sacrifice and were reborn, not to mention having the power to heal and to distill wine out of water. As for Orpheus, he is a Christian precursor too—of John the Baptist. John spread the teachings of Christ much as Orpheus spread the Dionysian mysteries. They both developed ideologies based on ascetic living and practiced rituals of purification with water—to the Greeks it was kathairein, or catharsis, to the Christians it is baptism. But my favorite analogy, one I am sure you can appreciate, is that John was beheaded at the request of an angry woman.”
“Salome?” I had seen an opera about her. The princess who demanded John’s head when the young prophet didn’t return her love.
“Salome, yes, the most consummate witch of all. Or wildalone, as you might call her. Used her beauty as a weapon to get his head severed. After watching her dance, the king just couldn’t say no.”
I pretended not to notice the curiosity with which he looked at me as he said this.
“A
nyway, the Christian appropriations from the Greeks are a topic for a different, and potentially endless, conversation. The point is, Dionysus was much more than a god of wine and sex. His rituals were part of a complex philosophy, a series of mystical initiations whose goal was to achieve rebirth. A spiritual rebirth, certainly. But also a physical one.”
“How exactly did they do it?”
“This is one of the greatest enigmas of the ancient world. Hence the term ‘mysteries.’ The culmination of them all—the Mystery at Eleusis—lasted nine days and was arguably the most profound experience known to the Greeks. Unfortunately, everyone initiated into it was sworn to secrecy. And the secret remains untouched to this day.”
He gave me that expectant look again, as if I had the uncanny ability to get his Greek mysteries decoded.
“Miss Slavin, I don’t suppose you can think of a circumstance in which one of these creatures, one of your . . . wildalones . . . might decide to venture out on her own?”
My wildalones. I shook my head.
“Strange that you can’t, because your sister described it so vividly. She developed her own—rather colorful, if I may say—version of the Orphic myth. I still have no idea how she came up with it. Perhaps growing up in those lands, on top of millennia of history, fuels the imagination in ways we, Western scholars, can only envy. But the fact remains: I hadn’t seen anything comparable until then. And I haven’t since.”
“What was so unique about it?”
“Everything. How would you react to the proposition that before Orpheus went into the Underworld, long before he even met Eurydice, he was already dead?”
I thought I had misunderstood. “You mean his soul?”
“No, really dead. In the most common, physical sense of the word.”
“I don’t see how it is possible.”
“You don’t, not yet. But now imagine this: a young man dies, probably an accident—even the most brilliant musician is not immune from death. Everyone mourns him. Especially women, all the women who were charmed by his music but never managed to steal his heart. Then out of nowhere, in the middle of the wake, a mystifying rumor trickles out—rumor of a ritual. Secret ritual. Dangerous. Dark. One that would plunge you straight into the madness of Dionysus. If you only dare, you can achieve the two things you desire most: bring that man back from death and make him forever yours. All this, of course, at a price—your own life.”
I stared at Giles. He sounded a bit delusional. Maybe one had to be, in order to climb so high up the academic pyramid? But I was curious about the rituals, so I decided to play along. “If you die, how is the man forever yours?”
“Giving up your human life doesn’t mean you die. On the contrary, you are reborn as a maenad—immortal, possessed by the god. According to your sister, someone loved Orpheus enough to go through the ritual for him.”
“Eurydice?”
“No, Eurydice comes much later. This woman is different and doesn’t have a name—your anonymous wildalone. She is angry. Broken. Orpheus has never loved her, and never will.”
“But you said she could have him forever.”
“Aha! Here we come to the core of things: How do you own someone? And not just own them, but own them against their will. Any guesses?”
I had none. Couldn’t even imagine it—owning or being owned.
“It all goes back to that same ritual. The woman becomes a maenad. And the man, he . . . he wakes up from death to find himself a creature of a very different kind. You can think of him as a demon, although not exactly in the traditional sense. Our modern concept of the demonic dates back to medieval times, when Christian scriptures linked the term to malevolent spirits. The Greeks, on the other hand, believed in a being known as daemon.”
He wrote it down and circled the diphthong.
“Is there a difference? I mean, other than the extra letter?”
“They are like black and white. The Greek daemon was a benevolent creature, halfway between man and god. Your sister described him as a version of Dionysus: sensual, temperamental, prone to madness and even violence. In typical Dionysian fashion, he also had absolute power over nature and an unmatched gift for the arts. Music, especially. Which would explain why, through the rest of his time on earth, Orpheus achieved unsurpassed mastery of the lyre. The only problem is”—here Giles turned to a nearby projector and flipped the power switch—“even a daemon must pay a price for immortality.”
A scene from a vase emerged on the opposite wall. It resembled the one from my psykter: a vicious maenad attacking a weak musician. But then I began to realize that this was a different kind of attack. She was forcing her mouth on his, pressing his hand over her bare breasts.
“Are they . . .” I wasn’t sure that saying “sex” out loud was a good idea. “It looks like the maenad is raping him.”
“Because that’s exactly what she is doing. The ritual operates as a marriage vow, binding the daemon to the maenad forever. In essence, he has a debt to repay—since she gave up her human life to save him. And now every month, on the full moon, he must engage in the sexual rites of Dionysus with her. The two have become eternal lovers, whether the daemon likes it or not.”
“What if he breaks the vow?”
“Here lies the irony, you see. Nothing in this world can do physical harm to him, with one exception: he is at the mercy of a single woman, a woman he probably will never love. If he breaks the vow, she will tear him to pieces. The Greeks called this sparagmos, and I used to share the majority view that such acts of violence were only symbolic, enacted as theater in the dramatic spirit of the rituals. Now, having read your sister’s paper, I am not so sure anymore.”
He switched the projector off, returning the wall to its varnished white.
“How do you know there is truth to all this?”
“I don’t.” The regret in his voice confirmed why he had been so eager to assign the vase to me: Who else, if not Elza’s sister, to bring him the missing answers? “Nothing would thrill me more than to find proof—any proof—that what she wrote was actual historic fact. Yet for now I must dismiss it as mere speculation. Provocative, compelling—sure. But still nothing more than an afflicted girl’s fantasy.”
“Afflicted . . . you mean mentally ill?”
“Maybe not according to strict medical definitions. Unfortunately, however, I can’t rule it out completely.”
The thought that something had been wrong with Elza’s mind sapped me of any interest in the Dionysian rituals.
“Professor Giles, I don’t think my sister wrote this paper.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because Princeton bought the vase in 1995. It wasn’t even here when Elza was attending.”
He savored the challenge. “You have a rare inquisitive mind, Miss Slavin. But I am sorry to tell you that the vase was here in 1992. It had been loaned to our museum by a Greek foundation, and your sister’s paper became the reason I eventually lobbied the school to acquire the piece. We obtained funds quickly, although the logistics took years.”
Without saying anything else, he took a few typewritten pages out of a drawer. The edges were dark with age.
“This is what I wanted to show you. I must say, I never expected it to see the light of day again.”
I noticed Elza’s name printed at the top, and had to fight the urge to grab the sheets from him.
“She writes very convincingly, you will see for yourself. But when I first read it, I thought it was better fitted for a creative writing class. Not so much art historical analysis, more of a dreamy garble. A recounting of make-believe cult practices.”
Obviously, he had changed his mind—enough to save the dreamy garble for fifteen years.
“Then I looked at the back, at the copied illustrations. And the Dionysian practices were all there, exactly as she had described them. Everything already painted on the vases, over twenty centuries ago!”
He started to leaf through, pointing at each image.
He flipped back to the first page. It started with a single sentence, separated from the rest:
I AM THE MAENAD AND THE DAEMΩN,
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
“Can you guess what this is?”
“It sounds like a quote.”
“The quote of all quotes. I suppose you haven’t read the Bible?”
“No. My parents grew up under Communism and we were not very religious.”
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Christ said it in the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation. These are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They have become a Christian symbol, a code for the belief that only through God can one achieve immortality.”
“Just like in the Greek rituals?”
“More so than you think. A similar statement has been attributed to Dionysus, so I am not surprised to see it in a Greek Art paper. The better question is, why did your sister replace Alpha and Omega with ‘maenad’ and ‘daemon’? It has to do with the ritual, obviously, but I can’t pinpoint the exact link. It must be a pun of some sort. A riddle.”
And now he, in turn, was passing that riddle on to me.
“What happens in the rest of the paper?”
“It flows beautifully. All the way to its tragic end.”
“The death of Orpheus?”
“Not just a death. A suicide. The daemon breaks his vow, so that the maenad will kill him. Because what is immortality without happiness?” He let the question sink in, as if expecting it to haunt me even after all his other questions were gone. “When we humans lose a love, we wait for time to dull out the pain. And time obliges—they don’t call it ‘healer of all wounds’ for nothing. But a daemon can never heal. In eternity, time simply doesn’t exist.”
It was a while before there was another sound in the room—he was getting up and his chair screeched against the floor. I took this as a sign that we were done and hurried to get up too.
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