The Silence of the Girls

by Pat Barker

  After nine long years of blood and conflict, these eleven shining days of peace.

  I remember it as a strange time; a time out of time. We seemed to be living in the hollow of a breaking wave. Every day was punctuated by shouts and cheers from inside the walls of Troy, as another fighter won a race and received his prize from Priam’s depleted stores, though none of them would be able to enjoy his prize for long.

  On the second day, Ajax came to dinner, bringing with him Tecmessa and their little son. We women sat on the veranda eating a tray of the sweetmeats Tecmessa loved—or rather, she ate them; I watched. The child was playing with a wooden horse his father had carved for him, clicking his tongue as he made it gallop along the veranda. I sat, shading my eyes, watching Achilles and Ajax play dice. They were sitting at a table in the centre of the yard, laughing, teasing each other with the freedom of long familiarity, groaning loudly and clapping their hands to their foreheads whenever the dice didn’t fall their way. All their gestures seemed slightly exaggerated, like people miming playing a game of dice.

  Suddenly, Ajax leapt to his feet. Thinking he’d seen somebody inside the hut, I turned to follow his gaze, but there was nobody there and when I looked back Ajax was on the ground. He lay there, knees drawn up to his chin, wailing like a newborn baby. Achilles sat motionless, letting the outburst run its course, until, at last, Ajax regained control of himself and sat down again. Neither of them spoke, just went on with their game as if nothing had happened. The whole incident, from beginning to end, couldn’t have lasted longer than ten minutes.

  Tecmessa, who’d started to stand up, settled again into her chair and reached for another square of honey-coated nuts.

  “He’s not sleeping,” she said. “He has these awful nightmares; the other night he dreamt he was being eaten by a spider, he could hear its jaws moving and everything, woke up screaming. Oh, and if I ask him what’s wrong…”

  “He won’t tell you?”

  “Course he bloody won’t! I’m supposed to just put up with it and say nothing, and if I do try to talk about it, it’s: ‘Silence becomes a woman.’ ”

  Every woman I’ve ever known was brought up on that saying. We sat on the shady veranda and contemplated it for a moment and then suddenly burst out laughing, both of us together—not just laughing either, whooping, screeching, gasping for breath, until, finally, the men turned to stare at us and Tecmessa stuffed the hem of her tunic into her mouth to gag herself. The laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun. We sat drying our eyes and wiping our noses on the backs of our hands. I picked up the tray and offered her another slice…On the surface, we were back to being our normal selves—apart from the occasional, subversive hiccup—but something had changed. I’d never liked Tecmessa all that much, but after that moment of shared laughter we were friends.

  I said: “How soon can you tell if you’re pregnant?”

  She stared at me. “Depends—I knew straightaway, sick as a dog from day one, but, you know…Everybody’s different, some women say they don’t know till they’re in labour, though I don’t know how they don’t know; I mean, even if you were still seeing your periods, you’d think being head-butted in the bladder every five minutes might be a clue.” All this time, although she’d been careful to speak in general terms, she’d been looking at me shrewdly. “Is it his?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not Agamemnon’s?”

  “Not possible. The back gate, remember?”

  She was overjoyed for me; a good deal more overjoyed than I was for myself.

  The shadows were lengthening. In a moment, the men would get up and go into dinner, but for these last few minutes—the sun hanging on the lip of the horizon—nobody stirred. Ajax had twisted round in his chair and was looking in our direction. At first, I thought he was watching the little boy, who was now jumping down the veranda steps, shouting: “Look at me, Mummy! Look at me!” But then I saw with a shiver that his eyes were perfectly blank. Achilles shifted in his chair; he seemed to be desperate to distract Ajax with another drink, another game, anything, but that terrible blank stare went on and on, through the hut, through the stable yard and out across the battlefield to the gates of Troy and far beyond. He wasn’t looking at any one particular thing; he was staring at nothing. Into nothing, perhaps.

  * * *

  ——————

  After dinner, the drinking and the music carried on in Achilles’s living quarters. Alcimus played the lyre, Automedon revealed an unexpected talent for the double flute, though when he tried to sing he sounded so much like a bull calf newly separated from its mother that everybody begged him to stop. All the songs were about battles, about the exploits of great men. These were the songs Achilles loved, the songs that had made him. He was happier that night than I’d seen him since Patroclus had died.

  Later in the evening, the little boy became fractious. Tecmessa picked him up and took him outside, where she walked up and down the yard with the heavy child in her arms, singing him to sleep. The lullaby was one I remembered from my own childhood. My mother used to sing it to my youngest brother while I snuggled into her side, allowed, for those few precious moments, to be a baby again myself. As Tecmessa went on singing, the men gradually fell silent and listened. She had a sweet voice. I looked around the group. There they were: battle-hardened fighters every one, listening to a slave sing a Trojan lullaby to her Greek baby. And suddenly I understood something—glimpsed, rather; I don’t think I understood it till much later. I thought: We’re going to survive—our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.

  The song came to an end in a flurry of cooing from Tecmessa and a deep sigh of contentment from the sleeping child.

  “Ah, well, then,” Ajax said, slapping his thighs. “Best be off.”

  He and Achilles hugged each other long and hard, but wordlessly, and then we stood on the veranda together, watching the little family disappear into the night.

  I went back into the hut with Achilles and we settled by the fire. The short time that had passed since Priam’s visit had confirmed my first impression of a change between us. Achilles no longer sent for me. He just assumed I’d be there. I thought a lot about that night. Looking back, it seemed to me I’d been trying to escape not just from the camp, but from Achilles’s story; and I’d failed. Because, make no mistake, this was his story—his anger, his grief, his story. I was angry, I was grieving, but somehow that didn’t matter. Here I was, again, waiting for Achilles to decide when it was time for bed, still trapped, still stuck inside his story, and yet with no real part to play in it.

  Though that might be about to change. I stared into the fire and I knew I had to tell him. I don’t know what kept me silent. All the other women were saying: Go on, tell him, for god’s sake, what are you waiting for? This was my chance of security, or as close to security as I was ever likely to get. I remembered what Ritsa had said about Chryseis: that if she gave Agamemnon a son she’d be made for life. And yet I held back, because from the moment I spoke the words, I knew my life would change again. I’d be the mother—the prospective mother—of a child who was both Trojan and Greek. The old loyalties, the old certainties—the very few I had left—would drop away. So I sat by the fire and sipped my wine, and said nothing.

  46

  He had to fight long and hard to get the ceasefire Priam wanted. The negotiation was a complex, time-consuming business because he had to convince not only Agamemnon but all the other kings as well. And, in fact, the case for pressing on with the assault now that Troy had been fatally weakened by Hector’s death was unanswerable. But somehow, he managed to bring them round at last. Patroclus would have
been proud of him. Even Odysseus, who’d blocked him every inch of the way, said, “Well, that was a surprise. We might make a diplomat of you—one day.”

  Achilles just laughed and shook his head.

  There is no “one day.”

  * * *

  ——————

  Every morning, he goes to stand on the beach, on the strip of hard sand, and strains his eyes for the first glimpse of his mother.

  At first, she’s no more than a dark stain on the white gauze of mist, but then, as she wades towards him through the shallows, he catches the silvery gleam of her skin. He both longs for and dreads that moment, because every meeting now is a prolonged goodbye. He’s tired of this, he wants it to be over. He’s spent his entire life saturated in her tears. So when, at last, she disappears into a swelling wave, he’s secretly relieved. The mist she brings with her immediately begins to clear and there’s the sea, stretched out in front of him, a thin, glistening transparency like the first film of skin on a healing wound.

  By the time he gets back to the hut, the sun’s burned off the last shreds of mist and the camp’s bursting into life. A woman’s kneeling by a fire, blowing on the underside of a log and feeding a handful of dry grass into the flame. Horses snuffle inside their feed bags and men bend over them, running gentle, calloused hands down every leg, lifting hooves to check for stones. Nothing new, nothing special, he’s seen this every morning for the last nine years, but he’s never seen it so clearly, never loved it as it deserves to be loved, till now.

  Every morning, Alcimus sits on the veranda steps polishing his armour. Sometimes Achilles picks up a cloth and joins Alcimus in this task—ignoring Automedon’s scandalized expression. Great Achilles, godlike Achilles, is not supposed to polish his own armour. But he enjoys the work: the rhythm of the strokes; the challenge of digging out a particularly recalcitrant bit of dirt; the simple, achievable reward of shining bronze. When his mother gave him this armour, he’d hardly bothered to look at it, he was so intent on finding and killing Hector. Now, he has all the time in the world to appreciate the beauty of the shield: herds of oxen grazing by a river, young men and girls circling a dance floor, sun, moon and stars, earth and sky, a quarrel, a lawsuit, a marriage feast…Though he can’t help wondering what his mother meant by the gift. This is the strongest, the best-made, the most beautiful shield in the world, but it can’t save him. His death’s determined by the gods. Instead, every morning, it reminds him of the richness of the life he’s about to lose.

  He thinks a lot about his mother as he polishes the shield. Somehow, here at life’s end, it seems natural to go back to the beginning, to close the circle if you can. As a small boy, allowed to stay up late in the hall after dinner, heavy-lidded, fighting sleep, he used to look at her and notice how inflamed her eyes were. “It’s the fire,” she used to say. “The smoke.” But he knew it wasn’t. Some nights she could hardly breathe. And then her skin would begin to crack—always, the corners of her mouth went first—and then the cracks would deepen and spread till they began to ooze. Not long after, she’d disappear and he’d be left to wander, listless and bereft, along the shore until suddenly there she was again, sweeping him up into her arms and kissing him, eyes clear, skin glowing, her shining black hair smelling of salt.

  But the bad times became more frequent. Often, his father would reach out and stroke her arm—and she always let him, she never once pulled away, though, cuddled close into her side, Achilles felt the suppressed violence of her recoil. She was an angry woman, his mother, angry with the gods who’d condemned her to a mortal’s marriage bed. And how she hated it: the slime mould of human copulation and birth. Even breast-feeding her child…He imagines her—is it imagination, or memory?—every muscle in her neck tense, trying not to pull away from the little sea-anemone mouth clamped to her nipple, sucking milk, sucking blood and hope and life, binding her ever more closely to the land. Oh, it’s left its mark on him, that imagined, or remembered, revulsion. He’s never found much joy in sex, whether with man or woman. Physical relief, yes…But no more than that. Even Patroclus was made to pay a high price for such pleasure as he gave or got.

  All his love, all his tenderness, is for his father. He is, first and foremost, “the son of Peleus”—the name he’s known by throughout the army; his original, and always his most important, title. But that’s his public self. When he’s alone, and especially on those early-morning visits to the sea, he knows himself to be, inescapably, his mother’s son. She left when he was not quite seven, the age at which a boy leaves the women’s quarters and enters the world of men. Perhaps that’s why he never quite managed to make the transition, though it would astonish the men who’ve fought beside him to hear him say that. But of course he doesn’t say it. It’s a flaw, a weakness; he knows to keep it well hidden from the world. Only at night, drifting between sleep and waking, he finds himself back in the briny darkness of her womb, the long mistake of mortal life erased at last.

  * * *

  ——————

  Even his grief for Patroclus grows easier with the approach of his own death. It’s not the tearing, rending agony of amputation it used to be, but an almost peaceful feeling, as if Patroclus had gone ahead of him into the next room. He talks about him often, telling Alcimus and Automedon, who are both too young to remember the first years of the war, about the battles and sea voyages of that now-distant time. But alone with Briseis, he goes back beyond the battles, beyond Troy, to the childhood he and Patroclus shared, all the way back to their first meeting. “I’d never seen him before in my life and yet when I looked at him my first thought was: I know you.”

  “It was a stroke of luck, wasn’t it? Meeting him.”

  “For me, it was. I don’t know how lucky it was for him. Let’s face it, if he hadn’t met me, he’d probably still be alive.”

  “I don’t think he’d have chosen a different life.”

  “No—but I would for him.” Achilles shrugged. “He had a lot of patience, he’d have been a good farmer. A good king. He’d have been good at the really tedious stuff, court cases, all that.”

  Whenever he’s alone with Briseis, there’s a sense of Patroclus’s presence, sometimes so strong it’s actually quite difficult not to speak to him. He’s never asked Briseis whether she feels it, because he knows she does. It’s been like this from the beginning, their relationship—if you can call it a relationship—filtered through their shared love for Patroclus.

  Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment. He rarely, if ever, thinks about the future, because there is no future. It’s amazing how easily he’s come to accept that. His life rests like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand, a thing so light the merest breath of wind can carry it away. From somewhere—perhaps from Priam—he seems to have acquired an old man’s acceptance of death. He knows there’s no future and he really doesn’t mind.

  And then one morning, he wakes to find the bed empty. He’s grown used to Briseis always being there and so he gets up and goes in search of her. He finds her outside, bent double, retching into the sand.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, something is…”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  It takes a moment to sink in. He says: “Are you sure?” He has a dim memory of somebody saying a woman doesn’t know she’s pregnant till the baby kicks. Is that true? He knows nothing of such matters.

  She looks him steadily in the eye. “Yes.”

  He believes her. She’s not a woman who tells lies. She didn’t even lie about Agamemnon not sleeping with her when it would’ve been in her own best interests to do so. So immediately, in the space of a few seconds, there is a future, though not a future he can be part of, but still, one he has to reckon with.

  The idea of this new life worms itself into hi
s mind. And with that comes a renewed fear of dying. He wakes in the darkness, drenched in sweat, wondering how, precisely, his life will end. There isn’t much he doesn’t know about death in battle: he’s seen the worst, because he’s inflicted the worst. And then, afterwards, to be naked and helpless in the hands of women…Though god alone knows why he’s worrying about that. It’s not as if he’s going to be there, in any meaningful sense.

  But he does worry about it—in the long hours of darkness. And then, in the morning, he forgets the weakness of the night.

  * * *

  ——————

  All this time, his lyre’s been wrapped in oiled cloth and stowed away in a carved oak chest. Now and then, he takes it out and touches the strings, though he always ends by setting it aside.

  But then, one evening, towards the end of the eleven-day truce, he catches himself thinking: How do I know I can’t do it? The truth is, he doesn’t know; he can’t know until he tries. So he sits down, cradles the instrument in his arms and picks out the simplest tune he knows: a child’s lullaby. After playing it through several times, he jumps to his feet and paces up and down, too excited to sit still.

  After that, the lyre’s never out of his hands. Next night in the hall, after dinner, he plays duets with Alcimus. Song follows song, the lyrics becoming steadily more obscene as the evening wears on, until at last everybody’s helpless with laughter. Afterwards, in his own quarters, he plays the music he loved as a boy, songs of battle, sea voyages, adventure, the glorious deaths of heroes…It’s such a joy to be able to play again, not just sit empty-handed and listen to others play.

  Briseis is watching him from the bed. It’s late, very late. “I’ve just remembered, there’s something I’ve got to do,” he says, and gets up and goes out into the hall.