by Annabel Lyon
“My father told me to wait here,” I said.
What a lot I am claiming for the eyes—my mother’s eyes, my father’s, and now his—but I swear he looked at me as much as to say that he too had such a father, and understood, and would help me. He flicked me again, roughly in the same place, with his knuckles this time, enough to open the wound there and start it bleeding again.
“Come on,” he said when I hesitated. “Come on. Have to clean that up.”
The other pages were already ahead of us. I was seeing through a red scrim.
“It’s just over there,” he said.
I had never been in a gymnasium. The attendant wanted to bandage my eye, but my father believed in clean water and open air. He said covering allowed a wound to fester. The attendant dabbed hard until the bleeding stopped, and told me to avoid anything vigorous or risk opening it again. The other boys were already hard at it, my brother too, wrestling and tumbling on the mats, their voices echoing off the high stone ceiling. The few old men who had been there when we arrived sighed and left for the baths. Philip looked around his world in approval.
“You’ve never been in a fight in your life,” he said. “You don’t have another scratch anywhere, and when I hit you, you didn’t flinch. You didn’t even see it coming. And you didn’t try to hit me back.”
“Can you swim? I need a place where I can swim. Every day.”
He asked if I was fast and I said no. “No kidding.” He laughed. “Maybe one day you’ll be my physician.”
“No. Do you swim or not?”
“It’s like you’re retarded. I can swim. Do you fuck girls or boys?”
“Both,” I said.
“That your father?”
He was in the doorway, waiting.
“Tell him I hit you for no reason,” Philip said. “I want to see what he does.”
I could tell my father was staring at my brow as I walked over to him, and only at the last second looked at my eyes. “All right?”
“I hit him for no reason,” Philip said. He had come right along behind me.
My father took him by the elbow and raised his arm once or twice like a wing. “Show me.”
Philip pulled the clothes from his shoulder and let my father dig his fingers under the collarbone. I looked over my father’s shoulder to see the scar.
“Excellent,” my father said. He cuffed Philip lightly on the head and turned away. I followed him.
“I’m going swimming tomorrow,” Philip called after us. “Can he come?”
My father raised an open hand without looking back, yes.
The scar had been a smallish white clot, indicating a penetration rather than a tear. My father told me, when I asked him, that it was from a training session, a spear wound, and Philip was lucky it hadn’t been a finger or two off in any direction—joint, throat, heart.
OURS WAS AN ODD friendship, with respect and contempt barely distinguishable. I was smart and he was hard: that was what the world saw, and what we saw and liked and disliked in each other. I was not his first friend by any stretch, but he was interested enough in me that I became known around the palace, and I did eventually have a few more encounters with his father. Soldiering had hammered Amyntas down, scarred him ugly, wrecked his knees, hollowed his eyes. He said (as everyone did) that he saw my father in me, which I took to mean tall, serious, quiet, forbidding, sad. Philip claimed I never shut up. I taught him to swim with his face in and his eyes open, and he taught me to use my height against him when we wrestled. He was never devious in combat.
My father, strangely, liked him. Strangely, because Philip was no kind of scholar, loved violence, and had a crude sense of humour and a precocious sexuality he didn’t bother to hide. “Watch him,” my father said more than once. “You have a unique opportunity to observe at close quarters the moulding of a king.” He could be pompous like that. He approved of our friendship and encouraged me to spend time with him. I didn’t mind, mostly. My father was busy in the city, his cachet as the king’s man securing him work amongst the courtiers and administrators too, and I was usually left to myself. Arimnestus took his schooling with the pages. Arimneste spent most of her time tending her flowers, or whispering with two or three other well-born girls my mother had found for her to weave with, preparing their dowries. They had their dolly picnics in the courtyard and shrieked with laughter when I walked by, Arimneste’s glance lingering on me a little longer than the others. I never did take her out.
I spent a lot of time wandering alone, and sometimes I thought of writing, though I wasn’t sure what I would write, where to start. When I confessed to my mother that I had thought of writing a great tragedy, she stroked my hair and told me I must. She must have spoken privately with my father, because not long after that I was summoned to his room for a talk. Or, rather, a listen.
“I have found you a tutor,” my father said.
That sounded possibly pleasant; someone to talk to about the things I was interested in. Though it gave me a sick feeling, too. Someone chosen by my father would probably be someone very like my father, and I didn’t want anyone else controlling my time. I didn’t want to be guided.
“You’re not cut out to be a soldier,” he continued. “We have to think what to make of you.”
At this I was a little offended. I was tall and rode well and Philip’s wrestling lessons had improved my coordination. I could hold my breath under water a long time, and my eyesight and hearing (then, anyway) were pure and sharp. I was not sure how holding my breath was relevant to soldiering, but it was an athletic feat that I thought deserved some respect. And then, if I wasn’t meant for soldiering, wasn’t I supposed to become a physician, like my father? What failing, I wanted to know, had suddenly disqualified me from that?
“No failing.” A trick of the light, maybe, but my father’s face softened a little into that sadness that sometimes kept him too long in bed, the way it did me. “You are well on your way to becoming what I am. Only I thought it bored you.”
And I was ashamed, because it did.
“His name is Illaeus,” my father said. “He had a play in the festival in Athens, once. Your mother tells me you have an interest that way.”
And that of course made it official: I would become a tragedian and have plays in the festivals in Athens. The only way to overcome the shame of his knowing this ambition of mine (half-formed at best) was to embrace it wholly.
“He expects you tomorrow afternoon, and says not to be early. Apparently he does his own work in the morning.”
I saw approval withheld, but disapproval too. It dawned on me that my father didn’t know what to make of this Illaeus, and wasn’t at all sure of himself in sending me to him. What other avenues had he exhausted without my even knowing of them, I wondered, that he would take such a risk?
Fall was then hardening into winter, and the next day came up soft and grey, a low sky with a whisper of snow. I liked it; it was a change from rain. If the man did his own work in the morning, then I decided I must too, and sat in a corner of the kitchen with a tablet and stylus. I wrote nothing. After lunch I put on my warmest clothes and went out to find the house my father had directed me to. It was in a poor part of the city, a long walk down the hill from ours. I passed a man in rags shitting in the street who laughed at me when I looked at him and then when I looked away. Steam rose from the little pile. The houses here were small and mean, and I knew the families inside slept in single rooms with their children and their animals too. My mind went inside their doorways, to the rich noises and smells of that shared sleep. There had been farmers in Stageira who lived that way in the wintertime. I had never shared a room with anyone.
I asked a child for the house of the scholar, Illaeus, and she pointed to a stone hut like the others.
“He’ll eat you,” she said.
I had seen her appraising my woollen clothes and knew I should toss her a coin, but I had come out with nothing but the pouch my father had given me for the sc
holar.
“Cunt,” she said when I turned away from her. She might have been five.
I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door jamb, pushed aside the heavy curtain, and stepped in. It was dark but for a single oil lamp on a table in the far corner (and that not so far, really, only a few paces away). A man sat there. I could see the outline of him but no details, nor of the room. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark.
“Here is star bright,” the man said.
I asked where I would find the scholar Illaeus.
“Now, isn’t that interesting. You know you’ve found him but you ask anyway. Is that a good way to start relations?”
I realized my father had never met this man, or I would not be here. I wondered who had been the go-between. Was that person playing a joke on my father, on me? I saw now the table in front of him was empty. He was drinking unwatered wine from a cup he coddled in his groin and never put down. The room was warm enough. The walls were heavily swathed in cloth to keep the heat in, and the bed and chairs were lapped with more cloth and bolsters. Dim warmth and softness on every surface: a drinker’s cocoon. A corner hearth, which I had taken for dead, glowed faintly, a spidery heat outlining the embers in white.
“Will you stay, star bright?” he asked. “Or have I emptied my piss-pot for nothing?”
I could see now that he was not as old as my father, though his face was sternly lined, especially around the mouth, like a shirring, and his hair was a bristle-brush of white. It was the skin of his cheeks that gave him away; my father had taught me to look for that; smooth, pink. In a woman of his age it would be a last remaining vanity. His voice was deep, not loud. I sat on a chair.
“Does he talk?” he asked his cup, and drank again.
“My father might have misled you. I’m not writing a play.”
“That’s a relief.”
“What is your work?”
“Chatty,” he remarked to his wine cup. “He’s chatty now. He likes the idea of work, I think.”
I nodded.
“Wants his own work. A problem to solve?”
“Maybe. Not exactly. I’m not sure.”
“Why did you think you were writing a play?”
I told him I had trouble sleeping because my mind was so full, and I had thought it might relieve me to write something down, get it out of my head.
“But there are other things to write,” he said. “Not just plays.”
I told him I thought maybe it would be better for me to write one of those other things.
“Excellent. And did you bring something to write on?”
I pulled my tablet from under my clothes.
“Describe this room, everything in it. Me, if you’re ready for that. Don’t leave anything out.”
“Why?”
“No one will read it but you. You’re still nervous. I want you to calm down. We’ll start properly next time. We’ll get some of the busyness out of your head so that next time you’re here you can concentrate. Some of what keeps you awake, yes? Maybe you’re thirsty?” He half-offered me the wine cup.
“No.”
“Fine young man.” He nestled the cup back in his groin. “We begin.”
I wrote for a long time, until, even in the windowless hut, I could tell it was getting dark. My stomach growled.
“Tomorrow you might even take off your cloak.” He had lit one or two more lamps and woken the fire, and there was a simmering pot now, beans from the smell, hanging from a peg above the flames. I had been oblivious to everything.
On my way out, he handed me a coin from the pouch I had given him. “If there’s a boy in the street out there, give him this and tell him Illaeus is hungry. A young one, mind you. Not if the voice has broken, like yours.”
In the darkening street I found a boy my brother’s age playing a game on the ground with pebbles, tossing them into piles and allotting himself more pebbles as prizes when he scored. “Do you know Illaeus, who lives in that house?” I asked, pointing.
He held out his hand. I gave him the coin and walked away, back up the long hill, without looking back.
I went to him for three years. I learned more about him—that he had lived in Athens, studied with a great man there named Plato, had been a star bright himself, briefly—and I learned nothing more than I had learned that first day: that he was a drunk with a tooth for young boys, who didn’t like me or my father but badly needed our money for wine and sex. He needed these so much. Some days he was too drunk to teach, and I stayed in the shadows and let him ramble on about his glorious youth and every petty remembered grudge and grievance, tits he had nursed at for years, that had led him to this time and place, where he would die. Other times he spoke of Plato, still in Athens, still nurturing young men such as he had once been, young prodigies. “Maybe one day you’ll go to him, star bright,” he said, and the idea seemed to take root in him as he spoke it, for he mentioned it again once or twice when he was more sober, said he would write to recommend me, said the man would remember him and would take him seriously. “I can’t do this forever,” he would say, which I believed—he had some sickness in the chest and by the end kept two cups on the table, one for his wine and one for the wine-coloured clots he spat up. He was never so drunk, though, that I could slip away without him giving me a coin and having me procure a child for him. Once he even asked for a girl. “Variety,” he said, laughing at the surprise on my face. “You must taste all the fruits of the world. Curiosity is the first sign of an intelligent mind.”
I found a prostitute my own age, fifteen or so by then, whose face opened up when I approached her and closed again when I explained the situation. She said the coin wasn’t enough. I turned to walk away.
“Not enough for that old bag of blood, I mean,” she said. “It’s enough for you.”
My sister had married Proxenus a few months before and gone to live with him in Atarneus, where she was now, at thirteen, expecting her first child. Arimnestus’s training with the pages had given him biceps and soldier’s slang and a flop of hair over the eyes and a lazy grin. People liked him. People, girls.
“Where?” I asked.
She led me into another hut a few doors down. An old woman poking at the hearth with a stick got up and left when we came in. The girl sat me on the bed and sucked on me until I went weak and the room tipped over into sweetness. My father had told me that touching myself would turn my fingers black and my mother would know what I had been doing, and I had believed him. For long moments I thought this girl was murdering me in a way I had never heard of. I thought I was dying, had died. When I finally sat up, the girl smiled, grudgingly, with one side of her mouth.
The next day, Illaeus said nothing about the missing girl or the missing coin.
I haven’t said what he taught. At first history, geometry, a bit of astronomy. He had books that he kept hidden, in a hole in the floor or behind the cloths on the walls or in some other place altogether, I couldn’t tell. I would arrive and he would have one or two sitting on the table in front of him. He would assign me to read and then summarize what I had read. Exercises of memory, I said once, dismissively (I was good at them), and he corrected me: exercises of attention. Once he asked me if I agreed with a particular passage from Herodotus, about the battle of Marathon. I told him I didn’t think it made sense to agree or disagree; it was history, facts.
“Of course.” It was a year before he asked me the same question again, about the same passage.
“An exercise of attention,” I said.
“Don’t be such a braggart smartass. I get so sick of you I want to puke.”
“No, you don’t.” I knew he had come, if not to like me, at least to tolerate me. He got angry when I was late and smiled when I was quick with an answer.
“No, I don’t,” he agreed. “I get tired is what it is. I didn’t think my life would end this way. I don’t mean you, you’re a good boy.”
I could see the lesson was ending, and hesitated, my hand gr
azing the Herodotus.
“Yes, yes, you can borrow it. I loved books, too, when I was your age. You know not to eat when you’re reading?”
I did; my mother had taught me that during one of my father’s long absences, when she reluctantly allowed me into his library for the first time. No eating, no creasing, no taking books outside; clean hands, not too close to the lamp, and everything back exactly where I found it.
It was my father who noticed the inscription.
“Look at that,” he said. “Plato. You have to be one of ten or twenty in the world to be allowed to study with him. This Illaeus, does he speak much of his time there?”
“A little,” I said. “Not really. He seems—bitter.”
My father frowned. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Perhaps you should ask him. Draw him out in conversation. Ask him about his own work. Flatter him a little. You can be quite unfriendly at times, and perhaps he senses that.”
“I am not!”
“Bitter.” It was as though the word had only just caught up to him. “I wonder why he left the school. Those who study there often stay on to teach, I’m told. Would something like that appeal to you?”
“Teaching?” I was appalled.
“I didn’t think so.” He handed me back the book. “Take care of this. I don’t want him coming after me for a replacement because you dropped it in a puddle.”
“I can take care of books!”
“Don’t raise your voice to me,” my father said. “Bitterness is caused by an excess of gall. Perhaps he needs to drink more milk to counteract the effect of that humour. I think I will prescribe the same for you, so you don’t end up with a similar personality. I see the beginnings of it in you, already.”
I drank goat’s milk every day from then on, brought to me by a slave on a small tray every afternoon, usually while I was studying. It became one of the household rituals. I was to take it out into the courtyard, drain the cup, eat the accompanying walnuts (little brains for my big-little brain), and give the tray back to the slave, who would take the empty cup straight to my father, to prove I was following orders. Our household was sewn up in such solemnities, the absurdity of many of which was gradually coming clear to me.