by John Gardner
“Maybe. But try it. One day at a time, second by second.”
She put if off for a week and decided to stay.
I visited Iona and told her what had happened. Iona said nothing when I told her, merely, “Strange.” I couldn’t tell whether she was alarmed or grieved or what: her face was wood. She asked me questions about Tuka, and I told her all I could—her childhood, her father, her friends, her music. She kissed me when I left—clung to me, her cheek against mine, but she looked past me, her mind far away. A few days later I visited her again. We sat in the garden behind her house, where she’d been collecting flowers for one of her decorations. She said, cold-eyed, smiling like ice, “I’ve figured out why I love you, Agathon.”
“Good,” I said.
“It’s a kind of revolt. I’ve cleaned house, cooked meals, borne children, all without stopping to think about it—obeying the laws of Nature and Society. I’m tired of it. I want to be something.”
“Commendable,” I said.
“Don’t mock. I mean it. If it weren’t you, it might have been someone else. When I fell in love with Dorkis it was because the time had come for me to break free. From my parents, that time. From childhood. Now it’s from the drudgery of a wife.”
“Maybe that’s so,” I said, though it wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t. I looked up into the bare branches of the tree arching above us. I was very tired. The chilly air seemed heavy on my arms and legs and chest. My bad leg, asleep, was heavy as a log.
After a long time, Iona said, “Do you suppose everyone in Sparta knows about us?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Then we should stop, shouldn’t we?” She pursed her lips, seriously considering it, or pretending to, peering into the cup of the dark-red flower in her hand as if the answer might be hidden there, written on the petals.
“It would be a terrific idea, if it were possible.”
She started to nod, then checked herself, still studying the flower. “Anything’s possible, Agathon.” Her smile could bring an early winter.
I shrugged. “Sure.” So break it off, I thought.
She leaned forward, clasping her knees in her arms. All I thought, all I was, disgusted her. I couldn’t miss it. “You really believe that no one can ever change anything, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. “One can change things. One can stab people. One can break up people’s homes. One can throw out one tyrannical government and put in a new one for somebody else to throw out.”
“Solon’s?” she asked. “Is that tyrannical?”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “Not fully.”
She sighed, then smiled like alum in your teeth. “Thank God I’m no philosopher.”
“Oh, you’re a philosopher, all right. You’ll no more start a revolution than”—I hesitated, then went wearily on—“than Dorkis.”
“Wait and see,” she said.
Her tone grieved me. At least for now, she meant it.
“Second by second,” I said.
“Oh, nonsense. You say that too often. ‘Second by second.’ You’re like a machine.” Her annoyance was not seductive now. It was withering. I felt a queer flash of panic.
“It’s true,” I said, clownishly morose. “Except that I don’t say it. I just open my mouth and it comes out—an impulse from the gods.”
“There are no gods,” she said.
I looked up into the trees.
When we parted, that day, we didn’t kiss, though she gave me one of her flowers, breaking a petal off as she dropped the flower in my hand. No doubt she had her mind on the revolution.
Tuka said, “You were there?”
I nodded. “I was there.”
I spent the afternoon with the children, telling them the glorious story of Herakles.
“Tell them the story of Akhilles,” Tuka said, “how the poor boy died for love.”
I smiled and shook my head. “An idle tale.”
22 Peeker:
I can’t get the picture of my mother out of my mind. The white hair, the tremble of the knobby fingers. I’ve got to get out of here. And yet how can I? Even if I could escape some way, or get the tall ephor to do something, as I’m convinced he wants to, even then could I go back to my mother and help her, now when she needs me, and not help poor Agathon? I think of taking care of them together, feeding them and waiting on them in the same house, and I laugh. It would be safer putting a tiger and a smart old snake together in a cage. Yet I’ve got to do something. No choice.
I told Agathon the problem and he went on writing, scratch on scratch, leaking out the obscenity of his life. “She’s old,” he said. “Everybody dies eventually.”
“I could say the same of you,” I said.
He paused and glanced up, leering. “You’re beginning to catch on!”
Smart-ass old bastard. I should brain him with the chamberpot. But I was only mad for a second or two. I understand him better and better. He’s philosophical about death. Good. But I hear how he groans and whimpers in his sleep, and I see how goddamn scared he is when he peeks out through the cell door, watching the fires. He jokes about how when they drag him away he’ll bawl like a baby the ephors have decided to throw from a cliff for its sickliness, but I see through the jokes: he really will bawl, and stupidly, hopelessly, he’ll try to bribe them, and when they lift the execution rods over his head he’ll die of terror. So would I, maybe, though I don’t think so. The difference between us is that he hates himself for it, hates himself for everything, and hates everybody else that shares his faults. As simple as that Agathon, the great lover, hates people.
He told me a story once. I didn’t believe it at the time—I thought he made it up to convince me that he really used to have the famous book—but I’m not sure now. It could be true.
There was an empty crypt in the graveyard next to the shrine of Poseidon—a very old crypt that he learned about from a man in Korinth. The bodies had been removed a long time ago, maybe a hundred years or more, and the door had been sealed. But the crypt had a secret entrance, the man in Korinth told him, a large movable stone half buried in vines, and when Agathon went to look where the man said the entrance was, he found it. The crypt was the perfect place to hide the book. So night after night Agathon would sneak out to the graveyard, taking a few scrolls at a time and ducking from tombstone to tombstone and tree to tree till he reached the crypt, and at last, after weeks of this, his treasure was hidden. He could go there when he pleased and close the secret door behind him, and he could read with no crack of light showing until the air became too thin to breathe; then he’d blow out the lamps and open the secret door until morning and then close it and steal away home to bed before anyone was up. Not a soul in all Sparta knew about the place, not even his wife.
Then came the revolution. He had friends that were up to their ears in it, especially the woman he keeps prattling about, Iona. (I saw her twice: small, shrunken, rolling-eyed as a wolf. The grass wherever she touches it turns to dust. It may be true that she was beautiful once. You might even say that she’s beautiful now, if you like your beauties old as Time, and violent, and crazy.) One night she and her husband and their people burned up the hall of ephors. By morning it was nothing but stone walls and window holes. (They’ve rebuilt it since, though not the way it was before. It used to be carved columns, beautiful hangings, statues, the works. The inner supports are now planed timbers, and the only decoration, if you can call it that, is Poseidon’s iron trident. Statues encourage hero cults, Lykourgos says.)
Anyway, someone saw them and recognized one or two Helot faces. So the Civic Guard was after them, and Iona, or else Dorkis, one of them, went to Agathon. She knew he had some secret hiding place for his book. He’d bragged about having one, no doubt. They put on pressure. (Iona, it must have been. Both of them must have known that sooner or later, even when the book was involved, he’d succumb to her.) And at last poor miserable Agathon showed them the secret entrance and the revolutionists�
�all but the leaders: Dorkis, Iona, and one or two others—went in. They bored air holes and closed the entrance behind them. No one knows for sure what happened then. Some Spartan saw them going in, or some informer revealed their hiding place. Within hours the Civic Guard had cracked open the front door and thrown in oil and lit it. Those who tried to escape by the secret entrance or the open front door were struck down like pigs at a slaughterhouse; those who didn’t flee died in the fire. The Guard waited until it was certain that no one had survived, then left. Until then, the Helot crowd watching could do nothing. But as soon as the Guard left, the crowd rushed to the smoldering crypt to see the horror and reclaim their dead.
Agathon was one of the first. No one noticed, in the beginning, what he was doing. While the others were dragging out bodies, hunting in the maniacal way people will at such times for some sign of life, and grieving when they found none—old men tearing their clothes and hair, women beating the ground, screaming—Agathon was rescuing the charred remains of his scrolls of dead knowledge, hurriedly stepping over bodies, as indifferently as he’d have stepped over stones, snatching up the parchment husks and running with them, weeping and moaning, to the torchlight where the others were examining their dead. Cruelly, like a sow driving through children to her litter, he pushed past mourners, trampled dead men’s outstretched hands, till he came to the center of the torch’s influence and threw himself on the ground to peel blackened page from blackened page, searching for some remaining scribble. He would howl, finding nothing, and would tear out locks of his hair and beard; then, with a wild look, remembering the crypt, he would charge back through the mourning crowd, indifferent to their lives and sorrows as a battering ram, and would search the blackened room again. Long after he knew there was nothing there he kept returning to the place, searching and whimpering like a bitch who’s lost her pups.
They saw it, at last: separated their grief from his and reacted like a single heart to the outrage. It was the women first. Some woman, pushed over as Agathon ran past, looked up from the corpse she futilely soothed, and saw, and understood, and screamed. They seized him by the hair and clothes, pulled him to the ground, began beating him and scratching at his face. Then the men and children understood and started kicking him and throwing sticks and stones. They would have killed him except for Dorkis, his friend.
He appeared out of nowhere, as if shot down by lightning, shielding Agathon’s body with his own and howling, “Wait!” In the dim light no one recognized him. He caught stones as they came and hurled them back, snatching up stones from the ground with his free hand. “Wait!” he kept yelling, hurling stones with the aim of an infantryman. Whether his barrage checked them, or whether they finally recognized him, Agathon couldn’t say, telling me the story. They paused, anyway, and Dorkis rose to a crouch. “What’s the matter with you people?” he yelled. The women told him, sobbing, all of them speaking at once. (Agathon got this all at second hand. He was out cold. They’d fractured his skull.) Who knows whether Dorkis understood their jumbled noise or simply knew, knowing his friend? “Go away!” he said. “You have no idea how this man loved his book. You’re fools! Idiots! Go away! Mourn your corpses!”
They were swayed, or shamed. Who knows? They backed away, and then Iona was there, and the other leaders, and they began the process of carrying away the dead. Dorkis threw Agathon over his shoulders and carried him the mile and a half to Dorkis’s and Iona’s house. Dorkis worked on him all that night and all the following day—Agathon remained unconscious—joining broken bones, forcing in the mysterious Asiatic medicines he’d learned in his father’s house in Hydrea. For six days Agathon remained a breathing corpse. When he awakened Dorkis was sitting above him, upright, unsupported by his chair but fast asleep. Agathon asked for water, and Dorkis was awake in an instant.
It was months later—a week before Dorkis was executed—that Dorkis said to him, almost pityingly, as Agathon tells it, “You care more for knowledge than for people.”
“No,” Agathon said.
Dorkis smiled. It was a terrible smile, as Agathon reports it Dorkis was blind, at this time, and he’d been beaten till he was a mass of raw meat. “Don’t fret” be said. “I haven’t said I don’t love you for it.”
—Something has dawned on me. Agathon’s friend Dorkis was the man the revolutionists called Snake—the man I saw die. The mutilation, the blindness. Yes. He died like a god. Inexpressible. When the Spartans killed him, they killed him at the first blow—an extraordinary mark of respect.
Everything I think is confusion! Crazy old Agathon’s best friend in Sparta was Snake! They called him “The Mind of the Revolution.” Famous for his wisdom, his gentleness in private life, his deadly efficiency—until the time of his great mistake, the night he showed up with the sympathizers at the crypt. They had evidence before that. Documents. But no one believed, no one could connect him with the revolution. Then why? Why throw away his safety for Agathon? If he was wise, as everyone says he was, he must have known Agathon’s thing for his wife. And he must have known that Agathon would never do the same for him.
“You haven’t suffered,” Agathon tells me. “That’s the problem.” Not like him, thank God, not by betraying everything I ever loved without lifting a goddamn finger. He made his beautiful Iona ugly, and drove his wife Tuka home to Athens, and all by mere Nature, without a malicious thought. He’ll wreck me too, if his luck holds out. I should strangle him, and save the whole human race!
23 Agathon:
Curious how my mind wanders, these last few days.
I watched a terrible thing once. Why it should come back to me so forcefully now is not exactly clear. A man sees horrors enough in Sparta. Nevertheless—
I was up near the shrine with the children—Kleon and Diana—exploring. Kleon was about nine, I think; Diana something like seven. It was before the revolution—if you can really date the beginning of such things. We’d been climbing the ancient stone path all morning, a path just wide enough for a cart (We saw one on the path, far below and behind us. It did not occur to me to wonder, at the time, at its coming up toward the trees with its load of sticks.) The stones of the path had been worn smooth as old coins by generations of Helot laborers, donkeys, cows, and goats. Here and there tufts of grass and bright blue flowers pushed up between the stones. The bluffs soared up to our left, rising from the edge of the winding path and cluttered with huge boulders that looked like wolves’ heads, sleeping bears, the bones of giants. It reminded me a little of Athens. Between the boulders there were patches of short, brittle grass and twisted, dwarfish trees. Beyond the wall to the right of the path—where the wall itself had not fallen away—the bluffs rushed down toward a chasm where one of the streams that feeds the Eurotas rattles over little falls, pauses a moment in deep still pools, then swirls away past stones and the roots of trees. I held Diana’s hand, Kleon walking to the left of me and a little ahead, his heels just out of reach of my crutch. All the way up we’d seen almost no one—only four old Helot peasants fishing in the stream below.
We came around a sharp turn in the path, and there, high above us, stood Menelaos’s shrine. It was clean and white and solemn as a ghost on its cliff overlooking dark-green wooded slopes, its four front pillars set against the chasm like fists. Beyond the pillars, below the wide roof, the shrine sank away into darkness. We paused, startled by the suddenness of the shrine’s appearance. It seemed that the place might indeed be the home of a god. Then we hurried on, climbing toward it.
When we reached the place there was no one there, only the rows of darkening columns, the torch rests (but there were no torches), and at the center of it all, the sculptured altar. The fire was out, and there was no priest. The children talked in whispers as we moved through the place; as for me, I talked hardly at all. It was as if the air were filled with omens I couldn’t read. And it was, maybe, though the coincidence of place and event was accidental.
Diana said, “Daddy, listen.”
We
stopped walking. Nothing but the wind in the trees above the shrine. We took a few more steps. I was aware of the floor’s hollow boom. We listened again.
She said, “There’s somebody coming.”
And now I too heard it, children’s voices, chatting, casual, coming from somewhere in the trees to the north, beyond the outer row of columns. For some reason—it may have been something I heard without knowing I heard it—I took their hands and quickly led them away from the altar and out into the sunlight and through it to the trees to the east of the shrine, and there we stopped to see what would happen.
“Is something wrong?” Kleon asked.
I shook my head. But something was. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
A group of Helot children broke out of the trees and ran laughing and talking toward the shrine as though it were a place where they played often. There were—I don’t know—maybe ten of them, all very young, ragged and dirty, children of the lowest class of semislaves. Most of them were girls, and one of them, I remember, carried a handful of limp wild flowers. As they ran through the sunlight toward the shrine, the hackles of my neck rose and I knew before I saw them that there were others besides ourselves watching. I knelt down, in the shadow of the trees, and laid down my crutch and pulled Kleon and Diana to the mossy ground beside me, motioning for silence. They watched in fright, and I knew that in a moment Diana would scream. I closed a hand over each child’s mouth and held on relentlessly. Four Spartan boys, dressed in the loincloths of their war exercises, came out of the trees stealthily and ran in a crouch toward where the children played. They were smiling, the Spartans. It was unbelievable, nightmarish: not human. I heard the screams of the Helot children as the Spartans reached them, and the same instant I saw the Helot men coming out of the trees and from under the altar. One of the Helot children lay in a pool of blood—dead, I was certain. But now the Spartan boys had seen the men and understood. Ambushed. The Spartans could have run, but they turned and faced the Helots, witlessly brave, as usual. The Helot men surrounded them and killed them with their clubs and work knives. And now the cart we had seen on the path came up to the shrine as if casually, and the Helots lifted out the sticks—their children silent now, terrified and numb—and lifted in the dead Spartans, bright red with blood, and put the dead Helot child in with them, and covered the bodies with sticks. They splashed water on the blood-spattered floor of the shrine and worked quickly, efficiently with rags, cleaning up all signs. After that they vanished into the trees. The whole thing had taken perhaps ten minutes. I listened to the rumble of the cartwheels on the stones of the path, going down again to the valley, slowly, slowly. The driver looked asleep. Kleon vomited.