by John Gardner
“The guard will catch you,” I said. “You’d better go.”
He ignored me, raving on to Peeker in a whisper. “We’re hitting the wheat bins to the north. You’ll be able to see the glow. Sometime before morning. We’re spreading them out, you know. Thinning hell out of the guard ranks.”
Peeker nodded.
“After that, we strike at the herds.”
“Don’t tell us,” I said. “Trust no one!” I laughed.
He was silent a moment. I couldn’t see him from where I sat, and my legs were shaky. He said, “Grandmother sends her love.”
“Tell her thank you. She’s very kind.”
“We’re going to get you out of here,” he said.
“Wonderful,” I said. Poor old Thalia. Alive or dead?
A trembling fit came over me and I covered my face with my hands.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“A little bit under the weather. He he!”
“You’re sick as hell.” A mere child and talks like a soldier. His grandfather was a man of noble diction.
“You’re sick,” he said again.
“So my wife maintained.” I gave him a leer.
He seemed comforted. Good old Agathon, always the kidder. “You’ll be out of here in a matter of hours,” he whispered. “Take my word for it.”
“I believe you. Thank you very much.”
Another brief faintness came over me, or a memory, which is perhaps the same thing. My son across the table from me in Athens, the one time I visited there after Tuka left with the children. He wanted me to stay. He was nearly grown now. A handsome devil, with a girl friend who, one of these days, I was sure, would be his wife. He said, “Why do you have to go back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “To look for something.” Then: “No, that’s a lie. To escape from something, perhaps. No, that’s a lie too.”
Kleon said gently, as though he were the father and I the son, “What do you do there, now that Lykourgos no longer trusts you?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I teach, a little. Eat roots and berries.”
“I believe it.” He smiled suddenly, and the smile transformed him to the twelve-year-old I remembered. “I couldn’t believe it was you, when you first came. That beard—you look like a Jewish merchant. And that paunch! How’d you get so fat on roots and berries?”
“Berries with cream.”
Kleon became serious again, rather lawyerish. Made me defensive. “What do you really do there, Father? Do you ever see Lykourgos at all?”
“I see him, Kleon.” Speaking my son’s name brought tears to my eyes, my standard reaction to verbal evocations of the past. I folded my hands on the table and looked at them carefully, so I’d remember them later. “I am, I suppose you’d say, a hanger-on. I was not exactly kicked out of the palace. I saw fit to move, and no one objected. I go back, from time to time, and that, too, they accept. I’ve taken on the character of, you might say, a local Seer.”
He watched me with sorrow in his eyes, and I remembered his mother’s sorrow.
“Ah, youth!” I said. I kissed my fingertips. Solon’s gesture.
He too had folded his hands on the table and was looking at them. It struck me all at once that this handsome boy was the mirror image of what I myself had been as a younger man. I could have giggled.
He said, “You seem unhappy, Father.”
“Ah, well.” I shrugged. “Not as happy, perhaps, as Tellos, or those fortunate, fortunate brothers Kleobis and Biton.”
“Who?” he said.
“Some idle tale.” (Poor Akhilles, I thought. Dead these six hundred years.)
I did not see Solon while I was in Athens, though he asked after me. I saw Tuka twice, dressed in black, as stern and grieved as Lykourgos and more beautiful than ever. I said, “You look like a shipwreck, Tuka.” She smiled. “Thank you.”
I sat with my daughter Diana on the steps. She said, “You really are wonderfully funny. It must be they keep you as a court clown.”
“Do my kind of humor in Sparta and they bite your thumb,” I said.
She laughed. I wondered if it really was funny or if it was only that she loved me, whatever that meant.
Kleon said soberly, “Stay, Father. For Mother’s sake.”
I shook my head. “It’s not possible.”
“Because of—” He worked at it awhile, looking at his hands.
“No, not because of Iona. I rarely see her, though we’re friends.”
“Why then?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” An evasion. He knew I knew it. “Destiny,” I mumbled.
“What?”
He leaned forward, and this time I shouted it. “Destiny!”
Iona’s boy (grandson), crouched outside the bars, whispered at me, “Don’t shout! If the jailer hears—”
“Destiny,” I said more softly. I knew where I was and yet didn’t know. Time had collapsed on me. Destiny. Destiny. I tried to make out what it meant. Terror came over me, deeper than anything physical, it seemed, and I tried to face it, embrace it, but it wouldn’t come clear. An image of people dying: a faint sound of screams. They were all around me. I see an army moving down from the north. Great God Apollo save…I got up, shaky, and, leaning heavily on my crutch, went over to the cell door to be closer to the night. The image was gone.
The jailer was standing behind the boy. The boy’s eyes moved, following mine—Peeker saw him the same instant—and when the boy saw the jailer he cringed against the bars.
But the jailer didn’t stir. He merely looked at us, and after a while he said hoarsely, “Go away.” The boy inched around him, backed away, then turned with a jerk and ran. When I touched the place on the bars where the jailer had laid his fingers, I received an impression. “You are going to be murdered,” I said. He looked at me. “Don’t doubt me,” I said. “You are going to be murdered.”
When I woke up briefly, sometime an hour or so before dawn, the sky to the north was red orange. The grain storages were burning.
31 Agathon:
I had chicken for breakfast. It was four hours late. I was too sick to eat it, but I ate it anyway, because I knew it was not my food, it was my jailer’s. He stood stiffly erect, watching me eat, and when I thanked him he did not speak.
“I do you good, jailer,” I said. I made my face unhappy. “But alas, like the world, I’m perishing.”
Agathon is perishing,
But hear my second verse:
If Agathon is perishing,
He still could be worse!
I could be much worse, if I tell the truth. My stomach is in knots, my bowels run pebbled black water, I have a high fever, intermittently, but my mind is sometimes clear. I worked most of the morning on a piece of writing not related to this series of notes, or lamentations, or whatever—a kind of disquisition on jugs, the relationship between jugs and plants and lower animals and men. I filled several parchments, but I seem to have mislaid them. It seemed to me as I wrote that my brain had never been more alert, for all the Civil war of my system. It was perhaps the effect of the powder my physician gave me, a thing that lowers fever and makes the fingertips and toes go quite numb and at times produces a kind of ringing in the ears, not wholly unpleasant. It makes my mind seem detached from my body and nonpartisan, almost spiritual. But whatever the chemistry of the thing, I praise Apollo that my mind is clear again, if only for the moment I wrote, and read part of what I’d written to Peeker and my jailer, and they listened, though each perhaps with only part of his mind. They showed neither approval nor disapproval of my theories. A group of strangers were behind the jailer, peering in.
I said to my jailer at one point, breaking off in the middle of a sentence, “What makes a man like you a Spartan jailer?”
He shook his head, as if that were the least of his questions. “I’m past the age of fighting for my country,” he said.
No doubt he knew I could make that very risible but had decided to bring it ou
t anyway, and so I said nothing. He looked off to the north, where the storage bins still filled the sky with smoke. He shouldn’t be standing here, he knows. The prison is desperately shorthanded.—Iona’s work, unless I miss my guess. But he’s indifferent. He’s given up, like me. Perhaps he has accepted the fact I warned him of, his death. Poor soul, he loves this hellhole of a country. So do I. I will finally admit it. For all its sicknesses it has stumbled to certain virtues. It does not have, like Athens, the cancer of slavery. Even a Helot has more humanity than a slave, as I used to try to tell my wife. She couldn’t see it; arkhon’s daughter, fat-souled with wealth. But then, even Solon couldn’t see it. And so I understood my jailer, I think. I have sometimes stood on a hill in summertime, looking over the miles and miles of blowing wheat and barley this fertile land produces, the deep green pastures—specked with goats and cows and sheep, studded here and there with elm and maple trees—the land parted, as if gently, by wandering streams, and split down the middle by the wide, smooth-as-a- mirror Eurotas with its fishing boats and pleasure boats and its children swimming, splashing each other and laughing. I have gazed at the peaceful old temple to Orthia rising out of the marshy borderland, its white reflection motionless in the water (they have no scourgings there, only prayer and calm; the darker temple of Orthia is hidden in the mountains). And sometimes at night, on a fast horse, I have ridden that countryside alone, my head down close to the horse’s neck, my nostrils flaring to suck in his smell. The still night air would go rushing past my ears and the stars hung motionless, poised to strike, as if not a mile above me. I’d gallop down lanes where the smell of grapes rose from either side like fine perfume, down wide dirt roads that by day would be filled with Helot wagons piled high with cabbages or bundles of cloth, and I’d ride through villages where even the poorest were richer than most of the world. No such abundance leaps out of the earth around Athens. You fight the stony ground with broken knives and get scraggly grain in return, or thistles thick as fenceposts at the base. No wonder horde on horde of invaders has seized this Spartan ground with spears and shovels and temples to propitiate the knocked-down gods. Slaves are slaves, in Athens: the rich stand on the broken heads of the poor, and Solon’s laws are not the laws of nature but a feeble redress. In Sparta they have no need of slaves, they can get along on the semicaptive civilization of the Helots. In times of peace the Helots are even granted their own society, up to a point. What they need in Sparta—Lykourgos is right—is men who can hold off next year’s crop of invaders.
My jailer, whom I have scorned as a fool, is the helpless victim of a dream, an idea. Sparta at peace, wealthy, aloof, invulnerable.
Did he mean this too, looking off to where the storage bins still smolder: the dream is, like any dream, a victim of its history? They came down hungrily out of their mountains and seized the place and made their captives slaves, because slavery was their way, the way of all our cultures for centuries, though in fact they had no need of slaves in Sparta. That changed. The situation evolved. But the anger of the Helots did not die, nor the guilty arrogance of the conquerors. It might have been a magnificent State: a group of workers, a group of defenders, and at the head of it all two kings, not one—just rule tempered by another just ruler. But hate was in Sparta’s history, irrevocable: the diarchy too had its history: two kings, not one, because of the jealousy of ancient houses whose names we no longer remember except in dim, contradictory legends. And so Lykourgos wrested from Apollo the theory of the ephors, the board of wisemen-priests who ruled both kings and commoners. But every man on the board had his history.
My jailer merely looked off to the north for a long time, saying nothing, solemn, tight-jawed, and, I had a feeling, disheartened. From the instant time began, it has been too late. I clown and rage and lecture the stone-eared universe, but my noise comes too late. As for him, he gazes across the valley, observes the smoke of the impossible ideal, then at last looks down, reflects on his duties, and moves away without a word to attend to whatever prisoner or dreary task he takes into his mind when he puts me out of it. Call him Atlas. His work has no meaning, perhaps, but it has its dignity.
Agathon is sinking fast
While standing still.
The travel of the Universe
Is all downhill.
How was it? Dorkis was dead, yes. And Iona…
It’s all escaped me. I did something for them, something generous, even brave, perhaps.
Gone.
Incredible! This once fine mind, well, decent mind…I could commit long speeches to memory on a single hearing. I could read ten pages and remember them for years. Gone.
Poor Agathon has lost his wits
And is too sick to dance;
But still he has his dignity,
He hides his dirty pants.
Dorkis was dead.
I was in a room: the palace, I think. It was night, because when I looked up—I remember now, yes—the tops of the columns were in darkness like a heavy black fog. Footsteps—guards—and then lighter, slower footsteps: the feebleminded, prematurely old man, Kharilaus, the King. He raises his arm, a signal for me to approach, and I…
I’ve lost it
Tuka said, “Do you want her? You can have her now, you know.”
“You know who I want for my wife.”
“Not really. I know you love me, and I know you have a sort of investment in me—twenty years of your life.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s nothing at all. I wouldn’t have believed it, but it’s true. I even understand. I might have felt the same, if I’d met the right man.”
“Not Dorkis?” I asked.
She looked out the window, with one hand on the sill, as if for balance. “Almost,” she said. “If he’d been what he was that last few minutes—
A troop marched by outside, clicking their heels out. After they’d passed I said, “What was it that changed him?”
“Certainty,” she said. She bent forward a little, as if from some pain, then half turned her face to look at me. She said, “Death.”
I thought: I love you, Tuka. Come back. Wake up.
Wait. Yes.
Dorkis was dead.
The King raised his hand, and I went to him. I knelt I said, formal and sober as Solon with Kroesos, “Whatever this woman’s husband may have been guilty of, the woman and her children were not involved. Dorkis was a loyal and faithful servant for many years, and a loyal freeman after that. He was given concessions—a good house, provisions, the freedom to come and go as he pleased—and he valued them, as his family did. I speak as a friend who knew him well. Toward the last, he must have gone mad. Why would a sane man turn on all who had been good to him? Your majesty saw the execution. The man was not himself. He was admirable, perhaps, in a certain sense. Even noble. But I give you my solemn word he was not himself. If your majesty’s favorite dog went mad, would you punish the bitch and whelps?”
Both Iona and Tuka were white with rage at my degradation of his martyrdom. I could have mocked them. I remained solemn.
The King waved at me feebly, or waved in my general direction. His eyes were bad. “What is it you ask us?”
I bowed lower. “Let them keep their house. Let them live as they’ve lived in the past, honored by the community. They’ve done Sparta no wrong.”
The Joy of the People looked over to Lykourgos for help.
Lykourgos said nothing, watching me.
Kharilaus said, “Is this man, here…” His mind wandered.
Lykourgos showed no emotion. “As far as we know,” he said, “the man is trustworthy.”
Kharilaus was not exactly satisfied. Also, he was uncomfortable standing up, and clearly I was to blame for his having to put up with it. “He has gall, this man,” he said. “He has his gall making us listen to pleas about Helots!”
Lykourgos said nothing.
Kharilaus scowled and closed his eyes. “Very well, let him have what he asks for, whatever it is.”
Lykourgos nodded again. “As your majesty wishes.”
Though the King’s judgment was not binding, the ephors assented.
Kharilaus retired.
When Lykourgos turned to go, I said, “Thank you, horse.”
He paused, brooding. “You played it well,” he said. Then left.
Tuka said, “Do you want her? You can have her now, you know.”
“You know who I want for my wife,” I said.
“Not really,” she said. “I know you love me, and I know you have a sort of investment in me—twenty years of your life.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Let us say I am riding an elephant,” Kleon said. “I have chosen a goal, the riding of an elephant, and simultaneously I have chosen a means.” He smiled, gentle, infinitely distant.
For some reason we are in our room. There’s a terrible fight. Tuka is violently angry, but whatever it is that bothers her is a matter of indifference to me. She throws things. I dodge them like the coward I am, but this time I do not leave in scorn, because the last time I did she went into shock. We are naked, and I think, for all my anger or boredom or whatever, I love you, Tuka. Come back. She hurls herself at me and scratches my face, trying to reach my eyes. “Stop it!” I yell. “If you make me lose my temper, I could kill you.” I push her, to show her the absurdity of her pitting her woman’s strength against mine. But she’s there again, and I can feel the cool blood running down my chest, washing down my cheek like tears, though she still hasn’t reached my eyes. I seize her in a lover’s embrace, and while I hold her with my left hand I pull punches into her back with my right. She gasps, falls away, and I hit her in the face, then the stomach. She lies still, her nose bleeding.
“I told you!” I yell at her. “I warned you!”
She lies still. I hold her, move my hands on her back as I used to do when she went rigid with anger, but she’s not rigid now, merely unconscious, beaten. I tell her of my love.