Ithaca Read online

  “‘I’ll make an offering to the gods for you,’ I say, ‘the very day I land on Ithaca. I can picture it now. We’ll sail into the harbor. The fishermen will have seen our sail, they’ll be waiting for us. They’ll line the streets with flags, like they did when we left. People will cheer. Penelope will be waiting on the quayside with the baby in her arms. I’ll be holding her the moment my feet touch land. We’ll walk up to the big house together . . . she’ll line the servants up outside. We’ll give thanks, pour an offering . . . Eumaeus, my farmer, he’ll be herding stock down to the kitchen to be slaughtered for the feast. Five tables . . . no, ten, I’ll invite everyone on the island. My crew as guests of honor, their families hanging on their necks. In years to come people will call them “The Fighters of Troy.” And while the feast is preparing, I’ll go up to the shrine and make an offering to the goddess to care for the soul of Laocoon.’”

  Odysseus looked down at his hands suddenly. There was a silence. “So why’s he just looking at me?” he said at last. “Looking without saying anything, his grim, white face with the bloodstain on his jaw. Then he opens his mouth. ‘When you return to Ithaca, you’ll be alone,’ he says. ‘You’ll arrive in a strange ship. No one will know you. Your crew will be dead. Your home will be full of strangers. Your wealth will be gone. Your wife will be surrounded by admirers, and your son won’t recognize you. He’ll be sixteen years old, by the way. Not a baby, a man. Good luck, Odysseus.’ And he’s gone.”

  Odysseus swallowed. “Walked away, leaving me kneeling in the mud gasping. I don’t know what to say. My mind won’t grasp what he’s told me. Then a voice brings me back to myself. I look up. It’s my mother. I didn’t know she was dead. ‘Odysseus,’ she says, and stretches out her hand to me. She takes the goat’s blood and drinks. ‘My boy.’ She’s crying. So am I. ‘How did you die?’ ‘Of a broken heart,’ she says, ‘when you didn’t come home.’ Then I try to embrace her but it’s like hugging fog, it’s like the moment when you wake up and a dream slips away before you can clutch it. And she just looks at me. ‘What’s happening on Ithaca?’ I ask. ‘Go and find out.’ ‘Does Penelope still want me?’ ‘How can I tell?’ ‘What’s my son like?’ ‘A fine boy,’ she says. ‘A fine boy. He’ll be a fine man if they don’t kill him first.’ ‘Who? Who will kill him?’ But she’s gone too. Now I’m looking around, and there are people pressing right up to me. Faces I know. Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, my captain, standing there on the dead shore with his arms hanging useless by his sides, all the flesh melted off his face, the light gone from his eyes. ‘By the gods, are you here too? But why?’ I’m still kneeling in the mud. ‘Who killed you? A fight on the way home?’ He drinks the blood, then speaks. ‘It wasn’t the war,’ he said. ‘Nor the journey. It was the homecoming killed me. You think war’s hard? Life’s harder. My wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover slaughtered me in my bath. Slaughtered me like a pig,’ he said. ‘Blood overflowing the bath’s rim, the last thing my living eyes saw was her face staring at me. The look in her eyes was harder to take than the knife’s thrust.’ ‘What about my wife?’ I asked. ‘Penelope—what did you hear from Ithaca before you died?’ But he shakes his head and turns away. Agamemnon, a dead soul. ‘Is this where we all end up?’ I shouted after him. No one shouted on that plain. My voice made the mist eddy, the ghosts with it. One of the crew puts his frightened face above the gunwale and calls, ‘Come on, Chief, we have to leave.’ When I stand up, though, they’re pressing in on me. All the ghosts of all the dead. Hercules, Jason, Achilles . . . the stories don’t make them immortal, I can tell you. Dead souls on a dark plain. I drew my sword. Its glitter was the only light in that dark place. They drew back just enough for me to leap on board. ‘Cast off!’ And we’re drifting again across that misty ocean. Past the rock with the gull still on it. Out to sea, and the crew is staring at me. ‘What did he say?’ they ask. ‘What’s in store for us?’ Eager faces, apprehensive. Doomed. I knew they’d never see home again. Laocoon told me.

  “‘We’re going to make it,’ I say. ‘Home to Ithaca.’ ‘All of us?’ ‘All of us.’ And they dip their oars and start to row.

  “After a time I’m nodding off at the steering oar, and when I wake up . . .” He looked around at his audience. “When I wake up I’m back in Circe’s house.”

  He sighed. There was a pause. Alcinous reached forward and filled Odysseus’s cup, but Odysseus ignored it.

  “We buried Elpenor, as he’d asked. Prepared meat for the journey, baked hard bread and filled barrels with water. It took three days to get ready. Meanwhile Circe was telling me all she knew about the islands nearby, warning me of a current here, a whirlpool there. She didn’t know much. We left at night so I could steer by the polestar. ‘Good luck,’ she called. ‘You’ll need it.’”

  Odysseus sighed. “I won’t weary you with all the details of our voyage. Fog and storm, rocks and shoals. One island Circe had warned me of. An island of women. Sirens, she called them, with voices so sweet that any man who heard them would do anything on earth to reach them. Hurl himself overboard if need be. I heard them faintly one night, while the crew was sleeping. I knew what to do. Woke the crew, melted wax, and poured it in their ears. Then made them tie me to the mast. When dawn came we could see the island to the south. No sign of a house. You’d think it deserted if it wasn’t for those voices floating across the water. If gold was a sound, if sunrise was a note, if good wine was something you could hear . . . that’s how it was. Their song was like breath—you knew you’d die if you couldn’t suck in another note, suffocate because you could no more survive without air than live a second without the sirens’ song. The crew was rowing. I begged them to stop. They didn’t hear a word, of course. I screamed at them, they tightened my ropes. Then set to their oars and rowed us away ’til the island had dropped below the horizon and the sound was lost in waves.

  “Another island, we were trapped ashore a month, the waves flowing by outside the cove, a foul wind. The crew mutinied. ‘Eleven years,’ they said. And it was, by then. ‘We’ve fought for you, died for you, followed you through thick and thin. Where does it end?’ They’d never lost faith in me before. Some of them wanted to leave me stranded there and sail on without me. It took all my persuasion to bring them around. Then there were straits whose currents held us back a week. We nearly wrecked ourselves on some jagged rocks underwater, beached the ship to repair damage, sailed on. But not for long.” He shook his head. “Not long before the final storm hit us. The gods know where we were. I didn’t. Far out at sea, and the sky turns copper, the waves start to heave. We know there’s something dirty coming, so we do what we can, double up rigging, tie down everything that moves. Braid up the sail tight and wait for it to hit.” Odysseus looked at Alcinous. “It hit all right. Whistling across the water and laying us flat. Waves as tall as houses, solid as rock, slamming into us one by one. I saw men washed overboard, saw them clinging on, and the sea picking them off one by one, as if it hated men.

  “It’s the noise that shore people don’t understand. That roaring that stops you thinking, and your eyes blinded by spray. Can’t see, can’t hear and the waves slamming into us. One tore away half the gunwale, and another knocked us down. I thought I was drowned then. I was underwater, rope twisted around one leg. When we came up I was clinging to the mast, so I started to climb. Clung to the masthead and looked down on the sea. The ship, what was left of it, submerged in foam. Not another soul left alive. I had a rope with me, strapped myself to the mast, two turns ’round my waist. I remember making the end fast, then feeling the mast crack under me, and that was the last thing I knew.

  “I woke up lying on a beach. I don’t know how long after. I don’t know how I survived the storm. Waves sucking at my feet as if they were sorry they’d given me up. White sand, a fringe of palm trees, the ribs of a boat buried in sand, and two men standing over me in turbans. There were footprints in the sand all around me. People had been watching as I slept. One of the men stooped.
‘The mistress said to take you to the house.’ They were stronger than they looked. An arm ’round each shoulder, they dragged me to the trees, where they had a vehicle waiting, wheels like a cart and a wicker roof over it. They took the yoke themselves and pulled me up a well-paved road. Steeply up—the trees dropped down, I could see the sea stretching far away and then, high above, perched on a crag, her house . . .”

  Odysseus paused, closing his eyes. “Calypso’s house.” It was a moment before he went on. “She was waiting on the terrace. As beautiful as Helen herself. They laid me on a couch and she was on her knees beside me. ‘Poor man!’ Tears in her eyes. Lifts a goblet to my lips, spiced wine, I drink. Her fingers supporting my head. ‘All in one piece, I hope,’ and she’s feeling for broken bones. She bathed me herself, in a stone bath steaming with herbs. Massaged my back, my scalp. I wanted to get out, she splayed her fingers on my chest. ‘No hurry!’ she said. I’d already drunk her poison. She dressed me in silk. Back on the terrace there was a table laid, with candelabra, food, and the servants waiting. It was dark by then, the moon an arc of silver, a little wind tugging at the candle flames. ‘Come and see my view,’ she says, and takes me to the balustrade. I’ve never seen such a sight. The sea shining silver under the moonlight, islands studding it like jewels on a bracelet. ‘It is special, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I knew you’d love it.’ Five years.” Odysseus closed his eyes. “Five years, I stayed there . . .”

  “Five years?” Alcinous was frowning.

  Arete said, “Did you never think of your wife? Your son?”

  Odysseus opened his eyes, looking at her, then shook his head. “She drugged me. She was an enchantress, fooled me with a charmed life. Evenings on the terrace, mornings asleep. Picnics on the mountainside with the servants unpacking hampers. The house had courtyards with fountains in them, a room paneled with scented wood where we sat in winter around a little fire. Gardens, orchards . . . Five years rolled by like five days.” He shook his head. “Then one day I fell sick; not bad, a fever. For a week I refused her wine. The last night I dreamed of Ithaca. Penelope was there, waving me good-bye. I wasn’t on the ship, I seemed to be flying, but she grew smaller and smaller. When I woke up, my face was wet with tears. ‘You had a nightmare,’ Calypso said. ‘Tell me what you dreamed and it won’t come true.’ I didn’t tell her. I kept the thought of Penelope to myself even while her drugs fuddled my wits again. Clung to that figure waving me good-bye, and at night, when Calypso lay asleep beside me, I started to build Ithaca around it: the quayside on which Penelope stood, the harbor wall and town, the roofs of my house and the mountainside. My father, Laertes. There was an old man who looked after my pigs. I remembered his name, Eumaeus. The nurse . . . it took me a week to bring back her name, Eurycleia. And my son. I had no face for him—I never saw him. But I knew his name, Telemachus.

  “Calypso knew I’d changed. She mixed her wine stronger. I left all I could, and when she was asleep, stuck my fingers down my throat to make myself sick. I started going for walks down to the beach. She had the servants follow me. I stood in the surf, staring at the horizon that surrounded Ithaca. Sometimes I thought, I’ll just swim out to sea. Maybe I’ll reach Ithaca. Maybe I’ll drown. Eventually I went to Calypso. I told her about my wife, my child. I thought she’d scream at me.” He shook his head. “Do you know what she said? Put a hand on my cheek, ‘But of course you must go,’ she said. ‘Any time you like . . .’” He paused. “Not a boat on the island. As she knew. I was her prisoner as sure as if she’d locked me in chains. One day I found an old barrel sunk in the sand, swept overboard from some wreck. I thought, I’ll build a raft. I began to gather driftwood, planks and old crates. Tore creeper from the trees to tie them together. Two rafts she burned, Calypso the enchantress. I hated her, by then. And feared her. And I couldn’t . . . leave . . .”

  Odysseus heaved a great sob and buried his face in his hands. No one spoke. At last he straightened himself up, wiping tears from his eyes. “But I did, though. In the end. Pushed out to sea and paddled away. I could see their torches through the palm trees as they hunted me, but there was no moon—I’d chosen that night carefully. The terrace blazing with lights that shone back at me from the inky water. And the current slowly took me away. When the sun came up I was alone on the sea, no land in sight.” He sighed. “And there I drifted for sixteen days, sometimes paddling, sometimes not, sucking dew from my coat, trailing a line for fish. At night I lay on my back and stared at the stars. I wondered if people on Ithaca were watching the stars. That was all I thought about—that Ithaca I’d built in my head. In my mind, I wandered along every path, counted every stone in the wall of my house. I couldn’t remember why I had ever left.” He frowned like a puzzled child. “Why would anyone leave Penelope? How had I gotten there? To that raft on an empty sea? I lay on my back and watched the stars. The Hyades and Pleiades, Cassiopeia and the Bear. Days went by. Brine filled my mouth, soaked my beard. The sun burned my skin black. My food ran out, my water. I could feel my tongue filling my mouth, swollen as a rotten fruit. The raft started to come apart, ropes creaking under my back. It felt like my body was coming apart too, sinews stretched, skin decaying. I thought, When the ropes give, I’ll float on the waves like I’m a raft myself. Flesh bloated and white like a dead fish. My face like a mask on the water, spray foaming through my eyes and mouth.

  “Then, one night, I felt the raft lift to a wave, and knew the last storm had come. A raft of driftwood tied with creeper—I didn’t have a chance. To be honest with you, I hardly cared by then. I lay on my back and watched the stars. Stars I’d seen from the mountaintop on Ithaca. Stars I’d watched from the camp at Troy . . .”

  Odysseus didn’t talk for a long time. Everyone watched him. Then he raised his head again. “But the storm didn’t kill me,” he said. “It landed me on your island. And here I am.”

  Arete tried not to worry too much about Nausicaa. Her daughter had fallen in love before—quite often, in fact. Arete had been bothered when Nausicaa had spent the entire day in the courtyard with the stranger. She didn’t like the way he had allowed the girl to bring him trays of food and comb his hair—that, she thought, was irresponsible in a man his age. Although she didn’t go as far as her husband in disapproving of fighting men, she shared his view that they were violent, self-centered, and destructive, and she certainly didn’t want Nausicaa running off with one.

  But she had faith in her daughter’s essential good sense. Romantic she might have been, fond of stories, given to passionate enthusiasms and wintry sulks; but fundamentally she was a sensible Phaeacian girl growing up on a small island, princess of her little kingdom but utterly inexperienced in the world beyond its shores. That storm-tossed world—the world of fighters—was not for her, and deep down she knew it.

  The arrival of that world, in the form of Odysseus, was troublesome. Like Alcinous, she had seen the stranger’s charisma working on the inexperienced Phaeacians. His moody stare, his bunched shoulders and balled fists, the jut of his beard and tilt of his chin as he’d glowered around the hall: they had responded to them like small dogs when a wolf stalks into their kennel. He was bigger than anyone there. They knew it. He knew it. Alcinous, too, knew it, which was why he was so keen to get Odysseus off the island.

  When he’d begun his tale—his wholly ridiculous story of witches, demons, giants, dead souls, and the rest—Arete had felt his charisma herself. Of course she knew it was all nonsense. She had seen enough of the world, before her marriage, to have come across fighters before, with their tales of gargantuan slaughter and impossible trials, storms that emptied the sea, battles that filled rivers with blood. Heroic exaggeration was their stock-in-trade. She had even heard the tale of irresistible singers—“sirens”—before, from a Hittite captain who’d sworn it had happened to his brother. Fighting men were all guilty of boasting. It was normal to them, a kind of game. Only the small-town Phaeacians fell for such yarns.

  She didn’t. She had felt the tug of
Odysseus’s voice, though. Felt the pull of those murmured words, words spoken so softly they might have been meant only for himself, except that they coiled around you and drew you in. That was how the magic worked. Suddenly you felt the salt spray on your cheek, the thump of fear in your own breast. Suddenly you were there with him, clinging to the raft, rigid with fear as the cold ghosts slipped past you. That was what a talking man could do, and the magic of his words had worked on her too.

  At a certain moment, though, Arete had begun to feel something else, something more detached. She had become aware, as if she’d been standing beside herself, watching, of Nausicaa’s spellbound awe, of her husband’s frown of concentration. Odysseus’s words had flowed on, rising and falling like breakers on sand. But Arete had suddenly understood what it was she really felt for him, beyond her suspicion of his kind and her fascination for his tale.

  Pity.

  Arete knew men. She had grown up with brothers, raised many sons. She knew all the captains and merchants, sailors and navigators who dined at their table, put up with their boasting, laughed at their jokes. She was something of a mother figure to them. So she knew that Odysseus, behind that scarred exterior, behind the tumble of his words, was horribly damaged. She had seen the spear he had thrown and the spilled wine spattering the wall. She had heard, too, the cry of pain his throw had torn from him. He was hurt, and not only in his body. Something, she sensed, was cracked in him. To Phaeacians he still looked like a fighter. But she wondered what other fighters would make of him. To them, everything was about status. Odysseus had lost his ships, his men, his home. Would they even recognize the hero who conquered Troy? Would they see him in this bowed man with grey hair and lined face, this old man hobbling across their courtyard with his puzzled eyes and the leg that couldn’t carry his weight? His boastful, silly stories had made his lost years sound like an adventure. Read between the lines, though, and they told a story of disaster, of bungled raids and bad seamanship, of misfortune that had ripped away everything he cared for and left him, at the last, drifting naked on a raft, without company or possessions, broken.