Ithaca Read online

  “Would you still want him if he did come back?” Odysseus’s voice is hoarse now. “Let me tell you, I met him again. After Troy, I was traveling. We were on an island. You should have seen him then. He was broken. Strength gone, courage gone, he was a shell. He couldn’t talk, even, just sat by the fire, watching it burn. Would you want Odysseus if he came home like that?”

  “No!”

  Penelope hisses it so furiously I can barely hide my gasp. For what seems an age, silence creaks around us, the trickle of time flowing past something, a stone in the current, that can never be unsaid. No sound comes from my father.

  It’s a long time before she goes on. “But my son tells me he won’t come back. Thank you for talking to me.” Her voice has become distant—the chief’s wife talking to the beggar in the hall. “I’m going to my room now. Good night.”

  I hear her footsteps rustling away down the corridor. I almost run down to my father, but something stops me. I’m thinking, all those years, Penelope knew what Odysseus was like, knew about his deception as well as his bravery, knew his brilliance, knew his lies. To me, she always described Odysseus the way the storytellers did—as a fighter, a hero. That was the father she wanted me to have, but she knew the other side of Odysseus as well. Sixteen years of waiting, sixteen years of love, but now I know there were other feelings woven into that patient vigil: anger, bitterness, sorrow. What does she want now? What will Penelope do when she recognizes Odysseus, the man who betrayed her? Odysseus is her unfinished business, the thread still left in her hand with the tapestry incomplete. All this time I’ve been wrong about my mother. It isn’t only for love that she’s sat at her loom for sixteen years. She’s been waiting for an ending.

  I don’t go down to my father. Only he can decide what to make of what he’s heard. This is between him and Penelope. Instead, I stay leaning against the balustrade, watching the hearth and listening to his breath rasp in and out, until the flames burn low and the sound mingles with the slow breathing of dogs around the fire.

  I don’t sleep. I’m exhausted, but there’s too much on my mind. Just before dawn I fumble my way down to the armory, pick three swords and three spears, wrap them in sacking, and carry them to the hall, where I hide them beneath the woodpile. My father appears to be asleep, and I don’t wake him. I lock the rest of the weapons in the armory and hide the key under a stone.

  By then it’s almost daylight, and from below I can hear the first noises of the town waking up. There’s a streak of light coloring the sky behind the mountain. I set off downhill, making for the shore. The road’s still dark, overhung by thick trees. I hear bleating ahead, smell the hot reek of sheep, and step onto the grass to let the flock flow past me, its shepherd too weary to greet me with more than a nod. The sheep are being driven to the big house to be slaughtered for the funeral feast. They’ll be dead by noon. I walk on through the rutted mud they’ve left behind. The town’s first cottages are silent, but as I pass, a shutter swings open. A woman comes out onto the porch in her nightgown, yawning and stretching. I can almost smell the fusty warmth of her sleep. She greets me with a smile and stoops to lift a bucket of water, splashing it over her arms. For a moment I imagine Polycaste again, washing her arms in the mountain streams where we camped on the way back from Sparta. By the time I reach the square there’s enough light to see the tavern-keeper hooking his shutters against the wall. Cats slink along the roadway, searching for breakfast. A dog lifts its head to look at me, then lowers it, trembling, to the ground. I stand under the spreading branches of the plane tree. There are birds twittering among the leaves, a bright, harsh sound. One drops to the ground, cocks its head at me, then flutters back to its perch.

  I remember the debate here, when I begged the townspeople for a boat. I’d do it better now. With more skill and experience, I might have kept the town on Odysseus’s side, turned them against the visitors in the big house and somehow forged a force to defeat them. But it’s too late now. With the toe of my sandal I turn over a drift of last year’s leaves, which are crumbling into the dry earth. They break at my touch. A man and woman come into sight, pushing a wagon piled high with onions. I walk on past the quiet buildings to the beach, and stoop to touch the water. A ripple turns itself over, slapping the back of my hand. When I put my tongue to it, I taste salt. I look out across the sea. A single cloud hangs in the sky, bruised and dark, above the distant mainland. Elsewhere it’s clear, with the clean, fresh brilliance of early morning. I can smell resin from the pines behind the beach. Slowly I walk along the sand with my sandals dangling from one hand. Fishing boats are drawn up along the shore, and between them I can see the furrows carved by the keels of boats that have already put out.

  The creak of oars reaches me across the sea. Looking out, I can see half a dozen boats rowing slowly toward the point. Their wake shows briefly in the water, then fades from view. It’s almost cold. I stoop and pluck at an abandoned anchor whose bronze flukes have stained the sand copper-blue. I walk onto the rocks and climb to the flat point where men, yesterday, began building my father’s pyre. Neat piles of wood, shorn of their twigs, have been stacked around the base of the pyre, where logs are placed crosswise, leaving gaps for the flames to flow. A great heap of kindling and twigs stands to one side. When it’s finished, the pyre will be taller than I am.

  At my grandfather’s funeral we needed ladders to lift the old man’s body to the top. I can still remember its limp, soft weight in my hands, the cold feel of it through the layers of winding shroud. This will become my own pyre if things go badly. Hands will lift me onto the heaped wood this very afternoon. There’ll be a speech from Antinous. They’ll call me mad to have turned on my own guests. “A sudden madness sent by an angry god”—that’s the sort of thing people say. And the flames will ripple and flare in the afternoon wind, trailing smoke across the harbor and filling the courtyard of the big house with the smell of fire.

  Time to go back. I take the quick way along the beach, greeting the fishermen who, one by one, are preparing their boats for sea or sliding them down into the friendly water. A boy, no more than seven or eight, is paddling thigh-deep. Two others have splashed farther out, their brown bodies glistening. For a moment I feel an urge to pull off my shirt and wade out into the sea myself. A last swim, out to the harbor mouth, where I can turn and float, feeling the lift of the salt water and looking back at Ithaca, my home.

  Mentor is sitting on rocks at the end of the beach. He’s by himself, hunched over. He doesn’t answer when I say his name. There’s a vicious purple bruise on his cheek. Antinous.

  I sit down next to him at the water’s edge. “Did they catch you?”

  He doesn’t anwer, just sits there, staring at the sea.

  “Did they hurt you?” I reach up and touch the bruise on his cheek. He winces.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  His lips are trembling. “It had to be.” So quiet I can hardly hear. When Mentor turns to look at me, there’s a kind of film over his eyes, as if he can’t focus properly. “It wasn’t the pain. It was the things they said.”

  “Tell me.”

  He can’t. He bows his head and sobs, then gets it under control. “Dreadful things. Threats. My wife, my sons . . . what they’d do to them . . . and me. How can men say things like that? What kind of men must they be?”

  I put an arm around the old man’s shoulders. When we left for Pylos he wasn’t an old man, but he is now. I can feel him shaking.

  “I didn’t give you away,” he says.

  “Thank you.”

  “Not because I was brave.” He shrugs my arm off. “Because I knew it would make no difference. They’d go on beating us anyway. What kind of men can do that and feel nothing?” He looks bewildered. “Do you think the war was like that? All of them brutal? Even Odysseus?”

  I nod. I don’t know whether he can see me or not.

  “You’ve got to go away, Telemachus.” Mentor fumbles for my hand. His is cold and
weak, shaking. “Go away. Find somewhere else. There are places you can go. Islands, colonies. I’ll come with you. My sons, others. There must be another way. You mustn’t . . .” His face dissolves. He’s crying. “You mustn’t become like them.”

  I could go now. There are fishing boats on the beach. I could leave Ithaca, leave Odysseus, leave this death that’s waiting for me. Find Polycaste at Pylos and a new life, an island, peace. The sea glistens at the mouth of the bay. A long row to the mainland, where the forests will hide me. I’m tempted—I can’t pretend I’m not. But it’s too late for that now. I reach across and touch the bruise on the old man’s cheek. I can feel all the slights of my childhood in that bruise, all its pain, all its humiliations. Just for a moment I’m tempted to ask Mentor for help. But he and his sons have done enough already. I can’t ask them to die with us as well. I squeeze the old man’s hand and turn away. Briskly I climb the track to the back of the house, stopping only when I reach the kitchen yard. There’s an odd noise coming from a shed against the kitchen wall. Inside, twelve women kneel in rows, grinding grain in stone bowls. The women scrape stones steadily around the bowls, making a rhythmic sound like the noise waves make, grinding rocks into sand. One of them, with a strip of colored cloth tied around her head, stops suddenly, stretches, yawns. “I wish they’d all leave,” she says to the other women. “These guests. Then maybe we’d have some rest.”

  Does this ordinary scene happen every morning? I wish I’d risen early before to watch the big house come to life. What else have I missed? Ordinary things—the things people don’t notice but are actually what life’s made of. I turn and cross the yard to the kitchen door. Outside, a man is chopping wood from a heap of logs stacked against the wall. I want to go over and count the orange and buff rings in the sawn trunks, to see how old the trees were when they were felled. The man leans on his axe for a moment. Wood chips litter the earth around his feet. As I reach the kitchen door, a boy comes out, yawning, with an empty bucket to fill at the stream. From the doorway beyond I can smell the reek of burned charcoal. I wonder what’s happened to the sheep I passed on the road earlier.

  The kitchen is too crowded. I don’t want to talk. So instead, I pass along the corridor to the great hall to find my father.

  Odysseus isn’t there.

  His satchel is still lying against the column where he slept, but there’s no sign of him. I run to the courtyard but it’s empty too, the young men still sleeping in their tents. Perhaps my father has slipped out through the side door. In the orchard I hear a heavy droning from the darkness under the trees. A shadow ripples the air near the trunk of an ancient olive tree—a swarm of bees. But there’s no sign of Odysseus.

  Panic surges up inside me. I hurry back to the kitchen, where Melanthius, the cook, is lifting sheep hocks from a cauldron with a slotted spoon.

  “The tramp who was sleeping in the hall last night . . . Have you seen him?”

  The cook shakes his head. He’s a burly man with a white beard, once, it’s said, a priest. “He was gone when I stoked the fire this morning at dawn.”

  Just after I went down to the village, then. Perhaps Odysseus was only feigning sleep when I looked into the hall earlier.

  “He’s a tramp,” the cook shrugs. “He’ll have taken off. They do. Best count the silver dishes.” Laughter.

  Has Odysseus really left? I heard what Penelope told him last night. Maybe he’s scared she might not want him anymore; or scared by the odds against him. Even now he might be begging berths from the ships in the harbor, or rowing out to sea, one man against the waves, with the sun on his neck and the weight of the ocean against his oars. Returned and fled, the burden of sixteen years’ absence too great for him to bear.

  I run upstairs, but all the doors are closed along the corridor, and there’s no sound from behind them. Downstairs, I cross the courtyard to the main gate and find Eumaeus herding three hogs out of the olive trees with a thin birch stick.

  “My father’s gone.” I glance over my shoulder to make sure no one can hear. I can hear the panic in my own voice.

  Eumaeus snorts. “No, ’e ain’t. I seed him go up the mountain early. Took the cliff path.”

  Eumaeus points with his wand, and suddenly I understand. The path to the shrine. My father’s gone to the shrine. I set off after him, feet slipping on loose stones. Lizards snap away into cracks in the rock. It’s beginning to get hotter. When I glance over my shoulder, I see the bruised orange cloud I noticed on the beach spreading along the horizon like water flooding through a breached dam. There’ll be a storm later. The air is still. Grasshoppers flick from the path in front of me. To either side the olive trees shrill with cicadas.

  I lift the sacking over the shrine’s door and peer into the rancid fug inside. In the flicker of oil lamps I can see Odysseus kneeling in front of the altar.

  The priest’s sarcastic laugh breaks in on me. “See who’s here?” he cackles. “See who’s come back?” He points at the kneeling man. “Your father.”

  Odysseus looks up at me. As my eyes grow used to the murk I can see his cheeks are wet with tears.

  “He told me he was a tramp. Said his name was Aethon. I saw through him straightaway. You can’t tell lies in here. We see everything. She sees everything . . .” The priest gestures to the blackened statue on the altar, whose white enameled eyes glitter in the candlelight. “Odysseus of Ithaca, after sixteen years. What’s left of him, anyway. See? I gave him his offerings. Like a child playing with its toys.”

  The tray lies in Odysseus’s lap. He holds the little carved owl in one hand. In the other he’s slowly crushing the dried bay leaves from the mountain where Penelope grew up.

  “Leave us.” The priest looks like he wants to protest, but he obeys grudgingly, letting the sacking fall in place behind him. He’ll listen at the door, but I no longer care.

  “Did you sleep well?” I ask gently. The same voice I use with my mother.

  Odysseus shakes his head. “I dreamed . . .” He breaks off, and his beard sinks onto his chest. For a moment he doesn’t speak. “I dreamed of Penelope,” he goes on at last, then looks at me. “Why did I stay away?”

  “Only you can answer that.”

  “Maybe it would be better if I leave again.”

  “You can’t go.” I crouch down next to my father. “You can’t.” I hold my father’s soft, bewildered eyes.

  Slowly Odysseus shakes his head. “No.” He picks up the boar’s tusk and lays it down again, picks up the blade he dedicated the day he announced he was leaving for Troy and weighs it in his hand. “How much can you fight?”

  “A little. No one taught me. I killed someone.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Not at the time. Afterward, I was.”

  “Always afterward.” Odysseus nods. “I went to the town yesterday. I saw my daughter.”

  “Did you speak to her?”

  “I didn’t dare.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “She was with her mother. She hasn’t changed.”

  “Has Penelope?”

  Odysseus shakes his head and lets the dust of the bay leaves pour out between the fingers of his left hand.

  “She loves you.”

  “How can she?”

  I take my father by the arm. Through his cloak’s rough sacking I can feel a fighter’s hard muscle. “You’re Odysseus,” I say. “You led the Ithacans. You conquered Troy. The men we’ll fight today are empty. You understand? You’re worth all of them together.”

  A curious smile twists Odysseus’s scarred face. He raises one hand and taps his forehead with two hard fingers. “Sham,” he whispers.

  “No!” I clutch my father’s hand, pulling it down, but Odysseus only shakes his head.

  “Leave me now,” he says in a more normal voice. “I want to speak to the goddess.”

  “Speak to her?”

  Odysseus nods as if that’s the most normal thing in the world. “Alone.”

/>   I don’t know what to think as I skid down the path back to the house. Is my father mad? Is he in any state to fight a room full of murderous young men, trained fighters half his age? Will his tired body break first, or his weary mind? I pass a sloughed-off snakeskin on the track, crusted and old. Above, in the clear sky, I see an eagle wheeling. It turns, suddenly, and drops, faster than sight, to snatch a pigeon from the air and flap away on slow wings, a small, black burden hunched in its talons. As I reach the gate, a single rumble of thunder sounds from the east. A cold breath of air touches my neck. The olive trees toss. There’s a storm coming. Outside the gate, a flock of goats is kicking up clouds of dust, the stray dogs barking at them and the goatherd slashing at them with his switch. Eumaeus leans against the wall.

  “Find ’im?”

  “He’ll be down soon. Wait here.”

  I need to see my mother. As I cross the courtyard I pass young men rising, yawning and readying themselves for the day. They stand in a line, bare-chested, at the water butt in the corner. They’re stretching and loosening the sleep from their shoulders, confident in their muscled, fighters’ bodies. One is shaving over a dish of steaming water, peering at his own reflection in a burnished shield held by a servant.

  The upper floor is silent, but when I knock at Penelope’s door, her voice answers. She’s sitting on her unmade bed, hair loose and feet bare, frowning.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nods but doesn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry we argued yesterday.” I need to say that before the day begins.

  “Did we?” She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I love you.”

  “And I love you.” She looks up at me, puzzled.

  I come and sit on the bed next to her. “What’s the matter?”

  “I had another dream. Of Odysseus. He was here.” She looks down at the bed. “He was right here with me. He was old.” She shudders suddenly. Through her nightdress, I can see how thin my mother is. In the morning light she looks ill.