The Lost Books of the Odyssey Read online

  Within were passages, arcades and high galleries all wrought of the same blank white stone, echoes caroming at random through the interlocking rooms and interlaced corridors, tortuously returning the soft slap of his footsteps. Sometimes he thought he heard the beast moaning and sighing in its sleep; the frisson made him bare his teeth. Mastering himself, Theseus reflected that these sounds were not so ominous; if it was asleep, like any man or animal, then the creature could not be an immortal with ichor in its veins and eyes wide for a thousand-year watch.* Furthermore, it was accustomed to killing terrified children, not an armed and determined warrior (though he was only sixteen, he merited the name).

  From the layout of the palace he had inferred the rough dimensions of the labyrinth but either he had been wrong or got lost because he wandered through more corridors than he had thought the labyrinth could hold. As he went deeper, it appeared that Daedalus sometimes used the labyrinth as a workshop—in some rooms there were relief maps of Knossos carved into the walls, sometimes with notes in a spidery hand about strategic weak points and the relative merits of mangonels versus arbalests on wharves, walls, promontories and towers. In other rooms he found drawings of birds and sea creatures (some of the drawings remarkably life-like, others of carefully posed skeletons), waxy yellow crystals in numbered boxes and a shelf of books all of whose pages were parchment-thin mirrors with varying degrees of warp and translucency. In one room he discovered a map of the labyrinth but it was difficult to associate it with his recollections of the passages he had seen and he soon found other chambers with other maps, equally convincing and on inspection wholly contradictory.

  He found the Minotaur sleeping in an arcade, flat on his back (he was innocent of clothing and evidently male), his huge limbs sprawled out around him. The creature was big—upright he would have been around seven feet tall, Theseus guessed. The Minotaur’s horns were long and sharp enough to skewer a man but Theseus was nevertheless relieved—in his imagination the monster had snorted fire and filled a cavern with its bulk, but now that he saw the beast he recognized him as just another victim. Theseus crept forward, surprised that the creature could sleep through his heart’s clamor. He raised his sword to strike the carotid, but hesitated at the thought of killing a sleeping foe—he was still half a boy and loved honor.

  In that moment the Minotaur woke and swatted him away with a massive paw. Theseus recovered and sprang to his feet as the Minotaur bellowed and charged with lowered horns. Theseus feinted left and stepped right, as he had practiced so many times with his father’s bulls in Athens, and as the beast went roaring by he cut through its spine at the base of its neck. The Minotaur slowed, then teetered and fell heavily, comically, landing on its stomach with a loud slap. A blood bubble formed on its nostril, burst, and then stillness. Dead, the monster was pitiful, its glazed cow eyes full of terror. Theseus ineffectually tried to clean his sword on the walls (he did not want to sully his shirt and could not bear to approach the corpse), regarded his fallen enemy for a moment, and turned to trace his way back out of the labyrinth. It occurred to him to gather up the twine but it would have been hard to re-roll and anyway he thought, “Let them see the artifice by which their god was killed by Theseus the Athenian.”

  Outside the labyrinth Ariadne was waiting for him. Her cheeks were tear-stained but she greeted him with composure. They plucked the other Athenians out of their cells and stole away to the docks where they waved torches in the damp night air and their ship, which had been cruising outside the harbor every night, came in to fetch them. Once they were well out to sea they stopped creeping around the deck and speaking in whispers and started laughing, shaking their fists at King Minos and the city whose tutelary demigod Theseus had just butchered. Now and then they fell silent and there were no sounds but the rippling of the sails and the murmur of the bow wave. After a while someone would say, “Steak, anyone?” and the laughter would begin again. Ariadne did not participate, but Theseus held her hand and kissed her and told her how beautiful Athens was.

  When they arrived, King Aegeus embraced Theseus and welcomed Ariadne with the courtesy due a princess and the warmth due a daughter. She and Theseus were married on the Acropolis under a hunter’s moon while the people waved torches and sang. Their first son was conceived that night and not long after old Aegeus privately told Theseus that he was replete with honor and intended to abdicate so that he, Theseus, could enjoy the kingship while he was young. One son was born and then another and Theseus settled into maturity, the wise king of a prosperous people.

  One summer many years later, when Ariadne’s golden hair was turning silver, Theseus returned from a hunt and realized that it was the day the sacrifices would have gone to Crete. He thought of his fight with the Minotaur, and on a nostalgic impulse went down into the cellars beneath the castle to look for Ariadne’s sword. The cellars, excavated centuries before as a refuge against invaders, were dim, extensive and confusing. He lost his way but kept walking through the low corridors, taking turns at random, sure he would soon find his bearings. In this he was proved correct when he turned a corner and came upon a length of twine laid along the floor, disappearing down the hall in both directions. Beside it lay the sword he had been looking for. He picked up the blade, chose a direction and wonderingly followed the twine until he emerged from the labyrinth in Knossos to find Ariadne there waiting for him, golden-haired, a girl, calm and composed, her cheeks wet with tears.

  Once again he went through the motions of escape but this time his heart was not in it. He distrusted Ariadne, thinking she must be in league with Daedalus and Minos, trying to break him with her sorcery, tricking him into a labyrinth without boundaries. On the boat she went to him for comfort, but he was cold to her and she soon went off to sit by herself—the other Athenians took Theseus’s cue and ignored her. Theseus watched her with hard eyes and the next day announced that he needed to unship ballast and ordered the ship to Naxos. He did not force her from the ship at sword’s point, but said he would do so if he had to, even though the only sword he had was the one she had given him and thus probably cursed. She wailed and tried to cling to him but his face did not change as he flicked her tears from his hands and at last she allowed herself to be lowered into the shallows, racked by sobs. He made sail as she waded ashore through the breakers. Later, he thought she must have cursed him and made him forgetful, she who was a priestess and had the ear of spirits, because in his self-absorption he forgot to hoist the white sails and in the moment of his return became a patricide.*

  Once the ship was out of sight, Ariadne gave herself over to hysterical weeping and hatred for the man for whom she had betrayed her family and her kingdom. When she had recovered herself enough to breathe and walk again, she climbed to the peak of Naxos’s single mountain and made herself a bower in the woods. From time to time a ship would stop to take on water, sometimes even one belonging to her father, but she considered all ties cut and hid until they left. She practiced the black arts in which she had been instructed since she was a little girl and as years passed turned witchy and potent. Rumors spread of a white nymph haunting Naxos, as beautiful as she was fell and wholly without pity.

  She had been lonely for so long she could not conceive of its absence when the stranger washed up on her shore. His lips were blue and his hair matted and tangled with seaweed but in her eyes he was beautiful. She wondered if the half-drowned man would relieve her solitude but she concealed her need even as she nursed him. When he woke she said her name was Concealer* and that he was lucky to be alive. He made all the necessary noises of gratitude but within minutes betrayed her, telling some tale of a distant war and a longed-for home, a son and even a wife awaiting his return. This was painful, but she had learned patience. She gave him the run of the island and said he should go home if he could, she had done all that was in her power to do. He spent his days on the beaches in hopes of seeing a ship but the white fog she had summoned hid everything. On the fourth night she was not surprised,
and thus easily able to conceal her delight, when he came to her bed.

  As for Theseus, he is in Hell now, wandering and restless, but he is the happiest of shades, always expecting to find himself once again among the blank white halls, the arcades and the high galleries.

  *Pasiphaë was Minos’s wife. She had offended the goddess Hera, who punished her with a great passion for a sacred white bull. Daedalus built a sort of hollow cow simulacrum for her, with which she was able to consummate her desire. The issue of that union was the Minotaur, a cannibalistic monster half man and half bull.

  *A reference to Argos, a thousand-eyed giant employed by Hera as the guardian of a grove of golden apples. His eyes slept independently—no matter the time of day or night, hundreds would be awake and looking in any given direction.

  *Aegeus, his father, had told the ship’s crew to hoist white sails if Theseus lived and black if he had perished. When he saw his son’s black-sailed ship sailing toward Athens he flung himself from the Acropolis in despair.

  *The Greek word for concealer is Calypso.

  OCEAN’S DISC

  His days were bound by the disc of ocean. In the morning he climbed to the top of her island and sat clutching his knees to his chest against the wind, scanning the horizon for white sails. She left him alone while the sun shone but at dusk she approached out of the gloom, touched his face, took his hand and made to draw him back toward her cave. He pushed her roughly away. “Stay, then,” she said, “and look for ships in the dark.” He stiffened and turned his back. Her face fell and she said she was sorry, she had not meant it, but there was not much good in keeping watch at night. Carefully nursing his pride, she drew him back to her bed.

  In the fading light Hermes watched them go, exasperated. The sharp axe winked in the grass where he had put it weeks ago, the blade carefully turned to catch the evening sun. Behind it was a stand of straight, tall young pines, perfect for ship-building.

  SANATORIUM

  The war had been long and terrible. Of that Mr. O* was sure, though he could only remember a few disconnected, disconcerting images: Dust hanging over a battle-field, glowing as the sun rose behind it. A brass helmet struck into two pieces. A black tree in the middle of a white plain. Later he was told that these were images from famous songs, emblematic of the war—they had won prizes—and he had almost certainly not seen them firsthand. Nevertheless, he was sure he had been in the war. That was what the nurses told him, or at least implied, and then there were his scars, and why was he in this sanatorium if not to recover? Its small white cubical buildings clung to the island’s vertiginous cliffs like swallows’ nests, steep stairways tracing parabolic arcs between them. Cats sprawled on the walls tracking the sun and looking skeptically at the azure sea and the ospreys nesting in the parapets. Inexplicably, he wanted to leave. He exhorted himself to show a grateful spirit but this only made him more fretful. He took to plucking threads from his robe in the morning and to rolling bread pills at dinner.*

  The days passed like a flock of white birds wheeling overhead and he remembered no more of himself though he frequently resolved to make it his business to do so. Sometimes he found notes he had written to himself that set out meticulous plans for recollection—meditation and a diary, for instance, both of which he had soon abandoned. There was a cedar chest full of keepsakes at the foot of his bed—a bag of salt, a ball of beeswax, a fire-sharpened olive-wood staff, a black-fletched arrow with a black shaft. He took to handling them in hopes of jarring loose a recollection.

  During a musical evening a woman in a long green dress sang songs about an old war in which all-but-forgotten heroes fought and died for ends that even they, it seemed, held contemptible. Her plangent voice filled the music room, with its many rows of polite auditors and its ceiling painted like an evening sky. While others applauded, Mr. O reached absently into his coat pocket and found a worn, water-stained note, possibly in his own handwriting, advising him to take the cure with one or the other of the sanatorium’s eminent physicians.

  He was rapidly granted appointments, with none of the usual sacrifices or purifications. First he went to Dr. Sylvia’s rooms in which wide panoramic windows opened over a long drop to the sea, where waves dashed against rock and swordfish were breaching. She spoke to him of the accumulations of moribund memory keeping him uncomfortably and pathologically anchored in the past, and how they could be expunged.

  Next he saw Dr. Karidis, whose rooms were down many long flights of stairs, deep within the island, below the level of the sea. They were cool and dark, her silhouette barely visible, her bookshelves no more than conjectures in the shadows. She promised to usher him down and down, away from the moment, away from illness, through the watchful layers of ego, through the restive layer that always dreams and the torpid one that keeps the heart beating, till he need not come up again.

  After the consultations he kept to his room for days, refusing to open the door no matter how the nurse knocked, but even without her patient, gentle remonstrances he knew he would have to choose one of them.

  He chose Sylvia, explaining to the nurse on the way to the appointment his many and nuanced reasons for doing so, though really it was because she was slightly the less terrible of the two.

  The appointment itself was a blank, as were the days that followed.

  When he came back to himself he was disoriented and forgetful and explored his room as though it were new to him. There was little to find—a new diary, the pages uncut, and an empty cedar chest. He was going to give up and go back to bed but something moved within him and he kept searching, replying with feigned cheerfulness when a nurse called out from the hall to ask him how he did. His persistence was rewarded with the discovery of a small paper parcel wedged between the mattress and the headboard. Unfolding the paper, he found it bore a drawing of a horse, composed of just a few lines but executed in a confident, energetic hand. Within the paper was a plait of red hair. He held it to his face and inhaled, and a great longing swept over him to which he could not put a name.

  One morning soon after, a nurse came to his room, with his draft, he thought, but instead she looked very grave and explained that things had changed. The war, which had been thought to have settled, had only been hesitating. It was racing southward now, scattering all before it, and they had to go. Where will you take me? Mr. O asked. And what about my condition? My consultations? An awkward pause. Resources were limited, the nurse explained, and the rigor of the times such that some, the infirm, the less useful, must be left behind.

  To that he had nothing to say. He took to wandering among the white buildings, now empty. Sometimes there was a vague idea of another island, like this one but less lovely and more remote, but he could not put a name to it or remember the way.

  *The text for this chapter omits Odysseus’s name, providing instead what is, most probably, the uninflected masculine honorific followed by the letter Omega. “Mr. O” is a reasonably close rendering.

  *Around the first millennium B.C., the greatest centers of medical learning in the Greek world were the temples of Asclepius in the Cycladic archipelago. These temples were, in effect, hospitals. At the top of the temple hierarchy were the doctors, of whom each temple had only a few. They were believed to have the ear of the god and supernatural powers of healing. Access to them was carefully restricted—the sick might have to wait in the temple a year and slaughter a hecatomb of livestock before being granted an appointment. Whether this was due to the number of patients, demanding religious practices or a stage-craft of self-importance is not entirely evident from the textual and archaeological records.

  The nursing at the temple was carried out by women serving two-year terms in the service of the god. Many women joined after their husbands died. Though they were not exactly nuns, they were celibate for the term of their service and lived an essentially monastic life.

  FIREWORKS

  Odysseus roamed wild through the low hills of Ithaca. He swam like an otter through the
rough surf and riptides, and knew every cave, thicket, and droning, butterfly-haunted field. He hunted birds in the wood, lying in wait for hours till the silence seemed to fill him (but never a perfect silence—there was always something that was not quite a noise, right at the edge of hearing). The outer world was fog coming in over the ocean, a white sail on the horizon and the rumor of distant relatives. His parents tried to civilize him, and though he learned how to play the lyre and use a sword he saw these as mere formal observances, not touching his real self or the continuity of his days.

  In a wood by the sea there was a crumbling Egyptian temple,* its surviving columns carved with men who had the heads of birds and animals—ibis, lion, jackal, hawk, bull. He offered these found gods birds’ eggs and arrowheads, and wondered if they had stayed or gone away over the sea.

  When the sun was setting he would climb a tree, stretch out along a branch and watch the stars emerge from the deepening blue. Every night, he thought, they were a little closer, falling toward the world so slowly, from so very far away. He would fix a star in his gaze, shut his eyes and then look again, hoping to catch its brightness growing.

  Time hissed by like the black arrows whose shadows darkened the plain before Troy. The clutch of the battle was so dense that the soldiers could barely move, constrained on all sides by friend and enemy alike, the bodies of their neighbors bearing them up and weighing them down. The wind lifted waves of white dust that coated faces, swords and armor. When the pressure let up the bleached soldiers dealt each other vicious, clumsy, short-armed blows; the crimson flows and spatters of blood were vivid on their whiteness. When the wind was low Odysseus could see the walls of Troy, never far away and always out of reach.