Donna Tartt - The Secret History

I feel bad about it.'

'Well, of course, I do too,' said Henry matter-of-factly. 'But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.'

Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. 'No,' he said. 'Not that bad.'

No one said anything for a moment. I felt sleepy, ill, as if this were some lingering and dyspeptic dream. I had said it before, but I said it again, mildly surprised at the sound of my own voice in the quiet room. 'What are you going to do?'

'I don't know what we're going to do,' said Henry, as calmly as if I'd asked him his plans for the afternoon.

'Well, I know what I'm going to do,' said Francis. He stood up unsteadily and pulled with his forefinger at his collar. Startled, I looked at him, and he laughed at my surprise.

'I want to sleep,' he said, with a melodramatic roll of his eye, ' "dormir plutot que vivre"!'

' "Clans un sommeil aussi doux que la man…'" said Henry with a smile.

'Jesus, Henry, you know everything,' said Francis, 'you make me sick.' He turned unsteadily, loosening his tie as he did it, and swayed out of the room.

'I believe he is rather drunk,' said Henry, as a door slammed somewhere and we heard taps running furiously in the bathroom.

'It's early still. Do you want to play a hand or two of cards?'

I blinked at him.

He reached over and got a deck of cards from a box on the end table – Tiffany cards, with sky-blue backs and Francis's monogram on them in gold – and began to shuffle through them expertly. 'We could play bezique, or euchre if you'd rather,' he said, the blue and gold dissolving from his hands in a blur. 'I like poker myself- of course, it's rather a vulgar game, and no fun at all with two – but still, there's a certain random element in it which appeals to me.'

I looked at him, at his steady hands, the whirring cards, and suddenly an odd memory leapt to mind: Tojo, at the height of the war, forcing his top aides to sit up and play cards with him all night long.

He pushed the deck over to me. 'Do you want to cut?' he said, and lit a cigarette.

I looked at the cards, and then at the flame of the match burning with an unwavering clarity between his fingers.

'You're not too worried about this, are you?' I said.

Henry drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled, shook out the match. 'No,' he said, looking thoughtfully at the thread of smoke that curled from the burnt end. 'I can get us out of it, I think.

But that depends on the exact opportunity presenting itself and for that we'll have to wait. I suppose it also depends to a certain extent on how much, in the end, we are willing to do. Shall I deal'

' he said, and he reached for the cards again.

I awoke from a heavy, dreamless sleep to find myself lying on Francis's couch in an uncomfortable position, and the morning sun streaming through the bank of windows at the rear. For a while I lay motionless, trying to remember where I was and how I had come to be there; it was a pleasant sensation which was abruptly soured when I recalled what had happened the night before. I sat up and rubbed the waffled pattern the sofa cushion had left on my cheek. The movement made my head ache. I stared at the overflowing ashtray, the three-quarters-empty bottle of Famous Grouse, the game of poker solitaire laid out upon the table. So it had all been real; it wasn't a dream.

I was thirsty. I went to the kitchen, my footsteps echoing in the silence, and drank a glass of water standing at the sink. It was seven a. m. by the kitchen clock.

I filled my glass again and took it to the living room with me and sat on the couch. As I drank, more slowly this time – bolting the first glass had made me slightly sick – I looked at Henry's solitaire poker game. He must have laid it out while I was asleep.

Instead of going all out for flushes in the columns, and full houses and fours on the rows, which was the prudent thing to do in this game, he'd tried for a couple of straight flushes on the rows and missed. Why had he done that? To see if he could beat the odds?

Or had he only been tired?

I picked up the cards and shuffled them and laid them out again one by one, in accordance with the strategic rules that he himself had taught me, and beat his score by fifty points. The cold, jaunty faces stared back at me: jacks in black and red, the Queen of Spades with her fishy eye. Suddenly a wave of fatigue and nausea shuddered over me, and I went to the closet, got my coat, and left, closing the door quietly behind me.

The hall, in the morning light, had the feel of a hospital corridor. Pausing unsteadily on the stairs, I looked back at Francis's door, indistinguishable from the others in the long faceless row.

I suppose if I had a moment of doubt at all it was then, as I stood in that cold, eerie stairwell looking back at the apartment from which I had come. Who were these people? How well did I know them? Could I trust any of them, really, when it came right down to it? Why, of all people, had they chosen to tell me?

It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn't see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.

Back in my room, dizzy and exhausted, I wanted more than anything to pull the shades and lie down on my bed – which seemed suddenly the most enticing bed in the world, musty pillow, dirty sheets, and all. But that was impossible. Greek Prose Composition was in two hours, and I hadn't done my homework.

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, I finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is _j difficult for me to explain in English exactly what 1 mean. I can ™ only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.