John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

But the best, and worst, was when Tuka played at night, alone. Sometimes it would be long after dark, and Konon and I would be in bed, half asleep, when the sound of her harp would float down to us. She would play, then, as if feeling were all there were in the world, and nature had no resistance. I would open my eyes and lie motionless, listening with every nerve to the music moving through the night’s deep quiet like a god out taking a walk. Konon, beside me, went on breathing slowly and heavily, untouched by it, and Klinias slept on in his tangled mass of covers, his horny feet protruding from the bottom, his crow’s nest of hair from the top. I looked from one object to another in the room, and everything that detached itself from the general dimness stood transmuted. The large clay water jugs by the door had a new roundness — a volume and canescence that had nothing to do any more with space or time; they existed in a new dimension, brimmed with amrita, like the music. The big wooden astrolabe in the window, suspended against the stars beyond like some enormous flying machine from the farthest of the planets, had now some emotion in it, as if it had been transformed from a thing to a portent. Konon, whom I aternately loved and fought, one moment scorning him for his stupid ideas, his arrogant selfishness, his cunning, the next moment admiring him for an instant’s unexpected kindness, some leap of thought I could not have made, some comic sally I wished I’d thought of — Konon, still as a sleeping child beside me, his tanned arm resting close to my shoulder as though in his sleep he had reached toward me, became now clearly what he was, independent of moment-by-moment dissilience: my friend, mutable, infinitely valuable because the vision of eternality which the music gave implied that all of us would pass.

The harp soughed on, sorrowful even when the phrases joked, and the whole night seemed to listen, brooding on itself. Sometimes I would slip out of my bed, not waking Konon or Klinias, and would cross naked to the door and through it and up to Philombrotos’s big house. I would scale the wall, clinging to the ledges of the polished stone by my fingertips and toes, and when I reached her window I would hang there watching her play. Her slave lay on her pallet, pretending to sleep. Tuka sat in her chiton, facing away from me, and her movements, as she played, were not like those I saw when she played for an audience: it was as if, now, she was inside the music, moving only as the music moved, swaying for an instant, hovering, sometimes touching the dark wood beam of the harp with her face as though the harp, too, knew the secret. I was torn by contradictory emotions, like the music, and, like the music, I turned them over and over, as if by feeling them intensely, not with my mind but with my body, I might grasp them. I felt outside time, as if all things merely temporal, coldly dianoetic, were of no importance, and I felt at the same time a strong urge to go to her, show her my nakedness and plunge her obscenely, painfully into the world. But I hung undecided, the music moving in my chest like wind, like annulate waves, the cold night air moving softly across my skin, until my fingertips and toes ached from clinging, and I climbed back down. When I saw her by daylight it was as if what had happened in the night were unreal. The girl I had seen at her harp might easily have been anyone or no one, a spirit, but this daylit girl was Tuka, my friend, almost sister.

There was, it is necessary to mention, a third Tuka, besides the musician and the tomboy-friend, and this third was Tuka-not-quite-sane. I would stare in disbelief, shrinking back, wincing, struggling to make her fit with anything I knew of mundane reality. I could connect it with nothing I’d ever felt — or, anyway, could remember feeling — and with almost nothing I’d seen. At times it wore the mask of rage. For some reason no one ever caught at the time or could manage to reconstruct later, an argument with her younger brother would suddenly turn to a conflict in which the clear and unquestionable goal was her brother’s death. She would say things, at such times, from which no human being could defend himself. For instance: “You’re stupid, stupid! Your eyes are close together!” Foolish, insignificant. Nevertheless, I would see him suddenly made helpless, limp-kneed as a man who’s been stabbed, and I would see the cold, hard shine of her face — oh, brighter, neater than a Spartan knife — and I would wait in horror for her to say it was only a joke, to tell him she didn’t really hate him. But she would say more, as if the instant were final, there were no future mornings to get through with him: “You don’t know what people say about you, do you. Your ears stick out. Every time you turn your back, your friends all laugh!” He would cry, howl with grief, and could no more understand her dismissal of his humanness than I could, watching. If adults were nearby — even her slave — they would stop her. Her father would cry out sharply, “Tuka, go to your room!” and she would go. The slave would whisper, “Tuka! Tuka!” I — we who watched — would be left numb, like people who have witnessed, on a clear spring day, a death fall from a horse. She went beyond all turning back, exactly like a wolf or a striking snake that has no idea of continuations. And yet, unbelievably, Tuka would make up, later. She would explain, as if kindly, apologetically — but cunningly laying the blame on her brother—“You made me mad.” He would distrust her, at first, as I was distrustful in later years when she did the same with me, but Tuka had dimples and a clever tongue, and the gods had given her winsome ways; in time he would become confused about what had happened, and he would believe again that Tuka loved him. Partly this: she made the attack seem reasonable — made it seem that some fault in her brother, or in me, later, explained her rage. And he — and I, later — would shift his attention to his innocence or guilt, and would forget the other-worldly reality, the murder. So once her father said to me with the same mad shine of the skin, “Get out of this house!”—said it with such out-and-out avulsion that I would have done it except that I was not, or anyway not in the same way, crazy. I said, though I was a young man then, and arrogant, “I can’t do that I can’t just walk out and take your daughter away forever.” Thinking: You shit-eating son of a bitch. The old man trembled and got hold of himself, scratched his way back to civility.

Then again sometimes Tuka’s madness wore the mask of sadism. At times she turned it on her slave; once she turned it on children. Her father’s house stood, as I’ve said, on a hill. The lawn on the west side sloped down gently to a flagstone terrace where there were tables and benches of stone and, behind them, lilacs and high stone walls. Once, not long after I’d first moved to Klinias’s hut, I stood watching timidly from the edge of the lawn, in the shadow of the roundhouse, near the palisade, while Tuka, three of her older cousins, and a number of younger children played near the house. The older cousins were boys, two of them very dark, the other light, with eyes as pale as well water. The younger children were playing with a wagon, a toy version of a four-wheeled mulecart.

Tuka and the older cousins sat on the grass pulling up shoots and biting off the tips and talking loudly, teasing each other. The oldest of the cousins, one of the dark ones, offered to have his slave pull the smaller children in their wagon, then changed his mind and pulled them himself. They let them, and he careened around with them, two at a time, scaring them and making them shriek with joy. He would cut the lawn’s slope, almost spilling them out, turning downward into the grade at the last moment, and sometimes he would pretend he was going to run them into the stone benches. The children in the wagon screamed with happiness. The ones who weren’t riding yelled, “Me! Pull me!” Then — I don’t know whose idea it was — the game changed. Tuka and the older cousins lashed the tongue of the wagon to the wagon’s front panel so that the front wheels wouldn’t turn, and they set one of the children in and sent him, with cheerful cries of “Hang on!” and “You’re not scared, are you?” clattering and bumping down the hill. They aimed the wagon away from the tables and benches, at first. But I watched the path changing, sweeping, ride by ride, toward the tables. I crept closer and hid behind the bushes at the edge of the lawn. My heart was pounding. Tuka said softly, lighter than a swallow, “He’s so stupid he won’t even jump!” And she laughed, a beautiful lilt, unreal as ghosts. I watched her line up the cart, talking and laughing with the child, and I watched her eyes as she started it down the hill. I watched the child’s face, ten feet away from me, when he realized he was going to hit. He screamed, but the cart made almost no sound as it struck. They came running down the hill. “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” There was a splash of bright blood on the child’s forehead. They’re insane! I thought I meant rich people — all of them. But I was watching old Philombrotos’s daughter. If there are dead men who walk, or if there are satyrs, and a man can meet them on a mountain path or beside some lake, they can be no more strange, no more removed from ordinary human feeling, than Tuka was at that instant.