John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Klinias, passing my bed that night, paused and bent his head toward me nearsightedly. He cleared his throat making the sharp Adam’s apple bob below his frail beard. “You comfortable, Agathon?”

I nodded, my covers pulled up to my nose.

Though Klinias was rarely demonstrative, he leaned down, as if thinking it out as he did it and tousled my hair. He said, “Homesick?”

I shook my head.

He studied me, awkwardly tipping his starved-wood- chuck head and frowning, lips pursed. The ceiling timbers were pitch black, sooty, above him. Then at last: “All right youngster, come out with it” He clumsily touched my shoulder. The fist was bony, and the punch hurt. In love as in almost everything, he was inept.

But I told him. He looked over my head as I talked. I was crying at the end, as I hadn’t been able to cry at the time. My fellow student Konon watched me with a look that teetered between pity and scorn. I said, “Why did they do it, Klinias? Why?”

He cleared his throat. “Don’t think about it. You just get to sleep, my boy.” He patted my shoulder and grinned, showing the holes where he’d lost teeth.

I whispered, “I think they’re crazy.”

“No no,” he said. He stood up and cleared his throat again and tugged at his loincloth, and scratched one hairy, bare leg. “We all do strange things sometimes,” he said. But he stood there thinking for a long time, fiercely scratching his head, making the dandruff fall like snow, “You boys get to sleep,” he said at last, and went over and sat on his bed. His lips were pursed. Then he straightened up a little and pulled in his chin, like a man about to burp, and said, “We’ll talk this over in the morning.” But we didn’t.

It had one other mask. Once I was playing with Tuka and her younger brother, and one of us, I don’t remember which, broke a large clay amphora that stood just inside the door. Her father was passing, abstracted as usual, but the crash of shattering pottery brought him to himself. He said, “Tuka!” Tuka and her brother ran out of the room, quick as snakes. It astonished me, but it didn’t occur to me to follow. Her father walked past me, almost running, as though I were invisible in the dappled light, and called to her again from the doorway. She didn’t answer, and he went after her. When I reached the doorway he was standing on the lawn, red-faced, sharp-nosed, the shadows of maple leaves splotching his cloak, and they were running from him, laughing. He came back at last and walked past me again without seeing me, his gray mouth working in spasms.

I said to her later, “Won’t he get you, when you go in to eat supper?”

She smiled, showing her dimples. “He’ll forget by then.”

“Still—” I said.

“Oh, Agathon, Agathon!” she said.

I tried again. “If I were your father—”

She clasped her hands as if in prayer and tipped her face, grinning. “You’d get a huge net, and you’d make these elephant traps all over the lawn, and you’d get a sling full of sharp stones and nails and things, and you’d get some slaves with bows and arrows that shoot flaming torches, and you’d have these trained wolves and some puff adders and moray eels, and if some little child ran away from you—”

Her brother laughed, wildly gleeful, and I too smiled. But all the same, it left me uneasy. I couldn’t answer her — I never could, because her way of thinking ruled out sober discourse — but just the same it was wrong, I thought, full of righteousness, to make a fool of a grown-up. Not because of what he could do to you. It was wrong to know that he would forget, even if he would; wrong to know that he would chase you only so far and then stop. Do you love your father? I should have asked. But I was too young to think of it, and she wouldn’t have understood.

Klinias said, “Ethics gives us generalizations, rules. Er-hem. But the first rule of ethics is: Never judge particular cases by general laws.” He nodded, pleased that he’d thought of it, then strode on.

I ran to catch up. We were climbing the old stone path toward where the shrine of Menelaos scrapes the clouds. He was teaching on the hoof, as he called it. I said, “Then ethics is nonsense. What good are rules if the first rule is: Don’t believe rules?”

“Fiddlesticks,” he said. “You take too narrow a view. Ethics is like medicine, to be taken only when needed. A man can enjoy good health in any number of ways. People who understand one another are beyond mere ethics. They can do things quite innocently to one another that it would be vicious to do to a stranger.”

“Maybe,” I said. (I was, as I’ve told you, a morose and rigid young man.) “But how will she know not to do those things to strangers?”

Klinias stopped climbing, leaned on his stick, and turned back to face me. He smiled. His hair shot out like red sunbeams. “My dear young Agathon,” he said, “you take this world too seriously. Look there!” He pointed upward to where the big, rough boulders hung on the side of the bluff, the homes of eagles. “You know what those rocks are thinking?”

Konon looked too, eyes narrowed. He said, “They’re thinking of rockhood.”

Klinias laughed. “Exactly! They’re thinking, I am a rock, I am a rock. Not a tree, not a goose, not a goat’s blood pudding, but a rock. That’s what holds them together! And what is our quester for truth, here, thinking?” He laughed again and bobbed his head, delighted with himself. “He’s thinking: I am a human. Is Tuka human? What is a human? If he isn’t careful, we’ll be carrying him home in loose atoms.”

Konon jerked one shoulder and gave a sort of sneering grin. “Poor ol’ Agathon’s in love,” he said. He ducked as if I were going to hit him and picked up a pebble to toss up and down.

“In love!” Klinias said, and looked at me in amazement. Then he laughed again. “Of course!”

“The shit I am!” I said, forgetting myself in my wrath.

“Here now,” Klinias said. “ Here now!”

Konon went into a laughing fit, maybe at Klinias’s startled, stern face, or maybe at me. I went for him with my fists. Klinias was yelling, “Here here here!” and banging the stones with his stick. The mountain walls screeched it back at him like crows.

We were hardly aware, for all Konon’s teasing, that what we felt for each other was love. She was my closest friend, closer even than Konon. When we were in our teens I would sometimes walk with Tuka, holding her hand, her slave behind us, sullenly observing, but even then I misunderstood. I knew, I suppose, how I felt about her, but she was to me some higher form of life, as distant from me as a goddess would be from a cow. She knew other boys, lean and elegant, boys of her own class, whose fathers had mansions in the country, and though I knew I was smarter than they were, I understood my lot. I chased and tumbled humbler girls, kitchen slaves mostly, and Tuka and I would sit on a hillside talking about them, refulgent as the sun- swept hills, and we would laugh and laugh. Her eyes sometimes flashed. I stubbornly misunderstood. As was proper and right, of course. Her father was an arkhon: his land, his wealth, his power sprawled for miles.

Then, when I was fifteen, I met Solon, who brought about a change, a whole new world.

We were in Philombrotos’s high, timbered central chamber — five or six of the chief rulers of the city, my teacher Klinias (dressed in the fine cloak Philombrotos had given him), Konon, and myself. I was often in on important deliberations at this time. I had no part in them — Konon and I took notes, carried unimportant messages, filled the wine bowls. As for Klinias, he was a sort of adviser to Philombrotos. He would sit with a great frown, pink eyes gazing at his toes, and would never speak until Philombrotos would say, “Well?” Klinias, who was extremely nearsighted, would look up, vaguely in Philombrotos’s direction, pulling his fingers through his hair like a comb, and with great shrugs and greater pauses and throat-clearings that made his Adam’s apple bob, would deliver his delicately reasoned-out opinion. There were those who said in mockery that he was king of Athens. He wasn’t, but he had a kind of sixth sense about what the commoners would accept and what they wouldn’t, and what they’d do. It was Klinias who brought Solon to the attention of the oligarchy. “A profoundly philosophical person,” Klinias called him. Meaning: very tricky.