John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“You’ve had an adventure,” I said.

“God save me from more!” She laughed, but she seemed troubled. Was it true, then, that she too had glimpsed the skull behind the mask?

She lifted her face from her knees to squint at the water, then smiled suddenly, as if she’d decided to. It was one of many moments with her when I saw in amazement how powerfully she could clamp down on her emotions with her mind. Unless, of course, she’d faked the emotions.

“Now I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. She spoke too loudly, as if the kiss were far behind us, the foolishness of youth. “I think Dorkis takes too shortsighted a view. What we need is full-scale revolution.”

“Oh, right!” I said. I wondered briefly if she’d ever seen a field of corpses, and I sensed, more than thought of, some vague connection between revolution and desiring a good friend’s wife.

“It’s possible, Agathon,” she said, “and moral.”

“Certainly.” I added, “Moral, anyway.”

“Possible, too. We’ve got them. We’ve had them all along, we just didn’t notice.” She put her hand on mine. Again the excitement and doubt. “We could burn them out — every storehouse, every field and vineyard — plug the sewage ditches, poison the water with carcasses, wreck their houses. Let’s see what the mighty wasps eat when their drones stop work.”

“They could eat Helots,” I said.

“Reprisals. Ten for one.”

I laughed and moved my hand around her back.

“I wonder what Spartans taste like,” she said.

“Stringy and tough, I imagine. Something like baboon.”

“We could plow their city to salt,” she said. The idea was taking hold. Or the vision. Whatever. She lay back, rolling toward me a little, on my arm. It was as if she was testing me.

“You’re untrained,” I said. “You haven’t got a chance.”

“That’s what justifies atrocities on our side, and makes theirs all the worse.”

I jiggled my head, squeezing my eyes shut. “You better go through that again.”

“It’s true,” she said, hardening to the thought and moving toward me more. “If ten commit atrocities against two, the crime’s far worse than if two commit atrocities against ten for the sake of revenge.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“Will you help?” she asked.

“Iona, love—” I looked at her and saw she meant it, meant it with all her heart, at least for the moment. Mainly, though, I saw her mouth. I laughed in alarm. “We’d better get back to the hut.”

Her hand closed hard on my wrist “Agathon, we need you.” Overtones rang around her words like rings from a buoy. She made me feel, more than I’d felt for a long time, manly, stronger than Herakles, beyond all mortal or divine intimidation. We need you. The earth calling to the sun, the sea crying out to the land. Because the Helots weren’t men? Big-muscled Dorkis not a man? I wasn’t thinking all this. My mind was inside it like a building standing in a wind. It was as if for an instant we’d fallen back to the first hour, archetypal woman clawing up from her castrated mate to the new male. But was I less eunuch in my own secret bed? My mind struggled clumsily, drowning in the primal scent straining toward logic, genesis-old defense, desperate and needful as the myth that no Helot can fight. All this in one brief pang of sensation. Damn her, did she love me or not?

“I can hear the historians now,” I said. “‘The leader of the Helots, infatuated with an Athenian visitor and wishing to devise some means of seeing him frequently without rousing the suspicions of their respective spouses, conceived the plan of organizing a revolution. But on learning, later—”

“Stop that!” she said, and made a face. “Revolutions don’t start because some dumb female…” She let it trail off, maybe concentrating on the movement of my hand on her back. She grinned. “Now I have to do it. You’ve given me a reason.” She drew away, sat up, fixed her hair.

“Tell me one thing,” I said, watching her. The moment had passed. I could feel it yawning away, and I was filled with anguish. “Did you just now make all that up on the spot — the revolution business? Or is it something you’ve been working on?” Light, flip. But I was drowning.

“On the spot,” she said, mock-innocent. “Would I spend days on such a morbid idea?”

“It’s pretty clever. If the Helots weren’t people I cared about, I’d advise them to give it a try.”

“You think we won’t, don’t you? That’s really dumb.”

“You might, from pure stubbornness. Most things people do is mere stubbornness — a sort of proof to themselves that they exist.”

“Boy, that’s really dumb,” she said again. “Believing the things you do, how come you don’t kill yourself?”

“I do,” I said. “Second by second.”

She smiled wryly, shaking her head so that the hair she’d just gotten neat flew out. “I’m beginning to understand you. You’re on some drug.”

I stood up and gave her my hand. When she was standing I closed my arms around her and kissed her, pulling her body tight to mine. But the moment had passed; I believed in neither of us. After a time she pulled her mouth away and kissed my shoulder. “I really don’t believe this,” she said. “This can’t be me.”

In the aerie, Tuka was lying naked on the bed. Dorkis was out somewhere, walking. I wondered, cowardly, whether he’d seen us. I listened to Iona undressing beyond the screen and looked at Tuka. My mind couldn’t separate them. She was beautiful, white as old stone by moonlight. It filled me with self-hate — sexual desire and impotence of soul.

Tuka said, “Agathon, we really have to talk about all this. Not tonight, but sometime.” I laughed. I undressed and made rough love to her. When she climaxed she growled, for the benefit of Iona.

After that I lay awake for a long time, listening, sweating and remorseful, for Spartan boys with daggers. I heard Dorkis pass in front of the hut, then behind it. He too, it came to me, was expecting Spartans. That was why he’d come. When I got up and crept to the door to look out, he was hunkering in the shadow of a rock pile, a little up the hill, behind the hut. His bow lay on the rocks beside him; his knife lay unsheathed across his knees. The feeling came over me again: This is it.

I woke up in bright sunlight. Dorkis was already up, beaming, getting our breakfast ready. His thought of fleeing Sparta, killing Lykourgos, all the rest, seemed to have evaporated. I watched his huge, muscular arms, his wide hairy chest, and wondered if he’d had my wife. He’d had his, I knew. She looked pummeled to limpness, and joyful. She blew me a kiss as she came from behind the screen.

“How’s the revolution?” I said.

“Oh, that was yesterday!” She laughed.

Tuka said later, “I don’t understand them. They laugh and screw around and drink, and the soldiers kill them off like mice. What’s the matter with them?”

“Second by second,” I said. “One hour at a time.”

She looked at her hands. “He really was good, you know.” She shot a glance at me.

It wasn’t true, I learned later, that she’d slept with him, though she could have. He was tentative, impotent for all his fondling (or so she decided), and in the end he was embarrassed. She thought it was funny. Tuka has a curious mind.

The tall ephor was here again. I’m more convinced than ever of his honest concern. It’s all very well for idealists to howl that Sparta’s rotten to the core, as my master does, but the fact remains, it’s the greatest city in the whole world, not only because of its size and beauty and natural wealth — the fertile plains stretching out all around it — and not only because of its army either, but also because of, so to speak, its vision. No place is perfect — anyone knows that — but where except Sparta have kings and commoners united behind the ideals Equality and Justice, and fought with all their might against corrupting forces like wealth and laziness? You’ll notice the god doesn’t hit Sparta with plagues and pestilences, the way he does places like Pylos and Methone. I’ve heard about the seaport plague from people that have seen it, and it’s something. It starts with fainting and stomach trouble, and then fever develops and terrible, terrible pain. It comes and goes in waves. You think you’re getting better and suddenly it’s worse than before and at last it kills you. (“That’s life,” my master says.) Anyway, we don’t get such things here in Sparta. My father fought and died for Sparta, even though he was a Helot. I think I’d do the same. Lykourgos’s vision’s not achieved yet, true, and it’s true that some of his methods are questionable. Nevertheless, it’s a great experiment — as Agathon says in his mocking voice. And however bad a few Spartans here and there may be, there are still men like the tall ephor, devoted to making the vision into reality. I feel as if I’ve been blind, all this time with old Agathon. He’s a good man, I still say that, for all his boring self-centeredness; and men like him served a purpose once: no matter how faithful to his vision a man like Lykourgos may be, he can always use a critic. Lykourgos must have known that all along. If he were here in Sparta, Agathon would be free in a minute, putrid old husk though he is.