John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

After a while the woman reappeared with food — fresh fruit and wine and some finely spiced kind of meat I couldn’t identify — and again before I could question her, she was gone. Seeing them against the fruit I realized how dirty my hands were. I ate. The servant- woman appeared when I finished as if she’d been watching all the time from some chink in the wall. I said quickly, for fear she might escape again, “Thank you very much. It was excellent. But now I’d better be leaving.”

She shook her head, alarmed. “You mustn’t do that!” And again she was gone. It was beginning to get amusing. Or it would have been except for this: I kept having the feeling that that tricky old bastard Agathon had set the whole thing up. He couldn’t have, I knew; but the feeling stuck with me. I suppose the feeling will be with me all my life, from time to time. I could see him hobbling from view to view. “Wonderful! Charming! Bless me!” Then, playing the other part: “We’re so pleased you like it!” He was as real as ever, in my mind: volatile as a small sunlit whirlwind. His rags flew out as he inspected the walls, found dust on a chair back, pretended to be horribly embarrassed. My eyes filled with tears. How could he possibly be dead?

I waited on and on. It was ridiculous. He would have loved it. Finally the servant-woman appeared again. She did not like me, did not believe I belonged in Philombrotos’s house. She stood stiffly at the door. “She wants to know do you want a bath,” she said.

“I could use one,” I said meekly.

She took it decently, considering. “This way, then.”

Again I followed her. I was tempted to mimic her walk, clump clump, but I was nice. We went down some stairs and along a hall and came to a beautiful tiled room with high, small windows, and on the back wall faucets in the form of golden lions’ heads. I’d never seen such a room before. She lit the lamps, grudgingly, I thought — it wasn’t really all that dark — and turned the faucets on above the…pool, like. Regular water came out of one, and steam came out of the other. She went away and closed the door and I undressed. While I was bathing she sneaked in and stole my clothes. Hours later, feeling guilty, I suppose, she brought in some new ones.

“She wants you upstairs,” she said, and left with a jerk.

So I hunted around in the cellar for a couple of hours and finally found my way upstairs. Agathon’s wife was waiting in the room with the harp, and she wasn’t alone. The covers had been taken from the chairs, and the room was warm with lamplight. The sky to the west was deep red, the sun glowing like a coal on the rim of the sea. The three of them were all dressed to the nines. So was I, come to think of it In Athens they do things right.

The tall, middle-aged man who looked like Agathon gone sane came over to greet me. “So you’re Demodokos,” he said. It sounded like a put-down, though very genteel.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes Peeker.” I grinned, to be polite.

He looked at me harder. “You remind me of him,” he said, and smiled, a little stiffly. Suddenly, for no reason, I liked him. He looked like a man who did things. Business, politics, expensive funerals, something.

“You remind me of him too,” I said. “You’re Kleon — his son?”

He nodded. “And this is Diana, my little sister.”

I bowed. She was pretty. Blond hair, a dimple, a double chin. Unmarried. Insofar as possible, I made a point of not imagining her soft, fat tits.

“How do you do?” she said, and, as if in panic, made a smile.

I do horrible, I wanted to say, wringing my hands and wincing. I beg from door to door, I kill people to steed their sandals, I rob oats from stalls for horses. Tine,” I said. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” She extended her hand, palm down, as she’d no doubt seen her mother do, and I did not drop to the floor and kiss it, merely touched it, lightly, politely, with my fingertips. I loved her passionately. I thought she was the funniest lady I’d ever seen.

Kleon said, “You and Mother have already met, I think?”

I turned to her, bowing. I’d been watching her from the moment I first came through the door — I would have said so if I could have thought of a way to write it and still cover all this other stuff I was walking through. She was seated, with her eyes on me from the first instant, neither kind nor unkind, neither suspicious nor trusting: watchful, like someone at a play. The statue of her father watched me from just above her left shoulder. Though she must be seventy, I knew, her hair was black as night except for one white streak. It stood out like lightning. And it was real, you could see; not art. Below the white, at her temple, she had a scar. By rights, whatever made the scar should have killed her. The scroll was in her lap, lying on her black wool cover.

“Sit down, Demodokos,” she said.

Kleon pushed a chair toward me. When I seated myself, they too sat down, Kleon and Diana.

A silence. All of us were nervous except the old woman.

“Mother tells us Father passed away,” Diana said.

I smiled — I’d lived too long with the critical old bastardy — then covered my mouth quickly and shot a glance at Agathon’s wife. She’d caught it.

“You loved him, didn’t you,” she said. Coolly, flatly. Merely an observation. “So did we.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said politely.

It was Agathon’s wife’s turn to smile. Holy Zeus but she was fast. No wonder she scared him.

Diana leaned forward with her dimpled hands folded. Kleon sat like his mother, just waiting and watching, but he wasn’t as self-possessed. Diana said, “Could you tell us how…it was?”

“In prison,” I said, then started over: “He was taken sick while in prison…. There was a plague of some kind in the seaport towns. We didn’t think it could reach Sparta but—” I glanced again at the old woman. She was hard to talk in front of. If she took a notion to mimic me she could nail me to the wall.

“Plague!” Diana whispered. Her eyes welled with tears.

“Come, come, Diana,” Kleon said. He moved his hand as if to reach out to her, then realized he was too far away. It was Agathon’s kind of scene. Kleon folded his hands, embarrassed.

With a quick, sharp grin, the old woman said, “Kleon’s a lawyer.”

“Kleon’s what keeps this family together,” Diana said fiercely, then looked startled, apologetic, then looked stubborn. I loved her. I would conquer elephants in her name.

There was another silence. The old woman simply waited; time was nothing to her. It was as if she had come to believe she would never die.

Diana wanted details. She was pitiful, sweet I told her all I could, but cleaned it up. How the sickness mysteriously began (I didn’t mention the rats), how it progressed, how the Helots rescued us from prison, and how, finally, he died. He died peacefully in his sleep, I said, and I said I was with him all the time. I didn’t look at the old woman as I talked. Even if she hadn’t read the scroll to the end, she would know how it was, I thought. If she wanted to contradict me, that was her business. If she opened the scroll up, I’d swear it was all lies.

The story took a long time to tell I told it like a poet, and Diana kept using her hanky. It was dark outside when I finished. Diana sat now with her hands over her face, weeping and wiping her eyes with the hanky’s edge. Kleon’s eyes were a little funny, but he hadn’t let us see him cry. He’d gone out for wine for all of us while I was telling the saddest part.

Kleon said huskily, clearing his throat, “He was a strange man.”

I nodded. The old woman was watching me. So was the statue.