John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He cleared his throat again. “I remember when I was a little boy he used to carry me on his shoulders. He never said a cross word to me. Never once!”

I sipped my wine to keep from the old woman’s eyes.

“He was an important diplomat for Lykourgos, you know. And Holy Apollo what a horseman that man was!” He laughed and shook his head, then shaded his eyes for an instant, afraid of breaking. “He’d gallop over the snow, hunting rabbits — Great Zeus, he’d be going a hundred miles an hour — and the rabbit would go under a six-foot hedge and he’d go over it as if the hedge wasn’t there, and he’d lose the rabbit and he’d yell, ‘Whoa, rabbit! God damn you, rabbit!’—mixing up the rabbit and the horse, you know—” He laughed again, loudly, and this time, having brought Agathon to life, he did break, and covered his face and made peeping noises. I could have told him it would happen. So could his mother. Or the statue.

“Poor, dear Kleon!” Diana whooped, and leaped from her chair and went to him and threw her arms around him. He sobbed on her bosom.

“He loved us,” Kleon sobbed. “At least I think he did. You could never tell with Father.”

The old woman watched me.

“I’ve read the scroll,” she said. She sipped her wine.

“I thought you might have,” I said.

She looked away from me at last, over at her children. She got up, not effortlessly, exactly, but gracefully all the same. I wondered if she could still play the harp. She crossed to them and touched the nape of Diana’s neck gently, then touched her son’s balding head. She looked back at me. “Come,” she said.

We went down the hall and down the long stairs and outside to where the slope was, and at the foot of it, the stone benches and tables. The old serving-man peeked out the door and looked furious, then disappeared and returned a minute later with a torch. He carried it past us and set it in one of the torch rests beyond the tables, behind a thin statue whose features were in darkness. The servant never glanced at his mistress (much less at me), though she watched him like a critic.

When he was gone she said, “It’s true, you know, that I loved him.”

“I know.”

“And Diana loved him too, though she’s stupid, poor thing.”

I nodded. “There are worse faults. I like her.”

She said nothing for a long time. I watched the torch. At last she said gently, as if afraid of hurting me, “You’re aware, of course, that Agathon too was stupid.”

I said nothing for a while. It was a difficult moment. Then I said, “Yes, finally.”

She smiled. Not old. You’d have sworn she was eternal. “However, I happened to love him.”

“Then why did you leave him?” I asked as innocently as possible. A stupid question, she might say. But I’d risk it.

She answered easily. “Because sooner or later he’d have killed me, you know. — In one of those rages that Kleon can’t remember.” She smiled. “Poor Agathon hardly remembered them himself, to judge by the scroll.”

I could see the scar very clearly, a shiny place in the torchlight.

“But if you loved him, as you say—”

“Think,” she said. “If he killed me, and couldn’t kill himself…with his history, you know — after riding his brother down that night, and later the awful thing with Konon…He did love me, Demodokos.”

I nodded. Harp music floated down from the house.

“We were all crazy enough as it was,” she said, and laughed. Then she frowned, sudden as a springtime change of sky, musing. “And of course I was young,” she said. For the first time she evaded my eyes, stared at the death-white hands crossed over her knees. I wanted to touch them. I looked away. She said, “I needed to know he loved me — needed to know he could forgive me for being…unlike him.” She frowned, fine creases descending to the sharp square chin as white as winter. “A woman…” She paused. She tipped her head up, looked at the stars, and smiled as if with amused compassion for all her kind. “A woman needs proofs of a sort no man can possibly understand. Sometimes even violence will do.” Her eyes became tiny chinks and her hands tightened in her lap. “I gave up my death for his sake, Demodokos.”

I nodded.

She mused, then she gave her head a barely perceptible jerk, as if driving away the first faint mumble of a dream. She smiled, slightly scornful, like a beautiful young girl. “That’s stupid. I made it up.”

I shrugged. “But interesting.”

She smiled again and touched my hand. Her tremble went through me. “Ah, Demodokos, Demodokos! You do me good!” Darkness was pulling her outward like old light.