Ithaca

For Catherine, Victor, Marina, and Maria

W
hen I was younger my mother used to tell me stories. Always about my father.

The time they met—already knowing they were to be married—and spent the night on the mountain above her father's home, and Odysseus cut a sprig of laurel leaves that they swore to keep forever. The first boar he killed, aged sixteen—the age I am now. His friends had been left behind in a frantic chase through the forests. In its first charge, the beast, a monster, gored Odysseus's thigh, but he ignored the pain and hurled himself on the animal with a spear. His friends found him that evening, lying bloodied but alive across the boar's carcass.

My mother took me out for picnics. Three, four years ago things were different in the big house. Everything was calm and orderly. Melanthius, the cook, would have a basket ready for us, full of fresh bread and olives, honey cakes in a linen cloth, salty little cheeses wrapped in vine leaves. Eurycleia, my nurse, would fuss around, warning of hornets and snakes. Medon, the steward, would snap at servants who disturbed the perfectly raked gravel. My mother, Penelope, was only sixteen when I was born, the year my father went away to the war. When I was growing up, she seemed more like a girl than a grown woman. Everyone loved her. She laughed at Eurycleia, bewitched Melanthius with a smile, and the two of us would be gone, up through the olive groves behind the house, past the rocks and little temple, to a high promontory above the sea, where we could eat our picnic and she could tell me stories about Odysseus, the father I'd never met, while we gazed at the far-off, misty horizon beyond which he'd vanished.

“And then,” her stories always ended, “Odysseus sailed home to Ithaca, and we all lived happily ever after.”

I know her stories were true. The sprig of laurel leaves and the boar's tusk, roughly sawn off at the root, are both kept in the little temple on the mountainside. I went up there yesterday, along the weed-choked path that skirts the cliffs then climbs steeply through oak forests to an overgrown valley where a cave was faced, years ago, with a portico of rough wooden columns twined in ivy. Behind a curtain of sacking the cave is stiflingly hot, its air thick with the stench of rancid fat and rotting meat. Rows of oil lamps flicker on every ledge. Smoke coils from a brazier on the altar step. It always takes time to adjust from the sun's glare outside. Only slowly do one's eyes take in the fantastical array of objects that crowd the wooden shelves stapled to the cave's walls: jars of wine and bunches of fading flowers, silver goblets and enameled dishes, rings and
bangles. Everyone on the island comes here to make offerings to the goddess to win her help. Farmers leave dishes of grain for a good harvest. The sick leave clay hearts, hands, or feet. Hung from the ceiling is the entire prow of a boat, the thank-offering of some fishermen who survived a wreck. Some of the offerings are encrusted with jewels, others as humble as a comb carved from bone, the love-pledge of a girl trying to capture some boy from the town.

The goddess's statue, a blackened thing of silver and wood, watches over everything through white enameled eyes. The altar step below her is black with spilled oil. As always, lining the step are rows of silver dishes piled with feast-day sacrifices of thigh bones wrapped in yellowing fat. Their putrefying reek makes the air in the cavern almost unbreathable.

Yesterday the priest, a slovenly old man in a wine-stained robe, was filling oil lamps when I came in.

“Telemachus.” He nodded curtly to me, then went on with his task. I reached into my satchel, drew out a silver cup, and placed it on the altar.

“To bring your father back?” His voice was sarcastic, as always.

“Yes.”

“Light a candle.”

We all hate the priest, but no one on Ithaca challenges him. People say he talks directly to the goddess, just as I might talk to my mother or Eurycleia.

“Is there something else?” His white robe was dirty at the sleeves. A single yellow tooth jutted at an angle from his lower lip.

“I want to see my father's offerings.”

“You know where to find them.”

Among the hundreds of offerings in the cavern are four that my father dedicated before he disappeared. They're kept
together on a felt-lined tray next to the altar: the boar's tusk, the sprig of laurel, so faded it's almost grey, and two others.

One is a bronze sword, a wedding gift from my grandfather. Odysseus dedicated it the day he announced he was leaving for the war. Yesterday I picked it up and weighed it in my hand. Boys my age should know how to fight, but with my father gone, there was no one at home to teach me. The sword's hilt sat awkwardly in my hand. Its cold bulk dragged at my arm. I found myself wondering, for the thousandth time, what kind of man could fight all day with a sword like that, stabbing, thrusting, never tiring? A man like my father, Odysseus.

I laid the sword back in the tray and picked up the fourth offering, a tiny, carved owl. My mother told me stories about the laurel, the sword, and the boar's tusk, but she never talked about the owl. I held it closer to a lamp. The carving is crude, the eyes roughly scratched with a pin. The priest told me Odysseus came at dawn on the day he sailed, ordered him out of the cave, and went in alone. He found my father's other offerings on the altar step, but the little owl stood apart—he didn't know why.

“The owl is the symbol of the goddess. Maybe Odysseus left it as an offering to her. To protect him in war. To make sure he came home.”

“So why did he set it apart?”

The priest could only ever shrug.

Yesterday, when I put the little carving back in the tray, he put down his jar of oil. “Eurycleia was here yesterday. Sent by your mother. Another gift.
To bring him back
. A bracelet, solid gold—over there.”

His voice was mocking. I turned to look. The sight never failed to break my heart. A whole alcove is filled with wooden cases. My mother had them made by the island's best carpenter, to hold her offerings. Sixteen years since he sailed away. Sixteen
years of offerings to bring him back: enameled brooches, gold bangles and ingots of pure silver, rings and hairpins. Some were treasures Penelope must have bought from traders in the harbor—blown ostrich's eggs, and turtle shells waxed to shine like brass. Others were embroideries she sewed herself in tiny stitches, whose colors glowed in the candlelight: Ithaca's mountain and the sea under moonlight, a battle scene, ships returning home.

In the beginning, she left offerings to keep Odysseus safe in war. Then, when news came that the war had ended, eight years ago, she left offerings to bring him back. To preserve him from shipwreck and pirates, from storms and whirlpools, currents and sea-monsters—from everything and anything that might keep a good man from his family and island home.

I ran my eyes over them. The new gold bracelet shone on the top shelf. Sixteen years of faith, those offerings represented. Sixteen years of waiting. A small fortune in jewels, precious metal, and hope.

And that's the only fortune my father has left.

I
'm in my bedroom thinking about my father when I hear a commotion outside. A man shouting, a girl's high-pitched scream. I pull on a shirt and hurry out onto the gallery. Below, in the shantytown of tents that fills the courtyard, two men are circling, knives in their hands. Agelaus I know; the other is a newcomer. Agelaus's torso is bare, his hair unbrushed. It looks like he's only just woken up. Melantho, my mother's maid, tugs at one arm, sobbing and pleading. The other man, slim and youthful-looking, shifts his weight nervously from one leg to the other as he clutches his knife. I'm guessing he's Melantho's new lover.

The fight doesn't last long. Agelaus rubs his hand over his eyes, like Melantho's voice is giving him a headache, then
shoves her aside and in one movement brings his knife up into the other man's leg. It happens so fast the newcomer barely even moves. He looks down at his leg, where dark blood is suddenly pulsing across his thigh. Melantho screams and puts her arms around him, trying to hold him up, but he's already sagging to the ground. Agelaus yawns, wipes his knife, and crawls back into his tent. The other men in the courtyard watch until the youth on the ground stops moving, then go back to their tasks. One picks up an axe to hack firewood from a stack of furniture. Another, his face tattooed with the pattern of a wolf's head, wets his razor in a barrel of water and begins to shave.

I grip the balcony rail and look down at the scene below me. At the washing lines festooned with young men's clothes, at the tents made of carpets draped over furniture dragged from the great hall, at the targets daubed on the walls, the piles of smashed jars, broken sticks and abandoned wineskins. I breathe in the stench rising from the pit they use as a toilet, and the fire of sawn-up furniture whose smoke is already dirtying the clean morning air. I watch a crow drop to the ground, hop forward on strong legs, and tear at some abandoned food on a tray under the colonnade. I don't want to think about what I've just seen: a man killed casually in a knife fight over a girl, his body left lying in a pool of blood. I try to remember what the courtyard looked like when I was little. I used to run after the gardeners who tended it each morning, their rakes sweeping arcs in the gravel. The whitewash was so bright it hurt to look at. Servants dozed away afternoons in the long, cool colonnade. There was a great jar of water always kept full, with a bronze cup hanging on a hook for anyone who was thirsty. On feast days, we draped garlands around the gateposts of the great hall, whose pillars were carved in the shape of boars' heads, my father's symbol.