Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 (21 page)

‘That was when Bev started singing, eh Bev?' The bedclothes in the corner did not respond. ‘She come out with “Stand by Me.” She's got a good voice, that one. She started up and then they all joined in. Even me, and I can't sing a note. It was fucking loud, the kangas came and peered in through the glass. We didn't take no notice, just sang louder. Up yours, arseholes.'

Tuesday 18th December 5.30 pm

Anthea sat in Seminar Room 64B as Lefteris Chrysostomos came to the end of his talk on ‘A Return Ticket to the Underworld? Hell and Healing in Ancient Greece'. The heating was on full, and beyond the curtainless windows a black void gave no hint of the snow lying in Gordon Square below.

‘In conclusion,' Lefteris was saying, ‘We have seen that in the early Greek literature the idyllic Elysian fields formed no part of the realms of the dead, and the view of the afterlife was generally the depressing one. One can perhaps understand better the appeal of the new Christian ideology of the resurrection if it is compared to the pagan alternative, a bleak one, of a shadow life in the kingdom of Hades.'

The audience – some students, some academics – sat round four rectangular wooden school tables which had been pushed together to make one large table. The students leant on the varnished surface busily taking notes; most of the academics leant back calmly in their chairs as if they thought they knew what was going to be said.

‘One of the earliest cases and most poignant is the veteran from the Trojan War, Achilles. Odysseus meets him on his visit to the underworld.' Lefteris briefly consulted his notes and looked up. A smile creased the scar on his left cheek, ‘Achilles is perhaps one of our first “celebrities”: he was destined to a short life with fame rather than a long life without it – the priority to be on other people's lips rather than in his own skin… But in Hades, Odysseus finds Achilles' shade having empty hands: he is robbed of everything except the memories of his famous exploits in the world above. Achilles makes to Odysseus the famous comment that he would rather be a serf in the land of the living than a king among the shades, and this sums up the picture of what we might call literally a dead end. This is all so different from the Christian happy ending. Could human life really finish like this, as a dead end, a full stop?' Lefteris paused and looked around the faces of his audience. They fidgeted and looked down.

Anthea sneezed loudly and fumbled in one of her bags for a tissue. Some of the people sitting near her turned to look.

‘So,' continued Lefteris, ‘one does not want to end up in the Greek underworld. My question has been, can one return from there? Odysseus, we saw this, visited as a tourist on a mission to have a consultation, to receive prophetic advice, and he used his return ticket, so to speak. Trophonios had some kind of afterlife, returning from the dead to his tomb to frighten as well as enlighten the petitioners at his oracle.' Lefteris hesitated for a moment to give a friendly glance in Anthea's direction. ‘Eurydice was rescued by her husband Orpheus but only on the condition that as they walked up and out to the world above he did not look back to see if she was still following him. At the last moment he lost his courage, he turned and lost her forever.

‘Perhaps the best-known case is that of Persephone – Core – the maiden seized and stolen by the King of the Underworld, Hades. She is called back to the light only through the efforts of her mother Demeter. Being the goddess of food with the power to starve humanity, Demeter had – how shall we say – influence in high places. But before Core left the underworld, Hades arranged that she ate some pomegranate which bound her to return to the underworld at certain intervals.'

He put his script down on the table for a moment and folded his arms. ‘So much for the ancient myth,' he said. ‘But what about now?' He paused and surveyed the room as if genuinely hoping that someone from the audience might volunteer an answer. No-one did and he returned to his script:

‘So. If we take the view widespread among our contemporaries that hell is not a place but rather a state of the mind, and if we follow Sigmund Freud in using the Greek myths to extract truths about the psyche which, he tells us, are relevant in our 20
^th
century, then what can we say that these stories tell us?

‘Perhaps we should ask whether human beings – or in Freud's thinking, patients – can return from the private hell of neurosis to rejoin the world of the living? And if so, how? There is a large metaphysical question still staying, which we cannot answer despite millennia of debate: that is the question of whether there is any return from death. The smaller question we might however dare to consider, that is whether humans can return from those traumas that take them to a different experiential world. Those small deaths of depression and breakdown. And perhaps this smaller question also has a metaphysical dimension.

‘Can one human help another find the way back to the land of life? Orpheus failed, Eurydice was victim of her husband's anxiety: enough faith was not there. Perhaps the help of another can only be brittle, with the outcome unsure. In the case of Core, her mother's grief and insistence brought her back, but only in part. Core lived marked for ever by her experience, with this shadow of the unavoidable return always hanging over her. Can this polysemic metaphor offer to us ways of thinking about the process of healing?'

Anthea's gaze moved from the speaker to the man sitting next to him, a bespectacled middle-aged academic with pale gingery hair in a crew cut. She caught his eye and he hastily glanced away. Anthea looked back towards the speaker.

‘Odysseus, of course, goes of his own will,' Lefteris was saying. ‘He strictly follows the due procedure, he cuts the throat of two sheep and pours the blood for the shades of the dead to drink to enable them to speak. He forces the crowds of the dead to keep at a distance so that he can first ask the dead prophet Teiresias for advice about his journey home. The dominant theme of his visit is sadness as he meets the great people brought down low and the poor unfortunates who were cut off out of time, but he returns wiser from his contact with the other world.

‘It seems a paradox that contact with the dead could be deliberately seeked for, not only for the insight but also for the healing it could bring, at incubation sites such as the one of Amphiaraeus near Thebes where inquirers slept within the precinct to consult the oracle: here the dead could help the living.

‘The experience of the maiden Core suggests that in other circumstances such an experience makes a scar from which the person never fully recovers.'

Including his audience in the sweep of a dazzling smile, Lefteris launched into his last sentence: ‘While hell surely means something different for each and every person, the question of how it affects us and whether we can return from it produces implications for our imaginative phrasing of the possibility of healing in human life,' he glanced down at his text, ‘as well as for our understanding of the beliefs and ideas of the ancient Greeks.'

He sat down amid sporadic applause.

The ginger-haired academic next to him stood up: ‘Thank you, Lefteri. I appreciate that it is late, and – dare I say it – uncomfortably close to Christmas, and in view of the snow some of you may fear that travelling home may indeed be a journey from hell, but are there any questions?'

After a pause, a male student wearing a brown cardigan put his hand up at the back: ‘If hell is not a physical place, would you like to comment on the oracles of the dead at specific locations known in antiquity?'

Lefteris stood up to answer. ‘Yes, indeed, this is a good point. There were as you say specific places where contact with the underworld was easier, where it was more possible to touch that world. Tombs play a role here: the tomb of Trophonios that I mentioned is only one example. There were also generic sites, including Thesprotia and Tainarum, where the souls of the dead could be summoned and questions asked to them. It is just as, to follow our Freudian parallel, that there are in the present day places, times, events and people that are more likely to throw the individual into their own private underworld or hell. The conditions for the – shall I say – bleeding through between the two worlds can be specific.'

Anthea raised her hand: ‘In contact with the dead in ancient Greece, could you say something about the significance of bones?'

‘The bones were important, yes, was there something specific?'

Anthea hesitated. ‘Well… did people talk to bones?'

The male student at the back gave an audible sneer: ‘Is that a serious suggestion?'

The whole table-full of academics and students erupted into laughter. Anthea looked down at the table and a red blush rose from her neck up to her face.

Lefteris raised a restraining hand. ‘I should say that talking to bones is indeed a part of modern Greek tradition. However there is, as far as I am aware, no evidence for it in the classical period.'

The ginger-haired academic beside him volunteered: ‘For Bronze Age Crete, Xanthoudides has pointed out the shortage of skulls in relation to bones at a number of cemetery sites. And the find of a fragment of human skull in a settlement site near Myrtos suggests they may have done things with bones in that period.' His English had the perfect intonation of an Austrian who has been naturalised British for many years.

Lefteris nodded. ‘Dr. Scheiner is right. But the lack of deciphered textual evidence from that era means that we cannot be sure what practices, if any, were followed along those lines.'

‘And, Lefteri,' said the ginger-haired academic, ‘I feel we're being rather led away from your topic here. This is perhaps something of a red herring.' He glanced in Anthea's direction.

‘Not entirely,' said Lefteris. ‘To me there is some irony in the fact that despite the Christian rhetoric of the resurrection, in the Greek Orthodox practices of the 20
^th
century we find that traditions have survived which involve a clinging to the bones. The preserving and handling of the skeleton material, this underlines the concern to adhere to the physical remains. This brings to foreground the mortality of humans, and the wish to maintain contact with what still remains of the dead person as they once were – rather than a sense of transcendence or revitalization under new forms. Perhaps the old pagan ideas have shown to be more tenacious than we might have imagined.'

Tuesday 18th December 6.30 pm

Alex and Duane met outside Ren's house. There were eight steps up to the front door, which was framed by imitation columns set into the wall. The paint on the plaster decoration was peeling. Alex, in her navy-blue coat with the hood up, stood on the top step pressing the bell. Duane appeared at the gate, picking his way carefully in trainers over the packed snow. He was wearing a faded beige anklelength overcoat with 1970s lapels.

Alex took her finger off the bell. ‘Evidently Ren's not home yet. I'm Alex.'

‘I'm Duane. Pleased to meet you.' He scratched his head through the brown woolly hat bulging with hidden hair and looked up at her. ‘So, she's expecting you too? You want to wait here?'

‘She said to go to the pub.'

Duane put a lager and a gin and tonic down on the dark varnished table. ‘You know, I think I've heard Ren mention your name. Strange us meeting on the doorstep at that moment. Like it's fate, right?'

Alex studied the tonic fizzing around the ice and lemon. When it had settled down she drank a couple of gulps. ‘I've known her a long time. You don't believe in fate, do you?'

‘I do and I don't. You?'

‘Mystical rubbish. Religion, fate, spirits, the after-life, it's all nonsense cooked up to distract us from what's wrong with the real world.'

‘You know what you think, don't you? But as it happens that does not mean you're right. If you like, I will tell you why I believe in ghosts.' He took a neat sip of his lager and put his glass down.

Alex arched her eyebrows and looked into her glass. ‘Honestly, I'm sure it's very fascinating, but…'

‘Personally,' Duane continued, ‘I wasn't sure, I never believed in nothing 'till I saw a ghost with my own eyes.'

Alex's smile was sarcastic. ‘People can always see things if they want to see them.'

‘It wasn't like that,' said Duane. He caressed his brown cheek slowly. ‘You're an attractive woman,' he said. He stared at her with brown eyes in which her reflection floated. ‘You think you know a lot, don't you. Maybe you do. But you don't know everything. Do you want to hear something you don't know about?'

‘You're wasting your time,' Alex spoke as if she was being very patient.

‘Or perhaps you're wasting yours. Staring into your gin and tonic making small talk.'

Alex uncrossed her long thin legs and crossed them the other way. She could wrap the end foot around the ankle an extra time so they looked like a corkscrew. ‘Go on, then,' she snapped. ‘Tell me about the ghost.'

‘It's a bit personal,' said Duane. He took another precise sip and looked away across the lounge of the pub. It was a large hall, with rows of wooden tables stretching towards the half-glass doors that opened onto Stoke Newington High Street.

‘I thought you wanted to tell me?' she asked.

‘Not particularly,' He said the second word very slowly. He rested his fingers on the table. His nails were long and well-kept.

They sat and watched goings-on at the bar, where a young barmaid seemed to be upset, and an older man, who looked like the manager, was holding his hands up and barking at her. They couldn't hear the words.

‘Oh, go on,' said Alex, touching him on the arm, ‘tell the story.'

‘It's not really a story,' he turned back towards her. ‘It happened to me. In my life. The things that are most unlikely are usually like that.'