The Walled Orchard (4 page)

Well, there I was, safe and sound, and I wanted to see the expressions on everybody’s faces when I walked in and told them I was well again. Being a horrible child in many ways I thought I would give them a surprise, so I crept over to the back door and tiptoed in to the inner room, where I expected my grandfather would be sleeping after his midday meal. But he wasn’t there; instead I saw my mother, sitting bolt upright in her chair in front of her spinning-wheel, as dead as Agamemnon. I could see from the state of her and the horrible expression on her face that she had died of the plague; typically she had stayed at her household duties to the last, so that Hermes would be able to report to the Judges of the Dead that she had died as a woman should. That was my mother all over.

I found our Syrian houseboy doubled up in the corner of the inner room — he had taken off his sandal and bitten clean through the thongs — while the Libyan maid was lying in the storeroom. The pain had clearly been too much for her to bear, poor creature, and she had cut her own throat with the fine ivory-handled razor my mother used for shaving her legs and armpits. However, I could find no sign of my grandfather anywhere in the house, and I began to hope that he had somehow survived, and maybe even gone to get help. But I found him, too, a little way down the street, which was utterly quiet and deserted, the way an Athenian street never is. He was in one of those big stone troughs set up to catch rainwater in the dictator Pisistratus’ time, and I guess that he found the thirst so unendurable that he had jumped in and drowned. It was a sad way for such a man to die, for he had been at the battle of Plataea, when the Athenians and the Spartans had defeated King Xerxes’ army and killed his great general Mardonius.

It was a most peculiar feeling to come out of that stable and find that all my family and household had died without letting me know. While I had been ill, I had assumed that I was the only person in the whole of Athens to be afflicted, and that if and when I ever got out of there the world outside would be roughly the same as it had been when I went in. As I stood there looking at my grandfather floating in the rain-trough, I must confess that I felt little or no grief or sadness, and ever since then I have never been able to take the Choruses in the Tragedies very seriously. You know what I mean; the Messenger bustles on with the news of the great disaster, and at once the Chorus start moaning and singing
Aiai
and
Hottotoi,
and all those other things that people are supposed to say when they’re upset but never do; and then twenty lines or so later they’ve pulled themselves together again and are saying that the Gods are just. Whereas, in my experience at any rate, I find that bad news takes at least a day to sink in properly, and it’s only after people have stopped sympathising and are saying what a callous brute I am that I start going to pieces. Well, there you are; I felt no great urge to lament or tear my hair, only a sensation which I can best describe as a Godlike detachment, as the Gods must feel when they look down and see mortal men. After all, I had survived and everyone else in the whole world hadn’t; this created a division between them and me as wide as that which separates the immortal Gods from mortal men. I couldn’t feel any sorrow, or even any involvement, just as a human being can never feel involved when he pours boiling water on an ants’ nest and so wipes out a city which in their terms might be as great as Athens or Troy. Perhaps, after all, I was too young to have feelings, or I was stunned by the sheer scale of the disaster. But I don’t think so; I felt the same way when I was a grown man in the walled orchard, and that was just as great a disaster, or maybe even greater.

So there I was, standing by the rain-trough and thinking these deep thoughts, when I saw a man in armour hurrying up the street with his cloak round his face to keep the bad air out. I was just thinking that this was pretty foolish, since there is no special magic in a cloak that can counteract the effects of plague and death, and that was just another example of the folly of these puny mortals, when the man caught sight of me and nearly jumped out of his skin. Of course, I said to myself, he’s frightened at seeing a God: I must reassure him; so I called out, ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.’

‘The hell with you,’ said the man. ‘You’ve got the plague, haven’t you?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘I had it for a while but the God cured me. You’re quite safe, I won’t infect you.’

He didn’t look at all convinced, so I started describing the symptoms and how I had recovered, and then he wasn’t so frightened. It turned out that a fellow soldier of his had had the plague and survived, and so he knew I was telling the truth. He came over and sat down on the edge of the trough, with his cloak still up around his ears; but I could see his face. He was about twenty-two, with a long thin nose and sandy hair just starting to recede from his temples.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

‘Callicrates,’ he replied. ‘I’m looking for the house of a man called Euthydemus son of Euxis, of Pallene.’

‘The house is down there,’ I said, ‘just before you get to the corner; but if you’re looking for Euthydemus himself, you’ll find him right behind you.’ For of course Euthydemus was my grandfather’s name and Euxis was his father, and our village and deme was Pallene.

Callicrates looked round but could see nobody; then he caught sight of the body floating in the trough and started violently.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘what do you want to go playing tricks like that for? You nearly gave me a fit.’

‘Honestly,’ I said solemnly, ‘that’s Euthydemus there. I should know, because I’m his grandson, Eupolis. All the rest of us who were in the house are dead, except me. The God cured me, like I said.’

Callicrates stared at me, as if I had just told him that Babylon had fallen. ‘Is that true?’ he said, after a moment.

‘Of course it’s true,’ I said. ‘If you don’t believe me, you can go and have a look for yourself, but I wouldn’t advise it. They all had the plague, you see.’

He was silent for a very long time, staring at the knots on the thongs of his sandals as if he expected them to burst into flower. Then he turned his head and looked at me gravely.

‘Eupolis,’ he said, ‘I am your cousin, the son of your mother’s elder brother Philodemus. My father and I have been away at the war and we’ve only just come home. As soon as they told us about the plague my father went off to see if our house was all right, and he sent me to look for his sister.

‘I’m afraid she’s dead,’ I said gently, for I could tell that the shock of seeing my grandfather had unnerved him and I wanted to spare him any further pain; he was only a mortal and might be upset. ‘But she died at her spinning-wheel and I’m sure the Ferryman will take her over for free, since she was Athenian on both sides. Have you got any water in your bottle? I’m really thirsty and I don’t want to drink the water in the trough.’

He handed me the bottle and I’m afraid I drank it all, without thinking where we would get any more. But Callicrates didn’t say anything, although I expect he was thirsty too. Then he opened his knapsack and handed me a piece of wheat bread, white and still quite soft, as good as cake.

Callicrates smiled when he saw how much I was enjoying it, and he said that where he had been they ate wheat bread as a matter of course and imported all their wine from Judaea.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that Callicrates was a coward, because he wasn’t. He had made up his mind to go into the house, which not many men would have done, and the only reason he did it was for my sake. You see, he knew that if there was a lawsuit about property someone would have to give evidence about how everyone had died, and I was too young to take the oath. So he screwed his face even more tightly into his cloak, took a deep breath, and plunged in. He wouldn’t let me come with him, and I was secretly relieved, since I no longer felt that the people in the house had anything to do with me. He was gone about five minutes and then came back, shivering all over as if he had been out in the snow in nothing but a tunic.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen everything I need to see. Let’s go to my father’s house.’

That sounded like an excellent suggestion, since I liked Philodemus; you may remember that he was the one who arranged for me to meet Cratinus, and he knew a lot of people and was always quoting from plays. He was a small, jolly man and I thought it would be more fun living with him than with my grandfather, who had never really liked me very much.

‘Callicrates,’ I said, ‘did you really have to go in there?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘like I told you.’

‘There won’t really be a lawsuit, will there?’ I said. ‘I thought that was only when people did something wrong, like stealing.’

He grinned, and the cloak fell off his face. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. And he was right, too, as it turned out. There was the most almighty lawsuit, and if he hadn’t gone into the house we would have lost, because of some legal presumption or other.

Whatever else I may forget, such as my name and where I live, I shall always remember that walk through the City. Everywhere we went, the streets were either totally deserted or frantic with activity; and where there were people, they all seemed to have bodies with them. There were bodies in handcarts, or on the backs of mules, or slung over men’s shoulders like sacks, so that it looked for all the world like the grapes being brought down for the vintage. Some were taking them to be properly burnt (there was no space to bury anyone, not even the smallest child) but they had to hurry, because if anyone saw a pyre burning and no one watching he would pitch the body he was carrying on to it and go away as quickly as he could. Others were actually digging shallow trenches in the streets to bury their dead; in fact there was a lot of trouble about it later on, when people started scraping up these trenches to recover the coins that the relatives had left in the corpses’ mouths for the Ferryman, and the whole plague nearly started all over again. Then there were many people who dumped dead bodies in the water-tanks and cisterns, partly because they reckoned that water would wash away the infection but mostly because by that stage they couldn’t care less; and only a complete idiot left the door of his stable open, or even his house; because if he did he would be sure to find two or three corpses there when he came home, neatly stacked like faggots of wood. Really, it was like watching a gang of thieves desperately getting rid of stolen property when the Constables arrive.

Naturally I wanted to stop and watch, since I felt that if ever I wanted to try my hand at a Tragedy or a Poem this would make the most wonderful set piece; the plague in the Greek camp at Troy, for instance, or the pestilence at Thebes at the start of an Oedipus. But Callicrates just wanted to get away as quickly as he possibly could, and he virtually pulled my arms out of their sockets in his haste to get home.

‘For God’s sake, stop dawdling, can’t you?’ he said several times. ‘You may be immune, but I’m not.’

And so I had to let all those marvellous details go to waste and scamper along at his heels, like a dog who can smell hares in the corn but has to keep up with his master. Eventually we reached Philodemus’ house, which was mercifully clear of infection, and I was just able to eat a huge bowl of porridge with sausage sliced up in it and drink a cup of wine and honey before falling fast asleep.

Apparently I slept for the best part of a day and a night, and while I was asleep Philodemus and Callicrates took out the cart, fetched the bodies out of my grandfather’s house, and cremated them honourably. Of course my grandfather himself was saturated with water from the trough and wouldn’t burn, so they had to dry him in the sun like goat’s meat for a journey; but they didn’t tell me that until several years later. They performed all the proper rites, however, mixing the ashes with honey and wine and milk and burying them in an urn with all the right invocations, and I’m very grateful for that, since properly speaking it was my job. When they got back, both Philodemus and Callicrates washed themselves very thoroughly and even burnt the clothes they had been wearing when they handled the bodies; Philodemus had got it into his head that the plague was somehow directly connected with all the dirt and squalor that went with having the whole of Attica cooped up inside the City walls. But Philodemus always did have a thing about cleanliness, even to the extent of having all the household refuse put into jars and dumped in the next street.

So I came to live with Philodemus and Callicrates, which I suppose was the greatest benefit I derived from the plague. I say the greatest, since of course with so many of our family dead I was the heir to a considerable amount of property. It’s true what they say, after all; men die, but land goes on for ever, and in those days people were only just starting to realise that land could be bought and sold. As a result of the heavy mortality among my kinsmen (most of whom, I confess, I had never even heard of) I stood to inherit a considerable holding.

Of course, there were endless lawsuits. About the only human activity not interrupted by the plague was litigation; indeed, with so many deaths the probate Courts were almost as busy as the political and treason Courts, and the litigants themselves never seemed to fall ill. Some of them were survivors like myself, laying claim to family estates, but even the others seemed to stay clear of the disease, at least while their case was being heard. Cratinus said that all the hot air and garlic fumes released in Court kept away the infection, and that Hades was in no hurry to crowd his nice orderly palace with noisy Athenian litigants, all shouting and calling each other names; he preferred to take quiet, honest men who would be a credit to his establishment. Cratinus, incidentally, went everywhere throughout the City visiting sick friends, helping them to laugh their way through the final agonising stages of the disease, and then burying them when even his jokes could keep them alive no longer. He claimed that his preservation was due to the prophylactic effects of cheap wine, but I prefer to think that Dionysus was looking after him too.