The Walled Orchard (46 page)

It was easy to rationalise, of course; obviously, the news of the disaster had not yet reached the City. This was hard to credit; surely someone in authority at Catana should have sent a letter or something. But probably someone had left it to someone else, or it was still on its way, or the ship it was on had been sunk or stopped off at Methana to do a little business.

Then it occurred to me that, if I was right, the son of Philip and I were the only people in the whole of Athens who knew about the destruction of the fleet. That was not a pleasant thought. Now it was clearly my duty (I couldn’t count on Aristophanes to do anything useful) to go and tell someone about it, such as the Polemarch and the Council. But would they believe me? Of course not. Cleagenes the corn-merchant hadn’t believed me, so why should the Polemarch? I would probably find myself in the prison for starting seditious rumours or something of the sort.

But I couldn’t just go home, take my boots and hat off, and pretend I had never been away. Leaving to one side the fate of the City, which was now totally defenceless and at the mercy of the Spartans (who undoubtedly knew), there was my peace of mind to consider. I couldn’t keep a forty-thousand-corpse secret to myself; I would burst, like the frog in the fable. Perhaps I could tell someone else who would tell the Council for me; someone they would listen to.

I was walking along thinking like this when a man touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Is that you?’

I turned and looked at him. It was Philonides the Chorus-trainer. I said nothing.

‘Eupolis,’ said Philonides, ‘I thought you were away at the War.’

‘I was,’ I replied.

‘When did you come back?’

‘Just now.’

‘This morning?’

‘Yes.’

He studied me carefully; I wasn’t usually this taciturn, he was thinking, perhaps I was ill. ‘Have you been wounded?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’re back?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m all right.’

‘So what are you doing in Athens?’ It was extraordinary, I thought. Here is a man I know, being friendly in a normal sort of a way, and I suddenly don’t know how to talk to him. ‘Glad to see you, of course. And how’s the War going?’

‘The War’s over,’ I said.

He broke into a smile. ‘Already?’ he said. ‘I knew we could rely on Demosthenes to get it finished. He’s hot stuff, Demosthenes, whatever they say down at the Baths.’

‘We lost,’ I said. ‘Demosthenes is dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes,’ I snapped, ‘dead.’

‘Oh God,’ said Philonides, and he seemed to sag, like a punctured wineskin. ‘So Nicias is in charge of the army?’

‘Nicias is dead too.’

‘Nicias as well?’ Philonides stared at me. ‘But that’s impossible.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Then who’s in charge of the army, for God’s sake?’ he said. ‘Not that imbecile Menander. I couldn’t bear it. Or Eurymedon, for that matter. The man’s a fool.’

‘There is no army.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Watch my lips,’ I said. ‘There is no army. Got it? They’re all dead. All except maybe two or three hundred.’

For a moment his mind rejected the statement; then he believed it. ‘The whole lot?’ he said.

‘The whole lot.’

‘So what about the fleet?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s the fleet?’

I smiled, I can’t say why. ‘At the bottom of Syracuse harbour,’ I replied. ‘Most of it, anyway.’

He stood there for a moment, a totally empty man, a shell of a man, a man with no contents. His mouth was wide open, and I noticed how straight and white his teeth were for a man of his age. He clearly didn’t have anything to say, so I reckoned it was up to me to keep the conversation going.

‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘I managed to get away to Catana with Aristophanes the son of Philip. He’s probably at his house by now, getting drunk I shouldn’t wonder. Go and ask him if you don’t believe me. How did his play do, by the way; the one he left with you?’

‘It came second.’

‘Second?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh well.’

‘All
of them?’ he said. ‘That whole army?’

‘Yes.’

We stood there for a moment; there was no hurry about anything. Then Philonides said, ‘Have you reported to the Council?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’m on my way home. I badly need a wash and a shave.’

‘That can wait,’ he said. ‘Look, my nephew Palaeologus is a Councillor, we’d better tell him first.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Shall we get Aristophanes to back me up?’

‘Good idea,’ said Philonides. He was excited, talking quickly; this self-imposed task was something he could keep between himself and what he had just heard. ‘Look, my place is on the way, I’ll send the boy round to Aristophanes’ place — you’re sure he’ll be there?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t say where he was going.’

‘Oh well, never mind. We’ll send the boy anyway. Then we’d better get over to Palaeologus’ house.’

So that was what we did. The whole thing struck me as vaguely comical; after all, I reasoned to myself, if our army were dead now, they were likely still to be dead after I had had a wash and a shave, and probably would stay dead until I had had something to eat. But I didn’t want to say anything to Philonides; I felt it might upset him.

Palaeologus the Councillor wasn’t unduly pleased to see us; he had been up late the night before, he said, and he had a headache. I offered to go away and come back later, but Philonides shut me up. He said he had some terrible news. I objected that I was the one with the terrible news, and would he please stop upstaging me. He got rather upset with me at this and told me to be quiet; in fact, he was getting rather hysterical. Palaeologus the Councillor looked at me, since I appeared to be rather more in control of myself, and asked me what was going on. I told him.

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God in Heaven.’

‘So you believe me, do you?’ I asked. ‘I thought I’d have difficulty convincing you.’

Palaeologus shook his head. ‘We’d heard news already,’ he said. ‘Well, sort of. We didn’t believe it.’

He explained. Two days ago, an Aeginetan scent-dealer had landed at Piraeus with a cargo of myrrh. He had sailed non-stop from Methana, and he was tired, and he wanted a shave, so he went over to a barber’s shop he knew just off the Market Square. While he was being shaved he started making conversation, the way you do in a barber’s shop.

‘Sorry to hear about your bad luck,’ he said.

‘What bad luck?’ said the barber.

‘In Sicily,’ said the Aeginetan. ‘It’s all over Methana. I’m sorry for you, really I am. It was a rotten thing to happen.’

‘We haven’t had word from Sicily for a while now,’ said the barber. ‘Things going badly, are they?’

‘I should say,’ said the Aeginetan. ‘Your whole army’s been wiped out.’

The barber stared at him for a second or two, then ran out into the street, still holding his razor, and started yelling at the top of his voice, ‘The army’s been wiped out! The army’s been wiped out!’ Now it happened to be just before Assembly-time, and so the magistrates and the archers were out, getting the red rope ready. They saw this lunatic running up and down, waving a razor and yelling, and arrested him.

He told them what he had heard and pointed to his shop, where the Aeginetan was sitting waiting for the rest of his shave. The magistrate marched into the shop, saw that the man was Aeginetan, and arrested him for spreading malicious rumours. He and the barber were in the prison at this very moment awaiting trial. The Council had been told, as a matter of routine, but they had ignored it. But what convinced Palaeologus was the fact that he knew (now he came to think of it) that I had been with Demosthenes’ army, because he had happened to see me at the dockside when he came to wave off his brother-in-law, and someone had pointed to me and asked him who I was.

Then Aristophanes arrived, looking very irritated at being disturbed, and confirmed what I had said. So we had to go down to the Council Chamber and wait until the Council could be summoned, and then the Councillors grilled us for what seemed like hours, asking all manner of trick questions to try and catch us out. This made Aristophanes livid, and he asked if they were calling him a liar, but I realised that it was just Athenian instinct and answered their questions as best I could. Then we were shoved into a little room — me, Aristophanes and Philonides — and the door was bolted on us. We asked .why we were being locked up like this, but nobody answered.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is cosy. So what’s been happening in the City while we’ve been away?’

Philonides didn’t answer, and we sat there for a while staring at the walls. Then Aristophanes asked how his play had got on. Philonides told him it had come second.

‘Second?’ said Aristophanes, with disgust.

‘That’s right, second.’

‘That’s bloody typical, that is,’ he said. ‘You realise that the parabasis was a thorough condemnation of our Sicilian policy? God, we deserved to lose.’

After two or maybe three hours someone came and let us out. They told us to go straight home and stay there, and not to say anything to anybody. There would be widespread panic, the man said, and it was the Council’s job to make the announcement.

We were bundled out by the back way, past the ash-heap, and escorted home by archers; hardly a hero’s welcome, I thought, but then, who cares? It was nice that some things, like the Council, were still the same. I wondered how long it would last.

The archer knocked on the door for me; I imagine he thought I might try and communicate a coded message if I knocked myself. The slave opened the door and stared at me, and the archer more or less pushed me through the door.

‘Hello, Thrax,’ I said to the slave. ‘Is your mistress here, or is she in the country?’

‘She’s here, asleep,’ said the slave. ‘We thought you were in Sicily.’

‘I was,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve come home. It happens quite a lot, you know. Go and wake her, will you?’

He went scampering off, and I drew my sword and put it back over the lintel, where it belonged. It made quite an attractive ornament.

Now I assume that you are all educated people and know your
Odyssey,
and your
Thebaid
and
Little Iliad
too; so I can’t describe this next scene as I would wish to, in the interests of dramatic effect, because you would object that I had stolen it from the classics. This business of not appearing to copy one’s predecessors is a very real problem for a writer, and when all the most obvious approaches to a particular scene have been blocked by the previous efforts of the great masters, he often finds himself reduced to describing what actually happened. The only form of literature that seems to be immune from this difficulty is Tragedy, of course, but the Tragedians’ minds are too lofty and elevated to worry about that sort of thing. At times, I feel, they live in a world of their own. But the poor, long-suffering historian has this concern as his constant companion, sitting by his elbow as he writes, and saying, ‘No, no, you can’t do that, it’s been done before; you must have them coming
down
the hill and turning left’; or ‘You must be crazy putting in a battle here; we had a battle in the last chapter that was exactly the same.’ Now your historian may start off with all manner of lofty ideals, such as recording for all time the clear essence of what actually happened, but he soon gets this beaten out of him by the people he reads his work to while he is writing it. Take the celebrated Herodotus, for example. Now when he was writing his histories, he spent years traipsing all round the world asking old men what their grandfathers remembered, and writing down their answers on wax, and when he got home he sorted through these facts and eliminated the inconsistencies and accounted for the errors in chronology arising from the fact that in some places a generation is reckoned at thirty-three years and in other places at forty years, and at last sat down and wrote his history. Then he read it to his wife.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ said she. ‘You can’t expect anyone to listen to that.’

‘Why?’ asked Herodotus.

‘Well,’ said his wife patiently, ‘it all sounds so… well, so
true,
if you see what I mean.’

Herodotus thought for a while; then he saw what she was getting at. He went back to work with a vengeance. He increased all the distances he had so carefully measured, and doubled the numbers of Persian soldiers which he had so painstakingly recorded; he took out the account of how gold dust is refined in the desert by the use of sieves and running water, and replaced it with a ludicrous fairy-story about pygmies and giant ants; and he invented a whole new section about Scythia, which was the one part of the world he hadn’t been to, and claimed that he had travelled the length and breadth of the country and seen all these fictional wonders with his own eyes. Finally, he lodged his original draft in the temple of Athena, in case the Council should ever need accurate information on any of these places or subjects, and gave readings from the revised version which were, of course, a spectacular success.

But I see, on looking back through what I have written up to this point, that I have given a factual and quite personal account of what happened to me in Sicily —written, it seems, on the assumption that my readers will be interested in the deeds of one single man who was not himself particularly important, which is of course a highly doubtful assumption to make. As a result, I have left myself no option but to describe what follows, including my meeting with Phaedra, as truthfully as I can after so many years, or else go back and rewrite what has gone before, putting in nice little snippets of geography and fable and scattering about gods and miracles, just as we interplant barley in the empty ground between the rows of vines in a vineyard. I would have no objection to doing this if it were up to me; but that tiresome man Dexitheus the bookseller was nagging me for a completed manuscript this morning when I went down to the Market Square to buy fish, and so I had better press on; and if what follows seems to you to be too realistic, you must blame him, not me.

I was putting my sword back over the lintel, as I have told you, when the door to the inner room opened and there was Phaedra. I assumed it was Phaedra; but if I had been a witness in a trial and the prosecutor was asking me if I was absolutely sure I would have had to qualify my statement, because I couldn’t just then remember what Phaedra was supposed to look like. What I saw was a woman of average size in her middle to late twenties, with untidy hair and the clear signs of a badly set broken jaw. As I looked at her, I could find no memories, recollections, associations in my mind about her; neither love nor hate, nothing binding me to her or repelling me from her, and I had this extraordinary feeling that it was open to me either to accept her as mine or reject her as spurious, as if she was one of the stray goats that we round up on the hills from time to time and do our best to identify. If I accepted her now — it was almost like a second wedding-day — then I would be bound to her for life. If I rejected her, I could turn my back on her and be done with her for ever.