House of Names

by Colm Toibin

  On some days, the wind became fierce. The old woman always knew when it was about to happen. She would warn them. It could begin with a whistling sound in the night, or start during the day when it became even warmer than usual, and it could build up and last for two or three days before calming down again. When it whistled most loudly, Mitros had to stay close to the dog, which grew nervous and growled and wanted to hide. On the nights when the wind was at its most intense, when none of them could sleep and they settled in the kitchen uneasily, the old woman, having taken down a bottle of distilled fruit juice and poured a cup for herself and given the boys plenty of fruit and water, would tell them a story, promising that, if she could, she would make it last through the night.

  ‘There was a girl,’ she began one night, ‘and she was known as the most beautiful girl that anyone had ever seen. There were different opinions about her birth. Some believed that her father was one of the old gods who had come to earth disguised as a swan. But, no matter what they thought about the father, all were agreed on the name of the girl’s mother.’

  The old woman stopped as the wind continued around the house. As the dog moved farther into the corner, Mitros sat on the floor close by.

  ‘What was the name of the mother?’ Orestes asked. ‘Was she a god too?’

  ‘No, she was mortal,’ the old woman said and stopped again. She seemed to be trying to think of something.

  ‘It was the time of the gods,’ the old woman said. ‘The swan lay with her, the mother, and some say . . .’

  ‘What do they say?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘They say that two were born from the swan as the father and the other two from a mortal father. A boy and a girl, and another boy and a girl. And the girl, the daughter of the swan, was the enchanting one. The others . . .’

  She stopped again and sighed.

  ‘The two boys are dead now,’ she continued, whispering. ‘They are dead, like all the men from that time. They died protecting their sister. That is how they died.’

  ‘Why did they have to protect her?’ Leander asked.

  ‘All the princes and kings wanted to marry her,’ the old woman said. ‘And it was agreed that anyone who bid for her hand even if they lost the bid would have to promise to come to her husband’s assistance if anything should happen to her. And that is how the war began, the war that took the boats and the men. It began because of her beauty.’

  The woman talked as the wind howled around the house. The three boys sat with her through the night, Orestes and Leander waking and dozing in their chairs, Mitros remaining with the dog, which was frightened by the wind.

  *

  Leander and Orestes learned to whistle so that even if they were apart, they could hear each other. Their main whistle was a greeting, a way of letting each other know where they were; another whistle was to say that it was time to go back to the house for food; another whistle meant that they should find each other as soon as possible; the last whistle meant intruders. They worked with Mitros, teaching him to whistle if they were late for a meal, and teaching him the loudest, sharpest whistle if the dog ever pawed the ground.

  Since they could whistle if they needed each other, Orestes and Leander could work in different fields, or one could stay in the house while the other went in search of an animal. It also meant that Orestes could walk along the edge of the cliffs until he found an opening, a rocky path that led down to the ocean. He knew that the old woman worried about the waves, which could be high and rough, so he never told her that he often went there when the day was coming to an end just to be on his own and look at the water.

  He found a ledge. Some days he walked down and watched the waves pushing in, crowding against each other to crash against the rocks below. Sometimes, birds flew over the sea in strange formations, some flying high and others closer to the surface of the water. It was mostly calm and still, but on the days when there was some wind, the wind seemed to toss the water far out.

  Soon, he convinced Leander to come with him. They sat together on the ledge as the sunlight faded. Leander seldom wore a shirt when he worked outdoors; his body was tanned. He was much taller than Orestes and bigger. He was like one of the warriors that Orestes remembered with his father, one of the men who walked purposefully in and out of his father’s tent.

  Orestes wanted to ask Leander if he had a plan, if he was counting the time passing, as Orestes was, by the waxing and waning of each moon, by the lambing seasons, by the way in which crops grew, and by the fruit trees with their harvest, and if he thought they would stay here for the rest of their lives, if they would remain even after the old woman died. But, as time passed, as moons grew full and thin, and no further intruders appeared, it looked as though the three of them had been forgotten, as though they had found the place where they would live safely and that any going or moving would only put them in danger.

  Sometimes, Orestes gazed at the sea, searching the horizon for boats or ships. He had remembered the boats and ships all waiting in the harbour when he was with his father in the camp. But there was no sign of anything.

  As they sat there together, Orestes lay back and leaned his head against Leander’s chest as Leander put his arms around him and held him. Orestes knew when that happened to say nothing, and think of nothing either, merely wait until the sun dipped into the sea, when Leander would relax his arms and nudge Orestes out of the way and stand up and stretch and they would walk back together to the house.

  Often at night, Mitros relayed to Orestes the stories that the old woman had told him when he was alone with her. Whispering, he recounted what she had said, trying to remember the exact words, stopping in the same way she did when he came to some of the details.

  ‘There was a man, or maybe a king,’ he said, ‘who had four children, one girl and three boys. He loved his wife and his children and they were happy.’

  ‘When was this?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mitros said.

  ‘And then the woman died,’ he continued, ‘the mother of the four children, and they were sad until their father sent for the sister of their mother and he married her and they were happy again until she became jealous of the four children. So she ordered the children to be killed, but the servant she ordered to do the killing said that he could not do it because they were beautiful children and . . .’

  He stopped for a moment as though he had forgotten the next part.

  ‘Maybe the king would be angry,’ Orestes said.

  ‘Yes, maybe. But then she came to kill them herself.’

  ‘When they were sleeping?’

  ‘Or when they were playing. But when she came to kill them she was not able. So instead, she turned them into swans.’

  ‘And could they fly?’

  ‘Yes. They flew away. It was part of the spell that they had to fly far away, but before they did they asked for one thing. They asked for a silver chain so that they would never be apart. The chain was made for them and they flew away with the chain between them.’

  ‘But what happened to them?’

  ‘They flew to one place and then to another, and then to another, and many years passed. Sometimes it was cold.’

  ‘Did they die?’

  ‘They flew for nine hundred years. And all the years they waited and talked about going home. They talked about the day when they would fly with the silver chain still between them and they would find the place they came from. But when that time came, everyone they had known was dead. There were other people there, people they did not know, new people who were frightened when the swans landed and their wings fell off, and then their beaks and then all their feathers fell off. And they were people again. They were people but they were not children any more. They were old. They were nine hundred years old, and all the new people ran away when they saw them.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘They died, and then the people who ran away came back and buried them.’

  ‘And the
silver chain? Did they bury that too?’

  ‘No. The people kept the silver chain, and they sold it later, or used it for something else.’

  *

  Slowly, the old woman weakened. Mitros made her a bed in the kitchen because she could no longer walk. She still talked to him during the day, and at mealtimes she ate some food but only if Mitros gave it to her. She did not recognize either Orestes or Leander. When they spoke to her, she did not reply. Sometimes, she began a story about ships and men, and a woman and the waves, but she could not continue. At other times, she listed names, but they seemed to have no connection with anything. They ate in silence at the table, letting her voice come and go, barely listening since almost everything that came from her made no sense to them.

  Halfway through a sentence she would often fall asleep, and then wake again and call for Mitros and he would feed her and sit close to her, bringing the dog with him, while the other two went back to work or moved to another part of the house or down to the ledge over the rocks to look out at the waves.

  One evening, the woman had repeated some phrases over and over and then some names before she stopped speaking and slept. They had almost finished their food when she woke again and began to whisper. At first they could not easily hear her. It was a list of names. Orestes stood up and moved towards her.

  ‘Can you say the names again?’ he asked.

  She did not pay any attention to him.

  ‘Mitros, can you ask her to say the names again?’ Orestes asked.

  Mitros moved towards the woman and knelt in front of her.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he whispered.

  She stopped speaking and nodded.

  ‘Can you say the names again?’ he asked.

  ‘The names?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This house was filled with names. Now there is only Mitros.’

  ‘And Orestes and Leander,’ Mitros said.

  ‘They will go as the others went,’ she said.

  ‘We will not go,’ Leander said in a louder voice.

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘The houses were all filled with names,’ she said. ‘All the names. This house was . . .’

  She put her head down and did not say anything more. After a while, when Orestes saw that she was not breathing, they stayed close to her for some time, Mitros holding her hand.

  Eventually, Orestes whispered to Leander: ‘What should we do?’

  ‘She is dead. We should take her to her room, bring a light with us, and stay with her until the morning,’ Leander said.

  ‘Are you sure she is dead?’ Mitros asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Leander said. ‘We’ll stay with her body tonight.’

  ‘And then bury her?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Mitros will know.’

  As they carried her body gently down to the room at the end of the house where she slept, Mitros, who was following them with the dog, started to cough and remained huddled in the corner of the room where the woman lay, moving at intervals to touch her face and her hands and then returning to where he had been. As the night wore on, however, and he began to cough more, he had to go outside for air.

  Orestes and Leander stayed with the body, now grown cold and stiff, neither of them daring to speak. This was, Orestes saw, the time they had been dreading, the time when something would have to be decided. They had been in this house, he knew, for five years. He realized that he did not know what Leander wanted to do, what he had been thinking about all the time they had been here.

  He did not want to go away from here. Too much time had passed. If, when Mitros returned, Leander said that he believed that they should stay here and make no plans to leave, then Mitros would quickly assent and so would he. They would stay until they grew old as the woman had grown old.

  Orestes tried to imagine which of them would die first, and who would be alone here at the end. He thought that Mitros would die first since he was the weakest. He imagined himself and Leander alone here, Leander looking after the animals and crops and he, Orestes, looking after the kitchen and the food and collecting the eggs. He imagined Leander coming in as the day ended and his having the food ready for Leander and then the conversation about the weather and the crops and the animals, and maybe they would, in time, talk about Mitros and the old woman and maybe even about home, the people they had left at home.

  In the morning, Mitros took them to the place in the bushes where the old woman had said that she wanted her body to be laid. He was still coughing and holding his chest as the other two dug a hole where the woman’s body could be buried. When flies gathered around her, Mitros made himself busy between gasps brushing the flies away.

  The woman’s eyes were still half open, and, even though her body was inert and lifeless, there were moments when Orestes felt that she had actually moved for a second, or that she could see them and hear them as they prepared her grave. When it came to the time when they could lower her body into the hole they had dug, they hesitated. They studied the scene, immobilized.

  Mitros bent down and held the woman’s hand. Leander sat on the ground, staring ahead. The dog crawled into the shade.

  Suddenly, it struck Orestes what he might do. He stood up straight, causing both Mitros and Leander to watch him closely. As he looked at the dead body of the woman, he remembered the song that had been sung by the wife as her husband had lain poisoned by the water from the well. He cleared his throat and began to sing. He was not sure of all of the words, but he remembered the melody. He remembered also the intensity that the woman had used as she sang to the sky. Orestes looked up at the sky as the woman had. When he forgot the words, he repeated previous lines or he made them up. He forced his voice to become louder as he saw Mitros nodding to Leander. Mitros put his hands under the woman’s shoulders, Leander knelt and put his arms under her legs. Slowly, they edged her to the side of the grave, lowered her gently into the ground and then filled the grave.

  As all three walked back towards the house, followed by the dog, Leander asked Orestes where he had learned the song. Orestes pictured the scene – the man in agony on the ground, the guards watching implacably, the child in the woman’s arms, the sky above them. It seemed like another life, or a life that had belonged to someone else.

  ‘I don’t remember where I learned it,’ he said.

  As Mitros remained in the kitchen with the dog, Leander went into the fields and Orestes went to his ledge, hoping to be joined there by Leander so that he could find out what plans he had. But Leander did not appear.

  He looked out at the sea and listened to the sound of the waves crashing below for as long as he could, and, when he grew tired waiting, he went back to the house to find Mitros on the floor coughing violently, with blood coming from his mouth. He went outside and whistled for Leander to come and then went back to the kitchen and held Mitros’ head in his lap.

  That night, they sat by Mitros’ bed as he slept and then woke coughing and then slept again. Later, they brought him food and made sure that he was comfortable, with the dog stretched out beside him.

  ‘We have to leave,’ Leander said. ‘We have been lucky up to now. But some day more people will come here and we won’t be able to withstand them.’

  ‘I can’t go,’ Mitros said.

  ‘We’ll wait until you’re better,’ Leander said. ‘Until the coughing has gone.’

  ‘I can’t go,’ he repeated.

  ‘Why?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘The woman told me that as soon as I left here death would be waiting.’

  ‘For all of us?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘No, just for me.’

  ‘And us?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘She told me everything that will happen,’ Mitros said.

  ‘Is it bad?’ Orestes asked.

  Mitros did not reply but held Orestes’ gaze for some time as though he were working out what to say.

  ‘You can tell
us,’ Leander said.

  ‘No, I cannot,’ he replied.

  He closed his eyes then and remained motionless. Orestes and Leander left him sleeping and went back to the kitchen.

  When they heard the loud cough again, they came to him immediately. His eyes were open; he reached out to grip Orestes’ hand.

  ‘Will you . . . ?’ he began before he coughed again.

  ‘You don’t have to talk,’ Leander said. ‘Just rest.’

  ‘I want to sit up.’

  They helped Mitros to sit up. All the time he was holding Orestes’ hand.

  ‘Will you tell them?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell them what?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘That I was with you all these years, and tell about the old woman and the dog and the house. Will you tell them the story of us, what we did?’

  ‘Tell who?’ Orestes asked.

  Leander put his hand on Orestes’ shoulder, pulling him back. Mitros released his hand.

  ‘We’ll tell them that you were happy,’ Leander said, ‘and that you were looked after and that we loved you and cared for you, and that nothing bad happened to you, nothing bad at all. I will tell them and Orestes will tell them too. It’s the first thing we’ll do when we get home.’

  ‘Orestes . . .’ Mitros began.

  ‘Mitros, I’m here.’

  ‘Maybe what she said about what will happen isn’t true,’ Mitros whispered.

  ‘But what did she say?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘Will you promise to tell them?’ Mitros asked in a louder voice, ignoring Orestes’ question.

  ‘Yes, I promise.’