House of Names

by Colm Toibin

  *

  As the morning progressed, the palace became like a marketplace, with food being brought to the kitchens, the front rooms filled with soldiers eating or sleeping or sitting in groups talking, and the corridors noisy with messengers and prisoners and women looking for their husbands or their brothers or their sons.

  When the elders came together in a building close to the palace that had not been used for many years, Leander explained that he needed guidance on what should be done with Aegisthus, who was now under heavy guard in the dungeon. When Electra expressed the opinion that it was obvious what to do with him, some of the elders agreed with her.

  ‘It is not obvious,’ Leander said. ‘Aegisthus knows every detail of what has been happening here. He is the only one alive who knows. There may even be kidnapped people such as my grandfather and Mitros and his family imprisoned in isolated places. Only he knows where these places are. He is the only person we can use to free them.’

  While he was speaking, Ianthe made her way towards him, waiting until he had finished, and then whispered into his ear. He listened attentively, nodding his head, as if she had imparted some fact that was interesting but not of any great consequence. And then he turned away and doubled up in pain. Orestes thought for a moment that he should go to him and comfort him, but Leander was kneeling, unapproachable, heaving as he sobbed. All they could do was watch him in silence. When Ianthe reached towards him, Leander found her hand and held it.

  *

  Later, it was decided by Leander with a majority of the elders that Aegisthus’ life would be spared but that he would have his legs broken, thus preventing him from wandering in the palace and fomenting conspiracies. Once he recovered, Leander decreed, he could be brought into the assembly room and included in the deliberations, but he would have to be watched carefully.

  When Electra protested, demanding that he be put to death, she was overruled.

  ‘There has been enough killing, there are enough dead bodies,’ Leander said.

  Since Orestes found Ianthe a more congenial companion than Leander or his sister, who had begun to ignore him, and often pretended that he was not there during these meetings about the fate of their enemies, he made sure that he was sitting near her.

  When Ianthe started to come to Orestes’ room at night, he did not ask her if she had been sent by Electra or how she explained her absence to his sister, or indeed if her brother was aware of what she was doing.

  As they lay together, Orestes was surprised at how much he wanted her and how the prospect of being with her at night made his days easier. Ianthe was hesitant with him at first, almost afraid to be touched. But soon she put her arms around him and let herself be held and they slept close to each other.

  Orestes observed a change in Electra now that Leander had returned. She no longer went to her father’s grave. She had become brisk, almost sharp. Since she spent her day issuing instructions, consulting Leander and the elders, exercising control, her movements were now decisive and direct and her voice deeper, her tone more exact and precise. She did not mention the gods or the spirits of the dead, but spoke rather of distant regions that would have to be brought under control. She was like someone who had been woken from a dream.

  He wondered how much of this was an act and under what pressure it might fall apart, as her earlier pose as the daughter who lived by the light of the gods had fallen apart.

  In the largest room in the palace, Electra spent her day with Leander. When they needed the elders, they called for them. It occurred to Orestes sometimes how much his mother would have loved this new dispensation, the urgent messages, the orders being formulated, the times being allotted for meetings with those in line outside the palace.

  He noticed how much his sister and Leander deferred to Aegisthus, whose knowledge of old family feuds or ancient disputes over boundaries or what land was the most fertile or which individuals could not be trusted was detailed and accurate. Aegisthus sat in a chair as if nothing had happened. When it came time to move, the loss of power in his legs seemed like merely a minor irritant, or an extra quality that made him endearing.

  Indeed, since he had taken up residence in Electra’s old room, where Leander insisted, in response to Electra’s protests, that he could be watched most vigilantly, Aegisthus had many visitors at night, beginning with the servants, who came with food for him and with warm greetings from the kitchen. Since Electra objected to his presence at meals, banishing him to his own quarters once the day’s business had been completed, Aegisthus took advantage of this. News spread that the best cuts of meat and the freshest pastries made their way to his solitary table. Once the food had been eaten, other visitors came, some of whom did not leave until dawn.

  Since his emergence from the dungeon, Aegisthus paid Orestes close attention. He had obviously been told that it was Orestes who had killed Clytemnestra, and Orestes could see that the idea both puzzled his mother’s former lover and deepened his interest in her son.

  Once, when they were discussing a plan for irrigation with some of the elders and Aegisthus began to speak, Orestes caught Electra’s eye. As she smiled darkly at him, he nodded to her. It was plain to him then that his sister had no intention of tolerating Aegisthus’ presence for much longer. No matter what Leander or the elders thought, he saw, Aegisthus would be quietly murdered when everything else had become calm. Orestes still had the knife he had used to kill his mother. It was hidden in his room. Once Electra gave him the sign, he would be ready to use it again.

  *

  Since they had returned, he and Leander had never once spoken about the place where they had been held, or their escape, or the old woman’s house, or Mitros. What happened in that time came to Orestes now as moments, single images, flashes of memory, things made all the brighter because they did not easily connect. He felt that Leander, having found out how near they were to being released when they escaped, did not want those years to be discussed. They would be consigned to oblivion, Orestes thought. Even though he could not revisit them with Leander, he did so in his imagination when he was alone. But it was not enough; they would shrink, shrivel, fade away until a time would come when what happened might not have been. He was the only one who would remember.

  And a few times when he met some of the boys, now grown men, who had been in the place of detention with him, he saw that they had been avoiding him since his return. Indeed, he thought, it was only now that he began to hear again their names. As they came with their fathers to the palace, they nodded to him in polite recognition, but nothing more.

  Leander had made a room for himself at the front of the palace where he oversaw the arrival of troops. It was he who decided which guards were on duty, and since the guards reported directly to him, Orestes presumed that he knew precisely when Ianthe moved each night from Electra’s room to Orestes’ room, returning in the hour before the first glimmer of dawn. On a number of occasions when he saw Ianthe to the door, he was tempted to go down the corridor to see if her brother was awake, but he was afraid of what he might find if he were to surprise Leander in his quarters.

  He felt sometimes that both his sister and Leander had wilfully abandoned him, that he reminded them of events they wanted to gloss over, forget. They were reluctant to be alone with him. He was no longer of any interest to them, just as the gods and the spirits no longer appeared to interest Electra or events that had happened in the past no longer interested Leander.

  Orestes was still living somewhere that was shadowy, haunted; it was a region that both Electra and Leander had lived in too but had left for a place that shone with a promise that his very presence seemed to dilute. It was strange to him that, while he had remained in the palace, Leander had gone out into the world, and that while he had remained within the orbit of his mother and Electra and Ianthe, Leander had become a warrior like Orestes’ own father. More and more, his killing of his mother seemed almost unreal to him, something that no one mentioned, as though it had not h
appened.

  *

  One day, when he came into Electra’s room, she was at the window in deep discussion with a lone figure. Orestes watched them quietly for a time. When the man turned, he saw that it was the guard, the one with whom he had rescued Theodotus and Mitros. It was clear from the guard’s relaxed posture and willingness to interrupt his sister that they were talking as equals or as two people who were well acquainted with each other.

  Immediately, they stopped talking, the guard moving away, pretending to be occupied with something else, Electra striding across the room busily. It was as if they had been found out.

  As Orestes observed them, his concentration was broken by Ianthe, who asked him to come and sit with her. He pretended that he was listening to her as he went over in his mind the scene he had witnessed, the obvious familiarity between his sister and the guard and the feeling that they had not wanted him to see them together.

  Increasingly, as Electra appeared sometimes not even to see him, and as Leander continued to ignore him, and as they and the elders left him out of all their schemes, he felt as though he had been singled out for solitude. All of them, maybe even Ianthe, were at ease in a complex web of plans and alliances whose intricacies only they understood. It made him wish that he were small again, living in a time when these things did not matter to him, when he was the little boy who wanted to engage adults in mock sword fights.

  *

  Ianthe spent her day in the room where there was most activity. She knew each messenger by name and noted what time each one left and was expected to return. She also remembered what had been decided or on what matters the various elders had asked to be consulted. Usually she said little. She had a way, Orestes noticed, of listening and then seeming to be about to speak and then thinking better of it. She gave the impression that she was wrapped up in her own thoughts while also paying close attention to everything.

  When she told Orestes that she was pregnant, he asked her to wait for some time before telling Electra and Leander. He wanted something in the palace to be his alone, some secret to be known by no one except him.

  ‘I have already told them,’ Ianthe said.

  ‘Before you told me?’

  ‘I am telling you now.’

  ‘Why did you tell them first?’

  She did not reply.

  The following day, Orestes watched Leander pretend to be involved in deep conversations with some of the elders. Eventually, Orestes pushed past the men around him.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

  ‘We are sending messengers out today so it is busy.’

  ‘This is my father’s palace,’ Orestes said. ‘No one speaks to me in that tone.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Leander was clearly irritated. A number of the elders began to move nearer so they could hear the conversation.

  ‘I need time with you in private.’

  ‘Perhaps once the day’s work is done.’

  ‘Leander,’ Orestes whispered, ‘I will go to my room now, and I will expect you to follow me there.’

  In the room, Orestes had prepared what he would say. Once Leander appeared, however, he began to shift about as he spoke, as though he were thinking aloud and talking to someone who was in the habit of obeying orders.

  ‘A great deal happened here in your absence,’ he said. ‘I studied the systems we use. For example, how we raise taxes, or how we deal with the outlying regions. Other than Aegisthus, I am the one who knows most. Some of the elders know some things, but it is best not to trust them. They need to be watched.’

  Leander leaned against the wall and listened to him.

  ‘When I am included, I am paying real attention to the deliberations,’ Orestes went on, ‘and I feel that it would be better if things were confined to a smaller group. And some of the information that is being offered is wrong, some of the decisions misguided. I know the information to be wrong. I am sure the decisions are misguided.’

  ‘With whom did you study our systems so that you are so sure?’ Leander asked.

  ‘With my mother.’

  ‘And you want us to believe that what she told you was true?’

  ‘We studied the systems of administration.’

  ‘And then you murdered her?’

  ‘She gave the orders for your family to be killed. It was done on her orders. She is the one who killed my father.’

  ‘I know all of that,’ Leander said.

  ‘Leander, I am with you. When you were away, I did what you asked me to do.’

  ‘I asked for nothing.’

  ‘You sent me a message telling me to help release your grandfather and Mitros.’

  ‘I sent you no message. I was in battle. I did not know where my grandfather was. If you had not released my grandfather, he might be with us now.’

  ‘Who sent the message, then, if you did not?’

  ‘I have other things to think about,’ Leander said.

  As they stared at each other, the atmosphere becoming more hostile, Leander beckoned to Orestes. When Orestes came towards him, he reached out and touched his face and his hair.

  ‘The elders do not want you to be involved in anything,’ Leander said. ‘They do not even want you in the room listening to us. You are there only because Electra and I have insisted. The elders want you sent away.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Can you name another man who has ever done what you have done?’

  ‘If I had not killed my mother, you would not be here now.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  Leander pulled Orestes closer to him.

  ‘My sister is fragile,’ he said. ‘When you found her, she was seeking death. I want you to be with her, stay with her. I do not want you to leave her side.’

  ‘There are grave matters . . .’ Orestes began.

  ‘They are for me to deal with, and for your sister and the elders.’

  ‘I am my father’s son,’ Orestes said.

  ‘Perhaps you should pray to have that burden lifted from you. Maybe that is the last wish the gods may grant.’

  Orestes was shaking. He started to sob.

  ‘You must live with what you did,’ Leander said. ‘What you did is all you have. But now that my sister is pregnant, you will marry her and look after her. But nothing else. It has been decided that you will be involved in nothing else.’

  *

  When it was announced that Orestes and Ianthe would be married, both Ianthe and her brother were firm in their view that the wedding ceremony should be brief and private. It took place in a small room off the larger assembly hall in the palace gardens. Once the vows had been exchanged, no one spoke. Orestes could almost sense his sister and his wife and Leander looking around them in the silence, alert to the names of the dead, alert to the ones who had been murdered, whose absence filled the air.

  *

  Over meals, when the elders had left for the day and no more messengers were arriving, Leander and Ianthe both spoke openly about their parents and grandparents and their cousins. Their tone was filled with simple sorrow as well as pride. Once or twice, Orestes found himself looking at Electra, wondering if they too could begin mentioning their sister or their parents, even just saying their names or recalling something that one of them had done or said, but he realized from Electra’s bowed head that it was something that would not happen.

  Once, when he saw the guard with whom he had rescued Theodotus and Mitros leading a group of prisoners from the dungeon, which had become vastly overcrowded, to another place of detention, he wanted to stop him and ask who had told him where the two men were being held and how Electra managed to know so quickly what had happened. He was almost ready to accuse the guard of collaborating with his sister until it struck him that the guard would suggest that he confront Electra herself. He knew that he could not do that. For a second, as they locked eyes, he noted a look of guilt, almost shame, on the guard’s face before he passed on with the prisoners.
>
  Each night, Ianthe prepared for bed in his room, but repaired at some point to Electra’s quarters for a short time, coming back with news or some fresh opinion that Electra had shared with her. Orestes enjoyed touching her stomach, asking her to imagine what part of the child was where, or whether it was a boy or a girl.

  When, one night, Ianthe told him how soon she thought the child would come, he expressed surprise. She moved towards him and whispered: ‘Electra is the only one who knows this. Leander does not know and your sister advised me not to tell him and she advised me not to tell you either.’

  Orestes felt tense, presuming that the midwife who had come to the palace had told Ianthe and Electra that the child was in danger or might not live.

  ‘You must not tell Electra that I have told you,’ Ianthe said. ‘She made me agree that I would only tell you that the baby might come before its time.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you found me, I was already with child,’ Ianthe whispered.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I felt I was, even then. My mother and my grandmother had told me what I would feel. When I came to the palace first I was not certain, but soon I was, soon I was sure.’

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘They forced me, the men, they forced me while all of the others, including my grandfather, watched, and then, while I looked on, they killed the others and stacked them neatly as you saw. I presumed that I would be the last to be killed and so I waited. But they left me and they didn’t come back and so I found a place under the bodies. I wanted to be with those who had died, buried between them.’

  ‘I am not the father of the child?’ Orestes asked.

  ‘I don’t think that what we do in the dark can make me pregnant. For that to happen, it must be different.’

  Orestes held her to him, but did not speak.

  ‘But I have not told Electra that,’ Ianthe said. ‘And I will not tell her.’

  She sighed and put her arms around him.

  ‘When I knew first that I was to have a child,’ she continued, ‘I was ready to dash my head against the stone outside, or find a knife. I was ready to do that until your sister began to wash me at night and touch me, and then you too began to hold me, and then my brother came back. But I’ll leave you now. The marriage has been a mistake. I’ll ask my mother’s family in the village to take me in. I’ll clean for them, do what I can for them. I will have the child there. The child is already moving. I will walk to their village.’