The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  Presently he made his way across to us, sweating with exertion, triumphant, belly bulging through the folds of his new Egyptian-style linen robe. He was soused in some extremely powerful, over-sweet scent: Charaxus, I reflected, could make even prosperity seem offensive. His opaque black eyes flickered from face to face as he nodded his greetings to us.

  “Well, sister,” he said, “I presume you’ve rehearsed one of your less obliging speeches for the occasion.”

  “You had no right—”

  “Right? I had every right. We’ll talk about that later.” He snapped dismissive fingers. “Anyway”—his face broke into a self-satisfied smirk that made me want to hit him—“hadn’t you better wait to hear what your share of the profits comes to? Gold, I’ve found, sweetens feminine bad temper in the most remarkable way.”

  I said: “That’s lucky for you, isn’t it? Pm sure Irana will have a few interesting comments to make on the subject.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Charaxus said equably. “But then, I know Irana. When she finds I’ve not only not lost her precious dowry, but nearly doubled it, she’ll get down and lick the dust off the floor if I tell her to.”

  No one could think of an adequate comment on this remark, especially since we all had a nasty suspicion it might be no more than the literal truth.

  Charaxus stared us out with brazen self-assurance. He had found a simple key to power and was now busily trying it on every lock in sight. His eye rested pensively for a moment on Larichus’ blond beauty: it seemed unbelievable that these two could be brothers. From Charaxus’ expression—a curious blend of the speculative and the lubricious— I began to wonder whether he might not be sizing Larichus up as a potentially profitable export for his next voyage. To judge by what I had heard of the Greek community in the delta—let alone of the Egyptians themselves—the profit-margin might well have been more than enough to overcome mere family scruples.

  But all he said was: “I shall send you both a statement of accounts as soon as possible.” Larichus and I looked at each other. Charaxus chuckled. “Don’t worry; I can promise you a pleasant surprise.” Then, brusquely, he turned to my cousin Agenor, and said: “Where’s your sister?” Agenor’s face was a dark, expressionless mask. “At home. Supervising the preparations for your arrival.” “Good,” Charaxus said, and rubbed his hands again. “Come on: we’ve work to do.”

  The two men walked off together: stride and waddle, long shadow against short, one of the most improbable working partnerships (if you could call it that) which I had ever seen. Hermeas stared after Charaxus’ broad retreating back and spat noisily in the dust. No one else moved.

  “Yes,” said a light, drawling, familiar voice behind us: “I see what you mean, dear boy.”

  We all turned round simultaneously, like so many puppets. For a moment I did not recognize this tall, deeply bronzed traveller with the close-cropped hair and neat beard, the supercilious grey eyes. He leaned on a tall wooden staff that was carved with strange figures of beasts and Gods; at his heels, tongue lolling, crouched a huge black hunting-dog. He lifted one eyebrow fractionally at my hesitation, gave a brief ironic smile.

  “Alcaeus!” I exclaimed, and impulsively held out both my hands. “Welcome home, old friend.” The odd thing was that I meant it: we came closer in that unpremeditated moment than we had ever done before—or, alas, were ever to do again. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t expecting to see you—and you look so different—”

  “Let me return the compliment,” he said. “At least, I hope it’s a compliment” His five years in Egypt had left him, I noticed, with a slight but unmistakable foreign accent. His eye travelled over my striped silk dress, my jewellery, the ivory comb in my hair, the rings, the cosmetics. “The little island chrysalis has become a splendid dragonfly: a famous one, too. Do you realize I’ve heard Greek soldiers singing your poems above the First Cataract?”

  I smiled. “How could I? You never wrote?

  “No one writes letters from Egypt. It’s another world. Nothing exists outside it.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t changed so much after all: you still make the same plausible excuses?

  “Well, now—” he said, and let go of my hands. I suddenly remembered that we were not, in fact, alone. Alcaeus moved forward to exchange formal greetings. “Lady Ismene,” he said, and bent over her outstretched hand. “My congratulations on your marriage: your husband was a good friend to me in the old days?

  Ismene nodded placidly. “Yes,” she said, “I know.” Just what did she know, I wondered: and did it matter?

  Alcaeus turned to Larichus: “I would like to shake hands with you,” he said, twinkling, “but I have a feeling you might strike me blind for presumption: I’m only mortal, after all.”

  Larichus was by no means averse to this sort of compliment: he lowered demure eyes and extended his hand palm downwards, as though inviting Alcaeus to kiss it. I began to see why he was so popular, as a cupbearer at City Hall banquets. Not for the first time, I decided I must, even at the risk of a breach between us, have a really serious talk with my all-too-beautiful younger brother.

  But Alcaeus, like the old campaigner he was, refused the bait: he shook hands briskly, and at once turned to Hermeas. Larichus scowled: a rather attractive sight.

  Alcaeus said: “You don’t seem to approve of your energetic cousin, Hermeas.”

  Hermeas said: “Approve?” His mouth twisted up as though he had eaten a bitter olive. “Could you approve of him?”

  Alcaeus shrugged. “He’s not my cousin. But you have my sympathy? Their eyes met. “I hope we’ll see each other again.”

  Hermeas said slowly: “So do I. There are many things I’d like to discuss with you.”

  A faint, uneasy premonition stirred the surface of my mind and was gone.

  “Of course.” Alcaeus was amused, benevolent: had he sensed my mood? “The mysteries of Egypt. I shall obviously have to prepare a lecture on them. Private consultations for ardent young women in search of love-potions—closely followed by their mothers, enquiring about the secret of eternal life.”

  Atthis said quietly: “Is it true that the Egyptian priests know that secret?”

  He turned, instantly responsive to her mood, his face serious and attentive. “Men believe so,” he said. “Their belief is what matters.”

  But she would not be put off. “Do you believe so?”

  Alcaeus hesitated. He said: “The priests die. Or appear to die?

  Atthis stared past him at the bustling, noisy, colourful crowd that thronged the quayside: porters stooping under their heavy bales, water-carriers, talleymen, merchants, dark-skinned foreign sailors, laughing children, the old one-legged sausage-seller frying his wares over a charcoal brazier, crutch propped against the nearest bollard, both hands busy; waterfront whores, as bright as parrots, a thin-lipped market-inspector with his scales, the inevitable beggars and hard-luck men, their saurian eyes alert for some likely victim; the old blind woman with her basket of flowers.

  She said hesitantly: “Don’t you believe that if they did know the secret, you could tell it from their faces?”

  “Perhaps.” Alcaeus considered. “How would they look, do you suppose? What sort of expression does a man wear when he has seen into eternity?”

  Atthis said: “I see his face as a living skull, eaten away by sadness, sadness past all bearing. I cannot envy him that intolerable weight of knowledge. Only the Gods are strong enough—and callous enough— to possess it with impunity.” Then she blinked, as though waking up, ran one hand across her forehead, and burst out: “Good heavens, what a ridiculous way to talk. I’m so sorry. I can’t think what got into me—” Her face broke into that radiant, heart-melting smile. With sudden tenderness I thought: She is only seventeen still.

  “Please don’t apologize,” Alcaeus said gently. “For you, then, eternity is well lost?”

  She nodded, eyes bright. Alcaeus glanced quickly from her to me, and back again.

  “But
you fear foreknowledge?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Perhaps you are wise,” he said, and then, with apparent irrelevance: “They say that the Helen who stood on the walls of Troy was only a phantom, fashioned from clouds, and sent there for the express purpose of provoking strife.”

  I said: “Where was the true Helen all this while?”

  “Why, in Egypt. Or so the priests maintain. Their records, they say, go back to the beginning of time.”

  Again that uneasy premonition, like the first whisper of distant thunder, ran through me and was gone.

  “Well,” Alcaeus said, “there will be plenty of time to talk later? He smiled and inclined his head, formally polite. “I must see to my baggage. Please excuse me.” He strode away through the crowd, a solitary, enigmatic figure. We saw him stop and speak briefly to a scarred, squat, weatherbeaten man, a mercenary by the look of him: then he was lost to view. The whole episode had been strangely dreamlike: I think all of us wondered, for a moment, whether he—like this new, disturbing Helen he spoke of—had really been there at all.

  The picture remains undimmed by time, isolated in my capricious memory: their two heads, fair and coppery, bent together under a trellis of trailing roses, voices too soft for me to hear, Atthis’ quick, warm, spontaneous laughter. She is dressed in white, there is a dark crimson ribbon in her hair. Larichus’ skin gleams biscuit-brown, I can see the muscles slide in his arm as he gesticulates. Behind them is the orchard, a flight of swallows bickering overhead, blue sky ribbed with tiny clouds of carded wool.

  They are so beautiful together that tears come to my eyes; the ecstasy is keen as a razor’s edge, slicing through flesh and muscle, loosening all my limbs. I stand there on the last step above the rosewalk, speechless, paralyzed. Larichus is showing her something: a tiny bird, held in his cupped hands. My whole body begins to tremble uncontrollably, I can feel the cold sweat running down, my eyes darken, there is that hard, metallic ringing in my head as though I were about to faint.

  Yet what I feel has no touch of envy or jealousy in it: only a yearning passion almost too intense to support, the knowledge that this moment is, for all its perfection, as transitory as those light summer clouds that have already changed their shape, are shredding out into wisps of vapour, merging with the milk-pale haze on the horizon—and an upsurging joy that my brother should share it, be part of its wholeness, should, now if now only, walk like an immortal. My love is boundless, it can contain the whole world, here, now, at this place and time—

  But not eternity.

  When the corn had all been gathered in, and heat danced over the stubble, when streams failed and flocks huddled for comfort under the cicada-shrill plane-trees at noon, Antimenidas came home from the ends of the earth, a Babylonian sword in his belt, his face burnt black by the desert suns of Judaea, an uneasy hero to walk our narrow streets, with a king’s ransom at his command and the jagged scar down one cheek. Alcaeus wrote a triumphal ode to welcome him, and there was a good deal of cheering and flower-throwing down at the harbour when his ship put in. Presumably Myrsilus took due note of this popular demonstration, but—sensible as always—he did nothing about it. The amnesty had been granted, and that was the end of the matter.

  “In any case,” Alcaeus said, lounging elegantly on my day-bed, and cracking almonds with his strong white teeth between sentences, “soldiers back from the wars deserve a few flowers—not to mention the girls who throw them. And when did Mytilene last turn out for a hero’s homecoming?”

  I knew the answer to that as well as he did: after Pittacus’ mildly comic campaign in the Troad. Our island is too rich, our climate too mild to produce a race of warriors—an accident which I, for one, have always regarded with extreme gratitude.

  I said: “What do you suppose he’ll do now?”

  Alcaeus looked at me sharply. “Do? Nothing, unless he wants to. He brought back some quite fabulous loot from Babylon, you know. We’re still sorting it out. Enough to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life, and—”

  He broke off abruptly: I knew what he had been about to say—his sons after him. Neither he nor Antimenidas, though for widely differing reasons, had ever married. Now it looked as though the family, one of the oldest and most distinguished on Lesbos, might well die out for lack of an heir. I glimpsed an unlooked-for conflict in Alcaeus’ mind, a guilty sense of failure, family piety set in the balance against deep natural repugnance and failing to tilt the scales.

  As though reading my thoughts Alcaeus said: “Perhaps this is the better way. When the will to live is gone, let the good seed die out. What is left for us now or for those who come after us? Will our sons thank us for having brought them into a world where they live on sufferance, deprived of their birthright?”

  “Who can tell? Have we the right to put words in the mouths of the unborn? Might they not cry out, despite everything, Give us the light?”

  “Have you never wanted to die?” Alcaeus spoke with a sudden dreadful intensity, all the more startling by contrast with his normal cool, ironic manner. “Can you swear that you have never, never been tempted to kill yourself? Never known despair so great that death seemed a blessed release, the one true happiness?”

  I stared at him, amazed. Then I said: “Of course I have known such despair. So have you, so have we all. But I am alive still, and you, and Antimenidas, and many others who have suffered as we have. That is an answer of a sort.”

  “Is it?” He dropped a nut and ground it under his heel with sudden violence. “How long do you suppose my brother will live? I can smell death on him like a lover’s perfume. You’ve seen him, he has the sickness in his blood. He must go on to the end, do what he has to do, pray for a quick release.”

  I remembered the great seven-branched candlesticks in our bedchamber, the legacy in blood and sacrilege which they bore. Then another thought struck me: my hand went to my throat.

  “He gave me back the amulet,” I whispered.

  Alcaeus nodded. He said: “Can you still, here, now, maintain that you are truly happy?”

  I said steadily, with conviction: “Happier than I have ever been in my life. Happier than I dreamed was possible.” Then a tiny shiver ran through me: I remembered where, and to whom, I had spoken those words before.

  Alcaeus said: “You sound as though you believe it. How odd. Were you happy when you married that poor devil Cercylas rather than stay in Sicily? Were you happy when you were deciding our future with that whorish aunt of yours?”

  Stung and surprised—how on earth had he found out about so private a discussion?—I snapped: “Neither you nor your brother were above accepting the amnesty, I notice.”

  “Perhaps your motives and ours differed somewhat.”

  “That,” I said, “is a matter of opinion.”

  “Just so. And in my opinion, my dear, your motives are very simple. You want to queen it in Mytilene; you want a rich husband, devoted admirers, a life of leisure, poetry, and private emotions. You want scope to indulge your luxurious tastes and your—interesting passions. I can admire that in a way: it’s so single-minded. What irritates me is that on top of everything else you insist on presenting yourself as a sensitive idealist, a paragon of all the virtues. You’re selfish and opportunistic to the core, and the most dreadful thing about it is that you honestly believe in your own innocence.”

  “Innocence of what? Even if all you said were true—which I don’t admit—there are worse ambitions in life. What are you trying to tell me? That I’ve betrayed my friends, or the aristocratic ideal, or my father’s memory? Is it so noble or virtuous to be a failed rebel, eternally mourning dead causes? We can’t live in the past for ever. The old days are gone. Your brother knows that if you don’t.”

  “But his reaction isn’t quite the same.” Alcaeus got up and began to pace to and fro in the colonnade. A pair of swifts swooped chattering down from their nest, and he watched them out of sight: he was passionately interested in all wild things,
I recalled—another unexpected facet of his character—and on occasion spent days walking the hills, alone except for a favourite dog.

  He said: “Sometimes, you know, I begin to think you’re a little simple-minded. Or is it just that stubborn pride of yours? Or pure childishness? Or the fact that you’re so obviously in love?”

  I said nothing: there was nothing to say. Alcaeus stared at me with that passionate but detached absorption he displayed when watching a flight of widgeon or a nesting hawk. “Yes,” he said, “love creates its own special obsessions and indifferences. To that extent it is, as tradition tells us, blind. But this blindness does not last. When I look at you and your demure little lover—”

  “She is not my lover.”

  “How prim that sounds, Sappho! And how characteristic of you to make such fastidious, meaningless distinctions!” He shook his head. “Of course she’s your lover. Whether you happen to have slept with her or not is completely irrelevant—and you know it. No, what concerns me is that you’re living in a bubble, the pair of you, a self-deluding dream, and sooner or later you’ll have to wake up. When that day comes, as it must, there’ll be a heavy price to pay—for both of you. But the responsibility will be yours alone. Think it over.”

  With slow deliberation he took one more nut, cracked it, spat the fragments of shell on the floor, nodded briefly, and was gone.

  For two days I tried to put this meeting out of my mind, argue away the insidious accusations Alcaeus had brought against me. I told myself he was eaten up by jealousy and spite, a sentimental reactionary who lacked even the courage to uphold his own convictions. I raged and fretted; there was a wary look in my houseslaves’ eyes when I came anywhere near them, the expression of a dog that expects to be kicked. Cercylas, with his usual consideration (or was it, I wonder, a form of emotional cowardice?) carefully avoided any reference to my mood, though I could feel it spreading through the entire house, as a cuttlefish will squirt out black ink in some clear pool, and for the same reason—to protect itself.