Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER RUSH

  NOVELS

  A Twelvemonth and a Day

  Last Lesson of the Afternoon

  Will

  SHORT STORIES

  Peace Comes Dropping Slow

  Into the Ebb

  Two Christmas Stories

  Venus Peter Saves the Whale

  MEMOIRS

  To Travel Hopefully

  Hellfire and Herring

  Sex, Lies and Shakespeare

  POETRY

  A Resurrection of a Kind

  BIOGRAPHY

  With Sharp Compassion: Norman Dott, Freeman Surgeon of Edinburgh

  AS EDITOR

  Aunt Epp’s Guide for Life: A Victorian Notebook

  Alastair Mackie: Collected Poems 1954–1994

  Selected Poems of Felix Dennis

  Felix Dennis: The Four L’s: Poems of Love, Loss, Life and Laughter

  CRITICISM

  New Words in Classic Guise: An Introduction to the Poetry of Felix Dennis

  SCREENPLAY

  Venus Peter

  WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

  Where the Clock Stands Still (with Cliff Wilson)

  TRANSLATION

  Young Pushkin (with Anna Rush)

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978 1 84697 309 3

  eISBN 978 0 85790 252 8

  Copyright © Christopher Rush, 2015

  The right of Christopher Rush to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  The publishers acknowledge investment from Creative Scotland toward the publication of this volume.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  Typeset by Studio Monachino

  Printed and bound in Sweden by Scandbook

  For little Sam and with a low sweeping bow to Adam Nicolson and a long libation to the divine Bettany Hughes

  CONTENTS

  PROLEGOMENON

  The Grand Plan

  PART ONE

  Before the War

  PART TWO

  The War in Troy

  PART THREE

  The Homecomings

  PART FOUR

  Ithaca

  EXODE

  The Last Voyage

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In my Dedication I have picked out the two scholars and explorers of the Ancient World who have inspired me most in recent years: Adam Nicolson and Bettany Hughes. I stand on their shoulders and see much further than I did before. If in places I have also leaned too heavily on either of them, I beg of each: grant me absolution.

  In the editorial process I have been borne along by Sarah Ream, an editor so watchful and all-knowing I think she was sent by the gods, though I know she was hired by Neville Moir, my rod and staff at Polygon, together with the rest of that splendid team.

  Turning back the page half a century and more to my school days at Waid Academy Anstruther, I want to thank two teachers in particular. Buggie Brown (I never discovered his first name) cheerfully taught me Greek for fun in the little steam puffer that chugged us to and from school each day between St Monans and Anstruther. ‘Never fear the Greeks,’ he used to say. ‘Homer is their greatest gift to the world.’ For relaxation he brought out the Greek New Testament.

  I owe another huge debt to my English master, Alastair Mackie, poet and translator, who first inspired me to read and write about Odysseus. We shared translations, and our mutual musings bore fruit in a number of dramatic monologues, one of which forms the basis of Odysseus’s last words in this book.

  It is a book which has taken me five years to write, and which kept me from my family: Anna and Jenny, and more recently Sam. To them I apologise for the long hours spent with Odysseus and with those who have written about him and his world: Kazantzakis, Tennyson, du Bellay, Umberto Saba, Aeschylus, Rupert Brooke and all the usual suspects, not least Homer. At last it’s over and I’m glad to be back in Ithaca. I hope the reader will think the voyage was worth it. Read and perpend.

  Christopher Rush

  MAY 2015

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Penelope’s Web is the story of Odysseus, one of the heroes of The Iliad and the eponymous hero of The Odyssey. The Iliad is narrated throughout in the third person, the impersonal voice of Homer. So is The Odyssey, apart from a slender middle section in which Odysseus himself brings a listening audience up to speed on his adventures. Other Greek writers, ancient and modern, have followed Homer’s example. In the present book, I have reversed this technique, allowing Odysseus to tell his own story in a blunt, soldierly, first-person voice that echoes the realities of war and peace, while Penelope re-invents her husband’s experiences, drawing on myth, legend and Greek literature, to portray him as the hero who overcomes impossible odds – and a series of women – to return to her and to his home in Ithaca. Arching over these two accounts is that of the omniscient narrator, the invisible author, who sees all.

  The constant voice-shifts are indicated by symbols – the Odysseus and Penelope icons, which represent him and her, and the Greek key icon, which represents the impersonal narrator. Penelope’s is the voice not of the woman herself but of the myth-making weaver spinning on her loom the web of lies – and truths. Odysseus’s voice is that of the soldier and sailor, finding his way in the field, charting a course through the sea of life, the aftermath of war. He is the man on the ground, as opposed to the stuff of myth. And yet Odysseus also dips in and out of myth and by his own admission is a slippery teller of the truth. Moreover, the voices sometimes merge and blur as truth shimmers like a mirage. The symbols are intended, therefore, as a general guide. I hope that the reader will find them helpful in the re-imagining of these old stories for our time.

  C.R.

  PROLEGOMENON

  THE GRAND PLAN

  From time to time the population of the earth becomes too much for it to bear, so certain methods are employed to thin out the density of its peoples and reduce numbers to a safe and acceptable level. Some say these steps are taken by nature, wisest of nurses. Or else human instinct is at work on an inscrutable level, a self-regulatory strategy scribbled deep into the genes. The religious sort say that the problem is addressed not by mortals, who are incapable of controlling themselves, but by the powers above us. Whichever way you look at it, it’s a survival tactic for a human race too clueless consciously to look after its own affairs. Neutral nature or the benign and merciless gods: they’re the same thing, really. It just depends on your choice of terminology, and that’s naturally determined by your beliefs.

  Let’s go with myth then, for the moment. Let’s occupy the ethical and imaginative high ground. Let’s leave reason aside.

  Once upon a time, as they say, there was a great race of men, a god-like race, a race of heroes. They were called Greeks. And there was another race, almost as illustrious, called Trojans. And these mortals, though separated by a wide and unpredictable sea called the Aegean, thronged the world to such an extent that Zeus, in his wisdom and his pity, hit on a plan to deliver the all too fruitful humans from themselves. That plan was war, an effective means of easing the squeeze o
n population. Specifically, the Trojan War, in which vast numbers of both Greeks and Trojans were killed, nature triumphed, the gods’ will was done and the earth’s burden was considerably relieved.

  True, that’s how some saw the war. It’s how some people will always see a war – as anything other than what it is: blind, brutal destruction. The men who fought it knew different. Soldiers in the field always know different, and better. I was a soldier. On the ground we knew precisely what caused the war: greed. Wars are always about ideology or greed. Or both. And in spite of all the hot air, it was no ideology that took us to Troy.

  But it’s always tempting to imagine a grand plan, even to believe in one. Penelope liked the idea of the grand plan. And under her cunning hand, the gods saw the problem and reached for something they had kept hidden. That something was a woman. And there she lay, naked and smirking in the lap of the gods, biding her time. You can see her in the opening scene of the web, wearing that salacious smile, the one that loosened so much sperm, so many nerves, knees, lives. She was the argument, the agent, the exterminating spark. She was the excuse. She was the weapon of mass destruction. And we were sent to Troy to find her.

  PART ONE

  BEFORE THE WAR

  ONE

  When I got back to Ithaca from a long tour of duty in Troy, plus other inconveniences I hadn’t bargained for, you might think I’d have done what every soldier supposedly does after a long campaign and a hard homecoming – get stuck straight in between my wife’s spread legs and smash pissers with her for an hour or two before the nightmares start up and the blackheads surround me for the hundredth fucking time in a three-sixty attack. The dreams of war. You might think that. And you might think that for all soldiers there’s nothing like I&I, intoxication and intercourse, to put the war behind them. For as long as the Lethe limbo lasts.

  If that’s what you think, then you’ve never been a soldier – at least not in Troy. And you know nothing about what war does to a soldier, how it strips him of himself. It has to, if the chain of command is to operate effectively. There can be no individuals, no identities, only numbers. You’re not there; inside that armour you don’t exist. It’s the anonymity that lets you kill, and every time you kill the more anonymous you become and the further away from home. The tide pulls you away from your wife and kids, your old folks, while the emotional undertow inside you is always trying to suck you back to what you left behind, what you hunger for in your heart of hearts. Or so you think.

  Sometimes it works, the undertow. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you’re left feeling that only the dead have identity – they’re always returning to us, after all – and that you’ll never regain your own self until you too are gone. Somebody once said it: call no man happy until he is dead.

  But that’s another fucking lie. As the great Achilles found out. Home turns out to be as cruel as war – normal life has been put on hold at best, destroyed at worst, and things are what the ordinary soldier calls FUBAR. Fucked up beyond all recognition. Or repair.

  You come back with a divided, displaced, dislocated feeling, a disquiet as loud as fucking thunder in your head. Your chest is never at rest. You’ve come home but you know you’ll never feel at home. You know that in spite of what they say about the hell of war, life will never be as rich again, you’ll never feel as close to anyone as you did to your comrades in the field, you’ll never feel the adrenalin kick in, the buzz of action that made you so intensely aware of being alive. Never again. You know that from now on there will be no hell like home.

  That’s not all. You know you’ve been brutalised and that you have to try to separate the killing instinct from the survival instinct. You also know for a fact that the two are inseparable in a soldier, yes, even though the brutality existed only to protect peace and defend civilisation – if you want to believe what your leaders have told you. The thing is, it’s still there, the blood-lust is still there, you need it, you need to keep going over and over in your mind the actual enjoyment of enemy casualties, the kick and thrill of killing up close with blades, boulders, bare hands, anything, the sheer satisfaction of knowing that you rained fucking devastation on the bastards.

  You know something else too. You know you’ll never trust anyone like you did before, not even your wife. For months, years, you’ve relied on the man next to you, your comrade, your best friend, looking out for you as you looked out for him. And you’ve relied on yourself, on your wits, on your weapons. On discipline. And on your determination to overcome the enemy, and to survive. And now all that’s gone. And all that’s left is a big fucking empty.

  A BFE. Even the remote and utterly worthless locations you’ve served your country in start to look like Elysium compared to what you’ve come back to. Even bumfuck Egypt calls you back. And you’d go like an arrow.

  There are other ways of putting it. Our army docs, with nothing but a handful of herbs to combat it, refer to it as the peace adjustment syndrome. Peace is now your enemy. Or, with some humour, I suspect, and half an eye to the sexual difficulties encountered by returning soldiers, they call it the re-entry problem. Re-fucking-entry. That’s a polite way of looking at your wife’s fanny. The ordinary soldier naturally puts it more graphically: WABHAC. War’s a bastard, home’s a cunt.

  Cunt, by the way, was the last thing on my mind when I got home and slaughtered the bastards who’d been offering to screw my wife in my absence. And cock wasn’t high on Penelope’s agenda either. What was she supposed to think, let alone feel, as she stood in her room, under orders, and a butcher walked through the door? Even without the blood on me, even ignoring the fresh stench of lopped body parts, I was hardly her husband, was I? What was I? A salt-bitten stranger from the sea. A war-torn wolf with the madness hard in his eyes, still glittering from the recent killing spree. I could have killed her next. I could see her thinking it, her hand clutching her chest, breathless, terrified, wondering what the fuck I was going to do, what I was going to say, a soldier from the war returning, blood on his beard, from a hard campaign, a long bastard of a tour. Long? It had been fucking years.

  Later she lied about it, as she lied about most things. Said she’d looked me over and that when I checked out and she was happy I was still her old fuck-stick, she’d lain back and we’d gone at it all night as we talked the stars round the sky till morning. The star thing was her very expression – not verbatim, not even made of words, but an image, among the first of hundreds stitched into her web. Art gets away with murder, the things language can’t always handle, including lies, and there were plenty of lies in Penelope’s web.

  Not that I can talk. I’ve lived by lies. I’ve survived by them. And survived them. But to be clear about the stars – yes, there were stars by the thousands. Maybe a million. But sex? No, I didn’t want it, didn’t want sex with the wife I hadn’t seen for years, not as we stood there staring at one another on either side of that white unbroken bed. What normal man would? And I wasn’t even normal. Nor was she. How could she have been?

  So we didn’t break the bed. We had a lot of ice to break first, a whole frozen ocean. And we both knew it would take months to melt, maybe years. Maybe never. Maybe talk was the best first thing. That much was true. We did talk. We talked the stars round the sky, and when dawn fingered the east we were still talking.

  I’ve known soldiers who can’t talk about war, their war, after they’ve come home. They don’t utter a word. They only scream – when the nightmares come. I’ve known men who can talk about nothing else. They’re still talking, years later they’re still talking, when they die, still talking. Mostly to themselves. The ones who can’t talk and the ones who can’t stop talking have one thing in common. They’re all well and truly FUBAR.

  And the wives? Each to his own, I suppose. Mine wanted to talk. And why not? Conversation is a first step to sex, unless it’s rape you have in mind. Nothing much the matter with rape, as a weapon. Nothing much the matter with conversation either, as a weapon, so long as it s
tays in hand. It’s when it gets out of hand that it becomes an end in itself, an endless prevarication, and you both have to admit that you don’t want sex anyway. Not because you’re strangers, but because you’re strangers who used to be close. Big difference. You’re strangers who used to be man and wife. And so now you do the only thing you can do. You talk. Talk’s easy, talk’s cheap.

  What to talk about? Can you guess what she wanted to know most?

  Did I still love her?

  No.

  I don’t mean no, I didn’t love her, I mean no, that’s not what she wanted to know most. What she wanted to know most of all was what she was like.

  ‘What was who like?’

  ‘Who do you think? Helen, of course, the cause of it all, the be-all and the end-all. Helen of Sparta. Helen of Troy. What was she like?’

  I said it would take a century to tell her.

  ‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘We have the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Not long enough,’ I said.

  Right now I wasn’t even sure what the rest of our lives would amount to.

  ‘But there’s one thing about Helen that might surprise you.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘She was like you in one way at least – she spent a lot of time at the loom.’

  ‘The loom? That bitch-whore?’

  ‘Whoring never stopped a woman from weaving, did it? Or weaving from whoring?’

  ‘Hard to imagine.’

  But she managed to imagine it when she set up her own web, her version of the war, its causes and effects. In Penelope’s web, Helen sat in her apartments in Troy weaving a vast tapestry of her own life. The purple traders trod the seas for her, the fishermen spent years harvesting the sea-snails, carting them in tons to the city walls and into the palace, and the slaves dissected them and boiled them up in their own urine. They pissed and art prevailed. The snails gave up their essence for it. Into the weft went the dark red dye, staining her creation the colour of death with a blush of power. Around her the endless bloody struggle continued, stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives armed in bronze, coughing up their lives for her in the same colour while she wove on, depicting their suffering, tracing their tears. And her own. Don’t forget, it was all for her.