Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  ‘Come on, don’t take all fucking day!’

  Then we herded them into the narrow space between the round-house and the wall. There was no exit from there.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘slit their throats.’

  They screamed and held each other.

  ‘Wait!’

  I thought Telemachus was having second thoughts.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Why should we give them a decent death? They’re not only whores: they also treated my mother like a whore. They fed the lusts of that filthy gang, slept with the little shits night after night. Opened their legs to all-comers. You saw how it was. It was a fucking brothel. Let’s rip off their tits first.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘stay calm. They’ll die cleaner than they lived, but it will still be a dishonourable death. We’ll hang the sluts.’

  I got hold of a ship’s hawser and fastened one end of it to one of the portico columns. The other end I sent snaking over the round-house and hauled on it till it was nice and taut. I made sure it was just high enough to stop their toes from touching the floor. Then I pushed them forwards one by one, still snivelling and twittering for mercy, like little birds that come to the coppice hoping to roost, but who fly into the net and find not sleep but death instead, the sleep of death, and they flutter for a while before they die, making tiny noises. That’s how these women died. There was no way out for them. The net had closed. They stood in a line and held out their heads obediently, and we fitted a noose around each slender neck, all twelve of them, and we let them kick, their feet feeling blindly for the floor.

  It didn’t take too long. I couldn’t help noticing how small all the feet were, and how delicate, how dainty, just like little birds’, especially Melantho’s, although she was the biggest whore of the lot. They kicked and quivered miserably. And when they stopped twitching, we cut them down.

  ‘And now,’ I said, ‘that goat-fucker Melanthius. Bring him down.’

  Eumaeus and Philoetius went and brought him from the arsenal, dragging him, still bound and screaming, across the courtyard.

  ‘You’ll be howling louder before I’m done with you!’

  I dragged him by the hair and pulled him through the gate. Then I cut the knots and unbound him. Limbs cracked.

  ‘Never mind. You won’t have much use for your legs shortly. You won’t need your arms either. You won’t have any fucking appendages.’

  We all got going on him. We sliced off his nose and ears and lopped both hands and feet. The screaming grew high-pitched, like a pig’s in the first minutes of slaughter. Lastly we ripped off his prick and testicles.

  ‘And now to stop your infernal fucking howling!’

  I cut out his tongue, threw it away, and crammed his cock and balls into the red hole. It was gaping but quieter now.

  ‘That’s what happens to fucking loud mouths!’

  After that, we washed ourselves at the well. Eurycleia was still around, watching us. She was everywhere, dancing her dance of triumph on legs like sticks, defying her age and sex.

  ‘Eurycleia, enough of that. Do something useful, will you? Bring me sulphur and get a fire on the go. I’m going to fumigate this place. Bring down the decent females to help you. And tell Penelope everything’s in order. She can come down now. Her husband is home. It’s over.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  Over? It’s never over, is it? It will be with you for the rest of your life. It will deprive you of your rest, it will provide you with your dreams. It will murder sleep.

  Sleep’s the word, but it’s more like drowning, this nightly descent, like slipping into the sea, pulling the liquid blanket over your head and sinking down, down, deep down to where the monsters lurk, except that you don’t actually drown, and the monsters prey on you until you wake. Until you die. Even when you’re awake you’re never sure where you are, or who you are. All that is solid melts into air, all that was holy is profane, all that was gold turns to rust. And all that you fought for is a lie. It was a lie from the start and you knew it, but you learned to live it. Out in the field, on the open sea, in the theatre of war. As if it were true.

  What happens when the lie shifts to the bedroom? When you can’t settle the issue with a weapon? Every man’s Troy is followed by every man’s homecoming, and the re-entry problem starts up another war, the war fought without arms. They’re no use to you now, the spear, the sword, the good old bronze. Your shield won’t protect you either.

  What did she really see when she looked at me again? A butcher, a lunatic, a stranger. I don’t know what she saw. I couldn’t climb into her skin and look at me. I hadn’t been standing there for all this time, waiting. I wasn’t where she was, what she was. I wasn’t the one lying in the bed. That bed.

  And what did I see? What does any man see nineteen years on? Or nine. Or even nine months. Does he see the same woman, she the same man? It could happen in nine hours, nine seconds. He’s changed, she’s changed. They’ve lived apart. Even without a war between them, countries, fields, years, seas, the rawness and madness, the terror and nerves – even without all that, the two of them become different beings; they’re no longer the same people who got married. Add to the equation of absence the heart’s fondness, coldness, cruelty, unpredictability, and the difference may prove to be unbridgeable.

  We may well possess some golden core of being: there may even be a soul, and it may even be forever. But the rubbish all around it doesn’t last, the daily wear and tear, the dear old house of flesh, so frail, so palpable, so tender, trite, so transient and true. Even the mind itself runs on like a river, flows away from us, becomes somewhere else.

  No, it’s not over when the killing’s over, when the living has to start, when it becomes clear at last, the solving emptiness, that what cohered across the years was absence, not Ithaca. Troy kept us comatose, or high. Troy kept us distanced from living, and even from dying, though we danced with death. Troy kept us free from self, from the sadness of home, from the endless tilling of fields and the going under. Troy was the ache and energy of love – of a kind. It was tough and kept us tough. It was the potency and pain of being young. Younger. Troy was the truth that will not come again.

  So I missed it – missed it like I missed home, or thought I did, and I see them now, the same old scenes, turning over and over like clods under the plough that unearths the darkness. And I hear them too – the spears, glorious as geese in winter, whistling, and the javelins darkening the skies. Weapons that broke men and built barrows, monuments. Mounds to forgotten success.

  Forgotten. What was it they said of me? A man whose white bones are rotting in the rain, or rolling in the waves. The dogs and the birds have torn him, flesh from bone, or the fishes have eaten him in the sea. His bones are embedded in some beach, the sands piled high above them. He’s never coming home. None of them is ever coming home. Only ghosts come home. There are no returners. There are revenants but not soldiers. They’re all dead now. They’re the forgotten army.

  It reminds me well enough of a piece of bullshit, spoken when Agamemnon was in an unusually lucid mood.

  ‘Forgotten army? Forgotten, did you say? Well let me tell you something, lads, you’re not forgotten! You’re not the forgotten army! Forgotten? It’s worse than that. Nobody has even fucking heard of you! But they’re going to! Oh, fuck me, yes, lads! They’re going to hear of you, because you’re going to do glorious fucking things, great deeds! You’re going to go down in history, you’re going to bring down the towers of Troy and ride in triumph through streets of fire! Am I right?’

  Yes. Easy, easy, lads. Easy to triumph, easy to die, easy to be forgotten. It’s forgetting that’s hard. And being remembered. And having to remember. Remembering is hard. What to do, what to say when you stand apart, facing one another, and nothing between you but the white bed, fresh as new bread, waiting to be torn, and tasted, like it was on your wedding night, yes, it’s hard, that’s hard.

  Why? It ought to be easy, like eating and drinking ar
e easy. Easy to approach her, to slip that robe from her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, to stare at it all over again, to be transfixed by the wonder of it, the conquest of the country of which she was once queen, and you the undisputed king, when those breasts pointed at you, a little proudly perhaps, and the belly pouted, urging you to hurry, and the hips that gathered themselves into your palms began to move, Penelope’s knees up around you again, the belly pushing, the pelvis thrusting, the legs in the air, the feet facing the sky, after all this time, yes, easy, easy to be inside her again, to feel the cunt sucking up the sperm, the tongue sucking out your soul –

  – and nothing between you.

  Except Troy. And the Cicones, and the Lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, the Keeper of the Winds, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Sirens, the Drifters, Scylla and Charybdis, Poseidon, Calypso, Nausicaa, the suitors, the ruined suitors, the Halls of Persephone, Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, Helen, Hell. Hell, hell, hell. You’ve come home and it’s not goodbye to all of that but welcome to hell, old boy. Yours is the House of the Dead, the mighty dead. You are the dead.

  Eurycleia hurries upstairs as fast as her little old legs can carry her, legs like dry sticks, and her feet fairly twinkling in her mad dash.

  ‘Wake up, woman, your husband’s home!’

  A yawn from Penelope. ‘Have you gone soft in the head, you old fool?’

  ‘Never clearer, I assure you – your husband is downstairs.’

  ‘Here I was having a lovely sound sleep, the best in years, and you dare to wake me up with this nonsense. Away with you, now!’

  Eurycleia sweeps back the bedcover and pokes her in the ribs.

  ‘I’m telling you, he’s back! He’s the old stranger.’

  ‘What old stranger?’

  ‘The beggar, of course, the black rag-bag, the king in disguise, just like in the old stories, remember? Haven’t you ever heard of kings got up as beggars? Haven’t you listened to the songs? Well, this one’s true. Your husband, King Odysseus, has come home. He’s not dead. But all your lovers are. He’s killed the lot. They’re all propping each other up in the portico, as dead as can be. If you don’t believe me, come and see. What do you think all the noise was about? Didn’t it wake you? Well I heard plenty, and I came down for myself and saw him standing there like a lion among the corpses, all splashed with their blood. A glorious sight – it would have thrilled you. Why won’t you believe it?’

  ‘I do believe it, perhaps – that they’re dead, I mean. But if that’s the case, then it has to be the work of a god. They’ve been punished at last for their insolence and immorality, all that depravity and greed. But Odysseus will never know it. What you saw was not Odysseus but an avenging Immortal. Odysseus himself is long dead and far from here.’

  ‘My god, you always were a stubborn one! I don’t know how he put up with you! The patience of Penelope? Pig-headed Penelope, more like. You belong with the swineherd. What will it take to convince you? Wait a minute – I know, I’ve got the proof. I’ve seen it, felt it. You know the scar?’

  Penelope’s heart leaps.

  ‘Scar? What scar?’

  ‘Don’t play your games with me, madam. I know you too well, and you know which scar. The one on his thigh, the one he had since he was a boy, the one he got from the boar. Last night when I washed his feet, I touched it accidentally and he nearly killed me, swore me to silence in case I gave him away and alerted the suitors. Does that convince you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?’

  ‘At last!’

  So they came down – and we barely even glanced at one another, it was such a moment. Mythical, unreal. Telemachus was shocked.

  ‘How can you sit there like that, mother, away from him, saying nothing, not even looking? This is the greatest moment of your life! Your husband, my father, has come back from the dead after years of war and suffering, and you don’t utter a word, let alone give him a hug. Are you so hard-hearted? This is the ultimate anti-climax. Has absence made you so cold, so cruel? It’s inhuman.’

  He was young, Penelope told him. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t. Nobody could. ‘I just don’t know what to say, what to ask, what to feel. To be honest, I feel numb. I can’t even look him in the eye. But perhaps –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Perhaps if the two of us could be left alone for a little while, we could work this out, put things to the test.’

  I had to smile.

  ‘Your mother’s right, son. As always. Leave us alone for a little, and I guarantee she’ll be smiling when you see her again. In any case, I need you to be busy. There’s another problem I want you to deal with.’

  ‘Another problem? I thought all our problems were dead.’

  ‘Precisely. We’ve just plucked the flower of Ithaca. Which says little for Ithaca, by the way – they were black weeds. But that’s not the way their families will see it. They’ll be after our blood. We need to buy some time. So here’s the plan. Get that minstrel going. He can thank me for his life. He promised to sing for me, remember? Well he’d better start now. A lively dance-tune, as loud and long as his lyre can make it. Get the girls to join in – plenty of singing, dancing, applause. Tell them to sing their hearts out and make it sound like a celebration – a wedding celebration. Penelope’s getting married. At last. That’s why the young lords are so long in coming home. They’re drinking till dawn, drinking toasts to the winner among them, to the lucky man and to the darling couple. By the time the families realise it’s a mass funeral they’re facing instead, we’ll have beaten a retreat to our farmlands up among the orchards, and we can plan our campaign from there, depending on how the people choose to stand on this issue.’

  So the festivities filled the hall – the false festivities, the hollow lyre pouring out hollow melodies and the feet of dancing men and women stamping madly. While just outside, the propped-up corpses still stared open-eyed, open-mouthed at the moon. And in the long arcades, in the cool night air, the new-hung maids swung, with swollen eyes and bulging tongues and bare unsandalled feet.

  People paused in the early morning streets, stopped and listened.

  ‘Hear that? Know what it means? She’s given in at last, the heartless whore. The empty bed proved too cold for her in the end. She fell at the final hurdle. She’s gone and married after all – and her poor husband still out there somewhere in a foreign land, imprisoned or enslaved or still fighting, who knows? And her too faithless to honour the memory of a hero. But she was always a cool one, a hard-hearted bitch.’

  Enter now Pallas Athene. Yet again.

  Eurycleia had already bathed me, washed away the blood, rubbed in the oil, kitted me out with a gorgeous new set of clothes. But the goddess put the vital finishing touches to the business, enhancing the heroic king from crown to toe.

  ‘I think we’ll add some height,’ she said. ‘Give you those few extra inches. They’ll make all the difference.’

  And she caused the lush locks to cluster on my noble head as thick as hyacinths in bloom at the height of their growth. I stepped out of the bath like a god.

  Was Penelope impressed? Did it make any difference? Not a bit. Still she didn’t budge.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘now I know you’ve a heart of stone. And the iron has grown into your soul over the years. Eurycleia had better make me up a bed just like she did in the old days, when I was a bachelor and a boy, since it looks like I’m not sleeping with my wife tonight.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Penelope. ‘You’re not sleeping with your wife, it seems, whoever and wherever she may be, and you’re certainly not sleeping with me. I last slept with my husband nineteen years ago, and he didn’t look anything like you. He was a lot shorter, for a start. Time changes us, but not that much, and not usually for the better. You’re not Odysseus. But if you’re so insistent you are, you can at least sleep in the marriage bed – alone. I’ll allow that much. Nurse, bring out the big bed. Get the maids to
remove it. They can make it up for this guest – outside the bedroom, if you please. You may provide him with plenty of rugs and blankets to keep out the cold after you’ve shifted the bed.’

  The test.

  ‘What are you talking about, woman? You know very well that bed can’t be moved. And I hope nobody tried to do so in my absence. I built it myself, in case you’ve forgotten. I fashioned the big bed-post from the trunk of the olive tree that was still growing there, and I presume still is, though back then it had already grown to an impressive height, reaching all the way upstairs. You know full well I built the whole bedroom round it. You could say, in fact, that I built the entire palace round that tree, since our bedroom is the beating heart of the house – at least it was. I hope to god you haven’t cut through the living tree and shifted the bed.’

  Test passed.

  And that’s what it took to thaw the uncertain heart, to banish the fears of trickery and time, to bring the tears to her eyes at last, to make her throw her arms around my neck and kiss me hard, the husband who really was her husband because he remembered the bed. What woman wouldn’t want her man to remember their bed? Many times I’d been wrecked and had felt the sweetness of the shore stroking my limbs, but this was the sweetest salvage of all, to feel beneath me the bay in which I now put in. And she wound her white arms round me and kept me anchored there all night long. Dawn would have come and lit up our love-making had not the tireless Pallas Athene added one more cosmic touch. She held up the universe for us. Slowing the horses of the night, she held them lingering in the west, while in the liquid east she kept Aurora waiting, so that Lampus and Phaethon, the nimble colts that pull the day’s chariot, stood unyoked and wondered what was going on.