Where Three Roads Meet

by Salley Vickers

— I have come at other times but you did not see me.

  — Did you make an appointment? I told you to make an appointment.

  — I did not say “would not” see me. I said “did not”.

  — I do not understand you. I have told you, I am not at all well. Speak sense or leave, please.

  — “Sense”? To you of all people, Dr Freud? I hoped to speak to you of something besides sense.

  — Please explain yourself.

  — It is of the senseless I would like to speak. A story without sense. No sense. Or maybe all sense.

  — What story? What is this nonsense? I am sick, I tell you. I’ve no time for stories. Go, or I shall ring the bell and have you removed.

  3

  London Clinic, 8 September 1938

  — Excuse me, Dr Freud?

  — God in heaven, you! You were in my mind just now.

  — Ah well, thought is real.

  — I was lying here, my mouth full of bloody wadding for the thirty-third time, recalling that first operation when Hajek tried to persuade me there was “nothing to worry about”. Imbecile! He and Deutsch thought they could pull the wool over my eyes but I smelled ’em out. It was partly you that gave me the clue. You turning up out of the blue frightened the life out of me.

  — Not entirely, it seems.

  — And the dwarf. Remember him? The smart little fellow the other side of the curtain who saved my life. I wanted to give him something, to thank him, but he never showed up. I wonder what will happen to him under the brave new regime. I can’t see the Nazis having much time for little cretins, however plucky. When I woke the next day I couldn’t for the life of me work out which of you was real. It was like some Grimm fairy tale.

  — It must have been.

  — What?

  — Grim.

  — Indeed. I thought you were the Grim Reaper, come to gather me in.

  — I gathered.

  — As long as it wasn’t me!

  — Would you really mind that, Dr Freud?

  — How do I know? Yes and no. Not on your life! I’m talking nonsense. But you didn’t want sense, I recollect. You said you had a story to tell me. A story with no sense?

  — You like stories, Dr Freud?

  — It has been my life’s work, listening to stories.

  4

  20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, 28 September 1938

  — I beg your pardon, Dr Freud. I didn’t mean to startle you. The door from your garden was open.

  — Good God! You again. And the dog didn’t bark?

  — Apparently not.

  — If you have gained a dog’s approbation you can’t be too dangerous. Jumbo’s not mine. I have him on loan while my faithful chow waits to be granted a clean bill of health. Well, come in.

  — Your own dog is unwell?

  — I’m the only sick dog round here. Lün’s in quarantine. The human aliens made it over here in a matter of days but my poor, patient Lün has to wait another four months before we can be reunited. I visit her in her temporary quarters, but it breaks my heart when she gazes at me with those candid canine eyes and I can’t explain that I can’t take her home with me. The Nazis have a lot to answer for.

  — But they let you go?

  — It was touch and go, I’m told, but in the end it seems it was “go!” Mind you, I might have stayed on to see what they would do, if it wasn’t for my wife. And my daughter, Anna.

  — They arrested your daughter, the Gestapo?

  — Did I say that? Did I tell you that last time?

  — Let’s say a bird told me. You’ve been in the wars, you and your family.

  — The bastards took Anna in for “questioning”, as they politely put it. But she stood her ground. They should have taken me.

  — You were too ill?

  — Take it from me, after fifteen years illness becomes the norm. No, they were afraid of me. They came to do over our apartment but they pushed off sharpish once I appeared. They’re cowards, you know? Bullyboy cowards. Adler wasn’t all wrong. A narcissist with half a set of testicles, a colossal inferiority complex and a compensating grandiosity, that’s our little Adolf. Paranoid.

  — Para noia – out of one’s mind.

  — Ah, my Greek could be better. I confess I stumble in it.

  — No matter, I stumble too.

  — But it seems to me that it is Greek we are speaking. Or have I gone out of my mind? The birds speak Greek to Mrs Woolf when she’s off her head, so her husband tells me. She’s one of those women who are all head, no genitals. But in the end the genitals will have their say. Do the birds speak Greek to you?

  — Yes, as it happens.

  — Are you out of your mind too?

  — I leave that to you to decide, Dr Freud.

  — Well, you’re persistent, I’ll say that for you. It seems like yesterday we met and yet…

  — Time is neither here nor there.

  — And this time at least I am not so unwell. Or no more than usual.

  — I am glad to hear that.

  — You must excuse my strange voice. I have undergone many operations since we first met and there’s not much of my mouth left to speak of – let alone with! I have to wear this “monster”, this wretched prosthesis. It’s lucky I don’t seem to need it talking Greek.

  — I know what it is to lose a faculty.

  — I beg your pardon?

  — I said I know what it is to lose a faculty.

  — Forgive me. I should have explained, I am also somewhat deaf, a problem with the right Eustachian tube, a result of the infernal operations. I see you have a prosthesis too. Your stick. Would you like to take the weight off your feet?

  — Hardly.

  — I mean would you like to sit down?

  — If you wish.

  — No, no, not, please, my analysing chair. The other one. By the desk. My daughter calls it my tripod. We had it specially made.

  — My turn to ask forgiveness. My sight is not what it was.

  — So, two old men with barely one set of eyes, ears and speaking equipment between them, is it? Even my nose is not up to snuff, thanks to my little carcinoma friend. Does the breeze bother you? I could close the French windows. I keep them open for the dog. She feels the heat.

  — No, the air is pleasing. I was enjoying it, making my way to you over the heath just now.

  — You walked here?

  — I’ve walked a way to find you, Dr Freud. There is something I would like to explain. Have you time for me to confide to you a story?

  — I have all the time in the world.

  — Yes?

  — A misleading figure of speech, I’m afraid. The truth is, my days are numbered. Laid low by these fellows here. Would you care for one?

  — Thank you, no.

  — Would you mind if I did?

  — Not at all.

  — I’ll lie here and smoke then, while you fire away. A fair division of labour! And you’ll forgive me if I don’t say much? Talking tires me.

  — It is your gift for listening I need.

  — Please…

  — It’s a while since my feet touched good earth. Walking here, I stopped a while on the rise of a hill, and hearing the rooks in the sky above I could almost imagine I was back there, on the mountainside. Not the high peaks where the sun hits hard and the wind can make a whistle of a man’s bones. But the lower slopes which fall gently, like a woman’s skirt. I’ve never seen your heath but it has something of the feel of that old long-ago mountain of my boyhood. Maybe this is what you would call wishful thinking, Dr Freud?

  — You would have to tell me more.

  — Whatever it is, the rooks are the same. Birds don’t change their tune.

  — Birds again. I’ve heard it said they are older far than us. Maybe that’s why they speak Greek to Mrs Woolf.

  — Aeons before men spoke or walked on two legs the birds were here. This morning the cawing of the rooks was music to my ears. It re-tun
ed my heart to the place I was born and the places I have come to speak to you of.

  — Tell me, I’m curious. We met first in the clinic in Vienna. I seem to think you spoke German then. Are you, like me, a refugee? You have come far to find me here. My new country, England.

  — It has been long in my mind to talk with someone who has lived as I have with life and death. You know a thing or two about life and death, Dr Freud. And suffering. And adversity.

  — I see we share something of the same fatalism! Are you Jewish? You’re not by chance the Wandering Jew?

  — A wanderer, certainly.

  — Or a gypsy? Gypsies tell stories. The little corporal has got his knife into the gypsies along with us Jews. He’d hate stories. They’d scare the living daylights out of him.

  — He would not like this one. And it is thanks to you it’s so well known, so it might be another bad mark against your name, Dr Freud. Ever since I heard of you I reckoned that here was a man I might talk to. A man almost as taken by the story I have come to tell as I who played a part in it. Though, if I understand you right, you would say we are all part of it.

  — Well, you have succeeded in this at least. You have captured my interest. Please continue. I shall try not to interrupt again, though I must warn you that my daughter will bring in my tea tray at five. She is most punctual, my Anna. But till then we can make believe we are free men.

  5

  — Where to begin? Let’s start with place. You know where you are with place. There is a particular place always in my mind when it comes to this story. A place in Greece in the region of Phokis, a place where three roads meet. A point where a road divides and one arm strikes northwest in a steep defile towards Delphi, while the other skirts the foot of Parnassus and winds eastward towards the fertile plains of Daulis. So, depending on your point of view, it could be a place of divergence or convergence.

  The third road, what you might call the trunk road, leads back to Thebes, so that if you are coming from the direction of Thebes here, at this point, the road branches; and on the other hand, here is where the two roads – the one from Daulis, the other from Delphi – connect with each other. So it’s a matter of which way you happen to be travelling, a widening of choice, or a narrowing. From the gods’ perspective all ways are the same and all roads will be travelled in the end. It’s only a matter of time.

  — When you talk of “gods”, you are speaking metaphorically?

  — Meta phora: a carrying across. I thought I felt you stir at my mention of the immortals, Dr Freud, though the atmosphere in this room suggests a respect for the old pieties.

  — I have my little statue of Athena without her spear on my desk beside you there. I like to say it was she who ensured our safe conduct here.

  — Athena’s patronage is worth having, though I doubt your Athena is mine. You might find it hard to conceive of deities who are revered yet capable of performing acts of seemingly meaningless violence. And injustice.

  — My dear fellow, aside from a displacement for repressed infantile desires any “deity” is a primitive need to rationalise natural injustice.

  — Whatever you say, Doctor. But I observe you still treasure your “little Athena” to whom, not wholly humorously I suspect, you attribute your own safe passage here.

  — You are right to pick me up on that. The humour no doubt conceals some relic of superstitious animism. It is hard to surmount entirely our primitive mentality.

  — She’s not a bad protectress, Athena. You could have chosen worse – though if you cross her she can be ferocious. But all gods have violent tempers. Yours included.

  — My dear fellow, I have no god.

  — But is it not a religious matter that took you from your home and brought you here?

  — Please continue with your own story. I’ve had quite enough of mine.

  — Fair enough. My part begins with my going to Delphi. When I was not quite twelve years old, I was on Cithaeron, the mountain that was in my mind as I came here today, with the goats. I liked goats. I liked their way of going their own way. And the man who herded them was something of a father to me, for my own was, let us say, wanting.

  — Ah, a father problem!

  — My Cithaeron “father” was a little, quietly spoken man, with a pair of legs bowed like a lyre and a twisted mouth which gave him a kind of faint perpetual smile. And big freckled hands. Kind hands.

  — You know, “kindness” has an interesting etymology. Its root is “kin”. I met it only this morning looking through Hamlet again. “A little more than kin and less than kind”, Hamlet says of his uncle.

  — I’m not familiar with your friend, Dr Freud, but as you go through life you come to see the worth of those who make you feel they are your kind.

  — Hamlet wouldn’t have quarrelled with that. Please go on.

  — I was on my way home from a day spent with my herdsman friend when before my eyes an eagle dropped through the air, like a spear, and carried off a newborn kid. I called aloud, “Gods save us!” partly at the marvel of the thing and partly out of sympathy for the bleating creature. And as I cried after it, the air about me brightened. It was towards sunset and I turned, as if I were suddenly parched for light, to stare at the crimson orb of the sun dropping to the horizon; and somewhere behind my eyes, like an image in a still pool, I saw my mother falling to the ground from the blow of a man’s hand. A hand I recognised.

  When I got home my mother was out but my grandmother was sitting, as she always was, by the hearth. Maybe I was looking a little askew because she questioned me and I told what I had seen. She looked at me with her eyes black and beady as ivy berries, and said, “Tiri, keep your blessed mouth shut, will you?”

  “About what, Grandma?”

  “What you’ve just told me, you naughty baggage.”

  This was my mother’s mother; a canny woman, which my poor mother, the gods bless her, was not. My father was a drunk and a bully and my grandmother knew which side her bread was buttered. She may have had some foretelling power herself. Her uncle was a Delphian, a high priest. So the prophetic gift was in her family.

  My mother never returned, not that day nor any after.

  — She died?

  — She disappeared. My father cooked up some story about her drowning in the river. I doubt I was the only one who privately thought otherwise.

  — You believe he killed your mother?

  — The hand I saw in my mind’s eye was his, Dr Freud. There was a white scar on his right knuckle where he’d had a fight with a wall. And three days later I saw him bundle her into the river; but I reckon she was dead by then.

  — You mean you witnessed the disposal of your mother’s body?

  — Not in person, you understand. My father didn’t take long to move in his mistress, a handsome black-haired woman with a face like chiselled stone and a hand to match. Birds of a feather! Although I was a boy child, I resembled my mother, who was tall and fair-skinned with grey eyes. I used to imagine your goddess Athena like her. I was a daily reminder to my stepmother of her predecessor, and I dare say this was one reason it was decided to apprentice me at the school at Delphi, the chief sanctuary of the god Apollo.

  It was my grandma’s idea to send me there. I’d always had this passion for birds and my great-great-grandfather was a pupil of Parnassus, who gave his name to the holy mountain. The first of our kind to make predictions from eagles’ flight. They say that the sky above Delphi was alive with eagles then. I would give my right hand to have seen them soaring over the earth’s centre at its beginning. My grandmother had heard, from the eagle’s beak so to speak, my prescient vision and birds were already my line of country.

  — You remind me of another man, who also believed that he was predestined to study the flight of birds. It was his fantasy that a vulture’s tail brushed his mouth when he lay in his crib as a baby.

  — An augurer too?

  — In a sense. An artist of genius; an intrepid scientist
but an inventor of eerie prescience besides. The vulture, of course, was a disguised refashioning of his repressed adult desire for fellatio.

  — Or perhaps it was his daimon, Dr Freud? Whatever the eagle was in my case, my grandma took it as a sign. No doubt she also had in mind to save my skin. My father might well have murdered me too.

  — Or you him?

  — Whatever you say, Dr Freud.

  It was on the way to Delphi, where I was sent with my uncle, my mother’s brother, that I first saw those three roads. We’d reached the point where the lower slopes of Parnassus begin and had paused before starting on the final haul. My uncle was a champion storyteller and to divert me – he must have been driven distracted by my tears – he pointed to the road that veered east and said, “Look, Tiri, the route to Daulis, where Procne and Philomela lived”. And there at the crossroads he told the story of the pair of benighted sisters whose spirits were transformed at death, one into a swallow, the other a nightingale.

  In my grief-torn imagination my mother’s spirit had become a swallow, a bird that remains in my mind as one of special grace. Listening to my uncle telling the story, I was filled with a desire to go to Daulis.

  — It was your fantasy that you would find your mother there?

  — As you know, Dr Freud, the world seems very simple to children. It was not my destiny to go to Daulis. I was led instead up the gruelling slopes of Parnassus to the novice house at Delphi, which for near on seven years acted as home.

  I remember weeping and my uncle embracing me hard and him weeping too, and then him leaving abruptly with the words, “Tiresias, don’t forget who you are”.

  — And who were you, if I may ask – now that I’ve learned who you are?

  — Maybe that is what I have come to you, Dr Freud, to find out. My uncle had never called me by my full name before. No one had, till I went to Delphi. It is in my mind’s eye still, him walking away from me down the hillside. He had my mother’s long back.

  And there is something else besides, which comes back to me now. Delphi lies like a theatre within the shelter of a hemisphere of steep rock: the Phaedriades, the shining cliffs. I’d watched my uncle walk away down the hillside and through the great gates and round the corner, and then I turned and looked up at the rock face above me, glowing red in the sunset. And a long way up the cliff, on a patch of pasture thick with yellow spring flowers, I saw my little freckled herdsman, with his brown and white goats.