Where Three Roads Meet

by Salley Vickers

  “And what is an idle, blind, bird-watching prophet to you, brother Creon?” They were not brothers, of course. Except through the connection with the queen.

  — The sibling blood tie may well have prompted some rivalry in the younger man.

  — Assuredly, Dr Freud. Many maintained that Creon should have seized the rule of the city when Laios disappeared. It was only through the stranger’s bedding of the widowed queen that he gained the title of Tyrannos, that is to say, one who is king through assumption and not lineage. You laugh at that, my friend? You may well. It is indeed a grisly irony.

  Creon had something of his sister’s propitiating tone. “Nothing, brother.” The tactful brother-in-law backing off, anticipating the flare-up and well practised in damping it down. To be honest, I doubt the man ever craved the position of king. Who in their right mind would choose to rule the vexed city of Thebes?

  “Forgive me,” I said. “The Lord Creon and I are not acquainted. But maybe we speak out of a common impulse.”

  “Which is what?” You could hear the imperial frown.

  “Which is to spare your majesties,” I attempted.

  “Spare us? Spare us your witterings. You have no good reason for keeping dark any information you possess.”

  “I have reasons assuredly, my Lord” – which was a mistake.

  “And what ‘reasons’ can there be which carry more weight than loyalty to your king and city? Are these ‘reasons’ so compelling they should set aside an oracle?”

  — You have to admire the man’s courage.

  — Or wonder at his bull-headed stupidity, Doctor! Creon’s ameliorating voice interposed again. “My brother, Oedipus, I hold your and the queen’s good, and the city’s good, in the forefront of every thought and action.”

  And now I felt the angry space turn its heat towards my ruined gaze. “And you, blind ‘seer’, what ‘good’ do you pursue? Your own, or your king’s and the city’s?”

  “All three, my Lord.” I tell you, Doctor, I could have wept. I could weep telling you now.

  — It was useless?

  — It was useless. Nothing was to stand in his way. He was Oedipus, the man who stood on his own two feet: self sufficient, self aware, self made.

  13

  21 December 1938

  — What time is it?

  — It’s not yet dawn.

  — I was dreaming of Heinz. My grandson. He had his tonsils out when I had the first operation, back in Vienna when you arrived. A lifetime ago. You know, when you reappeared at the London clinic, my first thought was that you had brought little Heinz with you. Brought him from Vienna. You couldn’t have done. Heinz is dead. Where am I now?

  — Still in hospital.

  — In London?

  — If you like.

  — What are we speaking?

  — Whatever language you choose, Doctor.

  — You know, all the time I lived there I hated Vienna but I miss it now. There’s human perversity for you! I was dreaming I was back there, walking down a street I recognised. Can’t recall its name. I was holding little Heinz’s hand and he was squeezing it, as he used to do, and digging his thumb into the palm of my hand. We turned a corner and there was my father with his silver-knobbed cane. I was so happy to see him. What were we talking about?

  — Oedipus.

  — Of course.

  — There is something I would like your view on, Doctor, when you are more up to talking. What is it to remember? Re-member. To put a body together again. But in the reconstruction what gets put in, or left out? An ivory shoulder for one of flesh and blood?

  — It is all encrypted in the body. What is not recollected is ineluctably re-enacted.

  — Yes, you see, Oedipus was a man with a terrible (I use the word intentionally) memory. The memory was so terrible that perforce he had had to forget. But he couldn’t forget. Or, I should rather say, it couldn’t be forgotten.

  — It has its own way of coming out. The shell-shocked soldiers I studied, notwithstanding their daytime blankness, found it came out in their nightmares.

  — In this case it came out in paranoia. It was understandable when you knew what had happened to him. Only he didn’t know. Or believed he didn’t. It emerged in his simmering belief that someone was going to do him down. Useless to explain that he had been done down already, about as savagely as a man could be, from the start. In his own mind, his history was enviable. It was the future that he had reason to dread. The anxiety, which he confided to no one, not even his adoring wife, must have been unspeakable.

  And I was not going to be the one to put him straight. What was to be gained? What’s done cannot be undone. But there’s this, too, which I’ve only begun to consider since we began our conversations. The Lord Apollo was Phoebus the pure, the bright one, god of the all-revealing light; but also he was Loxias, the obscurer, god of obliquities, for the sun travels the ellipsis slantwise. He was Aphetoros, the fell archer, the dead shot, deliverer of plague and putrefaction; but, coevally, he fired far-reaching arrows of piercing insight and he was Akesios, the healer and averter of sickness. He was Lykeios the ravener, the predatory wolf, and, at the same time, in his most domestic shape, he was Nomios, protector of flocks, god of the humble herdsmen and wanderers.

  — He was a shape changer, your god?

  — What he was, how he appeared, altered according to the conditions: he passed into sun and earth and stars, wild plants, insects, birds and animals. And men and women besides. Consider water, which can take the form of dew or rain, ice, hail or snow, of vaporous steam or cloud. To put it otherwise, there is always another way at the crossroads.

  But, you see, Doctor, once set on a course King Oedipus was not one to step aside or turn back. It was set in his bone, you might say.

  “Listen, old fool. From all I’ve heard, you have lived here, resting on your laurels, long enough. I, a stranger, had to come to Thebes to answer the riddle of the sphinx – and through my own mother-wit, with no help from the birds!”

  Which angered me, so I retorted more sharply than I intended. “Then I suggest you set your ‘mother-wit’ to work on yourself.”

  “What’s this? What’s this?”

  Still I hung back. I was damned if I would be the one to point the finger. And then the queen stepped in. “My love, consider…”

  But he would have none of it. “There is something afoot here. For the last time, speak old man, or I shall find less agreeable ways of persuading you to divulge what you know.”

  — I cannot help feeling it an irony that you, my friend, who could speak preferred not to while I, who long to converse, am hampered by my own “monster”.

  — But Doctor, you must have experienced how dismaying it can be to “know”. And worst of all is to know what is of no benefit to anyone. I had spent years trying not to know such things. I tried again to avoid the words waiting to emerge.

  “My Lord, I am old and tired and, believe me, there is nothing I can say that will help you. Have mercy on us both. For your sake and mine, for all our sakes, let this thing alone; let me return home…”

  But it was hardly out of my mouth before he flew at me. “Seeking to save your own idle, useless, withered skin, eh? You would drive a senseless rock to fury, you obdurate old fool.”

  Which is when I let fly. “You would be wise to watch your temper, my Lord. It has not served you well.”

  It was the naked truth; but I should have held my tongue. The words were a tinderbox to dry summer’s furze.

  “Villain! Traitor! Double-dyed villain! If you weren’t blind I would believe you were the assassin. In fact, I begin to believe you had a hand in it in spite of your dead eyes.”

  And in a sense I did. But not as he wanted, so passionately, to believe. There was nothing for it. He refused to be diverted.

  “My Lord, you may regret what you have asked me to say. The man you seek, who is here today in Thebes, is no one but yourself.”

  Deathlike si
lence. It was as if my words had wiped the noonday sun from the sky. The space before my absent sight blackened, flickered and then quickened into a blaze.

  “Conspiracy! Vilest conspiracy! This your doing my sly-tongued, double-dealing brother-in-law! Don’t imagine I can’t see your shifty, snivelling plot.”

  For what else could he attribute it to? He had to hang this crooked affair on some hook.

  “My dear brother.” Creon’s voice, pricked to indignation. “It isn’t so!”

  And then, around us, an agitated murmuring started up. He had surrounded himself with lackeys whose sole function was to lionise him. There wasn’t an independent mind among them. And through this hubbub came the queen’s cool, conciliating, “Husband, brother, hush. It is pointless to fall out among ourselves”.

  The fuming tower loomed before my dead eyes. “Think again, old man!”

  I allowed another silence to form before I broke it with, “There is nothing further to think, my Lord.”

  He would have struck me. I swear I felt the draught of a swiftly raised arm, but the queen interceded. She was cool-headed, that one. By the gods she could keep her nerve.

  “My love. The man is blind and old, and no doubt also confused in his wits.”

  “The man is blind in every sense: in his ears, in his eyes and in his wandering mind.”

  “I am the victim of the truth, my Lord,” I said. “As you are, as the queen is.” As we all are, in the end, the gods help us, I added, silently.

  “In league. In league, they are in league.” He was babbling now, repeating himself, unsure where to lash out next. “Conspiracy, conspiracy against myself, against the city and the gods.”

  And then he had what he supposed was a saving thought. “The man who witnessed the murder, what was his report?”

  The queen came in again at that and her voice was a mother’s, soothing a fractious child. “That the king was murdered by a band of robbers who killed everyone but the witness himself.”

  “How did this one manage to get away?”

  A shrewd question. I won’t say it set me thinking there and then but it lodged in my mind. It was an anomaly, when all else were slaughtered, that this one man should be spared.

  “I don’t know, my Lord.” The pacifying tone again. “By the time he reached us with the news you had arrived in the city.”

  “But the man who got away. Where is he?”

  “When you were appointed king this man came to me and asked leave to return to his former place. I granted the request believing that he deserved some respite after all he had endured.”

  She must have begun to be afraid by then. Had she never considered why this survivor of the massacre should beg to leave Thebes at the sight of its new king?

  “And what, pray, was his former position?”

  And the other voice, so light, so seemingly careless, spoke again. “I am not sure, my Lord, but I think I recall he was – was it a herdsman?”

  And there in the palace court I saw him again, Doctor: a little bow-legged man, with the slightly twisted smile and the sun-flecked face and kind hands. Hands you could see cradling a young kid or lamb, or a newborn child. And then into my mind came another sight.

  “Let this herdsman be summoned! Now!”

  “My dear Lord, to find him will take time. He will be up in the far summer pastures.”

  “Then, Lady, we shall wait till he arrives.”

  14

  — Are you still there?

  — I’m here, Doctor.

  — They have given me another injection. The relief, I must tell you, is profound. I can understand why people become addicted.

  — Would you like me to go on with my story?

  — It would help to make the time pass.

  — You remember where we’d got to?

  — Awaiting the survivor of the massacre at Phokis…?

  — Waiting. Waiting. Always waiting. The gods are terrible but they are patient. King Oedipus, however, was not. That long afternoon in the palace, surrounded by his flunkeys and troops of sycophantic old men, the king continued to rage and rail and then, when he had worn himself out, to roam restlessly about seeking a new foil.

  The next bid to relieve his anxiety was to round on Creon again who, the king continued to insist, was hand in glove with me. His reasoning, not wholly crazy, went like this: “You brought the news from Delphi that Laios’s murderer was to be found and put to death”.

  — Was that the oracle’s message? I misremember.

  — No, Doctor, your memory is faultless. Banishment was the penalty. But it was like the king to have proposed the harsher option. Something ferocious was working its way through him. He vented it now on the brother-in-law: “It was you I sent to fetch this treacherous old mountebank. A babe in arms could see that you took your chance to put him up to his monstrous accusation”.

  — A “babe in arms”? Telling, in the circumstances.

  — Just so, Doctor. And all Creon could do was patiently deny it. “My Lord and brother. Explain to me why I should wish to do such a thing. Have you not, in your graciousness, given my sister equal rights to rule with you? And, by the same token, have you not, most generously, granted the same rights to me? Why on earth, tell me, would I wish to risk traducing you – and you so popular – and lay myself open to some murderous assault? I prefer to sleep easy in my bed at night.”

  “The delayed ambition of a coward?”

  But Creon was equal to that. “My Lord, as everyone here will confirm, there’s ample evidence that my ambitions are confined to helping you and my sister. Otherwise I should have challenged you from the first for the title of king.”

  “But who solved the riddle which brought me that title? Not you. Nor this blind fraud. If he has the powers you claim for him why was he not able to free you from the rapacious sphinx? Why did you not call upon his gifts, if he truly possesses them, to discover the murderer of your king?”

  Which was a fair question. But he wasn’t going to stay for an answer. Violence was worming through him, feet upwards. It had to get out. Having failed with me he now had a further stab at Creon. “I am beginning to think that you, brother-in-law, are the murderer, aided, no doubt, by this feather-headed charlatan. But it is you who should be, and shall be, according to the order of the oracle, put to death.” You couldn’t blame him. The worst part of this whole story is how blameless the man was.

  — Blameless but not innocent.

  — The immortals’ very distinction, may I point out, Dr Freud?

  Creon held his ground. He was not a man of quick thought or imagination. He had the stolider virtues of common sense and reason. “Then, my Lord, I suggest you send again to Delphi to check the oracle’s words, and while you’re at it you may check up on your brother-in-law too.”

  And then the queen stuck in her fatal oar. “My love, listen to me. There’s no need to set such store by the words of any oracle. Let me tell you a story.”

  I believe if I had had eyes to turn on her I could have stopped her. Or had she been looking to me, I might have made some cautioning sign. But all her sights were set on trying to right what could never be set right. It was in her nature. She couldn’t change her skin.

  “When, as a green girl, I married King Laios I was anxious for a child; but the king had reservations. He visited the oracle and was told, not by Apollo himself but by one of his priests, that were he to have a boy child his son would kill him. I was sceptical about this so-called oracular pronouncement. It seemed to me that it was a way of avoiding my desire. And I also reasoned that there was an equal chance that we might have a girl child, who could pose no threat to the king, my husband. The risk seemed to me worth taking. I conceived and bore a child, a boy. But seeing the baby’s sex, his father became haunted by the oracle’s words. To allay my husband’s fears, after three days the child was destroyed. His two feet were pierced and shackled together and the child was given to be exposed. And eighteen years later the king
himself was killed, as we know, by the hands of foreign robbers at a place where three roads meet. So you see, my Lord, what the predictions of the oracle are worth. If the gods wish a thing to be, it will be, regardless of oracles.”

  And to the very edges of my senses I felt a blast of freezing fear.

  And then the voice of the king, but this time with a new note in it. “Where was it you said that the king died?”

  And in her answer there was also a new note, one that chimed with his, for they were in tune, those two. “In Phokis, my lord.”

  And then followed a tremendous silence.

  Within that silence I knew that everybody apprehended everything. But there was no going back. And you have to admit it, they were both of them brave. It was her, now, who ploughed on, though she must have wished, on the life of her lost child, that she could swallow the words she had just spoken.

  “Why does what I have said trouble you, my Lord?” As if what she had disclosed, so casually, did not include the greatest of reasons to “trouble” anyone, never mind an intimate: the planned murder by a mother of her newborn only child. But a place is an easier matter to focus on than infanticide.

  “I thought I heard you say that King Laios was killed at a place where three roads meet.”

  “Yes, in the district of Phokis. The road divides and one road mounts to Delphi, the other goes to Daulis.”

  “You were told this?”

  “By the man who escaped.” The man we were all waiting for.

  “And the king and his retinue. How many were there?”

  “Five in all, I believe. A herald, and others attending the carriage.”

  “And all died save this one man?”

  “All but him.”

  “And this happened when?”

  “My love, why does this concern you so? As you know, it happened shortly before you came here and rescued the city from its greatest peril, for which we were and always shall be lastingly grateful. What is it that distresses you in all this?”