And then it was the king’s turn to tell a story. “Your account, Jocasta, is strangely perturbing. As you know, I was born in Corinth, child of Polybus and Merope, king and queen of that kingdom to the west. When I was just eighteen years old, a drunkard at a dinner jeered at me, slyly implying that it was known to be a fabrication that I was my parents’ son. His words troubled me, more than I can quite account for. In any case, I challenged my parents with the drunkard’s story. They were aghast, horrified, and they repudiated the imputation absolutely. But the taunt lingered. So one day I determined to set my mind at rest. Without telling my parents, I journeyed to Delphi, intending to put the question of my birth to the oracle. But the answer I received was no answer. I was met by the Priestess, who ordered me away from the shrine with frightful imprecations and cursed me with the dreadful news that it was my destiny to sleep with my mother…”
But at that the queen’s voice broke in. “Oh my love, it is commonplace for men to sleep with their mothers in their dreams. What of it? A dream may be a destiny as much as any action.”
A saving thought, if a little late! But he would not be distracted. “And beget her children and kill my father? No, my lady, this was no harbinger of an idle dream.
“Shocked by this fearful prediction, I left Delphi at once and struck out, with no plan in my mind other than to put as much distance as possible between myself and Corinth. And descending the road from the heights of Delphi, I came to a narrow defile where there is a cleft in the road. And there I encountered a party coming from the opposite direction.
“The herald of the party ordered me, summarily, out of the way. And when I refused, feeling that a prince of Corinth deserved more respect and had no business kow-towing to anyone, the driver of the wagon tried to turn me back by main force. Unwilling to be thwarted by this show of ill manners, I carried on my way past the vehicle, whereupon its passenger leaned out and struck me hard on the crown of my head with a vicious two-pronged goad. My reaction was instantaneous. I pulled my assailant from his place in the carriage, relieved him of his filthy weapon and beat him to death with my own stout stick. Then I saw off the rest of his party.
“But before following the road which brought me here, to Thebes, I enquired from a local the name of the area. He told me it was Phokis. And now your account, together with my own memory, has set off the most frightful wonderings. What if, unwittingly, I killed King Laios that day?”
And neither had told the other these stories before? You, of all people, Dr Freud, will comprehend why.
— In a sense it is the essence of their story: that each had their own to hide. The very unspokenness redoubled the cathexis.
— Cathexis, Doctor? Ah yes. For them silence was golden, binding them tight with invisible filaments of the unexpressed. You know what intrigues me most? How it was first breached, that blanket agreement to keep quiet. The drunken episode. Oedipus must have been drunk himself that fateful night. They must both have been, him and his fellow diner: young men out together, painting the town red. But his companion’s taunt could only have made such an impact if it touched some spring of hidden fear. The adopted Oedipus must have had an inkling already that there was something wrong – or let us say, not quite right – about his parentage.
— Perhaps the mother was too concerned, the father over-lenient? Understandable in the circumstances.
— In any case, as you know, Doctor, children, like dogs, can smell what is out of true. But it took the intoxication of Dionysos to bring this buried knowledge to light. Dionysos, who died and returned to life again – as Oedipus had, in a sense, when as a baby his life, against all the odds, was seemingly spared. But why, I wonder, did his foster parents not come clean when he challenged them over his parentage?
— My dear man, truth is notoriously hard to bear but, as you were saying, even harder to tell. They couldn’t bear that he should know the truth from them.
— But think, Doctor, how Oedipus stumbled on the truth. In drink. I served the Lord Apollo and came to know his ways. And while I believe, in his wisdom, that my Lord inspired my advice to Laios not to father a child – a man of that temperament, a pederast and violently disposed, could hardly fail to antagonise a growing son – no judgement of Apollo Loxias was ever written in stone. And “Nothing in excess” was his motto.
It’s my belief it was not Apollo but his colleague and brother, twice-born Dionysos, who was there at Oedipus’ conception, who made his presence felt that evening, and later at Delphi. The god of the vine, and the fruits of the vine, the god of dismemberment and dissolution and resurrection, frightened Oedipus out of his life and into his wits with the pronouncement that it was his doom to sleep with his mother and destroy his father. For you see, Dr Freud, the deathless ones are outside time: what has been and what will be is all one to them.
15
20 Maresfield Gardens, 6 January 1939
— So it is you. I had begun to think you’d abandoned me for good. Introite, nam et hic dii sunt.
— I am glad to come in, Doctor, and very glad to hear you speak so kindly of the gods; though bidden or unbidden, they are with us.
— You know, I was pondering your “gods” just now. Before I was driven from Vienna like one of your birds in flight, I had the privilege of attending a performance of Mahler’s Ninth, conducted by Bruno Walter, to whom the piece was dedicated. The event was recorded. Alas, thanks to the little corporal’s activities I have not heard the recording myself but were I to do so I could predict where a man suppresses a cough and another sneezes. Yet in no way did I influence or affect these events. Is this perhaps what you have in mind when you describe your god’s oracular powers?
— Dr Freud, you are an apt pupil. It is not that the timeless ones determine our universe, as some have falsely claimed; but that theirs is the vision of eternity, where time does not so much stand still as come full circle.
— This afternoon, lying here, I had a weird fantasy. I saw you standing with your stick beneath our almond tree. The almond flowers early, they tell me. I should like to see it flower once.
— The only bloom on your tree at present is frost. It is freezing outside. Are you recovered from your recent ordeal, Doctor?
— I’m weak as a kitten and can see no one. I lie here, an impatient patient on my own couch (please take your usual chair) wrapped in my shawl, drifting in and out of islands of pain. Talking of gods, I was musing just now about your Dionysos.
— Not mine, Doctor. It would be a rash soul who claimed the anarchic Dionysos for his own. But you should make his acquaintance. You share a currency: the unspeakable thought, the wayward passion, the errant wish, the subversive desire. Drugs, drink and dancing, that’s Dionysos for you. But perhaps it’s not.
— Not what?
— Not for you.
— I’ll tell you my friend, I avoid drink and in general I avoid drugs like the plague. But morphine brings such relief that I daren’t admit even to myself how agreeable it is. But now I am back in the land of the living I need other palliatives. I was cogitating. You said that Oedipus referred to children when he finally told Jocasta about the words he heard at Delphi. How was that foreseen?
— As you know better than anyone, Dr Freud, what we re-member is itself a re-creation, reconstituted, reclaimed but coloured by what we have done since and where we are.
— Where are we? I’ve forgotten. You see how drugs mar the memory.
— Awaiting the sole survivor of the Phokis massacre.
— Ach, I can hardly bear to hear what you are about to tell me!
— Then, Doctor, you know how I felt that awful day.
All the fretting, fretful king’s expectation was hanging on this long-suppressed report. A gang of local thugs had killed the king and his followers. Not, please the gods, a single man fleeing with horror in his heart from his position of beloved son and prince; a man with murder already on his mind; a man whose imagination had been inflamed, not perhaps so much w
ith dread as a longing and desire for the comfort of soft breasts and enfolding arms which – so long ago it was like a half-remembered dream – he had once known.
— We have a German saying: Love is a longing for home.
— If only he had seen that the riddle he needed to solve in Thebes was not the one posed by the marauding sphinx, but that of a female closer to home. Who can tell what she was thinking by then, the woman who for thirty-six years had had a mortal secret to hide? Small wonder she didn’t seek out her husband’s killers on that branching road in Phokis. Whoever had committed the murder had removed the only witness, save one, to her long-buried crime. Or so she supposed.
I have thought of her so often and wondered why you made so little of her in your account of the story. Was it really regard for her husband’s life – or was it that she cared so passionately for the boy she couldn’t endure the prospect that he might ever leave her?
— And pre-empted a separation she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate? It makes sense.
— You’re the expert, Dr Freud. I’m just a humble witness. And speaking of witnesses, it was not the anxiously awaited herdsman who arrived next. It was an unlooked-for messenger. Footsore and dishevelled from a hurried trek over the mountain passes from Corinth to Thebes, he burst on the scene with what appeared to be marvellous news.
It was the queen he came across first. She had taken it into her head to make some propitiatory offering to Apollo and she had made me come with her to his cult statue. She had sense enough not to quarrel with the god’s priest however little store she set by his oracles.
“Madam, I have come with an urgent message for Oedipus, son of Polybus. Where may I find him?”
“I am King Oedipus’s wife.”
“Madam, then I have important news for your husband.”
She hurried off to fetch the king. They were both as jumpy as a pair of cats.
He came fast enough and I stayed put to listen. By this time, they’d clean forgotten me.
“My Lord Oedipus, I have travelled from your homeland with grave tidings. King Polybus, your father, is dead and all Corinth begs you to return as its king.”
He wept openly at the news and she, I could almost see it, all but danced in her little gold-heeled sandals for joy. And that was the pair of them in a nutshell. Like lightning, she comprehended what this entailed: that there was as much truth in the Delphic words heard by her second husband as by her first. She was right in that, of course.
— How did Oedipus take the news?
— He was pitched into profound grief. There was no doubt about it; he loved that Corinthian couple from the bottom of his valiant, stubborn, loyal heart. Wasn’t that the reason he had left them in the first place? To protect them. And the grievous loss of the man who had fathered him, and whom – for what looked to be the best of reasons – he had abandoned without explanation, hit him hard. Only noticing his wife’s jubilation did he grasp the other significance. And then he had to sit down.
I heard the messenger say, “That’s right, my Lord, you take the weight off those legs”. More like an uncle to a favourite nephew than a servant to a king. And I remember thinking that the king must have been truly pole-axed, for, as a rule, such a familiar tone would have received a regular lambasting. He sat there, speechless, and his wife said, “You see, my love, how little need you have had to concern yourself with oracles”. I would bet on it she patted his hand.
I think we all gave a despairing sigh when, after some minutes to take it all in, he started up again. “But my mother, Queen Merope. For her sake I cannot return to Corinth.”
And then the rough over-familiar voice came in again. “Lord, sir, why ever not? She misses you cruelly, your mother.”
It must have hurt him to leave his mother in Corinth without explanation. To cut himself off, like that. I could hear him sobbing and then his voice whispered forlornly, “But I cannot return. I have a terrible doom hanging over my head: that I will sleep with my mother and murder my father, and your news brings me only one half of relief”. Which again was surprisingly intimate to an inferior. But this was a day of surprises.
For the very next thing our startled ears took in was a cheerful, “Oh, as to that, sir, I can set your mind at rest”.
“Why? How?” The king sprang up. You could hear in his voice he was alight with new hope.
“Well, sir. Because she’s not your natural mother, any more than the king was your natural father. I could have told you that.”
“What could you tell me?”
“The gods above, sir, your legs should tell you the truth of it.”
The legs, the lame legs, which he never referred to, which no one ever must mention.
He must have got the man by the throat because the deep voice was quashed to a squeak and was bleating, “Lord, sir, let go of me. You can see the scars on them still. I saw them the moment I came in, from the iron spikes that were driven through them. It was me freed you then, sir. Won’t you free me now?”
And the queen’s voice, rising to a frantic scream, “For the gods’ sake, Oedipus, drop it, let the man go!”
16
— I am sorry, we are about to be interrupted by the tea ritual. I can eat nothing, barely drink, but Anna insists. It is something she can do for me, she says.
— It is itself a kindness to accept kindness, Doctor.
— I am learning that. Illness, while a confounded nuisance, is also a teacher. Would you stay and take tea with me? As a kindness?
— I will stay. But I will leave the tea to you. It is not part of my religion!
— But I may introduce you to my Anna?
— No. I shall sit in the recess by your safely-cabineted sphinx. Then if your daughter notices me at all she will take me for one of your precious antiquities.
* * *
— There now. I have done my duty. Played with a few crumbs of scone, for Anna’s sake, and slopped some tea down the rat trap. It’s as well you cannot see me: it is not an edifying sight, the old dog eating. I hope the wait didn’t bore you?
— You know, Doctor, I was thinking while you were occupied that what most distresses my dusty old heart now is the kindness. That kindness should have served such an outcome. The man who had come to tell the king his father had died robbed him of that birthright in the same breath. And yet his intention was pure gold. And it was kindness that this same man had shown for the helpless newborn pinioned through his tender ankles. Imagine it, the tiny joints, the cruel pins.
— I am overtaken suddenly with a memory of my little grandson. It is a pain so deep I feel it down my left arm. I would have given my life to save my darling Heinz.
— Would that have been so hard for you, Dr Freud, to give your life?
— No, you are right. It is keeping life going that has been the struggle. The more so when loved ones leave. I loved Heinz. And he seemed to love me. He used to laugh when I kissed him. He said my whiskers tickled. Why do you suppose that children constellate the greatest cruelty?
— Because they are closest to the gods.
— Are the gods cruel?
— The gods are the gods. The deathless ones, who have no fear of death. The timeless ones, who stand outside time. We mortals who, bound in time are bound for death, mis-take the signs as occasions to do harm.
— Not least to ourselves! Go on, please. I have brushed the scone crumbs from my whiskers and am ready to listen like an obedient child.
— We sat in the throne room in shocked silence – or stood, in the case of the king, who was now stubbornly refusing to show any further effects of those ruined legs – while the Corinthian unfolded his tale.
“I was a shepherd, then, sir. My pastures lay as far as the high pass where Corinth meets this land; your land, sir, as it is now. One cold morning – I remember I had to blow on my hands for the chill of it – I met one of your herdsmen from round here. We sometimes stopped and passed the time of day. It’s lonely work herding and it
’s pleasant to meet another body to chat with in like circumstances.
“I thought at first it was a stillborn lamb my colleague from over the hill had cradled in his arms, so small and weak and silent it seemed. And then I saw it was a human child.
“He looked queer, my herdsman acquaintance. It was a sharp day and there was a wind up, but he was more hunched than usual. He told me he’d found the child crying on the mountainside, abandoned, with its legs pinned and, having no wife or woman he could take it to, he was in a fix what to do. We stood together, I remember, chest to chest across a stone wall, with the wind blowing as if it might be bringing snow and the child lying in his arms, naked save for a twist of old sacking my friend had wrapped round him. And suddenly the little chap opened his eyes and sneezed. There was something about the sneeze and the way he lay so still in my friend’s arms, with his maimed feet, and the blood and pus still oozing from the wounds, as if to say: Do what you will with me – I’m in your hands. Anyway, I said, ‘I reckon I could find a home for the poor wee creature’, and I took him back to my lambing shelter and pulled out those terrible pins from his pretty limbs – which, for all I’m used to creatures in pain, was a task I hope to the gods I never repeat – and gave him some ewes’ milk from the rag I used for the lambs whose dams had died. I guessed this little one’s dam had maybe died too, and his father hadn’t wanted him, so I set to wondering where I could place him with one who did.
“After a bit, I remembered it was rumoured how our king and queen had tried for a child with no luck. So I decided to take a risk. I took the child, still wrapped in his bit of sacking, to the palace and showed him to the queen, who fell in love with him, dear lady.”
There was a muffled sound and I heard a stool scrape and footsteps going quickly from the throne room.
“‘Why,’ says the queen, bless her heart, ‘look at his poor little swollen paws, the lamb’. And that is how you got your name, my Lord. Oidi-pous: Swollen feet. Did you never work it out before?”
Where Three Roads Meet Page 8
