— He must have done, surely?
— Something in him did. He had worked so very hard to construct that other meaning that had governed his adult life. “Know-foot”. Not, at any price, one whose feet were swollen from a hideous crime against his defenceless frail young being. But, to be sure, those feet had their own say in how things fell out, Doctor. They turned out to be feet which “knew” of themselves to take him back to the home he had been thrust so cruelly from. They took him inexorably back to the woman who had maimed them, his own mother, who had never forgotten her deed.
For she must have guessed: guessed long before, stopping her ears, she ran that day from the throne room to the bedchamber where she had conceived a child by the man who had tried to murder the child – who had, in turn, murdered his would-be-murderer before he too lay in that same bed with the woman who had conceived him and begot with her four other children. As each of her husbands at the mouth of the world’s womb had heard would come to be so.
— She had to “forget”, to erase the crime against her own womb.
— But how, in the name of all that’s sacred, could she not have known that the man she lay with nightly, in the bed vacated by his father, was that same man’s offspring, her own lost son? You are the expert, Dr Freud, but don’t tell me she didn’t know. She believed – hoped, prayed – that against all the odds she had got him back, and for good. It was her deepest never-to-be-spoken desire: to recover to her womb her precious first-born son.
I was there. And it was not he who was so desperate to cover it up. She knew all right. He knew too – but the difference is that he didn’t know what he knew. Even then, even hearing all this, he cried out in a voice which, telling you now, still chills my spine, “And where in the name of all the gods is the man who brought you that child whom you say I was?”
And at that same moment he arrived: the single survivor of the attack on King Laios. The herdsman turned king’s retainer turned herdsman. My herdsman, the little bow-legged man with the twisted smile and the kind hands.
I could no more see him with my outer eye than I can see you, but as clearly as I see you lying on your rug-clad couch, the moment he walked into that throne room I saw the figure I had known on Cithaeron.
He had the same manner, quiet. So quiet we all responded. Even the king didn’t try to make him speak. He waited. I remembered the voice when it came, untentative and mild.
“My Lady?” I think until that moment the king had been oblivious to the queen’s departure. “My Lady Jocasta? She sent for me and I have instructions to speak only to her.”
“Call the queen.”
We waited again. I do believe from his feverish murmurs that the king was so far from being able to take in the truth of what we were all witnessing that he fancied she had left the room scandalised by the discovery that he was not of royal blood. Which shows you how far his mind must have gone, since, whatever else, she was not a snob.
The queen came back. I heard her distinctive tapping step pause on the threshold. Then she entered and the silence grew thick again.
“My Lord?”
“The man you summoned from” – he spoke stiffly but she must have been expecting worse – “your husband’s party, has arrived”.
Your husband’s party! Imagine. The man who for the past eighteen years had been her adored husband was speaking. Poor lady. She did her best but her voice was all but unrecognisable. The girlish lightness had quite fallen away and you could hear the struggle in it as, still dignified, she enunciated, with frightening precision, “Tell my Lord Oedipus all he wishes to know…” the very slightest hesitation “…to know about the death of King Laios”.
“Everything, my Lady?”
“If he wishes.”
We all felt her waiting in anguish for her husband to say one reassuring word. But it didn’t come. And then, still impeccably self-possessed, “My Lord, may I be excused? There are things I…”
If he answered her at all it was with a gesture and she left the room with the same firm step.
Only then did the king speak. “Tell me, my man, exactly what you saw that day.”
He had to seem to go on with the charade, though with his acute sensitivity he must have at once recognised – and sensed that he had been recognised. And not for the first time.
“My Lord, it is long ago…”
“Speak up, man.”
“My Lord?”
“Speak, I am your king and I command this – or I will throttle you with my own hands.” I could imagine his hands outstretched. He must have longed to annihilate this last witness.
“My Lord, we came to a place in Phokis where there is a cleft in the road…”
“I’ve heard enough today about those roads!”
“My Lord?”
“Whom did you meet there?”
“Meet?”
“Is the question not plain? I shall repeat it. Whom – did – you – and the party you travelled with – the king’s party – meet at this crossroads?” And again, you had to admire him. He wouldn’t draw back an inch. It was a frightful rerun of that other time. “Was it one man or many that killed your king?”
“My Lord.”
“Yes?”
“I…”
“Yes?”
“It was…”
“In the name of all the gods above, speak out man or die!”
And as my old friend from Cithaeron stood there, seemingly at a loss for words, the messenger from Corinth cried out, “My Lord, I am stark blind – this is the same man! The man who gave me the baby on the high pasture. The man who handed you over, my Lord, when you were just a tiddler, into my care”.
We stood, steeling ourselves to hear the forging of the last link in the chain of that fateful story; and there came from the inner quarters of the palace a heart-stopping cry and after it a long scream; and then the sound of women’s voices moaning.
With a howl, the king ran on those maimed legs from the throne room. He found his mother-wife in their bedchamber, hanging from the massy upper beam of the royal bed by a noose of her own devising: a child’s swaddling bands.
She had kept them those thirty-six years. Who can say for what purpose?
17
20 Maresfield Gardens, 2 February 1939
— Is it you? Wait, let me open the windows. You vanished into thin air again. I turned to light another cigar and you’d gone.
— I am sorry to seem to desert you, Doctor.
— Well, at least my old dog hasn’t. Lün is back with me at last. I sometimes think she is the only creature on earth I am able to love with safety. I’ve had to bear so many losses: my darling Heinz; his mother, my Sophie, my Sunday child.
— But you have other sons and daughters?
— Oh, I am lucky, believe me, I know.
— And how is your other “friend” treating you?
— My little carcinoma. Like you it is back, but it is less welcome. Pichler tells me there is nothing more to be done. So now it is a matter of waiting, sticking it out. I hope I shall survive to see the almond bloom. Did you see if it is in bud? …I am sorry, forgive me.
— No matter, I see it in my mind’s eye, Doctor. It grew in Daulis. The palest pink blossom.
— It is late this year, they tell me. I hope it won’t attempt to flower before the snow’s gone. How was it on the heath? I’ve not been out for days. Anna forbids it.
— It was deep today.
— And the birds?
— Birds don’t mind snow.
— Not much they can do about it if they do!
— They don’t complain.
— Unlike humankind?
— I’ve not heard you complain, Dr Freud.
— I might have done had you been here to listen. It’s a grotesque procedure I’m about to go through with not a scrap of hope at the end. I’ve thought a good deal about your story.
— Our story.
— If you wish.
—
No one hears the same story since your retelling, Dr Freud.
— Is that a compliment or an insult?
— Don’t get me wrong, Doctor. You got the size of the drama right, if not the entire point of it. Because, if I may say so, here in all the world was the one person you could safely say didn’t have the complex you dreamed up for him. He was Oedipus, plain Oedipus. But not simple. What was complex about him was not that he wanted to sleep with his mother (as she herself said, that impulse is not so uncommon) nor even that he killed a man who had once before threatened his life. Tit for tat, some might say. What was so remarkable was that his own safekeeping was usurped by the need to know what he needed not to know. He needed to know it so imperatively that he pushed on, against everyone’s effort to prevent him, even – most powerful – his own. It was as if his very life hung upon the thread of knowledge which could destroy it.
— He was more comforted by truth than fortified by comfort.
— You would know, Dr Freud.
— Thank you for that, my friend. Are you going to finish the story for me?
— You know as well as I do how it ends.
— Tell me anyway. I shall lie here, with my faithful Lün, like a child hanging on to the bedtime tale before he is banished finally into the night. In my case a long one.
— With who knows what at its end.
— That’s easy. Nothing.
— How do you know, Doctor?
— Because – you are laughing at me? Ah, I see.
— It’s more than I do. We’re the blind leading the blind, you and I. Both of us in the dark.
— All colours are the same in the dark.
— Who said that, Dr Freud?
— A great scientist. Isaac Newton. Something of a mystic, too, in his time. Time. It has come up so often in our conversations.
— We’ll have all the time in the world and more to talk about that. There is something I would like to consider with you first, if you will allow. I’ve spent ages mulling over this story but telling it to you, Doctor, has brought something more clearly to light.
— My talking cure isn’t such a bad one, then?
— By no means. You and I have more in common than meets the eye.
— Which is damn all in your case, if you’ll pardon my saying so!
— Ah Doctor if we don’t laugh how shall we bear it? What has been welling up in my mind is this. The herdsman. My Cithaeron friend, the man I saw on the high pasture when, as a heart-shattered boy, I came to Delphi. It’s my belief it was the Lord Apollo himself – no, don’t interrupt please. I have come to perceive that it was Apollo, in his herdsman’s shape, who rescued the outcast child from the consequences of his own oracle. It would be my double-natured Lord’s way: killer and healer, executioner and deliverer, wolf and shepherd. And what leaps to my mind now is that Apollo first showed himself at Delphi as a dolphin, the womb-fish, the nurturer.
— “His delights were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above the element they lived in”?
— That’s my super-subtle Lord! The very name of his sanctuary enshrines the dolphin’s name. I was listening to the birds chiming across the snow today. Sounds alter in the snow. Apollo was god of music and played many tunes on his hollow lyre. The paean, the healing strain of music, was his. And maybe, Doctor, the answering note to those hard parental hearts was the herdsman who took the pinioned baby from his mother’s arms and saw to it that he found other, kindlier, ones. I would wager my sight again that it was Apollo himself who spared the babe’s life and granted him a second chance by giving him into the safekeeping of that devoted Corinthian couple. And, by that same token, the herdsman was awarded his chance when his life was spared – when the boy whose life he had saved would have killed his own rescuer at that place of decision where three roads meet.
— And there was another way?
— There’s always another way. But we can only see as we are. And no power on earth, nor above or below it, not even yours, Dr Freud, can deflect the human will when it has its sights set on one direction.
And this is the most terrible irony of all: the attempt to outwit the oracle was needless, for its subtle prophecy had already been fulfilled. Before he was taken from his mother’s breast, Oedipus had lain with her three days and three blissful nights. She told us so herself, that dreadful day in the throne room, three days and three nights during which the thought of the male child, lying in bed with his mother, must have been a living death to his father. You can’t escape an oracle. You can merely find ways and means to live with it. If only, if only they could have let things be.
— They couldn’t bear to. Events must be endured if they are to disclose their meaning.
— Or unfold untold meanings? And no one, even you, Doctor, has ever quite accounted for humankind’s resistance to letting well alone – or for misfortune’s strong allure. It was in the blood of that mismatched couple’s ill-starred son; imbibed with his mother’s milk and drilled into his bone.
— Naturally he would have the same tendency.
— And with their atrocity against him, the seeds of all the forthcoming tragedy were sown. He carried it with him, the impress of that unholy assault, until it found its way back into daylight, through his own person. You see, it is not the gods that cause tragedy, Doctor. It’s we mortals who misconstrue the signs.
— From our mortal fear of mortality.
— Or immortality, Doctor?
— Certainly, he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is.
— But, Dr Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.
18
— Doctor?
— What? Oh. Forgive me. I drifted away.
— You’re tired, Doctor. Shall I leave you?
— No, don’t go. I want to hear the end of the story. You promised me the end.
— I promised you an end.
— Tell me, then, if you will be so kind, my particular Theban colleague, how the story ended for you.
— The next thing I heard in that throne room was a mounting wail, a wail which was taken up by all around me as the king came crashing back into the room from where he had once ruled so sure-footed and so proud.
How glad I am that I could not see the sight but had it only from report. He had torn two bronze brooch-pins from the breast of his mother-wife’s dangling corpse and with these adornments had repeatedly pierced his two eyeballs, as thirty-six years before – in an act unparalleled – the woman who wore them had assailed his newborn ankles. The sockets of the sightless eyes filled with dark blood and bloody gules, like tears, ran down his harrowed face. The god alone knows what unseen ravage there was to his mind and heart.
— It was castration, of course. The eyes and the male member; it is well established from the study of dreams that the two are synonyms.
— No, Dr Freud. Had Oedipus seen fit to castrate himself, believe me he would have done so. It was shame. Like a child who hides behind his hands he supposed that if he couldn’t see the world, the world could not see him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see – it was, in the horror of recognition, the horror of being recognised.
“My children, my children, my children,” he was crying pitifully. But this time, he didn’t mean his subjects. Someone at my shoulder whispered the old adage, “Never to have lived is best …” and all around his sycophantic court took up the theme.
One bold spirit came forward and put a stick into his hand and he stood and leaned on it, he who had stood so upright and proud, and cried out again. “My poor darlings. What have I done, what in the god’s name have I been to you?” And “What will happen to you now, my dear dears?” He was better than her, for all her charm. His children, his ill-begotten children, were his first thought.
— It was the daughters who stood by him?
— The girls, Antigone and Ismene. Especially Antigone.
— Like my Anna! And what about you, my friend? Did you speak to
him?
— I let him alone at first. I had no reason to suppose he would thank me for anything I had to say. It would have been rank folly to rush in. But after a time I did approach him. It was the blindness. I felt he should know that someone knew how he felt.
— How did he take that?
— Difficult to judge. He didn’t say much but he did say, “I was blind before so what’s the difference? How about you?” And I said, “It has compensations, blindness. You get to hear things”. He didn’t say anything to that.
— He had courage.
— He even hung on for a while in Thebes while Creon fussed and havered over what should be done. Creon was right not to have wanted the throne. He was a natural second-in-command and without his incisive sister and her consort he couldn’t take a decision to save his life. In the end, he sent yet again to the oracle and it was agreed, after more havering, that Oedipus should be banished – by which time Creon had succeeded in thoroughly embittering the former king.
Antigone and Ismene refused to be parted from their father. The boys never came to any good but the girls were cut from a different cloth. They insisted on going into banishment with him, he tap-tapping on his third leg. You see, Doctor, it wasn’t merely that he had overlooked that he was a man like any other, when he believed he had answered the sphinx’s riddle; it was horribly answered in his own person. He was forced on to four legs as a mewling babe, skewered then shackled by those brutal bolts; as the city’s ruler, he stood more firmly on his own two feet than any man; and as a blind broken mendicant he depended on a stick to find his way. The sphinx’s trivial riddle was a cheap parody of the oracle’s enigma.
— But rather easier to solve! I was thinking, it begins and ends with three. The ill-matched parental couple and the outcast child; the incestuous father and his pair of loyal daughters. How did the three of them get by?
— Sometimes taken in by merciful strangers, more often sleeping rough in barns or covered by leaves in dank ditches, or in foul-smelling caves, where lions and wolves make their dens and lairs. Enduring hunger, and rain and wind and hail and snow, and the raging sun, till Ismene, the younger girl, grew ill with it and he packed her off home. But the other, Antigone, had his stubbornness and refused to leave him. She was his prop till the end. He inspired loyalty.
Where Three Roads Meet Page 9
