by David Malouf
He worked his toes in the coolness and found himself chuckling. Most surprising of all was the way the fellow let his tongue run on, with no fear at all, it seemed, of being taken for a mere rattle or chatterer.
What he had to say, if you regarded it strictly, was unnecessary. It had no point or use. The wonder, given this, was that it did so little harm – none at all in fact – to the fellow’s dignity. There was something here, Priam thought, that he needed to think about.
In his own world a man spoke only to give shape to a decision he had come to, or to lay out an argument for or against. To offer thanks to one who had done well, or a reproof, either in anger or gentle regret, to one who had not. To pay a compliment whose decorative phrases, and appeals to vanity or family pride, were fixed and of ancient and approved form. Silence, not speech, was what was expressive. Power lay in containment. In keeping hidden, and therefore mysterious, one’s true intent. A child might prattle, till it learned better. Or women in the seclusion of their own apartments.
But out here, if you stopped to listen, everything prattled. It was a prattling world. Leaves as they tumbled in the breeze. Water as it went hopping over the stones and turned back on itself and hopped again. Cicadas that created such a long racketing shrillness, then suddenly cut out, so that you found yourself aware once again of silence. Except that it wasn’t silence at all, it was a low, continuous rustling and buzzing and humming, as if each thing’s presence was as much the sound it made as its shape, or the way it had, which was all its own, of moving or being still.
This old fellow his mule-driver, for instance, his Idaeus. What he had to say, his pleasant way of filling the time, was of no importance. It was full of something else. Interest.
It was as if you had found yourself peering through the crack in a door (exciting, Priam found, this imagining himself into a situation he would never have dreamed of acting out) and saw clearly for a moment into the fellow’s life, his world – the world of the daughter-in-law too.
That matter of the little cakes, for instance. The ingredients that went into them, and the convenient device the man’s son had come up with, out of simple affection, and to make things easier for the girl who was to cook them. It had never occurred to him that the food that came to his table so promptly, and in such abundance, might have ingredients. That a griddlecake or pikelet might have some previous form as batter. That batter might consist of good buckwheat flour and buttermilk, and that what you experienced as goodness might depend on the thickness of the batter or the lightness of a wrist. Or that ingenious arrangements might need to be made before a thing as simple as a mere pikelet could make its entry into the world. Or that one of the activities a man might give his attention to, and puzzle his wits over, was the managing of these arrangements, the putting together, in an experimental way, of this or that bit of an already existing world to make something new.
All that had been none of his concern. It had had no interest for him. Now it did. And he looked at the old fellow who had revealed these things to him with growing respect.
He knew things. The life he had come from, and had to some extent brought along with him, was full of activities and facts that, for all that they were common and low, had an appeal.
The good colour of the buttermilk, for instance, as it poured out of the crock: he liked what came to his senses when he pictured it. Even more the figure of the young woman as she squatted, her robe drawn up between her knees – but gracefully, modestly – to watch her cakes; flipping them over, very deftly so as not to burn her fingers, and when she did, popping the tips of them quickly into her mouth. All that was very lively and real. He could see it, though he had never seen her. And hadn’t he tasted, in the one little cake he had popped into his own mouth, the lightness of the girl’s wrist?
It had done him good, all that, body and spirit both. He wanted more.
To know, for example, whether that girl, the daughter-in-law, was well-favoured or not, and was meagre or on the plump side. How old was she? How did she dress her hair?
And the desire to fill out the picture, to see her more clearly, led to something very unaccustomed indeed, which he did not know how to deal with. The wish to put to the man one or two questions that were in no way necessary, served no purpose at all in fact, save the scratching of an itch he had discovered to know more about these unnecessary things, and to satisfy in himself a new sort of emptiness. Curiosity.
But the question, when he put it, was awkward, and did not touch on what he really wanted to know. It was a way, simply, of getting the fellow to start up again.
‘So,’ Priam said, ‘you too have been blessed with sons.’
The man looked up.
‘Blessed, my lord?’ He shook his head. ‘Well, you could say that. Blessed and then unblessed. In fact, sir, all I have left to me now is the daughter-in-law and a little girl four years old – no, she’ll be four next month if the gods spare her – my granddaughter. To tell the truth, sir, just at the moment she’s a worry to me. If I’ve been a bit absent at times, and wrapped up in my own thoughts, it’s because I’ve been thinking of her, poor soul, as you do, sir, when they are all that’s left of your own blood. When I set out this morning she had a fever, and naturally I didn’t expect then to be away for so long. By this hour most days I’d be home. Not that I mean to complain. But a fever is a worry. It’s a terrible thing to see their little bodies all hot and tossing from side to side, and hear them gasping for breath. It seems like such a simple thing to a big strong fellow like me – a breath. You’d think you could just give it to them, free, even if it meant a little tightening in your own chest. It would be worth it, not to have the fear, the worry, you know, sir, of them being taken. But she’s a strong little thing, there is that. Full of noise and mischief. Loves to be swung up on your shoulders and round and round till you’re both dizzy. You should hear her scream. She’s certainly got the breath for that! In just a few days, I dare say, she’ll be running round the yard chasing the pigeons. But you worry just the same, it’s in our nature. We’re tied that way, all of us. Tied here,’ and he closed his fist and brought it to his chest to indicate the heart.
‘She fell once out in the yard, on a stake, and the blood that poured out you wouldn’t credit in such a tiny creature. So much of it, and so red! All running away so fast I thought we’d never stop it. Then it stopped, just like that all on its own, as if something in her had said, “Enough, if things go on like this it’ll be the end of me.” What creatures we are, eh, sir? With so much life and will, and then, pfff, it’s ended. Well, she opened her eyes, blinked at us, laughed, and for that time it was all over: just a good-sized scar that is still there on her forehead, you can’t miss it. But we’d got a real fright, I can tell you. I shook all over. I thought, “I can’t bear it, if anything happens to this little one, the last of my blood.” I don’t know what I’d have done if the gods hadn’t thought again and been kind to us. But the truth is, we don’t just lie down and die, do we, sir? We go on. For all our losses. But I’d’ve been walking around, strong as I am, with a broken heart. My heart would have broken – it’s near broke already. My wife, rest her spirit, gave me three sons and four daughters, and you know, sir, not one of them is still living.’
He sat with his shoulders slumped, shaking his head. ‘Two of the boys got to be full-grown. The others, poor things, died early, of this and that. Stomach cramps, fits, fevers. One of the girls was so sickly she couldn’t feed. It was lucky there was an older child, a boy, who could take the milk. My dear one’s breasts swelled up like melons. They ached something terrible, and she cried and cried with the pain of it, though some of it was grief as well for the little one that just lay like a baby sparrow with its mouth open, gasping. Starved she was, too weak even to suck on your finger with a drop of milk on it. So the boy took it.’
Once again he moved away into his own thoughts and sat brooding. ‘I can see him now. Such a lively little fellow. Laughing and wiping th
e milk from his mouth. He was too young, sir, to understand what it cost the other. He grew up all the stronger for it, but it’s terrible to think of that little one’s ghost out there, still wailing and unfed.
But there it is! The one was lost, the other prospered, grew up strong as a bull. There was no other fellow in the whole district hereabouts who could match him for wrestling, or hurling a log, or carrying a couple of sheafs on his back. The strength he had in his shoulders! The thickness of him! Of his neck. Like the trunk of one of those tamarisks.’
He paused again, and so long this time that Priam had to prompt him after a bit to go on.
‘He’s no longer living, you say?’
‘That’s right sir, he’s not, he’s not. In the end his strength was the death of him. A neighbour of ours, a careless, drunken fellow, had got his wagon bogged with a load of wood and the boy was helping him lift it. He crawled underneath, digging his way in under the shafts, all covered from head to foot in mud, and was trying to raise it on his back, arching and straining and sweating, when something burst, something in his innards. He let out such a cry, I can hear it now. Like nothing I’ve ever heard, sir, before or since. I break into a sweat myself, even now, just at the memory of it. The wagon tilted with the load and began to sink, with him under it. We had to dig him out. Half-drowned he was, in mud – in his mouth, choking him, in his eyes. All night he lay, white as your robe. Then blue, and that was the end of it.’
He sat shaking his head. ‘Terrible. Terrible. To have got him up that far, and him so strong and likely to last it out. It leaves a gap you can’t ignore. It’s there. Always. The bit of a song he used to sing when he was washing out in the yard, preparing to go off with one of his girls. His cursing too, even that. And of course there was the work. Who was to take that on? It was hard on all of us. I sometimes think his mother died of it, poor soul. But he could be a difficult fellow at times. Light-headed, the way the young are sometimes. Foolish. He liked to show off. There was no reason for him to get under that wagon and do it all himself, except to show off in front of the rest. Though it was nothing in fact but a young lad’s foolishness. He would have grown out of it in time, if they’d just have given him the chance. Maybe they regret it.’
He looked up, squinting a little. ‘I knocked him down once, big as he was. I asked him to do something and he answered back with a why, and before I knew it I’d opened his lip with my fist. I’ve regretted it since. I’ve wished a thousand times over I’d just stood there and told myself, “He’s young, he’ll learn better, let it pass.” Mightn’t the gods regret it too, and think they acted too hasty, and be sorry now to have seen all that strength go for nothing in the world? Ah, there’s many things we don’t know, sir. The worst happens, and there, it’s done. The fleas go on biting. The sun comes up again.’
The man fell silent, stared off into the distance, his features darkened by a look that twisted the mouth, hardened the jaw under its grizzled beard. He rubbed his nose with the heel of his hand.
Priam too sat silent. There was much to take in.
He too knew what it was to lose a son. He had lost so many in these last months and years, all of them dear to him – or so he had told himself.
He had stood beside the body of each one and poured wine from the cup and named him to the gods. Sent them, each one, lighted by smoking torches and accompanied by prayers and the formal wailing of women, down into the underworld. All as custom and the law demands. Fired the brand, set it to the pyre with its load of slaughtered oxen. Surely he of all men knew what it was to lose a son.
But when he considered the terms in which his companion had spoken, the lively manner, so full of emotion, in which he had called the boy up at the very moment of his raising the cart on the strong arch of his back, that cry, of a kind he had never heard before or since, when something broke in his innards; his singing as he washed out in the yard on his way to the girls – all that was so personal, and the man’s memory of it so present and raw, even now in the telling of it, that Priam wondered if the phrase he had taken up so easily, that he knew what it was to lose a son, really did mean the same for him as it did for the driver. Whether what he had felt for the loss of Gorgythion, whose mother, the lovely Castianira, had come all the way from Aesyme to marry him, and Doryclus and Isus and Troilus and the rest, was in any way comparable to what this man had felt for a boy who was, after all, neither a prince nor a warrior, just a villager like so many more.
The truth was that none of his sons was in that sense particular. Their relationship to him was formal and symbolic, part of that dreamlike play before the gods and in the world’s eye that is both the splendour and the ordeal of kingship. He could not even be sure of their actual number. Fifty, they said.
But that was only a manner of speaking, a good round number. A bid, a powerful one, for the world’s regard, an aggressive purchase on the future; clear evidence of a godlike activity in the sphere of breeding and begetting, another aspect of the necessary show. Like the list of his allies, or the measures of gold and the suits of embossed and finely worked armour, the cauldrons and tripods and precious cups that made up his fabled treasury. The actual number he could not swear to. Two or three more than fifty? Two or three less?
Of course he was in each case the source of their life, the forceful agent by which, in an onrush of manly desire, or out of habit or kingly duty, as he lay with Hecuba or with one of his many other wives and concubines, this or that prince had sprung into being.
The occasion itself was personal enough – none more so, the most personal of all. How else speak of that falling so pleasurably into the great dark, that sighing of the spirit into the very mouth of death, and in the midst of all, the rush of tender affection – for Hecuba, for instance, the first and dearest of his wives – and the sweet words that passed between them as they lay together afterwards; the hundred playful episodes in which they whisperingly teased and tempted one another. Like children themselves. Blessed, utterly blessed, and naked before the gods.
But as for the particular little offspring of so much high activity – his Isus, or Dius, or Troilus – well, he had no memory of any one of them as a three-year-old wiping the milk from his mouth, or sweating and racked with fever. He had never knocked any one of them to the ground and afterwards hugged his fist and regretted it. Such an act of violent intimacy was hardly within his comprehension. Nothing in the world he moved in would have permitted such a thing. Any more than he would have abandoned the austere stance he was constrained to by sweeping one of them up onto his shoulders and swinging round and round till the little body was limp with an excited shrieking.
Did he regret these human occasions, and the memory of them that might have twined his sons more deeply into his affections and made his relationship with them more warm and particular?
Perhaps.
But hadn’t he been saved something as well?
When the years arrived in which, one after the other, his sons were brought in from the battlefield and he had twenty times over to stand by a corpse and pour out wine, and give the pierced and bloodless or hacked body a name, wouldn’t he have suffered twenty times over if, as he held the brand to the pyre, he had had to remember how this one’s sweat, when he crowned him once after a wrestling match, had had an odour of the stable as rank as any groom’s; and how that one had had a little spinning top, and had fallen once when he went stumbling after it on the palace floor, and had recognised, with an unexpected onrush of recall, the star-shaped scar that was still visible on the young man’s cheek, just inches from where a Greek javelin had shattered the jaw, smashed the teeth and taken a piece the size of his fist out of the back of his skull? Even the ghostly recollection now of what he had never in fact allowed himself to see made his old heart leap and flutter.
Royal custom – the habit of averting his gaze, always, from the unnecessary and particular – had saved him from all that. And yet it was just such unnecessary things in the old man’
s talk, occasions in which pain and pleasure were inextricably mixed, that so engaged and moved him.
‘And the other?’ he found himself asking, almost before he was aware of it. ‘You spoke of two sons.’
‘Ah,’ the man sighed. ‘That happened only last spring, my lord. As chance would have it, not a hundred paces from here.’
He had taken up a stick and he threw it now far out into the stream. The fishlings, destined to be disappointed again, darted in towards the circles of light that went pulsing from where it fell, themselves for a moment making a small disturbance on the surface before the river went back to its own life again.
‘There’s another fording place down there. Not so easy as this one, but not difficult either if you know what you’re about. Closer to the road. It was her fault, that little off-side mule I’m so fond of, Beauty, though I wonder at myself sometimes, she can be a bad-tempered creature if things don’t suit her. She must have lost her footing halfway across. It was spring and the river was high and running fast over the gravel. He would have been trying to get her upright. She must have taken panic and knocked him sideways and they were both swept out into the stream.’
He rubbed his nose, as previously – it was, Priam saw, a little habit with him – and sniffled. From off among the shadowy tamarisks came something like the hooting of an owl.
‘We found him late the next morning – I’d been out all night looking for them – all tangled in the reeds on the other bank. And she, silly creature, she’d just walked out easy as you please and never looked back, and was grazing with her halter loose, in a patch of meadow-sweet. Switching her tail and pricking her ears when she caught sight of me.
