The Hidden

by Tobias Hill

  –The ring’s in my coat. If that’s what you want.

  –No, she said, and moving away, You don’t keep pictures of her.

  Of them, he thought, and said instead, I’ve never seen the point.

  –Why?

  –I remember them. I don’t need reminders.

  –Do you miss them?

  –Every day.

  –It must be nice, to have a child.

  –Yes.

  –Boy or girl?

  –Girl. How did you end up here, Natsuko?

  –Max.

  –He was a friend of yours?

  She didn’t bother to answer him. She was at the desk again, leafing through his thesis notes (or whatever kind of notes they were now), seemingly absorbed in them until she let the book fall shut and drifted towards the window. He watched her opening the blinds, looking out, thinking how different she could be. Sometimes the mischievous telltale, sometimes this calm, mirror-eyed creature. Unreachable.

  –Natsuko?

  –Max does not have friends. Maybe Eberhard is his friend. Eberhard is a very admirable person.

  –Listen, can I ask you something? When I arrived, and there wasn’t a message for me…did you do that on purpose?

  –Yes.

  –Why?

  –We didn’t want you here.

  –But, I mean–

  –We didn’t know you then.

  –Oh. He stood up, rubbing his palms on his jeans. –Would you like some tea?

  –Not yet. What does your name mean?

  –Nothing.

  –All names mean something.

  –Ben is just Ben. Or anyway I don’t know what it means. Mercer means merchant, if you really want to know. It’s a good name for us, actually. We’ve always been selling something. Off the back of a lorry half the time.

  –What are you selling, Ben Mercer?

  –What do you want me to sell?

  –My name means Sweet Little Summer. You can see the pool from here.

  –Every morning.

  She turned as he came up behind her. For a moment he thought she would step into his arms, but instead she smiled and put out one hand again, this time against his chest. Not pushing him away, but spreading her fingers across his breast, as if to tell him to wait a little, or as if she were measuring him.

  X

  Notes Towards a Thesis

  Monday 15th: no Maxis brothers today. The cousin is delayed in Athens and the olives must be harvested. To harvest the olives (the Greeks say) is more important than to fight the war.

  Crossword came up in person with my wake-up call and Chrystos’s apologies. Bad news calls for room service. Her eyes go everywhere, two grey mice scurrying after the smallest scraps of unhappiness.

  Eberhard drove me up. We met at his with time to spare. We talked about nothing much. Elections and politics. Almost like friends.

  He has good books. I found this:

  All executioners are of the same family.

  And thought of this:

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  All extremisms are also alike. Does that mean all extremists are happy?

  Sparta, with its secrecy, its perfect, prehistoric strength, its arrogant brutality, its panoply of gods, its young bloods coming down at night to kill the sturdiest and the best, its mothers turning from newborns swaddled and cloaked, bawling and gone; its sly reptilian deadliness–

  What is the type of Sparta’s extremism? What is the Spartan pattern? In the terms of our age it is Left, Right, East and West. It is a meeting of all degrees and compass points. It does not resonate because it is strange but because it remains strangely familiar. The good extremist thinks he walks backwards, against the ways of the world. He thinks himself happy because others are unhappy and because he is unlike others it must be so. But his logic is false, and in any case he is not unlike others. He is akin to all those who have pushed themselves beyond the limits where the dial clocks back to nought. All extremisms are alike and in Sparta all are prefigured.

  I go on calling these my notes. I don’t know what kind of thesis I could rake up out of them now. I’ve botched the job: why go on with it? I’ve lost sight of my end. I have no argument. I have misinterpreted the most basic facts. How can I keep writing at all when I don’t understand what I have written?

  The Spartans had little time for outsiders. They were sparing with their respect. Even when their hands were extended in friendship they were tight-fisted with their trust. They were cautious even of those of their own whose stations took them abroad. Too often their emissaries would both learn and forget too much. The further that Sparta’s power reached, the more often its kings and admirals returned to find themselves no longer at home with the old severities. Degenerate habits would be noted in them. They would desire rich foods and prefer fine clothes. They would hold themselves apart from and above the company of their equals. They were found out in the possession of Athenian silver or Persian gold. In dutifully going out into the unhappy world they had been contaminated by unhappiness. In the end they would be cast out again, or killed, immured in the sanctuaries where they hid, their bodies brought out on the brink of death, that the gods be spared their corruption.

  Did the Spartans fear the world outside? Did they guard against its jackals and wolves? Their wall-less city claimed fearlessness. The Spartans had faith in themselves until the day they were destroyed. And yet their faiths themselves–their gods–are full of flashes of terror. If it was not the world without they feared then what was it, unless themselves?

  Their longest and most brutal war was reserved for their enemies within. The Romans and Athenians wrote of the Crypteia. Little is extant and nothing certain. As so often where Sparta is concerned, nothing has been unearthed which sheds any light on the rumours of others. The secrets are still buried deep, if they were ever buried at all.

  Crypteia means The Secret Matter or The Time of Hiding, The Hidden Ones or The Hidden. It was an enclave and a service. It was the young men who undertook to serve and the acts undertaken.

  The magistrates from time to time sent out into the countryside the most discreet of the young men, equipped only with daggers and the necessary supplies. During the day they scattered into obscure and out-of-the-way places, where they hid themselves and lay quiet. But in the night they came down to the roads and killed every helot they caught…the sturdiest and the best of them.

  The most discreet:

  The Hidden were selected not according to martial prowess but by merit of cunning and circumspection. By mental capability. This reflecting the nature of the Hidden, which was not a military force except in the last extremity; was firstly, rather, an instrument of subterfuge and terror.

  The Spartans were not unique among the Greeks in admiring subterfuge. Odysseus, the slipperiest of kings, is loathed by Homer’s Achilles–I hate the man who says one thing and hides another in his heart–but both are heroes even so. It is only that the valorous hero dies while the discreet one survives.

  The young men:

  Paidiscos; boy-like; nineteen years of age; between boyhood and manhood.

  The necessary supplies:

  What did the Hidden eat? Hunting was of ritual importance to the Spartans, but the Hidden could not have hunted freely. Nor could they have built open fires. By definition they were to remain concealed. Their period of service is unknown, but it may have been as much as a year. The valley here is lush but the highlands would offer little foraging. Onions and chestnuts, walnuts and snails. Hyacinths and pomegranates.

  The helot farmlands would offer better pickings. Theft–if accomplished–was admired in Sparta. There is a story of a Spartan boy who stole a fox, hid it under his cloak, and died from the wounds it dealt him rather than face the shame of failure (and this has come to seem a strange parable, a muddled, inscrutable Chinese whisper, though Apollodorus gives the fox as a symbol of Messene, the long-lost city of the helots, who
se lives were Sparta’s greatest theft and whose masses were an army at its back).

  Theft was admired, and so too were the qualities of scavengers and carnivores. Aristotle condemned the Spartans for raising men to be like wolves. Xenophon records a Spartan threat–the promise to devour an enemy raw–that equates the consumption of unrefined flesh with martial ferocity. Ferocity, tempered with control, was a quality the Spartans admired: Ares Thereitas was not the god of a people who fought in cold blood. I think the boy-men of the Hidden stole what they required, and ate as animals eat.

  Obscure and out-of-the-way places:

  Where did the Hidden rest? The winters are dreadful here and all seasons are unpredictable. Jason says there are caves in the mountains. People lived in them once, tens of thousands of years ago. In the mountain caves, a Hidden would have found both concealment and shelter.

  But in the night they came down:

  The Spartan territories possessed three notable areas of higher ground: the Aigaleon, Taygetos and Parnon mountain ranges. Since the Hidden inhabited the highlands during daylight, it can be assumed that these ranges were at times occupied by them. In such positions they were ideally placed not only as sentinels against foreign incursion, but as watchers of those within the kingdom.

  Nightwork served several purposes. To control their vast majority a permanent nocturnal curfew was imposed on the helots. Spartan numbers would have made such a measure impossible to enforce were it not for the Hidden. Without the fear inspired by the Hidden such subjection would not have remained a reality.

  The curfew was not inconsequential. Spartan armies bound abroad left their territories under cover of darkness. The defence of the state relied on the helot population never knowing what force remained to guard against their slumbering giant.

  How did the helots see the Hidden? They must have known of them. It was vital that they knew of them, but important too that they never knew too much. Nothing is as frightening as the unknown.

  They were not a learned people. They would live for thirteen generations without formal education. The Hidden must have seemed supernatural. Monsters in the shadows. Warnings against those who thought to wander too far or wonder too much. What killed the lamb that strayed last night? What is that moving in the trees? Don’t say that name. Don’t speak of that. Come back, my love, into the house.

  The sturdiest and the best of them:

  The killings themselves served three functions. Firstly, they inculcated fear: but Sparta also made use of eugenics among its own people, and its Hidden will have brought to their homicides a eugenic understanding of what it was they undertook. Secondly, then, the culling of a strong or clever helot would be seen as the elimination of troublesome stock, of singular sources of potential rebellion; and lastly, as the means to weaken the helot race as a whole.

  The Hidden would also have been well suited to performing the exposure of Spartan infants. While exposure of deformed newborns was common in Greece, in Sparta alone the practice was state-controlled and scrupulously applied. The monster (teras) would be adjudged as such not by the father but by the Council of Elders. The process of exposure was also known as The Hiding. The Hidden were under the age of marriage: they had no true experience of paternal feeling, or how it feels to gain or lose a child. The secrecy of the undertaking, its state administration, and its execution in the higher regions of the Taygetos or Parnon mountains, all suggest that exposure would be naturally delegated to the Hidden.

  …What did it mean, that the helots were human? It is Aristotle who describes how Sparta would declare war on its captives at the beginning of each new year. The declaration was needed precisely because the humanity of the helots was recognised. To kill in wartime was no crime; but that is not to say, of course, that such killing was without consequences. That the soldier commits no crime does not mean he is innocent. That the law pardons him does not mean he goes unpunished.

  The Hidden did not work alone. Terrorisation took many forms. Part of a Spartan child’s education was to watch a helot humiliated by being forced to drink unmixed wine. In Sparta’s declining years the helots were ordered to wear insignia in the form of caps made of animal skins. At other times suppression became extermination. Thucydides writes of the culling of two thousand helots who answered a Spartan call to arms. The same is retold by Plutarch:

  The helots who had been found brave had wreaths put on their heads to show their liberation, and they went in a procession to the temples. But not long afterwards they vanished–more than two thousand of them–in such a way that no man could say, then or afterwards, how they had come to their deaths…

  XI

  Shoot-’Em-Up

  Little by little the nights were getting warmer. For a week he slept poorly, windows thrown open to allay the Soviet blast of the hotel heating. He would lie awake for hours, listening to the town outside–an insomniac bird shrieking in its fourth-floor cage; a coming and going of music; a wolf-pack of revellers–and then would fall asleep with archaeological slowness, not passing between two distinct states but descending through intricate strata of consciousness, sub-consciousness, unconsciousness.

  Emine began to fade, first from thoughts, then from his dreams. A whole day would pass, and as lay awake he would realise with a stab of guilt to the heart that he had not thought of her. He wondered if it was what he had set out to do in leaving everything behind, this salving reduction of memory. And then sometimes it did not feel a salving, but like a tearing away.

  He wondered if even Nessie would come to mean less to him.

  Monday night he slept at Jason’s. That morning as they worked he had told the others about the kebab club, hamming it up to make them laugh, but Eleschen had been enthused, had begged them to go back with her for supper and cocktails, and even Eberhard had succumbed in the end. They had gone home to change and then had met up at the bar, sitting in the confusion of smoke and mirrors with Faith No More ringing in their bones, Natsuko drinking Grasshoppers that stained her tongue lizard-green, Eberhard arguing with the cocktail waiter about which sugar to use in an Absinthe Drip, Max dancing with himself–laughing at his own gracelessness–and then with the panda-eyed neo-goths Ben had seen in the place before. When Eleschen had been invited on to a name-day party by two military students (Galinis, they had called her, meaning blue-eyed and unlucky, though neither had looked as if they could believe their luck when she agreed), the five of them had followed in her wake to a flat at the west end of Thermopylae Street. He had soon been drunk enough to hope Natsuko might come back with him, but the girls had left together, hand in hand on the stroke of three, and Jason’s place had been round the corner; and besides, he had had cigarettes.

  He slept for an hour and woke as darkness faded. He was hungover but no longer drunk. His thoughts ran clear as if he were well rested. He picked his way across the bombsite of the bedsit to the galley kitchen, ran the tap and dipped his head and drank until his head sang with the cold. Weariness hit him as he stood, and he retreated to the sofa and lay down again, on one side, watching the light fill the windowpanes. He could see Jason still asleep. There was so much crockery around and in his bed he seemed to be laid out in a kitchen sink.

  He was woken again by a cacophony of machines. The computer was on in the corner, the bellows-drone of its overclocked fans accompanied by the death throes of a war game left to its own devices. The clock-radio and TV were playing and Jason was shaving at the kitchen counter, humming, dancing, baring his neck, working blind, edging his goatee with a battery razor, gulping last night’s coffee from an unwashed wineglass. Beyond him a weatherman was conjuring the sun while, on the radio, a singer grieved for long-lost Byzantium.

  City of God, City of Light,

  Constantinople, like the Phoenix,

  Will rise again, will rise again!

  He belched and tasted the night’s champagne, sour as bile against his teeth. There was something wrong with the weatherman. He was still trying to work it out when
Jason danced round to face him.

  –Oh, it’s you.

  –Of course it’s me.

  –I mean you’re up. I didn’t think you’d make it. Want coffee?

  –No.

  –Sure? It’s best served cold. Like revenge and pizza. Sweet dreams?

  –I don’t remember…What time is it?

  –Too early to think about. Me, I was hoping for Eleschen, but all I got was the time I got narked. I did underwater archaeology for a bit but I lost my nerve after that. Narked is when the nitrox gets you. A decent operation you use helium mix on deep dives but this one wasn’t quite decent. They called themselves archaeologists but they were selling the stuff on to collectors in Tunis. Don’t tell Stanton I told you, right? So you start to get narked at fifty feet and at a hundred you feel like you’ve had a good few solid vodka shots. I was twice that deep and it was dark down there. I was a state. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I thought I was going to throw up in the tubes. I could have got my weight belt off but I was scared of going up too fast. I saw someone do that once and the blood was running out of his ears. I was lucky they found me when they did. Anyway I had enough of that, that was my last dive…what’s up with you?

  –What do you think?

  –Oh, the new spiky hungover Ben. I like you better this way.

  Late, he thought: that was what was wrong with the weatherman. He should have been washed and dressed by now.

  –Where’s my watch?

  –How would I know? Stop worrying, we’ve got…ten minutes. Shit. Natsuko’s always on the dot too. The bathroom’s all yours anyway. Mea culpa in advance. Come on, cheer up, have a coffee. Look, there’s a clean mug here. Get dressed, I’ll warm it up for you.

  He found his watch in his boots and strapped it on. It was Natsuko he had dreamed of, he remembered, though he could recall nothing more than her face. The pock-mark at her temple. Her deer-dark eyes, sometimes cautious, sometimes fierce.