by Tobias Hill
He had stood up while Eberhard was still talking. He was seized by a desperate urge to get out of the range of his voice. He would leave him sitting there. He could find his own way home. He could pack tonight and take the first bus out in the morning. It was no better or worse than he had done before. He would put them all behind him. Nothing was stopping him.
It wasn’t true. It was too late. The cave stopped him. He had seen it now. Already he knew he would never excise the memory of it. The knowledge was inescapable. The man in the cave wouldn’t let him go.
And was even that the whole truth? Didn’t the others stop him too? They had been kind to him, in their ways. They had trusted him. He didn’t want to leave them. There was even a part of him, a small and pitiful part, that wondered if their judgement might not be better than his own: he hoped that he would realise, soon, that what they had done was right, and that it was only he himself who was in the wrong.
A silence had fallen on them. Eberhard was waiting for him to speak, he knew, but for a long time he could find nothing in himself that he could have put into words.
–He cut his hand, he said finally, and Eberhard sighed.
–Badly?
–I don’t know. I don’t think so. He says he needs a doctor.
–We’ll see to it. Did you talk much?
–A bit.
–Better not to, next time. Loose lips sink ships. Did he say anything else?
–He asked if I was the Englishman.
–Ah? I’ll have a word with Jason. Natsuko told me that he and Kiron were getting on a little too well for comfort.
–Are you going to hurt him?
–We’ve no intention of doing so. Why would we want to do that?
–I won’t say anything. I won’t tell anyone.
–Of course not. I’d hardly have brought you here if I’d thought for a second that you would.
–Why did you?
–It became a possibility as soon as you came trailing along after me from Athens. You worried us. You are intelligent and quite perceptive. There was a chance that you would learn of us against our will. That would have been dangerous. You left us very little choice, unless we were willing to drown you in the Eurotas. Which we were not, I hasten to add. And as it turned out we liked you. We wondered if we might use you.
–How?
–We’re hardly professionals, Ben, if what we are doing can even be spoken of in terms of being a profession…though perhaps it is one of the oldest? In any case, we need all the help we can get. Let’s talk about it later, you’ve done enough for one night. You gave him the food and water?
–Of course.
–Shall we go, then, for now?
The way down was easier, the satchels light, the rocks and trees and asphodel seeming to offer no resistance. They didn’t speak again until they were in the car and driving along the track towards the river road. He felt none of his earlier lethargy, only physical tiredness and a slow tide of panic. It came and went along with his sense of the cave, the madness of it unbearable one moment and the next no more pressing than the news of some distant war.
–Is it about money?
–We assume that money would be dangerous. To demand it we would have to receive it. The receiving of it would put us all in jeopardy. Jason was all for a financial arrangement, but Max was against it. He can be vociferous when it suits him, and he has some experience in this kind of thing. So, no, it isn’t about money. We’re asking for freedom. An exchange of prisoners.
–Who?
–People like us.
–You did it by sea, he said, and Eberhard nodded, eyes fixed on the road.
–It was plain sailing, most of the way. Max had details of the yacht. Kiron moored at Laurium, not far from his estate. Since his wife died he sails often. We followed him out to sea. He was helpfully drunk. The only trouble was of our own making. Jason got into a fight in Gythion on our way back. He was wound up very tight by then. It was already late and he insisted on buying champagne. Someone in the shop made an ignorant remark about Natsuko. What we were doing was new to all of us, except Max. It was difficult for us all, but Jason found it hardest. We drew more notice in Gythion than we would have liked…but it went smoothly, all things considered.
–Are you like The Birds?
–Not very. Times have changed.
–How?
At first Eberhard seemed not to have heard. His voice had been dismissive, and when his answer finally came it had become so divorced by the din of the road that it hardly seemed a reply at all.
–You mentioned hope. That is the change. You know what utopia means?
–It’s a pun, from the Greek. Outopia and Eutopia. No-place and Good-place.
–A pun, exactly. The man who coined it intended both meanings: so, an impossible paradise. Strange, isn’t it, that so many people remember only the latter? They fasten on the idea of paradise, not on the impossibility. Why is that?
–I don’t know.
–Hope. I think that’s what it is. I find that heartening, don’t you? The times have changed, but there is still hope. Thirty years ago, in the days of The Birds, the world was full of those who still openly hoped for utopia. Some put their faith in Communism, some believed in God’s will on earth. Now the Wall has fallen and the churches stand empty. The times have changed, but the capacity for hope has not. The question is, what to hope for? Where will people put their hope, when there is nothing left to believe in? That is the change and the chance and the challenge for us. Some say this is a cynical age, that people hope for nothing but personal gain. I think that is a mistake. There will always be those, like you, who are searching for more than selfishness, Ben, for something greater to believe in. You are not innocent. You understand the nature of utopia. But even if we accept that some things will never come about, we must do what we can. It is our duty to hope for great things. Do you understand?
–What do you care?
–I care very much. I’m sorry, Ben. You’ll need some time.
–You sound like The Birds, you know. You talk like a bloody manifesto.
–This isn’t the age of the manifesto. No one reads. No one listens. They only watch. They only want actions.
–Actions speak louder than words.
–Not any more. Now actions are the only language worth speaking. Words say nothing. Here we are.
They had drawn up by the girls’ place, at the edge of the cathedral square.
–What are we doing here?
–Drinking our cares away, I expect. You have some leaves in your hair, incidentally. Shall we go in? The others will have begun by now. Natsuko is cooking for us. I hope we haven’t kept her waiting.
He woke angry. He was in her arms. He was so entwined that at first, when he tried to rise without waking her, he found that she wouldn’t let him go. She frowned at him in her sleep and muttered a refusal, lovely and imperious and inextricable.
There was no milk–it was Palm Sunday, and besides the complimentaries had begun to reappear less often as March had given way to April, as if he had outstayed his welcome–but he boiled the kettle as always, made tea and drank it black, nursing the cup by the open window, looking out across Sparta. The hotel still felt deserted, but here and there were new signs of habitation. Three towels had been pegged up on the balcony of one of the better rooms, the wind bellying them like flags. It had become unseasonably warm: the local newspapers were full of reports of freak early tourists and cicadas.
The swimming pool was full of navettes of brightness, late morning light reflected down from the regimented windows of the apartment blocks beyond.
His head ached like a hangover, though he hadn’t touched last night’s wine. He had hardly drunk or eaten, had barely spoken. It had been as much as he could do to let the others’ conversation wash over him, their small talk coming and going, their companionship working at him. He had been sure when he arrived that nothing they could do would change the way he felt, knowing
what they had already done; and yet when it came to it, when it was time to go, he had been sorry to leave them. Just as he always was.
A dog barked out on the edge of town. For the first time in weeks he had dreamed of the jackals. He had been in the cave again, the torchlight filtering down, and when the prisoner had advanced into sight his head had no longer been human. He was a hybrid, a dog-man, a jackal-god. He had become Anubis.
The bed creaked behind him. He didn’t look away from the window. He heard Natsuko getting up, her yawn, the pad of her feet on the tiles, the flush of the toilet muffled at first by the bathroom door. He leaned back for her kiss just as her arms came around him.
–You left me.
Her voice was chiding. Her breath was sweet from sleep. He couldn’t help but return her smile.
–I’m still here, aren’t I?
–You let me sleep alone. I want to sleep with you. You’re mine, now. Don’t leave me again.
–I’m not leaving you, he said, and drew her down.
He spent the afternoon alone. Natsuko hatched an eager plan for a hiking picnic, but he couldn’t face the mountains any more than he could her. He wanted to work on his thesis notes, he said, but he saw in the fall of her face that she knew it was a lie, even if he didn’t quite know it himself until he sat at the desk, his head in his hands, his eyes staring unblinkingly into the laptop’s lunar light.
Don’t leave me, she had whispered again as she left. How often he had longed for Emine to say just that.
He wondered if he would betray them. Eberhard trusted him, but even Eberhard could be wrong. Emine, too, had trusted him once.
There was a police station near the museum. He would sit in a windowless room, smoking the cigarettes offered him, while the duty officer took down the foreigner’s mad story and finally, reluctantly, sent his least favoured juniors sweating up their hollow valleys, all the way to the caves.
No. Not like that. He would telephone. It could all be anonymous. There was no need for any name except that of Makronides. There was a phone on the highway, out on the stretch where the lights were gone. He could do it at night. No one would see him there. Makronides would tell them things–
Are you the Englishman?
–but by then he would have time to explain, to tell the others what he had done, and why. To make it alright: to get them gone.
What would they say? What would he see in their eyes? He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t face them. It was unbearable.
He would leave them, then. He was practised in that. At one point, that long afternoon, he stood up and began to pack. He lost his temper with himself even before he gave it up. He had been right before, on the outcrop below the mountains. The cave couldn’t be left behind. He had seen it now. It was too late to close his eyes to it.
He sat unmoving in his chair until the light began to go. It was a warm day even then. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He thought of heroism and cowardice. Of Orpheus, who looked back, and Perseus and Heracles, who joyfully killed all who stood in their way. Half-men and monsters. Medusa, the mortal Gorgon, whose gaze was cavernous and cold; whose head was twined about with the scales of dragons.
Have you set foot in Libya?
Have you had the task of Perseus?
Have you seen the eye which turns all to stone?
XIV
Notes Towards a Thesis
Words say nothing.
How can it be true? Words say. It is all they are. If they say nothing then they are nothing.
It is true. Words are nothing if no one hears them. Why do I write at all? My hands move in front of me, but the letters which proceed from them are silent and invisible. The thesis I will never finish might as well have never been begun.
I won’t write again.
Easter Week is here.
Easter: last of the Mysteries. Even its name is mysterious. Its roots are in the north, in ancient words for light and dawn. Its roots lie in the south, in the names of gods who long ago became the tarnished demons of younger, all-consuming faiths.
Ostara, in High German, from Ostar: sun-bound, sun-tending. From which Ostar-manoth, April, the month of openings and beginnings.
Eostre, goddess of the North. No image of her has been unearthed. No prayers to her survive. Only a Christian, writing thirteen hundred years ago in a monk’s cell in Northumbria, ever calls her by name, or claims Easter as her observance.
Ishtar, goddess of Babylon. Queen of Heaven, Queen of the Bow, Light of the Earth, Opener of the Womb, who invaded the Underworld and was imprisoned, buying freedom only with a vow to send another in her place. Returning to the living, and finding her husband Tammuz not mourning her as was fitting, she let the demons take him; but his sister Belili followed him, and begged the ruler of the dead to let her bear half his suffering, so that for six months of each year Tammuz, the god of plenitude, still returns to the sunlit world.
From Babylon, like progeny, Aphrodite and Artemis, Orpheus and Persephone.
But then the Greeks have no Easter. It is Pasoch to them, after the Pesach of the Jews (whose worship came out of the East, from Ur and Babylon). Pesach: the passing from slavery to freedom, death to life, earth to heaven, and night to light.
There is no mystery to it. There is only a coincidence of names, a confluence of themes and sounds, millennia of whispers. There is no mystery because it is all the same in the end, just as it was in the beginning. There is darkness. Then there is light.
Nothing is ever really hidden.
XV
The Hidden
On Tuesday they found the jars.
That week the hills were full of guns. Lent was almost over: the lambs were going to the slaughter. There had been a truce of sorts, a delaying of collisions. Missy had come back to the dig. She stayed close to Chrystos and Giorgios, Themeus and Elias, working with them when there was anything to do, loitering when not. She shied away from the others. The excavation had divided into two camps, Missy and the Greeks by the huts and the old pits to the north, the other foreigners at the new trenches to the south. Missy looked drunk half the time and miserable when not. She was afraid of them, Ben saw: afraid even of him. She spoke only occasionally to him and to the others never in his hearing. There were no more dig sermons. The others didn’t miss them.
On Monday night she was plainly too drunk to drive home, and from then on the brothers took her with them every morning and evening. Chrystos looked after her by day. He talked to her, kept her talking, whenever there was a chance to talk. Occasionally he would say something that would get a smile out of her. For a while her head would go up, and she would work with something of her old pride and vigour. Ben wondered if she was proud of herself for coming back. He understood that it must have been hard. Not that it was brave. Her silence wasn’t bravery, any more than was his own.
Monday night, awake, alone–though Natsuko still slept beside him–he realised what he waited for. It was his own impotence. As long as the man was in the caves, he had power over them. He could set Kiron free, if that was his decision. And yet what he wished for was for the decision to be taken out of his hands. He waited for his power to pass. For an end to things.
The world is not dangerous because of those that do evil, but because of those who stand aside and let them do so.
Tuesday broke like summer. The drive up was sweltering, and when they spilled out into the dappled shade of the cypress trees they found Therapne different, not to the eyes but to the ears, the hillsides full of the ecstatic chanting of the freak cicadas.
They parked by Eberhard’s Volvo. Themeus and Elias had arrived before them, too, were already dutifully toiling at the dark blots of the old pits. They didn’t look up from their work as Ben and Natsuko, Jason and Eleschen clambered past the chapel and down towards the Pigsty.
They had dug hard those last eight days. It was as if the source of their anxieties lay underground, could be discovered and eliminated. The new excavation had grown out of all recogn
ition. One pit had become two, linked by an exploratory trench, a long wound in the loam spreading southwards into the trees. Max was convinced there was more there than the junkyard-midden they had found under Missy’s direction, but so far it had all been fruitless. Nothing had come to light except the poorest of small finds and the labyrinthine roots of smoke trees, holm oaks and pines.
They worked in pairs that morning, Ben with Jason in the southernmost pit. The digging was hardest there, and he was glad of it. The more intense the work he found, the easier it was to lose himself, to reach the humming, mindless point where he became an animal, a cutting, digging thing that had no time or cause to think of more than the task ahead. Only sometimes, as the hours passed, was he dimly aware of Jason kneeling beside him, still talking breathlessly but incessantly as he had all that last week (and wasn’t that just his own method of reaching for the thoughtlessness which Ben sought through other means himself?), his trench shovel wielded any which way, just like Ben’s own, like a hammer or a spear, like a dagger or an oar.
He stopped only when he realised that Jason was gone. He backhanded sweat out of his eyes and, looking up, saw the others, the five of them eating together, in the shelter of the trees.
He threw the shovel out onto a heap of overburden and looked for the time. It was after one. His hands were bleeding. He folded his arms, pressing the hurt into his sides. His breathing slowed. He could hear the others talking indistinctly, and the cicadas. An arid, primeval laughter.
Ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Haaaah–
