The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  ‘The beauty of the cartonnage has understandably given rise to the popular name for the exhibit, which is known as “Helen”. This is of course merely a nickname, since the mask and the mummy were made around 425–475 CE, at least a thousand years after Troy fell. The alabaster tomb, of earlier manufacture, was reused for “Helen’s” burial, according to a long tradition of recycling classical artefacts. Many of the caves in Lycania contain the remains of a religious community, which never fully recovered after the ancient sea wall protecting the sanctuary gave way, in 620 CE, and the temple complex was buried in the landslide that followed.

  ‘Sir Giles Skipwith, an eminent scholar and amateur scientist, finding the site neglected and overgrown, undertook excavations in 1839. Digging also revealed an extensive necropolis and other buildings surviving under the silt deposited by the flood. However, the entire complex was damaged by looting by tomb-robbers as well as locals who carried off the marbles to build their villages, their homes and even byres and sheds for livestock. It was not unusual, Skipwith reported, to find a unique bas-relief in use as a manger. In the case of the sarcophagus, it had become a midden, filled with deposits from over a thousand years of changing settlement in the area.

  ‘The temple to the goddess Leto (pronounced LAY-T-OH, and meaning Lady) was especially rich in sculptures, including the tomb (G: Skipwith 674.1841) which depicts an episode from her story.

  ‘With these violations of our international cultural heritage in mind, the Admiralty authorised Sir Giles Skipwith to negotiate terms with the provincial governor of the region and he was granted permission by the Sultan then in power to transport the results of his excavations to the newly founded Royal Museum in 1841. This remarkable group of remains were known as the Leto Marbles, after the dedication of the principal shrine at the site. Skipwith 673 and 674 are only two of these recovered glories. It is unlikely that any of these treasures would have survived if they had been left in situ.’

  The curious, peering in at the room across the cordon that had been placed at the entrance, asked for the reasons for the news teams’ camcorders; many of these, even when the reply was not intelligible to them, joined the hubbub around the vacant dais.

  ‘It’s Helen of Troy.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Listen to what the man said. He said she’s something else.’

  ‘That’d’ve been a real turn up for the books, fuckin’ Helen of Troy.’

  ‘What’s her name then?’

  ‘There’s this Leto goddess then. Look, that’s what the handout says.’

  ‘What kinda name’s that?’

  ‘LAY-T-OH, you pronounce it, that’s what it says, see. Means “Lady” in her language.’

  ‘No, that’s just the name of the outside of her. Not her name. Not of the name of the lady, not of the lady herself.’

  ‘What’s a midden?’

  ‘It’s the marble’s called that.’

  ‘The tomb what she’s buried in.’

  ‘We’re here for the person, the person inside. Not here for the tomb. Where’s she gone?’

  ‘To Shiloh, it says.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be travelling all over the place like that.’

  Two women sitting on the floor in bird of paradise silks now added lamentation to the protest:

  ‘I want her back.’

  ‘To make puja to her.’

  ‘To bury her properly.’

  ‘Yes, to make a shrine to her.’

  The young men standing beside them joined in:

  ‘Not everyone gawking at her like this.’

  ‘Gawping at her.’

  Someone objected:

  ‘But she’s not here.’

  Then others all together:

  ‘She was here.’

  ‘She should be here.’

  ‘They’re gawping at her over there.’

  ‘At the bundle.’

  ‘It was her body was in there.’

  ‘A real body.’

  ‘Her mortal remains.’

  ‘In a fucking museum.’

  ‘A fucking freak show.’

  ‘In frigging Shiloh.’

  ‘Watch your language.’

  ‘Kids around.’

  ‘Nothing they don’t know.’

  ‘You lot—’

  ‘Should show more respect.’

  ‘Am showing respect.’

  ‘It’s those put her here like as if she wasn’t nothing but a stone.’

  ‘A piece of fucking marble.’

  ‘An art work.’

  ‘That’s what’s fucking dissing her.’

  ‘Watch it, told you to watch it.’

  ‘But she’s not here.’

  ‘We want her back here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes! Then we’ll lay her to rest, somewhere decent.’

  ‘Give her a bit of peace and quiet.’

  ‘Been a while.’

  ‘At long last.’

  All this was heard and recorded when the newspapermen held out their Dictaphones to the group, and the soundmen angled their boom to catch the burden of the protest.

  On the fourth day, the morning crowd of around forty people found another sign beside the notice of Temporary Removal. At 11.00 a.m., Dr Hortense Fernly would be giving an illustrated talk, in the Lecture Hall of the Museum.

  It was the director’s idea: ‘I’ll introduce you; I’ll say something about this glitch. Then you talk for half an hour to forty minutes maximum, and I’ll come on again and wind up. You don’t have to do the hard part. I’ll do that. I’ll address the politics. You give exactly the same talk you would give in the ordinary course of events. The history of the piece, of the accession, of its iconography, its relation to other works of this kind.’

  ‘But I can’t stand up in front of that kind of a crowd and spout about Hellenistic antiquities.’ Hortense was stuttering, as she struggled to extricate herself. ‘They’re not the usual crowd, ladies who lunch plus a sprinkling of homeless in off the streets for some comfort. They’ll get exasperated. And rightly.’

  ‘A detective’s coming along to explain various security aspects to you – so that you need have nothing to worry about, and there’ll be plain-clothes men in the audience, on the lookout for any real troublemakers. But they’re no-hoper types, honestly. Nothing to be afraid of.’

  Doctor Fernly was taken to look at the surveillance tapes. The image was microscopic, as if the assembly on the floor of Room XIX was a sample of live bacteria, compacted tightly of various, separate organisms.

  She was shown, at pencil point, one figure after another as the detective passed on what he knew.

  ‘Lots of women,’ he was saying. ‘Females who’re just lost for something to believe in. Some male long-term unemployed and their children. Ex-minicab drivers whose cars have been repossessed. First generation failed economic migrants. Second, third generation immigrants. Some in work, but lots of urban flotsam. Single fathers. Kids. No school parties, though.’

  Hortense bridled at his tone; she twisted an earring and tugged at it as she tried to concentrate her energies. She didn’t know where to begin, to savage his condescension or wail at the director imperturbably throwing her to the wolves. With Daniel away in Shiloh, working, she knew she was treated with faint contempt – however unconsciously. She was either ordered about, or flirted with lugubriously, as if it were rude not to show gallantry to an unattached woman of her age. Because she was small, and neatly made, she sometimes thought she should wear higher heels and harder suits to avert such moments, but the idea of power-dressing irritated her even more, on balance. Daniel was teaching, for lots of money, in a prestige antebellum private school on the other side of the globe near the city where he was born. They’d married so they could live and work together either here or there, but somehow, not having a complete grip on their destinies, like figures on a double spiral stair who pass again and again but never meet, they were both condemned to homesickness for part of the year –
when the Museum sent her to accompany one of its treasures, they’d tryst for a weekend, when they’d tiptoe around each other, anxious not to admit to enjoying their separate lives, but consequently depressed by the string of protestations and complaints with which they reassured each other that life apart was miserable.

  ‘Basically we want to bore them,’ the director was saying. ‘Sorry, Hetty, you know how much I value your work. But it’s wasted on them and that’s the point. Bore them till they find something else to distract them. Bore them till they leave off this particular passing fad.’

  She kept her eyes trained on the monitor. Even at her old university, in the department where one or two of the longer serving members still shuddered in the presence of women, like anchorites in hagiography when the devil tempts them with visions of cloven-hoofed and scented whores, she hadn’t been so nakedly patronished.

  The detective was tapping the screen where appeared a young man in a suit, with neat dark hair and eyebrows that were sufficiently defined for Hortense to make them out in the fuzz of pixillated greys.

  ‘He fancies himself as a kind of spokesperson – he’ll be at your lecture, Dr Fernly, and one of my men – or women – will be keeping a close eye.’

  ‘So what’s eating him?’ The director was casting about, Hortense noted, for information that would belittle the demonstrators.

  ‘Schoolteacher in Cantelowes.’ The detective tossed his head. ‘Just up the road from here.’ He paused. ‘Wasn’t born here, as you can see.’ Hetty shifted, annoyed, but he went on, fluently. ‘Comes from Tirzah. Bit of a gippo, I’d say – that lot from there, usually lighter-skinned. Almost like us.’ Hetty opened her mouth to remonstrate, and the director put his hand on her arm as the policeman continued. ‘This McQuy (sounds like McKay, by the way, but it’s written –’ and he wrote the name on a pad – ‘has some loopy notion about a New Albion. Leftish, but right of left, you know. The new patriotism. Got into agitation during the Eighties when there was a fair bit of . . . unrest in the colleges. Went to sixth-form college, became a student leader. Then teacher training. He’s in his mid-twenties. Talks about cooking a lot, about sugar and garlic and pepper travelling all over the world and belonging everywhere. How we wouldn’t be who we are without them. Claims he’s seen in this . . . mm, mummy . . . some kind of figurehead for his ideas.’

  Hortense looked at the tiny figure, standing up now, and clearly addressing the crowd. But the tape was silent, and, in the absence of his words, he appeared oddly kinetic, as if his movements were triggered by outside impulses.

  ‘He started HSWU,’ the detective continued, writing the initials down on the pad, ‘about five years ago. Grew out of his other political involvements. Known as “Zwu”. It’s a kind of off-the-wall political movement, active only on the web. Not many members, no programme to speak of. We keep an eye on them, but they’re not into direct action, not till now, anyhow. Just flannelling away. Stands for “History Starts With Us”.’

  Hortense looked at Kim McQuy’s audience paying attention to him. There were the women in the iridescent folds of fabric sitting cross-legged on the floor beside padded and frilled pushchairs. Some young blacks, again mostly women, turned out with sharp shoulders and short skirts in urban street executive style; they were standing, flicking fingers as they talked, fast, at one another. Some older men, belonging to that breed of amateur archaeologists and family genealogists who haunted Public Records offices and with whom Hortense had sometimes kept company in archives here and there, who, as she realised, obliged the archival service to the public to continue; one past sell-by date punk with a mohican, another skinny youth in what looked like studded leathers; a round fat man very close in to the vacant exhibition space, scanning the label. A mixture in short, a kind of snapshot of the crowd on the escalators in the centre of town at around 11.00 a.m. any weekday.

  ‘When you say you’re winding it up,’ Hortense forced herself to speak calmly. ‘What are you going to say? I’m not going to mislead them. We’ve done enough of that already. What, for instance, do you expect me to do about this ridiculous Helen imbroglio?’

  ‘Imbroglio! If you use words like that, they’ll be utterly bemused – which is what we want.’

  Hortense gave him a look, demanding an answer to her question.

  ‘I’m going to play it by ear. Take the temperature of the hall.’

  3

  In the She-Wolf’s Den

  [G. Skipwith 673.1841: Misc. Mss. G. Fr. 18, papyrus, c. 325–350 CE, translation in the hand of Hereward Meeks, keeper of Near Eastern Antiquities, 1858–76.]

  Leto and the twins left the byre. The ground of the cemetery was broken; dusty sharp plants, low-lying for want of water and already sere from the springtime sun, had worked stones loose from their matrix of rock; this was lizard and tortoise and snake terrain, and scorpions would already be baking under the hot rocks. She tried to pick out greener patches, where water lay perhaps concealed under the earth. Around her, some tombs stood freely, here and there marked by a pillar of honeyed stone with carved inscriptions; others were niches dug in the rock, empty, riddling the ground at random. She looked down into one: no water, only the pocked colander of the limestone where the rainfall drained away.

  But a cleft in the slabs flowed, moist and springing with plants; she tugged up green grasses and sucked their stems as she had done when a child; their dew gave back for a moment’s respite the familiar scale and contours to her tongue. So she took heart and followed the damp track of growth; even if there were no surface water, there might be a stream farther on, springing inside the rocks.

  The greenery took her down a narrow fissure between two escarpments of the tomb, and the temperature of the air cooled, turned musty; in the interior chamber, a dark green slab of water, flyblown over most of its surface. She knelt to it, splashed the larvae aside and dipped into its silk, then bent her face to the liquid sluicing through her cupped hands and drank.

  It was acrid; pungent, too. A watering hole, of course. Fouled by its users.

  So she recognised the animal by the gamey odour stirring from the recesses of the den; she knew she was in a cave used by wolves.

  Then, from the shadows beyond the pool, she saw a she-wolf ambling towards them, the animal’s powerful shoulders moving to her stride and her long narrow head cocked.

  Leto stopped drinking, put one hand over the head of the baby girl against her breast, tied with the stole, and the other on the head of her baby son on her back, where it lay against her neck. Though she had felt so dry-mouthed and sere she’d thought there was no fluid left anywhere inside her, a hot dribble spurted from between her legs, the heat of it searing the soreness there from the birth of her twins.

  But the wolf did not gather pace and did not collect its limbs to pounce. Instead it came steadily on until Leto could see that the tilt of the animal’s head was not menacing; then the she-wolfs narrow jaws parted to greet her instead, speaking from deep within her throat. Leto still clung tightly to the baby at her breast; began picking at the material that held the boy to her back because she wanted to take him into her arms, to shield him, too. For the wolf might be beguiling her.

  She could not be sure how she heard the animal talk to her: her thirst and exhaustion made the words vibrate inside her head like the commotion of fever. But her terror began to subside, for it seemed the she-wolf was tossing her thin snout to indicate a higher point in the rocks above the cave, and offering her and her babies shelter. ‘I was patrolling the area, keeping a lookout after they abandoned you. In case they came back to do you and the babes further injury.’ She stressed the word babes. Her long pink tongue showed itself between her thin jaws, in a smile that was less wolfish than nurse-like, a coaxing look, urging confidence on her patient. She was very close to Leto now, and her breath was hot and rank, but Leto did not recoil, for there was a smiling invitation in her glowing eye, her flossy pale ears, her lithe furry flanks. ‘They exposed you on the hillside
. They do that. You’re lucky they didn’t pierce your feet!

  ‘They want you to die by nature’s work. I suppose that way they feel less guilty – not dealing the coup de grâce but trusting to the elements – or to beasts like us – to do it for them.

  ‘But they don’t know the intricacy of our loyalties and our thinking. And besides, our kind can’t be done away with so easily.’

  Leto began to cry, against her will, with the hunger, the fright, the darkness, the sudden reprieve; the wolf’s sympathy.

  They would wait until nightfall, the she-wolf decided, and then she would show Leto the water hole in the valley, on the other side of this outcrop, in the direction of the sea. Meanwhile, they would use the pool by the wolf’s lair. ‘The supply’s not the freshest, so if your milk is dry and thin, you and your babes can drink mine – my own cubs are so lively they excite more than enough from their mother. It’d be a relief to me.’ She drew Leto deeper into the cave. Leto was trembling. But she began unwinding the sodden bundle of her twins that, by comparison to her host’s surroundings, was almost fragrant.

  To Leto the fetor in the cave was nothing; for the first time since she’d been discovered with her lover, she was safe.

  [Fr. 19]

  Lycia the she-wolf sang to Leto and the twins during the days they stayed in her den. She intoned a rasping, sad, tuneless kind of a lullaby, that began in her throat as a rumble and left her jaws as a thin howl, and it spread heaviness through Leto that nevertheless soothed her. As she grasped the song, she added her high quivering voice and then, to the steady intake and exhalation of breath, she and her babies slept quietly.

  The cubs played with a tortoise, sniffing inside the shell, trying to coax it to poke out its limbs. It refused, of course, and in its fright, dropped green smears, which the cubs investigated curiously, beating their short, plumed tails on the cave floor in excitement. The wolf also shared food with her: she suckled her, and gave her bones to pick; with a stiff grass blade Leto probed the marrow and drew some renewed strength from it.

  ‘Don’t let any of these troubles put you off living—,’ the wolf urged her. ‘Or put you off sex either, for that matter! There’s many more where your lover came from. Forget that one, even if he was a god (animals don’t much care for rank, you know). Sometimes you’ve just got to sit out the evil in your fate. It’s got to be cleared from the air, like the weight of a storm before it breaks and lifts and brightens the summer again. You’ve started young, so there’s lots of time. On the human scale, you’ll still be a young woman when this lot –’ she eyed Let’s twins – ‘are giving you trouble with their mistakes . . .’