The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  11 Agathon:

  But this is clear: I loved my wife—loved her second only to adventures and ideas. We were children together. My father was an oil merchant, well off but by no means nobly born. A kindly, gentle, reflective man. His chief hope of rising in the world, after the death of my beaming, extrovert younger brother, was my cleverness. (No one could have guessed in those days that within a generation Solon’s middle class would be governing Athens.) I was sent to a teacher by the name of Klinias, attached to the house of Philombrotos, Tuka’s father. He was an arkhon, her father; a member of the all-powerful landed aristocracy, and one of the most powerful men in the ruling oligarchy. I did well. Klinias was no fool (he had studied with Thales in Miletus), and I was, in my lugubrious, angry way, ambitious. I lived, along with another boy, Konon, in Klinias’s stone hut at the edge of Philombrotos’s grounds, and when I wasn’t studying or rabbit-hunting or trying to ride some horse to death (punishing all horses for my brother’s demise), I did chores, sometimes for Klinias, sometimes for Philombrotos. I first saw Tuka when I was working in the vineyard behind Philombrotos’s house—a small, private vineyard that served his kitchen. She was standing with her slave in a window high above me, looking down at me with a bold, steady gaze that unnerved me. I couldn’t guess how long she’d been watching or what stupid thing I might have done in front of her. I was—what? Nine or ten? In any case, I was observed, like something in a cage, like something owned, and I could do nothing about it. I was very conscious, of course, of my social class—and hers. My father was a democrat who liked to talk about the grand contribution of the merchant class, but I wasn’t fooled. I didn’t miss the exaggerated politeness with which he greeted the rich, and I didn’t miss the eagerness with which he encouraged my study. The girl went on staring, and I worked faster, fuming. Someday I was going to be avenged.

  She was there again the following day. It must have been more than an hour she stood there (her slave two steps behind her) watching, smiling now and then, pretty much as you’d smile at a turtle in a jug. I decided to ignore her, and I did, for perhaps three minutes. When I looked up again, she was gone. That was worse. I stood with my fists clenched, baffled, furious, staring into my half-filled basket. Then suddenly, as if dropped like apples from a limb or like gods shot down in the lightning from Olympos, she was there—she and her two friends, girls, their slaves not far off, behind them. The three girls stood ten feet from me, their hands folded, their clothes clean and elegant, startling next to the homespun of ordinary workers.

  She said, “What’s your name?”

  “Agathon,” I said.

  They laughed, and I knew I was blushing.

  “I’m Tuka,” she said. Her voice was softer, gentler than wind in leaves. It filled me with alarm.

  I laughed scornfully, and she looked puzzled. I mumbled, “I have to work.”

  “We’ll help,” she said.

  I shook my head. “You can’t. It has to be done right. A person like you—”

  She tipped her head far over to one side and looked at me. “How silly!” she said. The half whisper resounded through me like a judgment. They laughed again, like birds, and fluttered away.

  She came alone the next time, or alone except for her slave, and said, “I want you for my friend.”

  I said I couldn’t be. I had to study.

  She thought about it. “I bet there are things I know that you don’t, Agathon.”

  I laughed. I knew where I was strong. Who but Konon and I could read Klinias’s book? I said, “Like what?”

  She thought again, then came to me and took my hand. A sensation stranger than touching a fledgling in its nest. After a moment she kissed my cheek.

  I was doomed.

  We played together throughout our childhood. She was a tomboy, a good head taller than I was. I liked her looks because she was my friend, but I knew in gloomy secret that, except for her dimples, her soft voice, she was ugly. Her head was enormous, and her nose, though handsomely shaped, was a size too large. She couldn’t compete with prettier girls in looks, so she did it by wit. She had the slyest tongue in Athens—a mind like lightning and that soft, near-whisper of a voice that kept her victim from knowing what had happened to him until he came to, days later, in his bath. Her father, who was elderly, in fact decrepit, neither approved nor disapproved, exactly, of our friendship. He was the busiest man in Greece: he knew only instants of his daughter’s life, and even those instants, when he gazed fondly out to where she played on the lawn, or when he watched her at her harp, were befogged by his official concerns. Or by his dearer love, to be exact. He had no time, no room in his heart, for any love but Athens—beautiful, albescent as an aging virgin, irrational, tyrannical, deep-dreamed as a wife inexplicably wronged. The city was his goddess. When he spoke to the assembly he pleaded like a lover or a supplicant, scolded like a husband or a priest divinely shunned. The clouds above the Acropolis, the pillared, honeycombed white buildings, chamber rising out of chamber, the rolling-gaited crumple-horned cows of the valleys below were in every syllable he spoke. For all the studied, peculiarly statuesque dignity of his bearing, he seemed, like any lover, a man perpetually at his wit’s end. It was the time of the war with the Megarians, and Athenian politics were in chaos. As I grew older I became involved in all that, as Klinias’s student. Tuka’s father knew me as a record keeper before he recognized me as Tuka’s beloved old playmate.

  I have no idea what games we played, through all those childhood years. I know that we sometimes had long talks, the slave girl observing in silence from her place, and sometimes I tried to dazzle Tuka with a grim, disturbing theory I had about the prima materia. She was a master of pretending to listen, and sometimes she made me think of what I thought were brilliant things. They were wasted on her. She was un- if not anti-philosophical; a musician.

  Sometimes I would listen for hours while she played the harp. It was a big concert instrument, studded with jewels, imported walnut braced with gold, a gift from her father on her twelfth birthday. He meant to make her the finest musician in Greece, and he nearly did it. When she performed for me (or for anyone else) she treated her playing lightly, casually, as though it had come with ease and had no great importance for her. If the fingers moving too fast for sight made some slight mistake, she would cavalierly repeat the mistake when the phrase returned and would build it into her variations, cunningly flaunting her pretended indifference to precision. But I knew—better than her teacher, perhaps—how far she was from indifferent. Early in the morning, when the birds first began, singing in earnest and all the herbs in Klinias’s garden and all the grass and shrubbery rising toward Philombrotos’s house were newgreen and bathed in dew, I would hear Tuka at her practice. It was a lovely sound, those rich low notes like far-off herders’ bells, the tinkling high notes like leaves rustled by a breeze on a tree made of silver, but it did not seem for beauty’s sake she played. She would work one phrase again and again, doggedly, her mind calcinating by patient violence the stubbornness of fingers and wires. Hunched in the coolness of the morning, concentrating on Tuka from my patch of sunlight on the swept-stone steps of Klinias’s hut, I could feel her whole spirit contracting to that phrase, excluding all reality except for the ten or fifteen notes that refused to submit to her will. The phrase would come more and more quickly and lightly, and as her will gained ground she would begin to lead up to the troublesome phrase from farther back and from farther back still until suddenly—and I too could feel it—the recalcitrant phrase could no longer resist her but would fly by under her fingers as if by choice, like a storm in the wind god’s hand. Then suddenly, as if without a trace of pleasure in her mastery of the problem, she would move directly to her next problem—not even playing up to it, simply turning to it, single-minded as a spider—and the battle of music against wires and stubborn flesh would begin again. I would sit fascinated by Tuka’s mind—her compulsive need to appear casual and offhand in public, and the cold-bloodedness
of her assault on beauty—until the first excitement of the songbirds waned, the dogs, roosters, and donkeys of Athens lost interest in announcing morning, and the brume on the Akropolis had lifted. Klinias would nudge me with his foot, and I would look up as if surprised, though I’d been waiting for him to come drive me like a goose to my morning chores. I’d jump up, clowning obsequiously, to go for water at the well beside the vineyard.

  But the best, and worst, was when Tuka played at night, alone. Sometimes it would be long after dark, and Konon and I would be in bed, half asleep, when the sound of her harp would float down to us. She would play, then, as if feeling were all there were in the world, and nature had no resistance. I would open my eyes and lie motionless, listening with every nerve to the music moving through the night’s deep quiet like a god out taking a walk. Konon, beside me, went on breathing slowly and heavily, untouched by it, and Klinias slept on in his tangled mass of covers, his horny feet protruding from the bottom, his crow’s nest of hair from the top. I looked from one object to another in the room, and everything that detached itself from the general dimness stood transmuted. The large clay water jugs by the door had a new roundness—a volume and canescence that had nothing to do any more with space or time; they existed in a new dimension, brimmed with amrita, like the music. The big wooden astrolabe in the window, suspended against the stars beyond like some enormous flying machine from the farthest of the planets, had now some emotion in it, as if it had been transformed from a thing to a portent. Konon, whom I aternately loved and fought, one moment scorning him for his stupid ideas, his arrogant selfishness, his cunning, the next moment admiring him for an instant’s unexpected kindness, some leap of thought I could not have made, some comic sally I wished I’d thought of—Konon, still as a sleeping child beside me, his tanned arm resting close to my shoulder as though in his sleep he had reached toward me, became now clearly what he was, independent of moment-by-moment dissilience: my friend, mutable, infinitely valuable because the vision of eternality which the music gave implied that all of us would pass.

  The harp soughed on, sorrowful even when the phrases joked, and the whole night seemed to listen, brooding on itself. Sometimes I would slip out of my bed, not waking Konon or Klinias, and would cross naked to the door and through it and up to Philombrotos’s big house. I would scale the wall, clinging to the ledges of the polished stone by my fingertips and toes, and when I reached her window I would hang there watching her play. Her slave lay on her pallet, pretending to sleep. Tuka sat in her chiton, facing away from me, and her movements, as she played, were not like those I saw when she played for an audience: it was as if, now, she was inside the music, moving only as the music moved, swaying for an instant, hovering, sometimes touching the dark wood beam of the harp with her face as though the harp, too, knew the secret. I was torn by contradictory emotions, like the music, and, like the music, I turned them over and over, as if by feeling them intensely, not with my mind but with my body, I might grasp them. I felt outside time, as if all things merely temporal, coldly dianoetic, were of no importance, and I felt at the same time a strong urge to go to her, show her my nakedness and plunge her obscenely, painfully into the world. But I hung undecided, the music moving in my chest like wind, like annulate waves, the cold night air moving softly across my skin, until my fingertips and toes ached from clinging, and I climbed back down. When I saw her by daylight it was as if what had happened in the night were unreal. The girl I had seen at her harp might easily have been anyone or no one, a spirit, but this daylit girl was Tuka, my friend, almost sister.

  There was, it is necessary to mention, a third Tuka, besides the musician and the tomboy-friend, and this third was Tuka-not-quite-sane. I would stare in disbelief, shrinking back, wincing, struggling to make her fit with anything I knew of mundane reality. I could connect it with nothing I’d ever felt—or, anyway, could remember feeling—and with almost nothing I’d seen. At times it wore the mask of rage. For some reason no one ever caught at the time or could manage to reconstruct later, an argument with her younger brother would suddenly turn to a conflict in which the clear and unquestionable goal was her brother’s death. She would say things, at such times, from which no human being could defend himself. For instance: “You’re stupid, stupid! Your eyes are close together!” Foolish, insignificant. Nevertheless, I would see him suddenly made helpless, limp-kneed as a man who’s been stabbed, and I would see the cold, hard shine of her face—oh, brighter, neater than a Spartan knife—and I would wait in horror for her to say it was only a joke, to tell him she didn’t really hate him. But she would say more, as if the instant were final, there were no future mornings to get through with him: “You don’t know what people say about you, do you. Your ears stick out. Every time you turn your back, your friends all laugh!” He would cry, howl with grief, and could no more understand her dismissal of his humanness than I could, watching. If adults were nearby—even her slave—they would stop her. Her father would cry out sharply, “Tuka, go to your room!” and she would go. The slave would whisper, “Tuka! Tuka!” I—we who watched—would be left numb, like people who have witnessed, on a clear spring day, a death fall from a horse. She went beyond all turning back, exactly like a wolf or a striking snake that has no idea of continuations. And yet, unbelievably, Tuka would make up, later. She would explain, as if kindly, apologetically—but cunningly laying the blame on her brother—“You made me mad.” He would distrust her, at first, as I was distrustful in later years when she did the same with me, but Tuka had dimples and a clever tongue, and the gods had given her winsome ways; in time he would become confused about what had happened, and he would believe again that Tuka loved him. Partly this: she made the attack seem reasonable—made it seem that some fault in her brother, or in me, later, explained her rage. And he—and I, later—would shift his attention to his innocence or guilt, and would forget the other-worldly reality, the murder. So once her father said to me with the same mad shine of the skin, “Get out of this house!”—said it with such out-and-out avulsion that I would have done it except that I was not, or anyway not in the same way, crazy. I said, though I was a young man then, and arrogant, “I can’t do that I can’t just walk out and take your daughter away forever.” Thinking: You shit-eating son of a bitch. The old man trembled and got hold of himself, scratched his way back to civility.

  Then again sometimes Tuka’s madness wore the mask of sadism. At times she turned it on her slave; once she turned it on children. Her father’s house stood, as I’ve said, on a hill. The lawn on the west side sloped down gently to a flagstone terrace where there were tables and benches of stone and, behind them, lilacs and high stone walls. Once, not long after I’d first moved to Klinias’s hut, I stood watching timidly from the edge of the lawn, in the shadow of the roundhouse, near the palisade, while Tuka, three of her older cousins, and a number of younger children played near the house. The older cousins were boys, two of them very dark, the other light, with eyes as pale as well water. The younger children were playing with a wagon, a toy version of a four-wheeled mulecart.

  Tuka and the older cousins sat on the grass pulling up shoots and biting off the tips and talking loudly, teasing each other. The oldest of the cousins, one of the dark ones, offered to have his slave pull the smaller children in their wagon, then changed his mind and pulled them himself. They let them, and he careened around with them, two at a time, scaring them and making them shriek with joy. He would cut the lawn’s slope, almost spilling them out, turning downward into the grade at the last moment, and sometimes he would pretend he was going to run them into the stone benches. The children in the wagon screamed with happiness. The ones who weren’t riding yelled, “Me! Pull me!” Then—I don’t know whose idea it was—the game changed. Tuka and the older cousins lashed the tongue of the wagon to the wagon’s front panel so that the front wheels wouldn’t turn, and they set one of the children in and sent him, with cheerful cries of “Hang on!” and “You’re not scared, are yo
u?” clattering and bumping down the hill. They aimed the wagon away from the tables and benches, at first. But I watched the path changing, sweeping, ride by ride, toward the tables. I crept closer and hid behind the bushes at the edge of the lawn. My heart was pounding. Tuka said softly, lighter than a swallow, “He’s so stupid he won’t even jump!” And she laughed, a beautiful lilt, unreal as ghosts. I watched her line up the cart, talking and laughing with the child, and I watched her eyes as she started it down the hill. I watched the child’s face, ten feet away from me, when he realized he was going to hit. He screamed, but the cart made almost no sound as it struck. They came running down the hill. “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?” There was a splash of bright blood on the child’s forehead. They’re insane! I thought I meant rich people—all of them. But I was watching old Philombrotos’s daughter. If there are dead men who walk, or if there are satyrs, and a man can meet them on a mountain path or beside some lake, they can be no more strange, no more removed from ordinary human feeling, than Tuka was at that instant.

  Klinias, passing my bed that night, paused and bent his head toward me nearsightedly. He cleared his throat making the sharp Adam’s apple bob below his frail beard. “You comfortable, Agathon?”

  I nodded, my covers pulled up to my nose.

  Though Klinias was rarely demonstrative, he leaned down, as if thinking it out as he did it and tousled my hair. He said, “Homesick?”

  I shook my head.

  He studied me, awkwardly tipping his starved-wood- chuck head and frowning, lips pursed. The ceiling timbers were pitch black, sooty, above him. Then at last: “All right youngster, come out with it” He clumsily touched my shoulder. The fist was bony, and the punch hurt. In love as in almost everything, he was inept.