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Books, reading and anything else that comes to mind…with an Australian focus…on Ngunnawal Country. Archive for June, 68 June 29, Monday musings on Australian literature: Older men protagonists. The effect is of a black flood that has risen above head height, thick, solemn, lapping at the flickering redness of the upper walls, so that stepping out into it, what he feels is an unaccustomed lack of ease — he for whose convenience everything here is arranged by the conscientious forethought of stewards and the labour of a hundred slaves.
Here and there, as he passes, the faces of servants who sit backs to the wall, at this or that chamber entrance, loom up in the dark. Startled to see him at this hour and unattended, they stir and mutter the usual courtesies, but he is gone before they can stumble to their feet. But so is his plan. This plunging at near dawn down a deserted corridor is just the beginning.
He will get used to the unaccustomed. It is what he is after. He finds her already risen and sitting, very erect, on the day bed in her sitting room.
A cruse lamp is burning at the top of a tall copper stand. At her feet a pot of embers — she suffers from the cold — throws out a feeble warmth.
She too has not slept. Her hair is awry — that is what he sees first. But as soon as she catches sight of him, with her old pride in her beauty, and the wish as always to appear at her best before him, her hand, in a gesture that like everything she does is precise, controlled, with its own practical elegance, goes to the bodkin that holds it, and in a moment all is restored.
He watches, says nothing. Moved again by the tenderness they have so long shared, he seats himself beside her and takes her hand. It is no longer white now but veined and mottled like his own with liver-coloured spots, the flesh between the fine bones, which his fingertips gently feel for, puckered and slack.
He raises it to his lips, and she casts a piteous look upon him. Her eyelids are swollen with tears. They sit a moment, holding one another like children. The lamp flickers. She weeps. When her tears have come to an end, and she has once again taken control of herself, he begins. I know I have wept, and I see from this that you are still full of tears. And how could we do less, any one of us, for such a son and brother, such a fearless protector of Troy and its people?
And you most of all, my dear, who have lost so many sons in these last terrible years. He has much to tell her and wants to lead up to it slowly. He wants her to see the plan he is about to lay before her not as something desperate and wild but as the result on his part — though it is not, of course — of consideration and careful thought. But the look she casts upon him is so fierce that he draws back and cannot go on. He feels the hard purpose he has come with flutter in him and fail.
But not of grief. Of anger, fury, that I am a woman and can do nothing but sit here and rage and weep while the body of my son Hector, after eleven days and nights, is still out there on the plain, unwashed, unanointed, and eleven times now their noble Achilles has dragged him up and down before the Greek ships — my son, my dear son Hector!
Priam quails before this small, fierce, straight-backed woman he has known and not known for so many years. And what I remember of each one is how they kicked their little heels under my heart — here, just here — and the first cry they gave when I yielded them up to the world, and the first steps they took. Troilus was very late in walking — do you recall that, Priam? That is what I recall when I think of his body being tumbled over the stones and left out there for dogs to tear at and maul.
Priam shakes his head. It is not in his sphere. He remembers nothing of a dagger carved like a dog, or that his son Troilus had been slow to walk. What he recalls is a series of small squalling bundles, each one presented to him like a bloodied human offering on the outstretched palms of an attendant. To be recognised as his, and blessed and gathered into his household. What he recalls is that Troilus is dead, like so many of his sons.
Like Hector. But after a moment of quiet restraint he does so. To ride into the fray and leap down from my chariot and crack heads, and sweat and get bloody. And the truth is I never was a warrior, it was not my role. My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist — my breath too when talk was needed, because outside my life here in the court and with you, my dear, where I do like to speak a little, I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me.
To be seen as a man like other men — human as we are, all of us — would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, the world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice.
Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent. Unchangeable, therefore unchanged. Well, you know I am changed, my dear, because from you nothing of what I am, or almost nothing, is hidden. To others I am what I have always been — great Priam.
But only because they have never really looked at me. And when they do look, what they see is what they are meant to see. The fixed mark to which everything else in my kingdom refers. A ceremonial figurehead that might just as well be of stone or wood. So — to come at last to what I want to tell you.
But to Hecuba the image is a shocking one — she is more tied to convention than she believes — and as Priam warms to his subject she grows more and more disturbed.
What Priam is speaking of is a dream. Dreams are subtle, shifting, they are meant to be read, not taken literally. Hidden away in what they appear to present are signs that must be seized on by a mind that can see past mere actualities to what hovers luminously beyond. She has spent all the years of their marriage dealing with these visions that afflict him. She prepares now to reply as she normally would, but Priam prevents her. He goes on quickly to describe the driver who sits beside him on the bench, the wicker — work canopy over the bed of the wagon, the load they are carrying.
It is the better part of my treasury. Gold coins, armour and arms, plate, tripods, cauldrons, the rare gold cup — my favourite, you know the one, that the Thracians gave me all those years ago when I went on an embassy to them — all shining out as I sit on the bench beside the driver and we travel on under the night.
And this time, when I look behind me, what is glowing out from under the coverlet, under the wickerwork canopy, is the body of my son Hector, all his limbs newly restored and shining, restored and ransomed.
To go today, immediately, to Achilles, just as I saw myself in my dream, plainly dressed and with no attendant but a driver for the cart — not as a king but as an ordinary man, a father, and offer him a ransom, and in the sight of the gods, who must surely look down in pity on me, beg him humbly, on my knees if that is what it comes to, to give me back the body of my son.
His voice breaks and he turns quickly away. He dares not meet her look. When he does at last, Hecuba, her eyes narrowed, is still staring at him. She nods her head.
She is, he knows, controlling herself. He must be strong now. He has always been afraid of this controlled rage in her. The scorn in her voice is withering. She gets up and begins to stride about. The lamp flickers in the air she stirs up, as, small, straight, furious, she passes back and forth before him.
For what reason? To vent their spite on him, the cowards, for being what Achilles will never be, a man with no blemish on his soul, shining pure before the gods. And you expect this wolf, this violator of every law of gods and men, to take the gift you hold out to him and act like a man?
Something impossible. Something new. She composes herself, hoods her eyes and sits. The assurance with which he has spoken, the quietness that has spread around them, makes her wary: she must not cross him.
But the danger of what he is determined on fills her with alarm. She will need all her wiles, all her powers of firm but calm persuasion, to lead him back from it. Think of it. Two old men in a cart laden with gold? Do you suppose your grey hairs would save you? If it was their intention that I get there. I know. But what seems foolish is just what is most sensible sometimes. The fact that it has never been done, that it is novel, unthinkable — except that I have thought of it — is just what makes me believe it should be attempted.
It is possible because it is not possible. And because it is simple. Why do we think always that the simple thing is beneath us?
Because we are kings? What I do is what any man might do. But in another, deeper way, I am. I feel a kind of freedom in that. And perhaps, because it is unexpected, it may appeal to him too: the chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king.
To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man. Perhaps that is the real gift I have to bring him. Perhaps that is the ransom. Hecuba shakes her head. Who will stand by me in what we know is to come?
Because we know, both of us, what that is, and can speak of it here where there is no one else to hear it. Just ourselves and the gods. Her voice has fallen to the merest breath. The flame of the lamp, too, gutters and falls. And when my spirit fails, who will lend me the hand of comfort as you do now, my dear one?
Who will keep Troy, our beloved city, alive with at least a semblance of the old neighbourliness and order if its great centre and source is gone? They sit in silence now, her hand in his. They have spoken of these things before. Quietly, soberly. Two children holding hands in the dark.
But the question is to herself and he has no answer. His voice too when he replies is no more than a breath. We must leave that to the gods. Or to chance. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course. She wishes she had misheard. Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.
That Priam of all men should say such things — he who has always been so observant of what is established and lawful — makes her wonder now if his wits are not unstrung. She needs time. She needs the help of her sons. That is the proper course.
Imagine what it would lead to, what would be permitted. The randomness, the violence. Imagine the panic it would spread.
You must, I beg you, keep that strictly to yourself. Priam meanwhile, dreamily absorbed, continues to sit upright on the edge of the bed. When she returns he is still sitting. What more?
She has her own plan now to forestall him. Something that till now I have never spoken of in all the many intimate hours we have spent together.
Even to you, my dear, who know all my doubts and foibles, and little shameful anxieties and fears. Not because I wanted to be secretive — you of all people know I am not — and anyway, you have your own sweet ways of getting around me, so what would be the use?
I have not spoken of these things because I did not know how to. How even to begin. She responds with an answering pressure of her own. She is sensitive to the slightest shades in him, but he is odd today — she has no idea where all this is leading. It is a fact of such long standing, a story now in itself. He raises her hand to his lips, meeting her concentrated, soft-eyed gaze, and glimpsing in it, as from afar, the child he has just evoked: frowning, half-fearful, hanging on the story at whose midpoint his own small life was suspended.
The beginning. The long-drawn-out and terrifying business of its middle. Then all in an instant — in what is always a surprise, even when the listener knows already what is to come — the turnabout, the happy end. However often he may have heard it the listener sits breathless, his small soul hanging on a breath. In just a moment a miracle will occur, and the little victim, the lost one — me in this case — will be snatched up and happily restored. To actually stand as I did at the centre of it, of what was not a story, not yet, but a real happening, all noise and smoke and panicky confusion.
To know nothing of what is to come and simply be there — one of a horde of wailing infants, some no more than three or four years old, who have been driven like geese out of the blazing citadel, along with rats, mice and a dozen other small, terrified creatures, all squealing underfoot.
A rabble of filthy, lice-ridden brats with the mark of the whip across their shoulders, the spawn of beggars, pedlars, scullery maids, stablehands, whores. All hiding now — smeared with shit to disguise the scent of sweet herbs on their skin — among all those others.
Utterly bewildered like them, and waiting, too tired and hungry to be properly afraid, for some bully to come swaggering up, all matted hair and sweat, who has grown tired of slitting bellies and smashing skulls and is ready now for a little harmless fun. Ready to amuse himself by poking ribs, and pushing his thick finger into a mouth, and carrying off this or that one of us to be his slave and plaything, his prize of war.
Since the slaughter began, just after dawn, not a drop of water has passed our lips. Others are too stunned to do more than squat in their own filth. We cling together, all grimed with ashes and streaked with the dried blood of whoever it was, a parent or some kindly neighbour, whose arms we were snatched from. Waiting in the open now for the men whose voices we can hear, in a great roar up there in the city, to descend like wolves and carry us off.
They are idle fellows, some of them bloodied and in bandages, all of them terrifying to a child who has never known any but men whose every move is a response to the fulfilling of his needs. Their rough voices, their hands, their red mouths scare me. They range round the edges of the crowd, pushing and shouting. Even more frightful, when they produce them, are their grins. The men holler and urge them on.
Six years old and indistinguishable, I hope — my survival depends on it — from the offspring of the lowest scullion. I have just enough sense of the danger I am in to make myself small so as not to attract attention. Some of those I am hiding among are palace slaves. Any one of them might point a finger and name me.
Others again, just yesterday, were my playmates, little lords of all the world as I was. We avoid one another now. Turn our eyes away. Put the surging crowd between us. With a skin that had never known the touch of any but the finest cotton or silk, and in winter a lambswool undershirt.
The possessor of a sleek bay pony, and a pet rabbit, and a wicker cage the size of my fist with a cricket in it to drum and chirp beside my pillow. To be at one moment Podarces, son of Laomedon, King of Troy, and in the next just one of a rabble of slave children, with a smell on me that I had taken till then to be the smell of another order of beings. A foul slave-smell that I clung to now in the hope that it would cling to me, since it was the only thing that could save me from drowning like my brothers, up there in the citadel, in my own blood.
He sits, shaking his head. All this is so shameful, has for so long been secret in him. When he speaks again it is in a voice she barely knows. It looks quiet. It is empty as yet.
I stand looking at it. Slung across his shoulders like a sheep. To a life where you and I, my dear, have never met, have never found one another. To a life I have lived entirely without you.
But one that for sixty years has known only drudgery and daily humiliation and blows. And that life too, I have lived, if only in a ghostly way. As a foul-smelling mockery of this one, that at any moment can rise to my nostrils and pluck at my robe and whisper, So there you are, old man Podarces.
In our nostrils the stench is still there, the old filth sticks. And I am back there in the very midst of it, looking down that white-dust road into another life. And it means nothing, that other story.
In this one the miraculous turnabout has never happened. I am just one more slave-thing like the rest, one among many. I look at my blackened hands and feet, the rags I am dressed in, and know that I have no more weight in the world than the droppings of the lowest beggar or street-sweeper.
Some of them are whimpering, but for the most part they are resigned. I resign myself. I let my old name go, since to speak it or hear it spoken would be death. I let it go, and with it that odd, old-fashioned little fellow it was tied to, who has choked on his bit of wine-soaked poppy-cake and been reborn as No One, and is waiting now, along with the rest, to be dragged out of the crowd and claimed and heard no more of.
A breath, not my own, betrays me. When I shake my head and shrink back she speaks again. Louder this time. Bareheaded but still fully armed. His leather cuirass stained with sweat, his body pouring forth the stink of his terrible exertions.
The others know him too, and draw back. I am left alone under his gaze. I close my eyes, hold my breath. He is in a mood, it seems, to be amused. His voice is full of scorn. Leans down till his shaggy head is level with my own.
The huge paw comes down, an iron clamp on my skull, and I feel his hot breath in my face. Smell the rank meatiness of him. Glance up after a moment under the brute weight of his palm. But his smile! How easy it would be for him. Just a little more pressure of the fingertips, a turn of the hairy wrist, and my neck would snap.
Because he can. The small pig-eyes disappear in the muscled cheeks. With a substitute? He looks, in his huge bulk, rather foolish. He is trying to please her by making a game of all this. And why not? She, too, is just a child. She is to go — another prize of war — as a gift to his friend Telamon, and he has told her she may have, as a gift of her own, whatever she chooses, anything her bright eyes light upon — expecting her to choose some gaudy trinket, a bauble to hang at her wrist or an ivory footstool from Punt, a bronze mirror to catch her smile in.
She has led him down to the horde of filthy, tear-stained urchins and searched among them and chosen me. If this is what you choose, take him, take the brat, and let him be whatever you say he is, your brother or some nameless substitute, what does it matter?
But since he is to be my fine gift to you, and to show that I am a man of my word, let his name, from now on, be Priam, the price paid, the gift given to buy your brother back from the dead. So that each time he hears himself named, this is what he will recall. And in the secrecy of his own heart, that , for all the high titles the gods may heap upon him, is the life he will go on living day after day till his last breath. The substitute and pretender.
A great one of the earth. But only by default. Because it pleases your fancy, little princess, to choose him, and mine to allow it. Young as I was, I knew mockery when I heard it, sneering contempt. That sort of low, back-handed nobility was all a Heracles was capable of.
After all, he was a pretender himself. Only half a god, and that too by allowance and default. Little shadow that I was of a dead prince, I caught the second breath they offered me and was delivered, called back under a new name.
The gods had relented. Oh, I know what the story says. I had experienced something I could not un-experience and would never forget. After playing with me a little, and showing me what it was in their power to do, the gods had relented. They would allow me, in their high-handed, half-interested way, to cough up my bit of wine-soaked poppy-cake. But I had gone too far, you see, on the downward path to get back. What I have been telling you happened to me.
I stood in the midst of these things. She is bewildered. He has also frightened her. She resents having been brought so close to what she does not want to know or think about. That moment of standing beside him, even in imagination, in a crowd of dirty, wailing children — the spawn, as he himself put it, of pedlars, whores, scullery maids — he should not have asked it of her.
Dragging her in where she too would have that stink in her nostrils. Concealing the repugnance she feels, she once more gives him the whole of her attention, but with real fear now of this mood that is on him, and of the even darker places he may lead her into. When I slipped back into my old place in the world it was in a ghostly way and under a new name.
As a substitute. For that little prince Podarces of whom nothing more would be heard or known. Except that I know him, I lived the first six years of his life. And many times over, in the darkness of my thoughts, as he predicted, I have made my way down into the underworld and sought him out, that small frightened child. He acts in the realm — that too is his kingdom — of the seen.
But in my case the gift was a doubtful one. It was given then taken back again, and only in a joking, left-handed way restored.
In me the assurance, the inner assurance, was lacking. Well, that is my affair. I have never spoken of it till now, even to you, my dear — though I expect you have sometimes wondered — and I hope that to others at least I have given no sign that there might be this, this lack in me.
I have always, to the public view, been just what I appear to be. That is the discipline of kings. But to achieve it I have had to be more rigid than others. A little too punctilious, I know, in all that is due to ceremony. A stickler, as they say. For form, for the rules. So long, I mean, as I create the proper illusion.
Only I know what it costs to be such an object. To rattle about like a pea in the golden husk of my … dazzling eminence.
Never for even a moment to wobble or look flustered, or let the impressive effect be shaken by so much as the twitching of an eyelid or — god forbid! Or, in these latter days of my old age, by the trembling of a hand.
I did it out of defiance of the gods, as well as in fearful reverence for them. In defiance of the fact that their first choice, all those years ago, was against me, as perhaps they have chosen against me a second time in this business of the war, so that I have now to be ransomed a second time — to ransom myself, as well as my son.
By going to Achilles, not in a ceremonial way, as my symbolic self, but stripped of all glittering distractions and disguises, as I am. He sits with his hands clasped between his knees, suddenly weary.
Hecuba too is silent. You go to your bath now. Explain your plan to them. Let us see what they have to say of it. They are abuzz, puzzled by the novelty of this late-morning summons and the news that the king has an announcement to make. Once there was a full fifty of them. For they are divided, these princes, even with a common enemy at the gate, into factions, all very watchful of one another. Only part of this has to do with court politics. The rest arises from the rivalry of their wives.
Eager now to see what sort of mood their father is in, they turn as usual to Hecuba. She enters and immediately begins whispering to Helenus — a bad sign, this — then moves, as a diversion, from one to another of the wives. Careful as always to give each one of them the same cool but unaffected attention.
The wives are afraid of her, and it amuses the princes, who know their mother and her ways, that women who at home can be demanding, even intractable, go to water when this small, straight-backed woman puts her disconcerting questions, giving no indication in her smile of what she might think of the reply.
Today, Helenus too is on the move, consulting briefly with Deiphobus, leading Panyamus aside, and looking back over his shoulder to see which of the others may be watching. Meanwhile Priam stands isolated and very nearly forgotten, till Polydorus, who is still little more than a child, a high-coloured, athletic boy with coal-black tresses and eyebrows that meet in the middle, launches boldly forward and greets his father very warmly and unselfconsciously with a kiss, which Priam, when he has recovered, returns.
The others, one after another, follow, greeting their father and receiving his blessing, though they do not, like Polydorus, kiss him. At least outwardly respectful, they set themselves to listen. But when they hear, with growing alarm, what the old man has in mind, they are filled with a misgiving that swells, as the questions spread among them, to outright consternation.
How has he got hold of such a notion? It contradicts everything they have ever known of this grave and cautious figure who is their father. Challenges all they have ever demanded of the man, father or not, who is their king. A king whose stable is the envy of every prince in the known world does not ride in a wagon drawn by mules.
A king does not, in his own person, negotiate and deal. He has a herald to do that for him, in a voice that is skilled and trumpet-like, professionally trained in the laying down of challenges and the making of proclamations. It is Deiphobus, the most smooth-mannered and eloquent of them, who steps forward at last. How close we were. How of all my brothers he was dearest to me, as I believe I was to him. Yes, yes, Priam thinks, that is all very well, but what have you done more than the rest?
Beat your breast, fouled your hair with earth, wept a little. You are young and hardy. Even an old man like me can do that much. Do you really imagine that a man who has no respect for the body of his enemy, for the laws of honourable behaviour before men and the gods, who in the frenzy of his pride and wrath, his madness, daily violates the corpse of the noblest hero our world has known, that such a man would not take delight in hauling down your kingly image and dragging that too in the dust?
And what then of all you hold in custody? The sacred spirit of our city, the lives of each one of us. I say nothing of the treasure you will be carrying.
That is mere earth-stuff, metal, however finely worked. It is dispensible. You, my lord, are the treasure we cannot allow to be lost. You are what matters to us. Ordinary desires and needs and feelings are not unknown to you — I know that, you are my father; but you have, you can have, in your kingly role, no part in them — they are not in your royal sphere. Can you really believe that Hector, who was so proud, who loved you and cared so much for your royal dignity, and fought and poured his life out to preserve it, would thank his father for clasping the knees of his killer in a merely human way, and laying all the glory of Troy in the dust?
Priam lowers his head. When he raises it again his look is grave but his eyes, for all the power of emotion in him, are dry. I have had a good sixty years now to consider the splendour and limitations of what it is to be a king.
You speak, too, as a brother. I know how much you loved Hector, and how deeply affected you have been by the loss of a man we all cherished and depended on. You ask me to stand, as I have always done, at a kingly distance from the human, which in my kingly role, as you say, I can have no part in. But I am also a father. To learn a little of what that might be, and what it is to bear it as others do? I know I am an old man, feeble in body and ill-equipped to go venturing out at this late date into a world of change and accident.
But as you know, I am also stubborn, and I have not survived this long without a certain degree of toughness. The strength he had in his shoulders! The thickness of him! Of his neck. Like the trunk of one of those tamarisks.
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. 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. To have got him up that far, and him so strong and likely to last it out.
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. 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. Maybe they regret it. The fleas go on biting. The sun comes up again. 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. 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. 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. 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?
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