Ithaca (26 page)

I bite into the thick slab of bread Eumaeus has handed me. It's dry as dust, impossible to chew. “Is my mother safe?”

“She'll be better now you're 'ome. What are you doin' 'ere, Telemachus? Why didn't you come in the 'arbor?”

“They were waiting to ambush me on Asteris, Antinous and twenty others. I had to swim for it. Mentor took the ship in.”

“Yer can 'ide 'ere if yer needs.”

“No. I have to see Penelope. I have to tell her about Odysseus.”

“
Odysseus
,” the stranger whispers.

I spin around in fury, but something stops me from striking him. I can see the red mark where Eumaeus hit him.

He gets up, stooped. Comes over and stands in front of me, standing too close so I can see the deep blue in his eyes, smell the stink of his breath.

“Telemachus.”

“What do you want?”

“Telemachus.” He repeats my name as if it were a kind of prayer. “What would you say . . .” His voice is stronger than I would expect. “What would you say, Telemachus, if I told you that I
am
Odysseus.”

Eumaeus lets out an oath. I push the old beggar away. How many imposters have we had over the years? All of them confident they can prove it. Perhaps they'll have met someone who sailed with Odysseus and now hold a nugget of information “that only Odysseus could have known”—the scar on his thigh, usually.
A scar right here, right up my thigh
. Best to get it over quick.

I draw a deep breath. “Odysseus has a scar on his body. Where?”

“Many scars,” the stranger whispers. “Many scars.” The wrong answer.

“What do you know about Penelope?”

“I did her wrong.”

That's not what I expected. I pause. “What color are her eyes?”

“Green.”

“How does she weave?”

“With her left hand.”

“What does she wear around her neck?”

“The locket I gave her the day I left.”

I'm a bit surprised, I admit. Others have given the right answers before, but there's something unusual in the way this stranger replies. Not thinking, not striving to impress—just telling me what he knows with an odd air of bewilderment.

I go on. “There's a shrine to the goddess on Ithaca. Where?”

“On the mountainside above the house, past the gate in the orchard.”

“Odysseus left four offerings there. What were they?”

None of the imposters could ever answer this.

The stranger pauses, his eyes fixed on me. “A boar's tusk,” he says huskily. “The tusk that ripped my thigh. A sprig of laurel. I cut it with Penelope in the woods above her home. My sword. I dedicated it the day before I left for war.”

My attention is fully on him. And it's then I'm struck by the way he's looking at me. Inspecting me . . . no,
devouring
me, with a greedy, all-encompassing fascination.

I shiver, take too long a pull on Eumaeus's harsh wine, cough.

“The fourth.” For some reason my voice is hoarse.

“A wooden owl.” The stranger's blue eyes close. “I left it at dawn the day we sailed.”

A tusk. A sprig of laurel and a sword. A carved owl. I shiver. Perhaps the sea's chill has gotten to me. Anyone could go to the shrine; anyone could bribe the priest. It proves nothing.

Eumaeus gets up angrily and twists the skewers of pork on the fire. “Look at 'is ugly ol' face. Odysseus was strong as a tree, quick as an eagle. My master were a fighter, not some blasted ol' tramp. If this is Odysseus, then we's all buggered.”

As he sits down again, I feel his rough hand briefly gripping my shoulder. Support.

I can't take my eyes off the stranger, though. “Who made the owl?”

“I did.”

I
. Not “Odysseus.”
I
. But this isn't Odysseus, I know that. Odysseus is young, strong, a fighter. Odysseus is dead.

“I made two,” the stranger says before I even ask him. His eyes are locked on mine. This isn't possible—I know it isn't. No one knows about the second owl, the one my father carved for his daughter in the town.

“Where is the second?” My voice sounds unsteady in my own ears. I can feel it now, the second owl, pressing against
my belt. Only we know about it. The girl and her mother. I. Odysseus. Suddenly I'm no longer aware of the hut, or of Eumaeus watching spellbound from the fire. It's as if no one else in the world exists; as if there's no other moment but this one, this second in which my question hangs unanswered between us.

“I gave it to my daughter,” he says.

Eumaeus swears coarsely. “Odysseus ain't got no daughter!”

The man on the stool ignores him. “I lied about her,” he says, directing his words to me alone. “I lied to Penelope. I lied to everybody.” He pauses and swallows, then goes on with a wrench, as if the truth is something, an arrow, he has to pull out of his own body. “I had a daughter with a woman in town. The night before I left, I carved an offering for each of you, to keep you safe. Yours I dedicated at the shrine, but I couldn't leave hers there. She has it, Telemachus.”

How many days, how many nights? Days I'd walk up to the clifftop and pretend I saw a sail. Nights I lay awake, imagining that at any moment I'd hear the great gate slam, voices, a commotion. When I was young enough I convinced myself, more than once, that those footsteps were real. My eyes filled with tears as I lay in bed. I actually got up and ran downstairs to greet my father.

And found the hall empty, the guards asleep. Nothing.

How many different scenes did I play out in my head? The fleet sailing back into the harbor at dawn. Doors opening, children running out. The scrunch of keels on the sand, men jumping down, taking women in their arms while the sails billowed and the oars were stowed for the last time. Eurycleia shaking me awake in the middle of the night. And a hundred times—a thousand times—my father striding into the hall while the young men feasted, his face grim and his sword drawn.

But it was never like this: an old man hunched on a stool in a pig farmer's hut. No ships. No men. And
old
. Why did I never realize my father would grow old? That he would be scarred, broken—that eight years of war and eight of travel would wither his muscles and twist his legs, fill those blue eyes with that look of helpless pleading? As if he were a son looking for his father's blessing. As if he isn't a returning chief but a fugitive begging for help.

I don't take the hand he's holding out to me. I sit down and hold out my cup for Eumaeus to refill.

“Telemachus?” My father's voice trembles. He can feel the hostility. He can feel my anger like heat from a fire. I don't even know why I'm angry. Perhaps it's because I've found my father just when I'd stopped looking for him. Or because he isn't the hero I've pictured for sixteen years; he's a tired old man, an imposter.

Or perhaps because I've always been angry with him, every day of my life. My father: the first stranger I ever hated.

“What's 'appenin'?” Eumaeus's gruff old voice is trembling. He looks at the stranger. Gets up, goes to him, and peers at his shoulders, his face, his chest, the way he might inspect a pig he was thinking of buying at market.

“Eumaeus.” Is that a note of half-forgotten command in my father's voice? The old farmer can hear it too. And perhaps he hears in it, at last, the echo of remembered tones; a voice faded and hollowed out by time; a voice he never expected to hear again. Suddenly Eumaeus is weeping, gripping my father's shoulders and weeping like a child who wants to be forgiven.

The sound of Eumaeus's tears breaks me. I have the sense of a void filling, a circle closing.
Odysseus
, who was missing for so long. I go to him myself then, and let my father take my hand. His touch is odd, harsh, tanned by salt—so dry and cold I can hardly sense any human warmth in it. I look into his eyes and
suddenly, there, I see something I recognize as my own, a shard of mirror in a vast darkness. I may hate him, but I can't ignore my own father. And all at once I'm overwhelmed, not with love but with pity—pity for this poor, scarred old man quivering inside the name of Odysseus, pity for the wanderer who's come home alone, to find his house ruined and his fortune gone.

I always thought I needed a father. It isn't like that, I realize. Odysseus needs me.

H
ours later I'm watching the big house from the shadow of the olive grove.

I knew a man in town once who broke his leg. It mended slowly and crooked. It took time for the bone to knit, time for the hurt to heal, time for it to stiffen enough to carry his weight. Even then it didn't grow straight. He had to learn to walk again. We watched him hobble across the town square, treading gingerly on his twisted leg as if he wasn't sure whether or not it would hold. It's going to be like that for my father and me. It will take time for us to meld together, father and son, time for scar tissue to form and the bones slowly to unite. We'll have to learn how to walk on this crooked, tender
thing, our bond, test its strength little by little. Learn what it is to be part of each other.

Only we don't have any time.

We talked for hours this morning, but not about the things we should have shared—my childhood, his journey. There was no time for that. Instead, we talked about the battle that awaits us here on Ithaca in the next two days. About Penelope, imprisoned in the big house. About Odysseus's return.

Neither of us has any illusions about how complicated this is going to be. I came back to Ithaca expecting a fight. I'm still expecting one.

A few years ago, Odysseus might have returned home to Ithaca in triumph and been welcomed as a returning chief, but it's different now. Ithaca's changed—I saw that at the town meeting. Odysseus could stand up under the plane tree, he could tell them,
“I'm back, but your sons, your husbands, you're never going to see them again.”
Five hundred men. Would anyone leap up to acclaim him? I don't think so.

He didn't want to hear that. “They love me,” he kept saying, shaking his grey head. “They love me. They'd follow me to the ends of the earth.”

If Odysseus had come back a few years ago, the young men in the house might have packed their things, paid homage, and left. He's lost that opportunity too. The ruined courtyard and empty cellars, the feasts, the destruction—those are the work of invaders, not guests. The men in the house will expect Odysseus's vengeance. They'll kill him first.

That was when the discussion got difficult. Odysseus wanted to charge down to the house, sword in hand, and take them on. He and I, with the goddess to give us strength. It took all my tact to argue him out of that. How to tell your own father he's no longer the fighter who conquered Troy? That he's old
and weak? That his son has only ever fought a single fight, and his enemies are stronger than he is?

Odysseus sat on his stool, brooding. “Who are they?” he said at last, so I listed them, and my father nodded at each name. Most were children when he left for Troy. Now they're in their prime, stronger than he is.

“Antinous is the worst,” I finished. “He's vicious. And Eurymachus, Polybus's son.”

“No.” Odysseus shook his head decisively.

“You've never met him.”

“I knew his father. There's good blood in that family. His father was a good man. Count Eurymachus a friend.”

Commanding me, like it wasn't open for discussion. I didn't want to argue with my father on our first day together—perhaps our last day—so I forced myself to think impartially. Eurymachus had spoken for me at the town meeting. He'd given me money for my journey to Pylos. Had he been trying to ingratiate himself with Penelope? Maybe. But he'd shown me other kindnesses over the years. Grudgingly I was forced to admit my father could be right.

“He'll help us,” he decreed. “Four against thirty. Maybe more than four. We'll have supporters in the town.”

Eventually Odysseus accepted he couldn't just march into the big house and take possession. We needed to buy time. And it was in this acceptance, this talking through options, that I finally undersood this really was Odysseus sitting here in the hut—Odysseus, the great strategist, the trickster, the man who dreamed up the wooden horse. His mind moved like lightning. He was always two steps ahead, dismissing plans before we'd even described them, weighing pros and cons, conjuring up schemes. And I began to feel
proud
this was Odysseus, proud to be his son—which only added to my confusion. Proud, angry, resentful. How could I not be confused? For a moment
I found myself missing those hours last night when it was just me, sailing across a starlit sea alone.

At last Odysseus said, “Do what you planned yourself. Tell them I'm dead. Announce my funeral. They won't attack you until it's over. Meanwhile we must get me into the palace, disguised.”