Ithaca (3 page)

“Tell me about it.” He closes his eyes. “Tell me everything.”

Easier said than done. The Trojan War, which ended eight years ago, was a poisonous mixture of trade, diplomacy, and sex that drew in every city and island in Greece. Troy, on the straits leading to the Black Sea, charged tolls on the straits trade and became richer than any Greek city. A Trojan diplomatic mission ended in disaster when Paris—son of the Trojan king and a fast-moving boy with a lady-killer's smile—broke hearts around Greece and eloped with Helen, the fabulously beautiful wife of Menelaus. Menelaus's brother, Agamemnon, happened to be Greece's most powerful warlord. The elopement was the excuse for a massive Greek expedition to eliminate Troy. Odysseus, chief of Ithaca, sailed to join it on a hot June morning with six hundred companions, leaving his teenaged bride, Penelope, pregnant and weeping on the quayside.

My mother, with me inside her.

Like most invasions, the Trojan expedition was expected to be short and glorious. Instead it turned into an attritional nightmare played out in Troy's mosquito-infested marshes, where the Greek leaders squabbled and the soldiers died in pointless skirmishes, while the massive walls of Troy, impervious to any technology we Greeks possessed, remained unbreached.

I know it's wrong of me to talk of the war like this. Fighters are supposed to love battle—it's what they live for—and I'm a fighter's son. In the mouths of storytellers, the Trojan War
turns into something different: a heroic tale of valor and single combat, of bloody skirmishes and stirring speeches that keep audiences rapt in every tavern in Greece. When a new storyteller comes to Ithaca, the tavern is packed to the rafters, fishermen, traveling peddlers, and servants all listening with breathless attention. Even I get drawn into it then. Sitting under those blackened beams hung with ancient harpoons, fishermen's charms, and the dried-out beak of a swordfish, breathing in that reek of aniseed and grilled fish, eyes smarting from the charcoal braziers, ears filled with the storyteller's nasal drone and the thrumming of the instrument he plucks to accompany his tale, I hear my father's name, and suddenly the tears are running down my cheeks. By the time the story ends I'm sitting there quite sure—quite, quite sure—that my father, the hero of the Trojan War, is the greatest man in Greece.

I don't think it was really like that, though, so I tell Mentes the story the way I imagine it might actually have happened: war, pure, simple, and without heroics.

The war ended after eight years—ten, say the storytellers, rounding up for poetic effect—with Troy a smoking ruin and the surviving Trojan aristocracy herded aboard Greek ships as slaves. After much feasting, the Greeks built a massive shrine, hoisted anchor, and sailed for home, Odysseus and his Ithacans among them. One by one each leader reached his destination—all except my father, who was never seen again.

“He left Troy eight years ago,” I say.

Mentes dips a morsel of bread in his wine and swallows it. For a while he doesn't speak. Then he says, “You're an unusual boy.”

“I don't think so.” I can feel his white eyes boring into me. I can't meet them. I can feel myself blushing.

“You're more like Odysseus than I thought when I first saw you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You're clever, you're good with words, and you think things out for yourself. Have you heard any news of Odysseus since?”

“Nothing. We ask every ship that arrives here. There've been rumors. We follow them all up, but they never lead anywhere.”

Mentes touches his goblet to his mouth but barely tastes the wine. “Meanwhile, what of your mother?”

I don't want to talk about my mother—not even to this old friend of Odysseus. “She isn't very well,” I say reluctantly. But Mentes's brilliant eyes are staring expectantly at me, so I draw a deep breath and go on.

At thirty-two, Penelope is still the most beautiful and prestigious match in the islands, the daughter of a great chief, the wife (widow, say the young men who started to turn up three years ago) of another. Ithaca, the best harbor in the Ionian, is an idyllic island kingdom. No young fighter will ignore a prize like that.

Eurymachus was the first to arrive. I was waiting at the gate, excited at the idea of a guest. Eurymachus was tall, slim, and charming, and he carried a bunch of flowers in one hand.

“To pay my respects,” he said, and squeezed my shoulder. “I happened to be sailing past.” He put down his bag. “Is your mother here?”

Penelope was different back then. She was still well, still young, still smiling. I remember her running in through the gate, sucking her thumb where it had been pricked by a thorn. Eurymachus bowed formally as he took her hand. Something shifted then. It was the first time I saw Penelope not as my mother but the way other men saw her: as a beautiful woman, a prize.

Another young man arrived only two days later. He too just happened to be sailing past Ithaca. He wanted to say how sorry he was about Odysseus.

“My father isn't dead,” I told him.

“Of
course
not,” said the young man, gripping my hand. “Is your mother here?”

By harvesttime the guest rooms were full. It wasn't polite to ask how long a visitor would stay. Penelope arranged walks and hunting. There were feasts every night—the custom for honored guests. New arrivals were crammed into servants' rooms; baskets of fish were brought to the kitchen door each morning; sheep were slaughtered. I remember Medon, our steward, gloomily counting jars of wine in the musty cellar. Each night Penelope dressed carefully in front of the polished mirror in her room. She hung gold chains around her neck, made up her eyes and mouth, and into her hair fixed the tiny enameled boar that her husband had given her on the day he sailed away.

For the first year they were in awe of her. She laughed politely at their jokes, froze them when their laughter became too coarse. My mother was a chief's wife, after all; poised, immaculate, perfectly bred. She was Odysseus's wife. More than once I saw those young men glance nervously at the door, as if my father was about to stride in, sea-stained and soiled, gaunt from war, with his sword dripping at his side.

One of them tried to string my father's bow. I found him in the hall, holding it—the hunting bow that hangs on the wall, a massive thing of yew and ivory with a quiver of arrows next to it. He was weighing it in his hands when I came in, then pretended he was just interested.

“You mustn't touch that,” I said. “It's my father's.”

“I know that!” he snapped. But he put the bow back on its peg, and I never saw anyone touch it again.

Penelope's defenses decayed as the house did. It didn't happen overnight. Gradually the guests took to sunbathing in the courtyard, then leaving furniture out there. They
summoned Medon for wine instead of waiting to be offered. Someone told an improper joke in Penelope's presence. I remember the uneasy pause before the laughter, but once that barrier was crossed, their speech became less and less restrained. My mother took to leaving feasts early. The visitors didn't dare enter her room, but when she came out they crouched around her like vultures on a wounded bird. Weaving was a form of self-defense: it kept her hands busy and her eyes fixed on the wool. I never knew what they said when I wasn't there. Sometimes I found her walking down corridors with a young man muttering in her ear. Once she hurried in from the garden with tears staining her cheeks.

“They want to marry her,” Eurycleia told me after my grandfather's death. Her stern, old face was grim. “It's time you knew.”

I'd already guessed that. “What about my father?” I said. “My father will come back and kill them.” It's easy to be brave at fifteen. At the time, saying the words made me feel better, but there was an ocean of emptiness behind them.

“Of course he will,” said Eurycleia.

Penelope never did make her choice. Instead, she withdrew into her bedroom, and the young men destroyed our house. They emptied the cellars, built tents in the courtyard, hung targets on the walls. Their rough voices filled the colonnades, coiling up the stairwells like the eternal stink of cooking from the kitchen. On my sixteenth birthday they threw a party for me and made me drunk for the first time. I was alone. I had no father. There wasn't a thing I could do to stop them.

I don't tell Mentes everything. Not about the night I overheard a group of men talking so coarsely about Penelope that I had to stuff fingers in my ears to stifle their voices. Nor about what happened at the end of the birthday party, when they dressed me in one of my mother's robes, painted my face, and
made me stand on a chair to sing to them. Some things hurt too much to share with anybody.

“And so,” says Mentes in his strange, slow voice, “your father's house is full of men. They go into your mother's room. They touch her. You can't stop them.”

I don't say anything. Suddenly his arm shoots out and grips my wrist. I'm surprised by how strong the old man is. I try to pull my hand away but can't.

“Only a boy,” he says, releasing me, but he says it without contempt, simply as a fact. “You can't protect her.”

“My father will come back.”

“Will he?”

“He must.”

“Where is he?”

“I don't know.”

Mentes leans toward me. I can smell some odd perfume from him, some spice or oil mingled with his sweat and the sea-reek of his clothes. “You must go and find him.”

It's the last thing I expect him to say. I don't know what to reply. I've never thought of going to look for my father. I've never left Ithaca. “Who would protect my mother?”

“You can't protect her yourself.”

“I don't know where to look.”

“Go to Pylos. Nestor, the chief there, hears many things. Ships put in. People pick up news.” Everyone's heard of Nestor. He's said to be the oldest man alive.

“My father will come home.” I can hear a hollow echo to my own voice, like I'm not convincing even myself. “Odysseus will come home and drive them all out. He'll kill his enemies. He'll save both of us.”

Mentes just looks at me. “You sound like a child,” he says.

He stands up. I follow him to the gate, where the midday heat burns down on beaten white soil. Two dogs lie panting
across the threshold. His mule waits in the shade, flicking its long ears to keep off the flies. Suddenly I don't want Mentes to leave. Here's a man who actually knew my father. Knew Odysseus, traveled with him.

“What was he like?” I ask, wishing I didn't sound so young.

Mentes looks down at me. Suddenly I realize he hasn't smiled once since he arrived. Not smiled, not frowned, not shown the least sign of emotion. His face looks like it's carved from a slab of wood.

“He was like you,” he says. “Good with words.
Too
good with words, some people say. He was clever, like you.
Too
clever, perhaps. A lot of people hated him for that. Perhaps they'll hate you too.”

It isn't like a person talking to me, it's like an oracle, impersonal. “What do you mean?” I feel breathless. My head's spinning. This isn't the Odysseus of my mother's stories. “Everyone loves Odysseus. Everyone admires him. He's a fighter. Everyone knows that. He won the Trojan War.”

“Perhaps.”

“So why do you say people hated him?
Why
did they hate him?”

Mentes looks down at me from the saddle of his mule as he turns it away. “Because he was a liar,” he says quietly.

When he's gone, I slip down the alleyway that runs along the side of the big house, following it to the strip of beach that fronts the town. Boatbuilders make and mend fishing boats here. I need to be alone.

A gang of boatbuilders is at work now, planing planks whose fresh, clean smell drifts across to where I'm standing. Two gaily painted hulls lie on trestles beyond them. Nearby, an old man is slapping varnish onto the upturned hull of his boat, a can of pitch bubbling on a small driftwood fire next to him. Familiar
scents drift toward me—of fishing nets suspended on poles outside the doors of the low, white cottages, of drying seaweed, of the shining fish that two men on the beach, legs silver with scales, are gutting and tossing into a bucket between them. Beyond them, two boys are throwing pailfuls of charcoal into the furnace where they make bronze. The sky shimmers in the heat above it, as if the air itself is being smelted into hard metal.

I don't want the fishermen's company today. Instead, I turn away from the town and pick my way over the rocks to the headland that closes one side of the harbor. Clambering down to the water's edge, I settle myself on a round stone lapped by clear water. The sun is at its height, the horizon a brown smear of heat. Sometimes, after a winter storm, you can see mountains on the mainland and the silhouettes of the other islands. Today they're no more than ghostly shadows. Haze shrouds the horizon over which my father vanished on a hot day like this one, sixteen years ago.

What did Mentes mean when he called my father a liar?

I should have run after him and called him back. I was too shocked. It's only now I think of everything I should have said, everything I should have asked.

Waves wash the stones below my feet. I can see delicate black urchins clinging to the rocks below the surface and a seashell encrusted with barnacles. I'm thinking,
How can the world—this familiar world—be changed so much by one word?
My father not a hero but a liar. Is that possible? To the people of Ithaca, Odysseus was a man of action. A brilliant strategist and fearless fighter: that's what I've believed all through my childhood. Those are the stories I've been brought up with—about Odysseus's strength, his courage, his sharp wits. I'm thinking,
Does my mother know people call Odysseus a liar?
And
why
do they call him that? Perhaps Mentes was lying himself. But why would he lie if he was Odysseus's friend?