Shakespeare's Kitchen (22 page)

“She let me shell the peas,” Ilka’s mother reported to Ilka.

At dinner Eliza bad-mouthed Winnie. She told about Winnie covering every surface of the apartment with his papers, before he went to move in with Susanna and left them to take care of his boxes.”

“Dear,” said Leslie.

“He hates you,” Eliza said.

“He does not,” said Leslie. “Why does he hate me!”

“One has one’s reasons,” Eliza said, “to hate you.”

“That may be so,” said Leslie.

Eliza told the story of Winnie’s taking Una to London and, worst of all, bringing her back to Concordance with him. Eliza badmouthed Joe Bernstine. “He made Leslie leave a cozy berth at Oxford . . .”

“He didn’t ‘make me.’”

“So Leslie could run the institute for him.”

“He ran it for twelve years . . .”

“And stopped you from writing your book . . .”

Leslie looked nettled. “I haven’t stopped writing.”

“So
he
can write
his
book.”

 

 

On the third morning the bathroom shower stopped yielding anybody water, hot or cold, any time of the day.

“The pain-in-the-neck of antiquity,” said Eliza.

The two sad-eyed men who had effaced themselves into the hedge—or it might have been two other sad-eyed men—came to the gate, Algerians looking for work.

At lunch Eliza seemed more excited and angrier and returned to the attack on Winnie, his wives, his boxes, his Nobel acceptance speech composed when he was twenty-three.

“That will do,” said Leslie to her.

And taking up with little Una; Winnie skedaddling off to the West Coast on the day they lost the baby.

Leslie sat beside Eliza and ate his soup.

 

 

Late that same afternoon, the lush golden day turned a yellow gray. A mortal heat laid itself across the silent, unpeopled lanes, the massacred village, the dead ivy, the house with the melting stone urn and walls returning to the dust from whence they came. Maggie woke late from too long a nap, climbed into her mother’s lap, cried and held Ilka in a steel embrace. Something in the distance cried, it wept as if Matsue’s howl had followed them home to its European genesis. It was a low whine with a muddy multiplicity of voices like a distant organ. The season’s mistral.

Ilka’s mother pried the screaming child out of Ilka’s arms. “Let’s you and me go and play. Let’s go. Come.”

Eliza stood in the kitchen, her hair on end. Leslie went to her and said, “You can not blow here, with the child. Do you want to go home now?” Eliza picked a glass off the table and threw it at Leslie. It bounced off the back of his hand and shattered on the floor. Eliza went up the stairs into the master bedroom. Leslie followed her but she had shut the door, fastened it on the inside and screamed. Maggie came running and butted her head into Ilka’s stomach.

The mistral howled close.

Leslie said to Ilka, “Can you sit with me?”

“Maggie,” Ilka said, “
you
get to sleep with Omama Flora! Will that be fun?”

The child burrowed her head under Ilka’s arm.

“
Yes
, you want to sleep with Omama,” said Ilka. “Yes, yes, yes!”

Leslie and Ilka sat at the table. He said, “You need to find someone who is at liberty to love you.”

“Don’t!” said Ilka. They sat together through the night. Eliza had become silent but the howling outside did not let up. Ilka’s
mother, coming down with Maggie the next morning, asked Leslie how he had got the purple bruise that covered the back of his hand.

Leslie said, “I hit it against the door post.” He picked Maggie up and set her on his lap but put her down when Eliza came in. She looked rueful, wanted to apologize. Leslie prevented her. “There is nothing for you to apologize for.” All day Leslie kept his person beside Eliza, sat, rose, went out, went up the stairs with her.

The mistral whined and would whine for some days after Leslie and Eliza had returned to America.

I
lka didn’t see that it was a phallus until she noticed a second one on the left; then she saw the whole row—another row on the right, an avenue of them. She was walking with the Cokers, an elderly couple from her table in the ship’s dining room, the second day out, on their third Greek island. Mr. Coker put on his glasses, recognized the five-footer on its stone pedestal, and took his glasses off. He polished them with a white handkerchief, laid them away in their hard case, and said, “Bifocals! Would you believe a hundred bucks?”

“Wow,” said Ilka.

“You can say that again!” said Mr. Coker and, shaking his head in admiration, returned the case into his breast pocket. Mrs. Coker carried a large beige bag. Ilka had meant to look at her across the breakfast table, but the eyes refused to focus on Mrs. Coker. Ilka
once again dismissed the bizarre notion that Mr. Coker beat Mrs. Coker. We can’t deal with other people till we’ve cut them down to fit some idea about them, thought Ilka, and looked around for anybody to say this to. Ilka’s idea about the Cokers was that one didn’t tell them one’s ideas. She looked at the Cokers to see if they were cutting her down, but she could tell that the Cokers
had
no ideas about her.

Ilka looked over at the American woman, but she was looking through her camera, saying, “Belle, Hank, lovies, go stand over by the left one so I can get in all that sea behind you.” The American woman appeared to be traveling with that little bevy of good-looking younger people, but it was her one noticed. One always knew the table at which she sat, not because her voice was loud but because it was fearless. Ilka thought of her as the American woman although many passengers on the British cruise ship
Ithaca
were Americans. Ilka herself was a naturalized American, but this was a tall, slim, fair woman who moved as if gladly, frequently turning her head to look this way and that. She kept generating fresh and always casual and expensive pairs of pastel pants and sweaters.

Ilka stored her idea about the Cokers and her curiosity about the American woman in the back of her mind to tell Leslie, whom she was scheduled to meet in an Athens hotel—a week from yesterday.

 

 

In the waiting area at Heathrow, Ilka had checked out the glum, embarrassed passengers with the telltale green flight bags and had yearned toward the interesting English group in the leather chairs by the window—two couples and a beautiful one-armed clergyman. They seemed to know one another. Perhaps they were old friends?

At the Athens airport the green flight-bag people had been transferred onto buses to take them down to the Piraeus, and the
three men from the leather chairs turned out to be the three English scholars who came as part of the package. Professor Charles Baines-Smith knew what there was to be known about shipbuilding in the ancient Near East; Willoughby Austen had published a monograph on the identity of the Island of Thera with the lost island of Atlantis. It was the Reverend Martin Gallsworth who gave the lecture that first evening, after dinner, as the
Ithaca
pulled out of the wharf.

Ilka sat in a state of romance. She looked up at the Greek moon in the Greek sky and across the glittering black strip of the Aegean to the Attic coast passing on the right. She leaned to hear what the Reverend Gallsworth was saying about the absence, in the Hellenic thought system, of the concept of conscience which the Hebrews were developing in that same historical moment, some hundred miles to the east.

The two classy Greek women guides assigned to the
Ithaca
did not appear till breakfast, which they ate at a little table for two. Dimitra, the elder by ten years, walked with a stick, as if she were in pain—a small, stout, cultivated woman. Ilka liked her. She assembled the crowd in the foyer between the purser’s desk and the little triangular corner counter where one could buy toothpaste and postcards of the
Ithaca
riding at anchor or the little square pool on the upper deck. Ilka sent the
Ithaca
card to everybody at Concordance.

Dimitra led her little crowd off the boat, got them loaded onto the waiting buses and unloaded them in the parking lot at the bottom of twin-peaked Mount Euboea. Mycenae! Idea turned earth underfoot, grass, some wild trees, blue water, blue, blue sky and a lot of stones: Agamemnon’s actual palace! “Mine eyes dazzle,” Ilka said to the tiny, very very old English woman, bent at a 90 degree angle, who could be trusted not to hear. The old woman looked as if she needed all her wits to get one foot put in front of the other. The ascent was hot and steep but the very old English woman waved her sturdy stick at the campstool that the nice man
with all the cameras offered to unfold for her. She was going to stand like everybody else while Dimitra explained how the pre-Greek
ae
ending told scholars that Mycenae had been inhabited since the early Bronze Age. “That’s around 3,000 B.C. Over there is the famous lion gate you see on the postcards.”

Mr. Coker took his glasses out of their hard case and looked at them. “Would you believe bifocal
sun
glasses!” he turned to say to the American woman.

“Up there,” said Dimitra, “is where—one story says at the table, another one says in his bath—Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murdered the ‘king of men,’ as Homer calls Agamemnon, on his return from the sack of Troy.” When the old English woman raised her head to look, she tumbled, lisle legs and plimsolls in the air, backward into the grave-circle in which, in 1876, the German, Schliemann, thought he had unearthed Agamemnon’s golden death mask, tiaras, thoi, bracelets, and a necklace clasped around the cervical of what might have been a Mycenean princess whose royal garments had disintegrated a millennium ago. The old woman flailed her stick at the hands reaching down to her and climbed out by herself.

I think she thinks once she accepts help, she’ll lose herself, Ilka was going to tell Leslie in Athens on Tuesday.

“This way, everybody, please!” They stood peering down into the subterranean blackness of the cistern which, in times of siege, had brought water from the well outside the Cyclopean wall into the royal palace. “There are one hundred wet and very worn steps.
Please
let us not have any accidents,” said Dimitra, and the very old woman gave herself a small sad smile, a half shake of the head, and turned away. Ilka saw her, later, standing on Agamemnon’s flagstones and said, “I think I’m looking for the place where a bloody bath might have actually stood.”

Dimitra was clapping her hands. “
Ithaca
people, over here, please!” She kept one hand in the air. Ilka watched her watching the excruciating slowness with which a lot of people form into a
group that can be instructed. “Let us not become mixed with the people in the buses from the hotels. We are the green bus.”

 

 

Day two their guide was Aikaterini, an elegant woman with an interesting air of sorrow, though it might only have been the sorrow of a woman in her fifties. The American woman wore a peach cotton knit sweater tied round her slim waist and looked terrific.

It grew hotter. Sky and water were so blue that the whiteness of the marble columns constituted the dark element. “You’re standing on land’s end, which would have been the returning sailor’s first sight of home.” Something for Aikaterini’s little group to imagine.

The Reverend Gallsworth with his romantically missing arm was sitting on a stone. Ilka went and sat beside him and said, “This is embarrassing!”

The Reverend Gallsworth looked suspicious.

“Here I was being all dazzled and this turns out not to even be the original Temple of Poseidon after all! Darn thing is a mere thousand years old!” Ilka was flirting with the Reverend Gallsworth. The Reverend Gallsworth smiled with an exquisite exhaustion.

Ilka said, “Something I wanted to ask you, about your lecture.”

The Reverend Gallsworth looked alarmed.

Ilka said, “Conscience doesn’t do a very good job, does it! Sin really is like death: one lives comfortably enough with the knowledge of both for a good twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours.”

Here the Reverend Martin Gallsworth looked, and saw Ilka, and Ilka rose, said, “Well, I think I better . . .” and ran away.

Ilka went and stood beside Aikaterini. “I do sympathize with the two of you having to squeeze everything you know into five
minutes spiced up with skeleton princesses and homing sailors.” Ilka was flirting with Aikaterini, who drew her head subliminally backward. Ilka experienced the thrill of recognition. She said, “Your head is doing what my head does when one of my students comes up and asks me something to which the real answer is, “O.K.! I notice you!”

The sorrowful, elegant Aikaterini did not smile at Ilka.

Ilka saved the head drawing subliminally backward to tell Leslie.

 

 

The sun stood straight above the avenue of the phalli. Ilka worked her way forward, fell into step beside Dimitra, and tried again: “I’m getting used to coming to what looks like another lot of stones, and then you talk for five minutes and the stones stand up and they’re baths, markets . . .”