Antigone's Wake Page 19

  Abruptly, he became conscious of how confused he must seem to those watching from the street. Without further delay, he strode to the door, pulled it open, and stepped inside.

  *

  Photia had her eyes on him the moment he entered his wife’s quarters. She rose from her couch and, bearing with her an air of pensive sadness, seemed to manifest in his arms without crossing the space in between. He held her, feeling how insubstantial she seemed, how bird-like and sharp her shoulder-blades, for as long as she appeared to need it. When she pulled back, he was shocked at what he saw: in the nine months since he left, his daughter had aged ten years. What had been smooth when he set sail was now fraught with lines. If there was no gray in her hair yet, there was gray enough behind her eyes, in the wan smile she attempted for his benefit. He raised a hand to place it on her head, just as he always had done since she was a child — and found himself hesitating, leaving the hand suspended as it covered her from view.

  He completed the gesture, causing her to close her eyes in relief.

  “I wanted to go down to the ships to meet you,” she whispered.

  “No need.”

  “Her bleeding started again, so I had to stay.”

  Photia turned to the bed, to Nais who was lying there, watching them. The spectacle of the reunion of her husband and daughter seemed to give her no delight. But as he bent to kiss her cold forehead, Nais reflexively raised her arms, pulling him toward her. They remained that way for a while as Photia turned away, pretending to be distracted.

  He had seen his wife on the verge of labor twice before. This time, however, it seemed as if she was able to deliver herself into Hades. Her skin was not just unhealthy, not just pallid, but stark white, as if she had laid a coat of cosmetic lead on her face. The slick of sweat that covered her gave nothing like the moist glow of imminent motherhood. Instead, it was like some cold emanation from a corpse, shedding the last humors of the body. Layers of bedclothes were pulled up to her chin, leaving nothing for him to see of the rest of her except the swell of her belly. Yet even under all that she shivered visibly.

  “You are here,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “That’s good. It’s all been too much for the girl.”

  Photia opened her mouth to object, but Sophocles silenced her with a look. In truth, he wasn’t concerned with what Nais said, but how it exhausted her to say it. The effort just to utter a few words caused her to grimace with exertion.

  “Be quiet now,” he said, refolding the covers over her. “I’ll stay with you now.”

  “What’s that smell? Are you wearing perfume?”

  “It was an accident — on the street.”

  She summoned a smile. “Isn’t it always?”

  He stroked her cheek for the few moments it took her to fall asleep. Then he went back to stand beside Photia.

  “Where is Bulos?” she asked.

  “Coming with the baggage. What did you mean before, about her bleeding?”

  “The midwife says there is blood flowing into the womb. Not all the time — it starts and stops. It gets worse when she moves, so she must stay quiet.”

  “And the child is healthy?”

  “It seems so.”

  “Is her time close?”

  “It could happen today.”

  A temptation rose in him to ask the question any Athenian husband would ask — is it a boy? — but he quashed it. Instead, he pushed her gently toward the door.

  ‘I’ll sit with her now.”

  “I should help you — ”

  “You already have!” he said. “Now go. Take the bed in my room if you want it.”

  She relented. But then another worry occurred to him, and he had to stop her before she closed the door.

  “Wait! First tell me — what have you heard about your brother?”

  Like a boxer deceived by a feint, she winced at the mention of Iophon. The expression on her face told him all he needed to know.

  “The news came a few days ago,” she said. “They said it was treachery, and that you bore it well.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  Her tears came now, loosed by the dread that she had failed him. “I was afraid to tell her!” she confessed.

  He looked on her with an affection he had seldom indulged. Over the years, when work had not preoccupied him, it was Nais, and when it was not Nais it was Iophon. For Photia, dear undistinguished Photia, he had seldom spared a thought. Now that they were joined in a way he never feared possible, his neglect turned to remorse. “You were wise,” he said, reaching forth to give her a parting squeeze he knew was grossly inadequate. But it was all he could spare in his exhaustion, and he let her go.

  *

  The second of the Twelve Labors assigned to Heracles was to kill the Hydra of Lerna. This was a noisome sea-creature of many heads and poisonous breath, set to guard the entrance to Hades. Approaching the swamps of Lake Lerna with his nephew Iolaus, Heracles protected himself from the monster’s deadly fumes by covering his nose and mouth with his cloak. He lured the creature out with flaming arrows. Then, raising a farmer’s sickle he had brought for the work, the hero reaped a harvest of the creature’s many heads. But for every head Heracles loped off, two more grew back on the same neck. Realizing that he could never complete the labor by force alone, Heracles called for aid from Iolaus, who used a torch to burn the stumps before the heads regrew. In this way the mortals defeated the deathless monster. The last head, which could not be killed, they concealed forever under a boulder.

  But Hera would not let the Hydra rest. In her hatred of Heracles, the bastard child of her husband and the mortal woman Alcmene, the goddess was prepared to go to any length of spite. Summoning her daughter Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, Hera bade her to place a drop of the monster’s poisonous blood in the womb of every mortal woman. Eileithyia could not defy her mother, yet she knew that obeying her would mean the end of mankind. She therefore went to Olympus to find Themis, the goddess of heavenly justice, and put her dilemma before her.

  “This is not a problem for one unused to judging,” answered Themis. “Instead, obey your mother, but leave it to me to decide which women will get a fatal dose of the Hydra’s blood. In that way, both your duty and mine shall be fulfilled.”

  Eileithyia dispersed the poison. She left it to Themis, however, to decide how much to infect each mother, based on the impieties of fathers one generation removed, or a hundred. But as Themis set about this work, she realized that with so many fates to be decided, she would never have occasion to enjoy the diversions of Olympus with her fellow immortals. She therefore turned to Tyche, daughter of Ocean and Tethys, and said, “Sister, I wish to banquet as any goddess should, but this task weighs heavy on my time. Won’t you relieve me, then, so I may sit by the throne of my consort Zeus and take my share of his board?”

  “I see the size of the burden you have taken,” replied the goddess of chance, “and pledge to you now that it shall never rest on your shoulders alone.”

  From that time onward, no matter how outwardly strong a woman seemed, and despite all the arts of midwives and Asclepiads, childbirth struck down a fraction of all mortal women. And ever after, the question of whether it was Themis or Tyche, Justice or Chance, that loosed the monster within has bedevilled those left to grieve.

  When the time came for Nais to conceive her third child, the Hydra found its purchase along a scar left on her womb from the delivery of Iophon. The flesh, which was thinner there, put up little resistance as the placenta sank its roots deep. The skein of arteries drank greedily of the mother’s strength; it grew so thick that it split the uterus, invading the space of her abdomen. If a doctor had committed the impiety of cutting her open and looking inside, he would have seen a snarl of vessels bursting through the rent scar, spreading out to infest the kidneys, the liver, the intestines. An observant eye would see the serpent’s arms were irresistible, but also delicate: the slightest movement would tear them,
releasing still more blood into the mother’s body. From the ends of each severed vessel two more would grow back in its place.

  The doctor would marvel that she had survived as long as she had. And he would know that when the inevitable moment of labor came, the contractions would tear the Hydra apart, spilling its noxious blood as surely as the scythe of Heracles.

  *

  Sophocles sat with Nais for the next three days, snatching whatever moments of sleep he could on the bench beside her. Photia had to push him out to eat or bathe. In that time Nais’ moments of lucidity became shorter and fewer; at one point she woke up to ask what had happened at Samos. He began to explain, careful to leave out details that might upset her. But two hours later she seemed to rouse again and asked him, in a clear and strong voice, why he had not yet left for the war. That night, she grasped his hand with an abruptness that made him jump, and with coquettish eyes he had not seen in some years, said that yes, she would agree to marry him.

  The poet watched with a heavy heart as she veered from the woman he knew to an incontinent stranger. Alas, drama on the stage was one thing, but drama in his family quite another. When Nais called out for Iophon, telling him to stop loafing and turn out from his bed, he could finally take no more. He came out to the garden, blinking in the sudden brilliance of the afternoon. There he discovered Bulos lounging on his composing bench, his tunic hitched around his waist, contentedly scratching his balls.

  “What are you doing, you dog!” he cried. “Get up, or I’ll see you breaking rocks in some shithole in Laurion!”

  Bulos gained his feet just as Sophocles’ fist cracked across his temple.

  “Master, forgive me! I had no idea.”

  “Shut your mouth! Get your worthless self over there and clear those weeds! And when you’re done with that, scrape this bench and paint it!”

  The outburst worked like a tonic for his mood. Leaving Photia with Nais, he went out to the gymnasium for the first time since his return, then got a good meal at a tavern he would never have patronized under normal circumstances. As he came out, he saw someone familiar going in. This man, after recognizing Dexion in the gloom, grasped his hand and held it.

  “So it is you,” the younger man said, a pained expression on his face that was as close as he came to honest admiration.

  “Yes, me. Belated congratulations, dear Euripides, for your first prize this year.”

  “I don’t count it, because you were off doing greater things. If no one has told you, let me be first to say it: Athens has seen no better servant. Not even Aeschylus.”

  Dexion made some incoherent scoffing noise and attempted to wave his hand in dismissal, but Euripides would not let it go. As Dexion searched his rival’s face, it occurred to him that Euripides was serious. This was his first taste of acclaim that was beyond all precedent for a poet, and beyond all reason. The prospect frightened Sophocles more than a fleet of enemy warships.

  The next morning a caller came for him in Colonus. Coming out, the poet saw it was Pericles’ scribe, Evangelus. The slave uncovered his right shoulder, folded his arm under his ribcage, and delivered a bow worthy of a Medan courtier.

  “I see your master knows better than to send Menippus,” Sophocles remarked.

  “The general requests the favor of Dexion’s attendance at the memorial ceremony.”

  “Memorial?”

  “For the fallen at Samos. The master will recall the announcement of it on the Altar of Eponymous Heroes. It was posted three days ago.”

  “I haven’t read the postings,” replied the poet. “And I have no time for such nonsense.”

  “The ceremony is in seven days. Perhaps you will be available at that time?”

  “Tell your master, and Aspasia, that they don’t need me to admire their handiwork!”

  Clearly disconcerted, Evangelus performed another, somewhat less elegant bow, and wandered off with his lips moving, as if continuing the argument in his imagination. In truth, Sophocles had rebuffed the slave without thinking at all about the consequences. To waste a day in Pericles’ shadow was inconceivable while Nais was in such dire condition. He also felt a deep, unreasoning revulsion against the memory of his infidelity with Aspasia. Indeed, the image of her left behind in the comfort of the Cholargos farmhouse, composing and polishing Pericles’ victory speech while citizens fought and died to earn the conquest, seemed to him to border on the obscene.

  He returned to Nais’ sick room. His wife was asleep, though fitfully, with her eyeballs flitting under her lids and her breathing ragged. Photia sat beside her with a clay spindle and a basket of rude wool.

  “I’ll sit now,” he told her, picking the basket off the floor.

  “No, let me stay.”

  “It’s a fine day — go out to the Academy and enjoy it while you can. Do it for me. Now.”

  *

  The vigil ended four days later. Nais was roused from sleep by the spasms that came with increasing frequency. Throwing the blankets aside, Photia found the mattress soaked with a mixture of clear effluent and blood; Nais’s water had broken, and the bleeding had started again.

  “Bulos, fetch the midwife!” she cried.

  The next few hours seemed to unfold as quickly, with the same air of dread, as any cycle of plays he’d staged in the Theatre. The only coherent words Nais spoke was at the very beginning, when her eyes suddenly fixed on Dexion.

  “Did you let him go to the market again?” she asked, frowning.

  He grasped her hand and held it until the midwife arrived. The latter was a prodigiously heavy woman of forty, with great, red, sun-chapped forearms and a bristly moustache. In her arms she carried a bundle filled with implements that seemed more suited to the kitchen than the birthing room: a spatula, wooden tongs, a jar of pig tallow, a vessel for water, a bronze mirror, some bolts of cloth. Sophocles had seen the woman around the nearby streets for years, but had not realized until that moment that she was the local midwife. When she saw him, she jabbed a finger at him.

  “You, get out.”

  “Let him stay, Melitta,” begged Photia.

  “This is not going to be like dancing to the flutes. It’s going to be bad — and I won’t spare him a second look if he faints.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  With that, she set to work. Forcing Nais’ legs apart, she used the tongs to probe the birth canal. As Photia used the mirror to focus the daylight, Melitta peered and prodded, ignoring the flow of milky liquid studded with clotted blood that bathed her forearms. The next contraction forced Nais’ legs together, around the midwife’s ears. Melitta didn’t move, continuing her examination until the contractions ended. Pulling back, she said “She looks ready. But it’s hard to see anything with all that blood.”

  When the poet remembered that day with the perspective of many years, it seemed as if the passage from methodical preparation to horror took only an instant. Nais was in an almost constant state of agony, alternately screaming and clamping her jaw shut so hard the roots of her teeth bled. The midwife tried to shorten the ordeal as best she could, reaching in to grasp the baby’s head, but it had hardly crowned when they all saw, with rising despair, the blood filling Nais up from within, turning her body black. Melitta ran out of dry cloth; Photia ran through the house, tearing up bed sheets, tunics, wall hangings. The midwife pulled Nais’s bottom down to the edge of the bed and forced her hips up and open. “It’s working,” she declared. “I can see his ears!”

  The flow seemed to redouble; a patter, then a torrent of liquid hit the beaten floor, like the sound of a worsening cloudburst. Photia cried, “Bulos! We need dirt! Bring dirt!” as Melitta struggled to keep her footing, and Sophocles saw his wife pour out the substance of her life. In all his days he had never seen so much blood — not when an ox was sacrificed at the altar, not from all the spear wounds he had seen on the battlefield. This was like the abundance of a festival drinking party, of cheap wine shared out for public consumption in a common mixing
bowl. But for all that flowed out of her, he could see there was still more under her skin, pooling in dark circles that expanded before his eyes.

  She clutched at him; her eyes rose to him as if she had something to say. Leaning down, he asked “What is it, dear one?”

  “Do you think this is … ?” she began in a dry, cracking voice.

  “What did you say?”

  He leaned closer, putting his ear against her mouth. She said nothing more. Worse, he no longer felt the sensation of her breath against the hairs of his beard. He looked into her eyes. They did not focus on him, but seemed fixed on some spot over his head. She did not blink.

  “Nais!” he cried.

  Someone said, “It’s time for him to go.”

  Bulos appeared with a bucket; he saw Photia’s soft eyes, her hands on his shoulders. He was being propelled away from Nais’s twisted form as he called to her, desperate now for one definitive act, one gesture of recognition. For it was confusion he felt now, as they shut the door in his face. He was confused that she had been the center of everyone’s attention, with him at her side, holding her hand, and yet he could no more arrest her departure than fix the instants between the breaths that seemed to come faster, shallower, less distinct.

  He had been seated on the floor for some time — it seemed to him hours but it was only minutes — when he heard a newborn cry. He had not expected the sound, seeming to him as incongruous as children’s laughter in a slaughterhouse. The door rattled on its wicker frame and out came Photia naked, swaddling the infant in the only clean garment she had left: her own chiton.

  When the little one looked up at her, his eyes looked through her in the same way Nais had in her last moment.