My father took her to the airport. My mother stayed home with me and the baby. The new regime had begun.
But at least, maybe, with Frederika gone, Vishwa could come back and we could listen to records again.
My mother said no. “Vishwa is very busy now,” she said. “He’s conducting the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. It’s a big job and he hasn’t got time for lessons.”
I didn’t like Miss Evie but I had to admit that she understood some things about nine-year-olds. For instance, that we knew enough about hate and pride and envy to enjoy the story of the House of Atreus. It was one of the lead-ins to the Trojan War, but we could have studied the Trojan War without going all the way back to the cannibalism. However, that’s where Miss Evie started: Tantalus serving the gods a dinner made of his son, Pelops, whom he’d killed and cooked. What was amazing was that then Pelops came back to life and had two sons, Atreus and Thyestes, and the same thing happened again, only this time Atreus killed Thyestes’s sons and served them to him for dinner.
I thought this was very good. I liked that the story was the same but not quite—gods replaced by a man, two sons instead of one, nephew-murder, not son-murder. But the same thing kept happening, and something about that was satisfying. The horribleness was also satisfying. The storytellers hadn’t made even a gesture toward saying why. Tantalus cooked his son for dinner and that was that. Atreus had a bit of a motive. He was mad at Thyestes for stealing a ram with a golden fleece. But anyone could see that killing and cooking his children was an overreaction. It was clear that Atreus had to do what his grandfather had done. It was his fate, as the Greeks said. And it was the story’s fate as well, to repeat itself.
I wondered about the golden fleece, and whether it was the same one that had sent Jason off on his voyage with the Argonauts. I hadn’t liked that Jason story very much when I’d read it in Gods and Heroes during the early-man doldrums in England. I looked at it again now. The fleeces didn’t seem to be connected. For starters, Atreus’s fleece was still on the hoof. The fleece Jason was after had long before been stripped off its ram and nailed to a tree in Colchis, wherever that was. It wasn’t in Greece. The story was full of how special the fleece was, how there wasn’t anything like it anywhere else. But there was. There was a golden fleece in Greece too.
Poor Jason. He could have skipped the trip, I thought.
The further we went in the story of Atreus and his family, the more things happened twice. Or more than twice. First Aegisthus killed his uncle Atreus. Then Atreus’s son Agamemnon killed his uncle Thyestes, who was Aegisthus’s father. Later on, Aegisthus helped to kill his cousin Agamemnon. That was just the killings. There was also the sister and brother not recognizing each other. First Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, didn’t recognize her brother, Orestes, when he came home (not surprisingly, he’d come home to kill his mother and cousin). Then Orestes didn’t recognize his sister Iphegenia when he found her in Tauris.
Iphegenia was a surprise. We’d assumed she was dead. Agamemnon had sacrificed her to get a good wind for his trip to Troy. That was the trouble! That had been the start of the whole second round of killings—third round, if you began with the cannibalism. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus would never have killed Agamemnon when he got back from the war if they’d known he hadn’t actually sacrificed Iphegenia. And if they hadn’t killed Agamemnon, then Orestes wouldn’t have had to come home and kill them. And all that mess could have been avoided.
But Iphegenia was fine. She was living as a priestess in Tauris. Artemis had saved her at the altar, right there, with her neck under the knife. A beautiful young hind had appeared to be sacrificed instead. That got my attention. Wasn’t this the same thing that had happened when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac? Except maybe it had been a goat, or—this would be funny—a ram, maybe one with a golden fleece.
On my ninth birthday my father had given me a King James Bible. The family tradition was to give presents with cryptic clues on them. You had to guess what it was before you could open it. The rule might be waived for extremely difficult clues. The Bible’s clue was: FROM JC TO THE JEWS. I didn’t get it. I was allowed to open it, but even then I didn’t get it.
“Who’s JC?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said.
“But it’s the whole thing,” my mother pointed out.
“It’s true,” my father said. “Technically, it should have been only the New Testament. But the Old Testament is better.”
“We think,” my mother muttered.
“The stories are much better,” my father said.
It was hard to read those stories. Every paragraph had a number, which was distracting. The names were dotted with squiggles and slashes and accents, which was also distracting. And it was somewhat repetitive. I hadn’t made much progress.
I’d made enough, though, to get to the sacrifice of Isaac. I looked for it again. It had been a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns, said the Bible.
What did all these rams mean? I wondered. What did the sacrifice of children mean? Why did so many things happen twice?
I could have asked Miss Evie, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t think she would like my asking, and I was afraid she would tell me I was wrong—things weren’t happening twice. As for my parents, I didn’t ask them things like that anymore.
“You’re very sulky,” my mother told me often.
She was right. I was half dead and half sulky. But as the fall went on, I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. They were violent and arbitrary, and they didn’t explain. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things happened. The Greek stories were a lot easier to read, but I plugged away at the Bible too. I’d found a child’s illustrated Bible that I didn’t even remember owning (forgotten down under the waves with everything else), which was a good trot. When I couldn’t stand the numbers and the squiggles anymore, I’d leaf through the pictures of Daniel in the lion’s den and read the potted version of Joseph and his brothers. Then I could make sense out of the King James because I already knew the story.
Unlike me, my mother was in a good mood. She was playing a lot of cheerful Scarlatti. No agonizing Beethoven or abstract Bartók. Some days she’d try writing the shopping list in Greek, for practice. Kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi. But, “No Greek word for cottage cheese,” she said.
“Or vermouth,” said my father. “We’re out.”
“Oh, omicron. I always forget that one,” my mother said.
“Omicron and omega. Little o and big o. I am alpha and omega, the first and the last,” said my father.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“That’s what Jesus said,” he told me.
“Jesus spoke Greek?”
“No, he probably spoke Aramaic, which is a kind of Hebrew,” said my father. “But the Bible was written in Greek, so in the Bible he says it that way.”
That explained why the stories felt the same. “I didn’t know the Greeks wrote the Bible too,” I said.
“They didn’t,” said my father. “The people who collected the Bible spoke Greek, so they wrote it down in Greek. The New Testament.”
“And the Old,” my mother said. “Those seventy old Jews.” She shook her head at my father. “What’s the matter with you? Forgetting the seventy old Jews.”
My father shrugged. “Dumb?” he suggested, smiling. “Just a big dope?”
They seemed to be getting along nicely.
“What seventy old Jews?” I was lost.
“The ones who collected the Old Testament.”
“Was it lying around?” I asked.
“In a way, it was lying around,” my father said. “There were lots of different versions in various languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, and probably some others. These old Jews were the editors. They took all the versions and collected them into one version i
n Greek.”
“When did they do this?” I asked.
My mother and father looked at each other.
“Two hundred B.C.,” my mother said, firmly.
“It might have been earlier,” said my father. “It was before Christianity, anyhow.”
“Why were there seventy Jews in Greece?” I asked.
“They were in Alexandria,” said my father. “Have you gotten to Alexander the Great yet?”
“No,” I said. “We’re reading about the Atreus people and how they kill each other all the time.”
“It’s already November,” my father said. “You’ve got a lot of history to pack into the rest of the year.”
“And so what does it mean, ‘I am alpha and omega’?”
“It means I am everything. I am the beginning and the end and everything in between,” my father said.
I didn’t see how one person could be everything. But I’d had enough of sitting in the kitchen with my parents, so I said, “Oh, okay.”
Dapper-devil Eli was from Baghdad, like Aladdin in the fairy tale. My mother told me this in an effort to improve my Friday-night behavior. She also told me to address him as Professor Safar.
“He’s very formal,” she said. “He likes that.”
He didn’t seem very formal when he was sitting on the sofa guffawing with her all afternoon.
I didn’t like it when Eli Professor Safar came for dinner. He was a poor substitute for Vishwa. The main problem was he paid no attention to me. My mother’s instruction to address him by his title was needless; we almost never spoke to each other.
“You should be friendly to him,” my mother went on. “He hasn’t had an easy time. After the war he had to leave Baghdad and go to Israel, and then his wife died, and now he’s ended up here, where he doesn’t know anyone.”
“He doesn’t like me,” I said.
My mother tightened her mouth. “I’m sure he doesn’t think about you,” she said.
“Then why should I bother to be friendly?”
“To make him feel at home.”
“If he doesn’t know anyone, how does he know you?” I asked.
“Werner,” my mother said. “I was looking for a Greek teacher, and Werner Jaeger recommended Eli—Professor Safar—who’d just joined the department. Do you remember Werner? He gave you your copy of Gods and Heroes. He wrote the introduction to the English translation. He thought you would enjoy the stories. But maybe you don’t remember him. You were only about five when he gave it to you.”
“Does he have a mustache?” I asked.
“Yes,” said my mother.
“Like A.A.’s?”
“No. It’s the thin kind, the proper German kind.”
“Proper?”
“A certain kind of German professor has a thin mustache.”
I didn’t really care about mustaches. “How come all these people who teach Greek aren’t Greeks?”
“It’s too complicated to explain right now,” said my mother.
I persisted. “Aren’t there any Greek people to teach Greek?”
“It’s not the same language anymore,” she said. “What they speak in Greece now isn’t what they spoke then. It isn’t Ancient Greek.”
“What happened to the old Greek?”
“It died,” said my mother.
That was sobering. I hadn’t known that a language, like a person, could die. “How—” I began.
“Enough,” said my mother. “That’s enough now.”
We were in the kitchen. It was Friday, and Eli Professor Safar was returning for dinner at seven-thirty. My mother was salting the inside of a chicken and stuffing it with parsley and thyme, and then she was going to stab a shish-kebab skewer into its neck and close it up with a quick, nasty twist. Was Professor Eli Aegisthus? I didn’t want to think about that idea.
My mother finished assassinating the chicken and put it in the oven. She washed her hands twice. “Chicken is poisonous,” she told me. “Always wash your hands well after getting near chicken.”
Her plan was to poison all of us? “If it’s poisonous—”
“No. You know what I mean.” She was really fed up with me. “Raw chicken. Now go get ready. Go take a bath or something.”
I went upstairs and reread some of Gods and Heroes instead. I read the story about Zeus and Io, and how Zeus turned her into a cow. She knew she was a cow, and she didn’t want to be one. It was sad and worrisome, especially the part where she spelled out her problem with her hoof in the dirt. Luckily, her father understood her. But he couldn’t do anything. She was stuck. Eventually it worked out, but there were a lot of bad things first. The gadfly! What was a gadfly? It sounded terrible.
I had a vague memory of some other cow situation. I leafed through until I found it: Europa. Europa wasn’t the cow this time—it was Zeus. Zeus turned himself into a bull. He was an extremely beautiful bull, just as Io had been an extremely beautiful cow. The difference was he could switch back whenever he felt like it.
I had never been close enough to a cow to determine if it was an especially beautiful one. A black-and-white group in a field as we drove to somewhere in Vermont was all I could remember, seen through the car window at forty miles an hour. “ ‘I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one,’ ” my father would sometimes recite. “ ‘But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!’ ” Then he’d laugh. I didn’t want to be one either. Purple wasn’t the problem. I thought about Io trapped in the cow’s body—but that wasn’t quite right. That made it seem like Jonah eaten by the whale. This was worse. She was imprisoned in cowness. She was the cow but she wasn’t; she was Io. The book talked about her piteous cries to be released.
If I were turned into a cow, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to read, because I wouldn’t have arms and I couldn’t hold the book. Maybe I could use my hoof, like Io. But I’d have to stand up all the time. I wouldn’t be able to talk and I would be enormous.
I looked around my room, with its sloping attic eaves all along the edge, under which I could still stand up. Frederika had been too tall to stand under her eaves next door. If I were a cow, how would I get up the stairs?
It wasn’t worth worrying about. Nobody was going to turn me into a cow. I was just enjoying myself by pretending to be afraid of it.
Except something about it was real: not the cow part, the stuck part. I was stuck as myself. I wasn’t going to turn into anybody else. Sometimes, when I was very angry or very happy, my feelings seemed to be bigger than I was, as if they were the size of giants, and I would have to break open, the way, I thought, I had been able to break open at the chest in England when I traveled at night back to Cambridge or up and down our grim, gray English street. But I didn’t do that anymore. I didn’t take those nighttime trips. Probably I was no longer able to. Whatever that had been, it was now underwater with the lullabies and the snipped-off thumbs. All that was left was making believe I might be turned into a cow while knowing it was never going to happen.
“Dinner,” my mother called up the stairs. “Come and set the table.”
I went down slowly. On the second floor, my father was sitting on the bed in my parents’ room unlacing his shoes, and the baby was in her cot singing a lullaby to her favorite new toy, a stuffed owl.
“Did you get to Alexander the Great yet?” asked my father.
“No,” I said. “It’s all about the Trojan War. Too many battles.”
“It picks up,” he said. “Have they gone back for Philoctetes?”
“Is that the guy with the smelly foot?”
My father nodded.
“No. They left him on an island.”
“Yes, but they go back for him. And then they win the war. Still, hundreds and hundreds of years are left to cover. I don’t understand the organization of this program of study.”
“Maybe Alexander isn’t in it,” I said.
“That’s impossible,” said my father.
“Hey!” my mothe
r called. “What are you two doing? I need a hand here.”
My father put on his black Italian loafers, once sleek, now cracked and curled from their émigré life in arctic Cambridge, and we went downstairs to help.
“Put the salad plates on top of the dinner plates,” my mother said. “We’re having artichokes first.”
“Don’t forget the little cups for butter,” my father said.
“Ingrid always has mayonnaise,” I said.
“Ingrid makes her own mayonnaise,” my mother told me. “I’m not putting Hellmann’s out in a little cup.”
“Butter is better,” said my father.
I thought mayonnaise was better. A.A. used sour cream. He was as crazy about sour cream as I was. I’d tried that, but it drowned out the artichoke. I loved artichoke because it made everything else taste sweet. The best was eating bread afterward; it tasted like cake.
“Why do artichokes make things taste sweet?” I asked my father.
“Do they? I don’t think they do,” he said.
“Maybe it’s like asparagus pee,” my mother said. “Not everyone has asparagus pee.”
I hated asparagus pee. It made me think of mice or guinea pigs.
“That’s not true,” my father said. “Everyone has it, but not everyone can smell it. That’s the difference.”
“Those people are living in a fool’s paradise,” my mother said.
“Is that a good thing?” I asked.
“By definition,” my father said, “you’re a fool. That’s no good.”
“But if you’re happy …” My mother didn’t finish.
“Better to suffer and to know,” said my father.
Artichokes with melted lemon-butter. Chicken roasted on a bed of endive and leeks. Rice with currants—“What’s this?” my father asked.
“It’s a Persian sort of thing,” said my mother.
“Quite typical,” Eli Professor Safar said. “We often have this.”
“But Iraq—” my father began to object.
“Isn’t Persia,” Eli interrupted him. “But it’s a general cuisine. General to the area of Iraq and Iran. Jewish cooking in the Middle East is much influenced by the Arabic and Persian penchant for sweet-and-sour.”