Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables

1 The True Helen

Having been stricken blind, he believed, for his poetic defamations of Helen—whom the Laconians of his day adored as a goddess—Stesichorus regained his sight by composing an expiatory Palinode, in which he proclaimed that the Spartan queen had never really eloped with Paris, that the Achaeans and the Trojans had fought their great war over a phantom, and that the true Helen (who had remained ever virtuous) had gone instead to Egypt to live under the protection of the Pharaoh Proteus. Euripides later elaborated upon the tale, claiming that Paris had abducted a mere "eidolon" fashioned from aether by Hera while Hermes had carried the true Helen away to Memphis. And Herodotus recorded a somewhat less fanciful variant of the story. But the legend is of far more ancient provenance.

It was known in Sparta even when Menelaus and Helen still reigned, and had begun to spread along the Eurotas valley before Troy fell, and was the common lore of Lacedaemonian artisans and peasants before the ship bearing their king and queen sailed into the dark purple waters of the port of Gytheion. Helen herself heard of it the day after reaching harbor, from one of the Helot girls given to her as handmaidens for the triumphal procession to Therapne; and it provided her a few moments of amusement to think how foolish it made Menelaus look to suggest that he had returned from the war not with his truant wife, but only with a dream of a woman. But for the next few days she gave the tale no thought. In the following weeks, however, as the hideously gradual and circuitous royal progress crept across the alluvial plains stretching between the looming gray ridges of Taygetus and Parnon, and wound along the edges of dry ravines strewn with rocks, skirting farms and villages and olive groves, often accompanied by the discordant songs of the local rustics, Helen reflected upon the story more and more frequently, with an ever deeper fascination. Sometimes at night, after Menelaus had exhausted his carnal importunities of her and fallen asleep, she would leave her tent and look toward the far rises where distant shepherds’ fires gleamed in the darkness like stars floating above the ocean, as if this land she despised had melted altogether away, and she allowed herself the fantasy that, rather than the dreary hovels of Sparta or the pale argillaceous foothills to the north or the prospect of the grim Dorian citadel awaiting her, the morning would reveal a fabulous land of sparkling sands, vast temples, emerald river basins …

How thoroughly she had forgotten Sparta’s squalor, she often thought to herself during that journey. And already how remote seemed her memories of Troy’s great golden walls, the opulence of Priam’s palace, the high bright houses of the city. Now she must return to this rude, hard people she had never cared for, with their sullen satisfaction in their own terseness and their impatience with subtlety. She had loved the Trojans’ oriental delight in periphrasis and elegant bombast, and their insatiable appetite for everything splendid, intricate, and oblique, and had delighted even in the languid postures and inhuman aspects of their gods—like that hauntingly terrific image of Poseidon on Tenedos. But perhaps, she thought, it really was all an illusion. Or perhaps she was the illusion, and her memories only the dreams of a phantom. True, she recalled it all. Above all she recalled, with an aching tenderness, how that lissome youth, with his long perfumed locks and his almost epicene beauty, had borne her away at night and lain with her for the first time among the fragrant grasses of the island of Kranai, while soft salt breezes poured over them from a sea made violet and sapphire in the morning twilight. Yet now even that seemed as if it had hardly ever happened. This was not an entirely new feeling. Among her own people, after all, she had been half a myth from childhood: among those who had seen her loveliness, and even more among those who had only heard of it—all those rapturous whispers that her father was not really Tyndareus but Zeus, or her mother not Leda but Nemesis. At times, she had almost found the tales more credible than her own recollections. Even as a young girl, she had occasionally suspected that the world she knew was somehow false, that it was not her true home, that she was not who she seemed to be (even to herself). And now she found it almost plausible that every man who had embraced her, from that night on Kranai onward, had been like Ixion coupling with Nephele, and that she had all along been only her own phantom, and that her true self had been—and still was—somewhere else, very far away.

In the long years after her return to Sparta, Helen often dreamed that she was standing on the high walls of Troy, looking down to where the Scamander glittered among dark grasses and bone-white rocks as it flowed down to the blue and silver sea. But occasionally, and far more vividly, she dreamed that she was wandering at evening in the porches of a great temple built in a strange style, among immense statues of bulls and of gods with the faces of beasts—cats and crocodiles—and that far off she could see a verdant river plain, and still further off a sea of golden sand stretching to the horizon, shimmering beneath a sky of deep translucent blue and a moon that shone like burning glass.

When the Samaritan sorcerer Simon had found her in a brothel in Tyre, Helen had been barely more than a girl, though she had practiced her trade for seven years. Her uncommon beauty had made her a favorite of the house’s clientele of merchants and sailors, as well as a source of considerable profits, and so she was astonished when she learned that this odd and troubling stranger, who it seemed made his living as some kind of itinerant holy man, had possessed the wherewithal to buy her away from her owners. At first she was afraid of him, though there was also something about him she found compelling: something in the entrancing limpidity of his dark eyes, and in the strangely melodious intonations of his voice (despite the harsh Levantine accent of his Greek), and in the guileless earnestness with which he disclosed to her his secret teachings about himself—and about her.

The same night in which he led her away from the brothel he sat with her on a low harbor wall, and, as they gazed out at a brilliant moon shining upon the sea, he told her that he was God incarnate, who had descended from a divine Fullness, a realm of eternal light, to find her and deliver her from captivity, and through her to bring salvation to all the lost. She was, he told her, the divine Epinoia, the first emanation of the divine mind, who had languished in bondage to malign angels age upon age, passing through countless lives of degradation, again and again, fettered in flesh and forgetfulness. Most of what he said she found incomprehensible. But he went on for hours, telling her of the divine All, of Nous and again of Epinoia, of the Hebrew Demiurge, of the Archons and Angels who had created the world and then enviously imprisoned her, their mother, in matter; he recounted how in each age she had been a cause of contention among the angels, and so also among men, and how as Helen of Troy she had been fought over by gods and nations …

Here, at least, was a name she recognized. A few years before, a young tutor of wealthy merchants’ sons had made surreptitious use of her services on several occasions, and on account of her name had related to her the story of the Trojan War more than once; and she, starved for any diversion, had taken it in and had held fast to the memory. She could not help, therefore, but take some pleasure in the thought that she had once been the most beautiful and famous of women, the object of every man’s desire. But she found the Samaritan’s words preposterous.

In the year that followed, she traveled as his consort, spoke the words he gave her to speak, watched him perform marvels, and hid her boredom well during the long discourses with which he enchanted his followers. And sometimes she allowed herself to wonder whether indeed he had not, amid the nonsense of his elaborate mythologies, touched upon the truth about her, or upon some portion of the truth. Ever since childhood, and certainly ever since she had been made a prostitute by those who owned her, she had known moments when she had felt as if it were all a terrible dream, an illusion visited upon her by some invisible but redoubtable power of spite, and as if she were not truly there at all, and as if this world were not her true home. And even now she could not avoid sometimes feeling that perhaps her true self had always been—and still was—somewhere else, in a place of light, far away.

At night, she often dreamed of the brothel and of her misery there, and would sometimes wake in tears. Occasionally, though, and more vividly, she dreamed she was gazing from high city walls upon a shining river flowing across a plain of white rocks and dark grasses, down toward a pale strand where black ships were drawn up upon the sands, and then out into a vast glittering silver bay. And on very rare occasions, far more vividly still, she dreamed that she lay with a beautiful youth in the morning twilight, among fragrant island grasses stirred by soft breezes, fresh with salt, blowing in from a violet and sapphire sea.

2 The Scholar and the Nymph

As he stood alone in the immense library of his college a week after Michaelmas term, mourning the arrival of his sixty-fifth birthday and contemplating the mild, pristine, white light pouring in through the high arched windows, the senior scholar reflected that over the years he had perhaps added no accomplishments at all to those his father had instilled in him as a child. And these had been few enough: mastery of classical languages, knowledge of antique literature, and skill in the hybridization of phalaenopses. Moreover, he thought, closing the volume of Statius that had lain open on the table before him at no particular page for ten minutes, in none of these spheres had he ever equaled, let alone surpassed, that saturnine, perpetually weary man, whose image he could now summon up in memory only as a spectrally pallid face casting a disappointed gaze over the top of milky spectacles. Then again, he mused, he had finally succeeded, as his father had repeatedly failed to do, in producing a durable orchid from two seemingly incommiscible breeds: one a small ruby lithophyte—rupestrine, riparian, originally plucked from granite scree winding in a sleek purple ribbon along the banks of a Chinese mountain river—the other a cream-white epiphyte—sciophilous, with petals of almost carnal lushness, roused long ago from a moist mossy bed among the blue shadows of a Malaysian forest. And the issue of that unlikely exogamy had been truly lovely, reminiscent of a Phalaenopsis aphrodite but somewhat more delicate, with an elusive peach patina misted by faint red stippling, most concentrated at the blossom’s center and wholly dissipating just short of its petals’ edges, leaving a thin satiny hem of flawless white. It was a feat of natural magic before which his father might have felt, and even deigned to express, real admiration; but by then the old man was long dead.

The scholar sighed, lifted the book from the table, turned about, replaced it on its shelf at the end of the nearest case, and idly ran his finger down its lustrous red leather spine. As a classicist, he thought, he certainly had made no contributions comparable to his father’s. His entire scholarly and literary posterity would consist in one tedious monograph on philological reconstructions of Attic pronunciations, a critical edition of Appian, a few boringly recherché articles, a translation of Nonnus’s verse rendering of John’s Gospel, and the one volume he had written that had achieved a small measure of popular success (but that his colleagues mostly regarded as a frivolity): his book on the classification of nymphs. Perhaps this was his father’s real legacy to him, he thought. The old man had rarely betrayed any hint of a suppler, more poetic nature hiding behind the starched curtains of his prosaic demeanor; but his love of Greek myth at its most Arcadian, like his fascination with exotic flowers, suggested depths of imagination belied by the stilted aridity of his manner. There was, after all, that single mysterious utterance he had allowed to escape in one unguarded moment, in reaction to twenty lines of Latin verse his son had composed at school and brought home at the Christmas recess: In one’s life, one may know only one moment when perfect beauty is within reach; and then the rest of one’s life means nothing. But he had never elaborated upon the remark—or, for that matter, said what he thought of his son’s poem.

That book on the nymphs, though—the only book he had ever really wanted to write—but for his father …

He moved further down the stacks, to another shelf, and removed—he had no need to search for it—a large, black, handsomely bound copy of Golding’s translation of Ovid: the same edition that his father had kept in his study and to which as a boy he had often repaired not so much for the text as for the exquisite and tastefully salacious ink illustrations. He took it back to the reading table and opened it with a practiced hand; he had to turn only three pages to find what he sought. It was a plate depicting Lotis running from Priapus, before being turned into the flower bearing her name. Framed by vine-leaf illuminations was a full-length image of the fleeing nymph, viewed from behind, and the figure of her pursuer, from the waist upward, looming in the foreground: she outstretched in flight, unclad except for a diaphanous wisp of raiment irrelevantly flung over one shoulder and billowing out behind her, all her dorsal loveliness fully revealed, her face turned back in three-quarter profile with an expression of pure terror, her hair a wild tumult of hyacinthine locks more appropriate to one of the Anthousai than to a Nereid; he a shadowy mass of brute sinew, with one grasping arm outstretched like a warped oak branch. The scholar closed his eyes after a moment. That image had delighted him when he was a boy; the figure and face of Lotis had so perfectly accorded with—or formed—his ideal of feminine beauty that he had repaired to it continually during certain crucial years. And still, he thought, after all this time …

Something stirred beside him, at his shoulder; there was a soft, high sound of breath taken in, surely a woman’s, and the sound of bare feet gently falling on the hardwood floor. But it took him a few seconds to wake from his thoughts, open his eyes, turn, and glimpse a woman’s naked hip, shoulder, and calf, disappearing around the edge of a row of stacks, trailing a tangle of hyacinthine black tresses and a wisp of filmy white fabric. He caught his breath, trembled violently, and then heard himself—before he was aware of speaking—calling out in a strained voice, Wait, please! Then, scarcely aware of what he was doing, he was running, unsteadily, and in a moment had come to the end of the row, already out of breath. There she stood, halfway along the length of the stacks, turned sideways, gazing at him with a gorgeously enigmatic smile, her near leg drawn up and delicately crooked, her arms gathered in, her fingers at her lips, in a pose that seemed—despite her nudity—impeccably demure. Oh, he said softly, and then began slowly to approach her. She watched him, without any change of expression, until he was only five feet away; then she turned with a high bell-like laugh and dashed away and in an instant had disappeared again around the row’s far end. Oh, please, he called again, beginning to run once more, and from the other side of the books her laughter rose in a rippling glissando, somehow both innocent and wanton. Please!

Now, as he came around the end of the row, he was nearly staggering; and there she was, halfway along the stacks again but now slowly backing away from him, still smiling, beckoning him to follow with her fingers. "Devte! Devte! she called out in a voice of extraordinary sweetness. At this, for a moment he hesitated, slightly confused by the almost liturgical impersonality of the plural imperative; he glanced about to see if perhaps someone else were in the library with them, but there was no one there. When he turned back to her again, however, it seemed that her expression had grown tenderer and that her glistening dark eyes were fixed more intently upon his own. Devro," she called, more quietly, more gently. But then, as he started forward again, she turned and ran once more, and was gone. Now he began to feel something like despair growing in him, but he followed even so, at scarcely more than a shamble. And, on coming to the end of the row, he had to reach out and support himself on the nearest shelf, and he bowed his head with eyes closed. But then a thrill of warmth passed from his hand along his arm, and he opened his eyes again to see her standing before him, her hand laid upon his; and, as he gazed wordlessly at her impossibly lovely smile, she suddenly leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. There was something like the taste of honey, the fragrance of nameless flowers, the softness of a gentle rain—something delicious, something heartbreakingly intangible—and then a feeling of delirium. He shut his eyes once more, felt himself gently sinking down against the shelves, and again that musical laughter rang out, and faded overhead.

He must have lost consciousness for a time; something, at least—perhaps the altered angle of the daylight coming through the windows—told him so when he opened his eyes; but he had no recollection of it. And he knew she was gone.

It was several moments before he was able to rise to his feet (laboriously as a man of sixty-five must) and return to the reading table. It was several moments more before he was able to detach his gaze from the image of Lotis—in part because the longing it had always provoked in him now seemed subtly displaced by something like happiness, and in part because the expression on her face now seemed to him less one of terror and more one of mirth—and to return the book to its shelf. And then it was half an hour more before he felt composed enough to leave the library for home, reflecting as he walked through the doorway that perhaps he had surpassed his father after all, and at something of the greatest importance. At least, he knew something now that the old man had not known: there may indeed come only one such moment in a man’s life, but when it comes it does not reduce the rest of life to meaninglessness; quite the reverse, in fact.

3 Twilight

There were things, it all at once occurred to him, far more terrible in their holiness than all the mysteries of religion taken together—more ominous than any prophecy, more forbidding than any secret initiation, more tantalizingly impenetrable than any sacrament, more dreadful than any ritual slaughter. The vast silences, for instance, dwelling behind an ashen twilight over a dying city. Shadows deepening among deserted streets and derelict buildings. Deteriorating brick and black iron tenements, dark from burnt coke and powdered bitumen, awaiting demolition. The loneliness of a cool, early autumn evening descending upon a colorless world of stone and concrete and asphalt. A single tenuous ribbon of smoke in the distance, unfurled against a softly glowing silver sky. A desolate sense of vanished futures. These, he thought, were the true traces of the sacred. These were the true signs of any gods that might actually exist. Detached gazes, amused indifference, casual malice.

He could not have said why the thought had come to him just at this moment—unbidden but, for one stark instant, suddenly piercing—but he certainly knew he could not say anything about it aloud just now. Not only would there have been no purpose in doing so; it would have been an act of unpardonable cruelty. It could only have increased her sadness. Even unspoken, however, it had all at once rendered him unable to offer her the solace she wanted. He had known her too long not to be perfectly aware of what she hoped for from him, of course—what he was supposed to say next, what comforting words he had