The Mask of Troy (49 page)

‘Have you told any of this to Hugh?’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Dad said Hugh would have a good enough idea. And we didn’t want to upset him.’

‘So the nurse in Australia, Helen, sent you here?’

Rebecca nodded. ‘She’d worked here herself, in the 1950s. This is the last of these special houses, within sight of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. It’s a closely guarded secret. There are benefactors, Jewish organizations, others. They still call them the children, even seventy years on. They’re the ones who could never be rehabilitated. It’s as if their lives ended that moment on the railhead, and the only chance of happiness is to bring them back here, because this was the last place before the train drew up at that ramp.’

‘Hugh said that, when he showed us the drawing in Bristol. He’d spoken to the nurse.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘She remembered him. That’s why she agreed to tell us about this place. At first she wouldn’t, but then Dad went back to her alone, flew all the way to Australia to talk to her again. She said it was for Hugh.’

‘Okay. Let’s go inside,’ Dillen said.

Rebecca mounted the steps, then turned and held Dillen’s arm. ‘You said you knew? When I told you I thought Hugh wasn’t well.’

Dillen paused for a moment, then looked at her. He took her hand in his, and held it. ‘The day after we visited Hugh, just before you were kidnapped, when I went back to Bristol to set him up with the translation, I went with him to the hospital. He wanted me to know. He’d known for some time.’

Rebecca was crying. ‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘I thought there was something wrong when Dad and I picked him up. I just knew it. So Dad knew, too?’

‘He didn’t want to upset you. He thinks you’ve had enough already.’

Rebecca took off her glove and wiped her eyes. ‘So that’s what he went back to tell Helen in Australia. That Hugh was dying.’

‘We don’t know that. For sure.’

‘He’s ninety-three.’

‘Come on.’ Dillen took Rebecca in his arms, and gave her a hug. ‘Chin up, as Hugh used to say.’

Rebecca sniffed, nodded and opened the screen door and then the heavier wooden door behind. It was very warm, and Dillen quickly shut the door behind him. His glasses steamed up and he took them off to wipe them. There was a fire in the room to the right, a warm orange glow, and at the end of the stone-flagged floor ahead he could see a kitchen with someone moving around, a kettle on the boil. Rebecca gestured to a doorway to the left. ‘Keep your jacket on,’ she said. Dillen followed her into a dining room with a partition wall and an open veranda. On the patio beyond he could see several rocking chairs facing a garden, partly obscured in the mist.

Jack was there, standing quietly at the entrance to the veranda, arms folded, looking out. He turned as he heard them, then put his finger to his lips and beckoned them over. Rebecca let Dillen go first. He nodded at Jack, and then peered round the open door on to the patio. Hugh was sitting outside in a wicker chair, swathed in a blanket, facing away from them. His thick white hair was carefully combed back. Dillen looked beyond, where Hugh was facing. The garden was long, narrow, shrouded in mist, enclosed on either side by high hedgerows. It was facing in the same direction as the railway line, which was visible through a break in the hedge to the left.

Dillen peered down the garden, straining his eyes for what he knew must be there.

Then he saw her.

She was sitting like Hugh with her back to them, bundled up in a thick coat and scarf. He could tell it was a woman, from her shape, from the long hair that tumbled down her back beneath her scarf, wavy and thick. It was white, but it could have been fair. He knew it was an old woman, but it could have been a girl. The image came in and out of view in the mist, sometimes sharply delineated, sometimes barely visible. Suddenly he saw her very clearly. She was sitting behind a musical instrument, large, unmistakable.

The girl with the harp
.

Dillen couldn’t see Hugh’s face, or hers. He remembered his vision at the railway line, the image of himself crouched beside it. Here, it was two figures, but the image was the same, torn through by the line of the hedgerow, with the railway track beyond. He shivered, and took a step back. His breath crystallized, but he saw barely any breath in front of Hugh. He looked at Hugh’s hands. They were white-knuckled, clutching at the arms of the chair, trembling.

There was a whinny and a stomp, and a white horse appeared, its head peering over the hedge, shaking its long mane, and then it snorted and cantered off out of sight. It had been the only sound he had heard outside, and it was startling. Jack put his hand on Dillen’s shoulder, and then reached over and pulled the door to, leaving it slightly ajar. There was a sound of tinkling, and Dillen turned to see a woman place a tray of drinks and biscuits on the table. She was small, elderly, and was followed by a man of similar appearance. Dillen stepped forward and shook hands with them. The woman spoke English with an east European accent. ‘Welcome to our home. Can I offer you tea? Coffee?’

‘Thank you. Tea, please.’ Dillen gestured to the patio. ‘What about Hugh?’

‘He’s already had his hot chocolate,’ Rebecca said, smiling sadly. ‘Said it was the best he’d had since the war.’

‘Did you tell him that she was here?’

‘You can’t keep anything from Hugh,’ Jack said quietly, smiling. ‘Former intelligence officer, you know. Had to have the full operational briefing before we flew out. But it’s been a very big thing for him. He’s been like that since we sat him out there half an hour ago.’

‘And the . . . girl?’ Dillen said. ‘How long has she been there?’

‘Every day,’ the Polish man said. ‘Every day, for as long as we have cared for her. She is the last of the children. Now that winter is drawing in, we’ll bring her back in before too long. She has a hot-water bottle. She’s warm.’

‘Does she ever play?’ Dillen asked. ‘I mean, the harp?’

‘We think she plays for her parents, in her mind, all the time. We think they loved to hear her play. We never hear it, but sometimes when you get close you can hear her humming quietly to herself, and you can see her fingers playing, nearly touching the strings. Children’s songs, learning songs. The horse can hear it too, we’re sure. It’s got a beautiful mane, don’t you think? It rises in the wind like the waves on the sea. We think she must have had a horse as a child. That horse is descended from the white horse that the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, liked to ride, when he played with his own children by the river here.’

‘How . . .’ Rebecca said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘How could he do that?’

The woman shook her head, and continued organizing the tray. Dillen thought of what Rebecca had just said. Apollodorus of Rhodes knew it.
There is no mighty bulwark against evil war
. Once total war was unleashed, once Troy had fallen, it was there always, tempting, beckoning. All that was left to hold it back was the will of the individual. And maybe Schliemann had known. It may have been his fervent hope.
Individuals have the power to shape history
.

Dillen opened his folder and took out a few sheets of paper. ‘I’ve brought the
Ilioupersis
, the fall of Troy. It’s a hundred and twenty-six lines, the entire text that Jeremy and Maria found in the lost library at Herculaneum,’ he said. ‘I want to read it to you.’

‘Have you kept the Greek metre?’ Jack asked.

Dillen shook his head. ‘It wasn’t written that way. It retains some of the imagery, the familiar epithets of the
Iliad
, but it’s in a kind of free verse. Hugh and I found it disconcerting, at first. How could this be Homer, if it wasn’t written in his famous iambic pentameter? But then we realized why. The pentameter of the
Iliad
was suited to the heroic cycle, to the story of men powerless to shape their fate, acting on a stage created by the gods, relentless, repetitive. And it was suited to memorization, to the beat of the bard, to the accompaniment of the lyre. But the
Ilioupersis
is different. The heroes are all dead. The gods are gone. Man is ascendant.’

‘You mean the course of the story is no longer predictable, no longer familiar to the audience, time-honoured,’ Jack murmured.

Dillen nodded. ‘In the
Ilioupersis
, the poet describes what he sees, not a cycle according to some bardic formula. The
Ilioupersis
is shorn of ornament. For Homer, finishing the story of Troy that way, showing what he actually saw, was his poetic responsibility, just as it was three thousand years later for the poets of the First World War, for Graves and Sassoon and Owen and the others. The bardic tradition of the
Iliad
was for fireside stories of heroes, of clashes and contest, of strutting and shouting. Maybe Homer was afraid of this final truth he had written in the
Ilioupersis
, and put it away. Maybe his world crumbled around him as he watched and wrote, and the text was lost in the darkness at the end of the age of heroes.’

There was a low rushing sound outside, something flying overhead out of sight in the mist, the beating of wings. Jack peered out. ‘We heard that before you came, and I asked our host. It’s migrating birds, flying south from the Baltic towards Africa. Blackbirds, ravens, geese. It’s a strange coincidence, but from here they fly south-east to Gallipoli, over the Dardanelles and into Asia. In a day or two’s time, those birds will fly over Troy.’

Dillen listened, but they had gone. It was as if the birds were following a fault line, not a geographical fault but a rent in the fabric of civilization, between places that had become a terrifying crucible of death. He wondered whether Schliemann had looked up at Troy and seen those birds too, black ravens flying south, whether they had somehow brought to him a vision from the future, something so terrible it drove him to try to alter the course of history.

‘So,’ Rebecca said, cocking an eye at Dillen. ‘You said Homer actually
watched
the fall of Troy. Do you really think the
Ilioupersis
is an eyewitness account?’

‘The evidence is all there, in the radiocarbon analysis of the papyrus, the textual analysis, the early form of the alphabet. If Troy fell in 1200 BC, this couldn’t be much later than that.’

‘You’re not really answering my question.’

‘Tell me what you think after I’ve read it out. It’s for you to judge.’

‘Archaeology can’t tell the whole story of Troy, can it?’

Jack smiled. ‘The pottery only sings if you know how to make it sing.’

‘The immortal bard,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘That’s what Alexander Pope called Homer.’ She reached into her pocket and took out the copy of Pope’s
Iliad
that Dillen had given her. She opened it, and Dillen saw the inscription.
To Hugh, with love and affection from Peter. Remembering our summer at Mycenae, 1938
. Rebecca looked towards Hugh, then suddenly cocked her head, listening. ‘I think I can hear music. From the garden.’ She listened again. ‘
The harp
.’ Dillen craned his neck. All he could hear was an echo of beating wings. ‘Don’t go to Hugh yet,’ she said. ‘In case he can hear it too.’

‘What music is it?’ Jack said.

Rebecca turned to him, her face flushed. ‘I thought I heard James play it, on his lyre at Troy.’ She turned to Dillen. ‘It was that last evening, when you went back up to your trench and thought nobody else was listening. I was on the path in Schliemann’s trench, coming up to see you. It was a children’s song. It was beautiful.’

‘We should get cracking with the text,’ Jack said. ‘And Hugh shouldn’t be out there much longer.’

Dillen smiled at Rebecca, then stepped forward to the doorway. Hugh was motionless, facing ahead. Dillen looked for the girl with the harp, barely seeing her through a shroud of mist, in utter stillness. It was as if they all were caught in the moment the girl was in. Then he saw flakes of snow falling, like ash. He remembered what else he had brought with him, and reached into his pocket, taking out the piece of pottery, black, crude, like a charred fragment, that he had taken from the ancient pyre in his excavation trench at Troy. He glanced at Jack.
The pottery will sing
. He put it to his nose and inhaled deeply, smelling the fires of Troy. In his mind’s eye he saw another figure, sitting with a lyre on a rocky ridge above the battleground, watching the war-bent men of Mycenae surge forward, feeling the ground shake as the sceptre of their mighty king came crashing down.
Homer
.
Agamemnon
.

He saw Hugh slowly raise his right forearm, extend his finger like a pistol, and point it forward. Dillen knew that gesture, from the classroom all those years before. It meant
go for it
. He took a deep breath, then listened through the stillness, straining to hear the music that Rebecca had heard.

He looked down at the lines of ancient verse.
It was all true
. Homer had been there, had watched the fall of Troy. In the tenth year Agamemnon had stormed and raged, had crashed down his mighty sceptre, and his men had rained down a new horror, arrows of iron. The Trojan Horse had been a ship driven by the howling blackness of the sea against the walls of Troy, to disgorge Agamemnon’s iron-girt warriors to do their worst. And Helen of Troy was no woman, but a flaming pyre, a beacon that lit up the night sky, a fire that he himself had touched, had smelled.

Like the Turkish boy who had watched Schliemann and Sophia almost three thousand years later, Homer had watched Agamemnon steal down a passageway under Troy, had seen him shut for ever the great bronze doors of a chamber where once kings had met to keep hateful war at bay, to keep down the beast inside the man that was now unleashed in Agamemnon himself, tempted by new and yet more deadly weapons.

The age of bronze had become the age of iron. The age of heroes had become the age of men.

Dillen lifted the paper and began to read.