The Walled Orchard (3 page)

‘Hold on a moment,’ interrupted Cratinus. ‘I write cleverer speeches than anyone in Athens. If they always do what the best speaker says, why aren’t Pericles’ nuts roasting on a spit on my hearth this very moment?’

‘Because it’s just the Theatre,’ said my uncle, ‘and so they don’t take any notice; they’ve worked off their anger against Pericles by having you make a monkey out of him, and the next time he stands up in Assembly and proposes an expedition to conquer the moon, they stand there and gobble up his golden phrases like spilt figs. The Theatre is the place for making fun of Generals and Assembly is the place for voting for them. I’d have thought you’d have worked that one out ages ago.’

‘So you’re anti-democracy as well as pro-Pericles,’ said Cratinus irritably. ‘Don’t bother asking me here again.’

My uncle laughed. ‘What makes you think I’m anti-democracy?’ he said. ‘Just because my nephew here is an idiot doesn’t mean I don’t love him, and just because my city does a lot of very stupid things doesn’t mean I want to overthrow the constitution. I love the democracy and I hate tyranny. Which is why I get irritated with people who don’t understand the nature of democracy, and people who abuse it.’

‘If we’re going to start discussing democracy,’ said Anaxander, yawning ostentatiously, ‘I’m going home. I’ve got vines to prune in the morning.’

‘You stay where you are and shut up,’ said my uncle. ‘You’re just as bad as the rest of them really. Just now you provoked a quarrel with Cratinus just to see if he’d say something funny when he got angry, and then when he spat in your cup you didn’t like it at all. That’s typically Athenian. We all like a nice juicy crisis because it makes for such entertaining public speaking, so we all vote to annex this city or make that treaty, and when some smart-arse politician makes a good speech we feel so proud of ourselves that our little tummies swell up as tight as wineskins. Then when the crisis turns into a war and our vines get burnt we want to kill someone important, and we execute the first politician who catches our eye — probably the only one who really wants what’s best for the City and is trying to clear up the mess. And then the whole circus starts up all over again, with factions and political trials and more and more and more speeches, and in the meantime we’ve sent five thousand infantry to some god-forsaken rock in the middle of the sea to fight a load of savages we’ve never even heard of. Now all this comes from us Athenians being the cleverest and most intelligent race on earth, and loving the pleasures of the mind more than the pleasures of the body. That’s why Cratinus here is our most popular playwright, why Pericles is our most popular politician, why Athens is the greatest city in the world, and why one of these days we’re all going to meet with a nasty end.’

‘The hell with you,’ said Cratinus, after a long pause. ‘When I go out to dinner, I expect to do all the talking.’

‘Exactly,’ said my uncle. ‘That’s why I asked you. But then you got all incoherent, so like a good host I provided the entertainment myself. Where’s that boy with the wine? I’ve got a throat like stone-mason’s sand after all that pontificating.’

Anaxander emptied his cup out on to the floor and held it out to me to be refilled. ‘If I’d wanted to hear you speaking,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have come half-way across the City on a wet night. I propose that we don’t give Cratinus anything more to drink until he’s given us a speech from his latest play.’

‘Steady on,’ said my uncle. ‘You’ll give him a heart attack.’

‘You can keep your lousy wine,’ said Cratinus. ‘After everything you’ve said about me, it’ll take more than this goat’s piss of yours to get me to do any reciting.’

‘I’ve got a jar of quite palatable Rhodian out the back there,’ replied my uncle. ‘Now I know it would be wasted on you, but I’m such a typical Athenian that a really good speech might induce me to part with some of it.’

Cratinus grinned, displaying his few remaining teeth. ‘Listen to this,’ he said.

Which is how I came to be one of the first four people ever to hear the great speech from
The Lions
in which Pericles’ descent, conception and birth is described in loving and exquisite detail. It is quite the most revolting thing that Cratinus ever wrote, and will be remembered when everything I have written is long forgotten. Cratinus said later that he wrote the whole thing at a sitting while the barber was lancing a particularly objectionable and inconveniently situated boil. Of course we all fell about with laughter, stuffing cushions into our mouths to stop ourselves choking, while the great man sat there with a face as straight as a spear-handle, timing each line to absolute perfection, and when he had finished he got his Rhodian wine and shortly afterwards passed out. But my uncle was right, of course; if anything, it made me feel fonder of Pericles than I ever had before, if only because he had afforded me such glorious entertainment. To this day I believe that Comedy has very little effect on the part of the human brain that makes political decisions — God only knows what does.

It was not long after that dinner party that Pericles died in the Great Plague, and sure enough, Cratinus was inconsolable for months afterwards. He felt that Pericles had tricked him yet again, slipping quietly out of the world before he had had a chance to savage him properly. He had to tear up the Comedy he had been writing, which he swore was the best thing he had ever done, and immediately started on a new one, in which Pericles is brought up before the Judges of the Dead and condemned to the most frightful punishments, in most of which horse manure plays a prominent part. But he gave it up before it was finished and wrote a miserable little farce about Heracles and Alcestis instead. He dashed it off in a few days just before the deadline for entries for the competition, and to his unutterable disgust it won first prize at that year’s Lenaea.

CHAPTER TWO

And now I think it is about time for me to justify the boast I made at the beginning of this book, when I claimed that in my lifetime I have seen all the most remarkable events in our city’s history, and tell you about my experience of the Great Plague. After all, that’s something you’re bound to be interested in, even if you can’t be doing with Politics or the Theatre; so we might as well make the most of it. It is, with one exception, the most interesting of the events which has shaped my life, and so I can get on and describe it without having to be clever and witty to retain your attention. This will be a great relief to me.

Mind you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that because an event is of great historical importance it will have any significant effect on the lives of the people who were there at the time. I remember there was one very old man in our village when I was a boy who had been in the City when the Persians came. Now you would imagine that seeing the City burnt to the ground and the temples of the Gods levelled with the dust would profoundly affect a young man’s character and development; but this was not so at all in this man’s case. He was a tomb-robber by vocation, and he had only gone back to the City after the general evacuation to see if many people had left any articles of value behind in their hurry to escape, and when he found that the place was swarming with weird-looking savages with red faces and gold-plated armour, he very sensibly hid in a charcoal heap until they had gone past. When the burning started, he slipped out and escaped through a gap in the Wall with a sack full of small gold and silver statuettes he had found in a house in the Ceramicus, which later provided him with the capital to set up in business as a part-time blacksmith. The great event in his life, which entirely changed his perceptions of the world and the behaviour of mankind, was when the owner of these small gold and silver statuettes caught up with him and had him thrown in the prison.

The Great Plague, then, came early in the war and lasted for two or perhaps three years. I must be honest and confess that my memories of that period are all inclined to run into each other, so that I tend to look back on the plague as happening in the space of about a week; but then, I was young and it’s remarkable how quickly you get used to things when you’re that age. Recently I heard an account of the war by a very learned and scholarly gentleman — he had been a general at one time, and got himself exiled because of a terrible blunder; whereupon he retired to some safe little town in neutral territory and started writing this monumental
History of the War,
so that when everyone’s memories were getting as bad as mine is now he could read them his book and show them that everyone else had been at least as incompetent as he was and probably more so —and he claimed that Pericles died of the plague in the third year of the war, which surprised me very much. But I suppose I prefer to remember the years before the plague to those immediately after it, and so I have made that time seem longer than it actually was. Now I come to consider it, I’m probably not cut out to be a Historian.

Of course, everyone you meet in Athens claims that he had the plague and survived it; somehow it’s regarded as a mark of great moral and spiritual merit, as if you have been tried and acquitted by the Gods. Even the little general who wrote the book says he had the plague, and to be fair to him his account of the symptoms is at least recognisable. Mind you, he also gives you the impression that he was there on the spot when all the famous and significant speeches were being made, and since some of these took place simultaneously in opposite corners of Greece, I doubt very much whether he was sitting there with his wax tablets on his knees taking down every word as it cleared the speaker’s teeth. I do know for a fact that I did have the plague, and that only the intervention of the Gods saved my life.

The plague arrived in Athens on a grain boat, and was soon making its presence felt in the Corn-Chandlers’ Quarter. At first nobody took much notice, since most corn-chandlers are resident foreigners and one more or less makes no great difference to anyone. But soon it began infecting citizens, and then we all realised that we had a major problem on our hands.

My own experience of the plague was this. I had been on a visit to my aunt Nausimache, and there was gossip going around the City that she was having an affair with a rich corn-chandler called Zeuxis, who came from somewhere near Mytilene. In fact, if you have a copy of Cratinus’
Ants
(I don’t; I lent it to someone years ago, like a fool) I think you’ll find there’s a reference to that affair in it. Anyway, the plague was one of those diseases which you can catch from other people, and my guess is that she caught it from Zeuxis and I caught it from her; I distinctly remember her giving me an auntly kiss when we arrived, and wiping it off with the back of my hand when she wasn’t looking.

A day or so after this visit, I started getting these quite unbearable pains in the front and sides of my head, as if some idiot had knocked over a brazier inside my brains and they had caught fire. Then my eyes started to itch, just as though I had been peeling onions, and something horrible happened to the inside of my mouth. Even I could tell that my breath smelt like rotten meat, and my tongue was swollen and tender.

My grandfather, who I had gone to live with after my father died — I think I was about twelve at the time — took one look at me, diagnosed plague, and had me locked up in the stable with the goats and donkeys. The last thing he needed, I remember him saying as he put up the bar on the door, was a house full of plague, and if that was the Gods’ way of rewarding him for taking in orphans he was going to have to think very seriously about his theological position. Luckily we had a Libyan housemaid at the time, and she had got it into her head that her black skin would protect her from the disease. She reckoned that if she fed me and looked after me and I got well again, my grandfather would be so pleased that he would set her free and let her marry his understeward, and so she brought me out the scraps from the table and a jug of fresh water every day.

So there I was once again, entirely surrounded by goats, and the disease went into its next stage. For about a day I could not stop sneezing and coughing, and I vomited up bile of every imaginable colour; there was one peculiar shade of yellow that I have never seen since, except in some rather expensive Persian tapestries that someone was selling in the market. Then my skin broke out in little blisters which itched unendurably; but I think some God whispered in my ear not to scratch, and I managed not to, somehow. The worst part of it was the thirst, which I simply cannot describe, and here I think my grandfather’s treatment of me saved my life. You see, I had only a few cupfuls of water each day, and sometimes nothing at all when the maid forgot or couldn’t get away, whereas I have heard since that the people who were able to drink as much as they liked invariably died. In fact, my belief is that once the God saved me from the disease itself, this lack of water stopped me from catching the murderous diarrhoea which killed more people than the plague did, and which inevitably follows the disease itself, like a stray dog following a sausage-maker. After all, what with no food and no water, there was nothing inside me to come out, and so my body was spared the convulsions of the diarrhoea and I survived.

I fully appreciate that I must have been an unlovely companion while the disease was on me, but from that day to this I have not been able to forgive the attitude of the goats and donkeys towards me, which was little short of downright offensive. Did they come and bleat reassuringly over me, and soothe my fevered brow with their tongues, like they are supposed to do in the old stories? Did they hell. They all backed away into the far corner of the stable and didn’t even come across to eat the leaves and bean-helm in their mangers, and the hungrier they got, the more they seemed to blame me. This made me feel absolutely dejected, as you can imagine, and for a while I felt like giving the whole thing up.

On the seventh day of my sickness the maid stopped bringing food and water and I resigned myself to death, which was not a concept I had given much thought to previously. I remember thinking that it would be nice not to have to go to school any more, but that it would be rather a shame that no one would ever see one of my Comedies. However, I consoled myself with the thought of meeting my father again beside the waters of the Styx, always assuming that I could recognise him after so many years. Then I started worrying about how on earth I was going to pay the fare, since Charon the Ferryman takes nobody across the river unless he pays his obol. Then I remembered hearing somewhere (I think it was in a Comedy) that Charon had finally retired and that an Athenian had bought his pitch, increasing the fare (naturally enough) to two obols, but letting Athenians across for free. This comforted me greatly, since I had been greatly distressed at the thought of spending the rest of time on the wrong side of the river with all the murderers and parricides and people who hadn’t been buried properly, and so I settled back to die in peace.

Now I hadn’t slept at all since the disease started, and I think I must have fallen asleep then, for I swear I saw Dionysus himself standing over me, leaning on his vine-wood staff and wearing a Comic mask and boots, with the floppy leather phallus which all the actors wear in the Comedies dangling from his groin. He seemed very big and fierce and jolly, but I wasn’t frightened by him, or particularly surprised to see him there at all.

‘Cheer up, Eupolis of Pallene,’ he said, and the whole stable seemed to shake, like those caves down south that are supposed to vibrate to the pitch of your voice. ‘Pull yourself together and stop snivelling; you’ll have to put up with far worse things than this before you see the last of me — in the front row of the Theatre when they hiss that clever Chorus of yours, and in the walled orchard, of course. But remember, you owe me some prizes which you must pay, and I’ve hand-reared you from a puppy to write me a Comedy or two. If you die now and leave me to make do with that idiot Aristomenes, I’ll never forgive you.’

I wanted to promise but I couldn’t speak; so I nodded, and kept on nodding, and then I was definitely asleep, because I remember waking up. And when I did wake up, I knew that I was going to live; just as you can feel when you walk into a house whether anyone lives there or not. I know that I just lay there for a very long time, filled with a joy that kept me warm and made me forget how hungry and uncomfortable I was; not because I had escaped death and was clear of the pain of the disease, but because I had seen the God of Comedy and been promised success. It had been well worth the disease, I reckoned, to get that promise.

After a long, long time I remembered that I was starving hungry, and I thought it was time to do something about it. I started shouting at the top of my little voice that I was well again and wanted to be let out, but nobody came; so I assumed that nobody believed me, which was reasonable enough. So, as soon as I felt confident that I had my strength back, I examined the door of the stable, which was barred on the outside and wouldn’t budge. Now, after surviving the plague and being promised a Chorus by the God, a little thing like a stable door wasn’t going to get in my way, and so I sat down on the manger and thought hard. Unfortunately, probably because the war kept interrupting my education, I had never been taught how to get out of locked stables — unless you count that bit in the
Odyssey
where Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops’ cave, which I had been made to learn by heart. But I say that doesn’t count, because the circumstances of that case were quite unique and highly unlikely to recur. Just as I was starting to feel baffled, I caught sight of my uncle’s old black donkey, and I had an idea.

As soon as I was cured, the animals (who were just as hungry as I was) had resumed eating and drinking, and had finished off all their fodder. They were now getting extremely restive, and I saw how that could be turned to my advantage. You see, this old black donkey of my uncle’s, which he kept for hauling olives and ploughing in the season, had the sort of temper you only usually come across in bath-attendants and the commanders of naval vessels, and hunger had not made him any sweeter natured. I’ll swear that donkey hated everything and everybody in the world; but what he hated most of all, with the possible exception of other male donkeys and hard work, was being prodded in the ribs with a sharp stick. I happened to have a sharp stick handy — it had been in with the fodder in the mangers — and so I wrestled him over until his hind legs were almost touching the door of the barn. Then I took my stick and gave the donkey the most terrific poke and sure enough he lashed out with his powerful legs and gave the door a tremendous kick. I waited until he had settled down again and prodded him once more, and once again; and that was about as much as the stable door could take. The bar snapped, and at once I shooed the donkey away and threw myself at the door. It gave way, arid out I rolled into the blinding sunlight of the yard. As I picked myself up, I saw that the little finger of my left hand had snapped clean
off,
just like a dead twig, although I hadn’t felt a thing. I picked the finger up and stared at it — it had shrivelled away into a little white stick and it smelt quite disgusting — and I tried to fit it back on, but of course it wouldn’t stay. Eventually I gave up and threw it away, and a crow who had been busy with something behind the muck-heap fluttered over and took a very tentative peck at it. Apparently, the loss of fingers and toes and even whole hands and feet was quite common among people who had survived the plague, but of course I didn’t know that at the time and it startled me considerably.