Tides of War (9 page)

She made the offering and served my plate.

“We must find you a bride.”

I laughed.

“You’ll catch something from those whores.”

At last her handsome face lit with a smile. I clasped her to me, this noble dame who had ever been my benefactor and champion. When my embrace at last released her, I beheld on her face no longer mirth but sorrow.

“What shall become of us, Pommo?”

This cry wrenched from her, heartsore, with my name unwontedly colloquialized.

“What has become of our family? What will become of you?”

My aunt began to weep.

“This war will be the end of all that was fair and gentle.”

Then turning as if in conformity to some impulse of heaven, she seized both my hands in hers and pressed them with a vigor remarkable in one so frail.

“You must survive it, my boy. Swear to me by Demeter and Kore. One among us must endure!”

From the street could be heard the rude cry of some ruffian, no longer that of one passing through as a drayman or teamster, but one who dwelt here, below, and called this once-noble lane his own.

“Pledge this, my child. Give me your oath!”

I swore it, the way you do to a dotty old lady, never thinking of this promise more.

It was this lady Daphne
[Grandfather resumed his narration]
who arranged the marriage of her great-nephew Polemides to the maiden Phoebe.

You may find it queer, my grandson, when I relate that our client, throughout all recounting of the events of his life, not once made mention of his bride by name. In fact, save a solitary confession toward the terminus of his tale, he cited her existence only thrice, and that indirectly. Did this indicate a want of affection? On the contrary, I find this omission extremely significant, indicative in fact of precisely the opposite. Let me explain.

In those days, more so even than today, a man made reference to his spouse rarely. The greatest glory of a woman was modesty and reserve; the less said of her, for good or ill, the better. A wife’s place was within chambers, her role the rearing of children and the management of the household.

A boy raised in that period, particularly one as Polemides, schooled beneath the stern aegis of the Lacedaemonians, was taught primarily to endure. The virtues were those of men; beauty, men’s beauty. Remark the sculpture of that era. Only in recent seasons has the female form—and that only of goddesses—come to rival the male in currency of bronze and stone. A youth of that era was schooled to idealize the form of other men, not in a manner prurient or lascivious, but as a model of emulation. To behold in marble the peerless physiques of Achilles and Leonidas, to admire like perfection in one’s comrades or elders, fired the youth to forge his own flesh in the image of that ideal, to embody inwardly the virtues such perfection of externals implied.

The spell cast over his contemporaries by Alcibiades derived in no small part, in my opinion, from this impetus. His beauty was remarked, for those of noble mind, as an intimation of some loftier perfection inhering within. Why else would the gods have made him look like that? Another of our master’s disciples was the poet Aristocles, called Plato. His Theory of Forms arises from that selfsame interpretation. As the material manifestation of an
individual horse embodies the particular and the transitory, Plato suggested, so must there exist within some higher realm the ideal form of Horse, universal and immutable, of which all corporeal horses “partake” or “participate in.” To this way of perceiving, a man of Alcibiades’ spectacular beauty appeared little shy of the divine, his perfection in flesh approaching that ideal existent only upon loftier planes. This is why men followed him, I believe, and found it so reflexive to do so.

Thus to Polemides and those of our generation, his and mine, the male form alone embodied
arete,
excellence, and
andreia,
virtue. How must our client have responded, informed by his father of the identity of his bride-to-be? If he were like me, I doubt he had in his life considered the female form of especial beauty. In the carnal sense, yes, but never idealized as the male. How unappealing did she appear to him, this maiden of next door whom he had doubtless known since she was a drizzle-nosed runt?

Yet there is a telling allusion in Polemides’ tale. His wife, Phoebe, he stated at one point, when she was seventeen and already mother to their child, requested initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis. At another point in his narrative Polemides expressed his distaste for this stuff, which he regarded as little more than superstition, and effeminate at that. Yet he not only permitted his bride this favor but accompanied her upon its exercise, making the pilgrimage by sea and completing the full initiation himself.

Why would he do this? What could his motive be, save to honor his spouse and forge with her a deeper union? We may at this point be forgiven a venture into imagination. Let us picture Polemides at twenty-two or -three, already a veteran of twelve years of Spartan discipline and two and a half more of war. He returns home, wounded; he recovers, sufficiently for his father and great-aunt to provide a bride. Perhaps his thoughts turn toward mortality; he may desire children, if only to cheer the advancing age of his father. The Plague has begun. His countrymen are perishing for cause unknown; no abatement is in sight. Nor does he find his male companions to hand; all are off to war. He is cooped within the city, in the apartments he shares with father, sister, perhaps cousins, aunts, and uncles.

Our young soldier accepts his bride. She is of good family, friend to his sister Merope; no doubt she is possessed of wit, skilled in music and the domestic arts. She comports herself with modesty, self-effacing as all daughters of breeding; we may surmise that she is not without physical charms. Incapacitated as he is, the young husband finds he must rely on his bride for
company and converse, perhaps even such necessities as to be brought his meals, to read or mount the stairs.

He finds his bride kind and patient, shrewd in her application of their straitened resources. She is younger, her heart is gay. She makes him laugh. Here is a man, recall, who all his life has been drilled in hardship and self-denial, to whom the supreme virtue is the sacrifice of his life in war. It occurs to him with the shock of revelation that there is another oar in the boat. He is not alone. Perhaps for the first time the steel of his heart relents. His wound makes him dizzy, in alarm he gropes for balance; to his astonishment he discovers his bride at his elbow, steadying him with a gentle hand. May we not envision her delivering to his bedside a favorite dish, setting flowers for him upon the sill, singing at his side in the evening?

He discovers her affection for his father, and the love this gentleman reciprocates. He hears the lass giggling with his sister in the kitchen. Does this make him smile? Despite the horrors without, the clan manages cheerful evenings at home in each other’s company.

As for appetites of the flesh, our young Polemides has thus far slaked them only among the harridans of the whores’ camp or in illicit liaison with women of the street. Now he finds himself in the marriage bed, beside his bride. She must be innocent. Her tender years inspire not the rough lust of the soldier, but the gentle passion of the husband. How do they discover their desire? Haltingly perhaps; doubtless deficient in skill. Yet together, each for the first time with the other.

He speaks of this never, as any gentleman. But in his heart affection grows. He has never known another, save his family, to treat him with tenderness, to look out if he is comfortable, if his needs have been attended to. May we not fancy his soldier’s heart softening? Might not the occasion arise when our Polemides draws up upon the private instant and recognizes perhaps for the first time that he is happy?

Now consider her, the lass Phoebe. How does she find her husband? No paragon for the sculptor’s studio perhaps, but an athlete and soldier nonetheless; virile and disciplined, a young man of substance, beside whom she need never know fear. Unthinkable is it that he will abandon her. Should the worst come, he will die defending her and her children. Must not our bride, the Bright One, respond to this, beyond her schooling as an obedient wife, out of the uncoerced attachment of her heart?

And our bridegroom is vulnerable. He has been wounded, he knows fear.
He needs her. While outside, the foundations of the firmament crack and crumble, within, a private cosmos conceives itself and grows. A child stirs within the bride’s womb. With what joy must the couple, keenly aware of their own mortality, have responded? More than this one need not posit to imagine the pair, in the gentle darkness of their bedchamber, forging a union which the young husband, schooled to silence and close counsel, would not dream to disclose in words.

Perhaps I take license, my grandson. I may read into Polemides’ state of mind overmuch of my own. This, however, is what my heart tells me of the man.

So were we all, of that generation. Like Polemides we, too, were taking brides. We, too, had children growing and upon the way. Our steps should have been bearing us abroad in welcome to the spring; we should have been casting open portals to range with our darlings upon the vernal hills. Yet these stood shuttered to us now. We were walled in, compassed by the armored corps of our enemies. We had asked for war and war had come. What none had foreseen, however, was the spectral henchman at his shoulder: the Plague.

Here advanced an invader more implacable than the myriads of Persia, more pitiless than the phalanxes of Lacedaemon. One could not treat with this enemy or buy it off for gold. It countenanced no quarter; tokens of submission could not induce it to draw back. It advanced in darkness and in daylight, and no sentry’s cry could call the warning. Walls of stone could not keep it out. It answered to no gods, paid heed to no offerings. It took no day off, vacated upon no holiday. It did not sleep or pause for respite. And nothing could slake its appetite.

The Plague played no favorites. Its silent scythe cut down the illustrious and the obscure, the just alongside the wicked. Daily about us we perceived its mounting toll. In the gymnasium the comrade’s cubicle, within which no hand hung street clothes more. The vendor’s shuttered stall, the theater patron’s vacant seat. By day we inhaled the stink of the crematoria; at night the wagons of the dead rumbled beyond our gates. In sleep we heard the groan of their tread; their terror invaded even our dreams. In her self-legislated immurement Athens reeled beneath the scourge, soundless and invisible, to whose ravagement none stood invulnerable or immune.

In those days as you know, Jason
[Polemides resumed],
there existed few formal curricula in medicine; an individual could simply call himself a doctor and offer his services for hire. More frequently a private person found himself recruited, so to say, by his own facility for succor. This was the case with my father. He had the gift. Stricken friends sent for him. He made them well.