Sparta was small enough, though, that one would always recognize someone within a few moments of going out on the street. No sooner had this thought entered his mind than he saw a familiar face. It was, in fact, someone from his deep past, whom he had not encountered in all the years since his childhood. Antalcidas, walking by the man, raised a chin to a man with a conspicuous mole on his right cheek.
“Rejoice!” he hailed the former packmate he once knew as Birthmark.
Antalcidas was arrested by a series of expressions that came over the other’s face. First there was surprise- an involuntary widening of the eyes and mouth, a hint of amusement at the pranks of Fortune. Second came the imposition of a memory: Birthmark seemed suddenly afflicted, his legs unable to slow the pace that carried him onward. Finally, there was disapproval: a sanctimonious darkening around the eyes, and a deliberate speeding of his step as he completed the act of ignoring the comrade who had greeted him.
Antalcidas found himself walking stiffly onward, bewildered. Certainly Birthmark had recognized him-nobody forgot the faces of those with whom he had shared the Rearing. Such things always transcended circumstances that might take a man up or down in the esteem of everyone else. If Birthmark had been declared a trembler, Antalcidas would still have greeted him, perhaps even shared a drink with him. And he thought: how cold the Lacedaemonians had become, how petty in their resentments!
This thought put him in mind of his dear Andreia, who once told him that, of all the Greeks, the Spartans had the broadest territory and the narrowest hearts. Remembering her, a smile came over him as he redoubled his pace toward the little house in Kynosoura. The son of Antalcidas grows. It occurred to him that the boy must be walking by then, and learning the songs of his ancestors. If he hurried, he might yet be first to put a sword in the hands of his son.
9.
He didn’t have to wait long to see Andreia. As he came up the path she was bent to her garden work, picking herbs for the kitchen. Hearing him, she stopped, straightened; when she turned to look over her shoulder at him there was no reaction on her face. The smile died on Antalcidas’ lips. He was reminded suddenly of a feeling he’d had on a patrol high in the mountains of Arcadia, when the snows finally broke in late spring. Standing below, he was sure the avalanche would bury them, until the streaming white comet was diverted into some hidden ravine, and he and his men stood alone, abandoned by death. Andreia, too, turned aside. Yet the wall of her frigidity still bore down on him.
In his prison days he had spent much of his time daydreaming of her. He imagined the time of their separation-and her latest pregnancy-would have changed her, and occupied himself with imagining her appearance on the day of their reunion. As she conducted him inside wordlessly, he saw that his fantasies had failed him: Andreia’s figure had not become plumper with home comforts, nor her hair grayer, nor her cheeks more deeply lined with age. Instead of matured, she was simply diminished, as if worn down by the years. He remembered her standing nearly his equal in height, and was surprised to find that her head barely rose to his shoulders. Instead of gaining weight, she was thinner. Through the ungirt side of her chiton he could the blade of her hip protruding, the white of the bone almost visible beneath the taut translucence of her skin. Her hair had neither the luminance of her youth, nor the gray tendrils of age, but had become only darker, flatter, duller.
She still said nothing as he washed and dressed the road blisters on his feet. Playing the proud Spartan patriarch, he would not deign to engage in domestic chatter, but would wait for the occasion to measure out his words. He got his chance when Melitta ran into the house, and upon discovering her father sitting there, froze in her tracks. Antalcidas, grinning without reservation, raised a hand to summon the girl to him. Panic flashed on his daughter’s face as she backed away and fled.
It was not an unusual response of a Spartan girl to her father. “She looks well,” Antalcidas said at the top of Andreia’s bowed head. “But where, may I ask, is our son?”
With a sharp upward glance, Andreia met his eyes. All at once, his seigneurial pretentions crumbled; he parted his lips to say something, but his voice died under the blaze of her look. She rose, and after dropping the cleaning rag into the basin, retreated without explanation up the stairs to the women’s quarters.
Thus began the long process by which Antalcidas learned the fate of little Molobrus. She never said outright that his son lay with the jackals on the mountain; she let the story out in pieces, by means of frowns and significant silences, until even a proud Spartan patriarch could guess the truth. When he took to going around the house with a stricken look on his face, she said her first words to him since his return:
“And so the father is last to know the fruit of his sins.”
Antalcidas thought about this statement for a full day, his brow furrowed, until he attempted a defense the next morning.
“Why do you blame me, instead of the judges who condemned him, or the ephors who stripped us of our dignity?”
Andreia gave nothing but a bitter grimace as she took a clean rag to Melitta’s face. The girl, for her part, blamed her mother’s unhappiness on the arrival of this presumptuous stranger. The weight of a trembler’s disgrace, the gossip, and the loss of privileges, were calculated to fall on his child too, so that he was obliged to explain to her why her father was the lowest sort of man. He came to accept he would never know his daughter, and that in fact she was just waiting for him to disappear. Her cheek screamed the question when he touched it, and her hair, and her eyes: why are you still here?
He tried with Andreia again that evening, when she stood at the hearth, stirring the stew pot.
“So this is the homecoming you think worthy of me?”
This was more than Andreia could take. She threw the spoon at him, scalding his cheek with the boiling sauce on its bowl. He touched the burn with this fingers, a look of childlike hurt in his eyes.
“Tell me what I have done to you, woman-except my duty to you?”
“I only wish I had the courage to throw a knife!” she cried, and with eyes welling over, fled upstairs again. Though a wife’s quarters were beneath a Spartan warrior’s dignity to enter, Antalcidas followed. When he topped the steps, he found Andreia collapsed on her day couch, face buried in her hands. As he approached to sit by her, she spoke from behind her fingers.
“Even now you can’t grieve for him.”
He thought about this. He was saddened by the news at first, but it passed; he had, after all, never met the boy. Nor was it rare for infants to die in Laconia.
“A fine figure of a man I would be, to shed tears like you.”
“Weep for your name, then, which is as dead as you should be now.”
He pulled her hands from her face, and said in a voice he usually reserved for correcting subordinates in the field, “You know I had nothing to do with it.”
“This was your city,” she replied, “yet you let this happen.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“None of that is important. It is what people think.”
He sat trying to reason with Andreia for hours, and again the next day, and the day after that, though nothing, not even the surrender on the island, made him feel less a man than the number of words he wasted to convince her. With every day, he could see the crust of her indifference thickening. At last he took the husband’s prerogative with her, fighting his way through her stiff limbs. With his eyes, he made the only promise he could, to replace what was taken. Yet with every act of entering her, searching for her center, her could feel her receding ahead, into the darkness.
“I can’t. Not in this place-or with you,” she told him.
She never flung the ultimate accusation, trembler, but the word seemed poised to follow, like the inevitable conclusion to a syllogism.
He got up, but before he left he paused.
“Then the true coward is you,” he said.
