The Fall of Troy Page 5

  Sophia was taken aback. It seemed that Heinrich had been negotiating with her father on other matters, while wooing her at home.

  THE NEXT MORNING, just before dawn, Obermann roused her and led her from their bed. In the alcove that served as a kitchen, he carefully took up three floorboards—there, concealed beneath the boards, was a shallow wooden box half filled with goblets and pendants and other pieces of glinting metal. “Here is a brooch of gold and ivory,” he said. “It may have been worn by Helen herself. Here is a vase-cover of electrum. And here a spoon of silver, with a large omphalos in the middle. All of them priceless, Sophia! Do you feel the presence of Andromache and Hecuba? These were the jewels they wore in well-walled Troy!” He put back the floorboards. “I cannot announce their discovery as yet. Not until we have left Turkey behind for ever. But I have made notes of where and when they were found. I have become one of those Schematiker. I have become German! I have been methodical. Did you know that method comes from the Greek, Sophia? Meta hodos. Along the path. That is the direction in which I am travelling.”

  SHE HAD TIED canvas sacking to her legs so that she could kneel on the hard ground: she believed at first that she had found the line of a wall but the stone had curved downwards as she dug away the soil clinging to its rough surface. She was damp with sweat, and for a moment put her face up to the cool wind that came from the direction of the Hellespont. She was cramped, out of breath, and her fingers ached from persistent digging. But she was content to be part of this labour at Troy, part of the song of the workmen.

  During the course of the morning one of them came up to her with a small cup, perfectly preserved in the earth, with an ornamentation of zigzag lines. Her husband had warned her that the workers would sometimes incise the lines with their own knives, in order to increase the value of their finds; he had once caught a Turkish labourer forging the decoration of a plate, by creating a solar disc with rays, but Obermann had been so pleased with the addition that he kept it and catalogued it. Sophia had been horrified by his account of this double deception, but he had laughed. “You do not know the moral of this story, Sophia. The man had by chance drawn precisely the symbol used by some of the Trojan potters! It was a miracle. In my opinion the genius of Troy was working through him. It must be preserved for posterity, even if you and I alone know the secret. Of course I still fined him. It sets an example.” So by degrees she became accustomed to Obermann’s archaeology.

  The small cup seemed to her to be genuine, and she gave the Turkish worker ten piastres for bringing it to her. Her own work was proceeding slowly, until she noticed that the stone sloped downwards but then continued out again as a horizontal ledge. She called some men to the site and asked them to dig with shovels and spades on this spot. Within less than an hour they had uncovered three levels of stone-work. “Heinrich! Here is a staircase!” she called to him from the top of the trench. “Heinrich! Here!”

  He had been standing in a shallow pit, some feet away, and immediately joined her. “Do you see?” she asked him. “These are steps.”

  “It is as you say.” He leaped down into the trench, and examined the stone more closely. “This is wonderful, Sophia. Whenever I see a stairway coming out of the earth, I experience the strangest sensation. I go from earth to air. I am transported. These are Trojan steps!” He stood upon them, and banged his heels upon their pitted surface. “We must dig deeper. Always deeper.”

  He set eighty men to dig through the ground lying around the stairway, and by the evening they had partially uncovered a large building which, to Obermann’s evident delight, had been destroyed by a terrible fire. The interior was filled with black, red and yellow wood ash and with the charred remains of innumerable objects. Sophia had uncovered an area of the city previously unknown. “We must call it the Sophia district,” he said. But the idea horrified her.

  “I am certain of what happened here,” he said that night. They were eating Chicago corned beef with tinned ox-tongues and Turkish cheeses. “These are houses beyond the palace where the families took refuge after the onslaught by the Greeks. Priam is slain at the altar of Athene, which we will find soon enough. His wife, Hecuba, is enslaved to Odysseus. His daughter, Polyxene, is taken off to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. His grandson, Astyanax, is hurled from one of the tall towers of the city. Do you see it, Sophia? Aias rapes Cassandra in the sanctuary of Zeus Heracleion—which Monsieur Lineau to his everlasting glory has located…” Lineau put out his hands in a gesture of submission. “Ever afterwards the statue of the god looked towards the sky. All is confusion. So the remnants of the family—Deiphobus and his brothers—flee to the house that my wife has uncovered. There they are ringed with fire. When we have gone deeper, we will find human skeletons. I am sure of it.”

  Kadri Bey had been watching him intently. “If there is a body, Herr Obermann, there must be a burial. In Turkish law—”

  “Troy knows no laws, Kadri Bey.”

  “If it is the body of a slain warrior, then it must be given due honour.”

  “He will have more honour in death than he ever had in life. He will be carried in triumph around the world!”

  “His grave must be here. On his own soil.”

  “We have found nothing as yet,” Leonid said calmly. “The argument has no meaning. Can I mention another matter before you all? A workman has told me that two of the women in the village are wearing strange jewels of spun gold. They were boasting to the other women that they possessed them, and last night they had the effrontery to wear them. You know where they come from, I take it?”

  Obermann laughed very loudly. “Their husbands have found them here and kept them. It is monstrous! You must get them back, Telemachus, and scold the women for their impertinence.”

  “And their husbands?”

  “They must have sharp eyes. Fine them. But keep them on. I need such men.”

  “No, Herr Obermann.” Kadri Bey was carefully dividing a tinned American peach. “If this is theft, then the authorities at Kannakale must be informed. Otherwise there will be no end of robbery.”

  “So be it.”

  “It is just.”

  “I bow to you in this matter, Kadri Bey. You are quite right. Theft must not be rewarded.”

  Sophia did not look at her husband and, instead, turned to Lineau with a question. Had he examined the vase that Heinrich had found the day before, by the wall of the palace? She had noticed that it had the same strange marks—the cross or wheel—she had seen on a cup that morning.

  “It is not altogether strange, Frau Obermann. It is from the Sanskrit. The sauvastika or svastika. It is frequent in Buddhist manuscripts and inscriptions.”

  “How did it come to Troy?”

  “You must ask your husband. It is quite beyond me. But the sign is found everywhere in antiquity. In my opinion it is an image of the sun in motion. The great wheel, Frau Obermann. The fiery wheel.” As he spoke his dead eyes moved upwards, showing the milky retinas.

  “I have had that image in my mind all the time.” Obermann had been addressing Leonid and Kadri Bey, but now turned to Sophia. “Have I told you of it?”

  “Of the wheel, Heinrich?”

  “No, no. What are you thinking? It was an engraving in one of my schoolbooks. Aeneas is carrying his father, Anchises, on his shoulders away from the flaming ruins of Troy. There is a look of the greatest fear on the father’s face, but Aeneas is calm with the fixed serenity of a higher purpose. He is noble even as the city burns around him. Ever since I saw those high towers falling to the ground, with the smoke and flame billowing around them, I dreamed of finding them again. And here my wife has uncovered a building destroyed by fire! She has found one of the great stone houses of the engraving I revered as a child. Is that not fate? And do you know how all things work together? There are the strangest coincidences in life that would not be permitted in even the most outrageous fiction.”

  That night she questioned her husband about the marks on the vase a
nd the cup. “Lineau tells me that they are some kind of symbol.”

  “They may simply be marks, Sophia. Not everything has a meaning.”

  “They are meaningless?”

  “They are decoration. A simple pattern. Such patterns are everywhere in nature. They have no higher purpose.”

  She sat down upon the side of the bed. For a moment she felt very weary. If there was no higher purpose, what then? What of the pattern of their own lives?

  “Come to bed now, Sophia. We have much work to do in the morning. We must catch the worm, as the English say.”

  SIX

  The workmen continued their excavation of the house and staircase the following morning. As the weather grew warmer, some of them began to sleep in the trenches—or even crept into the great stone vases, the pithoi, which lay on their sides in a part of the excavations. Obermann had deemed the area to be an ancient storage-room, but now it had become a dormitory.

  The vases were of baked clay, dark red in colour, but protected with a lustrous red wash; they were all cracked and damaged by the pressure of the earth and debris once piled upon them, but, at a size of five or six feet, they afforded protection and coolness for the workers who slept in them. Obermann had named these men the genii of the lamps, because they emerged when bidden from their strange beds. And that morning, on his instructions, they set to work on the burned chamber that Sophia had uncovered. Their progress was slow since they had gradually to remove the mounds of rubbish that had accumulated over many centuries—here were pieces of pottery and small items of bronze, each of which had carefully to be noted and preserved by Leonid and Monsieur Lineau. Obermann always insisted that at half past nine they stop for a breakfast of bread and olives and coffee. He considered, correctly, that the workmen would continue their labours with more enthusiasm after a period of eating and resting. So he called, “Paidos!” to the men, and the cry was taken up along the file of diggers.

  He sat down with Sophia on a monumental stone that had proved too heavy to remove from the place where it had been uncovered; a figure was carved upon its side, but the features were so eroded that it was no longer recognisable. “I have formed a plan, Sophia,” he was saying to her. “I will take you to the place where Paris judged between the three goddesses. There is a glade on the western slope of Mount Ida, which can be reached along a track. There grow three willow trees on that spot, alone among the rocks and the tall grasses, and the inhabitants revere them as sacred. They are known as the ladies of the mountain, and I am convinced that they are some lost memory of Athene, Hera and Aphrodite. Look at the sky, Sophia.” An eagle was gliding on the wind, its wings outstretched. “Do you see how its plumage is dark, almost black? Homer calls it percnos, monarch of birds. And now look. This is extraordinary.” The eagle had seen something moving on the ground, and in an instant it swooped downwards in swift motion. It seemed to fall through the air like some great dark agent of destruction. It fluttered above the dust and stone for a moment, before soaring upwards with a long snake in its beak. Obermann called out to the workers around him, “Look! Omen! Omen! Oionos!” He stood up and pointed to the eagle. “The god has sent it skimming downwind. It has appeared on the right side. It brings a blessing to us!” He threw his white canvas hat high into the air, and gave a great whoop of delight. Sophia had never seen him so jubilant.

  Kadri Bey had noticed her surprise, and came over to her. “It is an omen of great victory, Frau Obermann. The eagle with the snake in its mouth is a sacred sign to the people. If the bird had approached us from the left, it would mark calamity. But from the right it signals triumph.”

  “I did not know such things were still believed.”

  “We are in Troy now. The age of omens has not passed. Look at your husband.” Obermann was shaking hands with the workmen.

  Instead Sophia observed Kadri Bey with renewed interest. He seemed to summon up for her the strange pieties of this region, where goddesses appeared in wooded groves and where eagles carried snakes into the air. His watchful eyes were now once more upon Obermann, who was handing out piastres. “Your husband is too generous to these men,” he said. “They will not feel gratitude. They will ask for more.”

  “He is joyful, Kadri Bey.”

  “Your husband is a man of great feeling. I have seen him turn from anger to delight in a moment.” Yet his expression seemed to say to her—such men are dangerous.

  The omen proved auspicious in one respect. Towards the end of that day’s excavation, the Turkish workmen found a small room to the north of the burned site. Sophia noticed at once the remains of a human skeleton. “Heinrich!” She had no need to call him since he had come up behind her and was even then rushing over to the bones.

  “This is magnificent, Sophia. Do you see how it is placed?” The skeleton was in a sitting position, slightly inclined against a wall. “I see it with its knees together in fear. Yes. In panic. Do you notice the colour of the bones? This person has been overtaken by the fire and burned to death. By the smallness of the skull I deem it to be a woman, but Lineau will confirm it. What a story this tells! This may be one of Andromache’s handmaidens or one of the Trojan wives! And here, what else?” In a corner of the room was a silver vase, some seventeen inches in height. “She was protecting her only possession in the world. What are these women doing?”

  The Turkish women, employed to take away the debris and earth, had put down their wicker baskets and had begun a general wailing; they were beating their breasts, and raising their faces to the sky.

  “It is a lament, Heinrich, for the dead.”

  “Good. A lament can do no harm, as long as it does not slow our progress.”

  Yet there was no more work that day. The Turkish diggers refused to touch the skeleton until it had been the object of ritual purification. Obermann informed Kadri Bey that he was ready to perform his own ritual for the benefit of the workmen. He suggested that spring water be scattered over the bones during a reading of Homer, but the Turkish overseer considered the idea to be preposterous. “Then we will move it,” Obermann said, “with our own hands.”

  “It must be buried, Herr Obermann. Every minute it is exposed is a dishonour.”

  “What do I care for your notion of honour when such a gift is presented to us? It is the first skeleton we have found!”

  “I resent the way you speak to me, Herr Obermann.”

  “And I resent your hindering of my work, Kadri Bey. Surely you realise that this is a discovery for science?”

  “I cannot allow it.”

  They argued for several minutes, amid the wailing of the women, but only with the intervention of Sophia was a compromise found. She suggested that Lineau should examine the skeleton where it was placed, and that Leonid should make detailed drawings of it; after that process had been completed, the remains could then be buried on the plain.

  “You are a healing force, Sophia. You charm us.” Obermann was mopping his face, moist from his recent show of anger.

  “Your wife could calm the sea,” Lineau said.

  “Mark well where it is buried,” Obermann whispered to her, as Kadri Bey walked away. “We can always dig it up again.”

  LINEAU WENT DOWN into the trench, assisted by a Turkish workman, and gently ran his hands across the skull. “Brachycephalic,” he said. “Decidedly female.” He might have been stroking it. “The face is somewhat broad, with low eye-holes and moderated nose.”

  “Can you see her, Lineau?” Obermann was peering into the trench.

  “Oh, yes. The chin is retracted. The forehead is full. The occiput is broadly expanded.”

  “And was she beautiful?”

  “She is beautiful still.” Lineau held the skull in his hands very carefully.

  “Draw this beauty, Telemachus. Let the world feast its eyes upon her!”

  TWO DAYS LATER the skeleton, which Obermann had named Eurycleia, was taken for burial from the mound of Hissarlik to the plain. It was laid in a hastily built coffin of
cypress wood, open to the sky, and the bones were scattered with woollen ribbons, garlands of flowers and fresh branches from the trees of the neighbourhood. The women chanted a dirge as the cart trundled down the rough track. Sophia and Heinrich Obermann were at the front of the mourners. “It is a strange thing, Heinrich, to bury one so long dead.”

  “Eurycleia is not dead, Sophia. She was waiting. She is a messenger. I am sure that we will find other bodies. You know that, during the siege, the handmaidens of Andromache concealed her treasures in a wooden box. She may have been one of those maidens.”

  There was to be a feast in the village of Chiplak that night as part of the funeral rites. They journeyed from the burial site, which Obermann had carefully noted, and upon entering the village the inhabitants rang the tiny bells that were hanging upon the walls of their dwellings as a sign of good luck. The meal itself, of roasted goat and lamb, was eaten outside in a central area in front of a small mosque. It was already growing dark when Obermann stood up in the middle of the area, and asked the villagers to form a circle around him. He placed a large lantern, similar to those that illuminated the market-stalls in Kannakale, upon the ground. He sat, on a wooden stool, in front of it. The villagers squatted on the earth and, as he instructed, congregated in a circle around the lantern. Then, from memory, he began to recite the opening verses of the Iliad. They understood none of it, word for word, and yet certain phrases seemed familiar to them. They murmured to each other at the expressions for the wild fig tree and for the loud, resounding sea. They were caught up in the rise and fall of Obermann’s voice as he narrated the doom to come upon Troy. At that point when Agamemnon prayed earnestly to the lord Apollo, the night fell suddenly upon the plain, and the Southern Cross shone far above the horizon. Many beetles had gathered in the space where he sat, and as they scurried forward to the unaccustomed light of the lantern, their hind legs inscribed peculiar markings in the dust. When he narrated the grief of Achilles, Obermann’s eyes filled with tears.